The Animal Gazer

by Edgardo Franzosini

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

  THE ANIMAL GAZER

  “In this elegant and disquieting novel, Edgardo Franzosini gives us a memorable portrait not only of a famed yet ill-fated artist most at home in the zoo, but also of a Europe whose cruelties are infinitely more extreme than any form of animal behavior.”

  —MICHAEL BRENSON, former New York Times art critic and author of a forthcoming biography of sculptor David smith

  “The Animal Gazer takes you on a glorious journey into the heart of cosmopolitan Paris as you have never known it before. Through the life of Rembrandt Bugatti, a sculptor with the panache of his name, this lively, fast-paced narrative evokes an exceptional epoch in all its color and eccentric charm.”

  —NICHOLAS FOX WEBER, author of Balthus: A Biography; Le Corbusier: A Life and Patron Saints: Five Rebels Who Opened America to a New Art

  “This wonderful book not only tells the life of a great sculptor, it is also a testimony to the devastation that every war brings to the life of men and artists.”

  —IL FATTO QUOTIDIANO

  “An unusual story about a gifted but doomed young artist that grows in poignancy as it accelerates towards its tragic end.”

  —MICHAEL PEPPIATT, author of Francis Bacon in Your Blood and In Giacometti’s Studio

  “Edgardo Franzosini is among the finest contemporary Italian writers ... Franzosini illuminates the life of this singular artist ... an artist capable of sculpting in bronze the movements of animals and grasping their vitality in such a way that critics, after years of neglect, are discovering its unique power.”

  —IL GIORNALE

  “So well documented and psychologically penetrating that the entire book gives the reader the feeling of an autobiographical testimony.”

  —LIBERO

  “A book that hurts but with a beauty and humane poetry that allows for nostalgia and sweetness.”

  —LA VOCE DI PISTOIA

  First published in Italy in 2015 by Adelphi Edizioni, Milan, as

  Questa vita tuttavia mi pesa molto

  Copyright © 2015 Edgardo Franzosini

  Translation Copyright © 2018 Michael F. Moore

  This edition published in agreement with Piergiorgio Nicolazzini Literary Agency (PNLA) Photographs of sculptures by Rembrandt Bugatti © The Sladmore Gallery, London

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Franzosini, Edgardo

  [Questa vita tuttavia mi pesa molto. English]

  The Animal Gazer/ Edgardo Franzosini; translation by Michael F. Moore.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-939931-52-8

  Library of Congress Control Number 2017907474

  I. Italy — Fiction

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  I

  By the main door of 3 Rue Joseph-Bara, a lead-gray building with a tile roof that had lost all its former elegance, Madame Soulimant, the concierge, was sitting, as usual. There, by the main door, she would spend most of the day—and in summer often some of the night as well—shifting her cane-bottomed chair from the right to the left of the small arched entrance, depending on the hour.

  “Good morning, Monsieur Bugatti,” she said, turning to a man passing through the entrance.

  The man replied courteously, doffing his wide-brimmed black felt hat, revealing a broad and prominent forehead. He was tall and elegantly dressed, but his shoulders were stooped and his gait stiff and awkward. (According to his friend André Salmon, when he walked he gave the impression of wanting to shun people if not avoid them altogether.)

  “Can you believe this weather, good heavens! Not a very promising start for the fall!” said the concierge, huddling in a sheepskin shawl, dirty and yellow, that Madame Soulimant would drape over her shoulders at the first sign of cold weather. “I read in Le Matin that it’s the cannon shots, the artillery fire. That’s what’s causing the rain!”

  “Really?” asked Rembrandt Bugatti.

  “Yes, the cannons cause the rain as surely as the moon sways the weather!” replied Madame Soulimant, with a slight turn of her head, her frizzy gray hair tied behind her neck in a loose bun.

