The Wax Is Lost

The phrase was technical and it was true and it was the oldest metaphor in the foundry.

Lost-wax casting. Cire perdue. The process by which a form made in wax was reproduced in bronze through the destruction of the original, the wax melted out, burned out, vaporized, gone, replaced by the bronze that filled the space it had occupied, the metal standing in for the wax the way a memory stands in for an experience, present in the shape of the absent thing, carrying its contours, its details, its gesture, but made of different stuff, harder, heavier, more lasting, and fundamentally not the same.

The wax was always lost.

This was the bargain at the heart of the process. You could not have the bronze and keep the wax. You could not have the permanent and keep the temporary. The wax had to be sacrificed — had to be burned, had to be destroyed, had to become smoke and residue and a slick of brown liquid in a catch pan — for the bronze to exist, and this sacrifice was not symbolic but literal, was the physical reality of the process, and every bronze that Oren had ever cast, every bronze that anyone had ever cast in the five thousand years that humans had been casting bronze, was a record of this sacrifice, a monument to the thing that had been destroyed to create it.

He thought about this on the morning of the New York pour.

The torso section of David Hersh's three-meter figure had been burned out overnight, the wax running and vaporizing in the kiln at Fonderia Mariani, the smell of it — that candle-factory smell, waxy and warm and faintly sweet — lingering in the foundry when Oren arrived at seven in the morning, and the shell stood in the pouring pit, supported by a steel frame, its white ceramic surface marked by the scorch patterns of the burnout, dark stains where the wax had been thickest and had taken longest to leave, and the shell was hot, still radiating the heat of the kiln, and inside it was the void, the torso-shaped void, the negative space that the wax had defined and that the wax had vacated and that the bronze would fill.

Roberto was already at the furnace.

Two crucibles were heating, each one containing fifty pounds of silicon bronze ingots, the ingots stacked like gold bars in the glowing crucibles, their surfaces beginning to shimmer as the temperature climbed past sixteen hundred degrees and the metal began its transformation from solid to liquid, from fixed to fluid, from the ingot that held its shape on a shelf to the liquid that would fill any shape offered to it.

The foundry was loud.

The furnace roared, the ventilation fans hummed, the crane motor whined, and underneath all of these sounds was the sound of the foundry itself, the metal building expanding in the heat, the steel beams and the corrugated walls ticking and creaking as they absorbed the thermal energy radiating from the furnace, and this sound — the building breathing, the structure flexing — was the foundry's heartbeat, the evidence of the enormous energies being managed inside it.

Giuseppe was at the pouring pit, checking the shell's alignment, ensuring that the pouring cup was level, that the shell was stable in its frame, that the sand bed was packed firmly around the base. Marco and Tomasso and two other foundry workers — Paolo, a veteran who had been pouring bronze since his twenties, and Sandro, a newer man but strong and steady — were putting on their protective gear, the leather aprons and gauntlets and face shields, the armor of the pour.

Lina was not there.

She had wanted to come but Oren had asked her not to, had said that the large pour was more dangerous than the memorial pour, that the volume of metal was greater and the risk was greater and the heat was greater and he could not focus on the pour if he was also thinking about her safety, and she had accepted this, reluctantly, with the single nod that meant she disagreed but would not fight, and he knew that the reason he had given was true but was not the whole truth, that the whole truth was that he could not watch Lina watch the bronze, could not see her face in the orange light of the pour, could not bear the metaphor of the liquid metal filling the void in her presence, because the metaphor was too precise, too close to the other process, the process happening inside her body where chemicals filled voids and voids opened in the tissue and the original was being lost the way wax was lost, slowly, by heat, by chemistry, irreversibly.

Roberto gave the signal at eight-fifteen.

The first crucible was lifted from the furnace, the liquid bronze inside it glowing with the intensity that Lina had compared to the inside of the sun, and the light filled the foundry and the heat pushed back the men on the shanks and Oren stood beside the shell and watched the crucible swing toward the pouring pit and he said, Ready, and the men tipped the crucible and the bronze poured.

The sound was immense.

