The Figures of Beauty (10 page)

R
ICHARD
C
HRISTIAN WAS OUR PREDECESSOR
in the flat on Via Maddalena, and it was Richard who, in May of 1968, two days after he’d returned from his trip to Paris to study the Captives at the Louvre, opened his apartment door to find my father and his backpack.

It was evening. Richard and his Italian girlfriend, Elena Conti, were having a dinner for some friends—my mother among them. Such are the incestuous circulations of real estate in a provincial Italian town.

Opposite the mailboxes and the clanging iron gates that open to the front steps of each of the Via Maddalena properties, there are no houses. There are no buildings at all across the street. There is a railing there, and usually a few parked cars. And there is a litter-strewn drop to a stream that runs down from the hills and from the mountains above the hills. Via Maddalena is parallel to the stream, and like the creek, it seemed to have no
ending. This was a distinction that I always felt suited the street’s holy namesake—a childhood notion I wisely kept to myself.

I was not permitted to attend Mass when I was a little girl—a ban that made Sundays quite lonely for me on Via Maddalena. My mother’s anti-Catholicism is an even more stubbornly held belief than her other tenets of faith: her own work; the sculpture of Michelangelo, Bernini, and Constantin Brancusi; the music of Gato Barbieri and John Coltrane; the songs of Jacques Brel and Leonard Cohen; the writing of Italo Calvino and Charles Dickens; the effect of blond Lebanese hashish rolled into black French tobacco and smoked with her first coffee of the morning.

I was envious of my friend Clara’s easy acquaintance with saints’ days and miracles. I was envious of her illustrated books of Bible stories and of her frothy confirmation dress. When, for a brief period, Clara was convinced she was going to become a bride of Christ, I tried secretly to steal him away from her by thinking devotedly of his curling hair and lean torso while lying under my duvet with my hand between my legs while the bells for early Mass were ringing—a pleasure I discovered long before Clara, and that I thought I could put to some divine advantage.

Otherwise, I amused myself with aimless neighbourhood wanderings on Sundays. When I did I liked to imagine that it was possible—even for someone whose mother thought the Holy Father should be in prison—to start off from our street and, by following it upward, eventually climb high enough into the heavens to see the thin, kind, world-weary face of Mary Magdalene herself.

Even today, with all the new development that has taken place in what used to be the countryside around Pietrabella, the infinite nature of Via Maddalena has not changed. It isn’t interrupted by wall, or an intersection, or a mossy, old fountain as is the case with the other streets in Pietrabella. It keeps going. Up.

Via Maddalena climbs the slope above Pietrabella’s central piazza. This rise, away from the coastal flats and the sea to the west and toward the white peaks of the Apuan mountains in the east, is the beginning of the rolling folds and valleys of the green foothills that travellers admire from the windows of speeding trains as they head south from Paris, or from Nice, or from Genoa, on their way to Rome. Clara and I both work at the Agency of Regional Tourism, and our job—not the easiest in the world—is to encourage people to stop in Pietrabella and its environs. But why should they? It’s the question I try to answer every day at the desk of my little cubicle, across the fluorescent-lit hallway from Clara.

A few years ago our boss, Pier-Giorgio, spent a considerable percentage of our section’s annual creative budget on three twenty-metre panels of mosaic tile. This horrible triptych (Pier-Giorgio’s quite pretentious noun; my quite accurate adjective) was undertaken with no internal discussion whatsoever, which is typical of Pier-Giorgio. His bureaucratic tyranny is pretty much summed up by the most frequently repeated phrase in our department: what an asshole. It is a strange dynamic of our office that almost nobody who works in it agrees with the man who is in charge—most notably with his conviction that our region’s tourist marketability has to do with the new discos and bars of our seaside and not with the workers, the traditions, and the rugged history of our mountains.

The murals depict the cabanas and bikini-clad women, the athletic-looking water skiers and speedboat drivers, the beach-side cafés and restaurants of the waterfront that Pier-Giorgio insists we call the Riviera of Pietrabella. The triptych decorates Pietrabella’s cold grey-marble train station. It is a marketing strategy that might be more effective if the express trains actually stopped in Pietrabella. Or even slowed down.

