The Figures of Beauty (14 page)

The steps cut between the terraced vines to the big, old home. The front buzzer clicked on the timed lights in the
interior stairwell. The white marble hallway didn’t echo very much. But somehow it gave the gleaming, cold impression that it could—quite a lot—given half a chance.

Elena stood beside Richard at the open door of their apartment. She was looking at me and my backpack with suspicion. I could hear voices and the clattering of cutlery behind her.

“Well, well,” Richard said. “Will you look at this. It’s my dying captive.”

There were many such dinners in that apartment during the time I spent in Pietrabella. As a result, I am not certain if I am remembering my first or an accumulation of similar evenings. There must have been a few of the young Italian artisans there—Giuliana, for one, who worked in one of the town’s studios, and who had a smile so broad and white it was as if it had been made that way by the marble dust of her work. As well, there would have been some foreign sculptors. Perhaps Luc, tall and gaunt, with dark frizzy hair, who made long, polished totems of marble that he sold through a gallery in Zurich. There were two Swedish sculptors who were often at Richard and Elena’s: they worked together on commissions for California wineries and developers in Florida, they lived together in the same mountain house with their girlfriends and jointly tended children, they wore the same denim overalls, and, on occasion, they dropped acid together. They were trying to raise the money to carve a memorial to the workers of the region who had died in accidents in the quarries. Their idea—born of Michelangelo’s unfulfilled plan for a mountainside colossus—was a sixty-foot-high figure of a quarry worker, carved directly into one of the flanks of Monte Altissimo. It was the kind of thing you came up with on LSD.

And, of course, there was your mother.

Elena and Richard were probably roasting chicken and vegetables that night. They often did. I was ushered in. I was introduced to their guests. Your mother was intrigued, so she later admitted, when Richard repeated what I had hastily explained at the apartment door. His version was shorter but more colourful than mine. He told his friends I was someone he’d met at the Louvre who was now on the lam from the French police.

I put my knapsack in the spare room as instructed.

When I returned to the kitchen, Elena turned and laughed—I’m not sure at what. It was not a particularly significant moment. She was quite small—small, that is, for someone whose quick laughter always became the centre of any room she was in. She was wearing bright colours. She had a wide, expressive smile. “Eyes like pools,” Richard once said. “Deep brown pools of mischief.”

Elena turning and laughing, at that counter, in that kitchen, is a memory I’ve always kept. Because I was lonely, I suppose. And because she was kind. There was no part of her laughter, and no part of the way her open face addressed everyone in the room that excluded me.

Elena turned and laughed, and then she asked if I would go outside and get more rosemary for the chicken. It felt like I’d been welcomed in some special way. It wasn’t something you’d ask a stranger to do.

At the back of the house there was a slope of vegetables and herbs. It rose in carefully tended terraces from a low stone border to the old town wall. I leaned forward and ruffled through the plants. I felt as if I were hunting through files.

When people talk about their travels, they seldom mention the air. They mention sights, and sounds, and events,
and the people they encounter. But they seldom mention the air—or if they do, they mention a partial aspect of it, perhaps its warmth, perhaps its salty briskness. They seldom make reference to its overall feeling: the combination of humidity, elevation, and temperature that makes everything so different in a different place.

I’d never felt air like the evening I met your mother. The sky was mauve and the temperature was so fresh it felt to me as if gravity did not have its customary hold on things.

I could find no rosemary.

The kitchen opened from the central hallway of the second floor. There was jazz on the record player. The air was full with tobacco and hash, heated oil and garlic turning gold in a frying pan.

My empty-handed return was not noticed quickly. Those were dinner parties at which everyone held forth on everything: on Coltrane and Brancusi, Django Reinhardt and Henry Moore, Kerouac and Donatello. The few supper gatherings that the Hughsons hosted in Cathcart were staid, formal, sober affairs. I think that first dinner on Via Maddalena was the first time I understood that talking and laughing and joking and telling stories were what dinner parties are for.

Richard particularly loved talking about music and sculpture, and it was not always clear which was which when he did. He was like Anna that way: not all that big on distinctions. He was not always easy to follow, but there was something about his Texan accent that made him sound sensible—sensible, that is, for an artist, sensible for someone who refused to take any money from his wealthy parents, sensible for someone who could go all the way to Paris to see a single piece of sculpture.