The small memorial pour had been a roar but this was a different order of sound, a deep sustained thunder that came from the volume of metal meeting the volume of air inside the shell, the bronze rushing down through the main sprue and flooding into the void, filling the torso cavity in a rising wave of two thousand degrees, the shell glowing orange from within, the heat radiating through the ceramic walls like light through a paper lantern, and Oren watched the pouring cup and called directions — faster, slower, steady, steady — and the first crucible emptied and was swung away and the second crucible was brought in and the pour continued, the bronze flowing, the void filling, the form taking shape inside the shell in the darkness of the ceramic, invisible, known only by the temperature and the flow rate and the small indicators that the experienced caster read like a physician reads a pulse.

The pour took seventy seconds.

Seventy seconds to transform a void into a solid, to replace the absent wax with present bronze, to cross the line between the reversible and the irreversible, and when the last of the bronze had entered the pouring cup and descended into the shell, Oren said, That is it, and the men set down the empty crucible and stepped back and the shell sat in the sand and glowed and the bronze inside it cooled and the pour was complete.

No one spoke for a moment.

This was the custom, the post-pour silence, the moment of respect for the process and for the metal and for the risk that had been taken and survived, and the silence lasted perhaps five seconds but those five seconds had a weight and a density that was out of proportion to their duration, because the pour was the climax of weeks of work — the wax, the armature, the hollowing, the sprues, the shell, the burnout — and the five seconds of silence were the acknowledgment that all of those weeks had come to this moment and that the moment had passed and that the bronze was either good or it was not and the answer would not be known until the shell was broken away and the bronze was exposed, and this uncertainty, this unknowing, was the pour's final gift, the last suspense before the revelation.

Roberto said, Clean pour. Good fill. No leaks.

This was the best possible outcome and Oren felt the relief that always followed a good pour, the release of tension that had been building since the burnout, since the investment, since the sprue design, since the first day he had looked at the wax torso and begun to imagine the path the bronze would take through it.

He removed his face shield and wiped his face and the heat had left a red mark across his forehead where the shield had pressed against his skin, and this mark would fade in an hour but for now it was there, the pour's mark on his body, the evidence of proximity to the metal.

He drove home.

In the car, on the autostrada, with the windows down and the May air blowing through, he thought about the wax.

He thought about where the wax was now. Some of it was in the catch pan at the foundry, a puddle of brown liquid that would be remelted and reused. Some of it had vaporized in the kiln, the wax molecules breaking apart in the heat and rising as smoke through the kiln's exhaust and into the atmosphere above Pietrasanta where they dispersed and were lost, truly lost, irretrievable, the molecules that had been the torso of David Hersh's figure now scattered in the air above a Tuscan town, indistinguishable from the other molecules of the atmosphere.

The wax was lost.

The phrase repeated in his mind with the rhythm of the Fiat Panda's engine, a small two-note phrase that the engine seemed to be saying as it labored up the slight incline of the autostrada, the wax is lost, the wax is lost, and he thought about what was being lost in the other process, the process happening inside Lina, the cells being destroyed by the chemotherapy, the healthy cells dying alongside the cancerous ones, the collateral damage, and he thought that the healthy cells were like the wax, were the original, were the temporary form that had to be sacrificed for the permanent form to emerge, except that in Lina's case there was no permanent form, no bronze, no lasting replacement, only the treatment and the hope that the treatment would leave enough of the original intact to go on, to continue, to be recognizably Lina when the chemistry was done.

At the apartment Lina was in the kitchen.

She was sitting at the table with a cup of tea and a pad of paper on which she was writing a list, because Lina was always writing lists, lists being the grammar of her daily life, the syntax by which she organized the chaos of existence into manageable sequences of tasks, and the list she was writing now was a shopping list, Oren could see from the doorway — bread, milk, tomatoes, lemons — and the ordinariness of the list, its mundane specificity, struck him the way the smell of the wax in the foundry had struck him, as evidence of a process, a sign that the process was continuing, that the ordinary was still happening inside the extraordinary the way the wax was still present inside the shell in the moments before the burnout, intact, holding its shape, not yet lost.

