The Figures of Beauty (21 page)

“Oh, Archie. It said no such thing. It was just a door.”

“And there they were,” Archie would continue. “A dozen or so of them. In this dark, airless room. In those old, straight-backed wicker wheelchairs …”

“Honestly, Archie …”

“Sitting there. Just sitting there.”

She called them her boys. They were the soldiers, airmen, and sailors in the burn ward that had been established in a wing of the Cathcart General: young men whose war stories ended with being trapped by mined tanks, caught by plane wrecks, captured by explosion, encircled by flaming fuel.

She went back to visit them a few days later. Then she went back again. Soon it was part of what she did, every day. “Oh, I
just try to cheer them up” was her description of a task that was often impossible.

She helped them write letters to their families. She brought them treats of butter tarts and sodas. She read them stories. She comforted them when, as they sometimes did, they cried.

And then she invited them to her house on Hillside Avenue. For a luncheon.

The guests had all been instructed on what to expect. There were always a few young women there from the Cathcart Teachers’ College because Mrs. Hughson thought that pretty girls were probably what the boys worried about most.

The girls had been told not to stare.

They passed sandwiches. They chatted. And they laughed with young men who had probably thought they’d never laugh with pretty girls again. Someone played the piano. And they sang the songs that everybody knew in those days.

It was after two or three such luncheons that Mrs. Hughson had what she called their graduation. One by one, she took the young men out to a restaurant.

“Out into public, you see,” Mr. Hughson would explain to his poolside visitors. “The one thing that they didn’t think they could do. Out to the tea room of the Royal Cathcart Hotel.”

The staff knew her, and the waitresses were kind. But always there was someone—a girl at a nearby table, a new busboy, a child out for a treat with a grandmother—who would point. Or laugh.

At a bulging eye. At a smooth flank of skin where half a face should have been. At a twisted reconstruction of jaw and nose. At a lipless mouth. At a wispy island of hair.

And when a little girl gasped, or a child pointed, or a busboy tried to hide a snicker, the young man who had already been so brave—brave enough to have gone to war when he was
scarcely older than a boy—would feel something on his knee. It was a firm, small hand, under the tablecloth.

“Be brave,” Winifred Hughson would say. “Be brave, and you’ll be just fine.”

Her decline was long and slow and awful. She was in and out of the hospital more than a dozen times. It was the better part of a decade before she finally died.

I remember the green glow of the nursing station, the untouched dinner trays, the faint, persistent smell of urine. Archie and I took turns reading Dickens to her. And it was there, in that hospital room, that I found myself reading about what I had left behind eight years before. I was reading to pale, exhausted Winifred Hughson about the greenest of green hills, the bluest of blue skies. She hardly moved. She wore woollen socks on her icy, grey feet.

“That’s where you were,” she said weakly. “In Italy. That summer you went away.”

“Nearby,” I said.

“ ‘The quarries …’ Dickens wrote, ‘are so many openings, high up in the hills, on either side of these passes, where they blast and excavate for marble: which may turn out good or bad: may make a man’s fortune very quickly, or ruin him by the great expense of working what is worth nothing. Some of these caves were opened by the ancient Romans, and remain as they left them to this hour.’ ”

“Carrara,” she said with a bit of a smile—by way of showing me that she was still on the ball.

“Yes,” I said, “that’s right. Not far from Carrara.” And I continued reading.

Your mother thought that objects—actual physical objects—were one of the few things we have that eternity doesn’t. As she often pointed out, light is useless without them. Her appreciation of objects in space—whether of a tree, or a body, or a piece of stone—was how she said she knew she was alive.

It was one of the lessons she felt was necessary to teach. She found me shockingly unadventurous. “Do you know,” she asked me once, “that making love comes in three dimensions?”

And that’s why I don’t like forgetting objects. Even losing a car for a while in a parking lot upsets me unreasonably. Forgetting about things, so Anna used to say, is what happens when we die.

