Attingo — [repack]

Matteo stood alone with Saint Sebastian. The arrow points had flaked away centuries ago. The eyes were two dark almond shapes, patient and unknowing.

“Well,” he said.

“I know them,” he whispered. His hand did not move. “I wrote half of them.” attingo

“When I was twenty-two,” he said, “my teacher — old Cesare — took me to a chapel in Bologna. A Madonna by a painter no one remembers. Cesare said: ‘Matteo, touch her cheek. Gently. Just once. Because one day you will forget what it feels like to believe that something this beautiful was made by hands like yours.’ ”

“It will be visible under raking light. Every restorer for the next hundred years will know that someone touched here. That someone broke the rule.” Matteo stood alone with Saint Sebastian

“I touched her,” Matteo went on. “And for one second — attingo, we used to say — I reached not to the painting, but through it. I touched the man who had mixed that tempera in 1432. His hunger. His fear of the plague. His hope that someone, centuries later, would see Mary’s face and feel less alone.”

“Well?” she said.

For one second — attingo — the boundary between his skin and the wall dissolved. He did not feel plaster. He felt a pulse. Not his own. Older. A rhythm of hands reaching across time to other hands.