Richard always had about him the wild contradictions of exile. He had fallen in love with Italy as completely as he
had fallen in love with Elena—and he lived with a kind of glee, as if this addition to his life was entirely miraculous. But he was dodging a war with a sense of outrage and of justice that seemed, somehow, very American in its confidence. And sometimes late at night, usually when he was drunk, he suffered the sadness of those who adopt a country. Sometimes his bushy eyebrows drooped as if to hide his shining eyes. Sometimes his drawl halted as if he were not sure he could control his voice.

Elena and Richard’s kitchen had tall windows and a small stove. There was a terra-cotta pot on a gas ring. There was an oven. There was a cutting board on the kitchen table. There was a salad underway. There was a jug of oil. A chunk of hard cheese. A grater. There were open bottles of wine.

The room seemed old-fashioned even then, with its basic appliances, its high taps, and its small, deep sink. The little table—around which a surprising number of people could be seated for a dinner—had a grey marble top. The windowsills were also stone.

No rosemary? Elena smiled patiently at my stupidity. Everyone laughed. But it was Anna who got up. She was wearing an untucked man’s white shirt, rolled khaki slacks, and sockless old sneakers.

She led me out of the apartment, through the high double doors at the end of the marble-floored hallway.

Anna stood at the back of Via Maddalena 19. She pointed. There was a rosemary bush there. It was the size of a large boulder.

“You are not so bright,” she said. “For a desperado.”

I told Anna what I thought rosemary looked like.

“
Spreegs
?” she asked. “What are
spreegs
?”

Now, here I am. All these years later. Back up at the pool. I am following young Robert Mulberry’s instructions.

Here I am, cursed by the fury of your mother to still be in the land where rosemary can come in sprigs and spaghetti in cans. And rightly so. I was a coward. Most people are. Here I am, still in Cathcart.

I have a clipboard and some paper. With any luck this chaise—which must be as old as the pool—won’t collapse for a few more days. I am drinking Prosecco and grapefruit juice. For old time’s sake.

I have now almost concluded what business I need to conclude with young master Mulberry—which, at three hundred dollars per hour, is just as well. And I have now finalized my plans for my visit with you at the end of this month.

You’ll note that I say “visit.” The sale of the Cathcart property does not mean that I plan to stay in Italy any longer than a visiting relative should. Which is not long—in my opinion.

Not that I am opposed to the idea of staying longer. Staying longer is one of the possibilities that comes from having no place, and no job, and no family to return to. It’s one of the things that can sometimes happen to travellers. It’s always possible that I’ll encounter someone who will change everything.

The weather is warm in Cathcart this April—the result, no doubt, of catastrophic global changes in the climate, but for my isolated purposes, a happy coincidence. The fine balance between the warm sun and a wind that has just passed over the last snow in the Hillside woods reminds me of Pietrabella. There is the same lightness of air that I felt when your mother showed me the rosemary on my first night in Italy.

Your mother used to maintain that she had seen me falling
in love on the evening I arrived in Pietrabella—but not with her brown eyes, and her rumpled white shirt, and her wild hair. She said she could see me falling in love with the air.

“That was the beginning for you,” she said. “That was where your changes started. You felt everything first. The details came later.”

“You are the details?”

“Love is the details.”

“I think you’re getting a little carried away.”

“Your big problem,” she replied, “is you don’t get carried away enough.”

That was true—although much less true by the end of August than in May. Your mother was very good at getting us carried away.

Our presence in Rome could not have been unknown to the other guests of the poorly soundproofed
pensione
we had chosen near the Campo de’ Fiori. We didn’t make it to the breakfast room in the morning. And when, that afternoon, we stood together in the Cornaro Chapel, it occurred to me that the tragedy of art appreciation was that it could not always be taught by Anna on the afternoon after a morning of making love.

“Imagine her body,” she said to me. Her husky whisper made it clear there was very little innocence in the instruction. We’d been staring at Bernini’s
Santa Teresa
for almost ten minutes without speaking. “Can you picture her body under all that luscious garment?”

Anna looked directly at me at that moment. Her eyes are exceptionally beautiful. Then she returned to Saint Teresa.

“Do you see? Bernini catches her when she is just starting. You do not know this feeling. So let me tell you. Don’t bother trying. You cannot imagine how delicious this feeling is.”

She kissed me quickly, as if in commiseration for this unfairness.

“Bernini catches her when her climax is just starting. To rise. She is just starting to lift herself to meet the angel’s arrow.”

