The Figures of Beauty

by David Macfarlane

  She wasn’t going to say a word before she had a cup of coffee. Her hair, the dark circles under her almost-closed eyes, her long, rumpled T-shirt, her bare, flat-footed shuffle through her uncared-for kitchen made the point. They conveyed precisely the only reply that could, with Anna’s customary honesty, be made to Oliver’s polite, “How are you this morning?”

  The cure for a hangover of this severity—so Anna told Oliver as she poured her second cup of thick, hot espresso—was the combination of coffee, a spliff, and the crisp, cool air of the Apuans. She then set out to prove this to be true.

  An hour later, Oliver’s newly heightened appreciation for the beauty of the Tuscan countryside overcame what concerns he had about Anna’s driving. They made their incautious, bumpy way down from Anna’s place, and through the mostly empty, Sunday-morning streets of Pietrabella. They started up toward the quarries.

  Anna’s Cinquecento was so badly rusted the passing road was visible through the floor. The car was filled by their two bodies, the knapsack Anna hastily packed for lunch, and the satchels, books, sculpting tools, empty wine bottles, and dirty laundry that were already occupying what little passenger space there was.

  Anna had no money, of course. Oliver didn’t either, he was embarrassed to admit. But Anna thought she had enough gas to get to the point on one of the high, switchback roads where, she had decided, their hike would begin. They’d worry about coming down when they came down. If the worse came to the worst, she said, they could coast.

  This made perfect sense to Oliver. It was the first time in his life he’d smoked hash.

  After they parked, Anna lit the bottom half of what they had smoked with their coffee. The car filled with smoke. It smelled like someone had set a pile of dung on fire. Oliver wasn’t used to the black tobacco. He started coughing.

  “Is this dangerous?” he spluttered.

  “The hash?”

  “No. The climb.”

  “Ha,” said Anna. “It is very healthy, the climb.”

  “What are we climbing?”

  “We are climbing to the mountains of the moon.”

  FOR MOST OF THE SECOND HOUR of their climb they were below what looked like the loop of a giant clothesline. It was a Belgian invention.

  The cables didn’t turn on Sundays. But on every other day—except, of course, for Christmas—the valleys hummed with the steady revolutions of lines of thickly braided steel. They were so long they looked as if they were stays holding the mountains in position. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, they’d been the principal method of marble extraction.

  As it turned on its enormous loop, the cutting wire was lowered slowly into the marble. A slurry of water, ground quartz, and sand was fed into the deepening slice. There were workers who were so skilled at this they could judge the cable’s progress through the stone without ever looking at it. They made adjustments by sound alone.

  The steady friction made the cutting line dangerously hot. For this reason, far below the quarries, usually below the staging areas where the workers first entered the gates and where the wagons were loaded, water troughs were constructed. The cables ran through the water to cool before returning to the white caverns above.

  BY THE TIME they stopped for lunch, the cooling troughs, far below them, looked like miniatures of themselves.

  Anna knew a spot. There was a stream.

  The current widened, fed by a fall of water over a ledge of rock. She kicked off her old tennis shoes—footwear that Oliver thought alarmingly flimsy for so arduous a climb. But they didn’t seem to be bothering Anna.

  She stood, barefoot, in the shallows.

  She showed Oliver the different varieties of stone that she had gathered in a single scoop of the creek bed. She had been right. Her recovery from the night before was now complete.

  Anna held out the handful of smooth, wet pebbles. “Look,” she said. “They’re marble. But each is different. Look. Washed from quarries up in the mountains.”

  Cautiously, for the rocks underneath her feet were uncertain, she stepped closer to him. “The grey one is Ordinario,” she said. “Mostly for building. It is everywhere. Window ledges. Stairs. Floors. The pissoir on the way to Via Maddalena …”

  “How do you know that?” Oliver asked. He meant the question as a joke, although Anna took it seriously.

  “I was a curious little girl.”

  “And the white?”

  “Statuario,” she said. “The first prize for sculptors. We all want this, like we want snow. Or angels’ wings. Or stars. Because it is so pure for carving. It is such clean beauty. It was why Michelangelo came. And maybe he saw this very Statuario before it got knocked from his block.”

  “Do you think?”

  “It is possible. It could take centuries for a piece to be tumbled and washed, getting smaller and smoother, down the stream from up in the mountains where he was working—all the way to us, here, now.”

  She pointed out others. Oliver watched and listened, enjoying the rolling, generous vowels as much as her eloquent eyes. She held up a smooth oval. It was the size of a quail’s egg, veined with grey. She said, “Bianca Oscura. From the quarry where we are going. After we eat.” She looked at Oliver matter-of-factly. “And after we eat maybe we take a little rest if you want.”

  One by one, she let the stones drop back into the stream.

  They ate on a warm ledge of rock beside the pool. Light slanted through the apse of chestnut trees. After their picnic, with her eyes on Oliver while she spoke, she rolled her head slowly from side to side. Arabescato. Bardiglio. Breccia. He was listening to a cascade of vowels. He was watching Anna shake out her hair.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  JULIAN MORROW’S MIND WAS IMPOSSIBLE. Or that, at least, was what his quarry managers and his workshop supervisors professed it to be. It wasn’t that Morrow didn’t pay attention to what they told him. It was that he paid attention in his own unusual way.

