The Figures of Beauty (17 page)

“Ask him if he remembers the lazy, ancient god,” she instructed me. We were sitting at her outdoor table on a spring evening in 2009. I had just told her that I was going to go to Cathcart to meet my father.

She pulled on her hand-rolled cigarette, exhaled unhurriedly into the still evening. She considered the smoke carefully. I remember being surprised. This was the first indication that she might lift her embargo on his memory.

And so that’s how I picture him: on a chaise, in the afternoon, looking up into the sky. But he could just as easily be looking down. Direction is immaterial when it comes to lazy, ancient gods. It’s almost as irrelevant as chronology.

This is why my mother says she prefers Michelangelo’s unfinished sculpture to the most polished of an artist even as great as Bernini. She doesn’t love anything that insists on being observed from a single point of view—a staged theatricality on which Bernini usually insisted. She likes to move around objects. She says that’s what space is for.

Even a lazy deity could probably locate the right Italian town through the parting clouds—but it’s not easy. From way up, where the gods drift, there isn’t much colour to be seen down below. Everything is a grey, hazy map—like a polished marble floor. The pigments and earth tones become clearer as he descends, but even that isn’t much help. All the Tuscan towns look like the opening credits of movies. It’s the light.

The lazy, ancient god looks down, past the bell towers and red-tiled roofs, on the right piazza. He’s got the right time of the day, in the right year. It takes some doing.

It is late summer of 1968. At a table of the Café David, in the main square of a little town in the northwest corner of Tuscany, there is milk-foam on the rim of young Oliver’s cappuccino. He is twenty years old.

His journal is open. The smoke of his cigarette is drifting from his table on the southern side of the central piazza of the old town of Pietrabella. He has a train ticket in his pocket.

B
Y THE EARLY AFTERNOON
the three hikers had reached a height in the mountains at which the sunlight felt coated with a thin veneer of cold. The upward climb had taken four hours. Grace Barton had refused to be slow.

About thirty metres below their destination, the path seemed to end. A steel-cable ladder was staked into the outside edge of a wall of stone. Morrow stood at the base.

“This is a little dangerous,” he said to Grace.

She looked at him with alarm.

“But,” he said with a reassuring smile, “rather fun.”

She placed her foot on the first rung. He reached around to guide her.

She started up, not daring to look down. The ladder ended at a wide ledge high above the spot from which her anxious husband watched her climb. Julian Morrow waited for her to complete her ascent before he helped Argue Barton begin his.

Grace had been standing alone for several minutes, looking out to the red roofs of the distant towns and the flat blue of the sea, before her husband joined her. Morrow followed.

“Ecco,”
he said. Morrow gestured, and when she turned, she was astonished that she had not seen what was behind her. It was a high cave, cut into the side of the mountain. It felt as if they were standing at the portal of a cathedral.
“Luci di marmo,”
Morrow said. “The light of marble. It’s like this nowhere else on earth.”

They would eat their lunch on the picnic rug he opened in front of the long-abandoned quarry. From there they could peer up into the cave. They could see the high ladders and scaffolding. There were rusted stakes driven into the walls of the high cut of rock—From what original vantage? she wondered. How did the cobwebs of wire get so far up there? It was impossible to imagine working there under the calmest of circumstances. “What would it be like, she asked, “to be climbing the scaffolding, traversing those catwalks in a driving winter wind?”

“Difficult,” Morrow said. That was the only description. “Work in the quarries can be very … difficult.”

The accident had occurred in another quarry the day before. Julian Morrow felt how truly cold and implacable these mountains could be, and the thought saddened him. As it always did. His manager would provide him with the details.

These scaffoldings and ropes and dangling ladders were climbed and crossed and clung to, Morrow explained. “The workers’ job,” he said, “was to cut away the loose stone high above the vast blocks that would be cut from the wall.” Here and there, the sunlight caught an angle of broken white stone, sparking the crystalline glint sometimes called “tears of Christ.”

Or, he pointed out, his guests could look in the other direction. They could look from a great height out toward the coastal
towns. There, said Morrow, were the marble yards, the loading docks, the saws, the studios, and the offices where marble agents made the connections with buyers in London, in New York, in Paris. And there was the sea.

