The Figures of Beauty (8 page)

Glorious, Julian Morrow always thought when he saw this.

He stepped across the wet cobbles. He guessed he would soon make some money. He had an instinct for these things.

M
Y FATHER
, O
LIVER
H
UGHSON
, died on a flight from Toronto to Milan in late April 2010. He was sixty-two years old at the time. But this is not—as Paolo, the too-handsome husband of my best friend, Clara, told me—so very unusual. This is not what is strange.

Paolo is a commercial pilot—an occupation that gives him greater expertise in more subjects than most men imagine they have. Which is saying something. The best kind of tires, the most reliable automobiles, the cause of my father’s death—these are all subjects to which Paolo provides the answer, whether or not anyone asks him a question.

Normally, this would make me uncomfortable. Good looks and an assertive personality are not as good a combination as a lot of men think they are. On my own, I would probably not be comfortably belted into Paolo’s silver Mercedes once a week. But my best friend loves Paolo, and he loves my best friend, and that
changes everything. He often picks Clara and me up after our weekly African dancing class in Casatori.

The beat of the hand drums is usually still with me as we return to Pietrabella. I always feel radiant after dancing. Clara says it’s the same with her. The ride is so smooth it feels like we are gliding over the Autostrada.

Clara and I have known each other since we were girls. We are very close in age. We played on the terraces of vines and fruit trees that were the steep front gardens of our street.

There is a long climb of stone steps from the pavement to the front doors of the homes on Via Maddalena. The backs of the houses look up to the rooks’ nests, and garlands of capers, and the crumbling turrets of the old town wall. Clara’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Tagliani, owned a neat little box of a house up from where my mother and I lived. The Taglianis’ home was built in the late 1950s.

We rented our apartment. It is the second floor of a big, three-storey family home that is by far the oldest on the street. At one time the house must have been alone, just outside the old town wall—a primacy that suited my mother’s aesthetic dignity. When we moved from the countryside, my mother was drawn to Via Maddalena because she could see that its steepness meant that however much Pietrabella was expanding to its north, to its south, and to its west, our street would always remain on the eastern outskirts of the municipality. Where the houses stopped, the hills began. And where the hills stopped, the mountains started.

My mother’s coolness toward the “new houses on the street”—which is to say all the homes except the one in which we lived—might have been aristocratic disdain for the bourgeoisie were she in any way aristocratic. But the upper classes were as objectionable to my mother as postwar architecture. Her politics
meander from anarchism to communism to socialism to liberalism. The practical outcome of this is that she can, and often does, argue with everyone about everything.

My mother puts “sculptor” in the space reserved for “Occupation” on the very few government forms she ever reluctantly fills in. But this isn’t her complete job history: She had a daughter to raise and so she could not afford to be entirely impractical, however naturally she was that way inclined. My mother never resented the responsibilities of parenting. She just kept them in perspective.

Over the years she worked sometimes as an artist’s model. Her English is good, if idiosyncratic, and she was hired sometimes by marble merchants to act as a guide for visiting clients. But she was always clear: these were temporary measures. Her own stone sculpture has always been her most constant employment.

As a result, we never had any money. We were frequently in arrears on our monthly payments to the family that lived, in ever-expanding generations, above the wide wooden beams and below the cool marble floors of our apartment. But my mother can be very charming when it comes to the bills she owes and funds she doesn’t have. She is almost seventy now, and she has always been a good-looking woman She still has the posture of a teenager, still works stone, still poses on occasion for artists in town. Her hair is silver but still a thick tangle. Her smile is disarming—as is her disinclination to offer her creditors anything that sounds like circumstantial excuse. Her position is sweetly unapologetic: She is a sculptor. What do they expect?

The fact that we were the only tenants on Via Maddalena, and not homeowners, did not mean to my mother that we were in any way inferior to our neighbours. Quite the contrary. I was brought up to believe that living in a hovel would be only slightly
worse than sleeping in a room with dropped ceilings and sliding, vinyl-clad windows. The less said about aluminum doors and white wrought-iron railings, the better.

I returned to live in Pietrabella in 1999, the year I turned thirty, but it was neither nostalgia, nor my significant birthday, nor any sense of millennial significance that motivated my husband and me. It was a practical decision. The boys were one and three at the time. I had to find a decently paying job. We had to find an affordable place to live, with a good school, somewhere within a thirty-minute drive of the community college that had offered Enrico a not-very-decently-paying job as a teaching assistant.

