David (22 page)

Stone! I was born to it, my father, my uncles, every male I knew back home worked in the quarries. My childhood and youth passed in a haze of stone dust. Even Angelo used to boast that he got his calling from imbibing chisels and mallets with my mother’s milk!

Mind you, Lodovico didn’t like that. He was always opposed to Angelo’s work, and so was his uncle Francesco – until my brother’s reputation and fortune started to grow. Because Lionardo was a friar, Angelo was in effect the oldest brother and there were already signs that his father and younger brothers saw him as their own personal bank.

The love of stone was something he had in common with me and my family that his birth family could not understand. We both hated feeling anything sticky or greasy on our hands but the dry certainty of stone was what we were used to and never minded, no matter how dredged with white powder we were. There was something clean about it.

Those who work with stone must be strong and prepared to hard work; cutting marble out of a mountainside is no occupation for a weakling. And then it all has to be squared and transported before it can be turned into whatever its ultimate fate is. Statues are only a part of it – the high pinnacle of destiny for a block of marble. It might end up as table-tops or bathtubs or the facing for pillars. Some of it is used for grand schemes like the cathedral in Florence, other bits end up as marble chips in mosaics or some kinds of floor, while even the dust is valued and used, mixed with glue and lime to make a kind of artificial stone that was becoming popular as a cheap alternative to real marble.

I marvelled at how the earth seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of stone for us. The quarries at Carrara had been worked since the time of the Romans and were famous for the whiteness and purity of their marble. The ones at Settignano were almost as old – certainly for hundreds of years men like me had crawled over the face of the mountains hacking stone out and carting it miles away.

It was a dangerous craft too. I’d seen men fall to their deaths and others crushed by blocks of stone. Some had lost fingers but kept working when they had recovered. There were not many other ways of earning a living in my village; you either farmed or cut stone.

And families did one thing or the other; I suppose farming gets in your blood the way that marble does. I could imagine what it might be like struggling to raise food out of the ground but for me it would never match the sheer physical triumph of wresting workable stone out of a mountainside.

We took three days to reach Carrara, taking our time and staying the night in inns along the way. Angelo had been before – all the way from Rome when he was commissioned to carve the Pietà. How I wish I could have seen it!

That old block that was now David – or me – came originally from the same quarries. But Angelo was as excited as I was when our cart neared Carrara. As we wound slowly up the hillside, I spotted something I had never seen before or expected ever to see – the sea! I jumped up and nearly tipped the cart over.

‘When our business is done, we will go down to the shore,’ said Angelo. ‘Every man should see the sea at least once in his life.’

And then we saw them. Angelo was watching me, his lips curled in a rare smile; he had known how it would strike me.

‘They call this place “Luna” – the moon – because of the vivid whiteness of the marble it produces,’ he said.

Even I, with all my experience of cutting stone, had never seen anything quite like these mountains.

We went to lodgings Angelo had taken in the town, in a place where he had stayed before. It was in a road behind the cathedral but there was no time to explore it; Angelo had us leave at dawn the next day for the quarries. The cart took us up some very dangerous tracks in the mountainside and then we got to a point where wheels would not take us and we had to walk the last bit.

It was no problem for either of us to climb the white mountain following the newly risen sun. The day was fresh and the sky an intense blue above the white of the cliffside. I hadn’t felt this full of vitality since the day I had walked out of the city up to Fiesole in the sweltering heat of the summer before.

We stopped for a short rest and I took deep breaths of the good clean air.

‘This is good for you,’ said Angelo. ‘It will clear your head.’

‘I hope so,’ I said. Suddenly, it was not just my romantic adventures that felt sordid but the whole sorry business of spying, of pretending to be what I wasn’t – the deceit and lies.

And it was being back close to the stone that made me feel this way. Here was something you could rely on, something you could not disguise. If there was a flaw in the marble, it revealed itself. It wasn’t like the flaws in a man, which could be covered up and only later bring ruin on everyone around him.

‘You know what you said about being a sculptor’s assistant?’ I asked Angelo.

He grunted an assent.

‘I think I’d like it – if you were the sculptor,’ I said.

He clasped my hand in a rare gesture of affection.

‘I wouldn’t let you go to anyone else,’ he said.

And so our pact was made there and then, in the best place possible, surrounded by stone hacked out of the mountains. It made it more solemnly sealed than if we had been in the presence of priests or judges. I would leave the stonecutters’
bottega
and go to work with my brother, first at the Opera del Duomo, where two images of me were already lying and later, as we both thought then, in his new studio.

We moved on and down into the heart of the quarry, where our work lay before us. Men were already busy cutting or hauling stone.

Angelo obviously knew the quarry overseer well. They clasped arms and were soon involved in a deep conversation about the merits of different strata of marble. When they had finished, Angelo brought the man over to meet me.

