The Figures of Beauty (13 page)

Bernini treated marble with such tenderness it would appear to be wax or even the flesh itself
.

—A
BBÉ
F
RANÇOIS
R
AGUENET
, 1700

C
ATHCART
, O
NTARIO
. A
PRIL
2010.

I hope that Herkimer, Mulberry, Cannon, and Flatt have demonstrated to your satisfaction their dependability. Although this is not something I can be absolutely certain about, of course. Under the circumstances. It is April 2010. But things will change. I am here, writing this letter by an old pool, in the bright spring sunshine, confident of little else.

But Herkimer’s has always been reliably unsurprising in my experience. They represented my adoptive parents—executing the straightforward details of Winifred Hughson’s will in 1976, and then the conveyance to me of the Hillside Avenue property and the bulk of my father’s estate following his death fourteen years later. Herkimer’s—as once they were known by anybody who was anybody in town—used to be the firm of choice for established Cathcart families. The families Archie Hughson referred to as “the fine olds.” Anglicans, in other words.

Archie and Winifred attended Montrose United Church. Archie had been brought up in a more austere tradition, but his shift from Presbyterian to United was inspired not by doctrine but by the proximity of Montrose United Church to their Hillside Avenue home. “Same tub,” Archie summarized. “Slightly warmer water.”

He was a schoolteacher. He saw this as an honourable calling—one that combined the greatest possible responsibility with the lowest imaginable salary, as befitted the spare and earnest Sundays of his childhood.

But then he wrote a geography textbook. He had no literary aspirations and no hope for commercial success. He wrote
Our World
only because the dreary textbook from which he was obliged to teach was so terrible.

Studies in Geography
had been first published in the late 1920s. Archie ignored it as much as the curriculum would allow. It reduced the world to chapters that opened with small, blurry, black and white photo illustrations of “A busy street in Rome,” or “Natives harvest cane in Africa,” and ended them with questions of memorization for a test. Annual rainfall was a favourite subject. But the textbook’s departmentally approved dullness was not its worst sin, in Archie’s view. “Nothing in it is connected to anything else,” he complained to Winifred. “Which is rather a problem. Since everything in geography is.”

Archie was a popular teacher. There was an eagerness to him that he could never suppress—a sincerity that conveyed to his students that when he stepped into a classroom he was there not because there were curriculum requirements to get through, or a term to complete, or departmental exams to prepare for, or because it was his job. He was there—opening his worn leather briefcase at his desk; handing back carefully marked essays—because he had something very interesting to tell them.

Archie read avidly about the places he would never see, and he encouraged his students to put the Cathcart Public Library to good use. But he also encouraged them to learn about the world by paying attention to what actually was around them. He could teach something about the Amazon by taking his students to look at the marshlands on the outskirts of Cathcart in the spring. He could teach something about mountain ranges in Europe by guiding his students along the limestone trails behind his home in Cathcart. He hoped that what could be immediately observed would arouse curiosity about what could not. A melting bank of snow was a retreating glacier. A puddle beside the playground was a prehistoric sea. A widening crack in the sidewalk at the Girl’s Entrance was
the drift of continents. There was never a reason not to learn.

Archibald Hughson was famous—famous, that is, in Cathcart—for his kindly nature, his tough marking, his bow ties, and his geography hikes. But it was a legendary final exam on which his reputation most firmly rested.

It only happened the once. It was not an examination that could be repeated. But for years—indeed, for every year until Archie Hughson’s retirement—the exam’s impact was undiminished. Any student preparing for a geography final with Mr. Hughson did so with the knowledge that he was capable of asking anything.

On that memorable June day, his students—filing anxiously into his classroom, their heads brimming with the memorized names of rivers and precipitation rates and potash production tables—were confronted not with a page of printed questions on each desk but with two objects displayed on a small, white metal table at the front of the class: a rough chunk of limestone and a miniature marble replica of Michelangelo’s
David
. On the blackboard, written in an unusually large and solidly chalked script, were three double-underlined words: “Compare and Contrast.”

