The Stone Carvers

by Jane Urquhart

  Though born in Canada, Giorgio moved easily through the throng of Italian carvers at the work site, recognizing in them certain tribal similarities to the crowded community of his childhood and understanding the language his parents had spoken in their home. And the men themselves welcomed him as a lost brother, inviting him to camp secretly on the floor of one of the huts until he could be hired on and saving scraps from the mess hall so that he wouldn’t starve while he was waiting. They were all eager for information about the New World—some had plans to emigrate—and they questioned him constantly. Was it unbearably cold? Were there many large sculptural commissions? Marble quarries? Giorgio hadn’t the heart to tell them that, in Canada, most of the carving took place in humble shacks near the graveyard. And now even that employment was vanishing along with the money that supported it. Instead he gave the particulars of his parents’ address to anyone claiming they wanted to go to Canada, that and the whereabouts of the parish church.

  During the day he walked around the partly constructed monument, surveying it from every possible angle, then climbing the stairs to the top of the massive base, where he looked out again over the strangely innocent countryside. He then turned to examine the few completed allegorical figures. A downcast middle-aged man and woman were placed at either end of the east side of the base—Canada’s parents grieving for lost sons—and some other figures were in various stages of completion at the bottom of the two pylons. Giorgio was impressed by the enormity of the work, by the larger-than-life brooding presence of the figures, and by the massive architectural scale of the base and the pylons. Sometime soon, he was told, the man Allward would arrive and with him would be the largest sculpture of all: a female pleurante who would gaze down at the symbolic tomb that would be completed when the two carvers finished the marble cloth with which it was to be draped.

  Giorgio made friends with the carvers who were working on a grouping of Defenders, whose stern marble countenances and firmly crossed arms he found almost comical. The men told Giorgio about the pale limestone that contained just enough ochre to make it seem warm rather than cool, about its long journey on the sea and over mountains to this place. Aphrodisa, they told him, was the name of this stone, like Aphrodite, they said, with her honey hair, her cream-coloured skin.

  Giorgio looked at the figure they were carving, a powerful young man. The ribs and muscles of one-half of his torso were like the ploughed furrows of a field, the other half remained rough and primitive, the traces of the primary, harsh chisel work still explicit.

  The older carver handed the young Canadian a tool. “You make an ear for us,” he said, offering this command as a challenge—a challenge to the New World.

  “It’s the wrong chisel,” said Giorgio, “and I’ll need more than one. A drill also, and rasps.” He was remembering the ears of angels, his time in the shop in Hamilton. Juliani had always referred to the tombs with angels as sepulchral monuments, elevating them above the common tombstone. Now Giorgio was being asked to add something to the largest sepulchral monument of all.

  The second carver opened his tool box. “Use anything you want,” he said.

  Ever since he was a boy Giorgio had loved freeing the shell shape of an ear from the stone. What, he had always wondered, did angels listen to? It was, in many ways, the most delicate operation in the sculpting of a human body, more so even than the hand, though admittedly not as expressive. He looked for a long time at the location of the eye, the angle of the neck, and the shape of the skull. Then he climbed the ladder that rested against the figure’s shoulder and began by using a small drill while his companions worked opposite him, smoothing the bent arm that, with its twin, folded across the chest. By the time the shadow of the pylon touched the bottom rung of the ladder, Giorgio was using a small rasp on the outermost fold of the ear, that part which to his mind most resembled a curling leaf. The other two carvers were now watching and praising him. “Bellissimo,” they said and more than once, “Bravo.” Then, suddenly, they were silent.

  They had heard the sound of city shoes on the stone floor of the monument. Although the footsteps did not make an echo, there was the impression of an echo, and something in the rhythm of the sound made one think of a sentence, a declaration. Even in his concentration, even with the rasp his primary concern, Giorgio registered the approach of one who was not wearing the customary gum-soled workboots, and he looked down from his ladder into the face of a tall, middle-aged man with thick eyebrows and a broad forehead. He was dressed in the kind of dark woollen overcoat that Giorgio remembered the rich men who owned Ontario factories wearing on their tours of inspection.

