The Uncannily Strange and Brief Life of Amedeo Modigliani Read online

  The insect is alive and impudent.

  Brazen as the Bastille in 1879, like the chansons of Pan Zborowski, like the bark of a birch tree.

  He remembers everything—

  As though her face had remained for a few moments longer in his room frightening the phallusoid candles on the wall, frightening the stale, yellow, nicotine air.

  And as though the dragon run through by Saint George’s spear had burned his scrotum, his years (there were twenty-five of them), his brown, as yet unsold paintings.

  And everything.

  As though he had been jolted by the vault of an arched doorway, as though he had been bludgeoned by the Inquisition and as though he had died pinioned to a river bed.

  Because the sweet whore Lolotte had left Amedeo.

  Summer was nearly at an end.

  The sun fell slantingly into the bleak cell.

  The butterfly flitting around him was alive and impudent.

  Brazen as the Bastille in 1879, like the chansons of Pan Zborowski, like the bark of a birch tree.

  Liberty, Eyes

  BUT HE did not kill it.

  It is more likely that he recalled the false eyes on the butterfly’s back and, still more important, its uncertain trajectory, only at first glance absurd, when the brazen insect flew into the wide open jaws of the drunken guard with his whole bunch of clanking keys in his helpless hands.

  First it drenched the guard in bloody foam and only then did it die.

  What a wonderful death, said Amedeo thinking of the butterfly. It is worth remembering that this significant day in the uncannily strange and brief life of Amedeo Modigliani passed in the following way—

  —rising at six, from eight to nine he drove the sleep from his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, at nine yet another conversation with the two gentlemen and at ten o’clock liberty at last.

  The first thing he wanted in the street was a cigarette.

  After the gaoler left me I shined up my tin pannikin and studied my face in it. My expression was terribly serious, I thought, even when I tried to smile. I held the pannikin at different angles, but always my face had that same mournful, tense expression.

  The sun was setting and it was the hour of which I’d rather not speak—‘the nameless hour’, I called it—when evening sounds were creeping up from all the floors of the prison in a sort of stealthy procession. I went to the barred window and in the last rays looked once again at my reflected face. It was as serious as before; and that wasn’t surprising, as just then I was feeling serious. But, at the same time, I heard something that I hadn’t heard for months. It was the sound of a voice; my own voice, there was no mistaking it. And I recognised it as the voice that for many a day of late had been buzzing in my ears. So I knew that all this time I’d been talking to myself.

  ALBERT CAMUS The Outsider

  Gentleman, Gentleman II

  THE GENTLEMAN with the red nose who drinks—You have seen that human fear began even before the demon.

  You have seen that a poet’s words do not sob out of some lifeless invention, they spurt from moving, passionate human mouths, like tongues of flame—witnesses of the ruin of the world.

  And you painted all that, did you?

  Yes, says the painter.

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

  You have seen that the human comedy is just as symbolic as tragedy. You have seen that people with empty eyes cannot understand the sense of love, the greatness of sacrifice or the extended hand of Divine Providence, which prays, begs, says—

  BELIEVE AND YOU WILL BE SAVED.

  And you painted all that, did you?

  Yes, says the painter.

  The man with the red nose who drinks—

  You have seen that light comes into being through the burning of destinies, that the face and its obverse exist, coexist, explain one another, like black and white, like truth and falsehood, like life and death, or such things. You have seen that the fine lie of human nakedness may signify aristocracy, that the prone body exposed to the eyes of strangers, however denuded, has preserved a kind of inner calm—the arrogance and elegance of a time that has passed.

  And you painted all that, did you?

  Yes, says the painter.

  The gentlemen cross themselves, swear and spit at him.

  Gabriel, Feathers

  IN THE ROTONDE CAFÉ, Gabriel, an angel with no top to his head, waves his bedraggled wings to frighten the courtesans, the barman, the painters and drunks. Most of the customers are drunk and they applaud.

