The Figures of Beauty (22 page)

T
HE GOATHERD CAME RUNNING
on feet like little hoofs.

In one of the houses in the narrow cobbled street, a baby was sick with colic.

Italo Cavatore was stumbling in his awkward haste. As he ran, he swerved abruptly left, abruptly right, as if in pursuit of his lost balance.

The young mother could not stop her daughter’s crying.

Italo’s warning was already ahead of him, racing through the street. It sped across the laundry lines. It jumped from window to window in the little hillside town of Castello. It was as if the word he was shouting over and over had become a swarm of fears. They flew over the wide stone sills and through the dark interiors of the rough, unadorned houses.

He pounded on the doors with the flat of his hands. “
Tedeschi
,” he called out in his strained, shrill voice.
“Tedeschi.”
And then he ran, as best he could, to the next house. And the next.

The day had been strange, its stillness interrupted by sudden eddies of wind. The artillery had seemed far-off and to the north, but then closer, to the east and the south. And then quiet.

The young mother heard the goatherd getting closer. She was in her kitchen, trying to soothe her daughter.

Except for the goatherd and a few old grandfathers, the men of the village were gone. They knew every trail in the mountains and hills.
“Bella ciao”
the partisans sang.
“Bella ciao, ciao, ciao.”
She thought her young husband very handsome.

Now the dust could be seen from the town wall. It drifted below, through the olive groves. It was a cloud, raised by tires and treads and boots coming up the switchback.

The goatherd was running as fast as he could. But he was clumsy and stiff on his little feet. When he was young the other children made fun of him by walking on their heels to imitate his awkward, poorly balanced gait.

And now he could not begin to keep up with the fear. He could not. He could not.

And the fear that was racing ahead of him, that was rushing in useless circles through the little square, that was spinning down the cobbled street, was this: there was nowhere to hide in such a little, walled-in place.

Forgive me, the young mother was saying to her baby. Over and over. The baby was sprawled, her fat arms and legs batting the air. But the mother couldn’t think what else to do. She held the baby firmly in her lap. Otherwise, she could not be hushed.

Now the goatherd was pounding on her door. He was shouting. Now he was gone to the next house. And the next.

The baby was sick with the colic. She would not stop crying. And the young mother cradled her in her arms and poured grappa into her mouth, and the baby sputtered and choked. The mother soothed the baby and poured the grappa into her mouth,
and the baby sputtered and choked, and the mother soothed her and poured the grappa into her mouth. Then, finally, the mother kissed her, and breathed in the smell of her daughter’s dark hair.

She pulled the wooden slats across the lid of a marble vat. It was one of the small tubs in which she mixed the pork fat that her husband took with his bread to the quarry. Now it was empty. There had been no work for months. There was never enough food.

She folded a cloth over the wooden top. She placed a brown ironstone bowl there. And the baby was still, and the house was quiet.

It was all she could think of. Perhaps when the men returned—the next day, the day after that—they would hear a baby crying.

She wanted to get as far from the kitchen as she could before the Germans came. She wanted to get as far from the house. She ran. She ran from the doorway into the street and that was when she heard the first spitting of the guns.

M
ICHELANGELO IS THIRTY YEARS OLD
when he makes his way to the Carrara mountains. His journeys take him to the isolated abbeys and the convents that shelter the pilgrims on their way to and from Rome, by a route known for millennia as the Via Francigena.

Michelangelo hears vespers as he walks. These steep roads are switchbacks through chestnut woods, across tumbling millstreams. A thrush, frightened by the crunch of his old cordwain boots on the pebbled road, flashes through the branches. The golden light won’t last long now. He is approaching the convent.

The sisters will welcome him. They always do. He will be given the same simple room.

He is anxious about the courier from Florence with funds for the men in the quarries, with funds for the captain of the ox teams, with funds for the ships. Has there been any word? The sisters say there has not.

Everything is difficult.

He hasn’t changed his dogskin buskins in weeks. In the evenings, he sits in the cloisters with the abbess. It’s best to avoid mentioning the pope in his presence. Michelangelo isn’t exactly easy company.