  “Do I know you?” the man asked. “Chi siete?”

  “I am Giorgio Vigamonti. You cannot know me. I have just come from Canada.”

  “From Canada?” the man was surprised. “All that distance. Obviously I have not hired you.”

  This was Walter Allward then. Giorgio was silent. He carefully placed the rasp beside the other tools he had lined up on the upper platform of the ladder.

  “Why did you come? I expect to know absolutely everyone on my monument. And all of my carvers are Italian.”

  “I am Italian,” said Giorgio, “but from Canada. I fought in this war. I fought with the men you are honouring here.” He did not say that he had come because there was no longer any work for him in the country he had left behind.

  Allward turned to the carvers, who had removed their white caps. “And what do you think of this Canadian? Why have you let him work on your man here?”

  “He came from the New World,” the older carver said, “and we wanted to see,” he cleared his throat nervously, “we wanted to see what he could do.”

  “And,” Allward glanced up in the direction of Giorgio, “and what can he do?”

  “He can carve, sir,” the younger man blurted out. “Look at the ear. You see, he can carve.”

  There was a community of workers around the memorial: English stonecutters, Italian carvers, and French labourers all going about their business. Giorgio liked this, was comfortable in the midst of activity. He was less at ease when he found himself alone with one other person in a closed space, for he believed those were the times when terrifying and secret extremes of love or violence could occur. But not here, not with this easy, understood collaboration, this fluidity of contact, and this wonderfully open space. The choreography that was unfolding around a project of this scale excited and moved him, every cell in his body wanted to participate.

  Allward found Giorgio the next day sharing lunch with the two men who had given him the opportunity to carve the ear. “Hey, Canada,” he called from the bottom of the steps. “Come with me.”

  “So it’s Vigamonti,” the master sculptor said to Giorgio as they walked toward the overseer’s hut. “Vigamonti,” he repeated. “So … did you know, Vigamonti, that the French call carvers like you and your friends over there ‘praticiens.’“

  Giorgio did not. He kept his head down, sheltered from the wind. The sun that had given such explosive life to the blossoms had abruptly disappeared, and spring was frozen in its tracks by a cold front from the north.

  “I believe it is not necessarily a term of endearment. It means no creative thinking, no artistic designing. Does this matter to you?”

  Not knowing what to say, Giorgio shrugged.

  “Your Italian friends over there have been trained since birth not to consider anything but skill … nothing at all but the perfection of skill. How about you, have you been trained to do that?”

  Giorgio did not think that he had but maybe so. “I was apprenticed to an Italian gravestone maker,” he said. “Most of the monuments were very similar, but once in a while we suggested something if the client didn’t know what they wanted …”

  “You will suggest nothing here,” said Allward. “You will simply carry out instructions. What was your rank in the war?”

  “I was a private at the beginning. Toward the end I was promoted to corpo
ral.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Sir?” Giorgio noticed that Allward’s grey hair was standing upright in the wind, making him appear to be even taller than he was.

  “Why were you promoted?”

  Giorgio thought for a moment, then he spoke. “They said I was being promoted because I had served well, or something like that. But I think,” he looked northward, toward Belgium, squinting, “I think I was made a corporal because I was neither missing nor dead, and almost everyone else in my battalion was. So I suppose I was promoted for staying alive.”

  “No heroic acts then?”

  “No.” Giorgio was looking at the familiar mud at his feet.

  “Good. There will be no heroics here either, no spontaneous bursts of artistic licence. I’ve already done all the creative work.”

  “So you are the general and we are the troops.”

  “Something like that.” It had begun to rain and drops of water were running like sweat down Allward’s forehead.

  “I came here to carve words. I’m especially good at that, at letter carving.”