  Ah, he’s really good, squeals Jeanne, I’ll piss myself laughing. Amedeo Modigliani, liberated and full of wine, stands up, puts his glass down and imitates a cockerel in front of the ladies.

  The ladies giggle and fling up their legs.

  Amedeo is now standing calmly, almost deathly rigid, talking.

  Russians have blue eyes and Russians are sad. They are the midnight cranes of our drunken streets. Every day at half-past nine in the morning Nekrasov drinks tea and eats little shrimps from the sea.

  His search is pointless.

  We all know—

  THE DEPTHS CANNOT BE REACHED.

  Nekrasov, who is present, listens, lets Baronness Béatrice slip out of his arms, weeps and hugs everyone there. The Archangel Gabriel, who this time has come down to earth to take Modigliani’s soul, slips on somebody’s blood and, dragging a tablecloth over himself, falls onto the floor with a crash.

  Consternation all around.

  The ladies giggle and fling up their legs.

  Gabriel does not get up, he looks at their legs.

  Jeanne, Intimacy

  I CAN TELL BY THE CROWS, says Jeanne.

  Her hands smell of tobacco, her lips of wine, her neck, spectral, long, straight, is as tasty as sour dough.

  First the two of them lie, quite still, like icons, then his hand moves, quite slowly, onto her knee with which she is touching his thin ribs, fragile as piano keys.

  He kisses her mouth and Jeanne stretches like a cat.

  His forefinger touches her navel, then his hand moves over those first silken pussy hairs, soft and almost blonde, touching then the thick, warm juice of her open purple depths. It looks as though some mythical two-headed beast has stretched over the dirty, fairly low bed, hastily, greedily, thirstily breathing like a fish on dry land, sometimes emitting dreamlike, inhuman, throaty cries in the style—

  “Aaahh”, “no, no, noooo”, “now, now” and the like.

  Jeanne Hébuterne sighs and offers herself.

  Take hold of my flanks, mumbles Amedeo Modigliani aware of his swollen, pulsing vein, and straddling his wife’s soft body. She looks like all the other naked beauties, alive, abandoned, devoted, as she touches his thighs with the soft down of her fingertips, as she touches his little purple head with her tongue, lips, mouth, as she moves her pelvis, arches her chest, as she breathes into his ear and finally accepts him, swinging her rear left-right-left-right-left-right.

  Jeanne climaxes first and only then does Amedeo.

  Soon afterwards, the pelican of dusk, a large voracious bird, swallows her long, almost saintly face, so that Amedeo Modigliani thinks for a moment, but only for a moment, not without horror, that he is lying in his grave, dying without farewell, becoming part of the soil, trees, water or a root, rock, no matter.

  Jeanne puts on his shirt, three sizes too big for her, and goes over to the window. She is talking about autumn.

  How do you mean autumn, the man asks uncertainly raising his satyr’s head, is it not still summer according to the calendar.

  No, it’s autumn.

  I can tell by the crows, says Jeanne.

  Convex, Concave

  THE MIRROR SEES for the last time a modest brown jacket, a thick grey scarf, a wall that is shabby, without decoration, and a chair with a rickety back, full of woodworm. He looks into his eyes and sees only sockets.

  His arms drooping like cranes, pal
e, almost white, impotent, sick, hungry, weary. Touching his knee-cap with his left hand and with his right setting up, straight, broad, an untouched canvas, Amedeo Modigliani coughs and paints.

  He looks into people’s eyes and sees only sockets.

  Jeanne Hébuterne, naked again now, having taken off the shirt that was three sizes too big for her, stepping unsteadily like a wounded calf, approaches the man and kisses the top of his head.

  She looks into his eyes and sees only sockets.

  Self-portrait, she asks.

  Of course, he says.

  Then she lies down, sleeps, and dreams of her one-year-old daughter Giovanna Modigliani. Meanwhile the man looks in the mirror and works.

  Two hours later, everything becomes more difficult and darkness falls abruptly.

  SELF-PORTRAIT. Oil on canvas, signature bottom right, São Paulo, Brazil, collection of Francisco Sobrinho Matarzo.