“My world,” he said.

He was unpacking their lunch from his rucksack. The wine for their meal in the quarries had been wrapped in damp canvas by his cook to stay cool.

“Simple fare,” Julian Morrow said. “But I hope to your liking.”

I
DIDN’T KNOW
who my father was until a year before his death. I was forty years old when I made the discovery. And the first thing I did when I learned Oliver Hughson’s identity was figure out where he lived.

Getting any information from my mother on this particular subject was not easy.

At first she said, “He’s gone.” Her response to hearing a name she had not heard spoken for decades was calm but resolute. “Forever,” she added, as if she were a judge recalling a sentence from a long-ago case.

“But he was important to you.”

“Once.”

“Would you ever see him again?”

“It would take a miracle.”

She stared at me with her characteristically maddening combination of unreasonableness and concern. “Why do you want to get to know him? Now.”

“Because he’s my father.”

“So?”

“I need to learn who I am.”

“You don’t need to,” she replied. “You want to. There’s a difference.” And for a while we left it at that.

But when my mother eventually admitted to me that she could remember who my father was, she said she didn’t really know where he was from. Not precisely. She never had.

“Somewhere near New York,” she said. “Or Chicago. Or Hollywood, maybe.”

This was not a help.

What little information had found its way to her did not add up to a country. She was relieved to learn that no baby seals had ever been clubbed in Cathcart. Once, as a child, she’d read a book by Grey Owl, but she couldn’t remember anything about it. Sometimes, when she was crossing the smooth white surface of a quarry floor, she wondered what could be done with chisel blades that were built into skates. There was a Joni Mitchell song she liked about a frozen river. This was pretty much the sum total of her thoughts about Canada.

Anna thought the name of the town Oliver was from and the name of the province the town was in were a single word. When I mentioned this to my father on the evening of our first meeting in Cathcart, he smiled, a little sadly. “I haven’t heard that for a very long time,” he said.

Pietrabella is in Italy, but nobody knows where it is either, because it is not very distinguished and it is surrounded by places that are. It’s a dusty, noisy town, and probably only my father, who had hardly visited anywhere else in the world in his life, could have found it as magical as he did. He told me that, on his first morning there, he pushed open the shutters of the spare room in Richard Christian and Elena Conti’s apartment on Via
Maddalena—the same room, it so happens, in which I am writing now. He said he had never seen so beautiful a place.

This is not the common view. Pietrabella is not at all what people picture when they think of Tuscany—even when I instruct them to forget scenes from movies about people discovering picturesque properties requiring renovation and the intervention of handsome local tradesmen in the lives of lonely women. I tell them to think of the ordinary northwest corner of Tuscany on the ordinary flats between the Apuan mountains and the sea. Still, I am often surprised by the blank stares I receive, even from Italians. So then I say, “Not far from Carrara,” and usually people know where I mean. At least approximately. Although I have noticed that North Americans sometimes remain confused. As they often do.

Carrara is one of those names that Americans think they know. It sounds familiar, but they aren’t quite sure why. Sometimes they think it is a make of downhill skis. Or a kind of sports car. Or a line of fancy kitchen appliances or a condominium complex. “The marble quarries,” I then say. Which still doesn’t necessarily help.

My father was carried by two paramedics from his seat on the Alitalia flight from Toronto to Milan on the morning of April 23, 2010. He was carried because the wheels of the ambulance gurney would not pass down the plane’s narrow aisle. There were too many seats for that.

As we went through the papers he had with him in the airport, it became apparent that he had sold his house in Cathcart shortly before his departure for Italy. This was unsettling—partly because he had said nothing to me of this decision, and partly because the officials with whom I had to deal began referring to him as someone “of no fixed address.”

“He is not a nomad,” I told the immigration officer. “Obviously.”

Actually, it wasn’t that obvious. If my father had an address, we couldn’t find it.

“But where does he live?” the immigration officer asked. There was an edge of frustration in his voice, a bureaucratic reaction to an unsettling absence of necessary information. Apparently, the processing of my father could not continue—not satisfactorily—if it appeared that the body came from nowhere.

