The Figures of Beauty (9 page)

“Very good then,” said Julian Morrow. “I shall not hear otherwise.”

V
IA
M
ADDALENA
19 is the address at which Oliver Hughson first arrived when he hitchhiked to Pietrabella early in May of 1968. His entire European trip had thus far consisted of less than forty-eight hours in Paris and the better part of three cold, wet days on the southbound shoulders of French highways. He’d been obliged to leave Paris much more abruptly than he’d expected—a change of itinerary that left him without money and uncertain where to go.

Returning to Cathcart had not been an option. His ticket required a stay of no less than three months, no more than twelve. And the only address he had in all of Europe was that of an American he had met during his one and only visit to the Musée du Louvre.

It was a brief conversation. The man’s name was Richard Christian. They met in the Italian Sculpture Gallery. They were
both slowly circling Michelangelo’s unfinished marble
The Dying Captive
.

Richard Christian was an American sculptor living in Pietrabella for whom my mother occasionally modelled. He had a large moustache and a pronounced Texan drawl. He was working on an ambitious tableau of marble figures at the time, and he’d gone to Paris for the specific purpose of seeing
The Dying Captive
—one of the pieces Michelangelo had intended for the tomb of Pope Julius II.

Michelangelo wanted to quarry the stone for this enormous commission in the quarries closest to the town of Carrara—in part because the marble was of such excellent quality, in part because it was convenient, in part because he was on friendly terms with Marquis Alberigo, the lord of Carrara. But Vasari recounts that while Michelangelo was in Carrara word came to him that the pope “had heard that in the mountains … near Seravezza, in Florentine territory, at the top of the highest mountain, Monte Altissimo, there were marbles of the same beauty and quality as those of Carrara.”

This was exactly the kind of unhelpful change of plans that popes could be relied upon to make. Michelangelo suspected some other agenda was at play—some repayment of a province; some borrowing of an army.

“I’ve been traipsing around Italy,” he wrote in a letter to Florence, “borne all kinds of disgrace, suffered every calamity, lacerated my body with cruel toil, put my own life in danger a thousand times …”

As you see, he was an artist.

Still, Michelangelo had learned from bitter experience that when it came to disagreements with popes, there was only one rule: the popes always won. He left Carrara. He signed the contract for the stone at a meeting in a dim, airless, second-floor
room overlooking the main square of an unappealing provincial town that was a good two-day climb below the quarry from which his marble would come.

After more than ten minutes of neither Richard nor Oliver orbiting very far away from the marble figure that so held their attention, their gazes met, and Richard raised his bushy eyebrows at Oliver. This was an acknowledgment of a kindred spirit. They were two rocks around which tumbled a teeming rapid of tourists.

They encountered one another twice more in their slowly opposing circles before Richard turned to Oliver.

“Unbefuckinglievable,” he said.

It wasn’t clear that Richard was commenting on the greatness of what they were looking at, or the fact that nobody else in the sculpture gallery appeared to notice it. Richard spoke with a friendly, unfussy ambivalence that often allowed for more than one interpretation of what he was saying. The Texan accent helped.

Oliver had entered the long, high-ceilinged room, fully intending to breeze through it. That’s what most people seemed to be doing. The tour bus driver had given everyone an hour and a half in the Louvre. But then Oliver saw
The Dying Captive
. By the time he was talking with Richard, Oliver was already rethinking his itinerary.

The $1800 for cultural improvement that Oliver Hughson had been awarded as the recipient of the Grace P. Barton Memorial Travel Bursary had been deposited, in his name, by Barton Newspapers in an account at the Société Générale near Place de l’Opéra. It was a bank of such burnished
fin de siècle
dignity, its 1940s telephones looked too modern.

Of course, this was long before computers and debit cards. And my father’s comprehensive tour of the youth hostels,
cheap hotels, and second-class railway cars of Europe would be just as old-fashioned as his bank. Using Paris as the hub of his continental excursions, he would return to the city as his carefully worked-out travel schedules intersected with his need to draw more funds from his account. He would pick up his mail at the American Express in Place de l’Opéra before catching the next train to Amsterdam or Vienna or Madrid. Or such was the plan.

