The Stone Carvers (29 page)

“You’ll learn. I’ll show you a couple of scripts, and you’ll learn.”

In the past Juliani himself had always carved the names and dates, and Giorgio had paid very little attention to him while he worked at this task, which seemed to one who was constantly busy with angels to be boring in the extreme. He hadn’t been interested then, and he wasn’t interested now. But he was eager to enter civilian working life and felt, therefore, that it was prudent to agree—at least for the time being.

“With any luck,” Juliani was saying, “we’ll get a commission or two for a war memorial from some village or another. Good money in that.”

“And lots of words.”

“Well, lots of names, yes.”

And so Giorgio, quite reluctantly, began what would become a love affair with the alphabet. At first he struck a bargain with his employer that if he worked three weeks on words he would be able to spend two weeks on some image or another: an angel, a lamb, the face of a dead or missing soldier. To his great surprise, however, he developed—quite suddenly—a passion for the way words occupied the surface of stone, the placement, the depth, how the light affected them, and most of all their permanence. Even the mathematical calculations required for centring the words seemed to him somehow magical because they were so necessary. Without order, he came to know, the words would appear to be haphazard, unintentional, would lose the dignity that permanence demanded. He became fanatical about bevels and lines of incision, often in a temper for days about faults that even Juliani could not see. When the contracts for village war memorials began to arrive, it was he who negotiated with the mayors and councils, and he who carefully counted the number of characters necessary to honour the community’s lost sons. These symbols in stone would be all that remained of this farmboy, that office clerk, this boy who had played in the town band. Inevitably a quiet relative or friend or sweetheart would stand at a respectable distance behind Giorgio while he carved a particular name. And when he had finished they would shyly approach the stone and run their fingers over the marks that he had placed there. Sometimes they wept as they did this.

For ten years Giorgio Vigamonti would concern himself with rendering the letters of the alphabet, and with the powerful emotions this alphabet had on men and women when it was arranged in certain ways. He had, during this period, almost married a woman from an Italian family, someone he had known for years. The great friendship between her family and his, and the fact that he was now making a reasonable amount of steady money, made marriage and a family seem like a logical next step. Then the bottom fell out of the market. The last of the war memorials had been completed, the rich had lost their fortunes in the stock market crash, and there was very little interest in memorializing anything at all. The need for angels and lambs seemed to have departed from the earth, granite was replacing marble, and few had the money even for granite. Juliani, who was by then an old man, was forced to let Giorgio go and not much later to close his shop for good.

Giorgio, out of work, out of money, and out of luck, said goodbye to his family and his intended, left the city of Hamilton. For a year or two he became a vagrant and sometime migrant worker, drifting around the world of the hobos, eventually ending up in the large shanty town developing in the Don Valley in the heart of Toronto. It was here that he was reunited with Tilman, and here that he learned about the huge Canadian monument being built in France. A former soldier told him about it, a mad, dishevelled pencil seller who really
had
lost his right arm. The memorial was to honour the thousands of men who had gone missing in France—the names of those who had disappeared in Belgium had already been inscribed on the Menin Gate at Ypres. Giorgio would never forget the way the pencils in the man’s cup rattled as he gave him this news, as if they were an extension of the fellow’s constantly shaking body. He could barely believe what he was hearing. “The government is really going to pay for all this?” Giorgio asked.

“So I’ve heard,” said the pencil seller and then added under his breath, “the bastards.”

A week later, after hitchhiking to Montreal, Giorgio was stowed away in the baggage hold of a steamer headed for Le Havre, having unsuccessfully tried to persuade Tilman to join him.

“What could ever make you want to go back there?” Tilman had asked his friend. “Back to the scene of the carnage?”

“Work,” Giorgio had answered, “and anyway my particular scene of carnage was closer to Belgium, not in this part of France.”

