^{'Natura Morta' (1957) by Giorgio Morandi.}

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Innocenzio Aldobrandini

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i.

The shoes arrived from Petrocchi on a Tuesday. This was incorrect. He had specified Monday, in writing, on letterhead, the dispatch number underlined twice in a hand that had practiced underlining since the seminary. The box was opened on the marble console in the entry, where the marble had been chosen for its capacity to make a box look smaller than it was. The shoes were beyond reproach. That was not the point. The point was that the world had been instructed and the world had complied and yet the day had been wrong, and one cannot build a life on a wrong day. He wore them anyway, to the restoration committee, where a woman from Bologna admired them aloud, and he made a small movement with his eyebrow that meant he had received the compliment without confirming it.

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ii.

The email to the Ministry, regarding the loan of Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X from the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, went unanswered six days. On the seventh he sent it again, same body, same signature, same attachments, but in fourteen-point Garamond instead of twelve, the subject line preceded by the word Reminder in brackets. He believed in escalation by incremental adjustment. He had once won an argument with his late wife by changing the napkin; she had laughed, which he had taken at the time for surrender.

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iii.

The wall text for the Pordenone read, in its first draft, that the panel had been restored in 1948 by Cavenaghi’s nephew. Aldobrandini struck through nephew with a pencil sharpened in his own office by his own assistant on his own German sharpener, and wrote in the margin, great-nephew, please verify. The text went to print three weeks later, after seven exchanges and a phone call to the Soprintendenza, amended to by a member of the Cavenaghi atelier, c. 1948, which Aldobrandini disliked but accepted because the wall was, after all, only twelve linear meters, and twelve meters can survive a small surrender. He told the cataloguer, kindly, that she would learn. The cataloguer was forty-one.

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iv.

At a colloquium in Padua he interrupted a young South African scholar to correct her pronunciation of Artemisia Gentileschi, tilting his head with the patience of a confessor. She had been pronouncing it correctly. He had been pronouncing it correctly. The room understood that something else had been transmitted. She had, he noticed, the particular stillness of someone who has decided not to spend herself on the room. At the buffet he praised her paper, which he had not read. He pronounced Artemisia in the Roman manner, which he had recently decided was the only manner, having decided this in his bath the previous Thursday.

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v.

In Kyoto, at a conservation colloquium, he was shown a tea bowl repaired with gold lacquer by a curator of indeterminate age, the kind of face, he thought, that had simply stopped participating in time. She explained, through a translator neither of them required, that the fracture had not been concealed because concealment would imply shame regarding an event that had occurred and could not be recalled. The breakage, she said, had entered the bowl and could no longer be separated from it.

Aldobrandini asked whether the piece had held significant market value prior to the damage.

The translator did not render this at once. The curator looked at him in the way one looks at a difficult passage in a text one had expected to encounter, not offended, not surprised, only attending, the way you attend to something old and dense. Then she answered in Italian. Quite good Italian. Better, he thought irritably, than her Italian had any right to be.

It is more valuable now, she said.

He explained, because explanation was his professional obligation and because she was wrong, that restoration exists to resist time, not accommodate it. The line of gold directed the eye toward the injury and in doing so privileged accident over form. The object’s history was not the object. He said this in two languages, including one she had not invited him to use, and he said it clearly.

Before he left she placed the bowl in his hands.

It was lighter than he expected. The crack traveled the surface in a seam no wider than a thread, the gold irregular, almost geological, disappearing into the glaze before emerging again somewhere it had not been. He noticed that one section of the repair had darkened slightly with handling. He noticed also that his thumb had come to rest along the line of fracture and was following it the way one follows a sentence that has not disclosed its subject.

He returned the bowl with both hands.

That evening he wrote four pages on adhesive visibility in contemporary conservation ethics and in the margin beside one paragraph noted, in pencil, kintsugi, theatricality disguised as philosophy, then reconsidered disguised as and scored it through and replaced it with mistaken for, and was not satisfied with that either, and left it. The note was later omitted from the proceedings, though not by him.

At dinner he found he could not recall whether the bowl had been celadon or white. This troubled him. More than it should have, and in a way he did not examine.

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vi.

His brother’s daughter, eleven, played the Schumann at the family gathering in Frascati. She was, by any measure available to a child practicing two years on a house piano no one had tuned since the war, remarkable. Aldobrandini kissed her on the forehead afterwards and said, in front of everyone, that she had been adequate. He meant it as encouragement. He had been encouraged in this manner by his own father, who had been encouraged in this manner by his. The girl took up rowing within the month and never played again. Aldobrandini attributed this to the natural movement of taste in adolescence.

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vii.