  Rembrandt also read the news of the war every day in the pages of Le Matin and Le Petit Journal. The week before one item in particular had caught his attention. The Siegesallee was a broad boulevard in Berlin lined with thirty-two monumental marble statues depicting the Margraves, the Prince Electors, the Dukes and Kings of Brandenburg and Prussia, and the ancestors and predecessors of Wilhelm II. At one end a wood and plaster totem had been raised bearing the same features as General Hindenburg. L’Illustration reported, “At night it is illuminated by three hundred torches and its shadow is projected down the entire length of the avenue. And to assure that the spirit of war and victory, ‘the sovereign with echoing arms,’ is on their side, the people of Berlin have been invited to stick at least one nail in the figure. It costs one hundred marks to insert one golden nail, thirty for a silver nail, and only one mark for steel.”

  “And meanwhile,” added Madame Soulimant, “the Germans continue to advance. Soon they’ll be here.”

  “HAVE YOU BEEN to the market, Monsieur Bugatti?” the concierge asked the tenant, speaking a little louder so as to be heard.

  Chronic otitis had made Rembrandt almost deaf. One year earlier he had started to feel painful spasms, whistling, humming and his own voice echoing in his ears. Sounds had all started to blur into a single drone. The only thing he could still distinguish were the sounds of animals—trumpeting, roaring, whinnying—at the thought of which he could not hold back a smile. A white liquid had started to ooze down his cheeks on occasion. An ailment of this type was still considered insignificant, almost healthy, as his doctor told him, but there could be many serious complications: meningitis, perforation of the carotid artery, cerebral hemorrhage. This is why, after administering him a compound of sulfate and sodium salts, the doctor prescribed hot compresses on the ear, fumigations, and gargling.

  “Yes, first to Mass and then to market. You can’t find a thing there, you know. Four eggs and a crust of bread,” Bugatti replied. If not for a few overly guttural r’s, Bugatti’s French would have been perfect: by then the accents fell naturally on the right places. Besides, more than twelve years had gone by since he had left Milan and Italy and decided to split his time between France and Belgium, going back and forth: a few years in Paris, a few years in Antwerp.

  “Don’t mention bread,” said Madame Soulimant, “the thought of it makes my tongue swell and gives me pains in the chest and kidneys . . . worst of all, forgive me for saying this, after eating bread I can’t stop burping.”

  Rembrandt shrugged his shoulders.

  On their way out to Rue Joseph-Bara, all kinds of people had passed through the entrance, which reeked of cabbage soup, turpentine, rancid ham, and urine.

  And so many artists! as Madame Soulimant remarked with a certain pride. She had this to say about Paul Gaugin: I remember him, a big tall man. He was no brute, but he was always excited, talking in a loud voice, and he never closed the main door behind him. As for Jules Pascin: the only time he ever opened his mouth was to ask if the mail had arrived. Most of the time he was so drunk he could barely
stand up. Is there a letter for me? he would ask on his way in or out. How annoying! Any postcards today, Madame Soulimant? A telegram, perhaps? In many long years no one ever sent him anything. An impudent conceited little Bulgarian. Nothing like you, Monsieur Bugatti.

  Madame Soulimant liked this distinguished, reserved man with his angular face and serious expression. (Years later, seeing an actor at the cinema whom the French used to call Frigo but later became world famous as Buster Keaton, Madame Soulimant could not help but reminisce on the sad face of that tenant.)

  “Well, have a good day,” said Bugatti.

  “And a good day to you,” replied the concierge, placing her hands over her breast and lowering her gaze to the pointed black patent leather shoes with a brass monk strap that, despite the rain, Bugatti wore every day. He had on an overcoat that reached almost all the way to the ground. He opened it slightly to reach inside and dig out the apartment keys from a pocket in his black and white checked jacket, revealing a pair of rather wide gray corduroy trousers, almost puffy around the hips, which suddenly narrowed at the knee to end in a tube shape around the ankles.

  What elegance, what refinement, thought the concierge. Only princes, marquises, or dukes dress this way, she thought. And it was no slip of the tongue, when she happened to speak to someone else about him, that she called him the Aristocrat. Monsieur Bugatti, the Aristocrat, is also an artist, a sculptor, she would tell people, but he never invites models up to his studio. That way she didn’t have to worry about anyone leaving muddy shoe-prints on her stairs.

