Michelangelo once came to the region to sign a contract for marble, and he must have walked along the same road. More or less. And if he didn’t, Anna and Oliver had decided that they could say he did. Who was to say otherwise?
“He was on his way back to the convent where he’s staying,” Anna had decided. “There is a fountain where the old abbess always sits. It needs his attention.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MICHELANGELO WAS WEARING BOOTS of cordwain over his stockings. He had a task to perform. It was a favour for an old holy woman of great wisdom. A correction to a piece of marble statuary—little more than smoothing out a knot of stone where a piece had broken and been inexpertly rejoined.
The rejoining technique was something that he’d learned from old stone carvers as a boy—a very finely cut tongue and groove of stone, implemented in an elongated zigzag to maximize its strength. Sometimes there was a flaw in the stone that no one had guessed was there. And no worker wanted to abandon a piece when an arm, or a hand, or a curling beard that had been carefully worked over for hours and hours suddenly broke away.
Resin and marble dust were mixed to create an epoxy. Then the joint was carefully and finely polished. It was a useful trick, known to any experienced hand in a marble studio. It amused Michelangelo that the repair—almost invisible—would resemble an M.
The flaw in the convent fountain may not have been a carver’s mistake so much as an artist’s rush to complete a job for an impatient patron. Michelangelo was familiar with the problem.
The tomb of Pope Julius II was to be a project of unsurpassed scope. Michelangelo’s pupil Ascanio Condivi wrote that the “tomb was to have had four faces, two of eighteen braccia, that served for the flanks, and two of twelve for the heads, so that it was to be a square and a half in plan. All around about the outside were niches for statues, and between niche and niche, terminal figures; to these were bound other statues, like prisoners, upon certain square plinths, rising from the ground and projecting from the monument.”
The reasons for Michelangelo’s bad temper were obvious. His days were too full of contracts—contracts with quarry owners, contracts with transport drivers, contracts signed in airless second-floor rooms with obsequious marble merchants and greedy stone agents. It would be good for him to grip a chisel.
Michelangelo hurried over the millstream.
The task Michelangelo would perform at the convent wasn’t much of a job, but it would be a welcome change. The duties he was called upon to perform for Julius—all preliminary to the carving he longed to do—were wearisome. “I have ordered many blocks of marble and handed out money here and there, and had the quarrying started in various places,” he wrote in one of his letters to Rome. This was all necessary, but he did not enjoy becoming entangled in the business of marble. It gave him a headache. He wanted to get back to what he loved most. He wanted to get back to working stone. He always did.
During his time in the Carrara area, it was unlikely that Michelangelo left anything to chance—or at least not to the very good chance that somebody would be less a perfectionist than he was. He climbed and clambered and searched for exactly the right whiteness and sparkle of Statuario, exactly the right overcast Bardiglio, exactly the right creamy patterning of Arabescato.
Still, he made some mistakes. A marble quarry has its specialists. But not even the most experienced can know for certain what will be found when marble is cut away from a quarry face.
On one occasion, when a block was being hoisted to a wooden sled, it shattered, revealing a hollow at its core that none of the minatori had guessed was there. This was a constant and curious fact of a marble quarry: that a place that seemed to be so monumentally still could possess the potential for such sudden, crushing movement.
Uncharacteristically—for Michelangelo was furious at almost any setback in his schedule—he commented in a letter not on the delay but on the fact that everyone in the work crew, himself included, had escaped disaster only by chance.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE FIRST PART OF THEIR WALK that morning had somehow not been pleasant—or at least not as pleasant as Grace Barton had imagined it would be when she and her husband accepted Julian Morrow’s invitation. The first two miles, up the gravel switchback, were steep and difficult, especially for her. The gravel was thickly strewn.
The sun was not yet high enough to warm them. Occasionally, through the trees, they were able to glimpse the peak to which they were headed. It seemed to Grace to be very far away.
“Michelangelo’s mountain,” Morrow said. “The only place he got his stone in the region—or that, at least, is the popular myth.” The Welshman shrugged amiably. “There are three or four other ‘only places’ in the next valley.”
After a mile or so Grace wondered not so much whether she could make it but whether she really wanted to. She found herself thinking of what she might have done instead. She might have spent the day reading on the balcony of their hotel room in Carrara.
It was a gorge, more than a valley, through which they were climbing. The side of the road fell away steeply to their left, through a tangle of trees and goat paths and overgrown thickets of vine to a small river. They could hear the water, but the stream was too far below, too hidden in branch and shadow, for them to see.
They reached the end of the road and the entrance to the working quarry. They had to pass through it to get to the trail that would continue to the abandoned cliffs above.
As they crossed the quarry floor, they noticed a figure in the distance. Neither Grace nor Argue could identify what it was doing. Not until they were closer did they realize it was a man crouching over a tripod. He was in knickerbockers, hiking boots, a mountaineer’s worsted jacket, and a silk scarf. He had an owlish, intelligent face.
