The Figures of Beauty (16 page)

Even so, for years Michael remained convinced that his father had been wrong. The war was long over, but he still believed the country to be full of men with no better way to celebrate their good luck at being alive than by laughing in the spray of a speeding Barton Runabout—one hand on the steering wheel, the other around the girl in the bathing suit at his side.

Archie Hughson bought the pool in late 1947. This transaction was one of the early signs of the protracted disaster of what was always referred to in Cathcart as the period of Michael Barton’s “financial difficulties.” It lasted more than a decade. And it ended badly.

Michael shot himself in Toronto in early November 1958.
The hotel was just across from the bus terminal. The ticket stub from Cathcart was found in his pocket. He had nothing else with him—if, that is, you don’t count his clothes, his wallet, an open package of Silk Cuts, a Zippo, a half-empty bottle of Cutty Sark, and a Luger.

“H
OW VERY BEAUTIFUL
!” Grace Barton exclaimed.

“Yes,” said Julian Morrow. “But I’ve learned that it is not called beauty by those for whom it is the everyday. It is who they are. Not what they see.”

And Morrow was right. The inhabitants of the hillside and mountain villages didn’t think of what surrounded them as beauty. What they recognized was more a pride in their cobbled streets. And in their pale walls. And in the dark escarpments of evening across the valley. It was something they didn’t articulate but that they would miss terribly were they ever obliged to leave it behind. As many were. It wasn’t beauty—not to them. It was more the sadness that would someday attend its loss.

It was a clear summer day. They had been climbing all morning—Morrow, along with his guests, Grace and Argue Barton. They had lunched at Morrow’s villa the day before.

As they walked, Morrow kept a sharp eye for the wild herbs growing amid the rubble that fell away from the road.

He stopped, snapped open a jackknife, and cut the oregano he had spotted. The air expanded with scent. He pulled some cord from another pocket, tied the little bunch deftly, and dropped it in his pocket for his cook. He liked to bring her these little gifts.

They continued the climb.

He had been forced to change his plans. There had been an accident the day before in the quarry to which he usually took guests. These events were upsetting. He was not accustomed to marble’s sudden mishap. He doubted he ever would be.

But the quarry to which he was guiding Grace and Argue Barton was just as spectacular. Perhaps even more so. It was, however, a more difficult climb.

Eventually they reached the floor of a working quarry that they would have to cross. They would pick up the trail at the other end of the smooth, rink-like surface. He explained that their climb would follow the steep incline of an old
lizza
—the wooden slide on which blocks of marble had once been lowered.

Because the narrow road opened so abruptly to the wide, flat plain of the quarry floor, because the sun was now higher, and because the smooth, grey-veined white stone reflected the brightness of the cloudless day so strongly, Julian Morrow, accompanied by his friends, moved sharply from shadow to light. It was like stepping from the woods onto the wide, open expanse of a glacier.

The day changed with this transition. Even the sound of their footsteps changed immediately—from the crunch and slide of gravel to the padding of soles across cool stone.

The surrounding peaks, the green hills, the roads that twisted below for miles, the haystack of Corsica on the blue horizon—the clarity of these distances kept the scale of the quarry from becoming frightening. Or so it seemed to Grace, who was in the habit of assessing landscapes with a painter’s eye. But the
smoothness of the floor, the sharp right angles of the walls, and the levels of marble that had been worked by the quarrymen made Grace feel suddenly very small.

She laughed. “We are church mice crossing the cathedral steps.”

Two tightly drawn lines of cutting cables were strung overhead, across the sky. They continued up, out of sight, beyond the lip of the marble above, and they disappeared below, down the slope of the mountain.

“Will the marble ever run out?” Grace asked their host. She was walking beside him with a determined energy.

Morrow smiled. “Like your buffalo?”

“Yes,” she said, “I suppose. Like my buffalo.”

Morrow was not a small man. He grunted as he hoisted himself over a shelf of stone.

“Someday the sun will die. Someday time will end. I don’t think we need worry ourselves about marble running out. Do you?”

“I suppose not,” she said.

“At least, not on a day as lovely as this.”

