The Quarry

The road to the quarries above Carrara climbed in switchbacks through chestnut forest, the asphalt narrowing at each turn until it became a single lane of cracked and potholed concrete that the marble trucks had been destroying and the commune had been repairing in an alternating cycle that had been going on since the road was built in the 1950s and that showed no sign of resolution, the trucks winning by attrition, their forty-ton loads grinding the surface into a condition that would have been unacceptable anywhere in Italy except here, where the marble was the economy and the economy justified the destruction and the destruction was simply the cost of extraction, the price the mountain paid for being made of the most beautiful stone in the world.

Oren drove the Fiat Panda up this road on a Tuesday morning, the day before the pour, because Giuseppe had asked him to come, had said there was something he wanted to show him, and Giuseppe did not make such requests lightly or often, and when he did the thing he wanted to show was always worth seeing, was always something that bore on the work in a way that was not immediately obvious but that became obvious later, in the studio, when the hands were engaged and the mind was free and the connection between what he had seen and what he was making suddenly appeared like a vein of color in the stone.

Giuseppe sat in the passenger seat with his window down and his arm resting on the door and his face turned toward the mountain with the expression of a man returning to a familiar place that he had never stopped being amazed by, which was the correct expression for anyone driving up to the Carrara quarries, because the quarries were amazing in the old sense of the word, the sense that meant confusing and overwhelming and slightly terrifying, the mountains opened up like the bodies of enormous animals, their white insides exposed to the sky, the scale of the extraction visible from kilometers away as bright wounds on the dark green slopes.

They passed the village of Colonnata, which was famous for lardo — pork fat cured in marble basins with rosemary and garlic and spices, a food that sounded disgusting and tasted transcendent, a food that was itself a kind of patina, the fat transformed by the marble and the salt and the time into something that bore no resemblance to what it had been — and they continued climbing past the village and into the quarry district, where the road divided into tracks that led to individual quarries, each one a separate operation with its own name and its own owner and its own particular quality of stone, because Carrara marble was not one stone but many, ranging from the pure white of statuario, which Michelangelo had used and which cost more per ton than most people earned in a month, to the grey-veined ordinario that was used for floor tiles and bathroom counters and the facades of buildings that wanted to look more expensive than they were.

Giuseppe directed him to a quarry he had not visited before, a smaller operation on the north face of Monte Sagro, above the tree line, where the mountain was bare rock and the road was gravel and the Fiat Panda protested the gradient with a whine from its engine that made Oren think of the small animal in distress that he associated with the dishwasher.

They parked at the edge of the quarry.

The quarry was a vertical cut in the mountainside, perhaps fifty meters high and thirty meters wide, and the face of the cut was smooth and white and brilliant in the morning sun, the marble exposed in cross-section like a geological diagram, and at the base of the cut a wire saw was working, a loop of diamond-studded cable that ran on pulleys and that cut through the marble with a sound like a continuous sigh, the stone yielding to the wire in a slow surrender that produced a slurry of white powder and water that ran in streams across the quarry floor and pooled in depressions where it settled into a paste the color and consistency of yogurt.

Giuseppe led him to the base of the quarry face.

He put his hand on the stone.

Touch it, he said.

Oren put his hand on the marble. The stone was cool despite the sun, cool and smooth with a grain that he could feel but not see, and the coolness traveled up his arm and into his body and he thought of Lina's hand, which had been cool when he held it in the car driving home from the hospital, cooler than usual, the chemicals perhaps changing her temperature the way chemicals changed the temperature of a reaction, and he pushed the thought away and focused on the stone.

Giuseppe said, This is the stone they used for the Duomo in Pietrasanta. Four hundred years ago. The same quarry. The same face. The same stone.

Oren looked at the quarry face and tried to see in it the facade of the Duomo that he walked past every day, the white marble that blazed in the morning and went pink in the evening, and he could not see it, could not connect the raw face of the mountain with the finished surface of the building, because the connection required an act of imagination that bridged not only space but time, four hundred years of time, and the marble of the Duomo had been weathered and worn and stained by those four hundred years, had developed its own patina, its own record of exposure, and this patina was as much a part of the building as the stone itself.

Giuseppe said, I brought you here because of the memorial.

Oren waited.

Giuseppe said, The sculpture you are making. The vessel. The boat. The hand. Whatever it is. It needs to know where it comes from. And where it comes from is here.

He gestured at the quarry face, the white expanse of stone, the wire saw sighing through the marble, the dust and the water and the mountains above and the sea below, invisible but present in the air.

Giuseppe said, Bronze comes from the earth. Copper and tin, from mines. And the patina you put on it — the chemicals, the sulfur, the nitrates — they come from the earth too. Everything comes from the earth and goes back to the earth and the patina is the going-back part. The patina is the bronze returning to the earth. You accelerate what the earth would do anyway, in centuries, in millennia. You compress time. You make the future happen now.

