“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.”
Lena said nothing. The light through the high windows moved across the floor like a slow tide.
He raised his right hand. The two dead fingers dragged like stones. But the ring finger — still alive, still warm — extended itself. attingo
She picked up her bag. She walked to the door of the little church. Then she stopped.
“Yes.”
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.
“The pigment is friable here,” she said, pointing to the fresco’s edge. “Saint Sebastian’s robe. If you touch it, even with a dry finger, you’ll lift the azurite. It’s been dying for seven hundred years. Let it die in peace.” “I touched her,” Matteo went on
She had been wrong to do that.