He said, The pour went well.

She said, Good.

He said, The torso section. Clean fill. No leaks.

She said, Good, and she returned to her list, adding something — eggs, perhaps, or cheese — and the conversation was done, was complete, was the minimal exchange that sufficed between two people who had been together long enough to know that the important information was not in the words but in the presence, in the fact of being in the same room, at the same table, breathing the same air, and this fact was the armature, the invisible structure that held everything together.

The third infusion was on Monday.

Oren drove Lina to Pisa and the routine was a routine now, was a path worn through the unfamiliar by repetition, and they drove in the silence that was their driving silence, the silence of two people who did not need to talk to be together, and the landscape passed and the hospital appeared and the infusion room received them and the nurse inserted the IV and the chemicals dripped and the hours passed.

This time the side effects were worse.

Not during the infusion but after, in the days that followed, the nausea stronger, the fatigue deeper, the body's response to the third assault more pronounced than its response to the first or the second, because the effects were cumulative, each infusion adding to the burden of the previous one the way each coat of ceramic shell added to the weight of the previous coat, and Lina's body was carrying this accumulated weight and showing it, the surface changing — her skin drier, her color lighter, her movements more deliberate — and these changes were the patina of the treatment, the surface the chemicals were applying to her body, and unlike the patina that Oren applied to bronze, this patina was not controlled, was not intentional, was not beautiful.

She spent two days in bed.

Oren brought her tea and toast and soup and sat beside her and read to her from the newspaper — the Corriere della Sera, which she liked for its crossword and its cultural coverage — and she listened with her eyes closed and her hands folded on her stomach and her breathing was there, was present, with the hoarseness, and the room was quiet and the light through the window was the light of late May, golden and warm, and the mountains outside were green and the sky was blue and the world continued in its beauty and its indifference.

On the third day she got up.

She got up and showered and dressed and came to the kitchen and made coffee in the moka pot and the sound of the moka pot — the clank, the flame, the gargle — was the sound of Lina being Lina, the sound of the original reasserting itself through the patina of the treatment, and Oren heard this sound from the studio below and he stopped what he was doing and he stood at the bottom of the stairs and he listened and the sound continued and the coffee rose and the day began.

That afternoon he called Valentina Conti.

He had not spoken to her since the commission had been confirmed, since the contract had been signed and the deposit had been paid, and now, three months into the process, with the bronze cast and chased and waiting for its patina, he needed to discuss the installation, the timeline, the details of the garden in the Castelli Romani where the memorial would be placed.

Valentina answered on the third ring.

She had a voice that was Roman — quick, musical, with the particular Roman habit of dropping final syllables and compressing vowels so that Italian sounded like a different language, faster and less formal than the Tuscan Italian that Oren was accustomed to — and she said she was pleased that the bronze was cast, pleased that the work was progressing, and she asked about the patina.

Oren described what he intended. A base coat of liver of sulfur for the underlying brown-black. Then a sequence of cupric nitrate applications for the blue-green. Then ferric nitrate for the warm brown-orange highlights. Then a final fuming with ammonia for the deep verdigris. The result would be a surface that looked as though the bronze had been in the garden for decades, a surface of layered color, of accumulated chemical time, a surface that was simultaneously old and new, artificial and natural, intentional and accidental.

Valentina said, My mother loved green. The green of the garden. The green of the hills. She said green was the color of things that were still alive.

Oren said, The green of patina is the color of things that are changing. Not alive exactly. But not dead. Between.

Valentina was quiet for a moment and then she said, Between is right. A memorial is between. Between the person and the absence. Between the past and the present. Between is right.

They agreed on a September installation. Oren would apply the patina in July, allow it to cure and stabilize through August, and deliver the piece to the Castelli Romani in September, and the memorial would be placed in the garden before the fall, before the green of the garden began to change, before the leaves turned and fell and the landscape entered its own season of loss.

He hung up and sat in the studio.

