The Uncannily Strange and Brief Life of Amedeo Modigliani Read online

  Spring Comes Quietly.

  THESE SENTIMENTAL WORDS, almost stupid, but still so tender, remind Lolotte of her childhood, of her grandmother’s soft hands, white as a down quilt, of that time without men, alcohol or tuberculosis.

  Of the time when she was still Mother’s blonde angel.

  They remind her of her hymen, virgo intacta, of her father’s moustache, her mother’s cooking and all that dissipated time, vanished forever.

  And then the Angel of Sleep, a strange bird without feathers, comes down from the proud towers of the church and covers her eyes with his wing.

  The painter breathes tensely and discordantly in the darkness and feels for her breasts with his stiff fingers.

  He thinks how innocent and blind her nipples are.

  Amedeo, Angel II

  ON THE SIXTH OF JANUARY 1920 AD, on the Feast of the Three Kings, looking vaguely at the stains on the bar, Gabriel, the angel without a top to his head, turning his hands towards the heavens, drunk, tired, sick, drugged, belching, bought from Amedeo Modigliani a slimy, bloody, festering piece of meat for a modest handful of tattered banknotes.

  Somewhere in the middle of the nineteen-fifties Giovanna Modigliani, Amedeo’s daughter, in her book, Modigliani—Man and Myth, described this commercial enterprise like this:

  “As far as I know, she writes, my father’s troubles began on Twelfth Night 1920 when, in the Rotonde café he sold the Archangel Gabriel the last fragment of his lungs that were in any case ruined.

  With some of the money my father bought wine and fish.

  He drank the rest.

  He came home blind drunk and vomited blood for days.

  By the end of the month he was dead.

  And that was about it.”

  The vague and blurred memories of a woman (a child at the time), Cocteau’s note from 1923, the half-stammered statement of Monsieur Michel who had that morning taken refuge in the Rotonde from the onslaughts of the North Star and finally a newspaper article signed with the initials M J (Max Jacob) which referred to an unusual pact between a man and an angel, about the purchase of a lung and the yellow face of Amedeo Modigliani, Italian painter and sculptor, were the only proof of this hideous, lunatic, fatal DRUNKEN GAME.

  Soon after that (more precisely thirteen days later), the life course of Amedeo Modigliani came to an end in a cheap little room in the paupers’ Hôpital de la Charité. And the day after his death, Jeanne Hébuterne, his wife, threw herself out of the window of her parents’ house.

  They say that she was in the eighth month of pregnancy.

  Amedeo and Béatrice

  IN HER ROOM that smells of ether oil, with her hair filled with the feathers of large white birds, her eyelids still heavy as the breath of angels, Baronness Béatrice consumes a light breakfast followed by tart, sour red wine from Avignon. It’s like drinking mint, thinks Béatrice, rubbing her eyes sleepily.

  We see Amedeo Modigliani, tormented by frequent and demanding police hearings (in connection with the death of Madame Carmelita), alcoholism and tuberculosis, shivering like a drenched cockerel, outside the Baronness’s door, holding under his arm a middle-sized picture of the pretty face of the little harlot Lolotte. He presses the doorbell and starts to wait with the patience characteristic only of the desperate. The widow of Prince Stanislawksi, patroness of the arts, occasional lover of Lautrec, a secret talented poet, inexplicably long and unhappily in love with Nekrasov the Russian emigré and drunkard, nymphomaniac, Catholic and lover of wine, Baronness Béatrice opens the heavy baroque door, smiles, speaks, and takes hold of the painter’s arm.

  In the hallway she leans her full round breasts against the man’s emaciated torso.

  I hope, she says, that there is a difference between Adam the weary hunter and the furious deceiver, idler, drunkard and buffoon dissolute Eros. Because only leisure, only that fine patina of everyday boredom, can create art. Great, sad and inaccessible ART.

  THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THE MISUNDERSTOOD.

  HOMO FABER DOES NOT DREAM.

  He has long ago lost all hope in life.

  As she says this, Béatrice slowly opens the man’s fly and inserts her long, gold-encumbered fingers into his trousers. She breathes into his ear.