  “We’ll see about that when the time comes.” Allward bent down and picked up a piece of a military belt from the soil at his feet. “When we first started working here, the whole vicinity still stank of death.”

  “I remember that. I remember that, during the war, even the few flowers we saw smelled of decay, like they were rotting.”

  Allward held open the door to the hut. “Ah yes,” he said, “during the war they would have, I suppose.”

  When they were inside, Captain Simson, the short, plump overseer of the project, pushed a one-page contract across his desk for Giorgio to sign. “Welcome aboard,” he mumbled. “Are you afraid of heights?”

  Giorgio had never climbed a structure this tall so really he didn’t know, but he answered in the negative.

  “Tomorrow we’ll be starting the uppermost figures … if we can get the studio up there, that is. We’re going to begin to build it this afternoon … or we’re going to try.”

  Allward was looking out the window at the memorial. He turned to Giorgio. “You know what I like best about all that stone?”

  “I know,” said Simson, who had heard it all before.

  “What I like best about all that stone, Vigamonti, is that there is nothing putrid about it.” Allward walked out the door, repeating the words “so clean, so clean” to himself.

  And so it followed that Giorgio came to work in what the Italians soon called the studio nel cielo, the studio in the sky. With his lunch strapped to his belt, he climbed the rope ladders and scaffolding each morning to the precarious elevated hut, full of wonder that his employment was actually to take place in the room that was part swing and part tree house. As he worked he sometimes sang, “When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.” When asked which opera the tune came from, he eventually sang and then translated into Italian the whole nursery song for the two other carvers in the studio, who were horrified by this English verse they believed must be about infanticide. Giorgio was pestered for the rest of the story: Who put the cradle up in the tree? Was the mother dead? Perhaps the child was the result of some passionate and forbidden union, or a princeling whose existence would upset the order of royal succession? A complete narrative developed in full view of the silent plaster models, while the men busied themselves preparing the work space that would enable them to transform these into stone.

  One of the men was a genius with the pantograph, a kind of pointing machine that combined with Allward’s precise calculations would permit the carvers to accurately tease the enlarged female figures of Peace, Knowledge, Justice, and Truth first in rough and later in detailed form from the stone pylon.

  Giorgio worked on the sensuous stone body of Peace, who, with her back curved and her face lifted, held a laurel branch up toward the sky at the very pinnacle of the monument. He had to resurrect everything he had learned about the female body from carving angels—and what he had remembered from hasty encounters with women during the war. This was a handsome, strong, mature woman—nothing girlish here—and as he worked he realized he was beginning to fall in love with her, her slightly opened mouth suggesting an inhalation of breath, and her attitude, almost that of a swoon, which implied that she, herself, had made the enormous effort required to climb to the summit of the pylon, where she would stand forever locked in the moment of victorious arrival.

  The wind tore across the ridge some days, shaking the studio and causing the men to stagger like drunks under glass skylights drenched with rain. On other days there was golden light, a view across cultivated fields to villages still only half reconstructed after the annihilation of a war now more than fifteen years gone. The Italians knelt on scaffolding erected inside the studio and worked with such concentration it was as if they were engaged in the act of worshipping the human body.

  Although he couldn’t see them, it was possible at times for Giorgio to hear airborne larks singing on the other side of the thin studio wall. They provided a kind of thrilling accompaniment to the heartbreaking songs the Italians sang while Giorgio moved his chisel and then the palms of his hands over the stomach of the magnificent woman, the drapery that covered her slightly bent leg, or while he ran his fingers across the bones of her cool hand.

  When they boarded the ship in Montreal in mid-November, Klara was covered by a coat, a vest, trousers, and a cap, having decided to change gender once she left Ontario behind. She had walked to the end of a pier on the St. Lawrence River with a bundle under her arm and, after looking guiltily around, had dropped her burden into the water. Moved by the sight of her familiar clothing opening like the petals of dark flowers in the river, she had wept a little at what suddenly seemed to her to be the death of her young womanhood, a discarded body, floating away toward the sea, the arms of the black silk blouse extended as if still anticipating a lover’s embrace.