  He insisted on regular meetings, and he could be counted on to appear unexpectedly at a quarry or in a studio, usually with questions. Morrow had about him something of the amateur enthusiast—a curiosity about everything to do with marble that could be exhausting to anyone in his employ. It was how he had picked up his expertise so quickly. It was the same with his Italian. His acquired fluency inspired him to become more fluent still.

  If anything, he paid too much attention to what his staff and his employees and his servants had to say. But his attention was always embroidered with thoughts that had no obvious association to what was being discussed. Not obvious, anyway, to his managers and supervisors.

  The quarry boss was sitting in Morrow’s villa that Monday morning. His leather-covered notebook was open on the lap of his heavy trousers. His boots were cleaned and shined because he cleaned them and shined them every Sunday night in preparation for the weekly meeting with the owner.

  Morrow’s soaring optimism was subject, at times, to plummets of sadness. These came upon him rarely. But they rocked him. This was one such occasion.

  “The boy’s father?” he asked.

  “Yes,” the manager replied.

  “And two of his brothers?”

  “Yes. There were a few others at the table too. Not related.

  Or, at least, not related very closely. The villages are small places.”

  “This is sad,” Morrow said.

  The manager said nothing. This was the way it was in the quarries. It was always sad.

  IN HIS SPEECHES Morrow usually referred to his Tuscan villa as his “home away from home”—especially if his wife and mother-in-law were in the audience. They often were. And it amused him, privately, that they never guessed that the statement—always made with a courteous acknowledgment of their presence—was open to interpretation.

  The villa had an interesting history—so he thought. So he explained to his attentive audiences. For centuries the structure had been a convent, made of stone, freezing in bleak winters, home to
several dozen austerely hushed devotionals, a stop made by pilgrims and by other holy travellers. It was said that Michelangelo had stayed there. But the claim that Michelangelo had slept in rooms, or dined in homes, or signed contracts in the offices of marble agents and quarry owners in the area was not uncommon. The region specialized in such fables.

  Like the diminishing echoes of their vespers, the nuns faded to a last rough coffin and a final plain white marble cross. The building fell into disrepair and was eventually purchased by Julian Morrow. He tore down its two wings, saving the statuary and the worn marble of the floors and the bevelled panelling of the veined, stone walls for his own use. He built a pool at the spot where the ground was always sodden anyway. After considerable renovation, Morrow made the remaining central structure his home. It was his favourite office.

  THE QUARRY MANAGER had already gone over the first item on his agenda. He’d given his report to Morrow of the accident that had occurred two days before.

  Morrow continued to stand, as he usually stood throughout their weekly meeting. His hands were clasped behind his back. He was turned away, looking from the window of his villa.

  The manager was relieved that Morrow did not appear to spend any more time on the accident. There was nothing to be done anyway. There never was. There were other items on the agenda. The manager consulted his own childlike scrawl.

  There was a new kind of saw to be considered.

  There were some repairs that needed to be made to the lizzatura.

  Morrow was thinking the Bartons’ grounds would be a very fine commission—although he already knew from his conversations with Grace that developing the plans would not be a fast process. He could see that she had a good eye. He could also see that she had an eye for detail. And details were what took up time. And money. And more time. And more money.

  It would not happen quickly. He reminded himself that the grounds for the recently completed Morris-Jones estate in Suffolk had been almost ten years in the planning. So he would not rush Grace Barton. Patience was key.

  The timekeeper, Morrow’s manager was saying to him, had requested that a small stove be installed in the quarry gatehouse as the winter months were very cold and the poor man suffered most terribly from hemorrhoids that were caused, he believed, by sitting on the cold stone bench from which he conducted his important duties.

  This was not a matter, Morrow felt, that required his undivided attention.

  He nodded vaguely at what his manager was saying. His thoughts on the Bartons had led him to thoughts of the luncheon speech he would be called upon to give in Swansea a few weeks hence. Some of the information he had provided to the Bartons might work in the talk. With some few small adjustments.

  Abruptly, Morrow wheeled around from the window. A new thought had just occurred to him. His Italian was surprisingly convincing.

  “Does the boy have talents?” he asked.

  “The boy?” The quarry manager looked up from his notepad.

  “The boy you spoke of. The water boy.”

  “Oh,” the manager said. It had been almost fifteen minutes since he had reported to Julian Morrow the details of the quarry accident. The manager thought they were well into other matters. “Talents?”

  “Yes. Talents.”

  Morrow had a reputation for asking things that were unexpected. But for once this was a question to which the manager happened to have an answer. He knew the family. He had relatives of his own in Castello.

  “They say he has a knack for modelling clay.”

  “Does he?” said Morrow.

  “Before he started in the quarries, he made some pennies doing little clay portraits for birthdays and confirmations.”

  “Did he indeed?”

  Then Morrow seemed to slip for a few moments into one of his private avenues of thought.

