The Figures of Beauty (11 page)

I
T IS A GOOD HOUR’S CLIMB
from Pietrabella to Castello, and it is in the rugged, in-between area, about halfway from the town to the village, that my mother rents her little farmhouse. It’s where, in 1968, she spent the only time she ever spent with my father. It was a summer he could never forget and a summer that my mother, with typical stubbornness, would not for a very long time admit to me that she could remember.

The surrounding land had once been the grounds of an ancient convent. Before that, it was said to have been the site of an even more ancient temple and a sacred spring.

The convent had commandeered the property in much the same way that Christian holidays took over the dates of pagan celebrations. But in this case the church’s triumph was not as eternal as was hoped. At the same time that Napoleon’s sister Princess Elisa Baciocchi was inventing the industry of souvenirs, ornamental statuary, and marble replicas, she also embarked on a
campaign to reduce the region’s redundant religious institutions.

This early example of downsizing made many people uneasy. Cost-cutting efficiency was not obviously God’s will—not if the preceding four or five centuries of cathedrals, tombs, monasteries, frescoes, and lavish iconography were anything to go by. But in the case of the convent in the hills above Pietrabella, Princess Elisa and the forces of practicality did not need to intercede very strenuously. Time took care of things.

The convent’s hard, narrow beds, its long, unadorned tables, its cold stone hallways, and its cushion-less kneeling benches had been unused for decades by the time the old place was converted to a villa. The place became the residence of Julian Morrow, and its refurbishment had followed only one criterion. It was exactly what he wanted.

He built a spring-fed pool that he could see from his breakfast table. This view, of cypresses and stone figures and the cascading hills beyond them, was softened with moist haze when he took his coffee on summer mornings. At that hour the pool, its terrace of hedgerow and statuary, and its surrounding gardens were brushed with soft angles of sunlight. It was a landscape that never failed to remind him that he wasn’t in Wales.

The only reason I can even guess at the physical dimensions of the convent is that we know, to some extent, what Morrow’s villa used to look like. The pool, the gardens, and the statues were documented in considerable detail in the 1920s by a local photographer. This is the kind of thing that is only of interest to historians, however. As my boss, Pier-Giorgio, who is not one, frequently makes clear.

Giovanni Belli made the marble quarries and the work of the region’s artisans his most recurrent photographic subject. His black and white images are quite magnificent, but he never became very well known. This, in part, had to do with the fact
that he never had to. His family had owned quarries in the area for centuries. He loved marble, but as a young man he concluded that the family business was manned with a sufficient number of his siblings to allow him to pursue a related love. He’d been given a camera as a boy.

Before I travelled to Cathcart to meet my father, Clara and I tried to convince Pier-Giorgio that we should produce a travel brochure for the lobbies of hotels and
pensiones
in the Carrara region, to be entitled “Michelangelo’s Mountains.” We wanted to use Belli’s black and white pictures as its illustrations. It was our idea that the old photographs, most of which are preserved in an archive in Lucca, would appeal to a certain nostalgia that was then in fashion. We also thought that the local lore about Michelangelo’s trails and his quarries could be put to good, eco-tourism use. We were not without our marketing rationale.

What made the photographs of Giovanni Belli the perfect choice of illustration for our brochure were not only their historical value and compositional grandeur. Belli’s name is associated not only with photography but with his efforts to prove that Michelangelo left some evidence, somewhere, of the time he spent in the area. It was, in the region at least, a famous obsession.

Belli’s knowledge of Michelangelo was considerable, and by no means unsophisticated, but the premise of his belief was unshakeably simple. He didn’t think the great sculptor could go that long without doing what he most loved: carving stone.

Clara and I envisioned our brochure bringing throngs of hikers, all of them wearing expensive, Italian-made boots and carrying several credit cards. We pictured taxi drivers and waiters and shopkeepers kept busy catering to tours that came from far and wide to follow Giovanni Belli’s beautifully documented quest for Michelangelo.

But we were not successful in our proposal. “I’m sorry to have to inform you,” Pier-Giorgio wrote, “that we live in the twenty-first century. Not the Renaissance.”

As you see: what an asshole.

Julian Morrow’s villa can be seen in the background of many of Belli’s pictures. Because his studies of the pieces of sculpture in the terraced gardens were so various and so detailed, the building is visible in a useful variety of angles. And this is all we know of what the old convent might have looked like. Morrow’s residence—along with its pool, its statues, its fountains, and its hedged, terraced gardens—was destroyed by Allied artillery in 1944. A modest farmhouse was built in its place in the early 1950s.

