PART ONE: FERNANDO�S STONEYARD
Finding a Master
Sanchez and I came bouncing down that unspeakable road in the dark in his furgoneta (delivery van). I was lost but supposed we were headed towards the cemetery, which was where all the stone businesses were set up. Hades: the perpetually overcast underworld of tombstones and withered flowers. I�d been in and out of it dozens of times in the last three or four months looking for....for what? I thought it was a simple thing: I wanted to learn to carve beautiful figures in marble. Like Michelangelo. And I needed someone to show me how to do it. That was all. Maybe I was still too close to boyhood and used to people doing �nice things� for me only because I was a kid. I hadn�t yet understood the quid pro quo idea. Parents and grandparents and godfathers and many other people showered a boy with presents and goodwill all the time without requiring anything of him. They seemed happy enough if he smiled in thanks. So I thought that getting someone to show me how to carve stone, if I approached him with filial piety and honesty, was a realistic objective. I was even willing to pay should the fellow plead realities of life. I figured that cinched it. It sounded to me like a business deal.
But when I made this proposal to a dozen stone-cutters, none of them acted like uncles or my old football coach. They seemed to think I was past the age when boys are helped out of a general instinct the species has for its furtherance and survival. They broke away from their dusty work just long enough to hear the start of my spiel, then turned me out like a salesman. Was I nuts? Either I worked for them and they paid me (a pittance) or I got out of their way. Realities of life.
I had explained my scheme to marblers and stone copyists; engravers and teachers of modelling at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios. I had met near-sculptors, art dealers and gallery owners. I had even walked into a few real sculptors� ateliers. Sanchez was the last name in my book: a man whose business was selling abrasives and machinery to stone-cutters and masons. My hope was on its last leg when I got to his shop one evening at closing time. I unrolled my story one more tired time. I had rehearsed it most of the times I�d told it but now, partly because it was so well memorized and partly because I no longer believed in its power as a charm, I just let it come out as it fell. I didn�t expect Sanchez could help me. In my heart I was sure he was just another wild goose.
But he listened. He was a good listener with instant grasp. And he was sympathetic. He thought a moment, ran his finger down a big agenda with telephone numbers and addresses, picked up the phone, looked at his watch, put the phone back down and thought again. �Let�s go try Fernando. He should still be there. If he can�t help you we�ll go see Luis or Braulio, but I think Fernando�s your man.�
�You know a lot of sculptors,� I said.
�All of them,� he said. �I sell to every last one of them.�
And he locked up his shop and hurried me into his furgoneta.
The Yard
He pushed Fernando�s big metal gate right open without drumming on it first. He knew he couldn�t hear us above the compressor. �Watch your step�.
The stoneyard was dark except for Fernando�s big light bulb at the far end. We crossed through a yard that was open to the sky�a vacant lot strewn with enormous boulders. Fernando looked up from his stone and watched us come. �Damn it all,� he must have said to himself. We meant the end of his work. He had counted on another half-hour or hour tonight before calling it quits. Now, at this rate, he would need about three more evenings minimum to finish the capital. If there weren�t more surprises. He closed the valve on the rubber tube of the air-hammer and sat up straight to receive us, resigned. He smiled. Big glasses. A dusty beret with gray hair ducktailing out the back. ��Hombre! You�re going to wreck la furgoneta coming out here in the dark,� he said to Sanchez. He was high above us on that big rock, like a preacher in his pulpit, and he had to carefully climb down. �Let me turn the compressor off,� he said, and disappeared into the dark. Suddenly the big chugging stopped and everything was dead quiet; and Fernando reappeared beside us with his hand outstretched.
This was not one of the great meetings in art history. I wasn�t Michelangelo and Sanchez wasn�t my father turning me over to Domenico Ghirlandaio. Great sculptors and painters and their workshops were gone. Sanchez knew me only slightly from Adam. He was furthering the species�doing me a giant favor; and now he was challenging Fernando to do me an even bigger one. They were both unusually generous men in a country that lavishes gifts on the visitor and the foreigner. But one thing is what you offer to do on your own and another what you are asked to do. Other men had listened with a frown while selecting one of the very good excuses they had for bowing out. But Fernando never let up on his smile as he looked first at me, then at Sanchez, and back at me again; and the smile got bigger and bigger. What made him like the idea?
There was the curiosity of my nationality. What the hell was an American doing in Spain trying to learn sculpture? Don�t these Yankees come here teaching us everything? Maybe the guy�s wants into Montserrat�s racket.