  She leads him to her bedroom.

  Everything smells of ether oil, the room is spacious, white, clean.

  Soon they are naked.

  And then Béatrice moves her motherly vulva towards his problematic manhood.

  The face of Amedeo Modigliani flushes with a pink glow.

  Perhaps for the last time.

  And then for a long while after making love they drink wine, talk about colours, brushes, canvases, in a word they bore themselves.

  The afternoon, which comes quietly, from the tips of the bare trees, finds them asleep.

  Amedeo, Trial I

  IT HAPPENS IN PARIS, the ninth of January 1920 AD. The cold weather has kept people riveted to their homes, so that in the chilly courtroom we notice only a few individuals. Among them, Jeanne Hébuterne stands out with her flaming red hair. Leopold Zborowski is not present.

  Some time in February 1926, the judge, Monsieur Bertalanffy, with the face of a hardened gastritis-sufferer, was to tell Baronness Béatrice, in the Rotonde, having swallowed his bicarbonate of soda, the scandalous story of the uncanny behaviour of Amedeo Modigliani during the trial in connection with the death of Madame Carmelita.

  In her intimate diary, under a date which we assume is accurate, Baronness Béatrice wrote a poem which Jeanne Modigliani published in full, in the middle of the nineteen-fifties, in her book Modigliani—Man and Myth.

  The poem is elegiac, filled with hints of its author’s imminently approaching death and quite good descriptions of the landscape of her native Poland, ravaged by plague, hunger and war.

  Jeanne Modigliani presumes that this poem was the last that the already slightly deranged noblewoman wrote before all trace of her was lost somewhere on the Russian border, in the winter of 1943.

  And as for Amedeo Modigliani’s scandalous behaviour on the occasion of the trial, in her book Jeanne Modigliani mentions only that her father danced the whole time, his arms spread like Christ, quoting Dante and from time to time opening his fly.

  Acquitted for lack of evidence, she writes at the end of the chapter.

  Clara, Candles

  DONNA CLARA, daughter of Puerto Rico, third sister of the sow-woman Carmelita, came to Paris barefoot, carrying with her a painting of three saints spitting

  —the first was Saint Sylvester

  —the second John the Baptist

  —and the third Saint Paul, God of Fish and King of Ravens.

  She arrived the night after Epiphany, drunk and tired, barefoot, black as the very depths of night, with the face of Saint Theresa in ecstasy.

  Closing the heavy lead door, Donna Clara noticed on the wall yellow, phallusoid, extravagant candles.

  MON DIEU, she thought, this is the work of an Angel.

  And then she turned her lovely, black face towards the crucifix and began to pray in a murmur.

  Quietly, as though she was afraid of something.

  Amedeo, Clara

  AFTER THE THIRD LITRE of wine, they are already naked and he is kissing her. Clara has the taut stomach of a bitch, sharp elbows and the long, thin legs of hungry Puerto Rican boys.

  And then, because a harlot and a saint are separated only by one almost insignificant step, we see Donna Clara kneeling and using her mouth to work on the painter’s elongated, crooked member.

  They climax at almost the same time, jerkily, in spasms.

  The painter’s legs give out completely and with a loud, almost painful, cry, he collapses onto the floor, across the woman.

  Her black face is white with his semen.

  As he lies, the man plays with her breasts and the little, probably gold, crucifix between them.

  They tell each other their names, introduce one another, that is, and go on smiling at e
ach other for a long time in the darkness. Afterwards they rest and sleep.

  Because in the end the fine, almost golden, dust of sleep settled on their eyes.

  Fear, Dream III

  A GRAVEYARD WHERE SAINT PAUL drags out of the pregnant woman with his bare and unclean hands a newborn calf with candles instead of horns.

  A graveyard where black and white dolphins are breakfasting on the huge babbling tongues of Puerto Rican mothers, nuns and prostitutes.

  A graveyard where orchids have the face of a mother.

  A graveyard where a strong southerly wind strips the skin from bones.

  Simply, a graveyard.

  A graveyard that explains itself by death.

  He wakes with moist temples, shivering, terrified, and tells the woman his dream. She turns onto her other side and says nothing.

