The Figures of Beauty

by David Macfarlane

  These were the kind of minor points of parenting at which my mother did not always excel. But she was good at the major ones, and her occasional absences seemed demonstrations of her faith in me as much as anything. I was quite proud of being big enough to make my own plans now and then.

  My mother’s belief that a tidy house is the sign of a wasted life was not one shared by her neighbours. The citizens of Pietrabella are, for the most part, respectable, hard-working people—and the Taglianis were exactly that. The white marble of their kitchen floor was as spotless as a glacier. The old walnut sideboard gleamed with lemon oil.

  “Bourgeois to their souls” is my mother’s description. Her assessment is unkind but not inaccurate. Pietrabella is a conventional place—except for one idiosyncrasy.

  The town’s dependence on the region’s principal industry has left its otherwise conservative population with a deep respect for artists and artisans. Sculptors are treated by the population the way holy beggars might have been treated by a community of believers. “Your mother has her own way” was as close to criticism as Mrs. Tagliani ever came when, with no sign of my mother or of dinner, I wandered up the street to Clara’s parents’ house with my school books. I was always made welcome.

  In the bedtime stories that Clara’s father told us, the path that began with our street continued its slow, sleepy zigzag up, beyond the walls and the bell tower of Castello, beyond the cobbled central piazza where a white marble tablet of forty-three names commemorates the terrible massacre that occurred there in 1944.

  It went up through the higher fields and forests, and up to the clear cool pools and waterfalls and the lush beds of watercress and the plateaus of alpine grass. It went up past gorges and craggy outcrops of rock. It went up beyond scree and bluff. It continued all the way to the mountaintops and to the cold and glistening marble quarries where the great artist Michelangelo Buonarroti had climbed so long ago to find his beautiful white stone. And then, as Clara’s and my eyes closed so that we could better picture the heights Mr. Tagliani’s low, monotonous voice was describing, this meandering trail continued toward the sky. Up into the snowy peaks, and up into the clear blue, and up into the lofts of white clouds where, if we followed the gently twisting path, we might find angels who could sometimes come to the aid of little girls with troublesome monkeys—so long as the girls remembered to bring the angels chestnuts, which were very difficult to obtain in the bright and holy realm of Heaven.

  I loved the feel of the cool, tightly made sheets. Even in the shadows, I admired the vacant windowsills and the crucifix hung bravely alone and off-centre on the white wall. Clara’s father, a kind, tired man who worked as a clerk for a shipping company in Viareggio, sat in the dark in a wooden chair between the two beds and told us his bedtime stories. He made them up as he went.

  Their purpose, of course, was to lull us to sleep. But I think Mr. Tagliani often found himself under the spell he was weaving. There were times when the low, steady drone of his voice seemed to slip into his own dreams.

  “There are no troublesome monkeys in Pietrabella,” Clara said. She was suddenly fully awake. Her father had just introduced this strange, unexpected element to one of his narratives.

  “Hmm?”

  “You said ‘troublesome monkeys.’”

  “Did I?”

  “Pietrabella is not in Africa, Mr. Tagliani,” I chimed in helpfully.

  “Isn’t it?” The sleepiness in Clara’s father’s voice left me unsure whether he was kidding us or whether he had revealed some secret too mysterious to fathom.

  We had just learned in school about how the unimaginable pressures of tectonic plates had transformed limestone into marble millions upon millions of years ago. Our teacher was Signor Lambrusco, a small, huddled-up man whose stoop was thought to be the result of his daily forbearance of a famously bad-tempered wife. He told us that if we could travel faster than the speed of light we could go back in time—past Garibaldi and Verdi, past Michelangelo and da Vinci, past Dante and Boccaccio, past Jesus, past the Egyptians, past the cavemen, and past all the dim-witted dinosaurs—to an age when green and ancient tropical seas were being drained and our mountains were being formed.