M
Y MOTHER DOESN’T DISCOUNT
the possibility that other lives are ruled by chance. She is sure, however, that hers is not. When she begins working a piece of stone, she says she can’t explain what form she is seeking. But she also says, there is a difference between what can’t be explained and what can be imagined. She is not alone in this, as she often points out. Michelangelo believed that the hard, dusty journey of carving is looking for the destination that awaits the carver’s arrival.

For a sculptor immodest enough to compare her working process to Michelangelo’s, my mother was always understated about its results. “Because I’m not very good” is the most common response she gives to tourists in the Café David who wonder, gingerly, why they have not heard of her. But with my mother, an admission of not being good is not necessarily a sign of being modest. Whether she judges herself in relation to her contemporaries or to the sculptor who, in her opinion, is the greatest who ever lived, is not clear.

The Dying Captive
was not a name chosen by Michelangelo. Death is not at all what it brings to mind to anyone who stops in the Italian Sculpture Gallery and actually looks at it. The name must have been dreamed up by somebody—a priest is my mother’s predictable guess—intent on deflecting attention from
the solitary erotic pleasure that appears to be the figure’s dreamy preoccupation.

Richard and my father spoke for only a few minutes, but that was time enough. Richard talked about a piece of sculpture he was beginning in his studio. It was going to be called
The Pope’s Tomb
. It would be a dozen figures, each one mounted in a niche of a rectangular stone portico. The whole grouping was going to be about as big as a freezer—a dimension about which Richard’s gallery in Houston had serious misgivings. But Richard didn’t think he could make it any smaller. It was on the large size, he admitted, for a private collection. But it was small for a pope’s tomb.

Richard told Oliver that he should look him up if ever he got to Italy. As it happened, Oliver had every intention of getting to Italy. He’d even planned to stop in Carrara. He was aware of a connection with the old Barton pool. Archie Hughson had spoken of it.

Richard said he was going to need male models for
The Pope’s Tomb
. “Maybe I can give you some work,” he said. But this was not so much an offer as a way of ending a conversation. He didn’t expect to see Oliver again. Nor did Oliver expect to take Richard up on his offer.

Richard wrote his address on a scrap of paper that he dug out of a well-worn brown leather wallet:
Via Maddalena 19, Pietrabella, (Lucca), Italia
.

And that, pretty much, is everything Oliver Hughson knew about Richard Christian when, very early the next morning, Oliver left a Paris police station, returned to his hotel, packed his knapsack, and set out to find him.

T
HAT’S HOW IT HAPPENED
. My father walked into the Italian Sculpture Gallery on a fine day in early May 1968, and
The
Dying Captive
obliged him to reconsider his busy, transcontinental travel plans. This was a recalibration that he considered unhurriedly in the corridors of the Louvre—a delay that caused him to miss his tour bus, or at least that caused him not to be careful about catching it. And missing the tour bus meant that he could wander Paris on his own after the Louvre closed. Which is what he did for the rest of the afternoon, and for the evening, and into the night.

As the last hours of his first day on the continent of Europe passed, Oliver’s meandering return to his hotel had more to do with wishful thinking than actual navigation. Not that he minded. Paris is a good city to walk through at night—especially if you are young and have never been there before. He was pleased with his decision. He was happy to be in no hurry.

Every street was new to him and yet, in the manner of dreams and black and white films, not unfamiliar. He kept walking. And he was still walking a little before one in the morning. He was beginning to think that if he were ever going to get to bed, he would have to admit that he didn’t know where he was. Even he knew his hotel was nowhere near the river.

A piece of the footbridge might have fallen loose. A cable could have been left dangling. But neither was the case. There was just enough light to make out what was there. But even before Oliver’s summer abruptly changed from anything like what he’d imagined it might be, he knew without looking up what the stillness was, suspended so silently in the darkness above him. There is something unmistakable about the thin, hard smell of leather soles.

