The Figures of Beauty
Page 7
As they ate he showed his guests—“somewhere out there”—the distant sea where Percy Shelley drowned. Morrow was then often asked: Could he recite a few lines? He wondered if he could. He poured out more wine for the table. “Ah,” he said. “Let me see.”
“Ozymandias” was what came to mind. All fourteen lines.
His guests were charmed. Everything about Morrow was charming—his villa but one example.
His residence was a former convent in the hills above the town of Pietrabella, and his visitors remembered it as the most pleasant of homes. Summer breezes passed through it like billowing silk.
The linens were exquisite. The soaps felt like cream. His servants were present when he wanted them to be, invisible when he did not. The stone floors were cool underfoot as his visitors passed from their toilet to their beds.
The architects and builders, municipal officials and church leaders, developers and hotel owners, aristocrats and society doyennes, landscape artists and decorators who arrived in Carrara as Julian Morrow’s invited guests, left as his friends. A miniature David, about six inches in height and carved in white marble, arrived after their visit, with Julian Morrow’s business card.
MORROW INTERNATIONAL produced chancels, vestibules, lobbies, war memorials, altars, public conveniences, mausoleums, garden ornamentation, tombstones, embassy foyers, bank counters, office building facades, boardroom panels, and the grand bathrooms of royal suites, to name but a few areas of specialization. The brand was known anywhere anyone wanted substance, dignity, formality, luxury, and (it had to be admitted, on occasion) ostentation.
“From excavation to installation” was the company’s early motto. This was phrasing that wanted for dignity, so Julian Morrow felt. His wife proposed “Purveyors of Fine Italian Marble”—a suggestion he politely ignored long enough for the company to attain a level of success that required no elaboration beyond his surname.
Julian Morrow had not been born into stone. He had not grown up surrounded by marble. He was raised in a coal town in South Wales, the son of a mine company manager and a schoolteacher. As a young man he had seen opportunity in the construction trade. It was a skill he had: seeing opportunity.
Morrow was already married, with three young daughters, and his building company was already successful when he embarked on a European trip with his wife and mother-in-law. It was, by far, the longest time he had spent alone with both of them together. His wife had planned the holiday six months after her father’s properly mourned death. It was in the second week of their itinerary that Morrow was unexpectedly obligated to get off the train in Carrara. For business.
Morrow made arrangements to rejoin the ladies at the Hotel Baglioni in Florence two days later. He was confident he would not be missed. He’d been having some difficulty getting a word in edgewise. He wasn’t sure, exactly, what his business in Carrara would prove to be. But he’d never been happier to get off a train.
On his first day in Carrara, he stepped from a smoky café in which he had taken shelter from a passing rainstorm. As he did, he looked down at the sidewalk’s curb and realized what it was made of. It was hard to tell if it was the marble itself or the shaft of sunlight on the white stone that could make something as ordinary as a gutter so beautiful.
He did not need more society—although the ceaseless conversation his wife and mother-in-law had been having since Calais made him realize that his view was not everyone’s. The teas, the engagements, the babies, the illnesses, and the achievements in banking and accountancy of his many in-laws and their charming circle of friends were not great passions of his. Society had assisted him in his rise, but now that it was without this particular utility it was no longer as engrossing as it once had seemed to be.
He had been longing for something when he stopped off in Carrara. He wasn’t quite sure what.
IN THE CHILL STRICTURE of Cardiff’s sea-weather, in the restraint of boiled beef and parsnips, in the muted browns and civil greys, Julian Morrow was a provident husband, an attentive father, and a successful businessman. But Carrara brought out something else in him.
He fell in love with everything: with the distant peaks and unfolding valleys, with the intimacies of narrow, sleepy streets, with the narrow runs of millstreams below the open windows of bedrooms. He loved the weather. He loved the air. He loved the pouts of acquiescence, the slow untying of sash and ribbon. He found profitable reasons to return. In less than a year he owned his first property.
Now he visited his quarries. Now he climbed to newly opened marble terraces, argued with his managers, strode through shipping yards. He inspected orders, and he joined shoulder to shoulder with his men in the high-ceilinged, arch-windowed studios when they hoisted a piece of stone to their wooden, iron-braced turntables.
He loved mornings filled with work that was so physical it could resist the chill of the mountains. He loved the noontimes subsequent with sunlight, warm as fresh bread. He loved sleeps after lunch, rich in dreams. He loved the soft country ditches and the little roadside crucifixes. He loved the dusk of cypresses, and the hoist of skirts pressed against the stone of ancient walls.
THE TOWN OF CARRARA WAS, as Morrow liked to say, an acquired taste. It had long possessed beauty that he happened to love: the beauty of work and the beauty of industry.
By the eleventh century, the population had retreated to the hillsides, away from the pestilence of the seaside marshlands. With the rise of the region’s towns came the need for building material, and marble was the material close at hand. Those who first went looking for it simply followed the rivers and creeks and streams upward to the sources of the hard, smooth stone. The trail of little water-tumbled pebbles—some pure white, some misty grey—led into the foothills and up into the gorges of the mountains to vast deposits of marble. Quarrying began, and gradually, as the reputation of Carrara marble spread, the town took on its inevitable role. Pisa wanted stone. Florence wanted stone. Rome wanted stone. Carrara devoted its industry to unearthing, carving, and shipping the marble the world wanted. In 1922, that’s what it still was doing.