Nobody knew what to do. And there I stood, in the harsh, modern light of the airport, surrounded by a semicircle of police, immigration officials, airline representatives, and the two bewildered baggage handlers with a wooden crate the size and shape of a casket on the dolly between them. One of the airline employees—a woman—thought I had not heard the question. And after a few moments of silence, she repeated it more gently.

“Do you know his place of residence?” she asked.

A few more seconds of my silence passed. A delay in a flight to Nairobi was being announced.

“Cathcartario,” I answered—as much to myself as to anyone. And this, finally, was when I began to cry.

T
HE YOUNG
O
LIVER
H
UGHSON
was not athletic in his build. His arms were a little slender; his chest was a little caved. It was late in the summer of 1968, at a table of the Café David, in the main square of a little town in the northwest corner of Tuscany.

Pietrabella isn’t very far from the marble quarries of Carrara. It’s a town that sculptors have known for centuries. But it’s a place that Michelangelo didn’t care for very much, if you want to know the truth. It was an irony not lost on my boss, Pier-Giorgio, that a place that has always been so noisily, dustily, and charmlessly devoted to the industry of stone, seemed only to get in the way of Michelangelo’s chief obsession.

Michelangelo was one of those geniuses who seemed to have the history of art coursing through him—not because history interested him particularly but because both inspiration and instruction were to be found there. Anna used to say that
the past wasn’t something Michelangelo studied. It was part of who he was.

It was in 1506, on the Esquiline Hill in Rome, that a man came across what he thought at first was a buried grey rock. It appeared as if it had been worn into furrows by the passage of time. He was digging in a vineyard. And as he continued to dig, he was surprised by the size of what he was discovering. And then he began to see that it was not a rock at all.

A bearded male nude and two smaller, younger figures emerged. They were pulled from the mud and the pebbles and the shards of terra-cotta that had surrounded them for centuries. It took the farmer a good hour of digging before he could see that the three figures were of a single piece. They were struggling with two large serpents.

The discovery was sensational. Possibly, it was the Greek original. Possibly, a later Roman copy. Crowds gathered. Artists travelled great distances to study the marble statue.

The ferocious dignity of Laocoon’s struggle and the violent torque of the central figure fascinated Michelangelo. So did the serpents—sent by the gods to kill a father and his two sons. But Michelangelo was as interested in the practical function of the coiling snakes as much as anything. He admired the ingenuity. The serpents upheld the weight of Laocoon’s extended and otherwise insupportable arms.

By the time Michelangelo was in the Carrara area looking for the stone for the pope’s tomb, his first
Pietà
and the
David
were both behind him. He was no longer a young man, but he still had a young man’s passion for stone. He didn’t much like the place where, at the pope’s orders, he had ended up. He was impatient and restless and irritable.

There are more beautiful towns. It is the tragedy of Pier-Giorgio that he kissed only enough asses to be appointed executive
director of the tourist agency here, and not in Lucca or Florence—municipalities better suited to his goatee and his Milanese suits. Here, things aren’t so grand.

Most of the artists who work in Pietrabella are unknown foreigners. Most of them are young. And most of them are destined eventually to see for themselves, if they are not told by others, that they are not going to be great sculptors. In most cases they are not going to be sculptors at all. But there is a time of life when this doesn’t matter very much. There is a time of life that is, for some, the most beautiful of all. It can be a few days. It can be a year, sometimes two. It usually happens away—somewhere we can be who we want to be, instead of who we are.

For aspiring sculptors—their heads spinning with Brancusi and Moore, Bernini and Michelangelo—Pietrabella was that somewhere. It may be a centre of the marble industry in the Carrara area—the bustling headquarters of bathroom tiles, condominium lobbies, and kitchen backsplashes—but it is also a capital of artistic aspiration.

There are established artists who live in the area. And there are others who visit regularly, coming to choose stone, or to work, or to oversee the transposition of a small clay or plaster model into a piece of marble big enough to command a public square in Berlin or the entrance to a cluster of corporate towers in Shanghai. It is the local artisans, almost more than the stone itself, that make the place famous.

