The Figures of Beauty (18 page)

On one of his journeys along the region’s hillside trails, Michelangelo conceived of the idea of carving a giant into a craggy face of bald stone. This had great appeal to him. It would be enormous, for one thing. For another, carving directly into the bluff meant there would be no wagon contractor, no barge captain, and no rogue of a stone agent involved.

Michelangelo’s letters to Rome hardly stopped. “I think I have been gulled,” he wrote in April 1518. “And it’s the same with everything. I curse a thousand times the day and the hour I left Carrara!”

Michelangelo oversaw every aspect of quarrying, from choosing the face to be cut, to supervising the cutting itself, the sledding of the blocks down the mountainside, and the loading onto ox-drawn carts. He hired barges. He accompanied the blocks to the coast—an arduous and dangerous journey.

In Pietrabella’s main square, Oliver stepped away from his table and gave a brief, ordinary wave to Claudio Morello, the café owner. Claudio was banging away, as usual, at the espresso machine.

Anna liked the Café David. She was a fixture there. Claudio enjoyed her. Their political differences could not have been more
extreme. Given her history, it was hard to imagine that a friendship between them could be possible. But it was. Their disagreements were swept away by their major point of agreement. They were both impatient with any artist who did not insist on comparison with the greatest. It was Claudio Morello, bar owner and fascist, who most outspokenly shared Anna’s belief in the uncompromising importance of beauty.

At the Café David, Anna tended to become the centre of the tables full of foreign sculptors. Her English, her knowledge of all things local, and her looks meant that she never sat at a table by herself for very long.

So Claudio tended to undercharge her. The
stranieri
wanted to drink grappa with her. And talk about Brancusi with her. And ask her where to buy the best olive oil, the best pancetta, the best claw chisels and fine rasps. And late at night, not long before Claudio presented them with the sobering reality of their bar bill, they wanted Anna to sing “Bella Ciao.” It was a song of the partisans, from the war.

Oliver liked to go into town with Anna in the evenings. They got dressed up, a little. Which is to say, Anna got out of her cut-off jeans and construction boots, her T-shirt and bandana. She showered, or sometimes, when it was very hot, washed herself with the cold water from the old hand pump at the end of the garden.

Oliver never knew anyone who looked better in a man’s white shirt and a pair of blue jeans. In the Café David, he sat back, slightly removed from the centre of the pulled-together tables. The wine and the grappa were ordered and reordered. He watched Anna. She was at the centre of everything. And when she was laughing and clapping her hands it was the rhythm of Anna’s muscular arms and shoulders and the movement of her shining hair that became the beat of everyone’s singing.

O partigiano portami via / O bella ciao, bella ciao …
It was the song of a partisan fighter leaving his beloved. It was the song of all young men off to war.

Bella ciao ciao ciao!

Anna enjoyed these gatherings. But Oliver liked their departures from the bar best. Then the cool nights tumbled down to the square from the mountains. The air smelled of damp stone as they started their way up from Via Maddalena to the olive groves, to the hillside path that led to Anna’s farmhouse. There were fireflies once they got beyond the town wall. “We are walking through what Michelangelo would have known,” Oliver said. “It’s like we go back in time.”

Michelangelo walked the mountains, surveyed the quarries, tested small pieces, searched for breaks, studied veins. He listened to the stone, rapping it with a hammer to hear either the clank of imperfection or the clarity of a faultless ring. Marble can hide surprises—accessory minerals, or faults, or pockets that are not visible. And as Michelangelo studied the stone, he studied the quarry workers. His gaze returned to them again and again.

They lifted, they pulled, they heaved, they strained. He watched their taut muscles and their tanned skin and the way the sweat ran down the crevasses of their necks. He watched their twisting, turning, bending bodies accommodate themselves to the demands of their work. They were usually young. But they had about them something even more irresistible than their youth: they had the camaraderie of young men joining together closely in dangerous work. They were soldiers of sorts.

Nobody did male figures like he did. Vasari says that at the Santa Maria Novella job-site in Florence, the young Michelangelo “started to draw the scaffolding and trestles and various implements and materials, as well as some of the young men who were busy there.”

From the café Oliver crossed the square and disappeared under the rooks’ nests in the portal of the town’s old wall. He’d always liked the walk from Pietrabella.

He passed the train station where, earlier, he had bought his ticket for Paris. He passed a restaurant where he liked the bean soup. He passed a little hardware store where he bought some string once. He passed the doorways of a few vegetable stores he had come to know. He passed a good place to buy wine and olive oil that Anna had showed him. He crossed an intersection on the Aurelia. He took all this in. He was aware that these places were now no longer where he was. They were what he was leaving.

It was never an argument. It was never even much of a discussion. It was more like a running joke that Anna had with him, one that took the place of argument or discussion. But the subject never changed. “You are being pointed in a whole new direction,” Anna said one afternoon in their bedroom. “By fate. By destiny.” She always closed the shutters on the daytime heat. They could hear the landlord’s tractor in a distant patch of sun. Drying hay was on what breeze there was. “You are being shown your true path.” She tried, without success, not to laugh at herself. “Why can’t you see that, you
stupido
?”

He continued south on the shoulder of the road, protected by the plane trees from the traffic: cars and scooters and rumbling lorries. He walked beside a pale wall that, twenty-three years after the war, still bore pockmarks of the Allied advance and the German retreat from the Gothic Line. “It was at this unhappy site,” a plaque explained (and that Oliver’s bad Italian could just work out), “that five German soldiers were ambushed, resulting in the terrible retribution by Nazi forces and the tragic events of Castello on August 12, 1944.”

Beyond the cemetery, Oliver was in the countryside.

Oliver had no point of comparison, really. He was not greatly experienced in love. Which is to say, until he met Anna, he was not experienced at all.

He once said to Anna that the smell of her hair was what he imagined a forest would be like if he woke in its shadows after a midsummer nap.

She laughed and said, “You’re crazy.”

And he kissed the back of her neck and said, “Oh, you’ve got that right.”

So it wasn’t that Oliver didn’t know he was in love. What he didn’t know (but what any lazy, ancient god could have told him) was that he would never be so happy and so in love again.

The light was a combination of haze and precision. The cutout hills. The veins of smoke from the little fires at the edge of olive groves.

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.”

M
ICHELANGELO 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.

T
HE 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 asked 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.