The Figures of Beauty (23 page)

O
NE
S
UNDAY MORNING
in the spring of 1968, about ten days after his arrival in Pietrabella, Oliver Hughson was taken by Anna Di Castello on a climb up into the Apuan mountains of the Carrara region of southwest Liguria and northwest Tuscany—what Boccaccio and Dante knew as the Lunae Montes, the “mountains of the moon.”

Charles Dickens passed through the Carrara area in 1846. He wrote a memoir of his journey through Italy. He called his journal
Pictures from Italy
. It is included in volume XVIII of the red, cloth-bound complete works that was left to Oliver—along with a house, a swimming pool, several Royal Doulton figurines, some gloomy furniture, a miniature replica of Michelangelo’s
David
, and an investment portfolio comfortably adequate for a bachelor to live on.

Oliver had no pictures of his time in Italy. His camera—not very good anyway—had ended up in several pieces on the
kitchen floor of the little farmhouse in the countryside that for a summer he had shared with Anna. On that occasion, Anna had stood over it, glowering, knife in hand, as if watching for any sign of remaining life. Had the camera attempted one last, dying click of its shutter, she’d have run the blade of her paring knife—and the chopped garlic that still clung to it—through its Instamatic heart. Or that, at any rate, was what her expression conveyed to astonished Oliver.

As a result, Oliver’s souvenirs were idiosyncratic, to say the least. He had a copy of Rudolf Wittkower’s Slade lectures on sculpture, its binding long gone. He had a black and white picture of Bernini’s
Santa Teresa and the Angel
pinned above his desk in Cathcart. And he had the Dickens.

“They are four or five great glens …” Charles Dickens wrote. “The quarries, or ‘caves,’ as they call them there, are so many openings, high up in the hills, on either side of these passes, where they blast and excavate for marble …”

A
NNA LOOKED AWFUL
that Sunday morning. This was characteristic. Before she had her coffee, Anna looked like she’d bite your head off.

But her scowl wasn’t threatening. It was merely cautionary: a warning to anyone in her vicinity to steer clear until her second cup had been sipped in silence and her puffed eyes had sorted themselves out. And it was usually at her outdoor table, in T-shirt and underwear, that she eased herself through her disgruntlement at no longer being asleep.

Anna’s hair had the lustre of mahogany. So Oliver had by then decided—although he tried a dozen different descriptions of Anna’s hair in his journal that summer. None of them were quite right. Oliver thought her eyes indescribable. Literally.
His notebook was filled with his self-rejected efforts: almond-shaped, jewel-like, deep. “Flashing” was crossed out heavily. These were approximations—and wrong, in some important way, for being so.

Anna’s eyes were brown. That was about as close as Oliver ever got to finding a word that worked. They were the visual equivalent of the vowels that, no matter how he applied himself to his copy of
Italian for Beginners
, he was never able to master. They were eyes that were unafraid of demonstration—whatever mood Anna was in the mood to demonstrate.

Anna’s resistance to etiquette was such that she withheld her smile until moments when she actually felt like smiling. As a result, it seemed not so much an expression as a change of weather—intensely gratifying to anyone who happened to be studying the sky at the moment the sun broke through.

But, if forced to name a favourite of Anna’s physical characteristics, Oliver would probably have first chosen her hair. He often let it spread through the rise of his fingers just for the pleasure of watching it fall.

Anna’s hair was at its best in the evenings when she sat at the centre of several tables full of singing, laughing
stranieri
at the Café David. It looked like it had been swept by her day—by the swings of her head when she was working, and by the breezes she’d ridden through on her rusty old bicycle—and not by a hairbrush at all.

It was at its worst when she just got out of bed. The storms that passed across her pillows in the night left a mess that would have included tangled power lines and unpassable roads had she been a landscape and not, as Oliver suggested to her one morning—from a safe distance—“a grumpy sleepyhead.”

Oliver had no photograph of Anna because Anna would never let Oliver take one—a prohibition that he did not fully
appreciate until the day he snapped a picture of her chopping garlic on the counter beside the kitchen window. His camera was hurled against the wall as a result. She had wrested it from him with surprising, unstoppable fury. “I’m not going to be a fucking souvenir,” she shouted.