The workshops of Carrara were always busy, the streets often jammed with wagons down from the quarries. The Carrione River ran white with commerce.
Morrow could watch an artisan at work and lose all track of time. It was an idiosyncrasy of his. He loved the noise. He loved the dust. He was far from indifferent to art, but he knew that the real domain of his soul lay in transaction. His visits to Carrara became so extended, the distinction between home and away began to blur. He’d been in Italy for almost two months by the muggy August day in 1922 when he encountered the couple on the cobbles of the Via Carriona bridge.
THEY WERE STUDYING A STATUE. It was made of local marble, as almost everything is in Carrara. But the statue was much older than any other monument they had yet seen in the town.
The man was tall, pallid, with a grey moustache. He was consulting his Baedeker, apparently without success.
The woman’s auburn hair was not entirely concealed by a wide-brimmed hat and the wrap of a pale silk scarf tied under her chin. Her coat and dress were full length and cut for walking. One of her boots had an elevated sole, Morrow noted, and both were laced in a tight criss-cross that made him think of corsets. He often did.
When the woman stepped back to take a longer view of the statue, he could see that she had a pronounced limp.
“Damn useless book,” Morrow heard the man say. Morrow took the accent to be American—an error, as he was soon to learn. Grace and Argue Barton were from Cathcart, Ontario—a place with which Morrow was not, he would later have to admit to them, familiar.
He was curious, though. The gentleman gave the appearance of understated affluence. And the woman … well, Julian Morrow was inclined, always, to be curious about a beautiful woman.
As the weather cleared, it was becoming apparent that it was the haze of industry that was drifting across the distant peaks, not parting clouds. The sun caught the skein o
f marble dust.
Glorious, Julian Morrow always thought when he saw this.
He stepped across the wet cobbles. He guessed he would soon make some money. He had an instinct for these things.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MY FATHER, OLIVER HUGHSON, died on a flight from Toronto to Milan in late April 2010. He was sixty-two years old at the time. But this is not—as Paolo, the too-handsome husband of my best friend, Clara, told me—so very unusual. This is not what is strange.
Paolo is a commercial pilot—an occupation that gives him greater expertise in more subjects than most men imagine they have. Which is saying something. The best kind of tires, the most reliable automobiles, the cause of my father’s death—these are all subjects to which Paolo provides the answer, whether or not anyone asks him a question.
Normally, this would make me uncomfortable. Good looks and an assertive personality are not as good a combination as a lot of men think they are. On my own, I would probably not be comfortably belted into Paolo’s silver Mercedes once a week. But my best friend loves Paolo, and he loves my best friend, and that changes everything. He often picks Clara and me up after our weekly African dancing class in Casatori.
The beat of the hand drums is usually still with me as we return to Pietrabella. I always feel radiant after dancing. Clara says it’s the same with her. The ride is so smooth it feels like we are gliding over the Autostrada.
Clara and I have known each other since we were girls. We are very close in age. We played on the terraces of vines and fruit trees that were the steep front gardens of our street.
There is a long climb of stone steps from the pavement to the front doors of the homes on Via Maddalena. The backs of the houses look up to the rooks’ nests, and garlands of capers, and the crumbling turrets of the old town wall. Clara’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Tagliani, owned a neat little box of a house up from where my mother and I lived. The Taglianis’ home was built in the late 1950s.
We rented our apartment. It is the second floor of a big, three-storey family home that is by far the oldest on the street. At one time the house must have been alone, just outside the old town wall—a primacy that suited my mother’s aesthetic dignity. When we moved from the countryside, my mother was drawn to Via Maddalena because she could see that its steepness meant that however much Pietrabella was expanding to its north, to its south, and to its west, our street would always remain on the eastern outskirts of the municipality. Where the houses stopped, the hills began. And where the hills stopped, the mountains started.
My mother’s coolness toward the “new houses on the street”—which is to say all the homes except the one in which we lived—might have been aristocratic disdain for the bourgeoisie were she in any way aristocratic. But the upper classes were as objectionable to my mother as postwar architecture. Her politics meander from anarchism to communism to socialism to liberalism. The practical outcome of this is that she can, and often does, argue with everyone about everything.
My mother puts “sculptor” in the space reserved for “Occupation” on the very few government forms she ever reluctantly fills in. But this isn’t her complete job history: She had a daughter to raise and so she could not afford to be entirely impractical, however naturally she was that way inclined. My mother never resented the responsibilities of parenting. She just kept them in perspective.
Over the years she worked sometimes as an artist’s model. Her English is good, if idiosyncratic, and she was hired sometimes by marble merchants to act as a guide for visiting clients. But she was always clear: these were temporary measures. Her own stone sculpture has always been her most constant employment.
