Golden Stones & Sicilian Wines

“ I used to climb the scaffolding before they opened the doors, when the church was still empty and the gold was asleep. Before I begin I greet the Christ, the way you greet the master of the house: I make the sign of the cross and I wish him good morning.

My legs are not what they were, and I am in no hurry: I take the ladder slowly, one rung at a time, and I look around as I go. My feet know the scaffolding poles by heart. I have been on these mosaics for forty years. As a boy I passed the cotton and the lime to the old restorer. Now the old man is gone, and I am the one who holds the mosaics together. It seems to me a good way to have spent a life.

That morning I was working on the robe of an angel, high up, near the windows, where a handful of tesserae had come away and had been missing for centuries. I cut the gold with the hardie, one tessera at a time — Venetian smalto, with the gold leaf inside the glass — and each one I set into the mortar at a slight angle, never straight.

You must tilt it toward the one who looks, every tessera a little different, so that when the light comes in the wall does not stay still: it trembles, it breathes, and the angel seems to move. It is no miracle of mine. God makes the light; I only give it a road. Whoever sets gold straight has understood nothing: straight gold is dead.

I know the hour it happens. When the sun rises above the mountain, the light comes in high through the apse and the great Christ — the one who blesses with one hand and holds the open book with the other — lights up all at once, from his forehead to his feet. Down below, the tourists raise their phones all in the same moment. Not me. I wait for him the way you wait for a friend who passes every day at the same hour.

At noon I came down. In the workshop, a few steps from the cathedral, my daughter was preparing the lime and cutting the smalti. She learned from me as I learned from the old man, and by now her hand is good, better than mine was at her age. “Straight gold?” I still say to her, for the joke of it. “Is dead,” she answers, without lifting her head.

My new tesserae, among the old ones, must not be seen. The hand must not be seen, because the glory is not mine. I do not pray with words. I pray with my hands.

Tomorrow the angel will tremble for someone who will not know my name, nor hers. That is all right. The name does not matter. What matters is that it trembles.

The Lord lends a man his hands, then takes them back and gives new ones: the new ones are my daughter’s, and they set the gold the way I taught her, tilted toward those who will come. Then we went down the ladder slowly, closed the workshop, and walked home together. ”