The Figures of Beauty

by David Macfarlane

  And that, pretty much, is everything Oliver Hughson knew about Richard Christian when, very early the next morning, Oliver left a Paris police station, returned to his hotel, packed his knapsack, and set out to find him.

  THAT’S HOW IT HAPPENED. My father walked into the Italian Sculpture Gallery on a fine day in early May 1968, and The Dying Captive obliged him to reconsider his busy, transcontinental travel plans. This was a recalibration that he considered unhurriedly in the corridors of the Louvre—a delay that caused him to miss his tour bus, or at least that caused him not to be careful about catching it. And missing the tour bus meant that he could wander Paris on his own after the Louvre closed. Which is what he did for the rest of the afternoon, and for the evening, and into the night.

  As the last hours of his first day on the continent of Europe passed, Oliver’s meandering return to his hotel had more to do with wishful thinking than actual navigation. Not that he minded. Paris is a good city to walk through at night—especially if you are young and have never been there before. He was pleased with his decision. He was happy to be in no hurry.

  Every street was new to him and yet, in the manner of dreams and black and white films, not unfamiliar. He kept walking. And he was still walking a little before one in the morning. He was beginning to think that if he were ever going to get to bed, he would have to admit that he didn’t know where he was. Even he knew his hotel was nowhere near the river.

  A piece of the footbridge might have fallen loose. A cable could have been left dangling. But neither was the case. There was just enough light to make out what was there. But even before Oliver’s summer abruptly changed from anything like what he’d imagined it might be, he knew without looking up what the stillness was, suspended so silently in the darkness above him. There is something unmistakable about the thin, hard smell of leather soles.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THIS IS HOW THINGS had always been in the mountains. In as long ago as Michelangelo’s time not much was different. This is how it looked then. And this is how it looked in the summer of 1922.

  Even the sounds would have been similar. Michelangelo would have watched blocks of similar size, ready to be slowly lowered on the same kind of wooden trestle with the same great creaks of leather and rope. Except for the long loop of cutting cable—a technological advance introduced by a Belgian quarry owner to the Carrara region in the late nineteenth century—little else in the methods of extraction of stone had changed in centuries.

  The stone that the Morrow crew had loaded onto the wooden sled was rough with a crust of rusty brown that a grind and a polish would remove quickly enough. The quarter-ton block was the size of a large icebox—though solid. It was without interior flaw. Or so it appeared. No one ever knew for sure.

  There were tests to ascertain stone’s internal consistency. The ratio of a block’s weight to its dimensions was informative. There were often visible clues in the quarry wall from which a block had been cut. Sometimes just the varying sound of a hammer struck against a block could reveal the existence of a hollow flaw at the core. But the piece the crew had strapped to the sled seemed solid.

  Solid. But not safe, exactly.

  Like all marble, the block was so densely crystalline, its mass was dangerous. Whether revolving slowly in the traces by which it had been hoisted from the quarry floor or poised for its descent on the sled, it was intent on returning not so much to the ground as to the centre of the earth.

  The trestle on which the sled would be so slowly and carefully lowered was constructed on a built-up ledge of rubble. It was lined with a system of winches, ropes, and pulleys that reached down a quarter of a mile to the quarry’s loading area, to the wagon and to the sleeping driver and to the team of oxen waiting below. From there the stone would be transported down the switchback mountain roads to Carrara.

  Few of the workers in the Morrow quarry had ever been to the city. The cost of such a trip was beyond them. Even though they had jobs—difficult jobs, dangerous jobs, jobs that demanded diligence and ingenuity and practical intelligence, and jobs that, for generations, had produced a good profit for the quarry owners—the workers were poor. Too poor for salt, so the saying went.

  They were all from the villages that are tucked high in the folds of the surrounding hills. Few of them were ever out of sight of the white gashes that for centuries had been cut into the sides of the peaks. The villages were small places of cobbled streets and skewed walls. They were built-up levels of beamed floors and wide sills and tiled roofs and old, heavy wooden doors.