When I was starting out at
The Chronicle
, curricula vitae were not examined with quite the rigour that I’m sure they are today. Somehow, the vague notion that I was someone who had spent a lot of time in one place in Italy became the generally held belief that I had spent years travelling in Europe. People just imagined that I was an art historian, or a culture critic, or an expert on Renaissance sculpture by training. Somehow that became my reputation.

I’ve read a lot, of course. Over the years. I’ve always had a weakness for expensive art books. But more than self-education, I credit my brief time in Italy for any ability I have to discern what beauty is—and not only because of the great works of art I saw on day trips to Florence and on my one visit with Anna to Rome. Just as importantly, Anna showed me the staggering beauty of an old wall; a stone lintel; terra-cotta pots on deep sills; a lion’s head fountain, green with age, in the stone wall at the end of an ordinary, narrow, laundry-hung street.

These were everyday things in Pietrabella—just as the dusty red-maples that surround the pool are everyday things in Cathcart. These were the icons of Anna’s religion. They were
how she worshipped. And as I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to pay great attention to things.

That’s the beauty that I’ll miss—the limestone bluffs of Hillside; the sun and shadow on the fountain at the deep end of an old swimming pool; a neighbour’s roof, straight and grey as a fact in the rain. It’s form that I’ll be sorry to leave behind. More sorry than I’ll be about leaving a lot of the people I know, to be honest.

When it is my turn to say goodbye to a too-brightly-lit hospital room, I will mourn the loss of the most ordinary piece of rock—something rough and heavy that could be picked up from a creek bed and held and looked at, its weight cradled, its dull facets turned against the sky as if it were a jewel. Something everyday. Something that catches the light. The beauty of shape is what the dead lose: hedges and maple trees, lawn chairs and pool vacuums, and the green crossbar of an old garden swing where the Hughsons used to read Dickens to one another until the evening grew too dark.

It will be nice to meet my grandchildren. This sounds a little restrained, I know—the kind of muted emotional understatement that drove your mother crazy. But the fact is, I do think it would be nice to meet my grandchildren. I hope it might be more than nice. I worry that it might be less—through no fault of your two handsome young sons, of course.

That was what I was thinking as I stood outside the security gate at the Toronto airport, trying to make some sense of the numbers on the parking ticket I held in my hand.

And that was when your figure re-emerged. That was when you were suddenly turning back.

I could see the torque of your compact size, the artful
disarray of your orange hair, the drape of a shawl around your shoulders, the folds of your ankle boots. You had a leather travel bag over your right shoulder.

To be honest: I find seeing people off at an airport an awkward ritual. It has the irresolution of scenes in hospital rooms where goodbyes are said to those for whom goodbyes are already beside the point. Except for the occasional sheepish wave, the travellers don’t look back very much at the people who are wishing them bon voyage. Their attention is elsewhere: lineups, laptops, change in pockets.

I was more dressed up than anyone else outside the security area. Which isn’t saying much. I’d felt the occasion demanded some formality. I was a father seeing off his daughter. Mine was the only tie in sight. I was surrounded by track suits and nylon basketball shorts.

The guard who had checked your passport and boarding pass was wearing heavy, black-framed sunglasses. This gave the impression that your papers had been scrutinized by a military junta—a form of dictatorship that your mother had probably warned you to expect in the most remote corners of the North American continent.

In fact, the guard did move toward stopping you from stepping back out of Security. But even with his heavy sunglasses, even with epaulettes on his short-sleeved blue shirt, he was not much of a dictator. There was something in the set of your expression that made him realize you were not going to be interrupted.

You were moving as quickly as you could. You were pulling the floral silk shawl over your shoulder. Your face was round, but its broad simplicity was balanced with the fine lines of your features. Your expression was very precise: it was, in the cast of
its determination, the face of a woman who does not like to ask for anything but is about to ask for something now.

You were bumping through hand luggage and slipping between parting shoulders.
“Permesso,”
you were saying. “
Mi
scusi.”

The light was so sharp and modern it seemed white.

You looked up, directly into my face. “Write me,” you said. “Please. You owe me that. You never told me any stories.”

