The Animal Gazer

by Edgardo Franzosini

  Rembrandt would like to have formulated a reply, perhaps winning the argument with a Latin quotation such as talpae oculos possidetis (you have the eyes of a mole), or pulsate et aperietur vobis (knock and the door will be opened), but he leaned his head slightly forward in assent. His face was tired as if he hadn’t slept in weeks.

  “Do you need to confess?” the priest asked him, smiling, with a slightly less pointed and expressive look.

  “No, Father,” Rembrandt replied.

  “Alright, I have to leave you now. This morning I have a meeting with the young people of the Crusade,” said Père Galtier. (To beg for God’s intercession to bring an end to the war, the Archbishop of Paris had, in fact, come up with the idea of an army of children, of crusaders, as he called them, whom he organized in a rigidly hierarchical fashion. The corporals were obliged to receive communion once a month, the sergeants once a week, and the officers every day. In this army there were no mere foot soldiers.)

  Rembrandt made the sign of the cross again, headed toward the exit and, pushing the door, left the church. It was eight o’clock in the morning, in the month of January. A milky haze covered the Rue Royale.

  There was a man without a leg selling tricolor cockades, leaning against a column of La Madeleine and holding himself up with a crutch. Rembrandt recognized him: it was Monsieur Moussinac, the zookeeper from the Jardin des Plantes. A medal was pinned to the lapel of his coat. Rembrandt had grown thinner and more stooped. His face was pale, as white as ivory, in strange contrast with the vivid pink of his cheeks. It took the former zookeeper a few seconds to recognize the sculptor. But as soon as he did, he broke out in a smile and extended both hands toward him, holding himself up with one elbow on the crutch, and hobbling slightly.

  “I went to the hospital at least five times,” said Moussinac to Rembrandt, “and I showed what’s left of my mangled leg to at least ten medical officials, but two months ago it finally arrived. Yes, I received a new leg! Nowadays they make amazing things, even masks with moveable jaws: you can’t speak but at least you can chew. My new leg is a thing of beauty: a suction cup socket, oak, steel knee, a jointed foot. But I still have to get used to it. You have to take care of it, keep it clean. They recommend oiling it every day.”

  ON THE WALL of one of the two rooms on Rue Joseph-Bara, the portrait taken by André Taponier was gone. In its place there was a large wooden cross that reached almost to the ceiling, although the base was propped against the floor. Rembrandt had nailed the two planks together himself. He recovered them one night on Boulevard de Clichy, where a fire had destroyed a building a few months earlier. The only thing that remained was rubble, charred and splintered beams and wall frames, iron rods, and wooden poles. This is not the time to do animals, he thought.

  He found his Christ at a café in Montmartre. Antonio, if we must give him a name, had arrived in France two years earlier from a little village at the foot of Vesuvius, where he had been a construction worker. In his early days in Paris he worked at a soap factory. After they closed the factory he got by as best he could. He went to the wine market every day and for a few francs he would move around barrels that weighed a ton. From dawn to dusk he would fill bottles with Bourgogne and Crémant. He would wash the empties and divide them up: the Rhines to one side, the Burgundies to the other. He would scrub the casks, sweep the cellar.

  Rembrandt explained to him what he had in mind, and Antonio answered, “For me it’s just another job.”

  Not even when he found himself before the cross did he betray any misgivings, any hesitation, much less any second thoughts. He observed Rembrandt in silence while he ripped a sheet into three pieces and dipped one after the other in a bucket of water.

  “Take off your clothes and shoes,” he told him.

  The young man stood there naked. Rembrandt took a second sheet, rolled it up loosely, and knotted it against his hip. Although it was only early autumn, the cold air was already creeping in, especially at night. Shivering, with his arms folded, the model went to a corner of the room while Rembrandt removed the cross from the wall, and positioned it at a slant. “Courage, my friend,” Rembrandt told him, gesturing for him to come closer.

  Antonio set his foot on the wedge that had been nailed a few inches above the bottom, leaned his shoulders against the crossbeam, and stretched out his arms. Rembrandt tied his wrists with the strips he had torn from the bedsheet. First one, then the other, forcefully.

  “Now for your ankles,” he said, kneeling down on the floor. Twice around and a nice knot. “Is it too tight?” he asked.

  “That’s how it’s supposed to be, I think,” replied Antonio.

