The Figures of Beauty

by David Macfarlane

  To begin with, she taught him to cook—lessons that started with her standing at the marble cutting board in the farmhouse kitchen. She turned slowly around to him with a bud of garlic in one hand and a paring knife in the other. Her eyes were wide in disbelief.

  And there were other lessons. On late weekend mornings they sat in the sun at the outdoor table smoking spliffs and drinking Prosecco. They passed the time with the stories they invented. But usually, when the day got hot and drowsy, they ended up going back to bed.

  My mother has always insisted on being frank with me about sex. It is one of her personal measures for countering the strictures of the bourgeoisie. I was never comfortable with this. But my comfort wasn’t the issue. This was a struggle my mother expected to take generations. She felt she had an example to set.

  My mother wasn’t an exhibitionist. That would be an exaggeration. Let’s just say, she was never quiet—a recurrence of moans and sighs and shrieks that, as a child, I took to be something like thunderstorms, only more frequent. At a very young age, I knew what a lover was because I met so many of them at our breakfast table.

  Once the subject of the young Oliver Hughson was out in the open, my mother saw no reason to be discreet just because he was my father. “At first, he knew as much about lovemaking as he did about cooking,” she told me. There was a pause. “I had to tell him what garlic is.”

  On the occasions (usually late at night, usually after lots of wine) when my mother persisted in arguing against my father’s conviction that he should be reasonable—when, no matter how light her tone, she made it clear that she wasn’t joking about how important it was that he stay—he avoided confronting her directly. His claim that he didn’t know enough about the region’s history, or about marble, or about the history of sculpture to write the kind of book she had envisioned for him at least shifted the discussion away from immigration. Concern about talent was a safer subject for him to raise than his doubt about commitment—certainly it was less likely to infuriate my mother.

  “It’s connecting things that’s the problem” was what he had said to her. He knew she was susceptible to exactly this kind of abstraction.

  MY MOTHER’S FLAWS have largely to do with her relationship with the future. Her retirement, for example, couldn’t possibly be less real for her than it is. “I’m an artist,” she says. “Not being an artist is not something I’m saving up for.”

  As my ever-practical husband tried to explain to her, this is not a responsible attitude. People get sick, Enrico said. People get old. But there is a saying in the mountain towns that goes: the pail of strength and the pail of weakness are drawn from the same well. That’s my mother.

  Her lack of regard for the future has always been maddening. But it finds alternative expression in how fully she occupies the present. I am familiar with the look: her eyes closed, her lips parted, her neck arched back slightly, as if she is pausing, instructing herself to drink in every sensation of being alive. She moves through the air with an open, attentive saunter.

  Faith in the improvisational nature of the present is a kind of personal creed, one that is connected to her most important artistic pursuits. My mother believes that great sculptors—whether they be masters of the figure, such as Michelangelo and Bernini, or masters of more abstracted form, such as Brancusi—move from plane to plane without thinking about anything other than the instant of their carving. “They are like ancient gods, looking down on their world of marble,” she once said. “They are in the piece. They are outside it. They are close. They are far away. It’s a talent sculptors have.”

  She paused.

  “It’s why we are so bad at everything else.”

  ON THAT LATE AUGUST MORNING Anna smiled at how obviously Oliver Hughson’s sleep still clung to him.

  “But I think you are too sleepy to do magical things,” she said. “So you will have to be a lazy, ancient god.”

  My mother’s relationship to the past is more complicated than most people’s. She inhabits it more wilfully than anyone I know. What she chooses not to think about, she puts away, as if in a locked drawer. She is very disciplined in this. As one good example, she was so angry with my father, she didn’t think of him for forty years.

  This doesn’t mean that she was unable to remember him. It means that when she sensed his memory looming on her horizon, she turned away from it, the way someone with a stutter learns to avoid the approach of a troublesome consonant. In fact—as I eventually learned—she remembers quite a lot about the summer of 1968.

  “Ask him if he remembers the lazy, ancient god,” she instructed me. We were sitting at her outdoor table on a spring evening in 2009. I had just told her that I was going to go to Cathcart to meet my father.

  She pulled on her hand-rolled cigarette, exhaled unhurriedly into the still evening. She considered the smoke carefully. I remember being surprised. This was the first indication that she might lift her embargo on his memory.

  And so that’s how I picture him: on a chaise, in the afternoon, looking up into the sky. But he could just as easily be looking down. Direction is immaterial when it comes to lazy, ancient gods. It’s almost as irrelevant as chronology.

  This is why my mother says she prefers Michelangelo’s unfinished sculpture to the most polished of an artist even as great as Bernini. She doesn’t love anything that insists on being observed from a single point of view—a staged theatricality on which Bernini usually insisted. She likes to move around objects. She says that’s what space is for.

  Even a lazy deity could probably locate the right Italian town through the parting clouds—but it’s not easy. From way up, where the gods drift, there isn’t much colour to be seen down below. Everything is a grey, hazy map—like a polished marble floor. The pigments and earth tones become clearer as he descends, but even that isn’t much help. All the Tuscan towns look like the opening credits of movies. It’s the light.