T
HIS IS HOW THINGS
had always been in the mountains. In as long ago as Michelangelo’s time not much was different. This is how it looked then. And this is how it looked in the summer of 1922.

Even the sounds would have been similar. Michelangelo would have watched blocks of similar size, ready to be slowly lowered on the same kind of wooden trestle with the same great creaks of leather and rope. Except for the long loop of cutting cable—a technological advance introduced by a Belgian quarry owner to the Carrara region in the late nineteenth century—little else in the methods of extraction of stone had changed in centuries.

The stone that the Morrow crew had loaded onto the wooden sled was rough with a crust of rusty brown that a grind and a polish would remove quickly enough. The quarter-ton block was the size of a large icebox—though solid. It was without interior flaw. Or so it appeared. No one ever knew for sure.

There were tests to ascertain stone’s internal consistency. The ratio of a block’s weight to its dimensions was informative. There were often visible clues in the quarry wall from which a block had been cut. Sometimes just the varying sound of a hammer struck against a block could reveal the existence of a hollow flaw at the core. But the piece the crew had strapped to the sled seemed solid.

Solid. But not safe, exactly.

Like all marble, the block was so densely crystalline, its mass was dangerous. Whether revolving slowly in the traces by which it had been hoisted from the quarry floor or poised for its descent on the sled, it was intent on returning not so much to the ground as to the centre of the earth.

The trestle on which the sled would be so slowly and carefully lowered was constructed on a built-up ledge of rubble. It was lined with a system of winches, ropes, and pulleys that reached down a quarter of a mile to the quarry’s loading area, to the wagon and to the sleeping driver and to the team of oxen waiting below. From there the stone would be transported down the switchback mountain roads to Carrara.

Few of the workers in the Morrow quarry had ever been to the city. The cost of such a trip was beyond them. Even though they had jobs—difficult jobs, dangerous jobs, jobs that demanded diligence and ingenuity and practical intelligence, and jobs that, for generations, had produced a good profit for the quarry owners—the workers were poor. Too poor for salt, so the saying went.

They were all from the villages that are tucked high in the folds of the surrounding hills. Few of them were ever out of sight of the white gashes that for centuries had been cut into the sides of the peaks. The villages were small places of cobbled streets and skewed walls. They were built-up levels of beamed floors and wide sills and tiled roofs and old, heavy wooden doors.

These towns would come to be known as picturesque—a notion that would have been preposterous to the people who had always lived there. They didn’t see anything picturesque in the cold air, in the winter sleet, or in labours only relieved by sleep. There was nothing pretty in the flat tolling of the bells of the stone churches. For them, there was nothing quaint about the cool marble vats in which they seasoned the pork fat that the quarry workers spread on their hunks of bread on their midday break. There was no romance in the deep windows, or the peeling walls, or the slopes of vines that they knew too well ever to think of.

Everything in the village could be seen in a five-minute walk. Here, barefoot children played in the cobbled streets. Their voices carried far down the valley. Here, wooden barrow wheels rattled past the old tree at the centre of the piazza.

Here, the women smacked their wet washing on the flats beside a shallow stream just beyond the village wall. Babies cried. Old men argued. Dogs barked.

Pots clattered, pans sizzled. Knives
thunked
through onion on wooden counters. The voices of mothers and daughters and grandmothers came clear as the air from kitchen windows.

Past the worn marble flagstones where the town’s families gathered after Mass, beyond the baptisteries and the stone crucifixes of the old churches, at the fenced and tended verges of the modest parishes where weddings and holy days were celebrated and weeping mothers and wives were never comforted, the rows of tombstones stood like crooked teeth. The names of the men who had been killed in the quarries were carved in the same white stone they had died trying to obtain.

The crew that stopped for lunch that noon hour, like all quarry workers, knew extremes of temperature that were particularly cruel. But they didn’t separate work from the weather in
which the work was done. They complained of neither the cold nor the heat. They might as well have complained about gravity.

