The Figures of Beauty by David Macfarlane Page A

with sunlight, warm as fresh bread. He loved sleeps after lunch, rich in dreams. He loved the soft country ditches and the little roadside crucifixes. He loved the dusk of cypresses, and the hoist of skirts pressed against the stone of ancient walls.
    T HE TOWN OF C ARRARA WAS , as Morrow liked to say, an acquired taste. It had long possessed beauty that he happened to love: the beauty of work and the beauty of industry.
    By the eleventh century, the population had retreated to the hillsides, away from the pestilence of the seaside marshlands. With the rise of the region’s towns came the need for buildingmaterial, and marble was the material close at hand. Those who first went looking for it simply followed the rivers and creeks and streams upward to the sources of the hard, smooth stone. The trail of little water-tumbled pebbles—some pure white, some misty grey—led into the foothills and up into the gorges of the mountains to vast deposits of marble. Quarrying began, and gradually, as the reputation of Carrara marble spread, the town took on its inevitable role. Pisa wanted stone. Florence wanted stone. Rome wanted stone. Carrara devoted its industry to unearthing, carving, and shipping the marble the world wanted. In 1922, that’s what it still was doing.
    The workshops of Carrara were always busy, the streets often jammed with wagons down from the quarries. The Carrione River ran white with commerce.
    Morrow could watch an artisan at work and lose all track of time. It was an idiosyncrasy of his. He loved the noise. He loved the dust. He was far from indifferent to art, but he knew that the real domain of his soul lay in transaction. His visits to Carrara became so extended, the distinction between home and away began to blur. He’d been in Italy for almost two months by the muggy August day in 1922 when he encountered the couple on the cobbles of the Via Carriona bridge.
    T HEY WERE STUDYING A STATUE . It was made of local marble, as almost everything is in Carrara. But the statue was much older than any other monument they had yet seen in the town.
    The man was tall, pallid, with a grey moustache. He was consulting his Baedeker, apparently without success.
    The woman’s auburn hair was not entirely concealed by a wide-brimmed hat and the wrap of a pale silk scarf tied under her chin. Her coat and dress were full length and cut for walking.One of her boots had an elevated sole, Morrow noted, and both were laced in a tight criss-cross that made him think of corsets. He often did.
    When the woman stepped back to take a longer view of the statue, he could see that she had a pronounced limp.
    “Damn useless book,” Morrow heard the man say. Morrow took the accent to be American—an error, as he was soon to learn. Grace and Argue Barton were from Cathcart, Ontario—a place with which Morrow was not, he would later have to admit to them, familiar.
    He was curious, though. The gentleman gave the appearance of understated affluence. And the woman … well, Julian Morrow was inclined, always, to be curious about a beautiful woman.
    As the weather cleared, it was becoming apparent that it was the haze of industry that was drifting across the distant peaks, not parting clouds. The sun caught the skein of marble dust.
    Glorious, Julian Morrow always thought when he saw this.
    He stepped across the wet cobbles. He guessed he would soon make some money. He had an instinct for these things.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    M Y FATHER , O LIVER H UGHSON , died on a flight from Toronto to Milan in late April 2010. He was sixty-two years old at the time. But this is not—as Paolo, the too-handsome husband of my best friend, Clara, told me—so very unusual. This is not what is strange.
    Paolo is a commercial pilot—an occupation that gives him greater expertise in more subjects than most men imagine they have. Which is saying something. The best kind of tires, the most reliable automobiles, the cause of my father’s death—these are all