As a result, we never had any money. We were frequently in arrears on our monthly payments to the family that lived, in ever-expanding generations, above the wide wooden beams and below the cool marble floors of our apartment. But my mother can be very charming when it comes to the bills she owes and funds she doesn’t have. She is almost seventy now, and she has always been a good-looking woman She still has the posture of a teenager, still works stone, still poses on occasion for artists in town. Her hair is silver but still a thick tangle. Her smile is disarming—as is her disinclination to offer her creditors anything that sounds like circumstantial excuse. Her position is sweetly unapologetic: She is a sculptor. What do they expect?
The fact that we were the only tenants on Via Maddalena, and not homeowners, did not mean to my mother that we were in any way inferior to our neighbours. Quite the contrary. I was brought up to believe that living in a hovel would be only slightly worse than sleeping in a room with dropped ceilings and sliding, vinyl-clad windows. The less said about aluminum doors and white wrought-iron railings, the better.
I returned to live in Pietrabella in 1999, the year I turned thirty, but it was neither nostalgia, nor my significant birthday, nor any sense of millennial significance that motivated my husband and me. It was a practical decision. The boys were one and three at the time. I had to find a decently paying job. We had to find an affordable place to live, with a good school, somewhere within a thirty-minute drive of the community college that had offered Enrico a not-very-decently-paying job as a teaching assistant.
Clara emailed me about a position at the Agency of Regional Tourism. She had already been working there for eighteen months. She had returned to Pietrabella two years before, because her mother was not well, and because her handsome husband didn’t mind driving in his diesel-fuelled, four-door car with its excellent sound system and wonderful suspension to and from airports as far away as Milan and even Rome.
My mother does not believe in coincidence. She thinks that fate, not chance, has governed her life. Her ego is healthy in this regard. She was dismissive of all the excitement about the millennium. “Media bullshit” was her summation. But when I called to tell her that we would probably be moving to the vicinity of Pietrabella, she took this as a cosmic sign that it was time for her life to change too. I wonder sometimes if my mother doesn’t secretly believe that the purpose of other lives is to provide auguries for hers.
She learned that the German couple who had been holiday tenants in the same hillside farmhouse that she had rented many years before had decided to give the place up. Or rather, the husband had decided after tragedy befell them. His wife had been killed in a highway accident. My mother decided this was not happenstance.
My mother moved back up into the hills, and Via Maddalena 19 became my home address once again. Enrico and I and the boys settled into the flat in which I grew up, although the absence of her battered copies of The Stones of Rimini and The Maltese Falcon; the coffee-stained, disc-ringed covers of her old Leonard Cohen and Miles Davis LPs; her marble dust; her overflowing ashtrays; and her various works in progress make it seem quite a different place to me. Only the views from the high casement windows are the same—views that I discovered my father remembered very well.
CHAPTER EIGHT
JULIAN MORROW STEPPED across the curbside stream. His linen suit was the colour of butter. Despite his size, he moved with a surprising lightness of step.
When Morrow introduced himself to the couple he had spotted across the bridge of Via Carriona on that muggy morning in the summer of 1922, he spoke with confident, startling volume. Speaking quietly, being unobtrusive were beyond him. His English, Welsh accent notwithstanding, allayed the couple’s fears that they were being accosted by an unscrupulous local.
The man to whom Morrow addressed himself was pale in a way that seemed a result of too much time in offices, not ill health. His eyes were younger than his grey moustache suggested. As was he, actually. The difference in age of the couple was more apparent at a distance than close at hand.
Their romance had its beginnings on the day the publisher of the Cathcart Chronicle found himself at the newsroom’s entrance at the same moment as the paper’s young and, so he had noticed, quite pretty art critic. She had a bad leg of some sort, but it did nothing to diminish her good looks.
His awkward attempt at small talk revealed that he had not seen the exhibit and had no intention of doing so. This, Grace announced, was “absolutely ridiculous.” She would take him to the gallery herself the following week if he were free. Her tone was playful and not at all impolite. But she made it clear that she wasn’t joking. This impressed him. Very much.
He shook Morrow’s extended hand.
“Barton,” the gentleman said. “Argue Barton.” And then he turned with the measured slowness of a man still new to acknowledging his great good fortune. “My wife.”
Morrow bowed, his hat held by his spread left hand against his lapels.
The three of them spoke. And as they did, Morrow admired the woman. He was careful not to be obvious.
He had no designs, of course—and not because she was married. This had not always been an impediment. But Morrow liked to say that he was good at his job because of two skills he had acquired over the years: one was reading stone, the other, reading people. He didn’t doubt that he was reading the couple accurately, and his assessment only made the pleasure he was taking in a morning in Carrara all the more keen. He was, he was the first to admit, a sentimentalist.
He was of the view that what is often described as “love at first sight” is, more accurately, the realization of two people that they are soon going to be in love. In Morrow’s view, love took a little longer in life than it did in popular song—an opinion that made him more of a romantic than most men, not less. The prospect of love, he believed, is so exciting it can be mistaken for love itself.
Morrow knew he was witnessing this very process. He could see that their affection for one another was on the brink of becoming something deeper.
He admired her lively smile. Admiring women was something Morrow could not help doing.