“Fucking” was a word Anna used a lot. It was the word “souvenir” that she spat so violently it sounded like profanity. Oliver had never before imagined that anger could achieve such sudden gale-force extremes. On the plus side: he had never guessed that lovemaking could be so ferocious.

Anna made a rosemary infusion that she used instead of commercial shampoo—simmering it on the stove for hours, before cooling it in her not entirely reliable kerosene refrigerator. The water pressure in the house was just as iffy, and Anna washed her hair on the hot days of that summer under the creaking hand pump at the bottom of the farmhouse garden. Oliver watched. He was always amazed that this scene—Anna turning, brown-skinned, wrapping a towel around her head, and smiling at him—was real. It seemed impossible. But then, all of Italy seemed impossible to Oliver.

He had arrived in Pietrabella, after his long, mostly tedious journey from Paris, in the evening. When he awoke in Richard Christian and Elena Conti’s spare bedroom, it was late in the morning. He had slept soundly. But the room was still dark.

Richard had gone to his studio early. Elena had already caught a train to Rome, where she had a share in an apartment and where she worked as a freelance translator.

There were high, heavy wooden shutters on the window of the guest room.

Oliver opened them. He only wanted some light to unpack his knapsack. He had not anticipated quite so panoramic a view. He felt as if he were in a movie.

There were the terraced olive groves and grapevines. There were the footpaths that bordered the fields. There were the dusty switchback roads and red-tiled roofs.

The sounds were these: a commotion of roosters, the distant horn of a bus coming round a sharp turn in the hills, the whirring of the pneumatic chisels of men working stone.

There was white dust in the air. There was the smell of brush fires. There was the quiet, oddly distinct sound of cutlery being set for lunch in the house next door.

And above all this—either close or far away, he couldn’t be sure—there were the foothills of the Apuans.

It felt like falling, almost like fainting. Dickens called it a “cheerful brightness.”

When he opened those thick wooden shutters for the first time, the light of Tuscany staggered him.

Oliver lost his balance that morning. It was the first time he could remember it happening. He fell backward, his small, bare feet suddenly uncertain on the cool terra-cotta floor.

T
HE ROSEMARY INFUSION
gave Anna’s hair a distinct, woody scent—as exotic as the rosewood of jewellery boxes or the cedar lining of drawers filled with perfumed silk. Not that Oliver had any experience with either. And not that he’d had any experience with someone like Anna. Her difficulties with mornings often had to do with being up late in the Café David with a group of foreign sculptors.

Dusk settled over Pietrabella’s central piazza. More wine was ordered. The surrounding hills darkened. The strings of lights on the square came on.

The stories began. And then the arguments. And then the singing. And then everyone decided to go to the little place on Via Piastrone that made such good grilled quail.

There was more wine. There were many courses. There was more singing. There was dancing.

These were the kind of nights that preceded the kind of mornings when Anna looked most awful. This was what Oliver discovered when he knocked at the door of her farmhouse. It was eight o’clock on a Sunday morning.

Anna’s invitation to Oliver to go up into the quarries on Sunday morning had been typically unadorned with small talk. The offer was made at the Café David.

They’d met once before—at Richard and Elena’s on Via Maddalena, on the evening Oliver had arrived in town.

At the Café David, Anna was sitting amid a group of sculptors. She’d caught Oliver looking at her a few times.

She had a directness to her that had as much to do with the absence of nuance in her English as with her temperament. She was ending a relationship with an American sculptor at the time. Anna did not end her relationships with great diplomacy. And it was in response to a remark from him that she got suddenly, if not steadily, to her feet.

She walked to the table where Oliver was sitting by himself. She did not bother with preamble. She spoke loudly enough for everyone to hear. “Come to my house tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock. We will go for a climb in the mountains.”

When she turned, she almost knocked over the empty chair opposite Oliver. “I live in the hills,” she said. “On the way to Castello.”

Anna gave a final glare in the direction of the table at which she had been seated. “Everyone knows where.”

It was an impressive exit—although not impressive enough for Anna to remember it. Oliver’s arrival at the farmhouse at eight o’clock the next morning was not something she was expecting. Apparently.