  The lazy, ancient god looks down, past the bell towers and red-tiled roofs, on the right piazza. He’s got the right time of the day, in the right year. It takes some doing.

  It is late summer of 1968. At a table of the Café David, in the main square of a little town in the northwest corner of Tuscany, there is milk-foam on the rim of young Oliver’s cappuccino. He is twenty years old.

  His journal is open. The smoke of his cigarette is drifting from his table on the southern side of the central piazza of the old town of Pietrabella. He has a train ticket in his pocket.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  BY THE EARLY AFTERNOON the three hikers had reached a height in the mountains at which the sunlight felt coated with a thin veneer of cold. The upward climb had taken four hours. Grace Barton had refused to be slow.

  About thirty metres below their destination, the path seemed to end. A steel-cable ladder was staked into the outside edge of a wall of stone. Morrow stood at the base.

  “This is a little dangerous,” he said to Grace.

  She looked at him with alarm.

  “But,” he said with a reassuring smile, “rather fun.”

  She placed her foot on the first rung. He reached around to guide her.

  She started up, not daring to look down. The ladder ended at a wide ledge high above the spot from which her anxious husband watched her climb. Julian Morrow waited for her to complete her ascent before he helped Argue Barton begin his.

  Grace had been standing alone for several minutes, looking out to the red roofs of the distant towns and the flat blue of the sea, before her husband joined her. Morrow followed.

  “Ecco,” he said. Morrow gestured, and when she turned, she was astonished that she had not seen what was behind her. It was a high cave, cut into the side of the mountain. It felt as if they were standing at the portal of a cathedral. “Luci di marmo,” Morrow said. “The light of marble. It’s like this nowhere else on earth.”

  They would eat their lunch on the picnic rug he opened in front of the long-abandoned quarry. From there they
could peer up into the cave. They could see the high ladders and scaffolding. There were rusted stakes driven into the walls of the high cut of rock—From what original vantage? she wondered. How did the cobwebs of wire get so far up there? It was impossible to imagine working there under the calmest of circumstances. “What would it be like, she asked, “to be climbing the scaffolding, traversing those catwalks in a driving winter wind?”

  “Difficult,” Morrow said. That was the only description. “Work in the quarries can be very … difficult.”

  The accident had occurred in another quarry the day before. Julian Morrow felt how truly cold and implacable these mountains could be, and the thought saddened him. As it always did. His manager would provide him with the details.

  These scaffoldings and ropes and dangling ladders were climbed and crossed and clung to, Morrow explained. “The workers’ job,” he said, “was to cut away the loose stone high above the vast blocks that would be cut from the wall.” Here and there, the sunlight caught an angle of broken white stone, sparking the crystalline glint sometimes called “tears of Christ.”

  Or, he pointed out, his guests could look in the other direction. They could look from a great height out toward the coastal towns. There, said Morrow, were the marble yards, the loading docks, the saws, the studios, and the offices where marble agents made the connections with buyers in London, in New York, in Paris. And there was the sea.

  “My world,” he said.

  He was unpacking their lunch from his rucksack. The wine for their meal in the quarries had been wrapped in damp canvas by his cook to stay cool.

  “Simple fare,” Julian Morrow said. “But I hope to your liking.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I DIDN’T KNOW who my father was until a year before his death. I was forty years old when I made the discovery. And the first thing I did when I learned Oliver Hughson’s identity was figure out where he lived.

  Getting any information from my mother on this particular subject was not easy.

  At first she said, “He’s gone.” Her response to hearing a name she had not heard spoken for decades was calm but resolute. “Forever,” she added, as if she were a judge recalling a sentence from a long-ago case.

  “But he was important to you.”

  “Once.”

  “Would you ever see him again?”

  “It would take a miracle.”

  She stared at me with her characteristically maddening combination of unreasonableness and concern. “Why do you want to get to know him? Now.”

  “Because he’s my father.”

  “So?”

  “I need to learn who I am.”

  “You don’t need to,” she replied. “You want to. There’s a difference.” And for a while we left it at that.

  But when my mother eventually admitted to me that she could remember who my father was, she said she didn’t really know where he was from. Not precisely. She never had.

  “Somewhere near New York,” she said. “Or Chicago. Or Hollywood, maybe.”

  This was not a help.

  What little information had found its way to her did not add up to a country. She was relieved to learn that no baby seals had ever been clubbed in Cathcart. Once, as a child, she’d read a book by Grey Owl, but she couldn’t remember anything about it. Sometimes, when she was crossing the smooth white surface of a quarry floor, she wondered what could be done with chisel blades that were built into skates. There was a Joni Mitchell song she liked about a frozen river. This was pretty much the sum total of her thoughts about Canada.

  Anna thought the name of the town Oliver was from and the name of the province the town was in were a single word. When I mentioned this to my father on the evening of our first meeting in Cathcart, he smiled, a little sadly. “I haven’t heard that for a very long time,” he said.