Oren said, I know this.

Giuseppe said, You know it with your hands. I want you to know it with your eyes. I want you to see the mountain before the building. The ore before the bronze. The stone before the floor. I want you to see the raw material, the thing before the surface, because the memorial you are making is about the surface — the patina, the green, the age — and you cannot make a good surface if you do not understand what is underneath it.

Oren looked at the quarry face and this time he saw it differently, saw it not as a wall of stone but as a surface, a vast surface that had been exposed by the cutting and that was, in its way, raw — raw the way a newly cast bronze was raw, the interior made exterior, the hidden made visible — and he understood what Giuseppe was telling him, which was not about marble or bronze but about Lina, about what was underneath the surface of her composure, the raw stone behind the finished facade, and that understanding this — seeing the raw material, knowing what was beneath the patina — was essential to the work he was doing, both the work on the memorial and the work of being married to a woman who was dying.

They sat on a block of cut marble at the edge of the quarry and ate the panini that Giuseppe had brought from the bar in Pietrasanta, prosciutto and mozzarella on ciabatta, and they drank water from the bottles in Giuseppe's bag and the sun was hot and the air was thin at this altitude and the view was the view that the quarry workers saw every day and that Oren had not seen before — the entire coastal plain spread below them, Pietrasanta and Forte dei Marmi and Viareggio visible as clusters of terracotta and white along the coast, and beyond them the sea, the Ligurian Sea, flat and blue and infinite, reaching to a horizon that was indistinguishable from the sky.

Giuseppe said, How is Lina.

It was the first time he had asked directly.

Oren said, The first treatment was yesterday. She is resting.

Giuseppe said, My wife had treatment for the breast. Fifteen years ago. She is fine now.

Oren said, The pancreas is different.

Giuseppe said, I know. And then he said nothing more, and the nothing he said was the right nothing, the nothing of a man who understood that there were situations in which silence was not the absence of speech but the presence of something better than speech, and they sat on the marble block and ate their panini and looked at the sea and the silence between them was the silence of two men who had worked together for fifteen years and who trusted each other with the things that mattered — the quality of a casting, the thickness of a shell, the temperature of a pour — and who were now trusting each other with something that mattered more.

After lunch they walked along the quarry floor.

The floor was littered with marble fragments — blocks that had cracked during cutting, slabs that had been rejected for flaws, chunks and shards and splinters that ranged in size from boulders to pebbles — and the fragments were white and grey and veined and each one was a failed extraction, a piece of the mountain that had been cut but not used, and the accumulation of these failures was enormous, was in fact the majority of what the quarry produced, because marble extraction was a process of waste, of removing far more than you kept, and the ratio of waste to usable stone was, Giuseppe said, roughly seven to one, which meant that for every block of marble that went to a sculptor's studio or a building site, seven blocks' worth of stone went to the waste piles that grew at the edges of the quarries like white glaciers, and these waste piles were themselves a kind of landscape, a manufactured terrain that had been forming for centuries and that was, in its way, as permanent as the mountain it came from.

Oren picked up a fragment of marble.

It was the size of his palm, roughly triangular, and its surface was freshly cut on one side and naturally weathered on the other, the cut side bright white and smooth and the weathered side grey and rough and pitted, and the difference between the two sides was the difference between the present and the past, between the stone as it was and the stone as time had made it, and this difference was a patina, the original patina, the patina that everything developed simply by existing, by being exposed to air and water and sunlight and the slow chemistry of the atmosphere.

He put the fragment in his pocket.

They drove back to Pietrasanta in the late afternoon, descending through the switchbacks, the marble trucks passing them on the narrow road with a closeness that would have been alarming if it were not routine, the trucks' loads of raw marble blocks lashed to the flatbeds with steel cables, the blocks white and enormous and heavy with the weight of the mountain they had been cut from, and the road was dusty with marble powder and the Fiat Panda was covered in white dust by the time they reached the plain and the dust was, Oren thought, another patina, the quarry marking everything that passed through it with a thin coating of itself.

At the apartment Lina was awake.

She was sitting in the kitchen in the chair by the window, reading a new book — she had finished the Solstad — and she looked better than she had the previous evening, color in her face, energy in her posture, and Oren was relieved and knew that the relief was temporary, that the chemotherapy's effects were cumulative and that the first treatment was the easiest and that each subsequent treatment would be harder, the drugs building up in the body the way coats of ceramic shell built up on the wax, each one adding weight and thickness and the potential for cracks.

He showed her the marble fragment from the quarry.

She held it in both hands and turned it over, examining the cut side and the weathered side, and she said, It has two faces.