Clara emailed me about a position at the Agency of Regional Tourism. She had already been working there for eighteen months. She had returned to Pietrabella two years before, because her mother was not well, and because her handsome husband didn’t mind driving in his diesel-fuelled, four-door car with its excellent sound system and wonderful suspension to and from airports as far away as Milan and even Rome.

My mother does not believe in coincidence. She thinks that fate, not chance, has governed her life. Her ego is healthy in this regard. She was dismissive of all the excitement about the millennium. “Media bullshit” was her summation. But when I called to tell her that we would probably be moving to the vicinity of Pietrabella, she took this as a cosmic sign that it was time for her life to change too. I wonder sometimes if my mother doesn’t secretly believe that the purpose of other lives is to provide auguries for hers.

She learned that the German couple who had been holiday tenants in the same hillside farmhouse that she had rented many years before had decided to give the place up. Or rather, the husband had decided after tragedy befell them. His wife had been
killed in a highway accident. My mother decided this was not happenstance.

My mother moved back up into the hills, and Via Maddalena 19 became my home address once again. Enrico and I and the boys settled into the flat in which I grew up, although the absence of her battered copies of
The Stones of Rimini
and
The Maltese Falcon
; the coffee-stained, disc-ringed covers of her old Leonard Cohen and Miles Davis LPs; her marble dust; her overflowing ashtrays; and her various works in progress make it seem quite a different place to me. Only the views from the high casement windows are the same—views that I discovered my father remembered very well.

J
ULIAN
M
ORROW STEPPED
across the curbside stream. His linen suit was the colour of butter. Despite his size, he moved with a surprising lightness of step.

When Morrow introduced himself to the couple he had spotted across the bridge of Via Carriona on that muggy morning in the summer of 1922, he spoke with confident, startling volume. Speaking quietly, being unobtrusive were beyond him. His English, Welsh accent notwithstanding, allayed the couple’s fears that they were being accosted by an unscrupulous local.

The man to whom Morrow addressed himself was pale in a way that seemed a result of too much time in offices, not ill health. His eyes were younger than his grey moustache suggested. As was he, actually. The difference in age of the couple was more apparent at a distance than close at hand.

Their romance had its beginnings on the day the publisher of the Cathcart
Chronicle
found himself at the newsroom’s entrance
at the same moment as the paper’s young and, so he had noticed, quite pretty art critic. She had a bad leg of some sort, but it did nothing to diminish her good looks.

He held the door for her. At a loss for conversation—as he generally was with his staff—he complimented her on a review she had written of a sculpture exhibition at the provincial gallery.

His awkward attempt at small talk revealed that he had not seen the exhibit and had no intention of doing so. This, Grace announced, was “absolutely ridiculous.” She would take him to the gallery herself the following week if he were free. Her tone was playful and not at all impolite. But she made it clear that she wasn’t joking. This impressed him. Very much.

He shook Morrow’s extended hand.

“Barton,” the gentleman said. “Argue Barton.” And then he turned with the measured slowness of a man still new to acknowledging his great good fortune. “My wife.”

Morrow bowed, his hat held by his spread left hand against his lapels.

The three of them spoke. And as they did, Morrow admired the woman. He was careful not to be obvious.

He had no designs, of course—and not because she was married. This had not always been an impediment. But Morrow liked to say that he was good at his job because of two skills he had acquired over the years: one was reading stone, the other, reading people. He didn’t doubt that he was reading the couple accurately, and his assessment only made the pleasure he was taking in a morning in Carrara all the more keen. He was, he was the first to admit, a sentimentalist.

He was of the view that what is often described as “love at first sight” is, more accurately, the realization of two people that they are soon going to be in love. In Morrow’s view, love took a little longer in life than it did in popular song—an opinion
that made him more of a romantic than most men, not less. The prospect of love, he believed, is so exciting it can be mistaken for love itself.

Morrow knew he was witnessing this very process. He could see that their affection for one another was on the brink of becoming something deeper.

He admired her lively smile. Admiring women was something Morrow could not help doing.

When Grace Barton was amused there were those who couldn’t escape the suspicion that she was amused at them. There was something a little dangerous in her intelligence. When she smiled her teeth were very white, set off, as they were, against her tanned skin. Only the built-up sole of her left boot and the shortened, tilted rhythm of her step prevented people from immediately assuming she was a runner, or a tennis player, or a champion golfer. There was something about Grace Barton that brought to mind a beautiful pony.

