His cap is like those I once saw in a nineteenth-century photo of an old craftsman’s school in Italy. It is cream-coloured, and pulled halfway down the back of his head, with a rounded peak reaching out over his large nose. His point chisel nestles comfortably in his left palm as if it might be an extension of his hand.
He shakes his head and turns his shoulder, preparing to move away.
‘I used to carve!’
He stops and looks at me with eyes that have been so sharp for so long, eyes practised in detecting error and rooting it out, but which have now softened. After what seems a long time he grunts.
‘You want something to eat? Drink?’
He sits me at a lunch-table covered in checked cloth. Around it is an assortment of old chairs with names carved into the wooden backs, or engraved into the metal ones: Roger, Vincent, Frank, CS, Roberto.
‘Milk? Sugar?’
I nod.
‘Two.’
He places the cup in front of me with his large, gentle hands. Then he sits down. I barely notice, looking around the room, taking it in: the high ceiling, the exposed wooden beams, the skylight with the northern sun flooding the space, softened by the filter of dust. What seemed like carvings from outside are actually plaster models: keystones and capitals, bishops and saints. A plaster version of one of the angels inside the cathedral stands on a high ledge at the end of the room, looking down on us. I think of Sophe, can’t help but see a resemblance in the tilt of the angel’s head, the line of its mouth.
We sit in silence for some time. Eventually he pushes his chair back and moves across to the workbench where there is a block he is beginning to rough out.
‘Limestone?’ I ask.
‘Indiana limestone,’ he says, and then laughs. ‘This whole cathedral comes from Indiana!’
‘It’s soft?’
‘When he come out of the ground, my friend, he has a lot of water. The water makes him soft. But in the sun the water evaporates and he hardens. He has a compact grain, and holds the cut. He is sweet to work. And you? What is your stone?’
‘Sandstone. Though some people call it freestone because it doesn’t weather like most sandstone. It holds its grain.’
‘You from Australia?’
‘How did you know?’
‘We had carvers from all over the world here not so long ago. More countries than the League of Nations. Now it’s just me.’
He seems to sigh.
‘You have a family?’ he asks.
Such a simple question. I almost say no. A day earlier and I would have. A day earlier, though, I wouldn’t have visited the cathedral.
‘My mother died when I was a child. My older brother was killed. I just learnt my father has died. That’s why –’
I choke.
He waits.
‘We had a quarry,’ I finish.
*
Before dawn the next day I’ve set up a little tower of coins on the shelf of a phone box. I dial the number and hear the phone ringing fourteen hours away.
‘Em. It’s me, Bas.’
‘Bas. Oh, Bas. Bas! How are you, Bas?’
Her voice surprises me, is different from how I remember it. Somehow, despite the years of letters and her voice in those little domestic stories, her accent seems to have seeped away. She will have finished dinner now, I think. Will have washed up and be reading or knitting or quilting beside the tall living room lamp.
‘As well as you’d expect, Em. I didn’t read your letter about Dad until yesterday. I’m in Washington. The letter followed me here, but I only just got it.’
‘I wondered why I hadn’t heard from you.’
‘I’m sorry, Em.’
‘You’re the only one now, Bas.’
‘I lit a candle for him yesterday.’
‘That’s good, Bas. That’s good.’
A newspaper truck drives past – the rumble of its tyres on the bitumen as it approaches, then its roar and the glass of the phone box vibrating as it goes past. We both wait until it is gone.
‘Did you sell?’
Now the static, an ocean and two continents of it.
‘I’ve got a buyer,’ she says uncertainly. ‘It hasn’t gone through yet, but . . .’
‘It’s the right thing to do, Em, the right thing. I’m glad that’s what you’re doing.’
‘Yes . . . well . . .’
‘How are you, Em?’
So simple, yet such a hard question to find once you lose it. I couldn’t have asked it yesterday.
‘OK, all things considered . . . no . . . no, that’s not true. I’m lonely, Bas. I miss him.’
My stomach clutches.
‘I would have come back if it hadn’t happened so suddenly. I would have liked to have seen him. He suffered a lot in his life.’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘I’m sorry . . .’
‘But he didn’t blame you, Bas,’ she says quickly. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
The silence. What else might come to the surface?
‘Are you there, Bas?’
I close my eyes. There is no sun rising, no waking city, no receiver pressed hard against the side of my head.
‘He didn’t blame you for anything, Bas. He would’ve liked the chance to tell you that. I know he would.’
EIGHT
Antonio Vasari has set a chair against the workshop wall for me. He works his mallet and chisel with speed and intensity, faster than I’ve ever seen. It is loud too. Silence can be terrifying, so I listen with relief to the sound of his mallet and his chisel, the limestone chips scattering on the floor or crunching under the soles of his boots, the operas he whistles. Antonio offers me tea when he rests midmorning, and makes sandwiches with smoked ham from the fridge when he breaks for lunch.
‘Your brother?’ he asks, shaking his cap as he steps back from his work. I’ve been drifting, and look at him without answering, unsure whether I’ve heard him right.
‘You say your brother was killed. What happen?’
