Beyond the olive grove, the tractor trail becomes a goat path that continues upward. It winds up through woods and pasture, over old stone bridges and millstreams, past olive presses and abandoned farmhouses, all the way to the hillside village of Castello—the place where my mother, under the circumstances of a terrible war, was born.
CHAPTER TWELVE
LUNCH BEGAN AT NOON. The timekeeper’s handbell was the signal. But the foremen on the rock face could decide not to acknowledge it. When men were in the middle of a job that could not be interrupted—hoisting a block of stone to the sled or lowering the sled down the mountain with rope-creaking, winch-stuttering care—they had to continue. They got no extra time when the same bell rang exactly a half-hour later.
Experienced workers were adept at watching the sun and timing their tasks. Usually, when the timekeeper closed his watch, slipped it back into his vest pocket, and reached for the varnished wooden handle of the single brass bell, they were ready to stop. And on that day in the summer of 1922, the crew in the Morrow quarry had timed their work well.
They had secured the straps around the stone and had hammered the wedges into place only a few minutes before the lunch break began. The block could wait.
They sat on the two long benches of a bare wooden table. It was covered with a rigged-up canopy of scrap tin.
The crews who were working other parts of the quarry rested, in pairs or groups of four or five, on whatever conveniently flat slabs of stone or planks of lumber they could find. If the weather was bad, a few might be allowed into the foreman’s shed—a smoky place that smelled of herring and wet wool. But on good days, by custom, those who were working closest to the old wooden table took it, without argument.
It was sheltered by a wall of marble, a section of the quarry that was as high as a church. It had not been worked for so long that the steel cables strung along its cliff were broken and dangling and rusted brown. The wall leaned over the little plateau just enough to provide some shade at noon to the table and some protection from the mountain winds.
The workers spoke loudly, as if calling out over a roar that only they could hear. They unwrapped their packets of thick slices of crusty white bread and pork fat. Before eating, they refolded the cloth and coiled the string, packing them back in their lunch sacks with careful frugality.
There was a bottle of young wine. Each of the men produced, from their sacks, a squat, sturdy, carefully wrapped cup.
There were ways to do things. These were men who snorted their nostrils clear while they worked, and who could, without embarrassment, squat to shit at the edge of a steep scree, well in sight of other men. But they would never think of drinking wine from a bottle.
Far below, the road was visible. It belonged to the company. It was maintained by a few old men who had once worked in the quarry, and who now spent their days smoothing the ruts and raking over the gravel where the teams of oxen and the loaded wagons had thinned the sharp corners. The heavy wagons came slowly, carefully down the switchback, grinding ruts into the turns.
Every morning the timekeeper opened the gates. He wore a cap like a police guard’s and a blue serge jacket. He had come from Carrara, sound asleep, on the first wagon of the day. He would return, in much the same condition, on the last. He had soft white hands.
The workers nodded to him with the deference they used with any representative of their impossibly rich employer. The stories were extravagant.
The quarry owner was said to be wealthier than the duke of Milan. When he entertained in his villa the chandeliers were lit with a hundred candles and the quail were basted in the richest butter, and there were more potatoes than anyone could eat and the wine was so fine it was the colour of old velvet. His mistresses wore silk. They used soaps made of lavender oil and the rendered fat of songbirds. Their hot, foaming baths were scented with the finest French perfume. He had three, the owner did—a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead—each of whom had an ass as smooth as an angel’s and who knew every secret of love. Puccini had been a guest at his table. Such were the stories.
The timekeeper had the power to report anyone who was late. He exercised some discretion in this—not to be kind to those workers who rushed apologetically through the gate ten or fifteen seconds after six o’clock in the morning, but to reinforce their sense of obligation to him. As a result, he was always to be addressed as sir and always to be treated with the greatest respect—so any new workers were told when they first approached the entrance to the quarry. The timekeeper had once held an important job at the owner’s villa, the older men explained in loud voices to the younger as they passed through the gate. The timekeeper, who always smelled strongly of witch hazel, nodded solemnly back, pleased by the wide eyes and the nervous greetings of the new men. And then, out of earshot, the older men added: an important job, emptying chamber pots. And then, a few steps farther on: before he was sent to the mountains for fucking a goat.
THE QUARRIES WERE TOUGH PLACES—the kind of working environment that is almost beyond comprehension now. Perhaps the only useful contemporary comparison would be battle. If a worker was not strong enough or careful enough or experienced enough, he might not be lucky enough either. Unseen faults could widen, slowly, for centuries before the instant they gave way. Accidents were in the nature of things.
It was during a block’s downward passage that the worst accidents on the mountain occurred. Timbers slipped, cables broke, wedges gave way, winches were torn from their wooden pylons. Gravity—the force that the workers spent their days trying to contain—was suddenly cut free.
Men would shout and come running. Confusion would erupt. Work would stop, briefly. And eventually—once order had been restored, once the men were back to work, once the long cables were humming—the low, mournful call of something that sounded like a hunting horn would echo across the valleys.