He found the confidence in her mouth and eyes simultaneously attractive and disconcerting—a lack of equilibrium that he enjoyed. Her slender face was of so established a character that any change—fewer freckles, for example—was impossible to imagine.

Julian Morrow felt no threat. He could see that her pleasure—pleasure in the appearance of sunlight on the bone-coloured walls as the weather cleared, in the diminishing rattle of wooden wheels on stone as the quarry wagon became more distant on Via Carriona, in the Welshman in the Borsalino on the old stone bridge—was a pleasure general in nature. It coincided with his own.

Morrow imagined that prior to her engagement to Argue Barton, more than a few of Grace’s suitors had made the mistake of assuming she’d think herself lucky to have them. Their vain
misjudgment was probably because of her bad leg. Or because her slender good looks were more sharp and boyish than what was in fashion. Or because her lively, assertive face obviously could not accommodate the wide-eyed blankness of acquiescence that was equally in mode.

She’d been underestimated by the handsome young fellows who had called upon her. Morrow guessed that Barton, with the wariness older men bring to younger women, did not make the same mistake.

Cathcart
. Morrow let the name echo in the business corridors of his brain while he chatted with great enthusiasm about the name of the river, about the dogs in the cobbled street, about the statue they were inspecting.
Cathcart
. Morrow ran the name through his memory of contracts and commissions. He concluded that to his knowledge he had no business in a place called Cathcart. And his knowledge of these matters was extensive.

He owned several marble workshops in town, each employing a dozen or so skilled artisans. He owned several quarries, each providing work for hundreds of men. There were office lobbies in New York and Chicago, mansions in Tuxedo Park and Baltimore, public facilities in Shepherd’s Bush and Leicester Square, all built with his stone. Furniture outlets in England and the United States were stocked with his mantels, his sconces, his balustrades, his dresser-tops, his ornamental replicas of famous sculptures. There were even a few reputable shops in London and New York that carried his recently manufactured “antiques.”

Did Cathcart have no churches, no town squares, no cemeteries, no need for memorials to the dead of Ypres, or Amiens, or Vimy Ridge, or the Somme? Were there no train stations, no public washrooms, no office lobbies, no pools, or private gardens? Morrow thought that probably there were. And that, perhaps, there could be more.

“I am in newspapers,” Argue Barton said.

Morrow noted the plural. He could see that the man, though dressed for touring, frequented an excellent haberdashery. He had noticed the label on the foulard. The shop was in Paris, around the corner from the George-V. Morrow’s firm had supplied the marble for the hotel’s bathrooms. He shopped at the same store himself. He was familiar with its prices.

They stood at a niche in the old town wall. “The marble statue dates from the late Roman Empire,” Morrow explained.

The Bartons were pleased to find so genial a source of information. “What fun,” Grace said to her husband, putting her arm through his and tilting her head in attention to their guide.

It was only in retrospect that they realized that this was a turning point in their honeymoon. Had they never encountered Julian Morrow they would likely have said that their European trip had been most pleasant—and they would have been perfectly sincere. Delightful was what it ended up becoming. Morrow’s guess that they were somewhere between falling and being in love proved to be exactly right.

The Romans, Morrow continued, were skilled at choosing the finest and most durable stone. “There are medieval cathedrals,” he said to Grace and Argue Barton, “much younger than this piece. A thousand years younger, in fact. And the stone of their construction has deteriorated far beyond what you see here.”

The statue was worn by time and by weather, but its principal figure was clear. It was a young man. “Poised to leap into a deep chasm,” Morrow explained to his new friends. “To demonstrate his willingness to sacrifice himself—his strength, his beauty, his youth. For Rome, you see.”

“Rather a waste,” said Grace. Her abrupt tone and the brief flash of anger that crossed her face revealed what Morrow took to be strong views on the Great War. But this avenue of conversation
was interrupted by the approach of an old man to where they were standing on the bridge. His stubbled face was thin and deeply wrinkled. He had a cane.

It was the old man’s habit to stop anyone he passed on the Ponte delle Lacrime to tell them about the dangerous road, and the dangerous work, and about the mournful sound of the horn that announced an accident in the quarries.

“Ca-vay,” Julian Morrow translated for the Bartons. “The quarries.” He gave the old man a few coins, then waved him away.

The compulsion to transform something fleeting into something permanent is among the most ancient of human instincts. So Julian Morrow said. Had his voice become any louder it would have required a stage and a hall.

“I feel I should be taking notes,” said Grace.