He is a restless soul. He grinds his jaw.

But her quietude soothes him. He finds her manner comforting. Her face is so smooth it could be wax. He imagines in her peaceful countenance a spiritual contentment rich indeed.

She is thinking: here I am. Then, about half an hour after that, she is thinking: there is no water coming from the fountain.

Because she speaks so little her voice is like the rustle of a dry leaf. He isn’t sure he understands her question. But as she makes her noises, she points at the central figure in the trio of figures across and to his right.

His expert opinion is being solicited, he decides. This pleases him, of course. He’s an artist.

He stands. He walks around the stone. He says, “It is fine. You see the hair, here. This shift of weight, there. Contrapposto. This leg. The skirt. This is good work.”

She is thinking: water. She is thinking
splash splash splash
. But Michelangelo is concerned about other things.

“It came from a good workshop,” he says. Local, he guesses. “Although here, perhaps, here, this could be better.” He indicates the contours of the upper right arm and elbow. He could see the break clearly. The joint was unfinished.

“Sculptors,” he confides to the abbess, “are always being rushed.”

She seems untroubled by this information.

With his index finger he traces a line over the ball of the shoulder that aligns more appropriately with the forearm and elbow and with the weight of the water urn the figure is pouring.
He sees that some slight adjustment could be made to the folds of her skirt. The abbess follows his perusal of the statue with what he takes to be great interest.

And then, after a moment’s consideration, Michelangelo proposes something remarkable.

She listens to his suggestion with equanimity.

He would have preferred the abbess to protest—just a little. It would have not gone unnoticed by him had she said something like, “You are too busy, surely. You are a great artist and cannot devote any time to an inconsequential convent such as ours.” Something like that.

He’s sensitive about things like this. Ingratitude always reminds him of the pope.

His time is valuable, God knows. That’s what Michelangelo thinks. Even if nobody else ever seems to think so.

He looks intently at the abbess. This is a habit of his: staring at people. She seems to be untroubled by his gaze.

Then he understands. Then he realizes what he is encountering.

This is beatific calm, he says to himself. This is saintliness. The expression on the face of the abbess is the same endless gaze that he carved into his
Pietà
in Rome—the piece that some ignoramuses in St. Peter’s said was the work of that tunnel-digger, Gobbo.

Gobbo! They said this aloud! In earshot of Michelangelo!

Fuck them, Michelangelo thought. The next day he carved his name across the banner on the Virgin’s cloak. It is his only signed piece.

The expression of the abbess is serenity itself. This, surely, was the grace of God.

His tools are with him. They are wrapped in burlap. They were lugged by his servant through thickets of whores and thieves along the Aurelia from Pisa.

He insists. Not that he needed to, exactly. But he enjoys emphasizing the generosity of his offer. So he insists anyway. He insists that he will make the correction to the shoulder and the elbow the following day.

It is an acceptable intervention, since so many different hands worked on the piece in the first place. It was the work of a studio, not a single artist. And even if it were the work of a single artist, Michelangelo Buonarroti of Florence is not exactly modest about how his talent compares with the talent of others.

Even as a teenager he was not shy about his skills. Vasari tells us that he “went over the contours of one of the figures, and brought it to perfection; and it is marvelous to see the difference between the two styles and the superior skill and judgment of a young man so spirited and confident that he had the courage to correct what his teacher had done.”

So he sets to work, the next day.

He re-addresses the joint. He constructs a small armature in the hollow he has made. He applies the epoxy his servant has prepared. The chiselling and cross-hatching only take him a few hours. The filing and the polishing, the same again.

He studies his work. The line of the arm is now graceful. No one who didn’t know exactly where the zigzag was would ever see the
M
. He wasn’t sure he saw it himself.

He notices a wedge of leaves and dead branches at the base of the fountain. He bends down and, with a few digs of his chisel into the wet cavity, clears them away. He hears water burble from a source that sounds very deep and far away. No water runs from the figure’s jug, but the occasional rumble from the cistern makes him think that eventually it will.

