The Last Predicta

The Calling of St. Matthew: X-Ray Photograph

31 The Calling of St. Matthew: X-Ray Photograph Call it a gift, Christ’s opening the mouth of the room with a hand. As if it could speak. Overhead, an ellipse, left imperfect, hovers. Beardless men flare their peacock sleeves, offer the face of the money table their silk. Under a lamp of paint, they have come to count on their friend’s sudden departure, as we have, minutes before closing, arrived with an unexpected flock of school children, the live silica of their voices sifting through the air around us in this darkened chapel a short walk from the Pantheon, where you noticed what looked like mortar blasts in the inscription to Agrippa. I slide another coin into the spotlight’s slot, and Matthew has never seen so far into the faces of coins. Still, he catches Christ’s hand horizonward, bending the currency of his stare, as students close around the canvas, the clicks and flashes of cameras bruising the gift of our last day in Rome. Earlier, under the ocular lens of the Pantheon, we counted the centuries before the invention of photography, imagined Agrippa grasping the spade that laid its face down first in the dirt where his monument now faces the faces of millions, in millions of photos per year. 32 Earlier still, we searched every tourist shop a mile from here for an early photo of the Pantheon and found it—women in full dress, horse and carriage tethered to the pillars’ enormity. Men wore hats. You thought early 1900s. Why do we return? Back at San Luigi, with the Pantheon rolled in its cardboard scepter, I point towards St. Peter— fingerprint, luscious smudge—whom x-rays prove is a present, an afterthought in this painting’s party whose end is also its future, where food never rests on the table, never will. You shush the students and they stare with the astonishment of martyrs. People once died for art. For less. For the last time today, the spotlight’s eye closes. The students disband, one waving from the door mouth, stalled, throwing his hand across the face of the floor, like Christ’s hand behind the late addition of St. Peter. This all occurs, by the way, thousands of years after the first image of Christ was burned into the catacombs of San Sebastiano. And if it’s true that among his apprentices Caravaggio kept a lover, one he painted over and over, we imagine the boy in his own eternal celebrity, oiled by the inevitable camera flash burning him deeper into the church our coming here has made of this day. Late autumn now. The sun chokes on the fishbones of TV antennae and, though dimmed, sifts through thoroughfares, charging the cobblestones under us. ...