“I want them to think,” he had told his wife the day the idea had come to him. “I don’t want them to regurgitate.”

Our World
was the product of the same pedagogic instinct. It took Archie three successive summer holidays to write it. The new geography textbook was an entirely unanticipated success.

This made him an unusual client of one of Cathcart’s most highly regarded law firms. Archie had never expected to have money. Herkimer’s was favoured by the Cathcart families who had every expectation they always would.

I can remember the high ceilings of the old downtown offices of Herkimer’s. They were soon to be torn down when
I sat there with Archie a week after Winifred’s death. The wood-panelled rooms were on the top floor—the sixth—of a building with a marble foyer, polished hardwood corridors, brass mail chutes, and even then, elevator operators who wore white gloves.

I am not exactly ancient. But I learned from a young reporter at
The Chronicle
with whom I once made the mistake of having a coffee that the gradual disappearance of the old Cathcart has been followed by the much faster disappearance of the knowledge that there ever was one. The young reporter graduated in history, he told me. Perhaps so. But his degree had not given him much grasp on the recent past.

For some reason I was telling him about the pedestal drinking fountains in Cathcart. The fountains were on downtown corners, usually where maple or elm trees provided dappled shade to the thirsty passersby. The sidewalks in Cathcart were wide in those days.

These fountains ran continuously, and the central bud of water tasted exquisitely cold in the pure clear light of those stainless basins. “Really?” my reporter friend said. “And was it safe to drink?”

As far as he was concerned, the old incline up the bluffs of Hillside—its overgrown stone foundations still visible among the trees—might as well have been built by Ozymandias. My early memories of Cathcart—of the tawny sidewalks, of the awnings of china shops and dressmakers, of colonnaded movie-theatre lobbies, and of cool marble washrooms under a civic meridian of tended flower beds and Victorian fountains—were as exotic to him as Babylon. I enjoyed my conversation with the young reporter less, the more I reminisced. By the end of it, I felt a lot more antique than when I’d started out.

There is only one transformation that can compare to
the physical when it comes to growing older. And that is the change that occurs when you go from thinking that nothing disappears to realizing that everything does. There are now discount stores and Money Marts on the main downtown streets. Submarine sandwiches and pizza slices are available.

The Cathcart my parents knew has mostly vanished. And it won’t be long before the last of those who remember it are gone too. That’s how things get lost. And that, I suppose, is why, before I pause here for some lunch and probably a short nap, I’m asking you—my daughter, my only child—to undertake the occasional remembrance of something you never knew.

It would not be accurate to say that I fell in love with your mother the first time I met her. What would be accurate is: the first time I met your mother I knew that I was going to fall in love with her were I to meet her once, maybe two times, more. In a small town like Pietrabella, meeting Anna again—on the street, in the Café David, at the market—was inevitable. So that much was settled the first time I met her. The only question was how long this would take and whether Anna would ever find out.

She animated what might have been ordinary features—her narrow face, her long nose, her wary, brown eyes—with an energy that had every appearance of great beauty. Her hair so perfectly matched her personality it was usually the first thing that came to mind when anyone thought of her. It was comparable, so I once said, in its wild, abundant splendour to the cascading folds of the cloak in Bernini’s
Santa Teresa and the Angel
. I am embarrassed to say those were my exact words.

Sculpture was one of the subjects Anna had decided to teach me about that summer. Her love of stone seemed bound
up in everything. There were dinners when we talked about nothing else. I’d always had respect for art—a middle-class attitude that Anna felt could do with some heightening. She took me on day trips to Florence, and the first thing we always did when we got off the train—before we went to the Accademia, or the Uffizi, or the Bargello—was to go to a grove of trees in the Boboli Gardens and smoke a spliff.

Once, we went to Rome. Anna gave me her paperback copy of the treatise on Bernini by Rudolf Wittkower to read on the train. It was held together by an elastic band more than by its crumbling binding. It was underlined so much, there was little text that wasn’t.

