Ferric Nitrate

Iron nitrate nonahydrate dissolved in water produced a solution the color of strong tea that turned bronze the color of autumn — warm brown, orange-brown, the brown of fallen oak leaves, the brown of rust, the brown of earth — and when applied over a liver of sulfur base it produced a surface of extraordinary warmth, a surface that seemed to glow from within, as though the bronze itself were generating light, and this was the patina that David Hersh wanted for his three-meter figure, not the green of the memorial but the brown of old bronze, the brown of museum pieces, the brown that said serious and lasting and important.

The New York figure was assembled.

Giuseppe had spent two weeks welding the four sections together — torso, head, left leg-and-base, right leg-and-base — and then chasing the weld seams until they vanished, his die grinder singing in the foundry for ten hours a day, the bronze dust collecting on every surface, and the figure stood now in the center of the foundry floor on its base, a three-meter human form that was also not a human form, the torso opening into a doorway that went nowhere, the hands becoming roots that entered the base like fingers entering soil, and the figure looked, in its raw state, like something between a classical statue and a surrealist dream, the familiarity of the human body disrupted by the strangeness of the transformations, and this disruption was what the patina had to honor.

Oren set up the patina station at the foundry.

The memorial's patina he had done in the studio because the piece was small enough to handle on the worktable, but the New York figure was too large for the studio, was too large even for the foundry's regular workspace, and Roberto had cleared a section of the loading dock and rigged a temporary ventilation hood — a sheet metal canopy connected to an exhaust fan — and Oren set up his chemicals and his torches and his brushes under this hood, the patina station like a field hospital, improvised and functional.

For a piece this size he would need larger torches.

He used two: a propane torch for the detailed work — the face, the hands, the roots, the edges of the doorway — and a rosebud tip on an oxy-acetylene torch for the broad surfaces — the back, the legs, the base — and the rosebud put out a flame the size of a dinner plate, a broad soft heat that could bring a large area of bronze to working temperature in minutes rather than the tens of minutes that the propane torch required.

The base coat went on over three days.

The liver of sulfur, the same chemical he had used on the memorial but in larger quantities — a full jar rather than a glass, the solution mixed in a bucket rather than a jar — and he applied it with a large brush, the kind used for painting walls, working in sections, heating each section with the rosebud, applying the solution, heating again, rinsing, moving to the next section, and the figure darkened in patches, the dark spreading across the bronze surface like a shadow moving across a landscape.

He worked with Marco and Tomasso as assistants, because a patina of this scale required more hands than two — one person to heat, one person to apply, one person to rinse — and the coordination between them was a choreography, a sequence of moves that had to be timed to the chemistry, the heat and the application and the rinse happening in the correct order at the correct intervals, and Oren directed this choreography the way a conductor directed an orchestra, by gesture and by voice, by the nod and the pointed finger and the single word — heat, apply, rinse, wait — that communicated more efficiently than sentences.

By the end of the third day the figure was dark, the liver of sulfur base complete, and Oren stood on the loading dock in the late afternoon heat and looked at the three-meter figure standing against the corrugated steel wall of the foundry, the dark bronze absorbing the light rather than reflecting it, and the figure looked, in its dark state, like a shadow made solid, like an absence that had been given weight and substance.

The ferric nitrate went on over the next four days.

Unlike the cupric nitrate spray technique he had used on the memorial, the ferric nitrate for the New York figure was applied with brushes and sponges and rags, each application tool producing a different texture — the brush producing streaks and strokes, the sponge producing stipples and dapples, the rag producing washes and veils — and Oren used all three, alternating between them, building the brown surface in layers of different textures that combined to produce the complexity he was after, the surface that said years rather than days.

He worked in the July heat.

The heat was now at its summer peak, the temperature in the shade reaching thirty-five degrees and on the loading dock, with the torches and the sun and the radiant heat from the corrugated steel, reaching something that Oren estimated was close to forty-five, and he drank water constantly and took breaks in the shade and wrapped a wet cloth around his neck and the cloth dried in minutes and he wet it again and the cycle repeated, the water evaporating as fast as he could apply it, and this evaporation was itself a kind of chemistry, the same principle that made the patina work — a liquid applied to a hot surface, the liquid reacting and evaporating, leaving behind a residue that changed the surface — and Oren thought that he was developing his own patina in the heat, the sweat and the sun and the chemicals staining his skin and his clothes and his memory with the color of this July, this summer, this season of making.

Lina did not come to the foundry.

The foundry was too far to walk and too hot for someone in treatment, and Lina understood this and did not insist, and Oren was both relieved and sad — relieved because the foundry's heat and fumes were genuinely dangerous for her, and sad because her absence from the patina work meant that the collaboration they had developed during the memorial's patina, the watching and the being-watched, the commentary and the silence, was suspended, and the suspension made the foundry work lonelier than it would otherwise have been.

In the evenings he came home and told her about the work.

He described the day's progress — the sections completed, the colors achieved, the problems encountered and solved — and Lina listened with the attention she always gave to his descriptions of the work, and the listening was the collaboration now, was the proxy for the watching, and Oren tried to describe not just the facts but the experience, not just the chemical reactions but the way the surface felt when it was coming together, the way the brown deepened under the torch, the way the texture built up under the sponge, and his descriptions were halting and imprecise because words were not his medium, surfaces were his medium, and the gap between the surface and the description of the surface was the gap between the thing and the representation of the thing, and this gap could not be closed, only narrowed, and the narrowing was the effort, was the attempt, was the gesture of a man trying to bring his work home to his wife in the only container he had, which was language, which was inadequate, which was all there was.

