Free The Figures of Beauty by David Macfarlane

daughter. Delivered by hand.”
    He had imagined that the letter would become an artifact—something that closed a period of his life that he expected to be obscured in importance by the years to follow. But, as things turned out, there were no following years.
    It is a strange story—not complicated, exactly, but without the benefit of familiar pattern. And it was my mother who suggested that I use parts of my father’s letters to tell it. This was contrary to his wishes, but being contradicted by my mother is not an uncommon experience for those who have anything to do with her.
    When I asked my mother for her advice on the matter, she was silent for a good thirty seconds before answering. We hadjust come from the Taglianis’ house after Mr. Tagliani’s funeral. My husband and our two sons had gone to the seaside for the afternoon, with their soccer ball, and the picnic I’d packed for them, and the towels and sunscreen I made sure they didn’t forget.
    When my mother is asked by tourists or by some newcomers in the Café David in Pietrabella why she loves stone as much as she does, her answer surprises them. “Because I can move around it,” she says. “That’s what space is for.”
    When she works—as she does every day—she has her hammer in her left hand, a chisel in her right. Her hair is tied up. Its colour is no longer changed very much by marble dust.
    My mother works outside as much as possible. She enjoys the play of sunshine on stone as much as she enjoys anything. Rather than by the wristwatches she always loses and the clocks she forgets to wind, this is how she usually keeps track of time. The way light is dispersed across the surface of a rough block of marble accords with her non-sequential sense of things. This is how she marks the progress of her working days. She circles her chosen stone the way a god might circle the void that is going to become creation. “There are many beginnings,” she says. “The trick is choosing the ones that lead to the same ending.”
    But my father’s request had been troubling me. “How do I remember something I didn’t know?” I asked her.
    Her long pauses are characteristic. They are the deep caverns of possibility down which anyone who speaks with her eventually tumbles. When she answers a question she has a way of waiting for as long as it takes for everyone to dismiss all preconceptions of what her answer might be. People often find this unsettling. It is like speaking to a mad person. Not that my mother is crazy. It’s just that there is no point in even trying to guess what she might say.
    She might well have considered my father’s request frivolous. I’d only known him for a year. And it was entirely possible that my mother thought that distance and brevity were the only pertinent realities of the relationship. She is the least sentimental person I know. But it was just as possible that she might decide that my father had asked the one thing that he should have asked.
    What I had not anticipated—predictably—was what my mother said. “Nobody remembers anything. They only ever remember what they make up.”
    There was another lengthy pause. I knew not to interrupt it.
    “It’s what I said to him always,” she continued. “But your father wasn’t so bright. I told him always to let what he knows stay close to what he imagines. That’s how to be alive.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, as if passing on some advice to me about cooking or how to remove a wine stain from a blouse. “But he didn’t think he knew how.”
    She regarded me closely, to see if I’d got her point. She is always a little impatient when she sees I haven’t.
    “You should write it.”
    I shot her a look of surprise—a response that seemed equally to surprise her. “Well,” she said, looking down at her own hands, “you’re not going to carve it, are you.”
    “Carve what?”
    “What he wants you to dream up. What he was finally starting to dream in his