  Then, with a tremendous effort, Rembrandt pushed the cross up closer to the wall.

  “There, just right!” he said, with sweat on his brow despite the cold. Then he turned the valve that regulated the flame of the gas lamp to cast a little more light. From the tabletop he took a lump of Plasticine, approached the armature already prepared in the middle of the room, and started to feverishly model his three-dimensional maquette, as he always did, but this time with the addition, perhaps, of even greater energy, even greater impatience. After about half an hour of this rough and tenacious struggle, this blunt assault, with his head lowered, his Christ started to become visibly distressed, to twist his torso, to push his shoulders upward to relieve the tension on the muscles of his chest and abdomen, and to emit muffled groans.

  When Rembrandt untied him from the cross and helped him to lie down on the floor, his hands and feet were swollen and he was struggling to breathe. The cloth strips had left deep, purple marks on his wrists and ankles.

  With one of the strips Rembrandt delicately dried the cold sweat that coated his face and chest and the rest of his body.

  “It’s only cramps,” said the man with a vulnerable smile.

  “Cramps,” repeated Rembrandt, unpersuaded.

  A few minutes later Antonio was once again on the cross, his arms outstretched and his knees slightly bent, his hands and feet bound to the two boards. Once again Rembrandt pushed the cross and the body hanging from it against the wall, struggling to get it perfectly upright.

  The whole process was repeated five more times over the course of the night: when the model was on the verge of collapse, Rembrandt would lower the large cross from the wall, untie the man, place his hands beneath his armpits, lay him down on the floor, and without saying a word stand there observing him, waiting for him to recover. Antonio would stare at the ceiling for a few minutes, breathing deeply. Then he would sit up, rub his wrists and ankles with his hands and, making a gesture with his head that seemed to be contradicted by the expression in his eyes, he would tell Rembrandt that he was ready again.

  It was almost dawn when at the end of one of these pauses, Antonio, still full of zeal and goodwill, or maybe simply patient acquiescence, indicated that he could resume the pose. Rembrandt finally announced to him instead that the maquette was finished. He then added that he didn’t have a franc to pay him, and would give him in exchange one of his precious shirts or a pair of trousers, maybe a jacket. “Or would you prefer a pair of shoes?” he asked, pointing to the ones on his feet. The other man furrowed his brow, ready to protest. But a second later he shrugged his shoulders.

  “My fault. I should have known,” he grumbled. “When I arrived, I immediately thought that if such an elegant gentleman lives in a rat’s nest like this, it means he hasn’t got a cent. So be it. I’ll take the shoes.”

  Rembrandt removed his shoes and handed them over.

  “A little big,” said Antonio, after trying them on, slipping a finger behind his tendon. Only then did Rembrandt notice how small and boney the man’s hands were.

  “We’ll leave it at that,” said Antonio, “now I really need a bed.”

  VII

  Saturday, January 8, 1916. Early morning. The bitter cold of winter had left the streets icy and Rembrandt Bugatti’s gait was even more stiff and uncertain than usual. At the
corner of Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a woman made a timid gesture of offering him a small bouquet of violets.

  “For you, monsieur. You like flowers, don’t you?”

  Rembrandt accepted the bouquet of violets and gave the woman a coin. “I always take this street but I’ve never run into you before,” he said.

  “It’s the first time I’ve come here,” replied the flower woman, “usually I’m in the area of Notre-Dame. You’re not French, are you, monsieur?”

  “No,” replied Bugatti.

  After crossing the Pont de la Concorde and leaving behind the Seine, on which gray chunks of ice were floating, Rembrandt turned into Boulevard Raspail. From the sky there was a diaphanous light, and touching his felt hat with his fingertips Rembrandt felt moisture on the brim. Passing by a newsstand he stopped for a moment to look at the photographs of horses in the war zone on the front page of a daily newspaper. Their heads were covered with gas masks. Shuddering in his overcoat, he moved on.

  By the entry to 3 Rue Joseph-Bara, Madame Soulimant was seated as usual.

  “Good morning,” she said with a sleepy smile.

  “Good morning, Madame Soulimant,” replied Rembrandt.

  “Where have you been,” asked the custodian, who couldn’t help but notice that on her tenant’s cheek, which was generally so smooth and perfectly shaven, there was the shadow of a beard.

  “At La Madeleine,” replied Rembrandt, in a voice without affect.

  “At this hour of the morning?”

