It only happened the once. It was not an examination that could be repeated. But for years—indeed, for every year until Archie Hughson’s retirement—the exam’s impact was undiminished. Any student preparing for a geography final with Mr. Hughson did so with the knowledge that he was capable of asking anything.
On that memorable June day, his students—filing anxiously into his classroom, their heads brimming with the memorized names of rivers and precipitation rates and potash production tables—were confronted not with a page of printed questions on each desk but with two objects displayed on a small, white metal table at the front of the class: a rough chunk of limestone and a miniature marble replica of Michelangelo’s David. On the blackboard, written in an unusually large and solidly chalked script, were three double-underlined words: “Compare and Contrast.”
“I want them to think,” he had told his wife the day the idea had come to him. “I don’t want them to regurgitate.”
Our World was the product of the same pedagogic instinct. It took Archie three successive summer holidays to write it. The new geography textbook was an entirely unanticipated success.
This made him an unusual client of one of Cathcart’s most highly regarded law firms. Archie had never expected to have money. Herkimer’s was favoured by the Cathcart families who had every expectation they always would.
I can remember the high ceilings of the old downtown offices of Herkimer’s. They were soon to be torn down when I sat there with Archie a week after Winifred’s death. The wood-panelled rooms were on the top floor—the sixth—of a building with a marble foyer, polished hardwood corridors, brass mail chutes, and even then, elevator operators who wore white gloves.
I am not exactly ancient. But I learned from a young reporter at The Chronicle with whom I once made the mistake of having a coffee that the gradual disappearance of the old Cathcart has been followed by the much faster disappearance of the knowledge that there ever was one. The young reporter graduated in history, he told me. Perhaps so. But his degree had not given him much grasp on the recent past.
For some reason I was telling him about the pedestal drinking fountains in Cathcart. The fountains were on downtown corners, usually where maple or elm trees provided dappled shade to the thirsty passersby. The sidewalks in Cathcart were wide in those days.
These fountains ran continuously, and the central bud of water tasted exquisitely cold in the pure clear light of those stainless basins. “Really?” my reporter friend said. “And was it safe to drink?”
As far as he was concerned, the old incline up the bluffs of Hillside—its overgrown stone foundations still visible among the trees—might as well have been built by Ozymandias. My early memories of Cathcart—of the tawny sidewalks, of the awnings of china shops and dressmakers, of colonnaded movie-theatre lobbies, and of cool marble washrooms under a civic meridian of tended flower beds and Victorian fountains—were as exotic to him as Babylon. I enjoyed my conversation with the young reporter less, the more I reminisced. By the end of it, I felt a lot more antique than when I’d started out.
There is only one transformation that can compare to the physical when it comes to growing older. And that is the change that occurs when you go from thinking that nothing disappears to realizing that everything does. There are now discount stores and Money Marts on the main downtown streets. Submarine sandwiches and pizza slices are available.
The Cathcart my parents knew has mostly vanished. And it won’t be long before the last of those who remember it are gone too. That’s how things get lost. And that, I suppose, is why, before I pause here for some lunch and probably a short nap, I’m asking you—my daughter, my only child—to undertake the occasional remembrance of something you never knew.
It would not be accurate to say that I fell in love with your mother the first time I met her. What would be accurate is: the first time I met your mother I knew that I was going to fall in love with her were I to meet her once, maybe two times, more. In a small town like Pietrabella, meeting Anna again—on the street, in the Café David, at the market—was inevitable. So that much was settled the first time I met her. The only question was how long this would take and whether Anna would ever find out.
She animated what might have been ordinary features—her narrow face, her long nose, her wary, brown eyes—with an energy that had every appearance of great beauty. Her hair so perfectly matched her personality it was usually the first thing that came to mind when anyone thought of her. It was comparable, so I once said, in its wild, abundant splendour to the cascading folds of the cloak in Bernini’s Santa Teresa and the Angel. I am embarrassed to say those were my exact words.