  On the trip from Goderich through Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario and eventually down the St. Lawrence River, Klara had been amazed at the lovely composition of each lakeside town, the layout of which, she concluded, must have been determined in the nineteenth century with the notion of an approach by water in mind. Port Stanley, Cobourg, Kingston, and the large city of Toronto; she had heard of such places, of course, but until now they had seemed too remote to be interesting. Even Tilman, disliking boats as much as he claimed he did, enjoyed the passing scenery that was close enough to convince him that, if necessary, he could swim to shore, yet far enough away that he could imagine carving the hills and spires on one of his wooden boxes. He became quite animated as they approached the city of Montreal, telling Klara that he had been there once or twice during his time on the road and remembered its cosmopolitan flavour. He knew some good flophouses too, he explained, where they could lodge for a day or two until they sailed. But Klara, who wanted nothing to do with flophouses, eventually persuaded him to stay with her in a small, inexpensive hotel on the river.

  During the daylight hours Tilman disappeared into the streets and alleys of the city leaving Klara alone in their room watching the river traffic from the hotel window. As it neared time to board the ship on the day of their departure, an anxious Klara stepped out the door of the establishment to look for her brother. To her relief she soon spotted him under a nearby bridge, where he was standing around a fire with a group of vagrant men, all of whom had clearly recognized and accepted him for what he was, a temporarily reformed tramp. “The Frenchies are a more cultivated kind of ‘bo,” he had told Klara. “Better food, better wine, and more interested in looking around at where they are. They like nice landscape.”

  Not one of these hobos gave Klara a second glance as she beckoned to her brother, and she began, right then, to understand the freedom her costume gave her, a feeling of calm, similar to what she imagined men must experience walking unnoticed through the world.

  “Goddamned ocean,” Tilman complained when they were installed in the cabin they shared with
two other men. “Who’d have thought anything would ever get me back on the goddamned ocean.” Though they were still moving down the river he was already feeling dizzy.

  “We’re not even on the ocean,” Klara whispered, “and you were fine on the lakes. Surely you can’t feel sick yet.”

  “Don’t perch like that on my bed,” hissed Tilman. “Men never perch on beds.”

  The swell of the Atlantic in early November proved to be formidable. As soon as the river widened into sea, Tilman moaned, turned his face to the wall, and refused to rise from his bunk. Klara, however, was awestruck and exhilarated by the heaving expanse of water and by being buffeted by gusts and spray. She spent much of her time on deck, leaning on the rail with the wind in her face and her hand on her cap for fear of it blowing away and revealing her wealth of hair. Before the journey was over she would have to cut it, as Tilman kept insisting she should. But for the moment there was still some vanity left in her. As for undressing at night, she accomplished this by squirming under the sheets that covered her bunk. “My kid brother,” Tilman had explained to the other men, “is bashful. Always had his own room. Mama’s boy.”

  After ten days at sea, Klara saw the coast of France early in the morning through the porthole of the cabin where she and Tilman slept, and as if until that moment she had not believed she would set foot on that soil, she finally made the decision to cut her hair. With scissors in hand she made her way to the W.C., locked herself in one of the cubicles, and, wincing, began to slice off hunk after hunk, filling her trouser and jacket pockets with skeins of golden hair threaded here and there with silver. When she was finished she rubbed her head and was surprised to find the beginnings of the curls that, until now, had been straightened by the weight of her long mane. Then she placed the hat on her head and walked out to the deck. At this hour, it was not long before she found a private spot. Using both hands she tossed her shorn hair into the wind, and though some of it blew back onto the deck, most was swept away from her so quickly it was as if the elements were hungry, eager to help her assume her new role. As the ship moved forward, Klara did not see one lock enter the water. But for weeks afterwards she was still removing the remaining golden strands from her pockets and sleeves.