It is a pretty spot. But the isolated, rustic characteristics that had appealed to my mother when she was in her twenties proved to be inconvenient when I was born. My mother concluded that life with a baby was easier with reliable running water and electricity. We moved into town, to the flat at Via Maddalena 19, in the summer of 1969. I was only a few months old.

M
Y MOTHER WAS A SINGLE PARENT
, which was not at all common in Pietrabella even in the 1970s. And often when she was away, or busy, or just not there, I had dinner and then slept at Clara’s—a home that was so orderly it seemed to me wondrously the opposite of our messy, unvacuumed flat.

These were the kind of minor points of parenting at which my mother did not always excel. But she was good at the major ones, and her occasional absences seemed demonstrations of her faith in me as much as anything. I was quite proud of being big enough to make my own plans now and then.

My mother’s belief that a tidy house is the sign of a wasted
life was not one shared by her neighbours. The citizens of Pietrabella are, for the most part, respectable, hard-working people—and the Taglianis were exactly that. The white marble of their kitchen floor was as spotless as a glacier. The old walnut sideboard gleamed with lemon oil.

“Bourgeois to their souls” is my mother’s description. Her assessment is unkind but not inaccurate. Pietrabella is a conventional place—except for one idiosyncrasy.

The town’s dependence on the region’s principal industry has left its otherwise conservative population with a deep respect for artists and artisans. Sculptors are treated by the population the way holy beggars might have been treated by a community of believers. “Your mother has her own way” was as close to criticism as Mrs. Tagliani ever came when, with no sign of my mother or of dinner, I wandered up the street to Clara’s parents’ house with my school books. I was always made welcome.

In the bedtime stories that Clara’s father told us, the path that began with our street continued its slow, sleepy zigzag up, beyond the walls and the bell tower of Castello, beyond the cobbled central piazza where a white marble tablet of forty-three names commemorates the terrible massacre that occurred there in 1944.

It went up through the higher fields and forests, and up to the clear cool pools and waterfalls and the lush beds of watercress and the plateaus of alpine grass. It went up past gorges and craggy outcrops of rock. It went up beyond scree and bluff. It continued all the way to the mountaintops and to the cold and glistening marble quarries where the great artist Michelangelo Buonarroti had climbed so long ago to find his beautiful white stone. And then, as Clara’s and my eyes closed so that we could better picture the heights Mr. Tagliani’s low, monotonous voice was describing, this meandering trail continued toward the sky.
Up into the snowy peaks, and up into the clear blue, and up into the lofts of white clouds where, if we followed the gently twisting path, we might find angels who could sometimes come to the aid of little girls with troublesome monkeys—so long as the girls remembered to bring the angels chestnuts, which were very difficult to obtain in the bright and holy realm of Heaven.

I loved the feel of the cool, tightly made sheets. Even in the shadows, I admired the vacant windowsills and the crucifix hung bravely alone and off-centre on the white wall. Clara’s father, a kind, tired man who worked as a clerk for a shipping company in Viareggio, sat in the dark in a wooden chair between the two beds and told us his bedtime stories. He made them up as he went.

Their purpose, of course, was to lull us to sleep. But I think Mr. Tagliani often found himself under the spell he was weaving. There were times when the low, steady drone of his voice seemed to slip into his own dreams.

“There are no troublesome monkeys in Pietrabella,” Clara said. She was suddenly fully awake. Her father had just introduced this strange, unexpected element to one of his narratives.

“Hmm?”

“You said ‘troublesome monkeys.’”

“Did I?”

“Pietrabella is not in Africa, Mr. Tagliani,” I chimed in helpfully.

“Isn’t it?” The sleepiness in Clara’s father’s voice left me unsure whether he was kidding us or whether he had revealed some secret too mysterious to fathom.

We had just learned in school about how the unimaginable pressures of tectonic plates had transformed limestone into marble millions upon millions of years ago. Our teacher was Signor Lambrusco, a small, huddled-up man whose stoop was
thought to be the result of his daily forbearance of a famously bad-tempered wife. He told us that if we could travel faster than the speed of light we could go back in time—past Garibaldi and Verdi, past Michelangelo and da Vinci, past Dante and Boccaccio, past Jesus, past the Egyptians, past the cavemen, and past all the dim-witted dinosaurs—to an age when green and ancient tropical seas were being drained and our mountains were being formed.