  These towns would come to be known as picturesque—a notion that would have been preposterous to the people who had always lived there. They didn’t see anything picturesque in the cold air, in the winter sleet, or in labours only relieved by sleep. There was nothing pretty in the flat tolling of the bells of the stone churches. For them, there was nothing quaint about the cool marble vats in which they seasoned the pork fat that the quarry workers spread on their hunks of bread on their midday break. There was no romance in the deep windows, or the peeling walls, or the slopes of vines that they knew too well ever to think of.

  Everything in the village could be seen in a five-minute walk. Here, barefoot children played in the cobbled streets. Their voices carried far down the valley. Here, wooden barrow wheels rattled past the old tree at the centre of the piazza.

  Here, the women smacked their wet washing on the flats beside a shallow stream just beyond the village wall. Babies cried. Old men argued. Dogs barked.

  Pots clattered, pans sizzled. Knives thunked through onion on wooden counters. The voices of mothers and daughters and grandmothers came clear as the air from kitchen windows.

  Past the worn marble flagstones where the town’s families gathered after Mass, beyond the baptisteries and the stone crucifixes of the old churches, at the fenced and tended verges of the modest parishes where weddings and holy days were celebrated and weeping mothers and wives were never comforted, the rows of tombstones stood like crooked teeth. The names of the men who had been killed in the quarries were carved in the same white stone they had died trying to obtain.

  The crew that stopped for lunch that noon hour, like all quarry workers, knew extremes of temperature that were particularly cruel. But they didn’t separate work from the weather in which the work was done. They complained of neither the cold nor the heat. They might as well have complained about gravity.

  None of them had spent any time in Carrara’s cozy cafés, its comfortable art institute, its gale-free cathedrals, or its shaded, sheltered marble studios. Only the quarry’s timekeeper was from Carrara, and the workers conjured the unfriendly ways of the town largely from the evidence of his formal, rounded accent, his official cap, and the way he stood at the open gate with his pocket watch in hand, threatening to report anyone who was even a few seconds late.

  The Morrow workers had all been in the quarries from the time they were teenagers. Except for Sundays and on Christmas, they worked every day, leaving their homes each morning and walking through the woods, upward, along the secret network of damp paths that they knew well enough to follow in the dark. They carried coils of thick rope, their own heavy tools, and the oiled canvas shoulder bags that contained their carefully wrapped drinking cup, and maybe some wine, and a pouch of tobacco, and their bread and seasoned lard. Some of the younger men, having never worn a pair of shoes in their lives until the day they started work, tied their workboots together and slung them around their necks because they still found it more comfortable to be barefoot for the two-hour walk to the quarry.

  As they walked to work the sky lightened—but not very much. Rising above them, through the trees, was not the brightening morning but the silhouette of the mountain range they were heading toward, the dawn still beyond it. Even though their journey was eastward, it was as if they were on their way back into a remnant of the night.

  It was too early for even the most boisterous among them to whistle or sing a song. They w
ere shadows passing through the trees. Except for the occasional clank of tools in their haversacks or a rustling of leaves against their coarse trousers, they moved in silence. They used the woods because were they to use the gravel roads, they’d be charged a toll by the company for their passage.

  Gradually, the men of one village joined the men of another, and then another, along the forks of the paths they followed, until, just before the hour they were required to arrive for work, the entire force of the quarry emerged—the woods suddenly revealing dozens of men. It was like a trick. It was as if the mountainside were able to perform some ingenious sleight of hand. In old fedoras and vests and heavy, worsted pants, they appeared all at once, from out of nowhere, sliding down through bushes and bramble to the gravel at the quarry’s front gates.

  AMONG THEM THAT DAY WAS A BOY. It was the third day of his first week at work. Lino Cavatore had a thin face and tousled hair. He was younger than the rest—only twelve. He was working where his father and his brothers worked. And so he was very proud.