People moved around us while we clung to one another much longer than either of us expected. I was thankful for the handkerchief I’d tucked, as a jaunty accessory, in the breast pocket of my blazer.

The guard let you sidle your way back through Security. You gave a last little wave. Then your figure disappeared …

T
HE
A
POLLO
B
ELVEDERE
WAS CARVED
, probably from Carrara stone, about a century after the birth of Christ. It had been lost for many hundreds of years when it was rediscovered during an excavation in Rome in the late fifteenth century.

Its heroic spirit was admired, as was the grace of the left-turning head and the exquisite beauty of the form. The young man’s left heel is raised as he steps forward, and because marble is so dense and so heavy, the technical challenge of stabilizing such massive weight had to be overcome with a stone carver’s structural standby. A tree trunk supports the figure’s right leg. The
Apollo Belvedere
was the most celebrated piece of carving in the western world. It’s probably fair to say that it remained so until 1504.

That was the year Michelangelo climbed down for the last time from the rough wooden planks he’d had built around a block of marble in a courtyard in Florence. He was covered in white dust.

David
was carved from an eighteen-foot-high block of Carrara stone that had already been started by a sculptor named Simone da Fiesole. It was felt by many Florentine artists—and, presumably, by Simone himself, who had abandoned his faltering beginning—that the roughing-out had been badly botched and the block left unworkable. It sat untouched for years.

But Michelangelo saw a figure in the stone that nobody else had imagined. What he had in mind would fit—just. There was almost nothing in the dimensions of the block to spare. There was no room for a mistake.

He measured. He drew. He made a wax model. He built scaffolding around the stone. And then, in the courtyard of the Office of Works of Santa Maria del Fiore, in Florence, he set to work.

Leonardo da Vinci was making fun of Michelangelo when he compared the sedate approach of a painter to the sweaty exertions of a sculptor. Leonardo and Michelangelo didn’t like one another very much. But Leonardo’s description is as good a way as any of picturing Michelangelo in the courtyard of Santa Maria del Fiore.

“The sculptor in creating his work does so by the strength of his arm by which he consumes the marble, or other obdurate material in which his subject is enclosed: and this is done by most mechanical exercise, often accompanied by great sweat which mixes with the marble dust and forms a kind of mud daubed all over his face.”

Michelangelo’s work in the courtyard went on. And on. It seemed sometimes as if it would never end. But finally it was done.

He made his way slowly down the ladder. The scaffolding would be gone the following day. Then people would see.

But Michelangelo did not possess an optimistic nature. It
was his view that there were not many artists to whom optimism very naturally accrued. If his experience was anything to go by.

Five years earlier, he had finished the first of his great
Pietàs
. It had taken longer than he thought it would. Everything did.

It is carved from Carrara marble in a strong, triangular form, and its base is established by the highly polished folds of the mother’s garments. The sumptuously draped skirt is unrealistically full, but it is the apparent age of Mary that has been the subject of the most literal criticism. Michelangelo’s Mary appears far too young to be the mother of the dead Christ.

This physical improbability has been traditionally explained by the notion that it is Mary’s virginity that has preserved her so miraculously. Needless to say, this was not a theory to which my mother subscribed.

She thought that Michelangelo was creating the way a god creates. She thought Michelangelo was ignoring the irritating constraints of time. She thought he had carved two ideas at once. My mother insisted that the young Mary is looking down at what is both unseen and seen. Invisible to us, her baby is asleep in her lap. Visible, her grown son is sprawled in her arms. “That’s how time works,” my mother said.

As she pointed out, it was an idea familiar to Michelangelo. The sculptor who captured the sensual splendour of youth more completely than any other—and never more exquisitely than in his
David
—once wrote: “my passion only knows how to carve death: this is my skill’s poor force.”

Anna liked to picture Michelangelo coming down the ladder from the rough wooden scaffolding in the courtyard of Santa Maria del Fiore that evening. Nobody would have been around. The light would have been failing. He was hungry. Probably, he was wondering how long it would take before some idiot complained about the size of the hands.