“I wouldn’t even
think
of going,” Tilman said. He had remained unsmiling when Giorgio suggested he might find his leg there, at Vimy, where he lost it. But as Giorgio walked away, Tilman had called to him, “Look for me when you get back and we’ll go see your father.”

Giorgio had turned around then and shouted back, “Yes, we’ll do that. But what you should do in the meantime is find your own family.”

Tilman would always remember this, knowing, as he did, that in the final analysis both he and Giorgio had found the Becker family, or at least what was left of it.

Giorgio could barely imagine what eleven thousand names would look like carved on a huge stone wall surmounted by a magnificent monument. The texture they would make would be like no other surface, for words were like that. Even on impermanent, short-lived paper, even in foreign languages you would never understand, words had a presence unlike any other presence. They carried authority in a way no other collection of lines, circles, curves, and squares could. “Alpha and Omega,” he would sometimes whisper to himself when he was working. “Moses and the tablets.”

He was disappointed to discover upon arriving at the site in the spring of 1934 that another man would not be needed for the carving of the names for several months. At present, the list of men provided by the Ministry of Defence was being added to and subtracted from each day, as men believed to be missing turned up in the north woods of Canada, or in the tropics, or hidden in their attics. And every week or so a few other men would be reported as never returning to homes that had waited for them for years. Occasionally a body with identity tags would be found during the course of the work itself, when a landmine went off, or when a road had to be built, or a pit had to be dug. The boy in question would then be scratched from the list of the missing and his remains would be buried in a nearby military cemetery with the customary simple white stone engraved with a maple leaf and his name. Giorgio was told by Captain Simson, the overseer, that he might get a position as a carver, might be able to join the team of Italians who were currently hanging, supported by ropes and scaffolds, all over the vast pylons.

He would have to wait, however, until the man Allward returned to Vimy in a week or so, as each carver—even the stonecutters—had to be auditioned by him, and if Giorgio was to believe what Simson told him, the master sculptor was not easy to please. Still there was always work to be had, apparently, as each week a few Italian carvers would succumb to a combination of homesickness and the miserable weather, throw down their tools, and begin the journey home to Naples or Perugia.

Giorgio spent his first few days in the Picardie region, wandering in the countryside around the site, amazed by the colour green and the white, pink, and yellow blossoms in the orchards that had been planted since the war. So this was the celebrated French spring he had never witnessed during his years as a soldier. He could remember only the colours of flesh and of mud from that time; now there were tulips and daffodils in gardens, lace on the boughs of trees. After a day or two he began to feel uneasy, as if the display were somehow in bad taste in the face of what had gone before. There were those who were moved by nature’s blanketing of catastrophe. He was not to be one of them. To participate in work on the memorial seemed to him to be the only acceptable response to what had taken place.

His own battles had been fought farther north—notably at Passchendaele and Ypres—but it did not take much of an act of the imagination for him to re-create how things must have been at the ridge, in the trenches that surrounded it and on the slope that led to it. What he had never before seen was such an extensive series of tunnels snaking like an underground river system beneath the fields of conflict. As soon as he could borrow a lantern, he walked the half-mile from the busy site of the monument to the entrance of Grange Tunnel and began to explore this subterranean hallway and the passageways that veered off from it. The rusting military detritus underfoot and the names and images scratched into the chalky walls recalled so vividly the human activity that had taken place there they caused his eyes to fill with tears.

Though born in Canada, Giorgio moved easily through the throng of Italian carvers at the work site, recognizing in them certain tribal similarities to the crowded community of his childhood and understanding the language his parents had spoken in their home. And the men themselves welcomed him as a lost brother, inviting him to camp secretly on the floor of one of the huts until he could be hired on and saving scraps from the mess hall so that he wouldn’t starve while he was waiting. They were all eager for information about the New World—some had plans to emigrate—and they questioned him constantly. Was it unbearably cold? Were there many large sculptural commissions? Marble quarries? Giorgio hadn’t the heart to tell them that, in Canada, most of the carving took place in humble shacks near the graveyard. And now even that employment was vanishing along with the money that supported it. Instead he gave the particulars of his parents’ address to anyone claiming they wanted to go to Canada, that and the whereabouts of the parish church.