  But it was true: he carried a slight hollow of sadness in his pride. But only slight. He knew you can’t choose your work any more than you can choose your family. He was what the men called a bagash—a water boy from the village of Castello. But the Morrow quarry is not what he would have chosen. Were the choice his.

  There was a gully beyond the village wall, near the stream where the women did their laundry. Good clay could be found there. As a very young boy Lino had shown a talent for moulding figures and faces. The likenesses were often remarkable. But his family had no connections with the workshops of Carrara. The studios might as well have been on the moon. Lino had no way of learning about sculpture. His father and his two older brothers worked in the quarries. As did his uncles. As did his cousins.

  Men learned as they worked. This was on-the-job training that did not often allow for mistakes. In the quarries there was no apprentice system beyond the watchfulness that an older brother might keep for a younger, or a father for a son. The only position that gave a young boy an opportunity to learn something about the quarries before actually working them was that of the bagash, hired to fetch tools and rope, and to bring water up to the hot, thirsty men.

  Shortly before noon, Lino Cavatore was hurrying through the staging area. He passed oxen and the clusters of drivers. He greeted a cousin. He said good morning to one of the foremen.

  Lino’s rushed intensity made people smile. There was something about how seriously he undertook his tasks in the quarry that made him seem not like a boy so much as a boy pretending to be a busy old man.

  Lino’s father and his brothers were in the crew that had just strapped a slab of stone to a wooden sled. Lino had looked up in time to see them hammer the wedges into place. They would soon be sitting down at their wooden table in the cool shade of a marble wall.

  The water was a concession to the workers. It was a symbol of the owner’s concern for their welfare—or so the owner’s managers who had devised the system imagined. It came from a mountain stream. A young woman doled out the buckets to the boys who were sent down to get them.

  Lino Cavatore looked up the quarter-mile of incline. His boots were still new and uncomfortable. The wire handle was already digging into his palm.

  He decided to follow the slope of the sled tracks. It would be faster than the switchback path. He heard the timekeeper’s bell strike noon. He started up.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  RICHARD CHRISTIAN WAS OUR PREDECESSOR in the flat on Via Maddalena, and it was Richard who, in May of 1968, two days after he’d returned from his trip to Paris to study the Captives at the Louvre, opened his apartment door to find my father and his backpack.

  It was evening. Richard and his Italian girlfriend, Elena Conti, were having a dinner for some friends—my mother among them. Such are the incestuous circulations of real estate in a provincial Italian town.

  Opposite the mailboxes and the clanging iron gates that open to the front steps of each of the Via Maddalena properties, there are no houses. There are no buildings at all across the street. There is a railing there, and usually a few parked cars. And there is a litter-strewn drop to a stream that runs down from the hills and from the mountains above the hills. Via Maddalena is parallel to the stream, and like the creek, it seemed to have no ending. This was a distinction that I always felt suited the street’s holy namesake—a childhood notion I wisely kept to myself.

  I was not permitted to attend Mass when I was a little girl—a ban that made Sundays quite lonely for me on Via Maddalena. My mother’s anti-Catholicism is an even more stubbornly held belief than her other tenets of faith: her own work; the sculpture of Michelangelo, Bernini, and Constantin Brancusi; the music of Gato Barbieri and John Coltrane; the songs of Jacques Brel and Leonard Cohen; the writing of Italo Calvino and Charles Dickens; the effect of blond Lebanese hashish rolled into black French tobacco and smoked with her first coffee of the morning.

  I was envious of my friend Clara’s easy acquaintance with saints’ days and miracles. I was envious of her illustrated books of Bible stories and of her frothy confirmation dress. When, for a brief period, Clara was convinced she was going to become a bride of Christ, I tried secretly to steal him away from her by thinking devotedly of his curling hair and lean torso while lying under my duvet with my hand between my legs while the bells for early Mass were ringing—a pleasure I discovered long before Clara, and that I thought I could put to some divine advantage.

  Otherwise, I amused myself with aimless neighbourhood wanderings on Sundays. When I did I liked to imagine that it was possible—even for someone whose mother thought the Holy Father should be in prison—to start off from our street and, by following it upward, eventually climb high enough into the heavens to see the thin, kind, world-weary face of Mary Magdalene herself.