The narrow, steep path of the old
lizzatura
was the most difficult section of the climb. The slope seemed unreasonably severe and steep. Argue Barton’s new walking boots were not as comfortable as he had hoped, and he stopped several times to adjust their laces. But eventually the three hikers found their pace. They established the steady rhythm of their climb.

The only sounds were their shoes on the loose marble pebbles, the squawk of circling swallows, and the rattle of some abandoned metal siding in the wind.

Occasionally, Grace would stop. She would lean back, eyes closed to the sun, and let the mountain breezes wash over her.

It was noon by the time they reached the upper quarry. By then, it felt as if their sweat was sparking against the mountain air.

“How are you?” Morrow asked her. He was worried about her leg.

“Ecstatic,” she replied.

B
EFORE YOU READ
what I have written about my twenty-year-old father, I should tell you about the god. It was an idea that my mother came up with. This was in the summer of 1968. This was about the same time she was coming up with me.

She stole the idea from Constantin Brancusi—one of her favourite sculptors. Carve like a god, Brancusi said—something my mother took very much to heart.

This particular god isn’t much of a god, though. He’s not exactly all-powerful. He’s only ancient in the sense that he isn’t Christian—an important qualification for my mother. He’s pagan, or sort of pagan, or at least he’s a god more interested in wine and food and beauty and falling in love than in being the fount of goodness from whom all blessings flow.

He’s omniscient because he’s a god. But he’s lazy. This means he is observant but not likely to engage in the complications of doing anything about what he sees. His great advantage (so my
mother decided in the process of inventing him) is that he is not encumbered with the plodding order of time and space in which mortals are customarily confined.

She thought the god was an idea that might prove useful to my father. Because he was, in her view, a bit of an idiot.

My mother believes that the universe is ordered—just not in an order apparent to most mortals. She thinks that any attempt to proclaim a more sequential alignment of past, present, and future is propaganda for the forces of the unimaginative that are, unfortunately, in charge of most things. Most especially, the news.

She was afraid that Oliver was not sufficiently aware of this. Not only might his misguided sense of duty return him to North America, much worse: he was in danger of becoming a journalist.

To understand fully my mother’s disdain for the media, you’d have to know how implicated she believes it to be in the general decline of civilization. The short answer—not that she ever has one—is very. And there was no representation of journalism she disliked more than the assured, orderly voice that seemed so often to deliver it.

She thought this was a dangerous distortion of reality, a confidence that belied what she believes is the one essential fact of existence: that we don’t, as she always put it, know what the fuck is going on. The measured, certain tone of a weather report could infuriate her.

She thought the two things my father most needed to do were: learn more Italian and be less reasonable. They seemed to go hand in hand. She decided that were he to take on the more attractive qualities of a reasonably fluent, slightly drunken pagan demigod, that would be a good thing—and at the farmhouse, that morning, she told him so.

This was an appropriate setting for such an announcement—as my father pointed out to me in one of his letters. Although he did not want me to imagine that his reasons were authoritative. His sense of the region’s history came almost entirely from what my mother told him—a collection of local stories she’d picked up over the years, some true, some probably not.

She knew very little of her own history—very little, that is, beyond the story of the Castello massacre. Its prominence seemed to obscure everything else about her background. This, she resented.

In 1944, before their retreat became complete, the Germans had pushed back not many kilometres to the north of Pisa. But this reversal was not what the Germans imagined it to be. The temporary collapse drew the German forces back south into a deep and what would prove to be a disastrous salient.

But when the German armoured corps retook Pietrabella they did not imagine their triumph would be so brief. They returned with the authority of occupiers. And when they found the bodies of five of their soldiers, all of whom, it seemed, had been burnt alive, there would be no escaping their retribution. The bodies were on the Aurelia, not far from the cemetery, just beyond a small bridge on the outskirts of Pietrabella.

There must have been a vehicle. But the steel, even the shards of tire, had already been scavenged by the locals. The bodies had been left unburied.

It was my mother who told my father how the Germans took their revenge. They staged their assault on Castello from the site of what was once a sacred spring. It was said that in pagan times, women from the region who were slow to conceive came at dawn of the summer solstice to bathe in the pool in the hillside grove of trees. Mothers of infirm children brought their babies. My mother—generously disposed to any spirituality so
long as it had nothing to do with priests or nuns—thought the place had great powers.

