provincial town that was a good two-day climb below the quarry from which his marble would come.
After more than ten minutes of neither Richard nor Oliver orbiting very far away from the marble figure that so held their attention, their gazes met, and Richard raised his bushy eyebrows at Oliver. This was an acknowledgment of a kindred spirit. They were two rocks around which tumbled a teeming rapid of tourists.
They encountered one another twice more in their slowly opposing circles before Richard turned to Oliver.
“Unbefuckinglievable,” he said.
It wasn’t clear that Richard was commenting on the greatness of what they were looking at, or the fact that nobody else in the sculpture gallery appeared to notice it. Richard spoke with a friendly, unfussy ambivalence that often allowed for more than one interpretation of what he was saying. The Texan accent helped.
Oliver had entered the long, high-ceilinged room, fully intending to breeze through it. That’s what most people seemed to be doing. The tour bus driver had given everyone an hour and a half in the Louvre. But then Oliver saw
The Dying Captive
. By the time he was talking with Richard, Oliver was already rethinking his itinerary.
The $1800 for cultural improvement that Oliver Hughson had been awarded as the recipient of the Grace P. Barton Memorial Travel Bursary had been deposited, in his name, by Barton Newspapers in an account at the Société Générale near Place de l’Opéra. It was a bank of such burnished
fin de siècle
dignity, its 1940s telephones looked too modern.
Of course, this was long before computers and debit cards. And my father’s comprehensive tour of the youth hostels,cheap hotels, and second-class railway cars of Europe would be just as old-fashioned as his bank. Using Paris as the hub of his continental excursions, he would return to the city as his carefully worked-out travel schedules intersected with his need to draw more funds from his account. He would pick up his mail at the American Express in Place de l’Opéra before catching the next train to Amsterdam or Vienna or Madrid. Or such was the plan.
M Y MOTHER DOESN’T DISCOUNT the possibility that other lives are ruled by chance. She is sure, however, that hers is not. When she begins working a piece of stone, she says she can’t explain what form she is seeking. But she also says, there is a difference between what can’t be explained and what can be imagined. She is not alone in this, as she often points out. Michelangelo believed that the hard, dusty journey of carving is looking for the destination that awaits the carver’s arrival.
For a sculptor immodest enough to compare her working process to Michelangelo’s, my mother was always understated about its results. “Because I’m not very good” is the most common response she gives to tourists in the Café David who wonder, gingerly, why they have not heard of her. But with my mother, an admission of not being good is not necessarily a sign of being modest. Whether she judges herself in relation to her contemporaries or to the sculptor who, in her opinion, is the greatest who ever lived, is not clear.
The Dying Captive
was not a name chosen by Michelangelo. Death is not at all what it brings to mind to anyone who stops in the Italian Sculpture Gallery and actually looks at it. The name must have been dreamed up by somebody—a priest is my mother’s predictable guess—intent on deflecting attention fromthe solitary erotic pleasure that appears to be the figure’s dreamy preoccupation.
Richard and my father spoke for only a few minutes, but that was time enough. Richard talked about a piece of sculpture he was beginning in his studio. It was going to be called
The Pope’s Tomb
. It would be a dozen figures, each one mounted in a niche of a rectangular stone portico. The whole grouping was going to be about as big as a freezer—a dimension about which Richard’s gallery in Houston had serious misgivings.
After more than ten minutes of neither Richard nor Oliver orbiting very far away from the marble figure that so held their attention, their gazes met, and Richard raised his bushy eyebrows at Oliver. This was an acknowledgment of a kindred spirit. They were two rocks around which tumbled a teeming rapid of tourists.
They encountered one another twice more in their slowly opposing circles before Richard turned to Oliver.
“Unbefuckinglievable,” he said.
It wasn’t clear that Richard was commenting on the greatness of what they were looking at, or the fact that nobody else in the sculpture gallery appeared to notice it. Richard spoke with a friendly, unfussy ambivalence that often allowed for more than one interpretation of what he was saying. The Texan accent helped.
Oliver had entered the long, high-ceilinged room, fully intending to breeze through it. That’s what most people seemed to be doing. The tour bus driver had given everyone an hour and a half in the Louvre. But then Oliver saw
The Dying Captive
. By the time he was talking with Richard, Oliver was already rethinking his itinerary.
The $1800 for cultural improvement that Oliver Hughson had been awarded as the recipient of the Grace P. Barton Memorial Travel Bursary had been deposited, in his name, by Barton Newspapers in an account at the Société Générale near Place de l’Opéra. It was a bank of such burnished
fin de siècle
dignity, its 1940s telephones looked too modern.
Of course, this was long before computers and debit cards. And my father’s comprehensive tour of the youth hostels,cheap hotels, and second-class railway cars of Europe would be just as old-fashioned as his bank. Using Paris as the hub of his continental excursions, he would return to the city as his carefully worked-out travel schedules intersected with his need to draw more funds from his account. He would pick up his mail at the American Express in Place de l’Opéra before catching the next train to Amsterdam or Vienna or Madrid. Or such was the plan.
M Y MOTHER DOESN’T DISCOUNT the possibility that other lives are ruled by chance. She is sure, however, that hers is not. When she begins working a piece of stone, she says she can’t explain what form she is seeking. But she also says, there is a difference between what can’t be explained and what can be imagined. She is not alone in this, as she often points out. Michelangelo believed that the hard, dusty journey of carving is looking for the destination that awaits the carver’s arrival.
For a sculptor immodest enough to compare her working process to Michelangelo’s, my mother was always understated about its results. “Because I’m not very good” is the most common response she gives to tourists in the Café David who wonder, gingerly, why they have not heard of her. But with my mother, an admission of not being good is not necessarily a sign of being modest. Whether she judges herself in relation to her contemporaries or to the sculptor who, in her opinion, is the greatest who ever lived, is not clear.
The Dying Captive
was not a name chosen by Michelangelo. Death is not at all what it brings to mind to anyone who stops in the Italian Sculpture Gallery and actually looks at it. The name must have been dreamed up by somebody—a priest is my mother’s predictable guess—intent on deflecting attention fromthe solitary erotic pleasure that appears to be the figure’s dreamy preoccupation.
Richard and my father spoke for only a few minutes, but that was time enough. Richard talked about a piece of sculpture he was beginning in his studio. It was going to be called
The Pope’s Tomb
. It would be a dozen figures, each one mounted in a niche of a rectangular stone portico. The whole grouping was going to be about as big as a freezer—a dimension about which Richard’s gallery in Houston had serious misgivings.
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