  REMBRANDT BUGATTI’S FRIENDS—the ones whom he occasionally, but now more and more rarely, frequented at the Closerie des Lilas—called him the American. Not because he had the strong, active, energetic air of a man who practices the more vigorous sports, but maybe simply because of his height, together with the serene insolence of his gaze. Or maybe because as soon as he had his hands on some money, Rembrandt would spend it, the same way they imagined all Americans do.

  In one jacket pocket he still had his last invoice from Guillemet et Fils: one pair of gloves, 150 francs; one hat, 450 francs; two shirts, 600 francs; one necktie, 120 francs; three pairs of socks, 180 francs. He rested his eyes on the piece of paper and thought: I’ll have to ask Ettore to lend me some money. His brother had always helped him. And Rembrandt, for his part, had always paid him back. He loved Ettore as well as his wife and children: Ebé, Lidia, and Jean. Ettore was his older brother. Some years back Rembrandt had helped him to bury three car engines in the yard behind the sumptuous villa that he owned in Molsheim, in German Alsace, right across the border, next to the big workshop where Ettore built his automobiles.

  THANKS TO A safe-conduct granted at the insistence of Count von Zeppelin, a friend of Ettore and the inventor of the dirigible then being used to dispense death from the sky, Rembrandt and Ettore reached Strasbourg by train, passing through Switzerland. A taxi left them in front of the workshop gate.

  “First let’s go in the house for a moment,” suggested Ettore, “but without turning the light on. Too dangerous.”

  In the dark, Ettore went from room to room, while Rembrandt, patient and silent, followed close behind. His brother seemed to be inspecting them for traces of a stranger who had passed through, and he appeared surprised, almost amazed, that everything had remained exactly as he had left it at the time of his hasty departure.

  “Well, only a few months have gone by,” admitted Ettore, in a resigned and melancholic voice, as if an entire century had elapsed. “I left everything here.”

  Rembrandt looked at a corner of the parlor where in the dim light he could make out the outline of a guitar, seven feet high, with at least thirty strings. Rembrandt approached it and with one finger plucked a string: blen! That outsized instrument had been created by his father’s hands. (It was not the only outsized and unconventional thing that his father, Carlo, had built: armoires upholstered in camel skin; throne chairs with asymmetrical spindles, vellum inlays, and copper and bone appliqués; one-wheeled buggies; mirrors framed in donkey hide; stools shaped like boa constrictors.)

  “Help me carry this to the workshop,” said Ettore, indicating the guitar, “it’ll be safer there. Unless we want to bury it, too, in some part of the garden,” he added, but without smiling. Ettore lowered the guitar slowly until it was lying flat on the floor. “You take the neck, I’ll take the body,” he told Rembrandt.

  The two left the house. It was a moonless autumn night. The workshop, only slightly less dark than the night, was a few steps away. Inside the stench of grease melted into the smell of gas and the sickly sweet odor of rubber tires. Only one automobile was left: the Tipo 10.

  “The tub,” said Ettore. Which is what the two brothers called it.

  “The old tub,” repeated Rembrandt. And he thought back to the day when he was photographed behind the wheel of the Tipo 10 with his back straight, rigid, his long legs folded and a melancholic smile.

  “Let’s put it here, inside the tub,” said Ettore.

  The guitar was wedged between the seat and the windshield. The body bumped against the backrest, and a dark, deep, amplified sound was released into the still air of the workshop.

  “Now for the engines,” said Ettore.

  Along a wall, one next to the other, three engines were lined up.

  “We need some blankets,” added Ettore, and he went off to look for some in the house.

  In the meantime Rembrandt sat down on a stack of tires in a corner of the workshop. Through the big window he could see the house. This time his brother had turned on the lights. It would appear that the search for blankets was not so easy.

  When he returned Ettore said, “I found two blankets and a tablecloth. They’ll have to do.”

