The Figures of Beauty

by David Macfarlane

  The stories your mother and I concocted as we watched the fireflies in the thick dusk are the best way for me to recollect the pace of those few months. They are the best way to remember the day-to-dayness of being in love with Anna. For the truth is: they were lovely days. Time never passed the same way again.

  I added my own information to hers—a little reluctantly, at first, but she insisted that I contribute to the stories we told. She always thought they were parts of the same history anyway. Arbitrary distinctions—such as the division between the past and the present—were not of much interest to her. They ran counter to her sculptural instincts. If there was no obvious link between a baby abandoned in 1948 in North America and the Italian Renaissance, Anna would figure one out. So, at her request, I told her about growing up in Cathcart. I told her that the path from Pietrabella to her farmhouse reminded me of the trails along the wooded, limestone ridge behind the Hughsons’ house where I played as a child.

  Anna found ways—some almost plausible, I admit—to weave our stories together. I was never sure whether this construct was a metaphor, or whether she thought it was close to the truth. In either case, it expressed the same view: she believed the universe had conspired to bring the two of us together.

  I am someone who has been described—usually by disappointed women—as unemotional. But the truth is I am too emotional. As a child, flushes of happiness would pass through me like shocks—often during recess in the green washroom of the school I attended.

  Actually, there was no green in it. The floor was a blue-grey composite stone and the walls were brown tile. The copper pipes were luscious with condensation, and the full-length porcelain urinals marble-like in dignity. They were white as icebergs.

  But somehow the basement air was green. It was like being deep in an ancient sea. The water fountains, the wooden toilet stalls, and the smell of the janitor’s Dustbane created a sub-aquatic effect—clean, cool, dripping, spacious. I would not have been surprised by drifting jellyfish.

  Recess was a relief from the blank, thick air of the classrooms above. Don’t read too much into this, but peeing into a urinal the size of a sarcophagus caused a rush of pleasure—a pleasure I couldn’t always manage to conceal. The little seizures of joy that overtook me made me shiver—often with disastrous impact on my aim. I contain sadness no more successfully.

  At the end of the summer of 1968 I hid from your mother my decision to leave her until almost the last possible moment. This was because I was selfish and cowardly. But it was also because I have no capacity for unhappiness. I couldn’t imagine being with Anna when we were not happy. So I made our period of being miserable together as brief as possible. And as awful. She did not take the news at all well.

  Later that night, after my telling Anna I would be leaving, I came back to her farmhouse alone, returning from a party of foreign artists in town. Anna and I had gone to the party together—in glum silence. She was furious. But once we arrived, her mood appeared to change. Ridding herself of me seemed part of this transformation. But perhaps less important a part than I might think—or so the coldness of her eyes conveyed the few times our gazes met through the crowd in the smoky, noisy studio. She laughed, and she danced, and she sang “Bella Ciao.” She was dancing quite a lot with a young sculptor from Rotterdam. And it must have been close to midnight when I realized they were both no longer there.

  I walked back, alone. And the moment of my arrival at the farmhouse coincided with her climax. One of them, anyway. Anna could wake the dead sometimes.

  I’ve always wondered: When Anna was in the Dutchman’s arms, with her back arching off her bed, did she somehow know that I was standing on the path? And was what I heard in the thick, otherwise quiet darkness not at all what I thought it was? Was she wailing some Tuscan maledizione through the bedroom window at my humiliated silhouette?

  If so, the curse would have been a particularly pointed one. Knowing Anna. My guess is it would have been something like: You shall live your little life in the same little house in the same little provincial North American town in which you grew up. You shall never leave the place where they eat canned spaghetti and drink milk, and you shall never again find a love like the one you have just abandoned.

  Because that’s what happened. Unexpectedly, unpredictably, that’s exactly what happened. Here I am. Although being a single, reasonably attractive heterosexual who had the words “culture critic” under his byline in the Cathcart Chronicle was not always so heavy a burden. You’d be surprised how many women, single and otherwise, are interested in the arts.

  Some affairs lasted longer than others. There was one that danced for years around the subject of marriage. But one of the anxieties I’ve always had about dating is that sooner or later it’s bound to involve a couch, a bowl of potato chips, and an old tear-jerker on a movie channel. Goodbye, Mr. Chips was the most embarrassing.

  I am neurotically susceptible to pathos—which isn’t surprising, really. I can’t manage sadness because my life began with it. At least, that’s my guess. There’s not much chance that the history that immediately precedes the abandoning of a baby beside a swimming pool in a town in southern Ontario in 1948 is going to be anything but sad. There would have been a girl. And a boy. There would have been nothing more mysterious or glamorous than a moment of bad timing. And so I always steered clear of any investigation of my own origins—even when, as your exasperated mother used to say, “All the connections are staring you in the face, you stupido.”

  Your mother’s interest in my background might seem a writer’s impulse more than a sculptor’s. But I always thought it was the process of carving marble that informed her—about this as about most things.