And it was at that same spot—temple gone, convent gone, villa gone—that my father stepped from the kitchen door of a modest rented farmhouse out into the sunshine late in the summer of 1968. He had by then received a letter from Archie telling him of Winifred Hughson’s illness—a tumour discovered in a routine checkup. But Oliver never mentioned this to Anna. He was aware that he would be using it as an excuse.

The news from Cathcart didn’t make Oliver decide what to do. It made him realize he already had.

He was going to go down to Pietrabella later that morning to buy a railway ticket—an intention he had not mentioned to my mother.

M
Y MOTHER TAKES PRIDE
in the fact that she has never—“Not once,” she always makes a point of saying—paid for a piece of stone. Any countertop or cutting board she has ever had is a castoff from one of the marble yards in Pietrabella. All the pieces of sculpture she has carved have been made from fragments of local Statuario or Bianco P or Bardiglio or Arabescato.

She knows all the marble workers in town. And they all know her. Everyone knows my mother.

For her table she acquired a bevelled panel of Ordinario—the grey, workaday marble that is used in train stations, washrooms, and undistinguished office lobbies. The slab was about the size of a door. It had been discarded because, after it had been cut and polished, a corner had somehow been cracked off. My mother set it up outside the farmhouse on two carpenter trestles.

A remnant of the old villa’s terraced garden is there—a grassy plateau about the size of a generously proportioned dining room.
And it was there, that summer, that my mother and father often had their breakfast. This is how I picture it.

Anna turned to smile at his sleepiness that morning. “How is Mr. Up-Early-to-Write?”

The day was already hot and she had been sitting at their outdoor table with her coffee and her first smoke of the day—both of which were finished by the time my father appeared.

She was wearing the man’s white T-shirt in which she always slept. Her brown hair was in its customary morning disarray. Oliver wore a towel around his waist.

She said, “I’ve been thinking about what you were saying last night. Do you remember what you were saying last night?”

He closed his eyes and lowered his face for a moment into her hair, as if doing so would allow him to fall for a few seconds back into sleep.

“You were saying it isn’t paragraphs that worry you …”

His voice was still thick. “It’s the spaces between them.”

“Ah, you do remember,” she said, rolling her shoulder and head into his kiss. “So I have been thinking.”

“Have you indeed?”

“And I’ve decided that you must be more like Brancusi. You must be more like a god. As Brancusi carves stone. This is how you must write.”

“I see,” he said.

His writing was not what they were really talking about—my father knew that. What they were talking about were his obligations as a recipient of the Grace P. Barton Memorial Travel Bursary.

The reason I know the official title is not that my father ever used its full length. It’s because once my mother decided to talk to me about my father, she used nothing but. She only ever used the award’s full, formal name—as if anything shorter
would have contained insufficient syllables for her sarcasm.

The Grace P. Barton Memorial Travel Bursary was an endowment established by Cathcart’s one newspaper,
The Chronicle
. It was irregularly presented to the winner of an essay-writing contest open to university students. The trust awarded $1800 for “a summer in Europe to broaden the recipient’s cultural horizons,” and “part-time employment throughout his or her completion of an undergraduate degree.” It was understood that the bursary would lead almost certainly to a job at
The Chronicle
.

And so this was what my mother was thinking about when she came up with the idea of the lazy, ancient god. My father could return to Cathcart—as the Hughsons and the trustees of the Grace P. Barton Memorial Travel Bursary expected. That would be sensible. That would be within an established order. That would be reasonable. Or he could, as my mother believed, do something unreasonably and unpredictably godlike. He could do something really unexpected. He could stay with her.

“You must not give this up.” This is what my mother said the first time my father read to her a passage from his journal. Her voice was surprisingly stern. And although he peered closely at her eyes, he couldn’t tell whether she was joking. Nor was it clear whether “this” referred to the words he had written or to what they were describing: the dusty olive groves; the sweet, curling smoke of a farmer’s brush fire in the still, blue air; the flat, thin bell of the church in the hillside village above.