  Signor Lambrusco’s soft face took on a dreamy expression during this lesson. His voice was usually flat and weary. But he seemed entranced by the idea of getting away from the present as completely as possible. If we could only go back through the millennia, Signor Lambrusco told us wistfully, we would be able to see how marble happened. Two hundred million years ago, he explained, the Italian coastline was beneath the Tyrrhenian Sea.

  “And while it was …” The dramatic sweep of his arm took in everything: our school, our town, his wife. “While all this was drowned,” he said to us, “deep at the bottom of the Tyrrhenian Sea, do you know what happened?”

  We did not.

  “Flecks of minerals, bits of vegetation, and fragments of coral drifted down. Down through the warm depths. This accumulation was laid in beds of silt on the ocean floor over unimaginably long stretches of time. And these beds, in turn, were buried by millions upon millions of years of further deposits. And this mass was pressed into the layers of the calcium carbonate that eventually became …”

  Signor Lambrusco paused to see if anyone could fill in the blank. Nobody could—an eruption of the kind of silence that usually infuriated him. But he continued, pleasantly lost in the eons upon eons that had preceded, among other things, his marriage. For once he was untroubled by our ignorance.

  “Limestone,” he announced. “And layers of undersea limestone is what these strata would have remained, had the earth’s tectonic plates not begun their heaving and grinding thirty million years ago.”

  The pressure and the heat were intense in their effect. “The limestone seabed buckled upward, and took the form of a coastal mountain range. The Apuans,” he said, in case we’d missed the point. “But something else happened. Something even more astonishing than a seabed turning into a mountain range.”

  Did we know what that something was?

  “Metamorphosis,” he said. “The limestone was recrystallized by this incomprehensible force into deposits of an entirely new stone.”

  He crossed to the window of our classroom and looked upward, to the east. “Marble,” he said. “The marble of Carrara. As you see. Michelangelo’s mountains.”

  These were the same peaks that Mr. Tagliani described in the meandering bedtime stories that he told to Clara and me—mountains that looked white in the distance, as if, even in summer, they were crested with snow, as if they were the cold ramparts of the kingdom of Heaven.

  Lying in the fresh, tightly made sheets of the spare bed in Clara’s room, I wondered about Mr. Tagliani’s troublesome monkeys as I fell asleep. I thought about poor, beleaguered Signor Lambrusco. And I wondered whether my best friend’s father was dreaming of continents that had not yet drifted apart. I wondered if his stories came from a time not yet transformed into the order we now believe it possesses.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  FROM FAR AWAY IN THE QUARRIES there was the sound of a mournful horn—so faint, only someone who had heard it before would pick it out from the general bustle of the town of Carrara. The low, extended note was softened and confused by the unfolding of the valleys through which it passed. It seemed not to come from a single source, but more generally from the sky.

  Julian Morrow noticed it that summer morning. As always, he worried that it might be the signal of an accident. It often was. And he worried that it might be coming from one of his quarries. It sometimes did. He had not accommodated himself to the gruff acceptance of injury and death that the managers of his quarries took to be natural. But as some small comfort—not entirely convincing, he had to admit—Morrow reminded himself that the greatest beauty is never without its sadness.

  This was a theme on which he could expand. Often he did.

  He had a gift for describing things vividly to the attentive audiences of
his speeches. He could make people see views they’d never even imagined.

  It amazed him that in those community halls and Masonic temples, those library meeting rooms and church basements he could make people see: a quarry worker, his boots perched on an uncertainty of rubble, his head bent over the track he was repairing.

  The worker might have heard what sounded like thunder. He might have felt the shuddering in the ground. He might have looked up to see, for his last second, a snapped line flailing in the blue air. He might have had time to understand the meaning of the scattering timber and the flash of runaway white mass.

  In the past fifteen years Morrow had spent many months in Carrara. The rest of the time he attended to family life and ran his business in a chilly, frequently gloomy Welsh city that remained, officially, his place of residence. He addressed the subjects of danger and sadness and beauty in his speeches on the marble quarries of Carrara—most recently, only a few months previous, before a luncheon audience at the Cardiff Geographical Society.

