The Figures of Beauty (29 page)

T
OWARD THE END OF HIS LIFE
, the frail old man had taken to sitting on a white patio chair while he worked. Cleaning the pool was his job, and so long as the pool was open—so long as the old filter was humming in its shed and the water was not yet covered for the winter—the job never ended. The old man was always cleaning the pool.

He was slowly poling hand over hand, drawing the head of the vacuum across the bottom. He had mastered this long ago.

It was unexpected to find him cleaning the pool at night. But it wasn’t the time that was surprising, even though vacuuming the pool in the dark was something he had never done before.

But in the dream—one that marked the only few seconds of actual sleep that Oliver had on his flight from Toronto to Milan—it was not clear what other reason there could be.

Archie Hughson always held the long handle of the vacuum with his fingertips as if he were playing a flute. “I first fell in love
with his hands,” Mrs. Hughson once said—a remark made to Oliver at the dinner table when he was ten.

The Hughsons were affectionate with one another but reserved, and it may have been the uncharacteristic intimacy of Mrs. Hughson’s confession—made when her husband was not yet back from work, made over the tinned spaghetti and milk she served because Oliver liked that particular dinner so much and because he had an evening rehearsal at the church—that kept the comment in Oliver’s memory.

He was floating. He was staying still in the water. He was watching Mr. Hughson’s hands as he cleaned the pool. In the rising backwash of old age, Archie Hughson’s elegant fingers were the last shoals of his physical grace.

The old man sat, bowed forward, his floppy sun hat almost joining the raised knees of his loose khaki slacks. His forearms, outstretched, were slender, almost youthful in form, but they were mottled and badly bruised. The summer before he died he said, “My skin is so thin now. Every time I bump into something I start to bleed.”

The water was black. The deck was made of marble paving stones, worn with age. Around the periphery could be seen, even in the dark, hermits and saints, satyrs and maidens shielding their faces from the ages with their draped folds of stone. At the deep end, the graceful form of a female figure was pouring water from a jug into the pool. Two other maidens, in the distance, were approaching.

The hillside loomed. It was little more than a wooded ridge. But it was like a bank of cloud, and those rising trails led up, Oliver knew, not to street lights and garages and tracts of Cathcart’s new suburbs but to the cobbled square and thick walls of an ancient town.

When Oliver found the old man in a white plastic patio
chair, in the middle of the night, the still, humid air was heavy as slumber. He wanted to speak to him, of course, but that was out of the question. He was working silently, unimpeachable, in a realm that could not be disrupted, and Oliver knew that any movement he made would be a mistake. It was as if, rising from a midnight pond, he had come across something magical on the shore.

Oliver floated in the shallow end, trying to slow his breathing, trying to shield the silent air from the loudness of his heart. He knew that the slightest commotion—say the swallow of some familiar sadness—would change everything. The islands of lilac and maple trees, mapped black against the violet sky, would erupt with the hard memorial wings of an even older dream, and everything would be gone.

He went round and round the form until he had achieved a polished surface of such accomplishment and perfection that the beholder experiences an intense desire to savour this shape in an uninterrupted circuit
.

—R
UDOLF
W
ITTKOWER, ON
C
ONSTANTIN
B
RANCUSI’S
B
IRD

C
ATHCART
, O
NTARIO
. A
PRIL
2010.

However late it comes, this is not the ending I have in mind. Like everyone, I expect more to follow. Like everyone, I count on things continuing.

I am now sitting on a chaise at my old pool in Cathcartario. It’s not so hot and bright anymore. It’s only April. It’s getting chilly. But I’ll write a little longer.

The bare trees seem very still. The sky is more pewter in colour than grey. But the marble flagstones are still warm underfoot from when the sun was out.

I’ve had some difficulty with the pool’s filter system recently. And the cover won’t last another season. So perhaps it’s just as well that I am leaving. Perhaps, after all, I’m right. For once. It’s time for me to be unreasonable.