Sculpture was one of the subjects Anna had decided to teach me about that summer. Her love of stone seemed bound up in everything. There were dinners when we talked about nothing else. I’d always had respect for art—a middle-class attitude that Anna felt could do with some heightening. She took me on day trips to Florence, and the first thing we always did when we got off the train—before we went to the Accademia, or the Uffizi, or the Bargello—was to go to a grove of trees in the Boboli Gardens and smoke a spliff.
Once, we went to Rome. Anna gave me her paperback copy of the treatise on Bernini by Rudolf Wittkower to read on the train. It was held together by an elastic band more than by its crumbling binding. It was underlined so much, there was little text that wasn’t.
As was the case in the other subjects of her curriculum that summer, I was an eager student. And I was eager to show off what I’d learned. But when I brought up the subject of Saint Teresa I was crushed to discover I wasn’t the first to comment on the baroque associations—high baroque, actually—of Anna in bed.
Pietrabella was a town full of sculptors, and Anna had made morning coffee in her cluttered kitchen for many of them. It’s a place where a name such as Bernini—like Michelangelo, like Brancusi, like Canova, like Moore—is almost a household word. Everybody knows Santa Teresa and the Angel. So it’s not all that surprising that more than a few of her lovers would have made the same association I did. In Pietrabella, it wasn’t exactly obscure.
Bernini was drawn to these ecstatic, transformative split seconds. And as great a sculptor as he was, it was this dramatic compulsion that makes him less great than Michelangelo. This, at least, was Anna’s opinion on the matter.
Bernini’s mastery of the point, the punch, the claw chisel, the rasp, and the trimming hammer was unequalled. Few objects are less stone-like than Santa Teresa’s cloak. And few heads of hair were more like a luxurious disarray of heavy silk than Anna’s.
Bernini was incapable of creating anything as gracelessly unfeminine as some of Michelangelo’s worst female figures. But he lacked something that was in every piece of stone Michelangelo touched.
“He is terrible, as you can see, and one cannot deal with him,” said Pope Julius II of Michelangelo, and it is this quality of the terribilità—more so than the century that divided the two great artists—that distinguishes the furious preoccupations of Michelangelo from Bernini’s smooth genius. It was as if Michelangelo conceived of figures that, no matter the niche or plinth they were to inhabit, would exist most importantly in the infinite space of the viewer’s imagination. Bernini, on the other hand, placed his figures in elaborately contrived settings—dramatically coordinating sculpture and architecture. He dictated the viewer’s perspective and experimented with the theatricality of concealed, directed light. He was a showman. Not only did Bernini go for a story, he usually went for a story’s most spectacular moment.
By Bernini’s time, the marble of the Apuan mountains was the material of choice for sculptors (and, more importantly, for the patrons of sculptors) in Holland, Spain, England, Italy, and France. By geological happenstance, it was a material that held within its composition the strength required to support the most delicate carving. Bernini was a virtuoso of marble. Santa Teresa and the Angel was carved in Carrara stone.
The recumbent figure is abo
ut to be pierced by the arrow of the Holy Spirit wielded by the angel above her. Her eyes seem to have just closed.
The piece is often referred to as The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa—a title that Anna preferred. “That is what it is,” she said. She peered at me closely as we stood together in Rome, in the grey light of the Cornaro Chapel. She wanted to be sure I understood. She suspected I didn’t. The innocence of a Cathcart upbringing was a source of endless fascination to Anna. “It’s the statue of orgasm,” she felt obliged to make clear, as if explaining something to a particularly slow student. And because I have no photograph of Anna, it’s a black and white illustration on a page that had separated from the crumbling binding of her Wittkower that I keep pinned above my desk down at the house: “St Teresa and the Angel, 1646–52. Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Bernini.”