Via Maddalena is made up of not much more than twenty addresses. At its upper end, where there are no more houses, the street becomes a dirt road with ditches of long, sweet-smelling grass and red blurs of poppies. Clara and I often played here, flattening out secret hiding places that looked like big nests. Sometimes we took picnics.

Farther upward, the dirt road becomes the two flattened ruts of a tractor trail. It cuts back and forth through the olive groves that are there—one with trees so old it is said that Dante, who once passed through the area on his way to Pisa, must have seen the same ones we look at now.

When Clara and I were children, we were forbidden to play among the olive trees. The used syringes of the town’s drug addicts were scattered there in such abundance they crunched under the soles of our white sandals when we disobeyed the instructions of our elders. Heroin was common in Pietrabella—so common that the owner of the largest bar on the piazza took to drilling small holes in the bowls of each of his coffee spoons. This was his protest against what he described as Italy’s catastrophic shift from proud exporter of world-renowned goods to pathetic importer of crap.

Claudio Morello was a large man with a mane of silver hair and a goatee, a voice like an old-fashioned actor’s, and no bashfulness whatsoever about stating views that were much out of fashion. His bold opinions singled him out—if only because nobody else thought it advantageous to be honest about the not-so-distant past. The owner of Café David was, in my mother’s description, “the one person in all of Pietrabella who admits to having been a fascist during the war.”

As opposed as Claudio’s crazy right-wing political theories were to my mother’s vague allegiance to world revolution, the two of them enjoyed a long, improbable friendship. He never
called her anything but
bella
, and his booming lack of hypocrisy was something she admired. So was his ingenuity. The tiny holes drilled in each of the Café David’s spoons meant they would not be stolen. They stirred the excellent cappuccinos as well as they ever did. But they were of no use to skinny, pale teenagers, crouched in their American jeans around the gnarled roots of ancient olive trees, cooking the yellowish powder from Marseilles over the flames of their lighters from Japan.

Beyond the olive grove, the tractor trail becomes a goat path that continues upward. It winds up through woods and pasture, over old stone bridges and millstreams, past olive presses and abandoned farmhouses, all the way to the hillside village of Castello—the place where my mother, under the circumstances of a terrible war, was born.

L
UNCH BEGAN AT NOON
. The timekeeper’s handbell was the signal. But the foremen on the rock face could decide not to acknowledge it. When men were in the middle of a job that could not be interrupted—hoisting a block of stone to the sled or lowering the sled down the mountain with rope-creaking, winch-stuttering care—they had to continue. They got no extra time when the same bell rang exactly a half-hour later.

Experienced workers were adept at watching the sun and timing their tasks. Usually, when the timekeeper closed his watch, slipped it back into his vest pocket, and reached for the varnished wooden handle of the single brass bell, they were ready to stop. And on that day in the summer of 1922, the crew in the Morrow quarry had timed their work well.

They had secured the straps around the stone and had hammered the wedges into place only a few minutes before the lunch break began. The block could wait.

They sat on the two long benches of a bare wooden table. It was covered with a rigged-up canopy of scrap tin.

The crews who were working other parts of the quarry rested, in pairs or groups of four or five, on whatever conveniently flat slabs of stone or planks of lumber they could find. If the weather was bad, a few might be allowed into the foreman’s shed—a smoky place that smelled of herring and wet wool. But on good days, by custom, those who were working closest to the old wooden table took it, without argument.

It was sheltered by a wall of marble, a section of the quarry that was as high as a church. It had not been worked for so long that the steel cables strung along its cliff were broken and dangling and rusted brown. The wall leaned over the little plateau just enough to provide some shade at noon to the table and some protection from the mountain winds.

The workers spoke loudly, as if calling out over a roar that only they could hear. They unwrapped their packets of thick slices of crusty white bread and pork fat. Before eating, they refolded the cloth and coiled the string, packing them back in their lunch sacks with careful frugality.

There was a bottle of young wine. Each of the men produced, from their sacks, a squat, sturdy, carefully wrapped cup.