  That self-portrait dated 1919, one of the artist’s last works, is the finest and noblest expression of his art. Here he has presented himself without any enhancement, at a certain distance, but here too the nobility of his style lends nobility to his face, so that the words of his friend Max Jacob become clear to us—

  ‘ … you have lived your great and simple life like an aristocrat.’

  NELLO PONENTE

  Friends, Parents

  LEOPOLD AND HANKA ZBOROWSKI take the little girl—the one-year-old Giovanna Modigliani—home. They look at their reflections in puddles that are dirty, almost opaque. The child’s eyes are open, dark, longing for sun. The adults talk euphorically, gaily, occasionally taking a drink from a bright bottle that looks as though the sun had entered it.

  They see the drunken Cocteau in front of the Rotonde, raving, reciting Dante, his own poems, and other great saints.

  Hello, they say.

  Hello, says Cocteau.

  At the end of another road Zborowski buys opium from an Arab.

  They continue walking, eerily happy that their friend has been freed.

  They sing.

  They step firmly through the streets and the child walks behind them.

  Knives, Pearls

  THAT IS HOW they come to Madame Carmelita.

  The opium begins to work from below.

  First it transforms the heads of their women into balloons, and then their eyes into bright, midsummer fireflies. THEY KNOW THE SECRET says Amedeo Modigliani drunkenly and afterwards he smokes, drying the incomplete face on the easel with his breath.

  BALTHAZAR, CASPAR, MELCHIOR, gabbles the Pole with crazily bristling hair, the poet and merchant Pan Leopold Zborowski.

  The three holy kings, says Hanka.

  Five minutes later, armed with knives, the men go down to the floor below, they whisper and then they bang on the door.

  They return significantly more quietly, having disfigured with their blades the face, body and womb of Madame Carmelita. Scattering the pearls.

  That’s how pigs end up, declares Zborowski.

  They sit down on the floor, open champagne and drink, with their wives, late into the night. At half-past nine in the evening, they carry the sleeping child into the other room, and at half-past eleven cold visits them, riding in on a tail of marijuana, icing the windows, human breath, women’s laughter and the memory of early spring that will never come again.

  The most propitious hour, says Leopold Zborowski then, is the one between one and two, because that is when the malevolent have no power. Cold comes late at night when a person is sleeping, because all those who are tormented by insomnia, tormented by the curse of wakefulness, then come face to face with the malevolent—helpless, guilty without real guilt.

  Marked like all witnesses.

  Then Zborowski suddenly falls silent, gulping from the bottle big, sad, emigré mouthfuls of tart wine from Avignon.

  The others are either drunk or they clink glasses.

  Sleep and peace do not come.

  What is insomnia?

  The question is rhetorical. I know the answer only too well.

  It is to count off and dread in the small hours the fateful harsh strokes of the chime. It is attempting with ineffectual magic to breathe smoothly. It is the burden of a body that abruptly shifts sides. It is shutting the eyelids down tight. It is a state like fever and is assuredly not watchfulness. It is saying over bits of paragraphs read years and years before. It is knowing how guilty you are to be lying awake when others are asleep. It is trying to sink into slumber and being unable to sink into slumber. It is the horror of being and going on being. It is the dubious daybreak.

  JORGE LUIS BORGES Two Types of Insomnia

  Morning, Milk

  THE NEXT MORNING Mr Balthazar, the milkman, finds the dead sow-woman filled with pearls.

  MY GOD, says Balthazar, and looks at the hungry children.

  The children do not cry, they do not run away, nor do they pray to God.

  They are silent.

  Morning, Hunger

  IN THE MORNING, of course, they are all aware of the collective hallucination of the previous night. Hanka and Jeanne prepare breakfast, the men smoke and talk about Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, and the loveliness of the elongated form in African statuettes.

  They also talk about death.