In Roman times, and for centuries thereafter, marble was quarried by drilling holes at the stone’s natural faults. Wooden jambs were hammered into these fissures, and then kept soaked. As the wood expanded, the chosen marble sections—massive cubes of stone, sometimes as big as the shed of an olive press—would break away from the mountain wall.
In later centuries a quicker but much more wasteful method of extrusion was introduced: blasting, first with gunpowder, and later with dynamite. During his 1846 stopover in the Carrara region Charles Dickens heard the “melancholy warning bugle.”
The horn that Charles Dickens had identified was called the buccina. It was the warning of a coming explosion. But as dynamite became less commonly used, the buccina took on another function. A longer, even more mournful note was the signal of a quarryman’s injury or death. This was a common enough occurrence. But it was a sound that Julian Morrow never got used to.
The echoes from the cliff walls and through the valleys made it difficult for anyone at any distance to know from which quarry the sound came. Once the signal was heard, the women and children of the mountain villages could only wait until the end of the day to learn if the accident had been their father’s, or their husband’s, or their son’s. It was later, usually during one of his regular meetings with his quarry managers, that Morrow would learn the details.
THE WEATHER WAS EXTREME. In the winter there were frozen ropes and there were winches that had to be cracked free of ice with hammers in the morning. There were cliffs of ice that formed so transparently on the edges of the high marble walls, they were all but invisible against the white stone until they gave way. There might be a shout. There might be a useless scrabbling of boots.
Springs in the quarries were wet and cold. The flooding of the transport roads was not uncommon.
And then there were the summers. By the time the crew sat down at the wooden table, that August day in 1922, they were so wet with their own sweat it looked as if they had fallen into a river.
One of the men rose from one of the benches at the table. His tight, wrinkled face had been carved by the weather. His
lips were cracked.
He walked with the balanced, measured gait typical of an experienced quarry worker. He crossed the little plateau. It was fifteen or twenty yards of trampled grass and thyme surrounded by a fringe of wild sage.
He moved directly to the lip of the mountain. There was no slowing down as he approached the cliff, and no vestige of momentum the instant he stopped at its brink. The man’s view was from a height so great it could have been from the window of a plane. He kept his centre of gravity firmly behind the toes of his old leather workboots. He leaned forward.
In the quarries the weather of one season is never entirely obliterated by the extremes of another. On the coldest day the harsh glare of sunshine does not warm workers so much as remind them of the ferocity of the summer. And that August, when the walls of the Morrow quarry were like the sides of an oven, it was winter that came briefly to the man’s mind as he looked down. As he stood at the edge of the mountain, he felt a cascade of cold. It fell from the marble overhang above.
He leaned into nothing. His hands were at his sides.
Far below, a tiny blue timekeeper opened a miniature gate for a little wagon loaded with pebbles of marble.
There was the sandy ribbon of road. There were the distant valleys. There were the faraway marshes and plains. There were the beaches of the seaside. The day seemed bright as ice. He leaned farther out.
Now he could see his son. Lino was toiling up the incline with the bucket. He was already more than three-quarters of the way. The sleeves of the boy’s shirt were rolled, and his face and hair were protected from the sun by the peak of a battered cap.
His wife had given him four sons. Three now worked with him in the quarries. The youngest, Italo, would not. His legs were bad. He would be a burden.
This thought passed through the man quickly. As tenderness always did. There was nothing to be done. Italo could help the women. He could herd the goats.
Carefully, still keeping his weight centred behind the lip of stone, he watched Lino’s climb. He could see the boy’s care and steady determination. This pleased him. Then the man turned back. He crossed the wide ledge to the table.
“Winter’s coming,” he said to his two oldest sons, as he hoisted a leg over the bench.
Winter! They laughed in the heat. One of the lads handed him a cup of wine. And that was the end of them all.
LINO CAVATORE COULD SEE the last few trestles. He could see, poised above him, the block of white stone, strapped and tilted on the wooden sled.
Then he heard something. Or rather, he felt it—a deep, rumbling in the back of his head. It came up inside him, through the soles of his uncomfortable new boots.
It was easy to get confused in the quarries. They were places of constant change. Their permanence was illusory. The men worked hard: their industry was as relentless as it was underpaid, and with little more than saws and ropes and pulleys they transformed everything around them. And then, without pause, they transformed it again. Walls that looked as if they could never move vanished. And so, as the boy stepped past the marble block that was strapped to the tilted wooden sled, he thought, for a moment, that he had somehow made a wrong turn.
As he moved onto the flat of the grass, he could not understand how he could have made such an error.
Then he stopped and slowly, without noticing any relief, put down the bucket. There, lying against an outcrop of rock: his brother’s hammer, its shaft whittled, as he had shown him, to fit his grip. And there, against the winch, at the top of the incline: his father’s coil of rope. But everything else was different.
There was no wooden table scarred with initials. No rigged-up tin roof. No benches. There was no overhang of stone.
The thought formed very clearly. It was entirely calm and entirely unsentimental. He realized that his brother would not be much help. He felt himself tightening—as if bracing for everything he knew would follow. I will have to look after our mother, the boy said to himself. It will be up to me.
