The Animal Gazer

by Edgardo Franzosini

  The next morning crows circled in the pale autumn sky above the zoo. The smell of gunpowder stagnated in the air and blended with the stench of corpses that fermented and became putrid. Amid the haste no thought had been given to the reduced capacity of the zoo’s crematorium, while the quantity of animals was infinite. Because of the wait the carcasses had to be piled up near the fence, and the smell of blood drew packs of stray dogs for days and days.

  THAT NIGHT REMBRANDT had a dream. He found himself at the entrance to the Snail Room, hunched over, his long legs cramped. The room dated back to a few years earlier and had been conceived and built by his father, Carlo. It was made of oak and similar to the shell of a snail both in color and, if you touched it with your fingers, the porousness of its surface. Walking with his back bent forward, Rembrandt climbed the steps of the spiral that led to the room. At the center of the room there was an oval table, covered with a tablecloth of fine yellow brocade, on which miniature tapirs, anteaters, marabou, and ostriches the size of sparrows were moving excitedly. Next to the table, on a chair carefully upholstered in pewter and vellum, Carlo Bugatti was seated. On a sofa, with her legs dangling over an armrest that ended with the head of a giant snail, Rembrandt’s sister, Dejanice, was lying down. The snail head had crystal eyes.

  I built all this for the sultan of Constantinople, said the father severely, but neither you nor your sister is willing to boil the glue that holds it together. In the meantime the little animals have multiplied and no longer occupy just the table: they’re swarming onto the chairs, the sofa, and they’re starting to invade the floor.

  You who love animals and are loved by them in turn, order them to leave.

  At that point Rembrandt woke up, got out of bed, and dragged himself to a corner of the room where there was a pitcher and a basin, and splashed generous handfuls of water onto his face. Then he started to cough. A dry cough that hurt his sides and made him feel like vomiting. In the end he spit up a thick, foaming substance, a kind of clot, and the water in the basin turned red.

  FOR A FEW days, like a wounded animal, it seems appropriate to say, Bugatti wandered in the vicinity of the zoo, without summoning the courage to enter or even get too close. To go beyond a certain limit. He roamed the streets around Antwerpen-Centraal railway station with his temples throbbing and his head in a fog. The giant howitzers started to thunder in the morning, raising clouds of black smoke into the air. The Germans, people were saying, have doubled their contingent opposite the fortifications that surrounded the city. From the station square Rembrandt noticed a pair of chasseurs standing guard in front of the zoo.

  What are they guarding? he wondered. What are they protecting?

  Then he left, started to wander again, walking aimlessly down streets littered with shattered glass and chunks of plaster, coming across columns of soldiers moving from one neighborhood to another, and groups of families leaving their homes with bundles on their backs, bundles into which they had crammed their most prized possessions as best they could.

  As soon as the darkness came, with shaky legs and heavy feet, Rembrandt headed toward his studio on Begijnenvest, where he threw himself on his bed, exhausted, and fell asleep.

  ONE MORNING, TOWARD the beginning of September, before the indifferent stares of the two chasseurs (it seemed that no one had bothered to relieve them), Bugatti mustered the strength to cross the threshold of the zoo, and to enter, not without some hesitation, the great boulevard that led, after a slight swerve to the left, to the front of the Feestpaleis. The spectacle that appeared before his eyes was not what he had expected. Rather than desolation and silence he found an ample movement of people coming and going, a frenzy of activity. A frenzy that may have been heartrending but was still a frenzy nevertheless.

  The wide terrace balcony, the restaurant, the café, the billiards room, the winter garden of the Feestpaleis, and especially the sumptuous atrium with its marble floors and shiny chandeliers by which one entered the concert hall had been converted into a makeshift hospital for the wounded. Badly injured and suffering soldiers were arriving from the front every day, in addition to the people whom the hospital trains had already evacuated from the south and center of the country, from the now lost provinces of Liège, Namur, and Brabant. Strange that Rembrandt had noticed nothing, after hovering around the station for days, despite being in the grips of a mild form of somnambulism.

  “Do you know how to dress an arm, stop a hemorrhage, or administer medicine?” they asked him.

  “No,” replied Rembrandt.

  “You look young and strong: I’m sure you can handle the poles of a stretcher.”

  After an hour of intensive training, during which they instilled in him a few rudimentary notions about the transportation of the wounded, as well as how to monitor them (it’s important, they explained, to protect the wounded from themselves, to prevent them from doing stupid things or, worse, from making any rash movements), Rembrandt entered the ranks of the DSTP, the dispensés du service en temps de paix, those exempted from military service during peacetime. The other stretcher-bearers were mainly teachers who were on in their years, musicians from the town band, seminarians and priests (it’s easy to reawaken the faith of soldiers over whom death is hovering, leading them to pray, to confess, and thus prepare themselves for eternal happiness).