In May 1968 I arrived at Richard Christian and Elena Conti’s apartment on Via Maddalena in Pietrabella after three miserable days of hitchhiking from Paris. My last, and the only lucky, ride, a skinny Dutch sculptor, picked me up outside of Genoa. He was smoking Marlboros—non-stop, judging from the ashtray. And he had been listening to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Jerry Jeff Walker all the way from Holland, judging by his lack of interest in playing any other tapes for the rest of the trip.
He was going to Pietrabella. He was going to be there for the next six months. Maybe longer. He’d been there before. He had a studio.
Not only that, he knew the address scrawled on the piece of paper that Richard had given to me in the Louvre. He was happy to drive me right there.
With a crank of handbreak his Deux Chevaux stopped on the steep road in front of the garden wall of number 19.
The steps cut between the terraced vines to the big, old home. The front buzzer clicked on the timed lights in the interior stairwell. The white marble hallway didn’t echo very much. But somehow it gave the gleaming, cold impression that it could—quite a lot—given half a chance.
Elena stood beside Richard at the open door of their apartment. She was looking at me and my backpack with suspicion. I could hear voices and the clattering of cutlery behind her.
“Well, well,” Richard said. “Will you look at this. It’s my dying captive.”
There were many such dinners in that apartment during the time I spent in Pietrabella. As a result, I am not certain if I am remembering my first or an accumulation of similar evenings. There must have been a few of the young Italian artisans there—Giuliana, for one, who worked in one of the town’s studios, and who had a smile so broad and white it was as if it had been made that way by the marble dust of her work. As well, there would have been some foreign sculptors. Perhaps Luc, tall and gaunt, with dark frizzy hair, who made long, polished totems of marble that he sold through a gallery in Zurich. There were two Swedish sculptors who were often at Richard and Elena’s: they worked together on commissions for California wineries and developers in Florida, they lived together in the same mountain house with their girlfriends and jointly tended children, they wore the same denim overalls, and, on occasion, they dropped acid together. They were trying to raise the money to carve a memorial to the workers of the region who had died in accidents in the quarries. Their idea—born of Michelangelo’s unfulfilled plan for a mountainside colossus—was a sixty-foot-high figure of a quarry worker, carved directly into one of the flanks of Monte Altissimo. It was the kind of thing you came up with on LSD.
And, of course, there was your mother.
Elena and Richard were probably roasting chicken and vegetables that night. They often did. I was ushered in. I was introduced to their guests. Your mother was intrigued, so she later admitted, when Richard repeated what I had hastily explained at the apartment door. His version was shorter but more colourful than mine. He told his friends I was someone he’d met at the Louvre who was now on the lam from the French police.
I put my knapsack in the spare room as instructed.
When I returned to the kitchen, Elena turned and laughed—I’m not sure at what. It was not a particularly significant moment. She was quite small—small, that is, for someone whose quick laughter always became the centre of any room she was in. She was wearing bright colours. She had a wide, expressive smile. “Eyes like pools,” Richard once said. “Deep brown pools of mischief.”
Elena turning and laughing, at that counter, in that kitchen, is a memory I’ve always kept. Because I was lonely, I suppose. And because she was kind. There was no part of her laughter, and no part of the way her open face addressed everyone in the room that excluded me.
Elena turned and laughed, and then she asked if I would go outside and get more rosemary for the chicken. It felt like I’d been welcomed in some special way. It wasn’t something you’d ask a stranger to do.
At the back of the house there was a slope of vegetables and herbs. It rose in carefully tended terraces from a low stone border to the old town wall. I leaned forward and ruffled through the plants. I felt as if I were hunting through files.
When people talk about their travels, they seldom mention the air. They mention sights, and sounds, and events, and the people they encounter. But they seldom mention the air—or if they do, they mention a partial aspect of it, perhaps its warmth, perhaps its salty briskness. They seldom make reference to its overall feeling: the combination of humidity, elevation, and temperature that makes everything so different in a different place.
I’d never felt air like the evening I met your mother. The sky was mauve and the temperature was so fresh it felt to me as if gravity did not have its customary hold on things.