  Pietrabella is in Italy, but nobody knows where it is either, because it is not very distinguished and it is surrounded by places that are. It’s a dusty, noisy town, and probably only my father, who had hardly visited anywhere else in the world in his life, could have found it as magical as he did. He told me that, on his first morning there, he pushed open the shutters of the spare room in Richard Christian and Elena Conti’s apartment on Via Maddalena—the same room, it so happens, in which I am writing now. He said he had never seen so beautiful a place.

  This is not the common view. Pietrabella is not at all what people picture when they think of Tuscany—even when I instruct them to forget scenes from movies about people discovering picturesque properties requiring renovation and the intervention of handsome local tradesmen in the lives of lonely women. I tell them to think of the ordinary northwest corner of Tuscany on the ordinary flats between the Apuan mountains and the sea. Still, I am often surprised by the blank stares I receive, even from Italians. So then I say, “Not far from Carrara,” and usually people know where I mean. At least approximately. Although I have noticed that North Americans sometimes remain confused. As they often do.

  Carrara is one of those names that Americans think they know. It sounds familiar, but they aren’t quite sure why. Sometimes they think it is a make of downhill skis. Or a kind of sports car. Or a line of fancy kitchen appliances or a condominium complex. “The marble quarries,” I then say. Which still doesn’t necessarily help.

  My father was carried by two paramedics from his seat on the Alitalia flight from Toronto to Milan on the morning of April 23, 2010. He was carried because the wheels of the ambulance gurney would not pass down the plane’s narrow aisle. There were too many seats for that.

  As we went through the papers he had with him in the airport, it became apparent that he had sold his house in Cathcart shortly before his departure for Italy. This was unsettling—partly because he had said nothing to me of this decision, and partly because the officials with whom I had to deal began referring to him as someone “of no fixed address.”

  “He is not a nomad,” I told the immigration officer. “Obviously.”

  Actually, it wasn’t that obvious. If my father had an address, we couldn’t find it.

  “But where does he live?” the immigration officer asked. There was an edge of frustration in his voice, a bureaucratic reaction to an unsettling absence of necessary information. Apparently, the processing of my father could not continue—not satisfactorily—if it appeared that the body came from nowhere.

  Nobody knew what to do. And there I stood, in the harsh, modern light of the airport, surrounded by a semicircle of police, immigration officials, airline representatives, and the two bewildered baggage handlers with a wooden crate the size and shape of a casket on the dolly between them. One of the airline employees—a woman—thought I had not heard the question. And after a few moments of silence, she repeated it more gently.

  “Do you know his place of residence?” she asked.

  A few more seconds of my silence passed. A delay in a flight to Nairobi was being announced.

  “Cathcartario,” I answered—as much to myself as to anyone. And this, finally, was when I began to cry.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE YOUNG OLIVER HUGHSON was not athletic in his build. His arms were a little slender; his chest was a little caved. It was late in the summer of 1968, at a table of the Café David, in the main square of a little town in the northwest corner of Tuscany.

  Pietrabella isn’t very far from the marble quarries of Carrara. It’s a town that sculptors have known for centuries. But it’s a place that Michelangelo didn’t care for very much, if you want to know the truth. It was an irony not lost on my boss, Pier-Giorgio, that a place that has always been so noisily, dustily, and charmlessly devoted to the industry of stone, seemed only to get in the way of Michelangelo’s chief obsession.

  Michelangelo was one of those geniuses who seemed to have the history of art coursing through him—not because history interested him particularly but because both inspiration and instruction were to be found there. Anna used to say that the pa
st wasn’t something Michelangelo studied. It was part of who he was.

  It was in 1506, on the Esquiline Hill in Rome, that a man came across what he thought at first was a buried grey rock. It appeared as if it had been worn into furrows by the passage of time. He was digging in a vineyard. And as he continued to dig, he was surprised by the size of what he was discovering. And then he began to see that it was not a rock at all.

  A bearded male nude and two smaller, younger figures emerged. They were pulled from the mud and the pebbles and the shards of terra-cotta that had surrounded them for centuries. It took the farmer a good hour of digging before he could see that the three figures were of a single piece. They were struggling with two large serpents.

  The discovery was sensational. Possibly, it was the Greek original. Possibly, a later Roman copy. Crowds gathered. Artists travelled great distances to study the marble statue.

  The ferocious dignity of Laocoon’s struggle and the violent torque of the central figure fascinated Michelangelo. So did the serpents—sent by the gods to kill a father and his two sons. But Michelangelo was as interested in the practical function of the coiling snakes as much as anything. He admired the ingenuity. The serpents upheld the weight of Laocoon’s extended and otherwise insupportable arms.

  By the time Michelangelo was in the Carrara area looking for the stone for the pope’s tomb, his first Pietà and the David were both behind him. He was no longer a young man, but he still had a young man’s passion for stone. He didn’t much like the place where, at the pope’s orders, he had ended up. He was impatient and restless and irritable.

  There are more beautiful towns. It is the tragedy of Pier-Giorgio that he kissed only enough asses to be appointed executive director of the tourist agency here, and not in Lucca or Florence—municipalities better suited to his goatee and his Milanese suits. Here, things aren’t so grand.