  Morrow had been quick to realize that these speeches—to professional associations, to toastmasters clubs, to ladies’ auxiliaries and educational societies—were the best kind of advertising. Free, for one thing. Convincing, for another. He cast himself in the role of the adventurous explorer, and his audiences seemed not to notice that his motivation was more overtly commercial than Livingstone’s or Shackleton’s.

  Julian Morrow owned several quarries in the Carrara region. The use of the word “several” was his. This is not because he was modest about the number. It’s because the number was always under negotiation.

  He once admitted to one of his several Italian mistresses that he was “unappeasable in appetite”—but only because her English wasn’t good enough for this admission of faithlessness to upset her. When he wasn’t acquiring he was divesting. And he divested in order to do more acquiring.

  He had a craggy face that could never have been described as handsome. His nose was long and his eyes had the small, unwavering attention of bullet holes. But it was his energy that obtained, not his features. His enthusiasm gave people the impression that he was attractive. And parts of him were. He had the legs of a teenager.

  Julian Morrow’s approach to the complexities of commerce was to control as many of them as possible. His workers took his stone from the walls of his quarries so that it could be carved in his workshops and transported on his ships to wherever a need for Carrara marble was felt keenly enough to make the labour of his excavators, his drivers, his artisans, his finishers, his shippers, his distributors, and his installers worth his while.

  The breeches, boots, and hacking jacket were elements of costume he put to good use. When he delivered one of his speeches, he leaned a walking stick against the podium. And he usually read a passage from the journal Charles Dickens kept during a trip to Italy in 1846 by way of setting the scene.

  “ ‘But the road,’ ” Morrow intoned, “ ‘down which the marble comes, however immense the blocks!’ ”

  The use to which Morrow put Charles Dickens went beyond borrowing the great author’s descriptive powers. The name commanded deep respect, particularly among the audiences of luncheon speeches in provincial British towns. That Charles Dickens had written about Carrara lent capital to Morrow’s own musings on marble and on beauty. As well, quoting Dickens meant that Morrow didn’t have to rein in his fondness for dramatic proclamation.

  “ ‘Conceive a channel of water …’ ” Morrow’s left hand meandered in the air before the rapt attention of his audiences as if describing the course of a river. “ ‘A channel of water running over a rocky bed, beset with great heaps of stone of all shapes and sizes, winding down the middle of this valley; and that being the road—because it was the road five hundred years ago!’”

  Morrow always paused here, to let any grammatical confusion dissipate and to let this remarkable notion settle in. For it was true: the quarries Charles Dickens visited in 1846 were not very different from the ones Michelangelo had known.

  In the latter half of the thirteenth century, local demand for marble, as well as the requirements of Pisa and Florence, reopened several dormant quarries of Carrara. Marble’s associations with the traditions of the ancient Romans and the Greeks made it a medium sufficiently serious to embody the most lofty aspirations.

  This sense of marble’s spiritual and heroic characteristics only increased as the Renaissance unfolded. In the mid-1500s, in his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari compared Michelangelo’s David to the grand statuary of Rome, much of which had been quarried in the Greek colonies of Naxos, Paros, Aphrodysias, Dokimeion, and Marmara. The source of marble changed, but Vasari thought the same spirit prevailed.

  Morrow continued. He knew the Dickens quotation by heart.

  “ ‘Imagine the clumsy carts of five hundred years ago, being used to this hour, and drawn, as they used to be, five hundred years ago, by oxen, whose ancestors were worn to death five hundred years ago, as their unhappy descendants are now, in twelve months, by the suffering and agony of this cruel work!’ ”

  Morrow was a stirring public speaker. This was because, unlike many, his speeches had a purpose. He was a salesman.