Giovanni Belli travelled throughout the Carrara region on a motorcycle, his tripod and cameras loaded in his sidecar. He was friends with many of the famous artists who came to Carrara to work the stone. He played American music on his trumpet at their boisterous parties. His portraits of stone carvers at work in Carrara studios were much in demand.
But it is Belli’s documentation of the quarries that is his most celebrated work: the Piranesi-like catwalks and high, angled ladders, the stone lunch-huts and the black thinness of cables strung like cracks in the air. He captured the rolled sleeves and cloth caps of the workers, and the unbuttoned vests, walrus moustaches, and battered Borsalinos of the capi. He took long aerial views of distant valleys. He recorded the smallness of the crouched, the straining, the bending men in comparison to the enormous, tilted vaults and cut-away faces of the grained white stone.
“Ciao, Maestro,” Julian Morrow called.
“Ciao, Padrone,” Belli answered. He looked up and nodded, politely enough. But Belli was not going to stop what he was doing. “The light …” he began to explain.
Morrow signalled his understanding with a genial flick of his hand. “Come by soon, my friend. For lunch. I have a project I’d like to discuss with you.”
“With the greatest pleasure,” the photographer replied.
They continued past him. Belli bent back over his camera.
When they had continued a short distance beyond, Morrow spoke to the Bartons in the low voice of shared confidence. “A brilliant photographer. And an interesting man. He is convinced that he will find evidence of Michelangelo’s time here. In the area. Time spent, perhaps, on the very trail we follow now.”
Grace was enchanted. The climb had become easier—or rather she had accommodated herself to its demands.
Morrow had an inquisitive nature—especially when it came to women. It was one of his great attractions. He had a love of women that he expressed with curiosity. He showered them with questions about where they had grown up, what their interests were, their politics, which artists they admired. He was indiscriminate in this enthusiasm. He asked about suffragettes. He asked about perfume. He asked about the books they were reading. He ask
ed about their travels, and their education, and their beliefs. He asked about their childhood. He wanted to know everything about them. He couldn’t help himself. It was the most effective form of seduction he knew.
He asked Grace about her work, and she told him about her painting. And then she told him about the work she did for the Barton papers.
“Ah,” he said. “A journalist.”
“An art critic” was her immediate correction.
He asked with the gentlest deference about her leg. He assumed it had been a condition of her birth. But on this he was also corrected. She told him of the art school in Cathcart where she had taught when she was just a teenager, and the loft where the art supplies were kept.
“The boys pulled the ladder away as a joke,” she said. “They meant no harm.”
It was just to show them. She had jumped, skirt billowing, auburn hair streaming, just to get the better of their grinning, upturned faces.
“It was a very foolish thing to do,” she said. And for a while she was silent.
Eventually, he raised the subject of sculpture. Morrow always did.
“There is a village,” he said, “called Pomezzano.” He gestured to the hills to the south. “It is a place that specializes in making a carver’s tools, each with a specific name—gradino, subbia, dente di cane—and each with a special purpose in the process of carving.” The claws followed the points. The rasps followed the chisels. With marble, he told her, the bite depends less on the strength of a hammer blow than on the angle.
“Whom do you admire?” he asked.
The question puzzled her.
“What sculptor?”
She searched for a name that would not be too obvious. “Brancusi,” she said.
“Ah. You are a modernist.”
“No. Merely a lover of pure beauty. An admirer of direct carving. And you? Do you have a favourite?”
“Michelangelo,” he answered without hesitation. “No one else comes close.”
As they began to eat their lunch that day, Grace and Argue both became aware of how keen their appetite had grown. Later, when they recalled their time in the mountains, they both admitted that they had to restrain themselves from wolfing down the food, from gulping down the wine. It was all so good. So very, very good: the soft give of the bread beneath its crust, the bite of the cheese, the salt of the olives, the smokiness of the crumbling meat.
The wine was young and crisp and surprisingly thirst-quenching. It wasn’t quite effervescent, but it tasted somehow as if it were. Were she to choose one meal from her life as her favourite, it would be that lunch, there, at the mouth of that abandoned marble quarry.
She nestled against her husband’s shoulder. They listened as their host talked. And talked. It was mesmerizing: his Welsh voice, the rich history, this astonishing place. “There,” he said. “Out there, somewhere on that blue horizon is where Shelley drowned.” He recited “Ozymandias” without mistake, and in the prolonged silence that followed their impressed applause, they all became aware that the food and the sun and their morning’s climb had bestowed a drowsiness that was becoming irresistible. It was like a charm in a fairy tale. Morrow said, “There’s a warm spot. Over there. Behind that rock. Out of the wind. You’ll find the long grass quite soft when pressed down around you. I’ve napped there myself often. Why don’t you rest for half an hour or so before we start back down. I have some exploration of the ledge below that I have been meaning to undertake. You need only call down when you are ready to deal with the ladder again. You are experts now. But I shall hold it steady for your descent.”
She hesitated briefly. As did her husband. There was something about the idea that seemed bold somehow.
“Go,” Morrow said. “I’ll be on the level below. Meditating on vast and trunkless legs of stone. Contemplating what stretches far away.”