Signor Lambrusco’s soft face took on a dreamy expression during this lesson. His voice was usually flat and weary. But he seemed entranced by the idea of getting away from the present as completely as possible. If we could only go back through the millennia, Signor Lambrusco told us wistfully, we would be able to see how marble happened. Two hundred million years ago, he explained, the Italian coastline was beneath the Tyrrhenian Sea.

“And while it was …” The dramatic sweep of his arm took in everything: our school, our town, his wife. “While all this was drowned,” he said to us, “deep at the bottom of the Tyrrhenian Sea, do you know what happened?”

We did not.

“Flecks of minerals, bits of vegetation, and fragments of coral drifted down. Down through the warm depths. This accumulation was laid in beds of silt on the ocean floor over unimaginably long stretches of time. And these beds, in turn, were buried by millions upon millions of years of further deposits. And this mass was pressed into the layers of the calcium carbonate that eventually became …”

Signor Lambrusco paused to see if anyone could fill in the blank. Nobody could—an eruption of the kind of silence that usually infuriated him. But he continued, pleasantly lost in the eons upon eons that had preceded, among other things, his marriage. For once he was untroubled by our ignorance.

“Limestone,” he announced. “And layers of undersea limestone is what these strata would have remained, had the earth’s tectonic plates not begun their heaving and grinding thirty million years ago.”

The pressure and the heat were intense in their effect. “The limestone seabed buckled upward, and took the form of a coastal mountain range. The Apuans,” he said, in case we’d missed the point. “But something else happened. Something even more astonishing than a seabed turning into a mountain range.”

Did we know what that something was?

“Metamorphosis,” he said. “The limestone was recrystallized by this incomprehensible force into deposits of an entirely new stone.”

He crossed to the window of our classroom and looked upward, to the east. “Marble,” he said. “The marble of Carrara. As you see. Michelangelo’s mountains.”

These were the same peaks that Mr. Tagliani described in the meandering bedtime stories that he told to Clara and me—mountains that looked white in the distance, as if, even in summer, they were crested with snow, as if they were the cold ramparts of the kingdom of Heaven.

Lying in the fresh, tightly made sheets of the spare bed in Clara’s room, I wondered about Mr. Tagliani’s troublesome monkeys as I fell asleep. I thought about poor, beleaguered Signor Lambrusco. And I wondered whether my best friend’s father was dreaming of continents that had not yet drifted apart. I wondered if his stories came from a time not yet transformed into the order we now believe it possesses.

F
ROM FAR AWAY IN THE QUARRIES
there was the sound of a mournful horn—so faint, only someone who had heard it before would pick it out from the general bustle of the town of Carrara. The low, extended note was softened and confused by the unfolding of the valleys through which it passed. It seemed not to come from a single source, but more generally from the sky.

Julian Morrow noticed it that summer morning. As always, he worried that it might be the signal of an accident. It often was. And he worried that it might be coming from one of his quarries. It sometimes did. He had not accommodated himself to the gruff acceptance of injury and death that the managers of his quarries took to be natural. But as some small comfort—not entirely convincing, he had to admit—Morrow reminded himself that the greatest beauty is never without its sadness.

This was a theme on which he could expand. Often he did.

He had a gift for describing things vividly to the attentive
audiences of his speeches. He could make people see views they’d never even imagined.

It amazed him that in those community halls and Masonic temples, those library meeting rooms and church basements he could make people see: a quarry worker, his boots perched on an uncertainty of rubble, his head bent over the track he was repairing.

The worker might have heard what sounded like thunder. He might have felt the shuddering in the ground. He might have looked up to see, for his last second, a snapped line flailing in the blue air. He might have had time to understand the meaning of the scattering timber and the flash of runaway white mass.

In the past fifteen years Morrow had spent many months in Carrara. The rest of the time he attended to family life and ran his business in a chilly, frequently gloomy Welsh city that remained, officially, his place of residence. He addressed the subjects of danger and sadness and beauty in his speeches on the marble quarries of Carrara—most recently, only a few months previous, before a luncheon audience at the Cardiff Geographical Society.

Morrow had been quick to realize that these speeches—to professional associations, to toastmasters clubs, to ladies’ auxiliaries and educational societies—were the best kind of advertising. Free, for one thing. Convincing, for another. He cast himself in the role of the adventurous explorer, and his audiences seemed not to notice that his motivation was more overtly commercial than Livingstone’s or Shackleton’s.