I could find no rosemary.
The kitchen opened from the central hallway of the second floor. There was jazz on the record player. The air was full with tobacco and hash, heated oil and garlic turning gold in a frying pan.
My empty-handed return was not noticed quickly. Those were dinner parties at which everyone held forth on everything: on Coltrane and Brancusi, Django Reinhardt and Henry Moore, Kerouac and Donatello. The few supper gatherings that the Hughsons hosted in Cathcart were staid, formal, sober affairs. I think that first dinner on Via Maddalena was the first time I understood that talking and laughing and joking and telling stories were what dinner parties are for.
Richard particularly loved talking about music and sculpture, and it was not always clear which was which when he did. He was like Anna that way: not all that big on distinctions. He was not always easy to follow, but there was something about his Texan accent that made him sound sensible—sensible, that is, for an artist, sensible for someone who refused to take any money from his wealthy parents, sensible for someone who could go all the way to Paris to see a single piece of sculpture.
Richard always had about him the wild contradictions of exile. He had fallen in love with Italy as completely as he had fallen in love with Elena—and he lived with a kind of glee, as if this addition to his life was entirely miraculous. But he was dodging a war with a sense of outrage and of justice that seemed, somehow, very American in its confidence. And sometimes late at night, usually when he was drunk, he suffered the sadness of those who adopt a country. Sometimes his bushy eyebrows drooped as if to hide his shining eyes. Sometimes his drawl halted as if he were not sure he could control his voice.
Elena and Richard’s kitchen had tall windows and a small stove. There was a terra-cotta pot on a gas ring. There was an oven. There was a cutting board on the kitchen table. There was a salad underway. There was a jug of oil. A chunk of hard cheese. A grater. There were open bottles of wine.
The room seemed old-fashioned even then, with its basic appliances, its high taps, and its small, deep sink. The little table—around which a surprising number of people could be seated for a dinner—had a grey marble top. The windowsills were also stone.
No rosemary? Elena smiled patiently at my stupidity. Everyone laughed. But it was Anna who got up. She was wearing an untucked man’s white shirt, rolled khaki slacks, and sockless old sneakers.
She led me out of the apartment, through the high double doors at the end of the marble-floored hallway.
Anna stood at the back of Via Maddalena 19. She pointed. There was a rosemary bush there. It was the size of a large boulder.
“You are not so bright,” she said. “For a desperado.”
I told Anna what I thought rosemary looked like.
“Spreegs?” she asked. “What are spreegs?”
Now, here I am. All these years later. Back up at the pool. I am following young Robert Mulberry’s instructions.
Here I am, cursed by the fury of your mother to still be in the land where rosemary can come in sprigs and spaghetti in cans. And rightly so. I was a coward. Most people are. Here I am, still in Cathcart.
I have a clipboard and some paper. With any luck this chaise—which must be as old as the pool—won’t collapse for a few more days. I am drinking Prosecco and grapefruit juice. For old time’s sake.
I have now almost concluded what business I need to conclude with young master Mulberry—which, at three hundred dollars per hour, is just as well. And I have now finalized my plans for my visit with you at the end of this month.
You’ll note that I say “visit.” The sale of the Cathcart property does not mean that I plan to stay in Italy any longer than a visiting relative should. Which is not long—in my opinion.
Not that I am opposed to the idea of staying longer. Staying longer is one of the possibilities that comes from having no place, and no job, and no family to return to. It’s one of the things that can sometimes happen to travellers. It’s always possible that I’ll encounter someone who will change everything.
The weather is warm in Cathcart this April—the result, no doubt, of catastrophic global changes in the climate, but for my isolated purposes, a happy coincidence. The fine balance between the warm sun and a wind that has just passed over the last snow in the Hillside woods reminds me of Pietrabella. There is the same lightness of air that I felt when your mother showed me the rosemary on my first night in Italy.
The Figures of Beauty Page 13