Henry Moore used to visit Pietrabella often. On occasion my mother was hired by one of the marble workshops to act as a guide for his excursions to the quarries. She remembered that his nose was very red. Botero lives not far away. Giovanni Belli’s photographs include portraits of Jacques Lipchitz and Jean Arp sitting in the Café David after their day’s work. But for the most part, Pietrabella is populated by freight handlers, diamond-saw
operators, lorry drivers, marble workers, and commercial stone carvers. This is not, as Pier-Giorgio makes clear, very glamorous.

Above the Café David in the main square there is a plaque marking the gloomy upstairs room where Michelangelo signed a contract for the stone he needed for one of the many projects that he never completed. But the bidets for the sultan of Brunei also came from the workshops of Pietrabella. Crucifixes and
Pietà
s, telephones and sinks, cupids and communion chalices are churned out morning and afternoon by the artisans of Pietrabella, men dressed in blue dust coats and folded newspaper hats who could carve the curls of Christ’s beard or the folds of Mary’s gown in their sleep. These traditions, passed from generation to generation, are ancient. But they are not, as Pier-Giorgio frequently points out, very sexy.

Our office hears regular complaints from hotel guests who imagined their holiday as picturesque tranquility but who are awakened at eight in the morning by the whir of dozens of pneumatic chisels and the beeping of front-end loaders from the town’s marble workshops. The tourists who sit on the terraces of our cafés object to the noise and the fumes of passing lorries and stone-laden flatbeds. As a result, Pier-Giorgio rejects any marketing initiatives that emphasize the region’s industry. He takes particular pleasure in reminding us that our most important visiting artist did nothing but complain about what a shithole he found himself in.

The combination of Michelangelo’s displeasure at being here and his disinclination to leave much evidence that he ever was, do not make him a very obvious marketing tool for regional tourism. He presents challenges, I admit. But Pier-Giorgio’s attitude, when I am foolish enough to bring the subject up in her presence, drives my mother crazy. “Greatness is greatness,” she says. “And morons are morons.”

In order to get the full impact of Anna Di Castello’s aesthetic theories you’d have to sit at her outdoor dining table with her as she talks—at some length—about art. This is what my father did on the last, long evening he spent with her. He was going to buy his train ticket the next morning. He was going to sit for the last time at a table at the Café David and write in his journal the next day. And then he was going to come back to the farmhouse from Pietrabella to tell Anna that he was leaving her. But the night before all this would happen, she had talked about art until the light had fallen.

My mother believes that art is a spirit, not a museum of objects, and that the work of the truly great—of whom there are very few—becomes part of what mankind is, not what it observes when it takes the time to visit an art gallery. Of course this spirit is visible in institutions such as the Accademia and the Louvre, but it is also apparent in the everyday. In fact, it is especially apparent in the everyday because the reason great art is great art—at least according to my mother—is that it is the everyday. The patterns of beauty that are apparent in a cobbled street, a mountain stream, or in the arch of boughs over the curve of a hillside path, are the same patterns found in the curves and planes, the light and shadow, of
David
, or
Santa Teresa
, or
The Kiss
. My mother conceives of art as being an ongoing song, to which centuries of voices contribute. And a few of the voices—Michelangelo is always the example she uses—are so great, they become the melody with which others harmonize.

On that last evening, when she sat at her uncleared outdoor table, drinking wine and talking happily with my father, she insisted that the song was audible for anyone who cared to listen. She crumbled her hash, rolled her tobacco, set the spliff in the corner of her mouth, scratched a match on the rough underside of the marble slab—all without ceasing to speak. And
her descriptions to him of the music she heard were various. It was energy. It was a magnetic field. It was a global grid of mystical points, responsible for outbursts of genius such as Charles Dickens, Dizzy Gillespie, and Leonard Cohen among others. She believed the stir Michelangelo created in the universe when he carved stone was something that could be felt still. She blew out the match with the exhaled smoke of her only pause.

