Giovanni Muro (V2) 3rd March 1986- a ray of light

“Time takes no holiday. It does not roll idly by, but through our senses works its own wonders in the mind. Time came and went from one day to the next; in its coming and its passing it brought me other hopes and other memories.” Saint Augustine- the Confessions, book four, part viii. Looking around the table Giovanni recognised , yet again , that at 38 he was clearly over-aged for his role at the University, the functions of which ( rather than responsibilities, for these were minimal), had steadily attached themselves to him in the preceding years until his days had become a seemingly endless round of administrative meetings and workshops. On this occasion , as had been universally expected, the meeting had finished inconclusively , but at least it had ended on time . All the attendees gathered up their papers and made to leave. Giovanni had, as ever, said just enough to ensure that he should feature in the minutes and if, for some reason, his contributions went unattributed, then that would happily occasion an immediate named point of order when they reconvened the following month. Someone had abandoned that day’s newspaper on the table and Giovanni picked it up as he made his exit, tapping it on the handrail as he made his way up the two flights of stairs to the corridor where his office was located. It was late afternoon and the sparse lighting, that in a nod to the pervasive atmosphere of institutional austerity, would automatically go off at 6.00, seemed more than ever to be an aesthetic touch rather than an aid to the building’s inhabitants. Approaching his room through the gloom, his tread softened by the dark vermilion lino, Giovanni was surprised to see a workman crouched down at his door, a wooden trug containing assorted tools on the floor beside him while he tentatively used a mallet to tap a chisel , that was biting into the wood below the brass handle. “Just changing the lock, shouldn’t take long”. “But why? I haven’t had any notice of this”. “Well it’s on my rota for today. Should have had it done by now but I had a bit of an issue with another room further down the corridor. Like I say, shouldn’t take long”. “Is it ok if I go inside and wait?” “Sure, if you don’t mind the odd bit of banging”. With that the workman got up and moved to the side so that Giovanni could enter. “Do you want it left open?” “As you like”. Giovanni chose to leave the door ajar and went over and sat in the chair by his desk and switched on the lamp. The layout of the fairly spacious but sparsely furnished office was broken up by a large ,odd-shaped ,wooden plinth , that was a survival from the major rebuilding and re-ordering of the floor that had been carried out some years ago and upon which the desk and chair was now set. This curious feature , along with the small alcove at the back ,that Giovanni had draped with blinds so that it could be used as a darkroom , was, to Giovanni’s mind, faintly reminiscent of Carpaccio’s painting of Saint Augustine’s study ( although his room was on a far more modest scale). The painting was part of the cycle hung in the ground floor of the Scuola Di San Giorgio Degli Schiavoni , possibly Giovanni’s favourite place in Venice, although it was increasingly filled with tourist groups and staffed by anxious guardians. Originally Giovanni had shared the office with two colleagues, but Matteo had abruptly left the college in late ‘84 ( see Giovanni Muro (t)) and Bettina had resigned soon afterwards and was now acting as a part-time gallerist and the college had not re-assigned the space to anyone else. In the intervening sixteen months or so Giovanni had accumulated evermore amounts of stuff, that lay in piles around the room, but the overall effect was not in any sense “homely”. Giovanni had also pined a few of his photographs to the long wall to the right of his desk, but the scale and spacing was rather unsatisfactory and they consequently exuded a sort of provisional , decorative quality, like a student’s bed-sit poster rather than possessing an air of entitlement , authority and authenticity. Giovanni opened up the paper and started to scan it , starting at the back, as was his habit. The banging continued but soon enough the carpenter moved into the room to work on the door from the other side, placing a cloth on the floor to collect the chippings as he dislodged the old lock and prepared the frame for the new mechanism. Even more noise. Giovanni’s eye was drawn to a photograph on one of the sports pages, showing a middle-aged man being interviewed at an indoor stadium by a bearded contemporary holding a microphone. Giovanni had been instantly attracted to the photograph by an associative sense, a sense affirmed when he saw the caption identified the interviewee as being Tonino Zorzi, then on his third stint as coach to Venice’s “Carrera Reyer” basketball team, but almost unrecognisable from his heyday at the club some fifteen years beforehand. On the sideboard in his widowed mother’s apartment there was a framed photograph of the Reyer basketball team dating back to the early fifties, well before Zorzi had become coach for the first time. The photograph had seemingly been taken either before or after a match , as the background of the photo was made up of largely male supporters sitting on trestles , one of whom ,Giovanni’s father , Stefano, had always insisted , had been him. Stefano had been an avid fan of the club in the early 1940’s, during their first period of great success and in the early 1960’s had regularly taken Giovanni to see them play at their home venue , a mere ten minute walk away in Cannaregio and piquaresquely located on the first floor of the 16th century Scuola Nuova della Misericordia, designed by Sansovino . These evening matches had been for the adolescent Giovanni an authentically and overwhelmingly masculine experience, while the echoing sounds, dramatic shifts of play and the incongruity of such a modern sport being played out in such an historic space, had all made a deep impression on him, even if he had not retained a particular love of basketball itself. Even his father’s passion had dimmed in the 1970’s when many of the squad had been hired in from the professional and college circuits in the USA and from the Serbian region of Yugoslavia, squeezing out many of the Italians who Stefano had previously enjoyed cheering on, leaving his father and his friends to inveigh about the changes and reminisce about older times , while saving their worst comments for the overseas players of visiting teams. It had been during that period in the ‘60’s that the local paper had for a while run a “face in the crowd ” competition, using photographs taken at Reyer home games, and offering small prizes for the circled person who identified themselves to them. For a couple of years Giovanni would unfailingly spend time each week peering at the fuzzy raster dots hoping to see who had been picked out