None of them had spent any time in Carrara’s cozy cafés, its comfortable art institute, its gale-free cathedrals, or its shaded, sheltered marble studios. Only the quarry’s timekeeper was from Carrara, and the workers conjured the unfriendly ways of the town largely from the evidence of his formal, rounded accent, his official cap, and the way he stood at the open gate with his pocket watch in hand, threatening to report anyone who was even a few seconds late.

The Morrow workers had all been in the quarries from the time they were teenagers. Except for Sundays and on Christmas, they worked every day, leaving their homes each morning and walking through the woods, upward, along the secret network of damp paths that they knew well enough to follow in the dark. They carried coils of thick rope, their own heavy tools, and the oiled canvas shoulder bags that contained their carefully wrapped drinking cup, and maybe some wine, and a pouch of tobacco, and their bread and seasoned lard. Some of the younger men, having never worn a pair of shoes in their lives until the day they started work, tied their workboots together and slung them around their necks because they still found it more comfortable to be barefoot for the two-hour walk to the quarry.

As they walked to work the sky lightened—but not very much. Rising above them, through the trees, was not the brightening morning but the silhouette of the mountain range they were heading toward, the dawn still beyond it. Even though their journey was eastward, it was as if they were on their way back into a remnant of the night.

It was too early for even the most boisterous among them to whistle or sing a song. They were shadows passing through the trees. Except for the occasional clank of tools in their haversacks
or a rustling of leaves against their coarse trousers, they moved in silence. They used the woods because were they to use the gravel roads, they’d be charged a toll by the company for their passage.

Gradually, the men of one village joined the men of another, and then another, along the forks of the paths they followed, until, just before the hour they were required to arrive for work, the entire force of the quarry emerged—the woods suddenly revealing dozens of men. It was like a trick. It was as if the mountainside were able to perform some ingenious sleight of hand. In old fedoras and vests and heavy, worsted pants, they appeared all at once, from out of nowhere, sliding down through bushes and bramble to the gravel at the quarry’s front gates.

A
MONG THEM THAT DAY WAS A BOY
. It was the third day of his first week at work. Lino Cavatore had a thin face and tousled hair. He was younger than the rest—only twelve. He was working where his father and his brothers worked. And so he was very proud.

But it was true: he carried a slight hollow of sadness in his pride. But only slight. He knew you can’t choose your work any more than you can choose your family. He was what the men called a
bagash
—a water boy from the village of Castello. But the Morrow quarry is not what he would have chosen. Were the choice his.

There was a gully beyond the village wall, near the stream where the women did their laundry. Good clay could be found there. As a very young boy Lino had shown a talent for moulding figures and faces. The likenesses were often remarkable. But his family had no connections with the workshops of Carrara. The studios might as well have been on the moon. Lino had no way of learning about sculpture. His father and his two older brothers
worked in the quarries. As did his uncles. As did his cousins.

Men learned as they worked. This was on-the-job training that did not often allow for mistakes. In the quarries there was no apprentice system beyond the watchfulness that an older brother might keep for a younger, or a father for a son. The only position that gave a young boy an opportunity to learn something about the quarries before actually working them was that of the
bagash
, hired to fetch tools and rope, and to bring water up to the hot, thirsty men.

Shortly before noon, Lino Cavatore was hurrying through the staging area. He passed oxen and the clusters of drivers. He greeted a cousin. He said good morning to one of the foremen.

Lino’s rushed intensity made people smile. There was something about how seriously he undertook his tasks in the quarry that made him seem not like a boy so much as a boy pretending to be a busy old man.

Lino’s father and his brothers were in the crew that had just strapped a slab of stone to a wooden sled. Lino had looked up in time to see them hammer the wedges into place. They would soon be sitting down at their wooden table in the cool shade of a marble wall.

The water was a concession to the workers. It was a symbol of the owner’s concern for their welfare—or so the owner’s managers who had devised the system imagined. It came from a mountain stream. A young woman doled out the buckets to the boys who were sent down to get them.

Lino Cavatore looked up the quarter-mile of incline. His boots were still new and uncomfortable. The wire handle was already digging into his palm.

He decided to follow the slope of the sled tracks. It would be faster than the switchback path. He heard the timekeeper’s bell strike noon. He started up.