第8章 Pentimento

Pentimento is the word for a change of mind that a painter could not hide. The artist lays down a figure, then thinks better of it, and paints over it, and a century later the first figure shows through the second like a bruise beneath skin. Aloisia had spent her career reading pentimenti the way other people read letters, and she had never once found one that frightened her, because a change of mind is only ever evidence of a human being working. Even the worst of them was human. That was the comfort of the trade. On the twelfth day she cleaned the last of the brown from the covered group, and the comfort went out of the work. The group stood in the shadow of the blessed city, beneath the gate the saved were entering, and it was everything the sinopia had promised and more. Nine figures, or ten, drawn close together and bound at the wrists, their faces all turned away from the judge into the dark to the left of the composition. They had been painted by the good hand, the hand of the green sleeve, and then abandoned over by a lesser hand that had put a conventional saint where their leader should have been. Now that she had taken the saint away, the group was whole again, and it was a group of the condemned, or of the unjudged, standing where the painter had put them, with their faces averted like people who had been told to look at the wall and had refused. She photographed them at her fixed hour, eight in the morning, from the station she had marked on the floor with tape. She drew them in her chart. She counted them: ten. Then she counted them again, because a conservator counts twice, and got ten. The next morning she counted them and got eleven. She did not accept it at once, and she was glad later that she had not, because the eleven would have driven her out of the church if she had let it. Instead she did the thing the trade had trained into her, which was to distrust the instrument before distrusting the world. She re-checked the station. She re-checked the lamp, the aperture, the shutter. She made a fresh photograph and laid it over the first, aligning the gate, the gate's left post, the small tower above it, and she compared what stood between the gate and the mouth of hell. The eleventh figure was small, and stood behind the tallest of the ten, half hidden, and its head was bowed, and it had not been in the photograph of the day before. She took the scalpel and the magnifier and went up the ladder, and she put her eye to the place where the head was, close enough that her breath fogged the lens. The paint was old. The pigment was old. The red of the robe, the green of the shadow, the gold of the thin line at the collar—there was nothing wet, nothing fresh, nothing a hand could have laid. She touched the tip of the scalpel to a fleck at the edge of the head, under the magnifier, and lifted the smallest possible sample, and it came away the way old paint comes away, dry and brittle and croaking under the blade. If the figure had been painted overnight, the paint would still have been soft. It was not soft. It was as old as the wall. She climbed down and sat on the bench and made the only experiment that occurred to her. A conservator's work is full of temporary covers. A wall is protected with Japanese tissue, a stretch of ground is taped off, a band of intonaco is faced with gauze. She took a sheet of tissue the size of her hand and laid it flat over a square of the group and taped its edges down, so that the square was hidden but the wall around it was open to the air and to her eyes. She marked the corners of the square with tiny pencil ticks on the plaster. Then she photographed the whole group and went to bed. In the morning she lifted the tissue. Under it, the wall had not changed. The square held exactly the figures that had been inside it the night before—the tall one, the small bowed one, the bound wrists, the averted heads. It was the same wall she had left. Around the square, in the passage she had left open, there was a new figure, standing at the edge of the group with its back to her, and the fold of the tall one's robe had shifted a hand's width to the left. She stood very still on the ladder. She had made a controlled test, which is what a scientist does, and the test had returned a result that a scientist has no use for: the wall changed where it could be seen and held still where it could not. She spent the rest of the day trying to break her own experiment. The tissue was hygroscopic; under it the microclimate would have been damper, or drier, than the open wall, and a change in moisture could darken one passage and lighten another. She ran a second square with a sheet of glass instead of tissue, so that the microclimate was as close to the open wall as she could make it, and the result was the same. She ran a third with a square of black paper taped flat, and in the morning the square beneath the black paper held its figures while the open wall had gained another. Three tests, three times the same answer. The wall changed where eyes could reach it. It was as if the picture could not bear to be the same twice for anyone looking. The abbot came to the church that afternoon and found her sitting on the bottom rung of the ladder with her head down. He asked how the work went. She said the work went, and then, because she was tired and because she had begun to dislike pleasantries in this house, she said that the wall was not stable, and that she could not restore a wall that would not stay still, and that she needed to know everything the house knew, all of it, before she put another swab to the paint. He listened. He said, The wall is not unstable. The wall is counting, and the count is nearly done, and a thing that is nearly done moves faster at the end, the way a river runs quickest as it comes to the fall. She said, Counting what? He said, Us. And the ones who were here before us. And the ones who were never counted, because the house did not let them be counted. His face, which she had thought unreadable, was tired in a way that had nothing to do with age. He said, Finish the wall, and let us see what it has to say. I have waited a long time for someone who could read it without believing it. She asked about the sealed chamber beneath the chapter house. He did not answer that. He blessed her, absently, the way a man blesses a doorway he is passing through, and went out into the snow that had begun to fall. That night she photographed the blank oval at the head of the group, the face the painter had left empty, and she looked at the image until her eyes hurt. In the morning, at eight, she photographed it again, and between the two images a single line had appeared at the lower edge of the oval—thin, dark, and curved, the line a mouth makes when it is still deciding what to say. ---