The Uncannily Strange and Brief Life of Amedeo Modigliani (Pushkin Collection) Read online

  THE UNCANNILY STRANGE AND BRIEF LIFE OF

  AMEDEO MODIGLIANI

  A MOSAIC NOVEL

  VELIBOR ČOLIĆ

  Translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth

  What does it matter if radiance, which was once so vivid, has now been forever banished from my sight. And although nothing can bring back that instant of brilliance in the grass and splendour in a flower, we shall not regret it, but rather we shall draw strength from all that has been left us. We shall draw strength from primeval compassion which, since it has always existed, will continue—in the dying thoughts that well up from human anguish, in the faith that devours death, in the years that bring a philosophical understanding of the world.

  For Mary-Jane [1956–90]

  with all my love that proved inadequate …

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Paris, Rain

  Poppies, Dream

  Fear, Dream I

  Morning, Hunger I

  Carmelita, Children

  Crime, Punishment

  Night, Day

  Fear, Dream II

  Gentleman, Gentleman I

  A Letter, Jeanne

  Painter, Butterfly

  Liberty, Eyes

  Gentleman, Gentleman II

  Gabriel, Feathers

  Jeanne, Intimacy

  Convex, Concave

  Friends, Parents

  Knives, Pearls

  Morning, Milk

  Morning, Hunger

  Béatrice, Dante

  Doe, Intimacy

  Paris, Fog

  Apples, Wine

  Jeanne, Motherhood I

  Dream, Kandinsky

  Renoir, Star

  Paris, Dada

  Circus, Silence

  Montparnasse, Night

  Jeanne, Motherhood II

  Montparnasse, Snow

  Leopold, Béatrice

  Giovanna, Emigrés

  Amedeo and Béatrice

  Amedeo, Angel I

  Spring Comes Quietly.

  Amedeo, Angel II

  Amedeo and Béatrice

  Amedeo, Trial I

  Clara, Candles

  Amedeo, Clara

  Fear, Dream III

  Paris, Spawning Ground

  Amedeo, Rats

  Amedeo, Trial II

  Amedeo, Pathos

  Amedeo, Children

  Cocteau, A Walk

  Cocteau, Explanation

  Amedeo, Soutine

  Amedeo, Port

  Evening, Hunger

  Towns, Tears

  Amedeo, Death

  Post Scriptum

  Acknowledgments

  Also Available from Pushkin Press

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  Paris, Rain

  AT LAST, on the twelfth of August 1919 AD, it rained. Lolotte came along the west side of the street, bringing a scorched wreath, virtually dry, of cows’ eyes for lunch.

  The first morning shadows—those clearest ones, the most sharply defined—occasioned by the unexpected gloom outside—played over the wall, and then over the long, tormented face of Amedeo Modigliani, fading on the unfinished canvas where there was a prostitute with a pockmarked face. Eyes without pupils.

  Then the painter, coughing, dishevelled reached for a knife with an ornamental handle of soft rosewood and drove it despondently into the angelic and sensuous left arm of the girl who screamed. I watched as though hallucinating, said Leopold Zborowski later, as a piece of flesh, white as mutton, fell onto the wet street, alarming the drunken Cocteau, some prostitutes and a bow-legged Arab angel. Then I bounded up the stuffy stairway at a run to find the drunken Amedeo and the frightened Miss Lolotte in a tortured and indecorous position of animal coitus, while a thin red thread trickled down the girl’s left arm, leaving marks like rust on the floor.

  Dusk found the three of them drinking wine and discussing Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec and the delicacy and elongated form of African statuettes. Then Amedeo Modigliani talked about Lodovico di Vartemi, a nobleman from Bologna, who wanted to reproduce faithfully something he had seen in 1505 on a journey to Calcutta, a celebration of the festival of the twenty-fifth of December consisting of a circle of illuminated fir trees placed around a temple.

  Zborowski hiccuped and reminded them that he was a Catholic.

  Lolotte laughed and went to pee in another part of the room.

  The two men closed their eyes.

  Poppies, Dream

  MONTPARNASSE, AFTER RAIN, breathing deeply. Two men who are immigrants bring into that same room a considerable quantity of opium from Afghanistan, which makes the thinner and taller of the two, Nekrasov, leaning on the door-post, find it hard to breathe—he coughs yellow mucus into a stained handkerchief.

  He asks about the rust on the floor.

  The ones who live there say nothing.

  The two men who are immigrants leave the opium and vanish with a ’bye into the darkness of the stairwell. In the street the thinner and taller of the two, Nekrasov, steps with a rat’s caution round a lusty ultramarine lady, who has eyes without pupils, who is in fact the embodiment of death—the worst kind: immigrant death. Death with no funeral service, no requiem, death with foreign clay in one’s mouth. Inside, Zborowski and Lolotte are kissing.

  Modigliani, high by now, sees a vision of poppies in his native Livorno. Since they have no champagne left, Zborowski and Lolotte move closer together.

  Intimately.

  Afterwards Zborowski places Amedeo Modigliani on his low, fairly dirty iron bed.

  But Amedeo’s head falls off the pillow.

