The Figures of Beauty by David Macfarlane Page B

subjects to which Paolo provides the answer, whether or not anyone asks him a question.
    Normally, this would make me uncomfortable. Good looks and an assertive personality are not as good a combination as a lot of men think they are. On my own, I would probably not be comfortably belted into Paolo’s silver Mercedes once a week. But my best friend loves Paolo, and he loves my best friend, and thatchanges everything. He often picks Clara and me up after our weekly African dancing class in Casatori.
    The beat of the hand drums is usually still with me as we return to Pietrabella. I always feel radiant after dancing. Clara says it’s the same with her. The ride is so smooth it feels like we are gliding over the Autostrada.
    Clara and I have known each other since we were girls. We are very close in age. We played on the terraces of vines and fruit trees that were the steep front gardens of our street.
    There is a long climb of stone steps from the pavement to the front doors of the homes on Via Maddalena. The backs of the houses look up to the rooks’ nests, and garlands of capers, and the crumbling turrets of the old town wall. Clara’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Tagliani, owned a neat little box of a house up from where my mother and I lived. The Taglianis’ home was built in the late 1950s.
    We rented our apartment. It is the second floor of a big, three-storey family home that is by far the oldest on the street. At one time the house must have been alone, just outside the old town wall—a primacy that suited my mother’s aesthetic dignity. When we moved from the countryside, my mother was drawn to Via Maddalena because she could see that its steepness meant that however much Pietrabella was expanding to its north, to its south, and to its west, our street would always remain on the eastern outskirts of the municipality. Where the houses stopped, the hills began. And where the hills stopped, the mountains started.
    My mother’s coolness toward the “new houses on the street”—which is to say all the homes except the one in which we lived—might have been aristocratic disdain for the bourgeoisie were she in any way aristocratic. But the upper classes were as objectionable to my mother as postwar architecture. Her politicsmeander from anarchism to communism to socialism to liberalism. The practical outcome of this is that she can, and often does, argue with everyone about everything.
    My mother puts “sculptor” in the space reserved for “Occupation” on the very few government forms she ever reluctantly fills in. But this isn’t her complete job history: She had a daughter to raise and so she could not afford to be entirely impractical, however naturally she was that way inclined. My mother never resented the responsibilities of parenting. She just kept them in perspective.
    Over the years she worked sometimes as an artist’s model. Her English is good, if idiosyncratic, and she was hired sometimes by marble merchants to act as a guide for visiting clients. But she was always clear: these were temporary measures. Her own stone sculpture has always been her most constant employment.
    As a result, we never had any money. We were frequently in arrears on our monthly payments to the family that lived, in ever-expanding generations, above the wide wooden beams and below the cool marble floors of our apartment. But my mother can be very charming when it comes to the bills she owes and funds she doesn’t have. She is almost seventy now, and she has always been a good-looking woman She still has the posture of a teenager, still works stone, still poses on occasion for artists in town. Her hair is silver but still a thick tangle. Her smile is disarming—as is her disinclination to offer her creditors anything that sounds like circumstantial excuse. Her position is sweetly unapologetic: She is a sculptor. What do they expect?
    The fact that we were the only tenants on Via Maddalena, and not homeowners, did not mean to