‘This is my assistant, Gabriele,’ he said. It was quite true that he had brought me on this trip to assist him, but the title had a new meaning for me now and I stood straight and proud to bear it.

The overseer looked me up and down.

‘My word, Ser Buonarotti,’ he said. ‘You have chosen well. Your Gabriele looks a strong lad.’

‘He is,’ said Angelo. ‘There is an old family connection. Gabriele is from Settignano, from a stonecutting dynasty.’

We all laughed at that and I thought I could see the overseer displaying just a touch of condescension – Carrara was the king of marble quarries, as I could see with my own eyes now, and Settignano a mere courtier in comparison.

‘What do you think of our mountains of the moon?’ he asked.

‘Like nothing I could ever have imagined,’ I replied sincerely.

‘Well, we have to do our best for Buonarroti the famous sculptor,’ he said. ‘Twelve matched blocks of the highest quality, I gather?’

‘For twelve apostles,’ said Angelo. ‘Nothing but the best. But you have already given me marble for Our Lord and His Lady so I don’t doubt you can supply me.’

‘You don’t want one with a flaw in it for Judas?’ I said without thinking.

The overseer’s mouth dropped open.

‘I would never sell Ser Buonarroti a flawed block,’ he said.

‘Take no notice of him,’ said Angelo. ‘Gabriele has some fanciful ideas. I shan’t be carving a Judas. I shall make a Matthias, the man who took the traitor’s place.’

The man seemed mollified.

‘But talking of flawed blocks,’ Angelo went on, ‘did you know I was working on that old slab that was quarried for Agostino?’

‘The one that neither he nor Rossellino could finish?’

This was no reflection on the quarryman’s work, since the block had been cut out of mountain before he was born.

‘It’s nearly finished now,’ said Angelo. ‘You must come and see it in Florence. It’s a good deal closer than Rome. I’m sorry you never saw my Pietà.’

Then we got down to serious business. All the separate quarries had different names and this one was called La Tacca Bianca, the white blow, because the first workman who ever struck his mallet into the rock found a pure white strain of marble. It was from here that the marble for Angelo’s Pietà had come.

‘You need a road here, Matteo,’ said my brother.

‘Yes, how do you get the blocks out?’ I asked.

‘You put them on a heavy sledge made of tree trunks,’ said Angelo, ‘and float them down the river.’

I looked at the riverbed, at present a dry scramble of scree and boulders.

‘You have to wait for the rains to come,’ said Matteo.

I suppose I looked disappointed.

‘You thought we would be taking the blocks back to Florence with us?’ asked Angelo.

I had. Both the older men laughed.

‘You know the secret to working with marble?’ asked Matteo and then answered his own question. ‘Patience.’

I nodded as I remembered how slowly the marble David was nearing completion after the intoxicating activity of the first few months that broke him free from the block.

They led me inside the mountain, along the sloping floor. The deposits of marble towered on either side of us, like cliffs. Or like the walls of a vast natural cathedral. Walls veined with grey, red and green where minerals had stained the rock. If you half-closed your eyes you could imagine it as a church interior with worked marble columns and floors.

The stone was cut from the roof of the quarries downwards; we could see men swarming over ladders and on wooden ledges, as sure-footed as any whose safety depended on being so. Their cries to one another echoed through the cavernous space.

‘I think this is where we will find your apostles, Ser Buonarroti,’ said Matteo, pointing upwards to a vivid slash of white rock that cut through the grey. ‘You have to have the purest of white – the marble of the moon – for statues,’ he explained to me. ‘The coloured veins are beautiful and much prized for pillars or for memorial slabs but it must be purest white for statuary.’

All three of us stood gazing up at the pure vein at the top of the quarry wall. I know I was thinking about the work that lay ahead to convert sheer rock into art and I was sure that Angelo was thinking something similar. But it seemed as if Matteo was thinking of more urgent practical matters.

‘Come to my shack,’ he said. ‘And I’ll write down the measurements for the blocks you need.’

After two more days of bargaining for prices, selecting areas of stone and the actual quarrymen he wanted to work on them, my brother was ready for the return journey home. But he had not forgotten his promise.

The carter, who had been having a welcome holiday, sitting and drinking in the town square, was surprised to be asked to take the coast road. It would add another half day at least to our journey. But he was not complaining. As long as he was paid, he would do whatever we asked.

I started to shiver as we approached the shore. One more bend and then there was the most frightening sight I had ever seen. Of course, I knew what the sea looked like – I had seen it in paintings. And I knew it could be different colours like marble or glass and that it might be calm or stormy.

But I didn’t know that it would smell as it did, pungent with salt, or be so noisy. Most of all I did not know – how could I? – that it would be so big. Before us stretched a whole bay, light sparkling on the water and the waves coming in, one after another, like the years of our lives.