He is satisfied. He has enjoyed the little job. He feels much better. Now he has to get to his room. He always sleeps well when he has been working.

The next morning Michelangelo departs—long before dawn,
long before the nuns awaken. The route up into the mountain quarries is long and arduous, and it is best to cover as much ground as possible before the day gets hot.

That morning, when the abbess takes her customary position in the cloisters and the first angled rays of the morning light touch the upper arm and elbow: an amazing thing! Water. From the fountain. There is nobody to hear her thin, little gasp of surprise.

E
VEN A MINOR GOD
has capacities far beyond our limitations. Even if he’s been drinking Prosecco and grapefruit juice since before noon.

“Work like a slave; command like a king; create like a god,” proclaimed one of the greatest of modernist sculptors. My mother loved this quotation. Constantin Brancusi’s work is famous for its curving horizons and smooth geometric planes. Several of his most celebrated pieces are in Statuario from Carrara.

“There are idiots who define my work as abstract,” the handsome, grey-bearded Romanian once said. Brancusi spoke with characteristic disinterest in diplomacy. In pronouncement, as in sculpture, his imagination was free of any obligation to the unnecessary. This was a quality my mother adored.

By the 1920s, the creator of
Sleeping Muse, Bird in Space
, and
The Kiss
was associated with the new abstraction by art’s general public. In other words, Brancusi thought that most of the people
who had ever heard of him were idiots—a contention that his dark, fiercely intelligent stare defended without a great deal of trouble. “Yet what they call abstract is what is most realistic,” he continued in a rumble of a voice that some women were reported to have said made them feel distinctly faint. “What is real,” he pronounced, “is not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things.”

It’s something that distinguishes most mortals from gods, and most mortals from artists as great as Michelangelo and Constantin Brancusi. We don’t often get to the essence of things. This shortcoming is particularly apparent when the object in question is time. When it comes to that particular dimension, gods think of us as morons.

Fucking morons, clarifies my mother.

Most gods aren’t so blunt, but none would disagree. Even a mid-level deity can observe a beautifully varnished speedboat in the summer of 1939 with the same casual glance by which he catches sight of a black-handled German service revolver on the bedside table of a cheap hotel room almost twenty years later. Gods are catholic in their attentions. They see different ideas at once. Past and future are all the same to them.

It was the blue, beautiful summer that would always be remembered by those who knew it as the summer before the war. Michael Barton was sixteen. His flapping white shirt is open to his smooth, slender chest, his right hand raised, his dark hair flattened by the wind. He is laughing through the spray of his own speed. The boat is a beauty. This is a snapshot from the annual regatta at the lake. There is a girl in a bathing suit at his side.

It’s the way any old god experiences time: the splashes of a runabout slapping across a summer lake are, in fact, the fumes of a bus terminal coming through an opened window in a cheap hotel. The waved salute of a handsome boy is also the neck of
a half-finished bottle of Cutty Sark by a bedside. The edges of the table are marked with the cigarette burns of prostitutes and travelling salesmen. The silver wake of a mahogany speedboat is the steel between a finally determined clench of teeth. The police responded to a desk clerk’s frantic call.

That’s the difference, between mortals and gods. And that, so my mother thinks, is why lesser gods will admit they sometimes envy the one thing that separates the best of us from the worst of them. They sometimes wish there were things they didn’t know.

G
ODS LOOK DOWN
, through grey veins of sky. They look down through branches. They see that regatta on that blue lake. No young man can guess what twenty years will bring, particularly when those twenty years will include a war. But gods can. They see that cheap hotel and that bottle of Cutty Sark. And they can see, not long before Michael Barton bought a one-way bus ticket from Cathcart to Toronto, what happened on the wooded hillside behind the Barton’s house. They can see two boys hiding there. One is Michael Barton’s son. The other is Christopher Barton’s best friend. It was Indian summer.

“No. Like this,” Christopher whispered. He was lying beside Oliver Hughson, both of them on their stomachs. They were deep in the rank old smell of October bridal wreath. The cliff fell away steeply below.