During the day he walked around the partly constructed monument, surveying it from every possible angle, then climbing the stairs to the top of the massive base, where he looked out again over the strangely innocent countryside. He then turned to examine the few completed allegorical figures. A downcast middle-aged man and woman were placed at either end of the east side of the base—Canada’s parents grieving for lost sons—and some other figures were in various stages of completion at the bottom of the two pylons. Giorgio was impressed by the enormity of the work, by the larger-than-life brooding presence of the figures, and by the massive architectural scale of the base and the pylons. Sometime soon, he was told, the man Allward would arrive and with him would be the largest sculpture of all: a female
pleurante
who would gaze down at the symbolic tomb that would be completed when the two carvers finished the marble cloth with which it was to be draped.

Giorgio made friends with the carvers who were working on a grouping of
Defenders
, whose stern marble countenances and firmly crossed arms he found almost comical. The men told Giorgio about the pale limestone that contained just enough ochre to make it seem warm rather than cool, about its long journey on the sea and over mountains to this place. Aphrodisa, they told him, was the name of this stone, like Aphrodite, they said, with her honey hair, her cream-coloured skin.

Giorgio looked at the figure they were carving, a powerful young man. The ribs and muscles of one-half of his torso were like the ploughed furrows of a field, the other half remained rough and primitive, the traces of the primary, harsh chisel work still explicit.

The older carver handed the young Canadian a tool. “You make an ear for us,” he said, offering this command as a challenge—a challenge to the New World.

“It’s the wrong chisel,” said Giorgio, “and I’ll need more than one. A drill also, and rasps.” He was remembering the ears of angels, his time in the shop in Hamilton. Juliani had always referred to the tombs with angels as sepulchral monuments, elevating them above the common tombstone. Now Giorgio was being asked to add something to the largest sepulchral monument of all.

The second carver opened his tool box. “Use anything you want,” he said.

Ever since he was a boy Giorgio had loved freeing the shell shape of an ear from the stone. What, he had always wondered, did angels listen to? It was, in many ways, the most delicate operation in the sculpting of a human body, more so even than the hand, though admittedly not as expressive. He looked for a long time at the location of the eye, the angle of the neck, and the shape of the skull. Then he climbed the ladder that rested against the figure’s shoulder and began by using a small drill while his companions worked opposite him, smoothing the bent arm that, with its twin, folded across the chest. By the time the shadow of the pylon touched the bottom rung of the ladder, Giorgio was using a small rasp on the outermost fold of the ear, that part which to his mind most resembled a curling leaf. The other two carvers were now watching and praising him.
“Bellissimo,”
they said and more than once,
“Bravo.”
Then, suddenly, they were silent.

They had heard the sound of city shoes on the stone floor of the monument. Although the footsteps did not make an echo, there was the impression of an echo, and something in the rhythm of the sound made one think of a sentence, a declaration. Even in his concentration, even with the rasp his primary concern, Giorgio registered the approach of one who was not wearing the customary gum-soled workboots, and he looked down from his ladder into the face of a tall, middle-aged man with thick eyebrows and a broad forehead. He was dressed in the kind of dark woollen overcoat that Giorgio remembered the rich men who owned Ontario factories wearing on their tours of inspection.

“Do I know you?” the man asked. “
Chi siete
?”

“I am Giorgio Vigamonti. You cannot know me. I have just come from Canada.”

“From Canada?” the man was surprised. “All that distance. Obviously I have not hired you.”

This was Walter Allward then. Giorgio was silent. He carefully placed the rasp beside the other tools he had lined up on the upper platform of the ladder.

“Why did you come? I expect to know absolutely everyone on my monument. And all of my carvers are Italian.”