  Once when I was watching Anna work I asked her what she was doing. My question was actually quite specific: I hadn’t previously seen the wooden-handled, claw-toothed chisel she was using. But she took my question to be more general and thus more stupid. “What do you think I’m doing?” she said. “I’m looking for the fucking figure in the fucking stone.” She enjoyed demonstrating her command of colloquial English.

  Anna believed that the last buff of emery on a piece of Carrara marble was predicted by the first stroke of her point chisel. The intersection where the plane of a question and the plane of an answer meet—despite the countless opportunities for them to miss one another entirely—is where your mother puts her faith.

  Your mother believed in the same perfect beauty that Michelangelo did—the one that he was always trying so furiously to find. It’s the frequent subject of his poems: the sculptor, chisel in hand, his face and his hair and his arms white with the dust of his impossible quest.

  Anna thought love was much the same kind of search. It was surprising, really.

  My upbringing could hardly have been more North American and more middle class. Before I arrived in Pietrabella, I knew about macaroni, and I knew about spaghetti, and I thought that olive oil was something that was kept in a small vial in the bathroom in the event of stomach disorders. Still, somehow, Anna and I answered each other’s question. We could lie together for an hour after, our lips hardly touching, our hands hardly moving, doing nothing but looking at one another.

  The mistake I made was not recognizing how rare such coincidence is. I was wrong to think I would ever love anyone as much again. But Anna knew. She did not think things happened by accident. Whereas the only thing I could claim as a birthright was the certainty that they did …

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MY FATHER’S LETTER was delivered to me by the Italian appointees of his Cathcart attorneys, much sooner than he had ever imagined. On the envelope, in the fine, black ink he always used, were written the words: “To my daughter. Delivered by hand.”

  He had imagined that the letter would become an artifact—something that closed a period of his life that he expected to be obscured in importance by the years to follow. But, as things turned out, there were no following years.

  It is a stran
ge story—not complicated, exactly, but without the benefit of familiar pattern. And it was my mother who suggested that I use parts of my father’s letters to tell it. This was contrary to his wishes, but being contradicted by my mother is not an uncommon experience for those who have anything to do with her.

  When I asked my mother for her advice on the matter, she was silent for a good thirty seconds before answering. We had just come from the Taglianis’ house after Mr. Tagliani’s funeral. My husband and our two sons had gone to the seaside for the afternoon, with their soccer ball, and the picnic I’d packed for them, and the towels and sunscreen I made sure they didn’t forget.

  When my mother is asked by tourists or by some newcomers in the Café David in Pietrabella why she loves stone as much as she does, her answer surprises them. “Because I can move around it,” she says. “That’s what space is for.”

  When she works—as she does every day—she has her hammer in her left hand, a chisel in her right. Her hair is tied up. Its colour is no longer changed very much by marble dust.

  My mother works outside as much as possible. She enjoys the play of sunshine on stone as much as she enjoys anything. Rather than by the wristwatches she always loses and the clocks she forgets to wind, this is how she usually keeps track of time. The way light is dispersed across the surface of a rough block of marble accords with her non-sequential sense of things. This is how she marks the progress of her working days. She circles her chosen stone the way a god might circle the void that is going to become creation. “There are many beginnings,” she says. “The trick is choosing the ones that lead to the same ending.”

  But my father’s request had been troubling me. “How do I remember something I didn’t know?” I asked her.

  Her long pauses are characteristic. They are the deep caverns of possibility down which anyone who speaks with her eventually tumbles. When she answers a question she has a way of waiting for as long as it takes for everyone to dismiss all preconceptions of what her answer might be. People often find this unsettling. It is like speaking to a mad person. Not that my mother is crazy. It’s just that there is no point in even trying to guess what she might say.

  She might well have considered my father’s request frivolous. I’d only known him for a year. And it was entirely possible that my mother thought that distance and brevity were the only pertinent realities of the relationship. She is the least sentimental person I know. But it was just as possible that she might decide that my father had asked the one thing that he should have asked.

  What I had not anticipated—predictably—was what my mother said. “Nobody remembers anything. They only ever remember what they make up.”

  There was another lengthy pause. I knew not to interrupt it.

  “It’s what I said to him always,” she continued. “But your father wasn’t so bright. I told him always to let what he knows stay close to what he imagines. That’s how to be alive.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, as if passing on some advice to me about cooking or how to remove a wine stain from a blouse. “But he didn’t think he knew how.”

  She regarded me closely, to see if I’d got her point. She is always a little impatient when she sees I haven’t.

  “You should write it.”

  I shot her a look of surprise—a response that seemed equally to surprise her. “Well,” she said, looking down at her own hands, “you’re not going to carve it, are you.”

  “Carve what?”

  “What he wants you to dream up. What he was finally starting to dream in his letter.”

  Irritation is never a good debating tactic with my mother. But it’s the one I usually end up using. For once my mother ignored my sharpness. She brushed objections away with the same gesture that sweeps the ashes of what she is smoking from her work shirt.

  “I don’t care what he said. He doesn’t want to be remembered. He wants to be part of who you are—the way you might look, or talk, or move, or maybe even write. He wants you to be a little bit like him. Because you’re alive. Not because he’s dead. That’s all. He wants to be heard a little in your voice. He wants a little of who he was then to be a little of who you are. Now.”