  Jesus, he says to her then, does this dream mean the dangerous proximity of death. Donna Clara, still naked, gets up, makes them tea and as she does so explains in detail the symbols of the dream.

  Finally she says: still, it is better than dreaming about a snake.

  What a singular, attractive figure is Modigliani! In a life as disoriented as could be, this painter-sculptor and sculptor-painter was able to create wonderful nudes and no less exceptional portraits.

  ADOLPHE BASLER

  Paris, Spawning Ground

  LEAVING DONNA CLARA asleep and alone, Amedeo Modigliani went out into the dirty, cramped, dank streets of Montparnasse. He smoked, looking at the expressionless faces of the little girl prostitutes. He thought of Lolotte, the blue flamingo.

  In the Rotonde, over their third litre of wine, Leopold Zborowski told him about the raspberry smell of his wife’s thighs, about himself, drugs, wine, about Paris which was, curiously enough, a TAROT-TOWN, that is just what he said: TAROT-TOWN.

  Don’t ask, my friend, said Zborowski drunkenly, why darkness falls and why water falls on the TAROT-TOWN.

  I used to love standing alone, holding a flag in the wind, he went on.

  I loved imitating an orchid, a bottle of wine and Dante.

  I loved teaching deer, nuns or painters.

  And then solitude mounted me,

  and then silence mounted me,

  and then poverty mounted me.

  But my horse was not strong enough.

  But my horse is an ordinary nag.

  The cards are badly dealt.

  The ones I have in my hands are significantly weaker than the ones in the hands of my opponents.

  ECCE HOMO—they cry because this TAROT is being played with living people.

  ECCE HOMO—they cry because they know that they have better trumps.

  ECCE HOMO—they cry because they know that they always, simply always, win.

  And then solitude mounted me,

  and then silence mounted me,

  and then poverty mounted me.

  But my horse was not strong enough.

  But my horse is an ordinary nag.

  And that is why never ask me, my friend, Zborowski ended his angelic ravings, hiccuping, why darkness falls and why water falls on the TAROT-TOWN.

  Don’t ever ask.

  Full-stop.

  The street met them like two crawling, lecherous crabs, like two dumb carp which, with glassy eyes, fell dully, stupidly, noiselessly into the opening of a sewer.

  WHAT A CHEAP END, thought Amedeo Modigliani, aware of the stench of human excrement and urine all over him.

  Amedeo, Rats

  NEKRASOV FOUND THEM and woke them.

  Removing the fattened rats from their lapels, Nekrasov, a tall and tubercular Russian émigré, warmed their frozen hands, ears, palms, lips, with his breath.

  Where is that woman, whispered Modigliani, whom I kissed on the breasts and three spans lower down. Where is she who waits for my loving charity with the wisdom of a Mandarin. Where, where, oh where is my dear Jeanne Hébuterne.

  Nekrasov told the story later on: As I lifted him up, I felt Amedeo’s downy, hazy, almost fluid incorporality; I heard his rasping breath, his nebulous talk of Jeanne Hébuterne; I noticed on his thin, elongated neck, almost like that of a crane, the yellow flower of madness, irregular, newly formed. Putting him down for a moment in order to pick Zborowski up out of the sewer as well (he was drunker and heavier) I was aware of a soft breeze on my neck, warm and barely audible, like the wing-beat of a humming-bird. I turned round, Nekrasov continued, and saw Amedeo float up and place his pale hand, almost white as a streak of light, on the proud towers of the church. Rats fell from him like ripe pears.

  Amedeo, Trial II

  IT HAPPENED IN paris, early on the morning of the nineteenth of January 1920 AD, when, in the unaired, cold, stale courtroom, Amedeo Modigliani, as the first accused in the affair of Madame Carmelita, stood before the astonished, honourable judge, imitating a cockerel and reciting Dante in the original, holding his fly with his left hand the whole time.

  Hoarse, suffering from a cold, tormented by gastritis, the investigating judge Monsieur Bertalanffy accepted that his investigation was in a blind alley, asked Zborowski routine questions, coughed, filled and emptied his pipe, and finally put the whole case on file.