Julian Morrow owned several quarries in the Carrara region. The use of the word “several” was his. This is not because he was modest about the number. It’s because the number was always under negotiation.

He once admitted to one of his several Italian mistresses that he was “unappeasable in appetite”—but only because her
English wasn’t good enough for this admission of faithlessness to upset her. When he wasn’t acquiring he was divesting. And he divested in order to do more acquiring.

He had a craggy face that could never have been described as handsome. His nose was long and his eyes had the small, unwavering attention of bullet holes. But it was his energy that obtained, not his features. His enthusiasm gave people the impression that he was attractive. And parts of him were. He had the legs of a teenager.

Julian Morrow’s approach to the complexities of commerce was to control as many of them as possible. His workers took his stone from the walls of his quarries so that it could be carved in his workshops and transported on his ships to wherever a need for Carrara marble was felt keenly enough to make the labour of his excavators, his drivers, his artisans, his finishers, his shippers, his distributors, and his installers worth his while.

The breeches, boots, and hacking jacket were elements of costume he put to good use. When he delivered one of his speeches, he leaned a walking stick against the podium. And he usually read a passage from the journal Charles Dickens kept during a trip to Italy in 1846 by way of setting the scene.

“ ‘But the road,’ ” Morrow intoned, “ ‘down which the marble comes, however immense the blocks!’ ”

The use to which Morrow put Charles Dickens went beyond borrowing the great author’s descriptive powers. The name commanded deep respect, particularly among the audiences of luncheon speeches in provincial British towns. That Charles Dickens had written about Carrara lent capital to Morrow’s own musings on marble and on beauty. As well, quoting Dickens meant that Morrow didn’t have to rein in his fondness for dramatic proclamation.

“ ‘Conceive a channel of water …’ ” Morrow’s left hand
meandered in the air before the rapt attention of his audiences as if describing the course of a river. “ ‘A channel of water running over a rocky bed, beset with great heaps of stone of all shapes and sizes, winding down the middle of this valley; and
that
being the road—because it was the road five hundred years ago!’”

Morrow always paused here, to let any grammatical confusion dissipate and to let this remarkable notion settle in. For it was true: the quarries Charles Dickens visited in 1846 were not very different from the ones Michelangelo had known.

In the latter half of the thirteenth century, local demand for marble, as well as the requirements of Pisa and Florence, reopened several dormant quarries of Carrara. Marble’s associations with the traditions of the ancient Romans and the Greeks made it a medium sufficiently serious to embody the most lofty aspirations.

This sense of marble’s spiritual and heroic characteristics only increased as the Renaissance unfolded. In the mid-1500s, in his
Lives of the Artists
, Giorgio Vasari compared Michelangelo’s
David
to the grand statuary of Rome, much of which had been quarried in the Greek colonies of Naxos, Paros, Aphrodysias, Dokimeion, and Marmara. The source of marble changed, but Vasari thought the same spirit prevailed.

Morrow continued. He knew the Dickens quotation by heart.

“ ‘Imagine the clumsy carts of five hundred years ago, being used to this hour, and drawn, as they used to be, five hundred years ago, by oxen, whose ancestors were worn to death five hundred years ago, as their unhappy descendants are now, in twelve months, by the suffering and agony of this cruel work!’ ”

Morrow was a stirring public speaker. This was because, unlike many, his speeches had a purpose. He was a salesman.

“‘Two pair, four pair, ten pair, twenty pair, to one block, according to its size; down it must come, this way. In their
struggling from stone to stone, with their enormous loads behind them, they die frequently upon the spot; and not they alone; for their passionate drivers, sometimes tumbling down in their energy, are crushed to death beneath the wheels.’

“The quarries so vividly described by Mr. Dickens are built in terraces,” he told the Cardiff Geographical Society, his large hands gripping the sides of a podium. “It is possible to conceive of them as abstractions—vast sculptures of geometric form and volume. But I am too old-fashioned for Mr. Brancusi’s modern art, I’m afraid.”

Morrow waited for the inevitable grumble of chuckles.

“And so I see them as ornamental gardens carved directly into the mountainside—great terraced landscapes of stone, extraordinary in their beauty. But the quarries are dangerous places, and for that reason, all the more beautiful. For beauty without sadness,” he said, his voice building toward his conclusion, “is mere prettiness. And pretty is the one thing that the quarries of Carrara refuse to be.”

Applause was enthusiastic, always.