He said, One face is the mountain. The other face is time.

She said, Which face is the real one.

He said, Both. Neither. The question does not apply. Both faces are the stone. Both are real. The difference is only the surface.

She set the marble fragment on the table next to her book and said, When is the pour.

He said, Tomorrow. Eight in the morning. The shell is ready. Roberto says it cooled clean, no cracks.

She said, I want to come.

He said, The foundry is hot and loud and the fumes are bad.

She said, I have had chemicals pumped into my body for six hours. I think I can handle fumes.

He did not argue because arguing with Lina on a matter she had decided was like arguing with marble, which was to say pointless, the stone being harder than any tool you could bring to bear on it, and he said, We leave at seven-thirty, and she said, Good, and she went back to her book and Oren went downstairs to the studio to prepare.

He laid out the tools he would need for the post-pour process — the hammers and chisels for breaking away the ceramic shell, the grinders and files for chasing the sprue stubs, the welding equipment for filling any voids or repairing any defects — and he organized them on the workbench with the care that the work demanded, each tool in its place, each tool maintained, the grinder discs checked for wear, the welding tips inspected, the files ranked by coarseness from rough to smooth, because the post-pour process was a process of progressive refinement, of moving from the coarse to the fine, from the violent to the gentle, from the hammer to the file to the sandpaper to the cloth, and the sequence was inviolable and the tools had to be ready.

He went upstairs at eight.

Lina had made dinner — a simple soup of white beans and rosemary, the kind of meal that could be made without much effort and that would be easy on a stomach that had been assaulted by four chemotherapy drugs — and they ate together in the kitchen and the soup was good, warm and uncomplicated, and the bread was good, and the wine — just a glass, the Vermentino — was good, and the evening was warm and the window was open and the sounds of Pietrasanta came in and the marble fragment sat on the table between them like a small monument to the day.

Lina said, Tell me about the quarry.

Oren told her. He told her about the road and the switchbacks and the trucks and the wire saw and the quarry face and the view from the top and Giuseppe's speech about the raw material and the surface and the going-back of things to the earth, and he told her about the waste piles and the ratio of seven to one and the marble dust on the Fiat Panda, and she listened and the listening was Lina's particular skill, the ability to hear not only the words but the architecture of the words, the way they were arranged and the spaces between them, and she heard in his account of the quarry the thing he was not saying, which was that the quarry had frightened him, that the scale of the extraction had made him feel small, that the sight of the mountain being opened up and emptied had reminded him of the thing he could not stop thinking about, the opening up and emptying of his wife by the disease and the treatment, and she heard this and she did not comment on it and her silence was the most generous response she could have given.

After dinner Oren washed the dishes and Lina dried them, which was a reversal of their usual roles, and the reversal was small and unremarked and significant.

He went to bed and lay beside her and listened to her breathe and the breathing was even but there was a new quality to it, a slight hoarseness at the bottom of each exhale that had not been there before the treatment, and he did not know whether this was a side effect of the chemotherapy or a symptom of his own heightened attention, his ears tuned to a frequency they had not previously monitored, hearing changes that might not be changes but that his fear insisted on interpreting as changes.

In the morning they would go to the foundry.

In the morning the bronze would be poured and the void inside the ceramic shell would be filled with two thousand degrees of liquid metal and the memorial sculpture would cross the threshold from potential to actual, from void to substance, from the negative space left by the lost wax to the positive form of the bronze that would, eventually, receive the patina that was the whole point of the work, the green surface that would make the new thing look old, that would compress time, that would make the future happen now.

And in the morning Lina would stand in the foundry and watch the pour and she would see the bronze and she would see it raw, before the patina, before Oren made it beautiful, and this seeing — this witnessing of the raw material before the surface was applied — was what she had asked for and what he would give her, because giving her what she asked for was the only thing he could do, was the only response he had to the ungovernable chemistry of the disease, and it was not enough and it was everything.

He slept.

He dreamed of the quarry, of the white face of the marble, of the wire saw sighing through the stone, and in the dream the stone was not marble but wax, and the saw was not cutting but melting, and the mountain was not a mountain but a body, and the body was Lina's, and the saw was the disease, and the mountain was coming apart in white fragments that fell into the quarry floor and collected in drifts like snow, and the drifts were beautiful and the beauty was terrifying and the terror was the dream's point, if dreams had points, which Oren did not believe they did, believing instead that dreams were the mind's patina, the surface it developed in sleep, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, the chemistry of the unconscious producing its own colors, its own corrosions, its own ungovernable green.

He woke before the alarm.

The mountains were dark against a sky that was just beginning to lighten, and Lina was beside him, breathing, and the breathing was even, and the marble fragment was on the kitchen table, and the ceramic shell was in the kiln at Fonderia Mariani, and the day had begun.