  Rembrandt learned immediately that the main requirements of a good stretcher-bearer are delicacy and precision. Precision in the sense of the ability to walk at an even pace, in concert with one’s partner, and to keep the stretcher as horizontal as possible. The steps to the entrance required special attention: you had to be careful to carry the stretcher headfirst when you were going up, and feetfirst when you were going down. Delicacy was needed when the stretcher was set down on the ground. And then there was a third quality that would come in handy for anyone equipped with it: resilience, if not a certain impermeability, before human suffering.

  Atop the pink marble pavement of the Feestpaleis, where the wounded had been laid out, there was an uninterrupted coming and going of stretcher-bearers. When someone died, it was their job to wrap the corpse in a bedsheet and add it to the pile that was heaped in what until a short time before had been the animal cages.

  Rembrandt had come to spend his whole day, every day, amid the moans and the howls of the suffering and the death rattle of the moribund, and he had learned that nothing is more consoling than the possibility of assisting one’s fellow man in his moment of pain. But in his case it was a brief, temporary consolation.

  THE ARTILLERY BARRAGE and the shots fired by two guns mounted on an armored train were not enough to hold the fortified positions. The flooding of the countryside around Antwerp slowed but did not halt the enemy’s advance. The two defensive flanks were broken and finally collapsed, one after the other. On the night of October 7 the monstrous German howitzers took aim at the city. The Belgian cannons went silent before the enemy’s superiority. On October 10 the mayor signed the capitulation of the city to the Germans.

  Bugatti abandoned Antwerp. He traveled with a convoy that moved slowly over deeply-rutted dirt roads, coming across clusters of soldiers camped out by the sides of the ditches, crossing small towns that were almost unrecognizable in the darkness and the dust. After one day he arrived, in the morning, at the Ostend port, from where he embarked that same night for Dunkirk. And from Dunkirk he finally reached Paris.

  There he spent a few weeks, just enough time to convince himself that even the elderly, women, children, and those exempt from the draft—the only ones, in other words, who had remained in the city—had the aura of people preparing to leave; enough time to realize that the houses, streets, and parks of Paris seemed familiar but were alien; enough time to notice that the Jardin des Plantes had been transformed into a desert. In the end Rembrandt took a decision: after ten years of being away, ten years in which, in truth, he had never lived with nostalgia or regret, he left Paris and returned to Italy.

  Two days bef
ore his departure for Milan, Rembrandt paid a visit to Adrien Hébrard at his foundry on Avenue de Versailles.

  The contract they had drawn up in earlier times was still valid: “Monsieur Bugatti agrees for a period of ___ years . . . not to cede any of his works to another foundry or art publisher . . . and to consign to Monsieur Hébrard, who will nevertheless be free . . . with exclusive rights . . .” etc., etc.

  But the foundry had been closed for months. The ovens were extinguished, ovens whose mouths had issued masterpieces that earned Hébrard comparisons to the master founders of the Renaissance, works that some had compared to the bronzes buried beneath the ashes of Pompeii.

  Even the doors to the gallery, whose windows looked onto Rue Royale, were barred. The rooms deserted and empty. The only thing left in the offices was a desk, behind which Bugatti found Hébrard, seated.

  “Times are tough,” Hébrard told him. “War destroys art. Did you hear of my father’s death? Do you feel like having a bite to eat?” he asked.

  Not far from Rue Royale there was a brasserie. It was a modest place, but with a couple of inside rooms where you could have a meal without running the risk of being disturbed. Bugatti and Hébrard headed in that direction.

  “What will you have?” asked Hébrard.

  “I think I’ll have the leg of lamb,” answered Rembrandt, after taking a quick glance at the menu.

  “I thought you were a vegetarian. Didn’t you used to say it was deplorable, shameful, to kill animals so we could gorge on their flesh and blood?”

  “You’re confusing me with Troubetzkoy,” was Bugatti’s curt reply.

  “Anyway,” Hébrard went on, “no one is interested in artworks anymore, whether paintings or sculpture, small or large. Not even in the colored terracotta statuettes that used to sell so well until last year. And even less in animal sculptures. Want to hear a story? The other week I needed a new pair of clippers to prune the plants in my garden, so I went to La Samaritaine department store. And who should I find amid the watering cans and rakes in the garden section? A man who looked like Pompon. François Pompon, the animal sculptor.”

  “I like Pompon,” said Bugatti, “he’s talented and brave. I’ve heard that he has himself locked inside the aviary with the birds he uses as models, not worrying that he might catch an infection from their feathers and droppings.”

  “That’s him,” continued Hébrard, “well there he was, Pompon, behind the counter, stacking up bags of fertilizer. At first I thought it couldn’t be François, but rather his twin, Hector, whom I don’t know, but whom I’ve heard mentioned. I didn’t know that Hector had died six years ago. It’s me, said Pompon, I don’t have any more commissions. Before I used to make a living carving out blocks of marble for other sculptors. Now there’s no more work. My wife is sick and it’s hard to find anyone who wants to give a job to a man with white hair. And so, when this position opened up, I accepted immediately. The salary is good. Can you believe it?” concluded Hébrard, eating a piece of cake. “This is the situation.”