One of his best customers, a sculptor from Barcelona, had ordered and was still ordering dozens of figures for galleries in New York and Washington. Fernando finished them, packed them up, and shipped them off. There was a chance that I would eventually give him some orders like that. But that was too far into the future to affect him. He was sixty and sick with diabetes. He might not even make it to retirement.
No; it was the other thing, the generousness. He liked the idea of showing me what he had learned. He hadn�t had a teacher. And though he had had plenty of people come to watch him work, he�d never had a serious student either. Maybe this boy could learn. Maybe he had it in him to be a sculptor. If he will listen to me, I can save him from all the knocks I had to take. How often have I thought: if only I had known then (when I started out) what I know now!
And Fernando knew everything about the world of stone. In art schools there were teachers who passed on the general principles of sculpture such as you could read in a book. But few or none of them had ever carved more than a trial figure �to get the idea�. Stone-carving, like any craft, needs thousands of hours of earnest practice; and this means years of exhausting work with the hammer and the chisel in a permanent cloud of dust, in the ice of winter and the sweat-dripping heat of summer. Your fingers will deform to accommodate the chisel and your hands will become almost as calloused and thick as your feet. Fernando had been through the mill: he was qualified all right. He was probably the fastest stone-carver in Spain.
�Do you like my workshop?� he asked me, introducing it with a sweep of his hand. He was teasing, challenging too. The place was completely unpresentable, even in the dark. Only two sides of the big yard were covered with a make-shift roof. And even they were open to the wind and blowing rain. Between the stone blocks the ground rose and fell in dunes of dust and stone chips. It wasn�t a workshop so much as a semi-permanent camp-site out in a field. And now, in the half-dark, it looked like a sort of disorganized cemetery on the beach. Fernando must have wondered whether I knew what I was in for. How easily will this kid get discouraged? Aren�t Yankees just big babies? He looked at me with a skeptical grin. Behind him, hopping and jumping to reach the light cord was a litter of kittens. They seemed to dance around him like fairies or elves. He walked over into the dark and reached up above his head. There was a flash as he twisted a big light bulb deeper into its socket, and then a continuous light. �Mira�, he said. �Look.�
The wall was full of statues, stacked on massive wooden shelves that bowed under their weight. They were jammed in just any old way and covered with a half-inch of stone dust and soot from the campfire. Many of them were broken and crushed. In that condition it was hard to understand them or see anything pretty in them. Nothing in Fernando�s workshop looked like the sculpture I knew, of which there are two, of course. The first does all the recruiting for the second. The first I�d seen in Florence on the Piazza de Signor�a, in the Uffizi and the Accademia. That�s the one you contemplate in museums and discuss over a glass of wine in cocky abstract language. It is the fresh flower picked off the bush. Fernando�s taller was the second, the bush�the thorn bush.
Montserrat�s Angel
The wiggling of the light cord had brought the kittens scampering over. They chased and fell on one another like little clowns in a slapstick act; and their chases ended in crazy little somersaults. They hopped up onto a stone as big as a table and began to play hide-and-seek around a reddish figure I hadn�t seen. It was a boy, nearly life-size, sitting on a little rock seat in sad reflection. He wasn�t like Rodin�s famous Thinker; he didn�t wedge his jaw into his hand and lock himself ape-wise into a rigid pose. Rather, he sat as if in a daydream, upright, one hand only grazing his face as though it were the caress of a mother; the other hand resting near his knee, perched as lightly as a bird. There was movement everywhere and yet the lad was still. He sat believably on the little stone and yet he seemed to have no weight, to be about to get up and run ever-so- lightly away. �This is really beautiful,� I said, walking around it to see if it was as good everywhere. Fernando watched me. It was his first opportunity to look at me while I examined the figure. I didn�t want to play the art connoisseur but I did want to let him know that I could spot a good thing.
�It�s an angel,� he said. �It�s for a grave. You remember��he said the name of a famous politician who had died recently. �It�s for his grave.�
Here was sculpture of the first kind. It was better than anything I had seen by a living sculptor and was, I had to admit, better than anything I could do myself�though I hoped to do even better some day. All the details were modelled with the authority of a clear idea: nothing was done only as a copy of nature. It was all an interpretation, a style. That was probably its only defect: the style obeyed a kind of predictable canon of elongation and suppleness. Still, the canon worked: the angel was graceful, light, and deep. It had none of the grand style, none of the terribilit� of the figures in the Medici tombs, but rather the young grace of Donatello�s David.
�Do you know the sculptor?� I asked.