and whether he and his father were in the photograph or even circled, but while they’d been occasionally close they had never been chosen. Even though he had eventually abandoned the habit, looking back Giovanni was aware that there was undoubtedly some sort of connection between this adolescent exercise in looking and his subsequent decision a few years later to write his graduation essay on the subject of faux-print effects in pop art and, in particular “Alice in Wonderland”, which was a work that Sigmar Polke had just created. However Giovanni had chosen to keep that associative continuity under lock and key, hidden in his most personal of memories, feeling that it perhaps signalled not so much a sense that there was a rooted authenticity to his academic studies as more a taint of immaturity , and that while his studies were ostensibly addressing the startlingly modern ,all the time he was ,in fact ,surreptitiously clinging to obliquely reassuring subterranean childhood patterns and materials. Sitting there in the gathering dusk of the late Winter’s day, yet again Giovanni felt he was being closed in by his addressable memories and that time was moving on while his inner growth had come to a halt . Giovanni knew that he had to start to progress again or risk losing everything , but that he could only start to progress again if he was prepared to accept new interpretations of the past; his past for sure, but also that of his parents’ and well beyond that as well. “Right, that should do it. Do you want to have a look?” Giovanni stood up and went over to the door to see the new lock. “Here’s your key, do you want to give it a turn?… I’ll come back tomorrow and tidy up the paintwork as it’s getting a bit late now”. Giovanni turned the key back and forth and the catch obediently retracted and was then released. The fitter picked up his cloth, emptied the wood chips and dust into Giovanni’s waste bin and then made his way out with his tools, closing the door behind him. It was just after 5.30 and the sun would soon be setting. Giovanni returned to his desk and the opened paper. While it was accurate to account for his immediately preceding mind-flows by reference to the image of the pugnacious Tonino Zorzi, it was a far from complete account , for , simultaneously, albeit with an entirely different intensity and rhythm, Giovanni had been and remained aware that while the figure of Zorzi triggered some intense memories, joyous and troubling in almost equal measure, there was something that was buried in the interviewer’s features, some maybe random connection , that was leading his mind somewhere else entirely. Then , in an instant, while gazing at the photograph again , from seemingly nowhere he remembered his grandmother in her final years, in her wheelchair with its soft, white squidgy wheels, frail and speechless after her severe stroke, a rosary wrapped around her fingers. Barely a teenager, he’d one day exhausted himself pushing her from the apartment, then via a vaporetto, to San Toma and onto the Frari , where they had rested in front of Bellini’s Pesaro Triptych. While Giovanni gathered his strength his grandmother had twisted her beads in one hand while she had gazed intently at the luminous painting , but not at the figure of the Virgin Mary, that Giovanni had thought she would have most wanted to have seen, but the outward facing portrait of Saint Benedict, gravely surveying the sacristy’s Franciscan space and those who found themselves before him . The portrait had possessed Giovanni with its almost overwhelming force and solemnity transfixing him as he had stood there, gripping the handles of the wheelchair. Giovanni now saw that the reporter questioning Zorzi had many traces of this physiognomic “type” as well, a comparison made more compelling by the shape of his carefully sculpted beard. Had the reporter or his barber consciously or intuitively chosen to echo the look that Bellini had bestowed upon Saint Benedict or was it an evocation untempered by any likelihood of influence? Would the reporter make a good model for some modern day iconographic programme, as , say, Abraham Grapheus had done for Jacques Jordaens several centuries before, Grapheus’ distinctive features being pressed into service to represent assorted saints in Jordaen’s devotional paintings? Giovanni had revisited the Frari’s sacristy many times since that first occasion, bringing with him an ever increasing number of memories, preconceptions and facts, all of which would mingle and press forward in his mind as he stood there, in the painting’s presence but often only tenuously in the present. Since gazing at Bellini’s Saint Benedict for that first time, Giovanni had seen glimpses of the same memorable blend of features, their human effects as numerous as the muscles of one’s face, in many other religious portraits painted over a roughly fifty year period , with the Saint Benedict more or less forming the mid-point : back in time to works by Bellini’s father , Jacopo, and to early Mantegna, onward to near contemporaries, such as Marescalco and Antonio de Messina, and then later still to Durer - each artist availing himself of the “type” to express a distinct idea of religious witness and authority , mediated through a personal , charismatic presence that exuded a sense of depth, power and knowledge, tinged by a humanity imbued by sorrowful compassion. But beyond these art-historical musings , every time Giovanni visited the Frari’s sacristy he would remember , above all, his grandmother , long since departed, and his searching for a handkerchief to wipe away her tears ,shed as they’d made to leave, the rubber wheels squeaking on the floor as Giovanni had made to swing the chair around, only to be relieved by a young woman in a red jacket, who seeing his predicament had smiled re assuringly at him before kneeling down in front of the wheelchair, her garment layers making a soft, silken sound against each other as she did so , before gently dabbing his grandmother’s face and saying some words to her that Giovanni had not caught. After the lady had got back to her feet she had squeezed his grandmother’s hand before giving Giovanni the handkerchief ,“ just in case...”. Even now he could remember its scent, sweet and musky, placed under his pillow at night until it was laundered by his mother. Suddenly the lights went out. Six o’clock. It was dark but not so much that he could not see and in a short while his eyes adjusted. Giovanni got up, stepped off the plinth and made for the door, before turning the lock to open it. Nothing. The catch did not move. In time honoured fashion Giovanni tried once more, then proceeded to pull on the handle. The door rattled in its frame but did not budge. Giovanni banged on the door, but all was silent in the corridor beyond. Giovanni was once again left alone with his thoughts and the handkerchief’s rich smell. Like the light , something was dying , but maybe it was for the best.