Anna swept her hair away from her eyes. “Everything about her is saying the same thing. Do you see?”

Anna’s hand moved through the air as if caressing the form she was describing.

“Even the folds of her cloak are like waves of …”

Anna’s head was cocked slightly to her left side. T-shirt. Red bandana. White coveralls. Old tennis shoes. No socks. Her hair was in its usual disarray. There she was,
Anna: Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome
. Her English sometimes deserted her.

“Pleasure?” I suggested.

“Exactly,” she answered. “Waves of pleasure. Coming right from the centre of the stone.”

I’ve always felt lucky to be able to remember something like that …

T
HE GOATHERD CAME RUNNING
to the village on feet like little hoofs. It was August 1944. The men had gone away.

O partigiano portami via / O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao!

The goatherd moved uncertainly. His legs were bad. He moved with stiff, awkward difficulty. He looked much older than thirty-three.

When he was small, Italo Cavatore watched his older brother Lino play in the square of the little hillside town. Lino was cunning in his feints and in the unpredictable dance of his slight body as he ran. But even though the two brothers were entirely dissimilar in movement, they bore a resemblance to each other that went beyond their lean faces. It was as if a pathology cast specifically over Italo’s stringy legs and curled-in feet had been visited more generally and less severely on his older brother. Lino was one of those taut, wiry boys in whose sharp features can be
seen exactly what age will do. He had never looked youthful, exactly. But he was very quick.

Italo liked to imagine that he was the one who was racing and leaping with the other children. Dusk fell and the blackbirds circled and the old bells from the villages across the valleys rang flat. And he ran and he ran in the daydream he liked to have.

He smelled the capers on the stone of the old wall that he leaned against. His legs were splayed and his feet tucked under his pale thighs, and when dinner was ready their mother called the two boys.

Lino. Italo
.

Sometimes he still thought he heard his mother’s voice.
Leeeeno. Eeeeetalo
.

When he was minding his goats when it was dry, the wind had a long, familiar sound. When he sat still, he could hear it. And in the sound of the dry summer heat he could hear:
Lino. Italo
.

He had dreams of visiting his brother one day. Lino lived in a house with electric lights, and hot water pouring from silver taps, and carpet on every floor.

Lino had been away for thirteen years. A long time. A long time for their mother not to see one of her sons. Lino had sent money to their mother every month until the war.

Italo felt special to have such a brother. The olive trees and the mountain crags and the birds and the butterflies and the little wasps treated him with respect when he hobbled along the goat trails with his herd. “That’s Lino Cavatore’s brother,” he liked to think they were saying when they saw him sitting motionless on a hillside in the shade of an old tree.

Lino Cavatore brought young men out from the hillside villages to work for him as apprentices. “I was given a chance,” Lino explained, “and now I can make the same offer.”

But the war had interrupted. The war was interrupting everything.

Italo kept careful track of his herd, but not by turning his head to watch them. He didn’t move a muscle. He listened to the shifting proximity of their tinkling bells. Butterflies landed on him.

He had dreams of girls. They were like clouds.

He was sitting in the shade on the hillside trail that day. His eyes were closed. His dreams were drifting around him. That was when he heard the noises: far below.

Ears like hawks’ eyes, people said of Italo.

He knew at once. He could hear danger coming up the trail.

So he ran. He ran as quickly as he could. He made his stiff, clumsy way under the grey wall of Castello and the stone foundations of the church.

He hurried up through the olive grove. He climbed the dusty path. He came up through a hedge of bramble and into the cobbled street.

The goatherd was running on his strange-looking hoof-like feet. They had no feeling.

“They have no feeling,” he always said. When he laughed, his face wrinkled with his years in the wind and the sun. And when, as the children always did, they asked Italo if this could really be true, he amazed them. He took off a worn old boot. He pulled down his darned sock. He sat. He lit a match. He held it there. Their eyes went wide.

And now he was running on feet that had no feeling. He was running as best he could. And he was pounding on the heavy wooden doors and he was shouting.

He had heard a commotion of motors from the valley. Tires on gravel. The opening of truck-backs. The clanking of straps and boots and cartridges.

Italo was hurrying through the narrow streets.
Tedeschi
. He was shouting in his strained voice as he went from door to door. Germans.

Soon the word outpaced him. Soon his warning was racing ahead of him in the village of Castello, leaping nimbly from house to house.