�Do I know him? I�d better: most of those figures are his��pointing to the rubble of plaster statues on the shelves. I looked at them again but couldn�t see any as good as the red angel and said so.
�You can�t see them,� said Fernando. �Another day we�ll take some down and look at them right. A lot depends on how a figure is displayed. You should see how pretty they look in marble.�
�Have you made all those in marble?�
�Most of them six or eight times.�
�And this one?��refering to the red angel. �What marble are you going to carve it in?�
�Carrara.�
Carrara! Michelangelo�s Carrara! It was the quarry in the hills near Fiesole which supplied him and all the great Renaissance sculptors with their marble. The Piet�, the David, the Apollo�all Michelangelo�s best-known works except the figures for Pope Julius�s tomb were in Carrara. I didn�t dare tell anyone that Michelangelo was my model. I knew it would have sounded childish, affected or arrogant, ignorant or mad, so I kept it to myself; like the schizophrenic who is careful not to tell you that he is a beetle because of the bad impression he knows it will cause. Or rather, like the young actor who, to avoid noxious smiles, has learned not to say that he is going to be like Gary Cooper.
And now here was Fernando saying Carrara in this unlikely twentieth-century workshop as if modern sculptors still dreamed of the David and the Boboli Giants and ordered figures in Carrara because that was the only proper raw material for True Art, having been the Master�s.
�Does it really come from Italy?� I meant: Do you mean real Carrara marble? But the question came out deflected because I had been knocked off balance by the surprise.
�It had better, from what they charge,� said Fernando with a little gust of a laugh and a look at Sanchez. �It�s been coming in really bad the last few months. Grayish. Light gray with blackish streaks that are harder than the rest and bitchy when you cut into them. They say the old quarries are about finished.�
�Do you have the block for the angel?� I started to look around at all those boulders.
�Just hold your horses. It�s still in the almacen. You�ll see it next week. And you�ll meet the sculptor too if you stick around.�
I meant to stick around. I was going to watch very closely how Fernando carved that red angel and I almost couldn�t wait until next week. I could see he was going to agree to teach me. But didn�t he need to know if I had any talent? Wouldn�t there be a test of some sort? The teacher at Escuela de Artes y Oficios had given me a sheet of Ingres paper and a piece of charcoal and told me to start copying a plaster version of one of Michelangelo�s Slaves. But Fernando was already acting as though the agreement had been reached and was chatting with Sanchez about something else. My desire to learn was enough for him. He didn�t consider himself a judge of artistic merit. He was going to teach a craft, not an art. He knew that only one thing mattered: constancy, the daily effort. Practice makes the master, only practice. If I could hold out for 3 or 4 years I would be far enough along to work on my own. Would I be a great artist? Fernando didn�t waste his time on considerations of that sort. To him, successful art was art that sold and made you a living. It was good art if you were competent. And you became competent by working hard. Now and then Chance picked out this or that artist and doubled or tripled the price he could ask for his figures. But that circumstance was just a lottery jackpot. It was no goal at all.
The Contract?
But business was business, wasn�t it? I thought it was time for the two parties to sit down and thrash out the terms of the contract. �I will pay you whatever you think right,� I said.
�All you have to do is come here on Monday morning and we�ll get started. �We�ll talk about money some other time.� He went on chatting with Sanchez.
But I insisted: �How are we going to do it? Will I pay you by the month?�
His smile had gone down to a frown now. �You can pay me once you cost me something. Don�t worry about it, all right?� This he said with more than a trace of hint-giving: that I should drop the subject. It was bad manners to go on speaking of money.
But this was no agreement at all. �At least let me pay for the marble blocks!� I pleaded.
�How big is your figure?� he said with exasperation.
I showed him with my hands. He shook his head. �Look, right there�s a piece of Marquina you can have. That�s too small for me to do anything with.�
Should I give up? Should I consider it all a gift, as he wanted, and accept graciously? This wasn�t a drink he was buying me. I wanted to work at his worhshop, using his tools and machinery, for months, maybe years. I wanted him to spend time showing me how to carve marble. Apparently he himself didn�t picture this contract correctly. �You have to charge me,� I said with determination. �Come on.�
I hadn�t yet understood my man, didn�t know what I was up against. Fernando was no meek craftsman I could cajol or soften up with a flattery or a tip. He was a proud king of a man and I was risking his royal displeasure. �Later on,� he said, �when you make bigger figures and we have to order the blocks, I�ll charge you for them. OK?� This was his absolute last statement on the subject. He abruptly turned his back on me and walked away with Sanchez.