In Vancouver, it begins with the rain. Aldobrandini had been engaged by a man named Tarp, lumber, late acquisitions, a wife from Geneva who had stopped flying, to assess a private collection in West Vancouver. He arrived in the rain, which had the steady, unimaginative quality of municipal water and smelled, where the car door opened, of cedar and creosote. He was driven from the airport along a road that disappointed him in ways he did not bother to specify. The Shangri-La gave him a suite on the twenty-eighth floor, where the carpet bore a pattern he found provincial and the welcome fruit included a persimmon that was not ripe. He sent his assistant, a young man from San Basilio named Davide, into the rain for a particular Norwegian water the hotel did not stock, and when Davide returned wet and apologetic with the wrong brand, Aldobrandini drank a glass of tap water in front of him without comment.

Davide said, quietly, without looking at him, It is already the same water here.

Aldobrandini corrected him at once. That was not correct. The water had differences of filtration, jurisdiction, provenance. He listed them numerically.

Davide did not respond. He stood at the window with the wrong bottles in a plastic bag, looking out at the harbour, and his hands, Aldobrandini noticed, were very still. In the car, later, he did not turn on the heat. He had always turned it on before.

The Tarp house sat above Eagle Harbour. It had been built by an architect from Portland whose name Aldobrandini affected not to know. The collection was kept on the ground floor behind glass calibrated, Tarp explained, to filter ultraviolet at ninety-eight percent. Ninety-nine is available now, Aldobrandini said. Is it, Tarp said, and a quiet entered the room of the kind Aldobrandini cultivated in himself like a houseplant.

The Morandi was wrong. He had known it would be wrong from the photograph, but he had taken the commission anyway, because the euros to Lugano were not a small consideration and because he had wanted, for reasons he would not examine, to see the Pacific in November. The Morandi was wrong in the way of a thing made by someone who had loved Morandi very much without understanding what Morandi had loved. He told Tarp this in a sentence that took ninety seconds to deliver and contained two subordinate clauses, one in Italian. Tarp listened the way a man listens when his money has never required him to follow the reasons. When Aldobrandini had finished, Tarp said, so we sell it. Aldobrandini said, so you sell it, and the rain went on outside the calibrated glass.

That evening Davide drove him to a restaurant in Yaletown where the chef had trained in Modena. The car was cold. He ate tortellini in brodo that was very nearly correct, which annoyed him more than an incorrect one would have, and he sent back the wine, chilled not to the precise temperature he preferred but to a temperature one degree off. The sommelier was a woman from Squamish with a calm face. She had remembered him from the spring before, the particular shape of his unhappiness, and had decided then what kind of man he was. She accepted his complaint without argument and replaced the bottle with an identical wine from the same case, kept in the same cellar, at the same temperature. He said it was better. She said she was glad to see him again. Neither of them looked away. He left her a tip in Canadian dollars he had calculated to the cent on the calculator of his telephone, pretending the telephone was for something else.

That night, in the suite, he stood at the window and looked down at the harbour. He had wanted Milan. He thought of his brother’s daughter and could not remember whether she had played the Schumann or the Schubert, and decided he had been right either way.

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viii.

At some point, he did not record when, and could not later establish it, he began a document on his computer he titled, in a folder marked ADMINISTRATIVE, Matters Requiring Attention. This was not unusual. He had kept such documents since the seminary. What was unusual was that he returned to it, over a period he estimated at fourteen months, without adding to it. The document read:

1. Response to Ferrante re: Calabrian fellowship, draft letter, do not send until position is clear.

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3.

He did not add items two and three. He left the numbers. He was not certain why he had left the numbers. Possibly he had intended to return. He deleted the document, eventually, when it became necessary to clear space on the drive, and did not replace it. He wrote the Ferrante letter the following week. By then the position had been filled by a man from Lecce whose work Aldobrandini did not respect but had once praised at a dinner because the host’s wife had been listening. He did not examine the relationship between these two facts. The letter was good. It was, he believed, one of the best letters of its kind he had written, measured against the correspondence of recommendation he most admired, which was Benedetto Croce’s, of which he had read a substantial portion in the Biblioteca Nazionale. He filed a copy in the cabinet marked CORRESPONDENCE: ACADEMIC. He misfiled it, in fact, one folder to the right of where it belonged, and did not correct this when he noticed it six months later, because the filing was close enough.

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ix.

Tarp’s collection, when it sold at auction the following spring, was described in the catalogue using sentences Aldobrandini had written in his report. The report had said the Morandi was wrong. The catalogue said it was of the period and circle. Aldobrandini read the catalogue in his apartment in Rome, in a chair that had belonged to his mother, and he was satisfied, because the report existed and the report was correct, and what the world chose to do with the report was the world’s affair. He filed the catalogue in a folder marked Tarp and the folder in a cabinet marked Pacific. In the same cabinet, in a different folder, was a letter from Davide, written some weeks after Vancouver, correctly formatted, on plain paper, giving notice of resignation and containing no other content. Aldobrandini had filed the letter when it arrived and had not opened the folder since.