  “Make sure the widow is provided for,” Morrow said. He looked at the manager, whom he knew and admired as a thrifty man. So he smiled when he said, “A little more generously than you might think appropriate.”

  The manager nodded and made a note of this.

  “And have the boy sent to me. I don’t like the idea of his going back to work in the quarries. It is too much to expect him to return.”

  The manager began to point out that accidents were facts of life in the quarries. But Morrow cut him off.

  “We have no shortage of workers in the quarries. If anything, we have too many. If the boy is a smart lad, we can find him a good apprenticeship in one of our studios in town.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  WHEN I RETURNED TO ITALY from my few days in Cathcart in June 2009, I told my mother of the conversations I had had with my father. Anna rolled a cigarette and listened. We were sitting at her outdoor table. But when, finally, she decided to speak, she remained typically oblique. She said, “I remember he asked me once what it was that made Michelangelo so great. So I showed him. All summer, I showed him.”

  That was how she started talking about him. Her recollections came slowly at first. But eventually, I could hardly get her to stop.

  For forty years she had never mentioned his name. She had never alluded to his existence in any way more specific than the frown and the shrug that had, all my life, been her response to my curiosity about my lineage. She had always been frank about the reason for this. She would purse her lips and shrug her shoulders. “My life was a little wild,” she would say. “That’s just the way it was in those days.”

  I’d discovered my father by accident. I was still smarting from Pier-Giorgio’s rejection of “Michelangelo’s Mountains.” And in order to get my mind off Pier-Giorgio’s smug face and on to something else, I embarked on one of my occasional and not ever effective campaigns to get my mother organized in some way for the poor accountant who suffered through her tax forms. It was during this futile exercise that I came across my father’s letters at the bottom of a cardboard box on a shelf in my mother’s bedroom. The letters were under a flap on the bottom of the box. I happened to notice a corner of blue airmail stationery.

  By then, I’d pretty much given up. Or it may have been that my curiosity was satisfied sufficiently by the on-and-off presence of a man in my mother’s life who acted a bit like a father to me when I was a girl. He might even have been my father—a possibility that my mother’s casual approach to my interest in my own conception never quite confirmed and never quite denied.

  In Pietrabella there were sculptors who appeared from Holland, from America, from Germany, from Britain, from Japan, and who stayed for a few weeks, or perhaps for a few months, and who never returned. Others became fixtures, either staying for good or returning regularly. Pietr Henk was such a fixture.

  Once or twice a year, Pietr drove down from Holland. He had not become a sculptor by profession. Few of the stranieri did. But even after he began working at the commercial art firm outside of Rotterdam, he continued to carve stone as something more than a hobby and less than an occupation. He lived behind a high, thick hedge of rhododendron in an old, leafy suburb—a grassy, overgrown double-lot of peach and chestnut trees that was populated with his chickens, his rooster, and his marble sculpture. But he continued to drive to Italy a few times a year to select the stone he needed and to take a workbench for a few weeks in one of the marble workshops in the town.

  His cars steadily improved over the years. But the Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and the Jerry Jeff Walker he listened to en route never changed. Nor did he—not very much. He never ceased being kind and tall and blond. He never gained very much weight as he grew older. He never stopped smoking Marlboros. And even after he married, he continued to stay with Anna when he came for his visits. Whether his wife was aware of this, or suspected it, was not something anyone in Pietrabella knew for sure, despite many years of communal speculation on the subject.

  He was not someone whose presence in Pietrabella vanished behind him when he left town. He’d been coming for years. His Italian was more than passable.

&
nbsp; There were restaurants he favoured. There was a spot at the counter at the Café David where he always stood for his coffee early in the morning when he was on his way to work. He was always at the cinema on the square on Saturday nights for the usually old, usually American movies. He was often accompanied by Anna. They made a handsome couple.

  Anna loved the way angled light caught things in black and white: a trench coat, a .38 on a kitchen table, Veronica Lake’s hair. She thought this is what America looked like.

  Pietr took me to the gelateria or to the beach from time to time when I was little. He sent me birthday cards.

  His visits became less frequent as he got older. I hadn’t seen him for several years when the news came that he was ill. And the news, from the beginning, was not hopeful. I wrote to him, in care of his office address. I asked if, please, he would put my mind to rest? Pietr agreed to the blood test.

  My mother was right. She had been a little wild in her day.

  “YOU WERE NEVER MENTIONED,” I said to Oliver on my first day in Cathcart. “I asked a lot of people. I am quite a thorough researcher.”

  “I can see that you are.”

  “But your name never came up.”

  Immediately, I realized that this would have to be hurtful. “Mi dispiace.”

  Oliver shrugged. The fountain splashed gently into the black, unlit water of the old pool.

  “The invisible man.”

  “I would not have found you had I not found the letters.”

  Letters that were never answered, Oliver was quick to point out. Not one. He’d been given no hint about me. He wanted to make this clear.

  It was not hurtful to him so much as strange that a time he remembered so vividly had disappeared so completely. His four months in Italy—four months he had visited and revisited all his life in his memory—had been forgotten by everyone with whom he’d shared them.