He rose. He repacked the rucksack and whisked away the crumbs. He crossed toward the top of the ladder. He hoisted the pack over his shoulders. He turned. He gave a last little wave, signalling the couple toward the spot he’d suggested for their after-luncheon rest. Then, swivelling his weight over the lip of the stone, he started cautiously down.
The warm, sunny spot was softened by moss and the promised long grass. It was secluded. Even sound seemed muffled by the breezes that curled around the protecting rock. It was away from everything. It was a place in the blue sky that proved too delightful for them not to give in. How had it happened? She always wondered.
It was so unlike them. But the luncheon had been particularly delicious. And the air, of course, was clear and splendid. “A rare combination of delights,” Argue said while they were straightening their clothes after. They’d laughed together at that. Argue’s Welsh accent was surprisingly good.
Michael was born close to nine months later. She chose to believe that’s where it happened.
It had been shocking behaviour—a thought that always made her smile. How could it have happened like that? Outside. Practically in public. And her only answers were: because the day was so clear; because the sun felt so good; because they had just fallen in love; because, perhaps, the wine had gone to their heads.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
OLIVER STOPPED ON THE FOOTBRIDGE. It was the last point on the walk at which he could change his mind.
He wasn’t certain. Looking up at the terraces of olive trees and the distant grey walls of the hillside town above, he wasn’t sure at all about his decision. A little ridiculously, and with a deep, hollow sadness that he was only just beginning to get to know, he was thinking: Anna has the most beautiful back.
Oliver continued across the footbridge. He was aware that he could be making a mistake. But he was not bold enough to share Anna’s belief in the unforgivable. He was naive enough to think that there were mistakes it was sometimes necessary to make.
He headed up the road, beneath an empty sky.
He crossed between the windbreak of bramble and through the buckled, wire gate toward the little farmhouse at the top of the narrow valley.
A country road, little more than two ruts made by the landlord’s tractor and hay truck, cut across the bottom of the garden of the little house. There was a red blur of poppies in the hedgerow.
The farmer’s rabbit pen was between the fields. It was built of wood and screening where once there had been a swimming pool. The villa had been destroyed in the war.
Tanned and slender and naked from the waist up, Anna was at the hand pump at the property’s edge. The well there is deep. However hot the day, the water is always cold. She filled a jug. She was rinsing a rosemary infusion from her hair.
Something was different about her that day. A lazy, ancient god could see that, even if she couldn’t. Yet.
She mistook her flush for the late-morning sun. She thought her shivers were caused by the cold water on her back and shoulders. She thought her drowsiness was only the remains of a long sleep.
Oliver did not call out. He did not wave. He decided that there was no way to soften this. He walked directly to her.
They stood together, face to face. He spoke.
And that was when she shouted. That was when she reached back as if swinging something.
Anna shouted you fucking coward and swung hard and hit Oliver’s smooth unfinished face.
Part Four
THE RASPS
No block of marble but it does not hide the concept living in the artist’s mind
—MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI
CATHCART, ONTARIO. APRIL 2010.
Eventually, I gave up expecting any kind of correspondence with Anna. She never replied to the letters I sent after I returned to Cathcart. But I can’t decide whether the fact, as you report, that she kept all twenty-three of them means that she held me in higher regard than I’d hoped. Or whether, because they were all stored at the bottom of a cardboard box crammed with equally unopened bills and tax notifications, her opinion of me was lower than I’d feared. In either case, there was
never any encouragement to write.
So far as I can bring to mind—up by the pool on this very bright, almost brittle April afternoon—the only people who have ever asked me to write letters are you (my newly found daughter), Robert Mulberry (my extremely well-dressed lawyer), and Christopher Barton (for a time, my closest friend).
The Barton property was adjacent to the Hughsons’—separated by the pool fence and, on the Bartons’ side, by a barrier of the lilac and forsythia and wild grape that nobody ever looked after. But Christopher and I might as well have passed our earliest years ten blocks apart. From his pre-kindergarten days, he attended Charlton House—a local private school. The Hughsons, naturally, were great believers in public education.
But even without its high chain fence of rampant morning-glory, even without its wall of untended bramble, the Barton grounds seemed distant and impenetrable to its more modest, more ordinary, more contemporary neighbours. This had as much to do with the stories that enshrouded the grounds as with any physical distinction. The place was famous—famous, at least, in Cathcart—as the wild flower beds, the overgrown statues, and the untended terraces of grief.
At Argue Barton’s instruction, Grace’s crypt was inspired in its formal, austere design by a tomb his wife had admired in Paris. It was in a chilly grey church they had visited the day before their departure for Italy on their honeymoon in the summer of 1922. Grace had always been a great one for museums and old cathedrals. Things of that sort.
The choice of Carrara stone for her tomb—supplied to Lino Cavatore with all possible haste by the Morrow quarry—was a more appropriate decision than Argue Barton fully appreciated. It was the kind of thing his wife would have explained to him. His interest in art, although entirely authentic, had only ever really been his interest in being in love with Grace. The finer points of cultural history usually passed him by.
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