Loving Modigliani

Afterlife: A Gothic Fairy Tale-4

“Maybe she didn’t plan it. Maybe it just happened in a moment of despair.”

“We’ll never know, will we?”

“Poor Jeanne.”

“You have to admit, she was a selfish girl and a bad mother! Abandoning poor Giovanna like this—it’s criminal. She might have been arrested if she had survived, or put in an insane asylum. She was always a bit off. You never knew what she was thinking. She hardly ever said a word in public.”

Such cruelty bewildered me but then a thought pierced me to the quick: since all this had started, I hadn’t really pondered Giovanna’s new predicament. Our daughter didn’t live with us in the studio, but with some nuns in a convent outside Paris, because Modi said that a studio full of toxic oil paints was no place for a baby whose crying would have ruined his concentration. Eventually, though, we had planned to have a real home. Now, when she’d be old enough to understand, the nuns would have to tell her she was an orphan. I was a monster, as Modi sometimes claimed whenever he was mad at me, which was often. When I tipped myself backwards through the window, I hadn’t given a thought to Giovanna. In fact, I wasn’t really thinking at all. I hadn’t slept in a week and I was so numb; I just wanted everything to stop for a moment. I opened the window and the night air felt so fresh on my face and the room was so hot. With the help of a footstool, while André snoozed, I hoisted myself onto the ledge and leaned back for just an instant, the way you relax into your lover’s arms to take a short nap on a train. I didn’t consider the consequences.

Now I placed my hand on my belly. Modi had wanted a boy. I had killed our son. I wanted to howl. Hanka was right—I was a terrible mother.

But I also realized something else: the two women were not speaking French to each other but Polish, and despite the fact I knew not one word of that language, I could understand them perfectly.

Gosia did up the brass buttons on the yoke, pinching my dead skin with her pearly nails. “Poor Giovanna. I do worry what will become of her.”

Hanka adjusted the sleeve on my wrist and fiddled with the right cuff. “Zbo and I have decided to keep her.”

“No, you cannot have my child!”

“Unless, of course, his family makes a fuss, then I suppose we will have to send her to Italy. Oh dear, there’s a stain on the sleeve and a button is missing, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. No one will notice.”

Gosia leaned over to button the left cuff and I smelled her floral perfume mixed with the faint sweaty smell of wool from her underarms. Sweet jasmine, like the scent samples my father used to bring home from the store where he worked as an accountant. My favorite was l’Heure du Rêve.

“Don’t Jeanne’s parents want to keep the girl? She is a Hébuterne after all.”

“I don’t think so.

“It seems so unfair to reject an innocent child for her parents’ faults.”

Hanka tied the bow once, frowned at the result, undid it and tied it again. “Perhaps Jeanne’s father wasn’t keen on having half-Jewish grandchildren.”

“How sad. How can that make such a difference to them?”

Hanka shrugged. “They are very devout.”

They came to the foot of the bed now, Gosia crossed herself, and the two women studied the overall effect of their work.

“There now, how does she look?” said Hanka.

“Don’t you think we should do something about her hair?” asked Gosia.

Annie came in and gave a start, seeing me there: a candy-striped mountain with a floppy red bow and my eyes wide open. “I have finished in the studio, Madame.”

“See if you can find a comb or a brush, maybe in the drawer of that bedside table.”

I peered over Annie’s shoulder as she slid out the drawer. Inside were all my favorite little things: my diaries—a bundle of small notebooks tied together with a gold ribbon, my green purse with some cash, my blue-green Venetian glass bangle, and a wooden comb. I ached to touch them but could not.

The girl’s fingers prodded the purse, as if feeling for coins, then caressed the glass bangle. It was the only ornament Modi had ever given me. “It changes green to gold to turquoise like your eyes,” he used to say. He once painted me wearing it.

“Please put it on my wrist,” I whispered to her, “I would so like to be buried with it.” I had come to understand that would be happening soon.

“There is a comb, Madame.”

“Well, give it to me then.”

With shocking dexterity, the little thief slipped my bangle into the pocket of her coarse brown skirt and passed my wooden comb to Hanka.

“Put that back! You can’t have that!” I tried to grab it from her pocket.

“There is also a purse, Madame,” Annie reported, oblivious to my futile attempts to retrieve my bangle from her person.

“Let’s have it.”

“Not my purse!”

Hanka and Gosia exchanged a sharp glance as Annie handed over the purse. Opening the clasp, Hanka shook out some change. “Nothing but a few sous.”

“But there ought to be at least ten francs!” Someone had taken my money, but who would have stolen it?

“Nothing else?”

“No, Madame.”

But she was a liar as well as a thief—my precious notebooks were still in the drawer.

Gosia took the comb and tugged it through my tangled hair, while Hanka picked out the tiny flecks of dried leaves and dirt.

“She had such magnificent hair,” mused Hanka. “Like a Botticelli. I think that’s why Modigliani fell in love with her.” I saw now that she was crying. So perhaps she did care a bit about me after all.