I’m not sure who would be more horrified by this—my mother or Pier-Giorgio—but I do sometimes think that even the most harried and exhausted tourist is still hoping for something magical to happen on a trip to Italy. Even the one whose feet are hurting the most, whose back is the most sore, and who is most bored by what a museum guide is saying must want to feel the ruffled air of the ghosts my mother feels all the time. It isn’t the fact that Michelangelo was once in the vicinity of her farmhouse that excites her. She thinks he still is.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Giovanni Belli spent a good deal of time looking for evidence of work undertaken by Michelangelo during what was, apparently, his unhappy time in the Carrara and Pietrabella area. When my father wondered how it was that Michelangelo could have been so grumpy about a place that seemed—at least to a visitor from a small, unremarkable place in North America—so very beautiful, my mother said that Michelangelo’s moodiness was not caused by where he found himself so much as by what he found himself doing. Which was not carving marble.

I
N
1968,
AS HE SAT ON THE TERRACE
of the Café David, Oliver had something. And what he had was being twenty. He thought it was his being in Italy. He wasn’t the first to confuse the two.

Oliver had come to Pietrabella with no intention of staying for more than a few days. This was how long he had expected it would take for the Société Générale in Paris to transfer his funds to a bank in Pietrabella. Once that was sorted out, he’d recommence his travels. This proved to be an unrealistically optimistic view of the efficiency of European financial transactions in the late 1960s.

Being an artist’s model was a job that he had never previously imagined for himself, nor one that he would ever feel capable of undertaking again. But during his four months in Italy—his four months with Anna Di Castello, his only four months anywhere that wasn’t Cathcart, half of which were spent waiting for the Société Générale to release the funds of the Grace P. Barton Memorial Travel Bursary—he was perfectly poised between his youth and his adulthood. This was a moment of grace he was able to put to some advantage. He needed to make some money and so he worked for Richard Christian: standing, sitting, squatting, twisting, and, for one of the figures in
The Pope’s Tomb
, simulating as best he could, without actually strangling, being hung naked in Richard’s studio. For Richard’s idea was that his captives, the figures that would populate the pedestals and niches of his tomb, would be the grotesqueries of the modern age: the murdered, the tortured, the starving, the war-torn. But this wasn’t going to be easy—certainly not for his model. “This figure,” Richard explained as he demonstrated the cowering crouch he wanted for one of his captives, “has just been sprayed with napalm. I want to feel his skin bubbling.” They were, as Richard put it, “killer poses.”

But Oliver was up for it. It was work. It was enough money to get by. He had arrived in a town of sculptors at the one instant in his life when artist’s model was an occupational possibility.

S
EATED AT A TABLE AT THE
C
AFÉ
D
AVID
on his last day there—with the milk-foam on the rim of his cappuccino, with the smoke of his cigarette drifting across the piazza, with a train ticket in his pocket—Oliver Hughson was copying a verse of poetry in his rounded cursive into his journal. He liked the quotations in his journal to be neat. He wrote carefully:

It was a verse from “Memory,” and it wasn’t likely that Oliver was the only young person who, at that moment, was sitting down in an outdoor café to copy Rilke carefully into a journal. It was late in the summer of 1968. The youth hostels and train stations and art galleries of Europe were full of Olivers.

At a café in the main square of Pietrabella, Oliver took a last inauthentic pull on his cigarette. He was not really a smoker. He just liked the way he looked with a cigarette. He finished his coffee. He put his cap on his pen. He tucked his journal and his Rilke into his rucksack. He stood to go.

It was a slow time of morning, the midpoint between the early caffè
corretto
of the artisans on their way to their workbenches and the later cappuccinos of the lost-looking tourists who found their way, usually by accident, to Pietrabella.

Oliver left a tip, more generous than usual. He’d be back someday, he was sure. Perhaps next summer. Or the summer after that. He had not quite thought things through.

He looked around, taking in the red geraniums on the old brick balustrade, the tobacco shop, the cinema, the fountain,
the wide, vacant steps of the cathedral. He looked to the east, up beyond the town wall to the hills. He could see the steep grey bluff that marked the western ridge of the Apuan mountains. He wished now that he had been more rigorous with his journal entries during the past four months. He wondered how vividly he’d remember the evenings when Anna sat at her marble table and taught him about the figures of beauty that so commanded her imagination. “Form,” she said. “Michelangelo was great because he understood that form is all we have. Here. Now.” Oliver wondered how clearly he’d remember the details of Anna’s face, her voice, her instruction.