  The tablecloth was made from burgundy velvet, with a fringed border. They wrapped the engines carefully and then took them outside and laid them on the grass, under a beech tree. Ettore circled the yard for a while, looking for the best place to dig.

  “Here, next to the boxwood hedge,” he said to Rembrandt, “the ground doesn’t seem as hard.”

  With the shovels they dug three five-foot deep holes. Then, with a delicacy suitable for an inhumation, they lowered the three automobile engines into the holes, one after the other, and covered them back up with soil.

  NO MODEL, MALE or female, had ever gone upstairs to Rembrandt Bugatti’s studio.

  What a face Madame Soulimant would have made if she had seen the models for Bugatti’s sculptures enter through the front door of Rue Joseph-Bara and climb the stairs that she scrubbed once every two weeks with a mixture of wood ash and boiling water: pelicans, antelopes, leopards, Nubian lions, Indian rhinoceroses, Grant’s gazelles, elephants, pythons, tigers, jaguars, deer, condors, bison, anteaters. Rather it was Rembrandt who travelled to his models, which lived behind the bars of the zoo. And he gazed with envy at the animals’ blissful ignorance. Every day he would take the street leading from Rue Joseph-Bara to the Jardin des Plantes, the Paris zoo, crossing Boulevard Saint-Michel and Rue Saint-Jacques. Rembrandt felt like himself only around animals, only in contact with that wordless community. The zoo is my consolation, he wrote one day to his brother. When I am in front of them and they stare me in the eye, he told his mother, I feel—please don’t laugh—as if I understand perfectly their joys and their sorrows. I know it might sound silly, sentimental, he said, baffled by his own words, but that’s how it is.

  WHEN THE JARDIN des Plantes opened to the public, at around ten o’clock in the morning, and the animal moved from the back of its cage (sometimes it was forced to the front by pushes and shoves) before the stares of the crowd, on the makeshift stage where it performed every day, Rembrandt, too, stopped by the cage and sat on a bench. If there was a bench. Otherwise he remained standing, but without taking his eyes off the animal. As if he wanted to understand the nature of its thoughts, or rather, as if he wanted to get under its skin.

  On some of the animals the fur was shiny and th
e nostrils wet. Animals that had been robbed of the joy of blood, the lust for tearing their prey limb from limb. Animal life, thought Rembrandt with an obscure sadness, perhaps, and fortunately, does not demand a huge amount of learning, does not demand long and complex efforts.

  Bugatti was able to observe some of his models from a privileged vantage point: the spot where the animals withdrew at night to sleep, or by day to rest, napping while waiting for the wardens to bring them their food. The cages were hidden from the eyes of the public. In those dimly lit and poorly cleaned corridors, echoing with animal sounds, Rembrandt was allowed to enter and remain all day. The animals seemed to pay him no mind, nor did the zookeepers, with whom Rembrandt would mingle starting early in the morning, from the moment the animals got their first meal. They would cast a glance at him and think they had seen stranger things.

  Rembrandt would set himself up there, sitting on an empty bucket turned upside down that had originally held the animal feed. His long legs bent, his hands resting on his knees. At that hour of the morning his mind was clear and his senses sang to the breaking point. The smell of the animals mixed in with the equally acrid stench of the food, not to mention the fetid odor that emanated from the fur balls regurgitated by the felines. Swarms of flies flew in the air, flitting around his forehead, his mouth, his hands. But this didn’t seem to deter Rembrandt, who would spend all morning observing the animals’ movements or contemplating them when they retreated, sated, to a corner of the cage. Sometimes his face was almost distorted by a frown, so intense were his efforts at concentration. He would remain motionless to decipher the bodies of animals with the eyes of a sleepwalker, his face dripping in sweat, as if he were about to cross an invisible border. The most important thing was not to frighten them. Learn to approach them without frightening them. It didn’t take much for them to be seized by panic. And then they might react by fleeing, attacking, or standing perfectly still—and for Bugatti this last possibility was no less unpleasant than the others. They need to get used to my presence, he thought. And I need to know exactly what the minimum distance is for each to keep them from reacting in one of these three ways.