Loving Modigliani

Afterlife: A Gothic Fairy Tale-2

The dustman was growing weary as he pushed me along the sidewalk—sweat beaded on his brow despite the winter air, and he wiped it with a dirty rag, all the while murmuring Pauvre petite under his breath. That’s how I realized that my hearing was improving as the numb echo in my head drained away. Now the morning traffic, like a symphony by Satie—creaking wheels, chortling engines, clopping hooves—trickled into my ears as we crossed Boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail and skirted the walls of the Montparnasse Cemetery. For a moment I thought we might be headed there and I anxiously peered through the gates at the headstones, but we passed on. Modi used to walk there in early morning to visit Baudelaire. Sometimes he would snitch roses from funeral wreathes to give to girls in cafés. But he was not there now.

We stopped again outside the town hall at the Place de Montrouge, where the dustman spoke to a guard. With some trepidation, the guard peeked at me under the sheet and ordered us to park the wheelbarrow away from public view. So I was bumped up the steps to the inner courtyard and left in a corner where I waited for over an hour, perusing a noticeboard displaying marriage bans and public auctions, while Monsieur LeRoux went inside. People scurried in and out carrying papers without so much as a glance in my direction until a little girl accompanying her mother on some business there ran over to the wheelbarrow and tugged at the edge of the sheet. A furious gendarme barked a warning and jerked her away, whispering harshly to her mother. I distinctly heard him say the word “suicide” and I cringed when I realized he meant me. I hadn’t quite thought of my situation like that.

Finally, Monsieur LeRoux reappeared, accompanied by a gendarme. I feared I might be whisked away and deposited in a dank, wormy cell where dead criminals are kept. But no, the dustman seized the handles of the wheelbarrow again, and together with the solemn, fiercely-mustachioed officer, we went back to Rue de la Grande Chaumière.

At that hour, art students with portfolios tucked under their arms thronged the entrances to the academies at numbers 14 and 20, and I spotted my friend, Thérèse, surrounded by chattering classmates. She was on her way to the life-drawing lesson at the Académie Colarossi, where I realized with some regret, I would never set foot again. For a moment, it seemed she observed, perplexed, the gendarme and dustman walking past with a wheelbarrow, and I waved to her, although of course she could not see me floating there above the street. I wanted to tell her I was sorry for neglecting her in recent months. But ever since Modi and I had returned to Paris from Nice with Giovanna, our newborn baby, and I had somehow managed to get pregnant a second time, things hadn’t gone well for me. I had planned to invite her over to the studio to see Giovanna and have a cup of tea and gossip a little, as we used to do when I was a silly student who didn’t know what was what. But then I had taken Giovanna to stay with the nuns because I just couldn’t keep up with everything, and with this second pregnancy I was nauseous most of the time. Now I watched the students filing into the academy. Did they even know that Amedeo Modigliani, Prince of Montparnasse, was dead? Thérèse, I called out, but she stepped inside, and the door closed behind her.

At number 8, the great blue door to the court was open and Madame was hanging some laundry out to dry. As we rolled in, she began shouting again, but the gendarme silenced her, informing her that I was to be put there, in my lawful residence. After Madame had retrieved her spectacles and duly examined the paper stamped with the seals of the prefect and the mayor, she consented. I have to admit, despite my uneasiness about entering the studio again, I was relieved, as my energies were waning and I needed to take stock of myself.

The gendarme and dustman shunted me up four flights of stairs to the rooms where my husband, Amedeo Modigliani, the celebrated Italian painter, lay dying of meningitis just two days before. As we passed the landing on the third floor, where Modi’s friend, Ortiz de Zarate, lived with his wife, two daughters, and three dachshunds, the dogs began to howl.

When the door opened, I could have screamed! We’d been robbed: all of Modi’s paintings had been stripped from the big front room. The flat was an L-shape with walls painted orange and yellow. The long front room was our studio, the shorter one in the back our bedroom. The studio always overflowed with canvases on easels or stacked on chairs, sketches pinned up all over the place, sculptures preening in every corner, and piles of carnets on the worktable. Now, all that had vanished. The paintings Modi had been working on before he got sick: the great nude sprawled on a green couch with her head thrown back, the unfinished portrait of Mario Varvogli on the easel, Modi’s self-portrait as a pale-faced as Pierrot—were gone. But my own paintings and sketches still gazed down from the walls, alongside the prints of Italian Madonnas from the Quattrocento that Modi never tired of studying.