It is what the Beards want. You. Go. Tell. It is what I have resisted. I shake my head.
‘No?’ he says. ‘Maybe I misunderstand. I thought you said you had a brother.’
I am trapped.
‘Yes,’ I say finally. And I begin.
Ignited, I talk on and on, trembling, laying it bare.
Antonio gasps and shakes his head, and murmurs, ‘Dear God, no.’ But when Jack is dead and it is Islam I accuse – as I quote the Qur’an, and demonstrate my proofs, and check he understands and test him to see what alliance there might be between us – he grows quiet.
The master carver rises from his chair and turns on the electric jug and puts teabags into two cups he lifts off the shelf.
He sits again and raises his cup of tea to his lips and takes a sip.
‘This table here,’ he says, touching it, ‘is good for stories. Good stories. Bad stories. Many years, and many stories. It is good for telling.’
‘What happened to my brother is not just a story. It is terrible. Evil! The greatest of evils, the worst of evils.’
He pauses a long time.
‘Yes,’ he says, looking me evenly in the eyes, ‘it is a very terrible story.’
*
‘You want?’ Antonio asks one morning, gesturing to the stone.
I stare at him.
‘You ever carve limestone before?’
I shake my head. Can he guess how long it’s been since I’ve carved anything?
‘You try.’
My heart quickens, and I feel a rising panic. I freeze. I am always freezing.
*
As a child, I’d wander along the foot of the sandstone cliffs in the early morni
ng, inspecting the rocks which had come off when the temperature fell during the night, and which the next day lay split open on the ground. I’d collect the larger grains of quartz and fill a jar with them, then pour water in and place the jar on my bedroom windowsill. Every morning the crystals would glint and glitter and I believed each new dawn was a thing of wonder.
Sandstone is the stone of light and dark. It is rough, is only ever fresh cut from the ground, just broken free, and in that very moment of liberation is already crumbling, once again, back into the earth.
‘It can’t be polished like marble,’ my father used to say. ‘And this is its majesty, because in its roughness sandstone casts shadows marble never can.’
He could sell stone, my father.
‘Sandstone refuses to be dressed up, it can’t be made pretty like marble, is never cold, never distant. It is alive in ways all those marble museum pieces can only long to be.’
And as a boy I learnt how to drill a row of holes, insert a feather-and-pin in each, then move across the row of them with a mallet, tapping them one by one like a percussionist – till the stone splits and what is unnecessary falls away. I learnt how to make sandstone smooth like young skin, or pocked like a turbulent sea. I could shape rock into animals or trees or letters or numerals, any pattern under the sun. I knew how to use a rust seam, which fissures would hold and which would split. I knew how stone moved, our sandstone. I could transform our hills, the very earth on which we walked, from which we were born.
*
‘You want to try?’
I breathe. I nod.
Antonio disappears from the workshop for a few moments and returns with a small limestone block that he sets before me. Then he puts his hands on my shoulders and turns me towards the shelves where his tools lie: an air hammer and a pointing machine, and coffee cans filled with rasps and chisels lined neatly on a shelf, their sharpened blades towards the wall.
‘Take anything you want.’
But when Antonio realises I’m unable to choose, he selects a chisel and mallet himself and places them in my hands.
Sophe is in my pocket, the pressure of her resting against my leg.
No matter how gentle you are, there is always that first touch of chisel on stone, when stone resists. Then you ready yourself, prepare to force yourself upon the stone. It is a sacred moment of doubt. I learned to trust it years ago. Without it, there would be mere butchery.
The first strike.
‘Be confident,’ I hear Antonio whisper. ‘You must tame your stone.’
Riddle, master, slave, servant, or lover.
The stone is your judge.
I raise my arm and strike.
NINE
Antonio sets me tasks, small ones at first, satisfying himself at every step. That I know how to find the bottom of a block, that I can make a surface flat, carve letters and cut leaves. That I know how to ‘find the dark’, as he calls it, in the light smooth texture of the limestone.
‘I think I can use you,’ he says eventually. ‘Not much. A few jobs. A few dollars, that’s all.’
He sets me up in a caravan in the backyard of his brother Gianni’s house in a modest part of the city, a little too far from the cathedral to rely on the buses. Gianni is older than Antonio and was once also a carver, but his body is now shrinking. Under his dyed black hair his eyes are filmy, and he probably needs company as much as I need a bed.
I accept the bike Gianni tells me he hasn’t ridden in years and cycle through the city’s streets in the bright, early hours of the day, pushing the last uphill stretch to the church. Leaning the bike on the inside wall of the workshop, I slip off the small backpack which holds my statuette.
Antonio tells me the cathedral was consecrated just a few years ago, once the major carvings – the altar reredos and the creation tympanum and the trumeau statues – were in place, and every crocket on every finial on every pinnacle had been carved and mounted on the cathedral’s steeples.
‘But it is not complete,’ Antonio says. ‘It will be a hundred years before it is complete.’
There are still grotesques to be added, bosses to be mounted, and carvings that need embellishment. Events that need memorialising, some past and some yet to come. ‘Every great cathedral needs its resident master carver,’ he says.