The fifth infusion was during the New York patina.

Oren drove Lina to Pisa on Monday morning and sat beside her in the infusion room and the chemicals dripped and the hours passed and at four o'clock they drove home and Lina went to bed and the pattern repeated — the nadir on days four and five, the recovery on days six through ten, the normalcy on days eleven through fourteen — and the pattern was a rhythm now, was the heartbeat of their life, and the heartbeat was irregular, was syncopated, was not the steady pulse of health but the complex rhythm of illness managed by chemistry, and Oren lived inside this rhythm the way he lived inside the rhythm of the foundry, adapting to it, working around it, incorporating it into the schedule.

During the nadir days he did not go to the foundry.

He stayed home with Lina and cooked and cleaned and sat beside the bed and read to her from the newspaper and the reading was the collaboration now, was the watching, was the being-present that Lina needed and that Oren provided in the only way he knew, which was physically, bodily, his large frame in the chair beside the bed, his voice reading the words of the Corriere della Sera, his presence an armature inside the days that held them in their shape.

On the recovery days he returned to the foundry and the patina progressed.

The brown deepened. The warm highlights emerged. The figure developed its surface the way a person developed a character, layer by layer, decision by decision, each application a choice about who this figure would be, what period it would suggest, what climate it would evoke, what kind of time had supposedly passed over it, and these choices were Oren's and they were also not Oren's, were also the chemistry's, the material's, the bronze's own contribution to its surface.

On the twelfth day of the New York patina, a Thursday in mid-July, David Hersh called from Brooklyn.

He wanted to know about the patina's progress. Oren described what he had done and David listened and then asked a question that no sculptor had ever asked Oren before: What does the surface want?

Oren was silent for a moment.

He said, The surface wants to be complex. It wants variation. It wants the eye to move across it and find different things at different points. It wants to be read, the way a text is read, from one passage to the next.

David said, That is what I want too. The figure is about the human body as a landscape. The patina should be the weather on that landscape. Variable. Changing. Never the same in two places.

Oren said, That is what it is. That is what it is becoming.

And the conversation confirmed what Oren had intuited — that the patina was not decoration but meaning, not coating but content, and that the surface of the figure was as much a part of the sculpture as the form, and the sculptor understood this, which was rare, because most sculptors treated the patina as an afterthought, a finishing step, a coat of paint on the finished form, and David Hersh understood that the patina was part of the form, was inseparable from the form, and this understanding was why Oren was doing this commission and why he was doing it carefully and why the two weeks of patina work were not two weeks of finishing but two weeks of making.

The New York patina was completed on a Saturday at the end of July.

The figure stood on the loading dock in its brown surface and the surface was extraordinary — warm and deep and varied, the ferric nitrate browns ranging from amber to chocolate to almost-black in the recesses, the texture dappled and streaked and washed and stippled, the combination of all the application methods producing a surface that looked like decades of museum patina, the kind of surface that old bronzes in the Uffizi or the British Museum had, the surface that said this thing has been here a long time, this thing has been looked at and touched and thought about, this thing has accumulated the attention of generations.

Roberto looked at it and said nothing, which was his highest form of praise.

Giuseppe looked at it and said, She is ready.

Marco looked at it and said, Can I touch it, and Oren said, Not yet, the wax needs to cure, and Marco pulled his hand back with the reluctance of a child told not to touch something beautiful.

The figure was crated and shipped to New York the following week. Oren would not see it installed. David Hersh would oversee the installation himself, in a sculpture garden in the Hudson Valley, and the figure would stand there in the New York weather — the hot summers and the cold winters and the rain and the snow — and the applied patina would interact with the natural patina, the artificial aging merging with the actual aging, and the figure would change over the years in ways that Oren could not predict, the surface evolving, the brown shifting, the weather writing its own story over the story that Oren had written.

The memorial was next.

The memorial had been sitting on the worktable in the studio for three weeks, its green patina curing, the wax seal protecting the surface, and Oren examined it on the Monday after the New York piece was shipped and the patina was stable, the green deep and true, the surface exactly what he had intended, and the memorial was ready for delivery, ready for the garden in the Castelli Romani, ready for the lemon trees and the rosemary and the jasmine.

But August was not over.

And September was the installation date.

And between now and September there was one more scan, and two more infusions, and the accumulating summer, and Lina's birthday in the third week of August, which would be her fifty-second birthday, and the question that hung over the birthday was whether it would be her last, and this question was not asked by either of them because asking it would be like asking a shell whether it would crack, the asking itself a form of the feared thing, the question creating the crack it described.

He covered the memorial with the cloth again.

He would uncover it in September, when the time came, when the garden was ready, when the installation was scheduled, when the bronze would leave the studio and enter the world and become the thing it was meant to be, the thing in the garden, the green thing among the green things, the memorial in the place of the memory.

Until then it waited.

And Oren waited with it, beside it, in the studio that smelled of liver of sulfur and ferric nitrate and the particular complex chemical signature of a summer spent applying surfaces to things, accelerating their aging, controlling their corrosion, making the new look old and the raw look weathered and the temporary look permanent, and this was his work and this was his life and the two were the same thing and had always been the same thing and were now more the same thing than ever, because the work and the life were both about surfaces and the surfaces were both about time and time was the thing they were running out of.