He treated this idea of my mother’s—the notion that he would not be a visitor to Italy but a resident—as the wildest fantasy at first. Although one way of describing his summer would be to say that each day of it inclined him more to the idea’s possibility. By the time he had to make a decision, the options were almost in equal balance. This was a shift in which my mother played no small part.

To begin with, she taught him to cook—lessons that started with her standing at the marble cutting board in the farmhouse kitchen. She turned slowly around to him with a bud of garlic in one hand and a paring knife in the other. Her eyes were wide in disbelief.

And there were other lessons. On late weekend mornings they sat in the sun at the outdoor table smoking spliffs and drinking Prosecco. They passed the time with the stories they invented. But usually, when the day got hot and drowsy, they ended up going back to bed.

My mother has always insisted on being frank with me about sex. It is one of her personal measures for countering the strictures of the bourgeoisie. I was never comfortable with this. But my comfort wasn’t the issue. This was a struggle my mother expected to take generations. She felt she had an example to set.

My mother wasn’t an exhibitionist. That would be an exaggeration. Let’s just say, she was never quiet—a recurrence of moans and sighs and shrieks that, as a child, I took to be something like thunderstorms, only more frequent. At a very young age, I knew what a lover was because I met so many of them at our breakfast table.

Once the subject of the young Oliver Hughson was out in the open, my mother saw no reason to be discreet just because he was my father. “At first, he knew as much about lovemaking as he did about cooking,” she told me. There was a pause. “I had to tell him what garlic is.”

On the occasions (usually late at night, usually after lots of wine) when my mother persisted in arguing against my father’s conviction that he should be reasonable—when, no matter how light her tone, she made it clear that she wasn’t joking about how important it was that he stay—he avoided confronting her directly. His claim that he didn’t know enough about the
region’s history, or about marble, or about the history of sculpture to write the kind of book she had envisioned for him at least shifted the discussion away from immigration. Concern about talent was a safer subject for him to raise than his doubt about commitment—certainly it was less likely to infuriate my mother.

“It’s connecting things that’s the problem” was what he had said to her. He knew she was susceptible to exactly this kind of abstraction.

M
Y MOTHER’S FLAWS
have largely to do with her relationship with the future. Her retirement, for example, couldn’t possibly be less real for her than it is. “I’m an artist,” she says. “Not being an artist is not something I’m saving up for.”

As my ever-practical husband tried to explain to her, this is not a responsible attitude. People get sick, Enrico said. People get old. But there is a saying in the mountain towns that goes: the pail of strength and the pail of weakness are drawn from the same well. That’s my mother.

Her lack of regard for the future has always been maddening. But it finds alternative expression in how fully she occupies the present. I am familiar with the look: her eyes closed, her lips parted, her neck arched back slightly, as if she is pausing, instructing herself to drink in every sensation of being alive. She moves through the air with an open, attentive saunter.

Faith in the improvisational nature of the present is a kind of personal creed, one that is connected to her most important artistic pursuits. My mother believes that great sculptors—whether they be masters of the figure, such as Michelangelo and Bernini, or masters of more abstracted form, such as Brancusi—move from plane to plane without thinking about anything other than the instant of their carving. “They are like ancient gods, looking
down on their world of marble,” she once said. “They are in the piece. They are outside it. They are close. They are far away. It’s a talent sculptors have.”

She paused.

“It’s why we are so bad at everything else.”

O
N THAT LATE
A
UGUST MORNING
Anna smiled at how obviously Oliver Hughson’s sleep still clung to him.

“But I think you are too sleepy to do magical things,” she said. “So you will have to be a lazy, ancient god.”

My mother’s relationship to the past is more complicated than most people’s. She inhabits it more wilfully than anyone I know. What she chooses not to think about, she puts away, as if in a locked drawer. She is very disciplined in this. As one good example, she was so angry with my father, she didn’t think of him for forty years.

This doesn’t mean that she was unable to remember him. It means that when she sensed his memory looming on her horizon, she turned away from it, the way someone with a stutter learns to avoid the approach of a troublesome consonant. In fact—as I eventually learned—she remembers quite a lot about the summer of 1968.