They were both ten. With his right arm, Christopher reached around Oliver’s shoulder.

This was 1958. That year all the boys were wearing sweatshirts with the sleeves cut off. Christopher’s breath was toasty with their smoking.

“With your whole finger,” he said. His right hand covered Oliver’s. “Not just the end.”

“Okay.”

“That’s it.” He was so close Oliver could feel the feather of his whispering on his ear. They had to be quiet.

The Luger had a well-tooled action. The magazine had chambers for eight rounds and slotted firmly into place in the handle. The two rounded steel knobs behind the breech had to be pulled up and then back for charging.

The gun was heavy, almost two pounds. Oliver needed to use both hands to keep it steady.

The vertical iron sight circled the rocking couple below. The pink of the man was blatant between his unfurled pants and the tail of his dark shirt. Oliver squeezed the trigger. Even without ammunition, the spring of the firing pin had a solid, satisfying release.

That Sunday was a final burst of autumn warmth. And the weather made the trails of the hillside exceptionally beautiful to the few who had ventured along them so late in the season.

The boys had spotted the couple below the ledge that they had established as their observation point that afternoon. The fact that the two boys had a single German handgun was explained by the difficulties that had followed their escape. It was a little-known fact of the Second World War that General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Montgomery had broken out of a POW camp together.

The steep wood of Hillside had once been the lip of a vast, ancient sea. It had been formed into a bluff as the softer layers of sandstone and shale eroded beneath the more durable layers of limestone. The grey ramparts on which the boys played looked upside down—more narrow in their bases than on their upper, bush-crested ledges. There were places where it looked like the roots of big old trees were all that held the bluffs from collapsing. The paths—through hart’s tongue, lady’s slipper, trillium, and
wall rue—turned here and there, around large, fallen shards of stone. The terrain was uncertain. The brown slope was scattered with fragments of grey. The tumbled creek beds appeared as a torrent of stone even when their streams were dry. The woods always looked like the rock slide had just stopped.

The man on top and the woman underneath him were in a grove just off one of the trails. They had spread out their blanket quickly among alder and chokeberry. Her long, thin hands were digging for the bones in his back.

“Will wonders never cease,” said Christopher. The accent he used made him sound like Alfred Hitchcock.

“Will you look at that,” Oliver replied, hoping for the flat rumble of the Midwest and of Lucky Strikes in his voice.

Stumbling across Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun screwing in the bushes was quite a break for the Allies. The gyrating bum made the perfect target.

“Hold it still. But don’t hold your breath,” Christopher said. “Take it slow and easy.”

“Like them?”

The barrel went all over the place. Oliver lowered the gun.

Their laughter was louder than they thought.

Now the dark-haired man was kneeling. Now the woman was sitting, yanking down her top with one hand while hoisting her panties with the other. Now the man’s head was swivelling and he was looking up. His face was red. Now he was shouting.

But by then the two boys were gone—along the ledge and down an angled path that cut through the woods to the main trail.

The boys’ homes were under the wooded slope of what in Cathcart was always called the Hillside. Oliver could see Christopher’s house from his bedroom window. It was usually at night that he looked at it. The ugly brown turrets of Barton House were the last shapes of anything before blackness.

Sometimes Oliver sat on the side of his bed and pressed his head against the cool, metallic smell of the screen. Sometimes late-night laughter, sometimes singing, sometimes loud voices came over the gardens. Once, a tuba. For a time, the Bartons had parties. These were always referred to by the Hughsons as “a little wild.” More recently, there were fights: a woman’s voice, a man’s.

On the Sundays that followed a late Saturday-night party, Barton House was dark, and hushed. The quarter-filled highball glasses and full ashtrays were still on the side tables and windowsills. Christopher knew by the thick, still air that his parents would not come downstairs until much later.

Christopher lifted the Rothmans from his mother’s purse. As usual. And then the boys went down to the basement to get the gun. It was a souvenir of Mr. Barton’s from the war.