He poured himself a glass of the Norwegian water, delivered that morning in the correct quantity by a service he had used eleven years.

Six years later, a scholar at the Brera attributed the Tarp panel to Morandi, on x-ray analysis and a previously unpublished letter from Bologna. By then the painting was in a private collection in Tokyo, having sold a second time at four times the price the report had recommended. Aldobrandini cut the page from Apollo and placed it in the folder marked Tarp. The folder was filed where it had always been filed. The Norwegian water continued to arrive.

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x.

In Padua, again, the young French scholar published a monograph that did not cite him. He noticed in the index, which he read before the introduction, as he always did, the index being the part of a book that tells you whether you are in it.

For a moment he could not remember Davide’s surname. He wrote it on a slip of paper and then misfiled the slip in the wrong folder. He did not correct this. That evening he found he had taken it out again without deciding to, and had been holding it, and could not say for how long.

He wrote the scholar a long letter congratulating her on the monograph and offering three corrections, each phrased as a question. He sent it by post, on letterhead, the dispatch number underlined twice. She did not reply. He told a colleague at the Hertziana she had been adequate.

That same month his brother wrote to say his daughter had married. The letter contained a photograph. Aldobrandini noted the husband’s surname, which was good, and the date, which was inconvenient, and then he noticed her hands, which had been a child’s hands the last time he had looked at them and were now the hands of a woman, rings on them, the hands of someone he had never met.

The hands the hands.

He set the photograph down. He set it down again. He set it down a third time and his hand stayed on it longer than he had given it leave to. The response custom required was sent the following Thursday, in a form shorter than was customary, and the reason for this was not available to him. The photograph he did not put away. It stayed on the desk three days, then a week, then he stopped counting.

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xi.

He dined alone, most nights, at a restaurant near the Pantheon where the waiters had known his father. He ordered the same dish for eleven years and complained about it for eleven years and tipped, always, the precise amount custom dictated, neither more nor less, because to exceed custom is vulgar and to fall short of it is worse. He sat with his back to the room and ate slowly and read the Corriere, which he disliked, the alternative being a paper he disliked more.

When the waiter took his plate he said grazie, very softly, in the tone of a man being patient with the world, and the waiter, who had heard him say grazie that way for eleven years, said prego, in the tone of a man who had taken the measure of Aldobrandini long ago and had decided not to mention it.

He had been right about the Morandi. He had been right about the day the shoes arrived. He had been right, he believed, about the girl.

The waiter, lifting the cloth to brush the crumbs, uncovered beneath it a slip of paper much folded, the creases sharp, as if it had been worked b etween a thumb and a forefinger over a long evening. On it, in his own hand, were a surname and beneath it three words begun and struck through, and beneath those a fourth word, forgive, with no name after it and no mark, as though the pen had stopped to consider whom and had not resumed. The waiter did not read it. He set the slip on the saucer where the espresso would have gone, in case the patron wanted it back. Aldobrandini did not look down, though something in him moved toward it and was refused. He paid in cash, counted twice, and stood, and buttoned his coat against the weather, though the weather, in Rome, that night, was clear. At the door he paused, the way a man pauses who has forgotten something he cannot name, and went out into the street.

The slip remained on the saucer. By morning it would be gone.

At half past one the waiter locked the door of the restaurant. Outside, in the dark, he was again Renato, and he walked home along the Via di Tor Millina, where his wife, as she had for thirty-two years, had left a light on in the kitchen for him.

Aldobrandini took the long way, by the Piazza Navona, where the fountains were running. In the piazza a dog crossed his path without slowing, going somewhere, belonging to no one. It did not look at him. He watched it until he could not, and then he walked on.

On the marble step before his own door he stopped, and for a moment he could not have said which of the keys on the ring belonged to the lock. He tried one. It would not turn. He tried another. The lock turned. He went inside and dropped the keys in the dish where they were kept.

He did not turn on the light.

He stood in the entry a long time. Somewhere in the building, above him or below, a child was being made to practice, the same four bars of the Schumann, again, and again, the wrong note in the same place each time, and he stood and listened to the wrong note arrive and arrive, and did not correct it, because there was no one to correct, and because his throat had closed around a sound he would not make. Down the hall, on the desk, the photograph was where it had always been. He could not see it in the dark. He knew exactly where it was. He took one step toward it. Then he did not take another. He stood with his hand half lifted in the dark, in the direction of the only thing he had not filed, and he let it fall, because it was late, and because he had been right, and because a man does not cross a dark room toward what he cannot undo.

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