  IN MILAN BUGATTI surrendered to the void, to ennui. There was no zoo in the city, only a few cages here and there in the Giardini Pubblici on Corso Venezia, with a giraffe, a leopard, a few deer, a monkey, and a few aging gazelles. The only friend he spent time with was Giulio Ulisse Arata, the architect and art critic. At first Rembrandt tried to see him every morning at his studio on Via Mascheroni. The studio, which also doubled as his home, was on the second floor of a building that Arata himself had designed (an elegant building, symmetrical, with a sober façade divided by pilasters with acanthus leaves and a moderate display of eclectic elements such as a double-vaulted balcony on the piano nobile. The building could not have been more unlike the gothic flights of fancy he would later design).

  This is how Arata described those visits: “Rembrandt would enter the studio looking painfully sad and melancholic. He would come in without saying hello, without saying a word, and sink into an armchair and start complaining about how tired he felt. He would attempt to work. He would start a statue but not finish it, making and unmaking. Some days he would come to the studio only to destroy the work he had done the day before.”

  His appearances at Arata’s studio became less and less frequent, tapering off until they ended completely. He confided to his friend that some nights he could only breathe by holding a damp handkerchief over his mouth. He could no longer stand Milan. He had the impression it was the city that kept him from shaking off the exhausting sadness and revulsion that had suffocated all his feelings.

  At the beginning of the summer of 1915, Rembrandt returned to Paris. His father and mother had left the house on Rue Jeanne-d’Arc some time ago, and were now living in Pierrefonds-les-Bains. Carlo Bugatti had become mayor of that small town in Picardy, known for the therapeutic qualities of its sulphuric waters, which relieves ailments and aches and pains.

  It was then that Rembrandt, looking for new lodgings that would also serve as a studio, ended up finding a two-room apartment, not very well-lit but large enough, at 3 Rue Joseph-Bara.

  On the opposite side of the street, at number 6, his friend André Salmon lived in a small oblong room. Now he was at the Western Front, with the 26th battalion of the Light Infantry. Poet, writer, journalist, art critic, a few years earlier, in the pages of Art et Décoration: Revue mensuelle d’Art Moderne, he had compared Bugatti “to an ancient shepherd,” who during his leisure time, rather than sculpt frolicking shepherdesses, preferred “to take as his subjects the sheep in his flock, his horses and his long-horned bulls.” He called him an “animal sculptor by predestination.” In closing he observed that even the few human figures Rembrandt had created were nothing more than “animals of a superior species.”

  VI

  Ever since his return to Paris, Rembrandt had gone to Mass almost every morning, to the Église de la Madeleine, and at least once a week he had Père Galtier hear his confession.

  He went to church that morning, too, and, at the end of the ceremony, Père Galtier saw Rembrandt make the sign of the cross and genuflect, and then head down the grand nave of the half-empty church, toward the vestibule. The priest was concerned. Strange rumors had reached his ears about his diligent penitent. He caught up with him and took him gently by one elbow, leading him toward the corner where the statue of Sainte Amélie is situated.

  “My son,” he said, “you and I must have a talk. The first thing I have to say to you is: man is progress, progress in every direction, do you understand? Can we say the same about the animals? Read the Histoire Naturelle by Buffon, read Ulisse Aldrovandi, read Pliny the Elder. Can you agree with me that sixteen centuries have not produced a single tangible change, a single significant step forward, in the manner of being or behaving that those great men observed for so long? Animals can see, hear sounds, smell, taste, touch things: yes. They can retain images, remember, dream, even discern what represents a danger to them: yes. But after that? Animals live and thus they have a soul, of course, and there is no difference between the nervous systems of animals and men, but as Saint Thomas or Saint Bonaventure argued—I don’t remember which one right now—we must never forget that between the soul of man and the soul of animals there are three essential differences: first, their nature, second, their origin, and third . . . and third . . . why don’t you tell me, my son.”

  Rembrandt pretended to search his memories for an answer to the question of Père Galtier, who after a few seconds of useless waiting resumed his speech.

  “But fate!” he exclaimed. “Fate.” And he added, lowering his voice, “Intra fortunam debet quisque manere suam. Every man should live within his own lot in life. We have to reject the idea that in animals there is any perception of the divine.”

  Then Père Galtier looked away from Rembrandt and, staring at the marble book that Sainte Amélie was holding, he said, “Although an animal may fear the unknown, that which seems supernatural to it—a rumbling in the woods, for example—this is no reason to assert tha
t it possesses a religious sentiment. No, it cannot, because the religious sentiment presupposes the idea of religion, and the idea of religion,” said Père Galtier, staring Rembrandt in the face and making a gesture as if to raise a finger in the air, “the idea of religion, my son, presupposes the idea of a being that is necessary, infinite, immutable, eternal, a sovereign and regnant being, the idea, in short, of God.”