  Amedeo Modigliani, now entirely incorporeal, without lungs, without pupils, feverishly celebrated his freedom, draining glasses of red wine in long, elephantine gulps. In a café Jeanne Hébuterne, his wife, broke a glass and then ate it.

  Later Zborowski came as well, bringing the icy tentacles of winter in with him.

  They shook hands.

  They talked.

  Finally Leopold Zborowski mentioned pigs, pearls and the spring that would not come.

  He wept, waiting for his wife Hanka.

  Amedeo, Pathos

  DONNA CLARA, the painter told her, coughing drily, all unhappy women have small breasts. Everything comes to an end where fury and impotence begin. Oblivion is:

  total indifference in the face of death,

  which is a pure, large, white ball,

  IT’S SNOWING, said Donna Clara, freeing her neck from his embrace. Large, grainy, sickly snowflakes were falling. Wet is sorrow and sorrow is wet.

  and its hand, the painter told her, coughing drily, its hand approached me as I slept and touched my chest, nails, hair. Its dangerous proximity was no more than three spans from me. A large dead army of smiling storks is marching on my cheek, Clara. Drunken friends dragged me out of hell.

  There, for a whole six months, one’s hands are raised to the sky. The apples, roses and tender wilting primroses of your dead spring.

  Clara, we are leaving,

  this time, for instance, with the wind.

  In my sleep last night I was on the edge of delirium, I wept, smiling at the grave of your joints. And the beautiful birds, the beautiful birds of our years were escaping, stupidly, seasonally, from the sky, leaving it empty. And the beautiful birds were losing their feathers.

  Clara, we are leaving,

  foolishly like this, recklessly, if only it’s not too late.

  Because nothing can bring back that moment between an exhalation and the next inhalation, that moment when a man is closest to death. I was born in 1884 and I died last summer.

  This now, I think, is only a dream.

  It is horrible in the street.

  The room is empty, literally empty, and I feel the icy terror of Montparnasse at night. The last drunks are vainly searching for the big strange bird: THE ANGEL OF SLEEP.

  Little coloured boxes, says Donna Clara, kissing his fingers, tender as the wings of mosquitoes, transparent. Little coloured boxes borne by water. In which poets lie buried. Dead, quite dead, abandoned to the current.

  Because we certainly have no use for living poets.

  I remember everything, the painter tells her, coughing drily, the summer arrived on yellow lanterns, on the tail of a dragonfly, on the backsides of grasshoppers, like withered peaches touching the very DEPTHS OF LIFE with their brittle bodies—I have ceased to exist.
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  Clara, I have fallen.

  As I talked about my sleepy nudes, yellow, ugly, singed pain, crouching in my alveolas and bronchioles, knocking lengthily, insidiously, growing tenaciously like roots, ramifying, spreading, growing.

  Clara, I have fallen.

  Entwined like a spider and a fly, says Donna Clara, running her hand over his emaciated torso, like a spider and a fly we are entwined in a vortex of love and death. The fly inevitably dies because it was not wise, while the spider lives on, because it had the patience to wait and because it was stronger.

  Amedeo Modigliani smiles weakly, they stop talking abruptly, and naked as they are they melt into one another. As they make love the woman closes her eyes because his face frightens her.

  Amedeo, Children

  CHILDREN IN THE PARK, by the monument, are collecting pigeon droppings, with joyful squeals. Thinking, probably, that they are glass, or God forbid, pearls.

  Amedeo Modigliani shudders, coughs, and leaves them to it. He has four more days to live and does not care whether someone cannot tell the difference between shit and pearls.

  Cocteau, A Walk

  LEAVING THE CHILDREN and the pigeons, Amedeo Modigliani continues putting one foot in front of another on his austere, morbid walk. Sad as the frozen branches of a birch tree, at the end of the street he catches sight of a large, restless, blazing fire. He notices that the drunken Cocteau is burning some strange kind of writings on it.

  He stops.

  VENI CREATOR SPIRITUS, Cocteau sings softly, placing some kind of strange, grotesque, wooden mask on his face, pale as quick-lime.