  Zborowski puts it back.

  Fear, Dream I

  WITH A COMB, the woman removes the top of the angel’s head. Jeanne Hébuterne tattoos poppies and marigolds on the inner side of her waxy thigh.

  It is summer but there is no sun in the sky.

  Her eyes have no pupils either.

  He dreams that he is stepping between his eccentric fellow countrymen, Italians, who are carrying a Madonna, naked, raped, on an improvised cross.

  She bears an incredibly close resemblance to Jeanne.

  He tries to explain that they are wrong.

  They tell him to fuck off, signore.

  Utterly confused and terrified, Amedeo Modigliani turns and runs across a field full of poppies. He looks up and sees the angel with no top to his head painting the sky blue.

  He hears his eccentric fellow countrymen, Italians, praising their own masculinity.

  He wakes and goes over to the table.

  The water is stale.

  He drinks it and glances outside, at the sky.

  The sky is grey.

  Morning, Hunger I

  JEANNE HÉBUTERNE is not the same as she was in the dream—

  In reality she is far less real.

  And then, as though compressed by the morning, the two of them have breakfast, the lascivious red-haired woman with eyes without pupils, Jeanne Hébuterne, and the thin, hung-over painter, the Italian vagabond Amedeo Modigliani. They eat the sparse cockroaches from behind the wallpaper, knights of the kitchen table, with salt, and drink stale water on the surface of which float fat drowned flies, black, almost dark blue with their legs turned towards the sky.

  Jeanne lifts up her skirt and shows him the bird.

  And then, as though compressed by the morning, they put salt on the young pheasant’s tail, scatter ashes over its head and big peppercorns on its impotent wings.
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  Then, they tear it apart and eat it greedily, while it’s still warm.

  There are feathers everywhere.

  Oh well, fuck it, she says, it’s raining at last.

  Of course, he says.

  Then they roll, light and smoke olive leaves, laurel and a strange Indian plant. The smoke fills the space, cramped but crammed with furniture, which is sparse and consists of

  —a fairly low bed

  —a rickety little table with a bottle and kitsch candlestick

  —a cement floor, stained in places with spit,

  windows (two) with three panes

  —and an easel and paints.

  They listen to the landlady, Madame Carmelita with the triple stomach, giving birth on the floor below, to her seventh child, emitting from her throat sounds resembling a wounded sow.

  They smoke again.

  Drawing a huge, elephantine, mouthful of smoke into his already damaged lungs, Amedeo Modigliani gets up, goes over to the easel and brings back paints

  —sickly yellow, the colour of tuberculosis,

  —Parisian blue, the colour of Montparnasse after rain

  —and ultramarine, the colour of her eyes and veins.

  They swallow them.

  His nudes and partially draped female figures are among the most sensuous and beautiful in the whole of art.

  H H ARNASON

  Carmelita, Children

  CARMELITA, THE LANDLADY with the triple stomach, first gives birth to Sebastian, a little boy, then, ten minutes later, tormented by an insidious pain below her navel, climbs up to the floor above hers squealing like a wounded sow, banging with both hands on the locked door through which some kind of smoke is emerging—exactly like incense.

  Open up, she says, fuck your drugged mother.

  From the other side of the door comes silence.

  Open up, she says, and pay your rent.

  Fuck off old woman, says the painter without opening the door.

  Carmelita, the landlady with the triple stomach, turns away swearing and runs down the dark stairs muttering about hell, muttering about the devil, muttering about someone’s thieving mother, muttering about prison.

  Muttering about the police.

  At that precise moment, barefoot, her sister Donna Clara is leaving their native Puerto Rico.

  From somewhere comes the music of the spheres.

  In the street a lot of people watch the fat woman in astonishment.

  Crime, Punishment

  YOU’RE A MONKEY, says Jeanne in English.

  He doesn’t understand her.

  You’re a monkey, she repeats.

  He looks at her.

  Jeanne is as beautiful as a soldier’s longing, beautiful as candle wax, as life itself, beautiful as the strong, atavistic bonds between man and the earth, deep, cosmic, simply

  —beautiful.

  Wisdom, she says, lies in tearing out the heart as soon as possible, before sorrow settles in it.

  Otherwise it’s too late.

  Of course, he says.

  The police find them, together, the two of them, in the first flare of twilight, completely naked, painting long phallusoid candles on the wall with yellow paint, the sickly colour of tuberculosis.

  Enough fucking around, say the policemen.

  Amedeo Modigliani drops his paintbrush, turns and looks blankly at the gentlemen with moustaches.

  Get ready, they say.

  Ten minutes later, he sets off down the dark stairway, treading slowly, at an almost funereal pace, accompanied by the tense gentlemen with moustaches.

  I’d read, of course, that in gaol one ends up by losing track of time. But this never meant anything definite to me. I hadn’t grasped how days could be at once long and short. Long, no doubt, as periods to live through, but so distended that they ended up by overlapping each other. In fact I never thought of days as such; only the words ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’ still kept some meaning.