  “‘Two pair, four pair, ten pair, twenty pair, to one block, according to its size; down it must come, this way. In their struggling from stone to stone, with their enormous loads behind them, they die frequently upon the spot; and not they alone; for their passionate drivers, sometimes tumbling down in their energy, are crushed to death beneath the wheels.’

  “The quarries so vividly described by Mr. Dickens are built in terraces,” he told the Cardiff Geographical Society, his large hands gripping the sides of a podium. “It is possible to conceive of them as abstractions—vast sculptures of geometric form and volume. But I am too old-fashioned for Mr. Brancusi’s modern art, I’m afraid.”

  Morrow waited for the inevitable grumble of chuckles.

  “And so I see them as ornamental gardens carved directly into the mountainside—great terraced landscapes of stone, extraordinary in their beauty. But the quarries are dangerous places, and for that reason, all the more beautiful. For beauty without sadness,” he said, his voice building toward his conclusion, “is mere prettiness. And pretty is the one thing that the quarries of Carrara refuse to be.”

  Applause was enthusiastic, always.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  AFTER MY FATHER’S DEATH IN APRIL 2010, and after I contacted his lawyers in Cathcart, a package was subsequently delivered to me through the agency of an associated Italian law firm. It contained details of my father’s estate, his will, and a letter that he had written—all to be handed to me by his legal representatives. He had been thorough in his preparations—though the absence of confusion did nothing to speed up any of the Italian agencies involved. We were still engaged with phone calls and faxes and meetings with lawyers by the time I decided I’d better get back to the weekly routine of African dancing in Casatori before I went completely crazy.

  Casatori is fifteen kilometres up the coast, and this was the first class I’d attended after my father’s death. It had been a stressful period. There are many complexities that arise when someone arrives dead in a country that isn’t the one in which he has lived.

  On the way home Paolo looked at me intently in the back seat. He switched the rear-view mirror back and forth between night vision and day a few times, as if selecting the best lens for his close-up. This is something Paolo often does when he drives us back. Smouldering intensity is pretty much Paolo’s default expression whenever he’s looking at a woman when Clara isn’t looking at him. I’ve come to realize it doesn’t mean anything, really.

  Usually, on the way back, Clara looks to her right, out to the sea and the sunset as we head south on the Autostrada, back to Pietrabella. She loves this view. But on this occasion, even though his wife was paying him no attention, Paolo wasn’t trying to be Marcello Mastroianni. He was only trying to convey sympathy with his mo
vie-star eyes.

  He said, “I am sorry. But I must tell you. This is not something that is uncommon.”

  Paolo says most people are anxious about flying to begin with, and probably they are out of condition, and maybe they had to run half a kilometre through a terminal with their luggage because they were caught in traffic on their way to the airport. This happens.

  “This is modern life,” said Paolo.

  Then they have to sit still. For hours. They can’t stretch their legs, which is usually the problem. There are always too many seats in what is always too narrow a fuselage.

  It was odd, I thought, that someone who had spent so tiny a fraction of his lifetime on airplanes should die on one.

  My father suffered, but not very much, from a genetic disorder that affected his feet and his calves. As he grew older his feet grew smaller. They turned in on themselves. His lower legs became slightly withered in relation to the rest of his body. The condition could be crippling, although in my father’s instance, it manifested itself mostly in his difficulty finding decent shoes. Occasionally, he lost his balance.

  The disorder’s chief irritant—at least in my father’s case—was the uncertainty that it stirred up around it. When he was in his late forties, its symptoms appeared to advance. But just as abruptly, and just as mysteriously, they retreated. Nothing changed until the year before he left for Italy.

  That was when he noticed a numbness in his feet, as if they were always cold. His balance abandoned him at unexpected moments. He took a bad fall up at the pool.

  It’s possible that this condition was a contributing factor to the catastrophe that shuddered through him somewhere high in the blackness above the North Atlantic. Or maybe not. But even if there was no actual physical connection to the blood clot that killed him, his problematic feet had a lot to do with why he was flying in the first place. He’d thought that the fall at the pool was a warning.