  Even today, with all the new development that has taken place in what used to be the countryside around Pietrabella, the infinite nature of Via Maddalena has not changed. It isn’t interrupted by wall, or an intersection, or a mossy, old fountain as is the case with the other streets in Pietrabella. It keeps going. Up.

  Via Maddalena climbs the slope above Pietrabella’s central piazza. This rise, away from the coastal flats and the sea to the west and toward the white peaks of the Apuan mountains in the east, is the beginning of the rolling folds and valleys of the green foothills that travellers admire from the windows of speeding trains as they head south from Paris, or from Nice, or from Genoa, on their way to Rome. Clara and I both work at the Agency of Regional Tourism, and our job—not the easiest in the world—is to encourage people to stop in Pietrabella and its environs. But why should they? It’s the question I try to answer every day at the desk of my little cubicle, across the fluorescent-lit hallway from Clara.

  A few years ago our boss, Pier-Giorgio, spent a considerable percentage of our section’s annual creative budget on three twenty-metre panels of mosaic tile. This horrible triptych (Pier-Giorgio’s quite pretentious noun; my quite accurate adjective) was undertaken with no internal discussion whatsoever, which is typical of Pier-Giorgio. His bureaucratic tyranny is pretty much summed up by the most frequently repeated phrase in our department: what an asshole. It is a strange dynamic of our office that almost nobody who works in it agrees with the man who is in charge—most notably with his conviction that our region’s tourist marketability has to do with the new discos and bars of our seaside and not with the workers, the traditions, and the rugged history of our mountains.

  The murals depict the cabanas and bikini-clad women, the athletic-looking water skiers and speedboat drivers, the beach-side cafés and restaurants of the waterfront that Pier-Giorgio insists we call the Riviera of Pietrabella. The triptych decorates Pietrabella’s cold grey-marble train station. It is a marketing strategy that might be more effective if the express trains actually stopped in Pietrabella. Or even slowed down.

  Via Maddalena is made up of not much more than twenty addresses. At its
upper end, where there are no more houses, the street becomes a dirt road with ditches of long, sweet-smelling grass and red blurs of poppies. Clara and I often played here, flattening out secret hiding places that looked like big nests. Sometimes we took picnics.

  Farther upward, the dirt road becomes the two flattened ruts of a tractor trail. It cuts back and forth through the olive groves that are there—one with trees so old it is said that Dante, who once passed through the area on his way to Pisa, must have seen the same ones we look at now.

  When Clara and I were children, we were forbidden to play among the olive trees. The used syringes of the town’s drug addicts were scattered there in such abundance they crunched under the soles of our white sandals when we disobeyed the instructions of our elders. Heroin was common in Pietrabella—so common that the owner of the largest bar on the piazza took to drilling small holes in the bowls of each of his coffee spoons. This was his protest against what he described as Italy’s catastrophic shift from proud exporter of world-renowned goods to pathetic importer of crap.

  Claudio Morello was a large man with a mane of silver hair and a goatee, a voice like an old-fashioned actor’s, and no bashfulness whatsoever about stating views that were much out of fashion. His bold opinions singled him out—if only because nobody else thought it advantageous to be honest about the not-so-distant past. The owner of Café David was, in my mother’s description, “the one person in all of Pietrabella who admits to having been a fascist during the war.”

  As opposed as Claudio’s crazy right-wing political theories were to my mother’s vague allegiance to world revolution, the two of them enjoyed a long, improbable friendship. He never called her anything but bella, and his booming lack of hypocrisy was something she admired. So was his ingenuity. The tiny holes drilled in each of the Café David’s spoons meant they would not be stolen. They stirred the excellent cappuccinos as well as they ever did. But they were of no use to skinny, pale teenagers, crouched in their American jeans around the gnarled roots of ancient olive trees, cooking the yellowish powder from Marseilles over the flames of their lighters from Japan.