She wasn’t going to say a word before she had a cup of coffee.
Her hair, the dark circles under her almost-closed eyes, her long, rumpled T-shirt, her bare, flat-footed shuffle through her uncared-for kitchen made the point. They conveyed precisely the only reply that could, with Anna’s customary honesty, be made to Oliver’s polite, “How are you this morning?”

The cure for a hangover of this severity—so Anna told Oliver as she poured her second cup of thick, hot espresso—was the combination of coffee, a spliff, and the crisp, cool air of the Apuans. She then set out to prove this to be true.

An hour later, Oliver’s newly heightened appreciation for the beauty of the Tuscan countryside overcame what concerns he had about Anna’s driving. They made their incautious, bumpy way down from Anna’s place, and through the mostly empty, Sunday-morning streets of Pietrabella. They started up toward the quarries.

Anna’s Cinquecento was so badly rusted the passing road was visible through the floor. The car was filled by their two bodies, the knapsack Anna hastily packed for lunch, and the satchels, books, sculpting tools, empty wine bottles, and dirty laundry that were already occupying what little passenger space there was.

Anna had no money, of course. Oliver didn’t either, he was embarrassed to admit. But Anna thought she had enough gas to get to the point on one of the high, switchback roads where, she had decided, their hike would begin. They’d worry about coming down when they came down. If the worse came to the worst, she said, they could coast.

This made perfect sense to Oliver. It was the first time in his life he’d smoked hash.

After they parked, Anna lit the bottom half of what they had smoked with their coffee. The car filled with smoke. It smelled like someone had set a pile of dung on fire. Oliver wasn’t used to the black tobacco. He started coughing.

“Is this dangerous?” he spluttered.

“The hash?”

“No. The climb.”

“Ha,” said Anna. “It is very healthy, the climb.”

“What are we climbing?”

“We are climbing to the mountains of the moon.”

F
OR MOST OF THE SECOND HOUR
of their climb they were below what looked like the loop of a giant clothesline. It was a Belgian invention.

The cables didn’t turn on Sundays. But on every other day—except, of course, for Christmas—the valleys hummed with the steady revolutions of lines of thickly braided steel. They were so long they looked as if they were stays holding the mountains in position. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, they’d been the principal method of marble extraction.

As it turned on its enormous loop, the cutting wire was lowered slowly into the marble. A slurry of water, ground quartz, and sand was fed into the deepening slice. There were workers who were so skilled at this they could judge the cable’s progress through the stone without ever looking at it. They made adjustments by sound alone.

The steady friction made the cutting line dangerously hot. For this reason, far below the quarries, usually below the staging areas where the workers first entered the gates and where the wagons were loaded, water troughs were constructed. The cables ran through the water to cool before returning to the white caverns above.

B
Y THE TIME
they stopped for lunch, the cooling troughs, far below them, looked like miniatures of themselves.

Anna knew a spot. There was a stream.

The current widened, fed by a fall of water over a ledge of rock. She kicked off her old tennis shoes—footwear that Oliver thought alarmingly flimsy for so arduous a climb. But they didn’t seem to be bothering Anna.

She stood, barefoot, in the shallows.

She showed Oliver the different varieties of stone that she had gathered in a single scoop of the creek bed. She had been right. Her recovery from the night before was now complete.

Anna held out the handful of smooth, wet pebbles. “Look,” she said. “They’re marble. But each is different. Look. Washed from quarries up in the mountains.”

Cautiously, for the rocks underneath her feet were uncertain, she stepped closer to him. “The grey one is Ordinario,” she said. “Mostly for building. It is everywhere. Window ledges. Stairs. Floors. The
pissoir
on the way to Via Maddalena …”

“How do you know that?” Oliver asked. He meant the question as a joke, although Anna took it seriously.

“I was a curious little girl.”

“And the white?”

“Statuario,” she said. “The first prize for sculptors. We all want this, like we want snow. Or angels’ wings. Or stars. Because it is so pure for carving. It is such clean beauty. It was why Michelangelo came. And maybe he saw this very Statuario before it got knocked from his block.”