  They even mention Madame Carmelita, the landlady with the three-tier stomach, and her sad, ugly end, when she expired, grunting like a small sow, suffocated by heaps and heaps of round pearls. They eat their breakfast greedily and, with his mouth full, Amedeo Modigliani talks about his dream of the previous night, about the hallucinatory, almost real knives that gleamed in the darkness of the stuffy staircase. About warm blood and about the cold, neon sheen of the pearls in her insides.

  In the end they all agree that this death and this kind of death have PROFOUND MEANING.

  In the nineteen-fifties, in her book, Modigliani—Man and Myth, Jeanne Modigliani described this event as a DREAM OF DREAMS, A SONG OF SONGS, as the complete triumph of the imagination over banal reality. One needs only to dream, she writes, one needs only to want something really, sincerely, strongly, with one’s whole being and DREAM WILL BECOME REALITY.

  AND REALITY IS NOTHING OTHER THAN YET ANOTHER DREAM.

  And so on multiplied and intertwined into infinity.

  As in a room with a thousand mirrors.

  The chapter ends with the words:

  YOU REALLY WERE A GREAT MAN.

  FATHER.

  Béatrice, Dante

  THE SECOND PART of our story of the uncannily strange and brief life of Amedeo Modigliani, painter, bohemian and vagabond, begins one warm October day in 1919, in the well-known Parisian bar La Rotonde, where we find three people, Amedeo Modigliani, Jean Cocteau and Baroness Béatrice, gathered round a table covered with sketches and papers, loudly discussing something, slicing their hands decisively through the lazy blue nicotine smoke. Three tables further away, behind them, we see a man cutting lines of verse with a narrow child’s knife into the heavy old wooden case of his favourite guitar. The name of that man is Max Jacob.

  In the dusk of that same day the bar-setting is the same, but the actor-customers are arranged like this:

  Baroness Béatrice and Modigliani are sitting at a table together, and a man, completely red in the face, partly with wine, partly because of the very distinct proximity of a slender girl in blue, is whispering in her ear some sort of words, which make her lips part like a leech into a sincere smile. Later some other people join them at their table, they drink champagne, something is evidently being celebrated, and, after closing time, in the street, the drunken Amedeo Modigliani recites extracts from Dante’s Divine Comedy, and then falls into the arms of the woman, Baroness Béatrice, who leads him to her airy, orderly and—remarkable!—spacious apartment. She puts him into bed, the man’s teeth chatter and he shivers, and in the end she covers him with her own body.

  Doe, Intimacy

  AS SHE CARESSED his sleepy, drooping head, settled sweetly on her bare br
easts, running the index finger of her left hand over his dark brow, Baroness Béatrice, somewhat to her surprise, felt his third eye. The pupil of that eye was turned inwards, into his head, and cautiously, like a cat approaching a piece of bacon—not to waken the man—the woman brought the fig of her lips to his sleeping brow, stretched her hand along the keyboard of his ribs, circling round his navel, and finally settling in the warm nest between his legs. Her quickened breathing, but more her downy touch, excited and woke Modigliani, who opened his eyes and shivered, at which Baroness Béatrice, shyly as a doe, withdrew her hand and somewhat foolishly, like a child caught stealing jam from a high shelf, smiled into the darkness.

  Paris, Fog

  WRAPPED IN FOG, dense and bad like cheese, Paris had withdrawn from its squares, and lay sleepily silent, yawning. Some people were performing a play by Molière on the Place du Trocadéro with an enthusiasm rarely seen.

  The greasy October day, all that fog that had become the final point, the source of all the light, in any case meagre, and all the sounds, in any case muffled, made the actors’ movements somehow exalted, divine.

  It seemed as though those people who were rapidly reciting sentences, mixing French and Italian words, had come to this Paris square from nowhere, like ghosts from some quite different age, almost forgotten, in which women smelled of sin and men of good wines, strong tobacco and Sunday afternoons spent hunting.

  The audience of this heavenly performance by travelling players was extremely modest, consisting of a few tramps and our painter Amedeo Modigliani, who lit one cigarette after another, gazing lengthily, dully, as though hypnotised, at the soft movements in the fog.