  My mother almost never cries. But sometimes her voice becomes briefly, almost imperceptibly, shaky.

  “That’s all we want,” my mother told me. “That’s all the past ever is.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  IT WAS LATE in the muggy August of 1922 that Julian Morrow—not yet Sir Julian—noticed a couple in the old part of the town. They were on the bridge of the Via Carriona, inspecting a marble statue. Visitors, obviously.

  Morrow stopped. He smoothed his moustache and beard with his left hand as if moulding thoughtfulness into his face.

  He was wearing a comfortable suit of the palest yellow—the light, rumpled linen a far better choice for the weather than the houndstooth jacket of the gentleman he was considering. It was already hot.

  Julian Morrow drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket. He patted his brow. He adjusted a soft-brimmed Borsalino. It was a favourite of his summer hats. He was about to start over the street but his crossing was interrupted by two heavy carriages pulled by yoked oxen.

  It was unusual to see tourists. Carrara was off the beaten track. A correspondent for an English travel journal had recently complained: “Thanks to a surfeit of marble, there is not the shadow of anything that can be called ‘society’ in Carrara.” This, so far as Julian Morrow was concerned, was not a bad thing.

  The wagons each had a single canvas strap holding rough blocks of stone in place on their wooden flatbeds. An old woman and a few hungry-looking dogs hurried out of the way.

  Morrow’s calculations were these: The couple was English, possibly American. Of some means, judging by the cut and quality of their clothes. He guessed that they were in Carrara because the wife—younger, very pretty—had an interest in art or history or something of that nature that the husband, Baedeker in hand, was accommodating.

  This presented promise. But what is important to know about Julian Morrow is that his calculations were so coincident with his own pleasure that he hardly thought of them as calculations. It was what he most enjoyed about this place: business was part of the same pleasure he took in the temperature, in the light, in the mountain air on his freshly shaved cheeks. It was a delight resplendent and swift, like water slipping over stone.

  There had been some morning rain in Carrara.

  He looked down at the toes of his own shoes, poised at the curb. They were the darkened brown of a saddle. They were well worn but well looked after. They were made of excellent leather. The runoff from the morning shower was clear in the marble gutter.

  JULIAN MORROW WAS SOMEONE who was good to know—certainly that was the reputation he fostered. He invited people to visit him. That these people might prove to be customers and clients was not beside the point. It was just not an objective Morrow was inclined to make very obvious. He was too good a salesman for that. They came to see his quarries, to tour his workshops, to stay with him at his villa.

  His love for the place was so obvious that it was not so much an emotion that he shared as a characteristic he was unable to hide. His girth was substantial and his shoulders were broad, but these were only part of the reason he was so often described—even by Italians—as larger than life.

  He loved the industry and art of the place as much as he loved the hills and the sky. “Buon giorno,” he called to everyone on the sidewalk as he made his way through the clattering morning streets of Carrara. “Buona sera,” he called to everyone in a café when, after his digestivo, he stepped briskly into the early evening light of the square. He broadcast his affection effusively—exclamations at the excellence of a fish soup endeared him to the cooks who prepared it, to the waiters who served it, and to the restaurant owners, who always greeted him so warmly when he stepped through their doors.

  He was the best of guides. He took his visitors to this statue, to that bridge, to a white marble
baptismal font in a country church that they would never have found on their own. He took them to eat in country inns where there were no menus because there were no choices to be made. They drank the local wine. They ate whatever the kitchen had prepared. The lunches lasted for hours.

  On Sundays—the only day of the week when the quarries were not worked—he took his house guests on hikes into the mountains for picnics. He pointed out the cliffside that Michelangelo had imagined carving into a colossus as a beacon for ships. He helped them discern the purple shadow of Corsica on the horizon. He gestured to the south, in the direction of Torre del Lago, the home of Giacomo Puccini.

  As he set out the meal his cook had packed for the Sunday picnic, it was Morrow’s custom to sing “Un Bel Dì.” This was a performance, but he did not let its lack of spontaneity diminish the pleasure he took in delivering it. Pausing, with the cork half pulled from a bottle of wine, he looked west to the distant blue line of the Mediterranean. Vedremo levarsi un fil di fumo sull’estremo confin del mare. Morrow’s speaking voice was gruff, but his singing was surprisingly musical. He transposed Butterfly’s soprano with improbable respect. E poi la nave appare. His guests often thought they heard a catch in his voice, so moved was Julian Morrow by the aria that he had decided, seemingly on the spur of the moment, to sing.

  The food was the simplest fare, but more than a few of those fortunate enough to experience an al fresco luncheon in the mountains with Julian Morrow would claim it as one of the best meals of their lives. The moist bread, the smoked sausage, the hard goat’s cheese, the blood oranges, the bottles of a local white wine so young it was almost effervescent were all set out in the sharp sunlight on a rough wooden table used for the same purpose by the quarry workers. At his customary lunch spot, there was a wall of marble that rose over them. The floor of the plateau was carpeted with wild thyme. The red-roofed towns and the bone-coloured beaches were far below.