I’m not sure I’ve said this to you directly. But if I’m going to, I might as well say it now.

I think I only made one serious mistake in my life. Thousands of unserious ones, of course. But only one that was serious. Only one that was a very bad mistake to make.

Of course, I didn’t know you existed—not until you appeared, striding so determinedly up through the garden almost a year ago. And even though it was my mistake that caused this ignorance, I can’t blame myself for what I didn’t know.

But what I can be blamed for is this: it is up to all of us to know what we most love. Youth is no excuse for turning away from it. Nor is responsibility. We cannot always be reasonable. Love isn’t. We cannot always do what is expected of us. Your mother knew that better than most.

There is no one to guide us, no one to inform us, no one
to instruct us about love. We have to know it for ourselves—otherwise it is not love. The same is true of beauty. It comes too rarely to be mistaken for anything else. It comes too seldom for us to afford a mistake.

Once that summer—it must have been in mid-July—Anna and I climbed the trails behind her farmhouse, up to the town of Castello. Anna did not visit the place often, but not, I eventually realized, for the reasons one might expect. She was not very sentimental. She didn’t go very often to Castello because, as a general rule, she had no need to. But that summer someone opened a small restaurant, with a patio that had a view from the Castello wall, up the dusky headlands toward Cinque Terre and out to the sea. One evening—when we both had a little money from modelling—we decided that we would go.

We’d made our decision a little later than was advisable for anyone climbing up toward Castello on the steep wooded trails in the evening. I remember being surprised by the sudden nighttime of temperature when we stepped from the open field. We had not thought to bring a flashlight. After our initial adjustment to the darkness, this turned out to be a good thing.

The lattice of black leaves and the long hollows through the trees of the path we were following proved to be like magic. Sometimes Anna led me. Sometimes I led her. And this was our upward climb, sometimes talking, sometimes laughing, sometimes stopping to kiss, but never, not once, letting go of one another’s hand. This, so ordinary, is the greatest claim I have to ever being truly alive.

On the face of it, I suppose, when I come back to the place where I once spent a summer, there will be a much older woman than the one I remember. But Anna’s a sculptor. She’s not much interested in what’s on the face of anything.

She will be carving stone under a green canopy of light beside an old farmhouse in the Tuscan hills. She won’t look quite the way I remember her, of course. But that won’t matter. I’ll have another perspective now. That’s what time is for.

Behind her, at the bottom of the garden, at a spot where once there had been an ancient spring, there will soon be a white figure. The sky will be the bluest of blue. The hills will be the greenest green.

DAVID MACFARLANE
has won numerous National Magazine and National Newspaper Awards. His memoir of Newfoundland,
The Danger Tree
, won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Non-Fiction, and his novel
Summer Gone
was nominated for the Giller Prize and won the Chapters/
Books in Canada
First Novel Award. He writes a weekly column in the
Toronto Star
and lives in Toronto.

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“
The Figures of Beauty
is a rich, imaginative novel about art, life, and beauty.
It’s epic in scale but intimate in tone, with Macfarlane’s prose as crisp and pure
as Carrara marble. One of the best novels I’ve read all year.”
—R
OSS
K
ING, AUTHOR OF
Leonardo and the Last Supper

“A beautifully written, complex, and bittersweet story that spans continents and eras.
Macfarlane teases his story to the surface as meticulously as his sculptors (Michelangelo,
Brancusi) extracted their forms from marble—and always with a vivid sense of place,
from a small Ontario community to the hill towns of Carrara.”
—D
APHNE
K
ALOTAY, AUTHOR OF
Russian Winter
AND
Sight Reading

Front cover: Juliet Ferguson/Millennium Images, UK
Back cover: Geoffrey James

The Figures of Beauty
Copyright © 2013 by David Macfarlane.

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EPub Edition © AUGUST 2013 ISBN: 9781443415989

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FIRST EDITION

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