|
Such a beautiful shape, so individual, how lovely it floats out of my simple bulk. Yes, you're right. The voice paused, the sculptor ignored it. -Well, you know, you were right about us. Together, I mean, the combination, master and perfect stone. Perfection, yes, composite perfection, yes, yes we are. You know I've heard . . . the marble prattled on, ignored.
Evening drifted through the workshop and paled. A three-quarter moon lit the room with a light that glowed on the dust brightly. The sculptor hadn't noticed that night had fallen. His eyes had fallen shut with the strain, lids heavy from the dust. His teachers replaced his eyes guiding his hands along the descending curves down to where they joined ridged block, his hands patiently handling the impartial tools, patiently raising the gentle form from the rough stone. He hammered blind, asleep sometimes, through the night, gouged, scraped and polished without hesitation or second thought. That his hammering grew louder was the only indication that he heard the voice of the marble as it gradually rose in volume.
As morning light crossed the workshop, the marble continued its incessant speech, spoke so much that it exhausted the sculptor's language. It shuffled random pieces of other languages, modern and ancient, into its soliloquy. First a word or two would slip into a metaphor, the soulnacht, or at excited moments whole phrases would drop in, joie d' vivre. There seemed no limit to the marble's effort, but the sculptor showed no shift in his concentration, not the slightest hesitation in his movements. By the afternoon of the second day, the marble tapered its sprawling polyglot chatter to a single word: bella.
The sculptor's face was by then masked in the dust. The sockets of his eyes were filled. Around his ears the fine dust collected, as in his hair, to smooth the features of his head. Only his mouth kept its shape, a pink split in the mask.
He hammered, gouged and sanded, hammered, gouged and sanded, shaped the shrinking block nearer its perfection, his masters echoing yes and yesyes and ignore the tricks. The fine dust drew the moisture from his fingertips, etched them until the deep cracks ruptured and wept pale red blossoms through the clotting dust. As the days and nights passed, from the bleeding and clotting as from simple fatigue, the sculptor's grip froze. Changing tools became impossible except by sliding their handles through his clenched grip.
And the paralysis spread quickly. He continued working as his spine stiffened. Stooped on his knees, he felt his shoulders stiffen and lock. He worked low to the ground, his hips still flexible, on what little remained of the block. At last his hips seized, and, on the morning of the fourth day, he worked lying on his side, straining, scratching the remaining lump to completion, the marble repeating bella, bella, bella.
The sculptor's wife found him later that day. She barely recognized her husband in the chalky silhouette collapsed on the floor. That he was working, indeed that he had worked himself to death, stunned her. Usually, drunkenness and women were to blame for his prolonged absences. His agonized body, bound in its shell, was warm where a shaft of afternoon sunlight rested on it. Though she was not moved to any emotion, she remembered a drawing he'd given her when they were young. It was of an old man lying in the midst of a wreckage, and it was beautiful.
|
|
