The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 50: May 13

Today I took a bus with some secular pilgrims to the top of a Tuscan hillside. We were here to see a famous, pilgrim-enticing fresco I’d never heard of called the Madonna del Parto. Our head pilgrim told us why we should seek to see this fresco. Because it is one of the very few images of a pregnant Mary. Because it was painted by a man named Piero della Francesca. Because Piero was big on math and so, behind his expressive faces there is not emotion but the math of an emotion. He discovered the perspectival equations for happiness and worry and fear.

Like all good modern-day pilgrims in Italy, we prefaced our visit to the Madonna by eating and drinking and seeing ourselves into a stupor. We’d already visited (before our lunch of three pastas) a church and two museums. Our head pilgrim talked about the art we saw. She performed a very graphic mime of a fresco painter slicing a yolk sac with a razor blade. I’d taken notes on the back of a museum ticket that, a day later, would prove inscrutable to me. (wear a hood — against germs — also so that you cannot be seen and thanked.)

The point is: I was not primed to feel anything much at the sight of the Madonna except exhaustion and a little guilt from having done too much with my face that day (eaten and drank and talked and seen with it), but nothing with my head. Technically today had been a workday. I was supposed to be working; I am in Italy at an art colony and away from my children to work. For the past six months I have been swamped by deadlines and by job stress. I have had such job stress that, even while home these past months, I spent so little time with my children that they started to call me “dad.” If I am not working, and getting ahead of the work and the deadlines, and by implication freeing up some future time I might be able to spend with them, I feel that I do not deserve to be in Italy. Also, my children are on the verge of not needing me at all. They no longer need me to read to them. They don’t beg as much for me to sleep with them. To leave them for a month is to force them over a threshold they might otherwise cross more gradually. They will realize while I am gone that I am not much missed. When I get home, I will only be their maid.

But when I stepped over the threshold of the building in which the Madonna was kept—“kept” really was the word; she was hung on a wall and sealed off from the air and the humidity by a layer of glass and then another layer of glass, resulting in a viewing experience described by our head pilgrim as “trying to see a jam jar inside an aquarium”—I felt overcome. (The poet Jorie Graham wrote of Piero’s Madonna, “This is / what the living do: go in.”) “It was believed,” said the head pilgrim, “that contemplation of the Madonna’s face could change the outcome of your pregnancy. It could change the outcome of your life.”

Fortunately, the Madonna was preserved like a nocturnal zoo creature in a dark room. I could, unseen, fight to control my own face equation while the head pilgrim talked about the Madonna’s ermine-lined tent, the open lacings on her maternity dress, the color-coded angels.

The head pilgrim said that you could gauge the length of time it took to paint the fresco by the giornate—the days of work. You counted the giornate by the round swipes of plaster Piero put on the wall each day before he started to paint. It took Piero seven days of work.

I listened and looked and tried to distract myself. I still could barely keep my shit together. Why was I so undone? I did not want to change the outcome of my life (if “outcome” is understood to mean “my life right now”—i.e., I am currently in my outcome). People had written prayers on paper scraps and left them under the Madonna; weekly, the church burned the scraps so the smoke could deliver their messages to God. Many of these people were praying for a child. I wanted to leave, not a prayer, but a note of gratitude. I have my children, but I didn’t want to feel about the Madonna as I did about my doctor who died before I could thank him. It seemed not unwise to deliver to the Madonna a retroactive prayer containing the hope that she could someday give me what I now had.

In the gift shop, I bought a postcard of the Madonna’s face. I saw it as an insurance policy in case “outcome” refers not to the life I’m in but to the one I’m eventually due. Who knows, in that case, whether or not I might need to change it. More than usual, my future concerns me. Since arriving in Italy, I have been beset by anxiety about my children’s welfare. I am certain something terrible is going to befall them while I’m gone. It does not help that my husband is driving them a long distance for an upcoming weekend, and that I am particularly afraid of car accidents. I’ve begged him not to travel with them, though everyone in the family likes to point out that I’m the hazardous driver, not him. If anyone will kill our children with a car, it will be me. But I see things he doesn’t. He might unwittingly kill them by failing to see! One of Piero’s other fresco subjects, Saint Julian, whom the head pilgrim had taken us to view before lunch, had been jinxed as a baby by pagan witches; the jinx ordained that he would grow up to kill his parents. When older, Saint Julian left home, presumably to avoid this fate. He became a famous hunter. If you are hoping to escape a murderer prophecy, I’m thinking you should probably not put yourself in regular contact with weapons. Whatever. He did. He much later mistook his parents — sleeping in his bed — for his wife and her lover. He killed them.

Saint Julian was not seeing the future properly. He was not thinking ahead like I do. Maybe, thinking ahead, I really should have left a prayer under the Madonna. Regardless, I have the Madonna’s postcard face. If needed, I can meditate upon it. Behind her face hides the mathematical equation for worry that, if I study it hard enough, perhaps I can solve for myself. How to leave my children behind without this constant anxiety that they will disappear in my absence? Because of course this worry is founded; I will not return in one month to find the same children I left. They are growing older by the hour, by the minute. The head pilgrim told us of a time when the Madonna was packed into a truck to be shipped to the Met in New York for an exhibit. The women of the town freaked out. Without the Madonna—even temporarily — the crops would fail, and the families would fail. It’s the women who fret about luck and how to keep it safe. It’s the women who worry, behind protective glass, about future outcomes, their worry protected from dampness or mathematical dismantling. It’s the women who foresee doom and take extreme measures to battle its approach. To prevent the Madonna from leaving, the head pilgrim said, the women of the town lay down in the street.