There were ways to do things. These were men who snorted their nostrils clear while they worked, and who could, without embarrassment, squat to shit at the edge of a steep scree, well in sight of other men. But they would never think of drinking wine from a bottle.

Far below, the road was visible. It belonged to the company. It was maintained by a few old men who had once worked in the quarry, and who now spent their days smoothing the ruts and raking over the gravel where the teams of oxen and the loaded wagons had thinned the sharp corners. The heavy wagons came
slowly, carefully down the switchback, grinding ruts into the turns.

Every morning the timekeeper opened the gates. He wore a cap like a police guard’s and a blue serge jacket. He had come from Carrara, sound asleep, on the first wagon of the day. He would return, in much the same condition, on the last. He had soft white hands.

The workers nodded to him with the deference they used with any representative of their impossibly rich employer. The stories were extravagant.

The quarry owner was said to be wealthier than the duke of Milan. When he entertained in his villa the chandeliers were lit with a hundred candles and the quail were basted in the richest butter, and there were more potatoes than anyone could eat and the wine was so fine it was the colour of old velvet. His mistresses wore silk. They used soaps made of lavender oil and the rendered fat of songbirds. Their hot, foaming baths were scented with the finest French perfume. He had three, the owner did—a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead—each of whom had an ass as smooth as an angel’s and who knew every secret of love. Puccini had been a guest at his table. Such were the stories.

The timekeeper had the power to report anyone who was late. He exercised some discretion in this—not to be kind to those workers who rushed apologetically through the gate ten or fifteen seconds after six o’clock in the morning, but to reinforce their sense of obligation to him. As a result, he was always to be addressed as sir and always to be treated with the greatest respect—so any new workers were told when they first approached the entrance to the quarry. The timekeeper had once held an important job at the owner’s villa, the older men explained in loud voices to the younger as they passed through the gate. The timekeeper, who always smelled strongly of witch
hazel, nodded solemnly back, pleased by the wide eyes and the nervous greetings of the new men. And then, out of earshot, the older men added: an important job, emptying chamber pots. And then, a few steps farther on: before he was sent to the mountains for fucking a goat.

T
HE QUARRIES WERE TOUGH PLACES
—the kind of working environment that is almost beyond comprehension now. Perhaps the only useful contemporary comparison would be battle. If a worker was not strong enough or careful enough or experienced enough, he might not be lucky enough either. Unseen faults could widen, slowly, for centuries before the instant they gave way. Accidents were in the nature of things.

It was during a block’s downward passage that the worst accidents on the mountain occurred. Timbers slipped, cables broke, wedges gave way, winches were torn from their wooden pylons. Gravity—the force that the workers spent their days trying to contain—was suddenly cut free.

Men would shout and come running. Confusion would erupt. Work would stop, briefly. And eventually—once order had been restored, once the men were back to work, once the long cables were humming—the low, mournful call of something that sounded like a hunting horn would echo across the valleys.

In Roman times, and for centuries thereafter, marble was quarried by drilling holes at the stone’s natural faults. Wooden jambs were hammered into these fissures, and then kept soaked. As the wood expanded, the chosen marble sections—massive cubes of stone, sometimes as big as the shed of an olive press—would break away from the mountain wall.

In later centuries a quicker but much more wasteful method of extrusion was introduced: blasting, first with gunpowder, and
later with dynamite. During his 1846 stopover in the Carrara region Charles Dickens heard the “melancholy warning bugle.”

The horn that Charles Dickens had identified was called the
buccina
. It was the warning of a coming explosion. But as dynamite became less commonly used, the
buccina
took on another function. A longer, even more mournful note was the signal of a quarryman’s injury or death. This was a common enough occurrence. But it was a sound that Julian Morrow never got used to.

The echoes from the cliff walls and through the valleys made it difficult for anyone at any distance to know from which quarry the sound came. Once the signal was heard, the women and children of the mountain villages could only wait until the end of the day to learn if the accident had been their father’s, or their husband’s, or their son’s. It was later, usually during one of his regular meetings with his quarry managers, that Morrow would learn the details.