Lavender light mixed with smoke was gathering over the rooftops. Twilight would soon fall. I always loved that hour in winter and would sit by the window, gazing out through the dusk, waiting for Modi to come home from the cafés when he was out on business with Zbo. I would take out my violin, which I had brought from my parents’ flat in Rue Amyot and practice a little Schubert, “Death and the Maiden.” But I could never get the opening bars of the first movement to sound quite right. Maître Schlict, my old violin teacher before the war, always said that I was too hesitant in the attack. I needed to learn to be more assertive. I could almost hear that music now, and I looked about the room for my violin but didn’t see it. Perhaps it was in the blue cupboard in the studio, which I couldn’t open. Now they puffed up the pillows and propped up my head, which tilted askew because my neck was broken. Hanka crossed my arms on my breast and arranged the long hanks of hair around me like a coppery cloud, while Annie swept the floor.

“It’s getting late. I hope the undertaker isn’t going to wait until tomorrow,” said Hanka, glancing to the window.

“Are we done here? I wanted to catch vespers and light a candle for Modi and Jeanne at Notre-Dame-des-Champs,” said Gosia.

“Remember: the funeral leaves from the hospital at ten tomorrow. His brother sent Zbo a huge sum of money. We could have all lived a year in high style on what is being spent just for the flowers.”

“I hope she will get a proper burial. Being a suicide.”

“Her brother has seen to all the arrangements. At least we didn’t have to deal with that.”

“Won’t she be buried together with Amedeo?”

“Zbo suggested that, but her parents objected on religious grounds. He’ll be going into the Jewish section.”

“And they’d deny me this one last privilege to lie beside my husband?”

All three stared at me in silence, then Hanka took Gosia’s hand. “How different it would all have been if Modi had met you first. If only he had gone away with you this autumn, I am sure you could have saved him from his devastating illness.”

Gosia sniffled and smiled through her tears. “He needed someone who could take proper care of him, make him hot soups and tisanes, but Jeanne was too young and flighty.”

“All lies! He never loved you! And he hated hot soups!” I grasped a candlestick to throw at her, but the cold brass dribbled through my fingers like icy water. In my clumsiness, my elbow knocked against the edge of the dresser. Annie jumped, for God knows how, I had managed to produce an audible sound.

“What was that noise?” asked Hanka, alarmed, turning to Annie.

“Don’t frighten her!” said Gosia.

“Annie?”

Annie gaped at my body on the bed, but shook her head. “I didn’t hear anything. Did you?”

“I thought I heard…” Hanka glared at Annie, then at me. “It was probably only a mouse in the dresser.”

Hanka pulled the sheet back over my body and my unblinking eyes.

“Annie, mop the room after we leave and get rid of Jeanne’s dirty nightgown and robe. The concierge will lock up later.”

“Shouldn’t one of us stay with her?” asked Gosia.

“You aren’t afraid to be here alone, are you, Annie?”

“No, Madame. I was very fond of Mademoiselle Jeanne.”

"So why did you steal my bangle?"

“Good girl. Gosia, shall we go?”

“Shouldn’t we…” She nodded towards the mirror on the dresser. “Cover it?”

“Are you so superstitious?”

“It’s traditional.”

“Go ahead, then.”

Was she afraid I might leap off the bed and suck their blood? If there were any vampires here, it wasn’t me, but them.

Gosia opened the trunk again, removed my red Indian print shawl, and spread it over the mirror. Then she noticed Modi’s jacket hanging on the nail by the bed. “Oh look! That old jacket of his.”

I seethed as she fingered the limp velvet sleeve.

“You don’t suppose anyone would mind….”

“Take it. Zbo will be coming later to remove the rest of his things before the new lodgers arrive.”

“Who’ll be renting the flat?”

“Nina Hamnett and her new boyfriend.”

“Not them! Sleeping in our bed!” Nina was another one who was always after my husband.

“Oh! Here’s his bandana in the pocket.” Gosia pressed it to her face. “It smells just like him.”

I could have scratched her eyes out.

“What about Jeanne’s things?” Gosia asked, wiping her tears with his bandana and tucking it into her sleeve.

“Her brother is coming to clear them out.”

“I’d also like to have that drawing of Amedeo with his pipe. As a memento. Do you think he’d mind?”

“Who will notice if it’s gone? It’s worthless.”

Gosia took down the drawing.

“Annie, don’t forget to close the windows or the bats will get in, and you’d better light some candles. It is almost too dark to see.”

They went out, and I was left with Annie, who lit a candle in a wine bottle and set about inspecting every inch of the studio. Perhaps she had heard how I used to hide money from Modi in books and pots, but she found none, and fortunately didn’t think of looking behind the cupboard, where I had my secret place, a niche in the wall. From the drawer of the bedside table, she took my notebooks, untied the ribbon, leafed through the top one. I had been keeping a diary since I was fifteen. My whole life was in those pages—shopping lists of groceries and art supplies, baby names, household accounts, my periods ticked on a calendar, doodles, sketches, dreams. She stuffed the bundle of notebooks into her apron pocket.

Leaning over the bed, she folded back the sheet and lifted the candle to my shrunken, yellow face. The flame gleamed in my lusterless eyes as melted red wax dribbled on my chin. When her dry lips brushed my forehead, I had no strength to push her away. She slid something into my breast pocket. I could feel it hard and cold against my n****e.