September was four months away. Four months was — he calculated — roughly eight more infusions, roughly half of the treatment protocol, roughly the midpoint of the oncologist's twelve-to-eighteen-month estimate, and he was calculating now, was always calculating, converting the time that remained into the units that mattered — infusions, months, seasons, the steps of the process — because calculation was control and control was the only response he had to the uncontrollable.

He uncovered the memorial bronze.

He looked at it in the afternoon light and the bronze was the same — raw, penny-colored, Giuseppe's perfect chasing — and it was waiting for him, for his hands, for the liver of sulfur and the cupric nitrate and the ferric nitrate and the ammonia, for the heat and the brush and the torch, for the chemistry that would transform its surface from the bright nakedness of new metal to the deep complexity of artificial age.

Not yet.

He covered it again.

The patina would come in July, as he had told Valentina, and between now and July there was the rest of the New York commission — three more sections to pour, all four sections to chase and weld together into a single figure, the seams to blend, the surface to prepare — and there was Lina's treatment, the infusions every two weeks, the side effects and the recoveries, the rhythm of assault and respite that had become the rhythm of their days, and there was the summer advancing, the heat building, the tourists arriving, the town filling with the summer people who came for the beach and the restaurants and who did not know about the foundries and the studios and the marble quarries, who did not know that beneath the surface of the resort town was another town, a working town, a town of makers and handlers and patinators, a town where surfaces were manufactured and the manufacture was invisible.

He went upstairs.

Lina was in the kitchen, making dinner. The moka pot was on the stove, already used and cleaned and set to dry. The shopping list had been executed — the bread was on the counter, the tomatoes on the windowsill where they would ripen in the sun, the lemons in a bowl. She was cutting zucchini into rounds with the knife that Oren had sharpened for her three weeks ago and that was already losing its edge, because knives, like bronzes, lost their edge through use, through the friction of function, through the daily contact with the surfaces they were meant to cut.

He stood in the doorway and watched her hands.

Her hands were the same hands. They had not changed. The rest of her was changing — the hair, the skin, the weight, the energy — but the hands were the same, the long Norwegian fingers with the short practical nails and the wedding ring, the plain gold band that he had bought in a shop on Hatton Garden in London in 1999 and that she had worn every day since, the gold developing its own patina, a softening of the surface, a blurring of the edges, the daily friction of twenty-six years wearing the sharp new gold into something warmer and less defined.

She said, without turning around, Stop staring at my hands.

He said, I am not staring. I am observing.

She said, You are staring. You have been staring at my hands for three months. As though they are going to do something unexpected.

He said, Your hands never do anything unexpected.

She said, Then stop staring at them.

He did not stop. He stood in the doorway and watched her hands cut the zucchini into rounds that were uniform in thickness, each round perhaps four millimeters, the consistency of a person who had been cutting vegetables for thirty years, and the uniformity was its own beauty, its own patina, the surface of long practice applied to the mundane task, and Oren watched and the watching was the thing he could do, the observation, the attention to the surface, and the surface of Lina's hands cutting zucchini was the most important surface in the world.

That night in bed he lay beside her and listened and the breathing was there and the hoarseness was there and the dark was there and the mountains were there outside the window and the foundry was there on Via Aurelia and the memorial was there under its cloth in the studio and the New York commission was there in its shell at the foundry and the wax was lost — all the wax, every piece of wax that had been shaped and sprued and invested and burned out — the wax was lost and the bronze remained.

He thought: the wax is always lost.

He thought: the loss is the price of the lasting.

He thought: I am not ready to pay this price.

And the dark continued and the breathing continued and the mountains held their stone and the stone held its memory and somewhere in the night the bronze was cooling in its shell at Fonderia Mariani, the metal contracting as it gave up its heat, the alloy finding its final form, the permanent shape that would outlast the wax and the shell and the kiln and the foundry and the town and the maker and the maker's wife and the maker's daughter and everyone who would ever touch it, the bronze lasting the way only things that have been through fire can last, the way only things that have replaced what was lost can last, the way only things that know the price of their own existence can last.

The wax is lost.

The bronze remains.

This is the bargain.

This is the only bargain.