The Figures of Beauty (24 page)

“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.

J
ULIAN
M
ORROW’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.

I
N 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.

T
HE 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.”

W
HEN
I
RETURNED TO
I
TALY
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.

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.

“Y
OU 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.

True, the limitations of his Italian meant that he had little more than nodding acquaintances with most people in Pietrabella. And the fact that he had spent a good deal of his time posing for Richard Christian in an otherwise unpopulated studio didn’t allow for much socializing.

Richard’s studio was a single room with a high ceiling and large, frosted glass windows with an eastern exposure. It had the soft greyness of natural light and the pleasing combination of clutter and emptiness that often characterizes places where artists work. It was furnished with tools, and reference books, and propane tanks, and rulers, and calipers, and drawing pads, and various works in progress, and armatures waiting to be used. There were dusty wooden tables and workbenches and a high,
long shelf for his finished pieces. There was a large poster of Ingres’s
La Grande Odalisque
on the wall.

There was great discomfort in modelling: the damp chill, the awkwardness of certain difficult poses, the slight headache of a long, hungry morning. As well, there were levels of irritation: itches that couldn’t be scratched, lashes in eyes that couldn’t be whisked away. But these are not the worst of it.

The real pain was stillness. It did not matter if a particular pose was hard or easy. The piece that Richard was working on when Oliver modelled for him required poses of considerable difficulty. Figures huddled. Figures writhing. One of the figures hung, as if from the struts of a bridge—an idea that Richard had latched on to shortly after Oliver had shown up on the doorstep of the apartment on Via Maddalena.

“I try to use what comes my way,” Richard said.

But it was not the difficulty of the poses that was Oliver’s biggest problem. It was simply not-moving that became intolerable. Sometimes he felt sick with it.

He found that the most casually bent knee, the most relaxed emphasis of weight on a hip, the lightest rest of an elbow on a ledge built steadily in intensity. They began as nothing worth thinking about and, after only five or ten minutes, became his sole preoccupation. He knew that this would eventually end—Richard would usually work about an hour before calling a break—but that didn’t help somehow. In fact, it made things worse. Oliver found that when he couldn’t move he was constantly in danger of being able to think about nothing else. His daydreams were of feasts of movement: he was running like a boy on a hillside path; he was walking through thick summer nights of olive groves and valleys; he was making love with Anna. But these were never dreams in which he could lose himself. They were longing. He’d never found the present so endless. There
was no straightening, no idle step, no stretch that could relieve its oppression.

But even with these stretches of time the four months vanished. Even with poses that felt more like eras to Oliver than afternoons, his summer in Italy disappeared. I never heard his name spoken by the sculptors, artisans, workshop owners, bartenders, restaurant owners, and shopkeepers to whom I’d turned for clues. Oliver had dropped through Pietrabella’s past without leaving a ripple. It was like he’d never been there.

M
ICHELANGELO WAS IN
R
OME
, waiting for the marble he had quarried for the tomb to arrive from Carrara, when, in 1506,
Laocoon and His Sons
was discovered by a man working in a vineyard on the Esquiline Hill. The piece fascinated Michelangelo. It was an inspiration. From the ancients came the heroic form that he held as the greatest expression of beauty. But even more importantly, from the ancients came the philosophy that transformed the sweaty, dusty drudgery of mallet and
gradino
into a process almost divine. Michelangelo’s gift for uncovering an object’s beauty was how he believed he reached the purpose of his soul.

This quest was so central to Michelangelo’s sense of himself that every delay in the marble shipments from Carrara felt to him like disaster. Every obstacle wasn’t just an obstacle—it was an idea that, impeded, might become ordinary.

By the time Michelangelo was back in Rome, by the time he set out to see the statue of Laocoon that had been discovered in a local vineyard, he was feeling the slow, dull wound that artists almost always get to know. Those who esteemed him, those who honoured him, those who encouraged him, those who once boasted that they knew him seemed to be turning away. He was
feeling the hollow, lonely sensation of attention going elsewhere.

Michelangelo had always been drawn to the beauty of the male body in exertion: straining, pulling, struggling. And Laocoon—the sad, unheeded character in the
Aeneid
who warns his fellow Trojans of the Greeks’ intentions—is a figure of such writhing anguish that some have suggested that Michelangelo saw his own struggles in the Trojan’s furious effort to free himself from the two snakes twisting around his extended arms and between his powerful legs. By then, struggle was something that Michelangelo understood well. Nothing was easy. Least easy of all: working for Julius II.

It wasn’t an uncomplicated time to be pope—which was just as well, since Julius thrived on his capacity for complexity. He had the French to worry about, and the Spanish. The Florentines were always difficult, the Venetians worse, and he was intent on regaining control of the papal fiefs of Perugia and Bologna. Still, with enough on his military and political agenda to occupy fully the mind and the treasury of a more modest man of God, Julius chose this moment in history to establish a legacy far beyond a mere tomb.

Designs for the new St. Peter’s occupied those of his attentions not already busy with diplomacy, politics, and war. The project for which he’d commissioned Michelangelo—the masterpiece that Michelangelo had imagined would be the crowning achievement of his youthful triumphs as a sculptor—wasn’t cancelled exactly. It was just that Julius was busy now with other, bigger things.

Michelangelo must have seen the tribulation of being an artist in the torment of Laocoon’s face. Even the greatest artist had to worry about money, about schedules, about impatient patrons, about dishonest quarry owners, about conniving agents, about wagons breaking down on mountain trails, about freighted
barges on stormy seas. It was all impossible. No wonder he ground his teeth in his sleep. But there was an even bigger worry. Everything depended on how importantly his work was regarded by those who hired him. He needed their money, of course. But money was only the measurement of something more important: affirmation. To be ignored was a cruelty he found intolerable.

I
MAGINE A
G
REEK CARVER
of marble
kouroi
in 600
BC
. This is something my mother used to tell me to do when she felt it necessary to teach me about the history of carving stone. She told me to picture an ancient Greek banging away on a block.

He is working at right angles to the unaccommodating surface. He is using a mallet on a bronze punch. This is because he’s a century or so too early for iron tools that can carve marble obliquely. As a result of this professional bad luck, he is obliged to create his figure with small, repeated indentations in the stone instead of the longer furrows that will soon become the bread-and-butter strokes of stone masons and sculptors. And let’s say that he grows tired of his arms feeling like battering rams. And let’s say he gets a little bored with figures that, even when they are finished, look a lot like the block of marble from which they’ve come.

The
kouroi
are majestic, in their way. They have …
something
. That’s what my mother said.
Something
. She could have said magic.

But she imagined that this particular Greek sculptor begins to think about the stone differently than any Greek sculptor had ever thought of it before. He wonders: What if it’s just stone?

And so, one day, with his mallet raised, and his face smeared with marble dust, and the sun glinting on the soon-to-be-obsolete alloy of his bronze punch, and his hands going numb
with his constant hammering against a material that seems not to want in the least to be hammered, the ancient Greek sculptor thinks: fuck it. He’s going to ease off—just a bit. He’s not going to bother putting absolutely all the strength, and all the grace, and all the skill, and all the inspiration, and all the apprehension of physical beauty that sits at the heart of a stone carver’s soul into every single stroke of his mallet. He thinks nobody will notice anyway.

It’s a moment with repercussions. My mother is of the opinion that it changed everything.

She said, “It doesn’t take long for everything to stop working the way it worked before. Soon the magical springs are just places to get water. Soon there are no spirits in the woods. Swans are just swans. Midsummer spells become stories people make up. Everything is different. But nobody notices.”