Matteo smiled. “You think I want to touch it to save it?”
“I know them,” he whispered. His hand did not move. “I wrote half of them.” attingo
“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.” Matteo smiled
“Don’t,” the restorer said. Her name was Lena. She didn’t look up from her light table. “You know the rules.” “I wrote half of them
She had been wrong to do that.
“Well,” he said.
“I have restored fifty-three churches, Lena. I have written treaties on non-invasive conservation. I have argued that touch is the enemy of art.” He looked at the fresco of Saint Sebastian — the young martyr, eyes turned heavenward, arrows like a strange halo. “But I am dying. And I want to touch one last thing. Not to save it. To be saved by it.”