The studio had hardly any furnishings: our worktable where I couldn’t properly be laid out, a battered armchair where our models would sit, a stove, and a big blue cupboard that touched the ceiling. There was no place for Monsieur LeRoux to put me, so they wheeled me into the bedroom, where the thieves had not ventured. It was just as I had left it two days ago, when Modi was taken to the hospital: the rumpled sheets stained with blood from his hemorrhaging lungs, the paint-spotted trousers he had shed on the floor, and a dozen empty sardine tins scattered all around, as that was all we had to eat in the studio. In those final few days, I had gotten too big to make it down the stairs to bring up water—there was no running water in the flat—or do the shopping, and Ortiz, who had been helping us with those chores, was away when Modi fell ill. The floor was still strewn with crumbs of charcoal—we had burned it all in a brazier trying to keep the bedroom warm when Modi’s chills had set in—and bits of broken glass—Modi was always throwing bottles when he was angry, and he had kept it up until his strength ran out. Seeing the room through Monsieur LeRoux’s eyes, I felt a bit ashamed that I hadn’t been able to keep the place a little tidier.

The dustman and gendarme surveyed the disarray without comment. Monsieur LeRoux tugged the sheets from the bed and covered the mattress with a paisley bedspread he had found wadded in a chair. They lay me in the bed, and the dustman joined my hands to my breast, crossed himself, and gently arranged the concierge’s sheet to cover me. Not knowing what else to do, I hovered there over the bed as the men went out with the wheelbarrow. Monsieur LeRoux took away the bloody sheets, saying they would have to be incinerated because Modi was tubercular.

How many times had we made love on that bed? Numbers have little meaning now. Two hundred? Three? How many times had Modi covered my bare shoulders afterward with that old paisley coverlet so I wouldn’t catch cold? How many times had I turned to his body in the night, so warm with thick tufts of hair on his shoulders and the base of his spine, and wedged my hand lightly in the cleft of his buttocks—a gesture which always helped him fall asleep—that is, if it didn’t get him going again. That’s how I wanted to remember him, the sleeping god Amor, not the peevish invalid with shrunken limbs, coughing and writhing in bed. I squeezed my eyes shut, but could still see him there.

Restless, I wandered around the room, and the string attached to my body let me move wherever I liked. At first, I worried it might get entangled in table and chair legs, but objects cut quite through it, as through a shaft of sunlight. I moved more easily now, such welcome freedom, considering I had been almost too heavy to walk in the last few weeks. The string tugged a bit as I zoomed back and forth between the studio and the bedroom. The rapidity and the rush were like skating on ice.

Everything was a mess, but I was disinclined to do anything about it, and anyway, I couldn’t have moved a hair, even if I had wanted. My hands just didn’t work anymore. I took note of all my possessions still in their usual places: my sketchbooks and paint-box on the worktable. My cloche hat like a squashed purple mushroom on a hook by the window. The brass candlestick I had brought from home beside the row of well-thumbed books from the stalls along the Seine where Modi loved to browse: Lautréamont, Dante, Baudelaire, Rimbaud. He used to rip out his favorite poems from books on the stalls and stuff them into his pocket, so that he could read them to me later in bed. But now not a single book could I take from the shelf! My fingers, like sunbeams, slipped across surfaces, but could not hold or clutch. Back in the bedroom, I lingered by the bedside table, where in the top drawer, I kept my purse, diaries, and other trinkets, like the blue-green bangle of Venetian glass Modi had bought me in Nice, but I could not manage to open the drawer.

There was something unsettling, uncanny in the room: the mirror over the dresser placed at the junction of the studio and the bedroom. As I glided in and out, I could see shapes on its glinting surface from the corner of my eye. I was afraid to confront it directly, but I was also intensely curious as to what I looked like now. I wove around it cautiously at first, the way you sneak around a stray dog asleep on the sidewalk. Finally, I made myself stop in front of it and open my eyes wide—but all it gave back was the beveled reflection of an empty room in which I was not. I stood before the mirror and pinched my cheeks so hard that I could feel the blood sting in my face. I yanked at my hair so violently that strands came away in my hands. I screamed and struck the glass with my fist—but the smug, blank slate did not even crack. I seethed with rage: how could I feel such strong physical sensations and yet have no more substance than an amputee’s missing limb?

And then I saw his brown velvet jacket with frayed cuffs reflected behind me, hanging on a nail in the wall. Twice had I patched its worn elbows and sewn its leather buttons back on after they had been torn off in café brawls. I went to it now, caressing the length of the sleeves, remembering the arms they once held, that once held me, and although I could not lift it from the nail, I could almost feel the smooth velvet ribs against my fingertips and cheek. Sticking my nose into the folds, I sighed deeply, and a miracle happened! I could smell again, and his scent, a ripe potpourri of tobacco, wine, turpentine, sweat, hashish, and soap, poured into my senses, and I thought I might collapse. My chest heaved with sobs, but my eyes produced no tears.

Then as my fingers crept into a pocket—an electrifying jolt! I had touched a familiar piece of crisp cotton: yes, his bandana! By an extreme effort of the will, I somehow succeeded in coaxing it just a half inch out of the pocket, and on it I noted a small brown spot of blood perhaps or wine on the edge. I plucked at it desperately, but had no power to dislodge it any further. I bent down and tried to tug it out with my teeth. It would not budge, yet my lips and tongue brushed the small brown stain. From the briny taste, I knew it was a drop of my husband’s blood, and a frisson shot through my entire being. I was somehow in contact with a living trace of him.