The stale space of gloom that opened off the bottom of the stairs had all the contemporary fixtures of a rec room—the muted plaids, the casually low-slung furniture, the dartboard, the television, the shelf full of regatta trophies, the bar. But there was something about the basement’s heavy drapery and unmoving air that never felt like fun to Oliver.

“That’s strange,” Christopher said. Normally, the gun was kept locked in the bottom drawer of a liquor cabinet. “The Luger’s not here.”

Oliver was the one who spied the angled black handle. He was looking right at it on the bar for some seconds before he realized what it was. It was unfamiliar because it was so out of place. It was beside a glass of brown liquid with a cigarette butt floating in it. Christopher slipped the pistol into his backpack.

They could never find any ammunition—and not for lack of trying. But the gun still had a heft and an action that made the daring escapes of General Eisenhower and Field Marshal
Montgomery throughout the occupied European countryside feel the way they imagined the game of battle to be. The gun added immeasurably to the veracity of their Sundays: like the time they were running down the path, after Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had started yelling at them.

“You goddamn kids. If I ever catch sight …”

Christopher and Oliver were leaping from root to rock, their shoes skittering, their legs like flywheels. They’d begun with their feet sliding sideways, like skiers traversing a nasty-looking drop, but that hadn’t worked for long. Now they were racing as if trying to catch up to their own weight. Oliver hid the gun by holding it by the barrel, its handle tucked against the inside of his forearm.

H
ILLSIDE ISN’T A HILL AT ALL
. It’s a ridge of sedimentary rock, a muscle of limestone underneath the soft floor of woods. It rises steeply, here and there, in grey, horizontal lines so clearly defined and stacked in such apparent regimen, it appears as if the fissures and planes have been carved into the face of stone. Archie Hughson was particularly knowledgeable about the process of formation. He led his classes on geography hikes along the same trail down which the two boys were racing.

Archie Hughson spoke plainly. It was a dialect, now almost lost, that blended a modest, rural tradition of language with the respect for Shakespeare and Milton and Dickens and Tennyson with which his generation had been brought up. Those students who did well on his famous final exam did so because they could remember that voice. They always would.

They would remember Mr. Hughson standing in a creek bed in the Hillside woods, his sample bag over his shoulder, the waxed paper of an egg-salad sandwich protruding from the right-hand
double pocket of his tweed jacket. They would remember him bending down with surprising agility and picking up a rough grey chunk of stone. They could remember him holding it up, turning it slowly before them as if it were an enormous jewel to be admired. And they would remember his flat, unadorned accent: “Let us imagine that a rock with much the same origins as this was under an ocean. Indeed, let us imagine that this rock was created under an ocean.”

T
HE ROOTS OF THE BIGGEST TREES
held the same horizontal as the ramparts of the rock face. The boys used them like secret stairways for speedy escapes. They took pride in knowing the details of the terrain.

Oliver was the better runner of the two, which wasn’t, actually, saying very much. He wasn’t the fastest boy on earth, but he had a quickness that often seemed—particularly in contrast to Christopher’s thudding strides—comic in its agility. He was a bit of a ham. And it was when they were on that path that day, racing down from the ledge after greatly diminishing the Führer’s quality of life, that Oliver gave into the temptation to let the pistol’s serious weight slip so that its handle was in his palm. The two friends were laughing, hidden from pursuing storm troopers by the hedge of long grass. Oliver was running through the woods with a gun in his hand like a Hollywood movie star.

Suddenly, Oliver braked, his sneakers skidding. Christopher stopped behind him, arms whirling back as if encountering a sheer precipice at his toes.

Oliver crouched. He spun.

“Sniper,” he whispered to his friend. “Eleven o’clock.”

Oliver took fast, deadly aim at the German hiding behind the tree trunk on the cliff above them.

The recoil jumped like an electric shock in Oliver’s hand. The sharp, precise crack of the pistol scared them both to death.

They both stared, not believing their eyes, at the burst of grey dust, suspended in sunlight, drifting over the stone above them.