T
HE WEATHER WAS EXTREME
. In the winter there were frozen ropes and there were winches that had to be cracked free of ice with hammers in the morning. There were cliffs of ice that formed so transparently on the edges of the high marble walls, they were all but invisible against the white stone until they gave way. There might be a shout. There might be a useless scrabbling of boots.

Springs in the quarries were wet and cold. The flooding of the transport roads was not uncommon.

And then there were the summers. By the time the crew sat down at the wooden table, that August day in 1922, they were so wet with their own sweat it looked as if they had fallen into a river.

One of the men rose from one of the benches at the table.
His tight, wrinkled face had been carved by the weather. His lips were cracked.

He walked with the balanced, measured gait typical of an experienced quarry worker. He crossed the little plateau. It was fifteen or twenty yards of trampled grass and thyme surrounded by a fringe of wild sage.

He moved directly to the lip of the mountain. There was no slowing down as he approached the cliff, and no vestige of momentum the instant he stopped at its brink. The man’s view was from a height so great it could have been from the window of a plane. He kept his centre of gravity firmly behind the toes of his old leather workboots. He leaned forward.

In the quarries the weather of one season is never entirely obliterated by the extremes of another. On the coldest day the harsh glare of sunshine does not warm workers so much as remind them of the ferocity of the summer. And that August, when the walls of the Morrow quarry were like the sides of an oven, it was winter that came briefly to the man’s mind as he looked down. As he stood at the edge of the mountain, he felt a cascade of cold. It fell from the marble overhang above.

He leaned into nothing. His hands were at his sides.

Far below, a tiny blue timekeeper opened a miniature gate for a little wagon loaded with pebbles of marble.

There was the sandy ribbon of road. There were the distant valleys. There were the faraway marshes and plains. There were the beaches of the seaside. The day seemed bright as ice. He leaned farther out.

Now he could see his son. Lino was toiling up the incline with the bucket. He was already more than three-quarters of the way. The sleeves of the boy’s shirt were rolled, and his face and hair were protected from the sun by the peak of a battered cap.

His wife had given him four sons. Three now worked with
him in the quarries. The youngest, Italo, would not. His legs were bad. He would be a burden.

This thought passed through the man quickly. As tenderness always did. There was nothing to be done. Italo could help the women. He could herd the goats.

Carefully, still keeping his weight centred behind the lip of stone, he watched Lino’s climb. He could see the boy’s care and steady determination. This pleased him. Then the man turned back. He crossed the wide ledge to the table.

“Winter’s coming,” he said to his two oldest sons, as he hoisted a leg over the bench.

Winter! They laughed in the heat. One of the lads handed him a cup of wine. And that was the end of them all.

L
INO
C
AVATORE COULD SEE
the last few trestles. He could see, poised above him, the block of white stone, strapped and tilted on the wooden sled.

Then he heard something. Or rather, he felt it—a deep, rumbling in the back of his head. It came up inside him, through the soles of his uncomfortable new boots.

It was easy to get confused in the quarries. They were places of constant change. Their permanence was illusory. The men worked hard: their industry was as relentless as it was underpaid, and with little more than saws and ropes and pulleys they transformed everything around them. And then, without pause, they transformed it again. Walls that looked as if they could never move vanished. And so, as the boy stepped past the marble block that was strapped to the tilted wooden sled, he thought, for a moment, that he had somehow made a wrong turn.

As he moved onto the flat of the grass, he could not understand how he could have made such an error.

Then he stopped and slowly, without noticing any relief, put down the bucket. There, lying against an outcrop of rock: his brother’s hammer, its shaft whittled, as he had shown him, to fit his grip. And there, against the winch, at the top of the incline: his father’s coil of rope. But everything else was different.

There was no wooden table scarred with initials. No rigged-up tin roof. No benches. There was no overhang of stone.

The thought formed very clearly. It was entirely calm and entirely unsentimental. He realized that his brother would not be much help. He felt himself tightening—as if bracing for everything he knew would follow. I will have to look after our mother, the boy said to himself. It will be up to me.

On the ledge there was only stillness—a roughly piled tomb of it. There was no shade there anymore.