Whatever Antonio entrusts to me I do: a small lily or an unobtrusive rose, some minor flourish. He teaches me to use the pointing machine – how to transfer the dimensions of a plaster model across to the stone, measurement by measurement. All those martyrs and missionaries who’ve first been shaped in clay by their sculptor, then cast in plaster and set before Antonio for him to recreate in stone. For months I rough pieces out for him to take over and bring to completion. My hands blister and callous, but they are returning to life.
I watch him finish a wreath of lilies at the feet of a saint, and nod in awe.
He smiles.
‘I always have trouble with flowers,’ he says looking up at me, pausing. ‘The damn bees get in the way!’
Then he slaps me on the shoulder and laughs heartily. The kindness of that invitation.
But when at lunch or over tea, or at the end of a day’s embellishing, I try turning the talk to Islam. Antonio waves me away, or ignores me, or tells me the floor needs sweeping.
If I grow angry he only closes his eyes and lifts his finger to his lips.
‘Shhh,’ he says, ‘shhh, now.’
As if I am a baby.
‘Not here. We need to work.’
*
When someone knocks the hands off a statue in the apse, we carry it down the aisle and out the door like stretcher-bearers.
‘Do you know who did it?’ I ask the cathedral dean, a tall, thin man, as he follows us into the workshop. The final approval for every design of every cathedral carving lies with him.
‘We have no idea at all, Mr Adams,’ he says. ‘Some people think it is a political statement. A statue of George Washington in the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine in New York was damaged the other day and a dollar bill with Washington’s defaced head was left on it. But we really don’t know. There are so many reasons for damaging a statue.’
‘The Muslims blew up the giant Buddhas in Afghanistan!’
‘The Taliban,’ he corrects. ‘Yes, and the Vandals destroyed the gods of Rome when they invaded, and Cromwell’s soldiers took the noses off Catholic saints all over England, and statues of vanquished kings and presidents throughout history are torn down and replaced by their conquerors. Yes, yes, yes, Mr Adams. But it’s more likely to have been a tourist looking for a souvenir, or a young buck acting out a dare, or some poor mentally ill soul. Do you know the story of the fellow who damaged the Pieta at St Peters?’
I grit my teeth. I know more about the Pieta than the dean ever will, but say nothing and endure his lecture.
‘If it’s the devil you look for,’ Antonio whispers to me when the dean has finished, ‘you look in the wrong place.’
We return the statue to its nook weeks later, with new hands, the cracks invisible.
*
Antonio sets lessons for me. I sharpen tools I’ve never used before and carve flowers I’ve never smelt. I complete all the tasks I’m asked, even begin anticipating them before Antonio speaks. I collect fallen chisels from the floor to save Antonio’s aging back, carry the stone for him, learn his rhythms.
Slowly I feel the stone of myself breaking. Deposits of soil accumulate in the fresh cracks in my spirit. I feel earth and leaf-litter and drops of rain, all the wetness and warmth of life returning. It is a new remembering.
*
‘Very good,’ Antonio says.
We sit at Gianni’s dinner table to celebrate the first anniversary of my arrival. The red-and-white checked tablecloth I found in one of Gianni
’s kitchen drawers makes it look like we’re sitting in a restaurant, something special. It is still summer and the light outside lingers. Heat rises from the spaghetti mounds as I serve it onto our three plates.
‘Yes,’ Gianni agrees. ‘Buonissimo!’
‘I’m no cook,’ I say, ‘but . . .’
They can’t know the effort slicing the onions took, even now.
‘No, no. Is good. Truly . . . Maybe not as good as a woman’s . . .’ and he winks and laughs, ‘but good for drinking wine.’
Gianni has closed his eyes. I’ve come to understand the death of his wife four years ago is a shadow he can’t step out from under, no matter what his brother tries. But for Antonio it is different. His ‘life of women’, he calls it, each touching him equally. Whether deeply or not, I can’t tell.
He lifts his glass.
‘To women!’ he toasts.
Our glasses chink.
‘To wine!’ Gianni says.
‘To carving,’ I say, and raise my glass.
TEN
Suddenly, one late summer day, there is vindication.
We see and hear nothing. We don’t even know it has happened until late in the morning when a group of breathless nuns in dishevelled habits knock on the windowpane. I follow Antonio out of the workshop and high up into the central tower of the cathedral and we look to the south-west where the nuns tell us a plane has crashed into the Pentagon on the banks of the river below. There are no flames from here, no visible embers. But smoke. Inexhaustible clouds of it spill from the opened building all afternoon, rising, catching on the breeze, filling the high blue sky.
*
‘What did I tell you, Antonio? What did I tell you? It’s exactly what I’ve been saying.’
‘Softer!’ Antonio barks. ‘You need the feel. Where is the feel?’
‘They hate us, Antonio.’
‘Your hands need to be soft, Bas. Tender. You can’t carve when you’re angry.’
I step back from the stone.
‘It could have been the cathedral.’
‘It wasn’t.’
‘Next time it might be. All these great carvings of yours might be destroyed in an instant.’
Closer to Stone Page 21