The fabric left first. December 1st, 4:19 AM, at the same fence, and I want to be precise about what had happened because it is the hinge of the whole sequence. The canopy had not fallen off. It had been drawn off, in one long banner, and the wind had hung it across the chain-link on a diagonal from the upper corner down to the ground, where the frame lay collapsed and waiting with its ribs open. Cloth on one side of the painting. Skeleton on the other. A body and the thing it had been wearing, separated by four feet of wet alley and nothing else at all.
The lamp stood behind the fence and lit the banner from the far side, so the whole strip glowed along its folds and the wire diamonds showed through it, and for a few minutes the alley had a stained glass window. I stood there longer than was sensible. Caravaggio’s Seven Works of Mercy has that cloth in the upper right, the one being lowered, and everyone reads it as drapery. It is not drapery. It is the only soft thing in a painting full of hard ones, and he put it up high where you have to go looking for it. The viewer will note that the frame on the ground has not lost its shape. Every rib is present. It is still, technically, an umbrella. It has simply been relieved of the part that made the claim. Sixth station of The Passion of the Broken Umbrella, and the last in which the two halves of the object appear together. After this the cloth went its own way. I never found it again. Velum abiit. Ossa manent.
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