As was the case in the other subjects of her curriculum that summer, I was an eager student. And I was eager to show off what I’d learned. But when I brought up the subject of Saint Teresa I was crushed to discover I wasn’t the first to comment on the baroque associations—high baroque, actually—of Anna in bed.

Pietrabella was a town full of sculptors, and Anna had made morning coffee in her cluttered kitchen for many of them. It’s a place where a name such as Bernini—like Michelangelo, like Brancusi, like Canova, like Moore—is almost a household word. Everybody knows
Santa Teresa and the Angel
. So it’s not all that surprising that more than a few of her lovers would have made the same association I did. In Pietrabella, it wasn’t exactly obscure.

Bernini was drawn to these ecstatic, transformative split seconds. And as great a sculptor as he was, it was this dramatic compulsion that makes him less great than Michelangelo. This, at least, was Anna’s opinion on the matter.

Bernini’s mastery of the point, the punch, the claw chisel, the rasp, and the trimming hammer was unequalled. Few
objects are less stone-like than Santa Teresa’s cloak. And few heads of hair were more like a luxurious disarray of heavy silk than Anna’s.

Bernini was incapable of creating anything as gracelessly unfeminine as some of Michelangelo’s worst female figures. But he lacked something that was in every piece of stone Michelangelo touched.

“He is terrible, as you can see, and one cannot deal with him,” said Pope Julius II of Michelangelo, and it is this quality of the
terribilità
—more so than the century that divided the two great artists—that distinguishes the furious preoccupations of Michelangelo from Bernini’s smooth genius. It was as if Michelangelo conceived of figures that, no matter the niche or plinth they were to inhabit, would exist most importantly in the infinite space of the viewer’s imagination. Bernini, on the other hand, placed his figures in elaborately contrived settings—dramatically coordinating sculpture and architecture. He dictated the viewer’s perspective and experimented with the theatricality of concealed, directed light. He was a showman. Not only did Bernini go for a story, he usually went for a story’s most spectacular moment.

By Bernini’s time, the marble of the Apuan mountains was the material of choice for sculptors (and, more importantly, for the patrons of sculptors) in Holland, Spain, England, Italy, and France. By geological happenstance, it was a material that held within its composition the strength required to support the most delicate carving. Bernini was a virtuoso of marble.
Santa Teresa and the Angel
was carved in Carrara stone.

The recumbent figure is about to be pierced by the arrow of the Holy Spirit wielded by the angel above her. Her eyes seem to have just closed.

The piece is often referred to as
The Ecstasy of Saint
Teresa
—a title that Anna preferred. “That is what it is,” she said. She peered at me closely as we stood together in Rome, in the grey light of the Cornaro Chapel. She wanted to be sure I understood. She suspected I didn’t. The innocence of a Cathcart upbringing was a source of endless fascination to Anna. “It’s the statue of orgasm,” she felt obliged to make clear, as if explaining something to a particularly slow student. And because I have no photograph of Anna, it’s a black and white illustration on a page that had separated from the crumbling binding of her Wittkower that I keep pinned above my desk down at the house:
“St Teresa and the Angel, 1646–52. Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Bernini.”

In May 1968 I arrived at Richard Christian and Elena Conti’s apartment on Via Maddalena in Pietrabella after three miserable days of hitchhiking from Paris. My last, and the only lucky, ride, a skinny Dutch sculptor, picked me up outside of Genoa. He was smoking Marlboros—non-stop, judging from the ashtray. And he had been listening to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Jerry Jeff Walker all the way from Holland, judging by his lack of interest in playing any other tapes for the rest of the trip.

He was going to Pietrabella. He was going to be there for the next six months. Maybe longer. He’d been there before. He had a studio.

Not only that, he knew the address scrawled on the piece of paper that Richard had given to me in the Louvre. He was happy to drive me right there.

With a crank of handbreak his Deux Chevaux stopped on the steep road in front of the garden wall of number 19.