  ALBERT CAMUS The Outsider

  Night, Day

  AMEDEO MODIGLIANI, with no paints or brushes, spends almost the whole of his first night in prison thinking of revenge. He considers ending Madame Carmelita’s piglike life with blows of a knife—one with an ornamental handle of soft rosewood—to her neck, her face, her body, everywhere.

  And filling her body with pearls.

  The night is as long drawn-out as hunger.

  At ten o’clock at night the drunken guard finally brings him supper.

  Amedeo Modigliani refuses the food, just takes the water.

  The guard talks about the way dreamers often die of hunger, thus proving that they lived on dreams.

  The painter says nothing.

  Then he sleeps and dreams of a prostitute.

  Fear, Dream II

  WHILE HE PLACED his lips on her cheekbones.

  While there in the dark he broke the silver of her neck.

  While the pallid strips of skin of his upper lip traced the form of her breast.

  While he made round nests in her hair and under her navel.

  While he hushed Venus with his palm.

  While he connected his lungs to the sky with the tip of his cigarette.

  While he counted the moles on her body.

  While he roused her breathing, her soft, sheep-like, white breath.

  Lolotte was a young boy.

  Lolotte was a shepherd.

  While he made discoid swallows of her blonde curls.

  While he whistled about elephants.

  While he transplanted motherhood into her apple.

  While he made a circus at her feet.

  While he listened to how fluid and juicy she was inside.

  While he settled the wind in her flaming nostrils.

  While he made her into a flamingo.

  While his hips moved up-down-up-down-up-down.

  While he smelt of chestnuts and seed.

  While he roused her breathing, her soft, sheep-like, white breath.

  A beautiful bird

  came to them

  and said—

  UNATTAINABLE

  Gentleman, Gentleman I

  AT THE END OF AUGUST 1919, just before dawn, the guard, sober at last, jangling his bunch of keys, enters the solitary cell and leads Amedeo Modigliani, Italian painter, sculptor and vagabond, to the first of many cross-examinations.

  In a fine, airy, sunny room he sees two very fine gentlemen. The first has a red nose and smells of wine, while the other looks like an apostle just descended from a cross.

  Sit down, they say in unison.

  The painter lowers himself onto a hard seat without a back.

  They talk.

  The gentleman with the red nose who drinks—

  You have seen, then, that the world begins from below, that the world begins with breaking women’s hymens, that the world in fact was born in hysterical virgins’ blood.

  And that consequently ART remains the eternal youth of the WORLD.

  Yes, says the painter.

  The gentleman who looks like an apostle just descended from a cross—

  You have seen women in static and vulgar poses, with long necks and eyes without pupils, whose crooked bearing in fact EXPLAINS THE CROOKEDNESS OF GOD, the crookedness of His mercy, which is boundless, and the crookedness of man, His curious creation.

  And you have seen that their yellow faces in fact represent sickness.

  Yes, says the painter.

  The gentleman with the red nose who drinks—

  You have seen that LOVE IS FRIENDSHIP WITH A GENERALLY SAD END.

  And you have seen that ART OVERCOME S DEPRESSION.

  You’ve seen that too, haven’t you?

  Yes, says the painter.

  The gentleman who looks like an apostle just descended from a cross—

  You have seen that warm chromatic colours do not symbolise life, joy and happiness but rather failure, sickness, sorrow, sometimes even death.

  You have seen that man
is the measure of all things.

  That a man’s face is in fact a springboard for God.

  Yes, says the painter.

  The two gentlemen are angry.

  They stand up at the same time and tie a black blindfold over his eyes.

  You are free until tomorrow, they say in unison.

  Some fifteen minutes later Amedeo Modigliani listens to the shuffling, uncertain steps of his guard, sober at last, behind him.

  He hears the door scrape.

  Then comes silence because he is alone again.

  A Letter, Jeanne

  HE WRITES THAT he is missing avenues of trees, friends, women, wine, Montparnasse by night or in rain, no matter.

  He also mentions Nekrasov the Russian emigré, colours, and sharp, clearly defined afternoon shadows.

  He is here, he is writing, very sadly because they often put a black blindfold over his eyes, as a punishment.

  COLOUR—THAT IS MY LIFE, he adds at the end in unsteady handwriting. The letter ends—

  JEANNE, LIFE, IT IS EITHER GLORY OR TUBERCULOSIS.

  There is no third possibility.

  He signs in the bottom right-hand corner of the crumpled paper.

  In those long ostrich necks and on those faces which are drawn as they would be seen by someone with a squint or as we would see them in a convex mirror, nothing allows us to sense the artist. Not the drawing, nor psychological probing, and particularly not the colour.

  ARTURO LANCELOTTI

  Le Biennale del Dopoguerra Rome 1925

  Modigliani was an aristocrat. His whole opus bears witness to that. His canvases are full of nobility.

  MAURICE DE VLAMINCK

  Art Vivant Paris 1925

  Painter, Butterfly

  HIS BACK BENT, Amedeo Modigliani does not in fact notice, does not feel the butterfly’s flight. Because he is dragging his heavy, fatal illness, dragging his bundle of cramped bones, dragging his sorrow, sickness and loneliness round his claustrophobic cell.