Free The Figures of Beauty by David Macfarlane Page B

place as much as he loved the hills and the sky.
“Buon giorno,”
he called to everyone on the sidewalk as he made his way through the clattering morning streets of Carrara.
“Buona sera,”
he called to everyone in a café when, after his
digestivo
, he stepped briskly into the early evening light of the square. He broadcast his affection effusively—exclamations at the excellence of a fish soup endeared him to the cooks who prepared it, to the waiters who served it, and to the restaurant owners, who always greeted him so warmly when he stepped through their doors.
    He was the best of guides. He took his visitors to this statue, to that bridge, to a white marble baptismal font in a country church that they would never have found on their own. He took them to eat in country inns where there were no menus because there were no choices to be made. They drank the local wine. They ate whatever the kitchen had prepared. The lunches lasted for hours.
    On Sundays—the only day of the week when the quarries were not worked—he took his house guests on hikes into the mountains for picnics. He pointed out the cliffside that Michelangelo had imagined carving into a colossus as a beacon for ships. He helped them discern the purple shadow of Corsica on the horizon. He gestured to the south, in the direction of Torre del Lago, the home of Giacomo Puccini.
    As he set out the meal his cook had packed for the Sunday picnic, it was Morrow’s custom to sing “Un Bel Dì.” This was a performance, but he did not let its lack of spontaneity diminish the pleasure he took in delivering it. Pausing, with the cork half pulled from a bottle of wine, he looked west to the distant blue line of the Mediterranean.
Vedremo levarsi un fil di fumo sull’estremo confin del mare
. Morrow’s speaking voice was gruff, but his singing was surprisingly musical. He transposed Butterfly’s soprano with improbable respect.
E poi la nave appare
. His guests often thought they heard a catch in his voice, so moved was Julian Morrow by the aria that he had decided, seemingly on the spur of the moment, to sing.
    The food was the simplest fare, but more than a few of those fortunate enough to experience an al fresco luncheon in the mountains with Julian Morrow would claim it as one of the best meals of their lives. The moist bread, the smoked sausage, the hard goat’s cheese, the blood oranges, the bottles of a local white wine so young it was almost effervescent were all set out in the sharp sunlight on a rough wooden table used for the same purpose by the quarry workers. At his customary lunch spot, there was a wall of marble that rose over them. The floor of the plateau was carpeted with wild thyme. The red-roofed towns and the bone-coloured beaches were far below.
    As they ate he showed his guests—“somewhere out there”—the distant sea where Percy Shelley drowned. Morrow was then often asked: Could he recite a few lines? He wondered if he could. He poured out more wine for the table. “Ah,” he said. “Let me see.”
    “Ozymandias” was what came to mind. All fourteen lines.
    His guests were charmed. Everything about Morrow was charming—his villa but one example.
    His residence was a former convent in the hills above thetown of Pietrabella, and his visitors remembered it as the most pleasant of homes. Summer breezes passed through it like billowing silk.
    The linens were exquisite. The soaps felt like cream. His servants were present when he wanted them to be, invisible when he did not. The stone floors were cool underfoot as his visitors passed from their toilet to their beds.
    The architects and builders, municipal officials and church leaders, developers and hotel owners, aristocrats and society doyennes, landscape artists and decorators who arrived in Carrara as Julian Morrow’s invited guests, left as his friends. A miniature
David
, about six inches in height and carved in white marble, arrived after their visit, with Julian Morrow’s