On the ledge there was only stillness—a roughly piled tomb of it. There was no shade there anymore.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
IT IS A GOOD HOUR’S CLIMB from Pietrabella to Castello, and it is in the rugged, in-between area, about halfway from the town to the village, that my mother rents her little farmhouse. It’s where, in 1968, she spent the only time she ever spent with my father. It was a summer he could never forget and a summer that my mother, with typical stubbornness, would not for a very long time admit to me that she could remember.
The surrounding land had once been the grounds of an ancient convent. Before that, it was said to have been the site of an even more ancient temple and a sacred spring.
The convent had commandeered the property in much the same way that Christian holidays took over the dates of pagan celebrations. But in this case the church’s triumph was not as eternal as was hoped. At the same time that Napoleon’s sister Princess Elisa Baciocchi was inventing the industry of souvenirs, ornamental statuary, and marble replicas, she also embarked on a campaign to reduce the region’s redundant religious institutions.
This early example of downsizing made many people uneasy. Cost-cutting efficiency was not obviously God’s will—not if the preceding four or five centuries of cathedrals, tombs, monasteries, frescoes, and lavish iconography were anything to go by. But in the case of the convent in the hills above Pietrabella, Princess Elisa and the forces of practicality did not need to intercede very strenuously. Time took care of things.
The convent’s hard, narrow beds, its long, unadorned tables, its cold stone hallways, and its cushion-less kneeling benches had been unused for decades by the time the old place was converted to a villa. The place became the residence of Julian Morrow, and its refurbishment had followed only one criterion. It was exactly what he wanted.
He built a spring-fed pool that he could see from his breakfast table. This view, of cypresses and stone figures and the cascading hills beyond them, was softened with moist haze when he took his coffee on summer mornings. At that hour the pool, its terrace of hedgerow and statuary, and its surrounding gardens were brushed with soft angles of sunlight. It was a landscape that never failed to remind him that he wasn’t in Wales.
The only reason I can even guess at the physical dimensions of the convent is that we know, to some extent, what Morrow’s villa used to look like. The pool, the gardens, and the statues were documented in considerable detail in the 1920s by a local photographer. This is the kind of thing that is only of interest to historians, however. As my boss, Pier-Giorgio, who is not one, frequently makes clear.
Giovanni Belli made the marble quarries and the work of the region’s artisans his most recurrent photographic subject. His black and white images are quite magnificent, but he never became very well known. This, in part, had to do with the fact that he never had to. His family had owned quarries in the area for centuries. He loved marble, but as a young man he concluded that the family business was manned with a sufficient number of his siblings to allow him to pursue a related love. He’d been given a camera as a boy.
Before I travelled to Cathcart to meet my father, Clara and I tried to convince Pier-Giorgio that we should produce a travel brochure for the lobbies of hotels and pensiones in the Carrara region, to be entitled “Michelangelo’s Mountains.” We wanted to use Belli’s black and white pictures as its illustrations. It was our idea that the old photographs, most of which are preserved in an archive in Lucca, would appeal to a certain nostalgia that was then in fashion. We also thought that the local lore about Michelangelo’s trails and his quarries could be put to good, eco-tourism use. We were not without our marketing rationale.
What made the photographs of Giovanni Belli the perfect choice of illustration for our brochure were not only their historical value and compositional grandeur. Belli’s name is associated not only with photography but with his efforts to prove that Michelangelo left some evidence, somewhere, of the time he spent in the area. It was, in
the region at least, a famous obsession.
Belli’s knowledge of Michelangelo was considerable, and by no means unsophisticated, but the premise of his belief was unshakeably simple. He didn’t think the great sculptor could go that long without doing what he most loved: carving stone.
Clara and I envisioned our brochure bringing throngs of hikers, all of them wearing expensive, Italian-made boots and carrying several credit cards. We pictured taxi drivers and waiters and shopkeepers kept busy catering to tours that came from far and wide to follow Giovanni Belli’s beautifully documented quest for Michelangelo.
But we were not successful in our proposal. “I’m sorry to have to inform you,” Pier-Giorgio wrote, “that we live in the twenty-first century. Not the Renaissance.”
As you see: what an asshole.
Julian Morrow’s villa can be seen in the background of many of Belli’s pictures. Because his studies of the pieces of sculpture in the terraced gardens were so various and so detailed, the building is visible in a useful variety of angles. And this is all we know of what the old convent might have looked like. Morrow’s residence—along with its pool, its statues, its fountains, and its hedged, terraced gardens—was destroyed by Allied artillery in 1944. A modest farmhouse was built in its place in the early 1950s.
It is a pretty spot. But the isolated, rustic characteristics that had appealed to my mother when she was in her twenties proved to be inconvenient when I was born. My mother concluded that life with a baby was easier with reliable running water and electricity. We moved into town, to the flat at Via Maddalena 19, in the summer of 1969. I was only a few months old.
MY MOTHER WAS A SINGLE PARENT, which was not at all common in Pietrabella even in the 1970s. And often when she was away, or busy, or just not there, I had dinner and then slept at Clara’s—a home that was so orderly it seemed to me wondrously the opposite of our messy, unvacuumed flat.
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