Morrow waved off the suggestion. “I’ve noticed that, for reasons I cannot entirely explain, the clear air of the region makes for a clear memory. Notes will not be necessary. You shall see.”

Morrow was working up a speech for the Arts and Letters Club in Pontypool to be delivered at a luncheon lecture several months hence. It was already partly written. But with the judicious use of thoughtful pauses, Julian Morrow was able to give the Bartons the impression that his thoughts were taking form before their very eyes.

“Our awareness of transience,” Morrow continued, “jostles constantly against the hope that our stories will last. Possibly the urge to create is nothing more than the wish to contradict the inevitability of death.”

Grace Barton expressed some mock dismay at this sad thought—and it was the humour in her eyes that inspired him to continue full-voiced, unabated.

“We imagine that a human figure cannot simply vanish. So inglorious a disappearance seems impossible. And so from
antiquity, faces and bodies, heads and torsos were memorialized in mud, in sand, in clay.”

The history of sculpture, so he explained, is a history of convergence: of tools and material. Wood could not be carved without flint, just as stone could not be shaped—not finely, not reliably—until the advent of iron. As tools improved, the choice of materials became more specific to the task at hand. The need to memorialize—the urge to create tombs and portraits—became part of something else. By the time marble emerged as a lasting and surprisingly adaptable substance, by the time the tools that could work it became more sophisticated, by the time the marble quarries of Carrara began to dominate the worlds of architecture and sculpture, the motives for carving stone had become complicated. What was being immortalized by artists was not only a noble face that needed to be remembered by citizens gathered in a piazza. It was not only a parable that needed to be recalled by worshippers standing humbly in the shadows of a great cathedral. What was being caught, what artists were rescuing from the relentless stream of the temporal, was beauty itself. This is what sculptors—“from Renaissance masters,” said Morrow, “to the most wild of our young modernists”—look for in their labour. “Beauty is what they hope to preserve in the myriad varieties of our marble.”

Morrow let this settle in. His face was tanned. He smelled pleasantly of tobacco and shaving soap.

“They change what is ordinary—and what is more ordinary than stone?—into what is divine.”

But the Bartons were puzzled.

“Myriad?” Argue asked.

“Isn’t Carrara marble … well, Carrara marble?” his wife added. She pointed as she spoke to the white, weathered stone that told the story of the young Roman consul.

“Oh, my no,” said Julian Morrow. His laughter boomed. He took some delight in its effect on his audiences.

“These mountains are like sculpture,” Morrow continued. “Their surface is only the most recent exposure of an intent far beyond our capacity to understand. And we regard the evidence of eternity as we would the marks left by a chisel in an unfinished piece of stone. These are glimpses of something beyond us. Something passing from a past too distant to comprehend to future eons we cannot hope to fathom. What was the Lord thinking when he set the forces of geology into motion that created marble? What was Michelangelo thinking when, with chisel in hand, he first glimpsed the possibilities of his own genius?”

Morrow was an experienced enough public speaker to recognize long before it became a problem that he was losing the thread of where all this was going. He paused—but his confident stance seemed to insist that this was not because he’d lost whatever point he thought he was making.

He smiled at his tendency to get carried away.

“One thing, you say? Marble? No. Here, there is no single marble. There is: Statuario, Ordinario, Bianco Carrara, Bianco P, Calacatta Cremo, Arabescato Classico. The list goes on. And on. There are scores of different varieties of Carrara marble.”

Julian Morrow stepped back, into the road, pleased with his rhetorical flight. “I see I have confused you entirely. Forgive me.”

The Bartons protested. Oh no. They found it all fascinating.

“And the only cure for such confusion—a confusion that is entirely of my own making, I assure you—is thankfully at hand. I am a fulsome tour guide, I’m afraid. It is a weakness of mine. But I hope you will do me the honour of joining me for lunch. My villa is not far—just beyond the next valley.”

He smiled, as if in apology for his effusion.

“The sky is clearing. We shall be able to eat by the pool.”

“Very kind,” said Argue Barton, “but …”

“We couldn’t possibly …” began Grace.

“Nonsense,” said Julian Morrow. “The cool mountain air falls from these hills and, in my experience, it inspires those of us lucky enough to breathe it with a healthy appetite. The noon-hour meal is one of the region’s greatest delights. My cook is much sought after. I’m sure you were planning to stop at some point for luncheon …”

He paused. They did not disagree. In fact, the mention of food reminded them both that the bread and apricot jam served with their coffee at breakfast were slipping into the distant past.