  “Yes, at the first Mass.”

  “What lovely violets, Monsieur Bugatti.”

  “I bought them from a woman who sells them on Faubourg Saint-Honoré,” said Rembrandt, placing them near his nose.

  “The flower that can resist the winter cold,” said Madame Soulimant. “They’ll make the whole house smell nice.”

  I’ll need water for these violets, thought Rembrandt while he climbed the stairs up to his lodgings.

  Behind the doors of the other apartments you could hear whispering and muffled sounds. People had just woken up. On the whitewashed walls of the landing, where the paint was peeling, the damp had caused green stains to form that resembled big cabbages. Water and a glass, he thought to himself. And in fact, the first thing he did, once he had closed the door to his apartment and even before taking off his coat, was to look for a glass on the table, which was still littered with leftovers from the night before, in addition to spatulas, files, a palette knife, sticks, and the shreds of Plasticine. After rinsing out the dried dregs from a wineglass, Rembrandt placed the bouquet in the glass and set it in front of a dirty window, beyond which all you could see was the blank wall of the building opposite. Then he removed his overcoat and hat and placed them inside the closet, where jackets, vests, and trousers had been carelessly hung.

  I have to straighten up this place, he said to himself, I have to get rid of the clutter on this table.

  Clearing the table quickly and making a little space, he took some stationery, a pen, and ink from the dresser drawer. Then he sat down at the table and started to write. He wrote three letters.

  The first was to a couple he knew who lived outside of Paris. Some time back they had asked whether they might visit the place where he worked. Struggling to maintain a serious composure he proposed that they of course come to see him the next week, when they would be more than welcome.

  The second letter was addressed to his brother: “Ettore Bugatti—Grand-Hôtel—Boulevard des Capucines, Paris.” Who knows whether Rembrandt advised him, once again, to be “a bastard with men, a gentleman to women, and God to children,” but always “good to animals.” More than a few conjectures have been made about this letter, and more than one fantasy, but its contents are still completely unknown today.

  The last was for the police commissioner of the neighborhood: “January 8, 1916. To the Police Commissioner of the Notre-Dame-des-Champs quarter. Dear Sir, My gesture . . .”

  LEANING AGAINST THE back of a chair, he noticed the rags he had used to tie to the cross the Italian whom he had met in the fall in Montmartre. Rembrandt took them and tore them into thin strips, meticulously, one by one. Then, with a fastidious slowness, he tucked them around the window frames and in the cracks between the door and the floor, sealing off every opening.

  Inside a pan he boiled a little water over the gas. He decided to shave. In front of a mirror barely big enough to show his face, he checked the part in his hair. The razor glided over his cheeks, his chin, and, delicately, around his mouth. When it reached his neck, at the height of his prominent Adam’s apple, Rembrandt may have hesitated, had a moment of uncertainty. But otherwise why would I have done all this work, so precisely, so diligently, with the strips of cloth? he thought, gazing at the islands of foam that floated on the water in the washbasin. When he finished shaving, he calmly dried his face and went to the closet.

  What should he wear? Without giving it too much thought, perhaps because he had imagined this moment many times, he took out a dark suit, an ivory vest, the last shirt he had picked up from the laundry, and a burgundy tie, and he laid them on the bed. In the back of the closet a pair of single-button, white cotton gloves almost completely concealed a small dark blue case. Rembrandt took the gloves and the case—on which the initials R.F. were embossed in gold letters—and set them next to his outfit.

  Outside the dirty windows the winter fog turned the air gray, leaving the room dark though it was already midmorning. Footsteps and voices echoed from the stairwell.

  Rembrandt walked over to the brass lamp that was hanging from the ceiling and opened the valve to the maximum. He stopped for a second to listen to the hissing of the gas.

  WHEN THE POLICE commissioner of the quarter, a certain Lompré, entered Rembrandt’s apartment, followed by a weeping Madame Soulimant, it was late afternoon.

  “The window,” he instructed the agent accompanying him. Then, covering his nose and mouth with one hand, he closed the valve of the lamp.

  Rembrandt was lying on the bed, impeccably dressed. On his hands, which were crossed over his stomach, he was wearing the white gloves. On his feet, which protruded past the edge of the bed, he had on a pair of patent leather shoes with square toes.

  The smell of gas was overwhelming and caught in the throat. Lompré bent over and placed his ear on Rembrandt’s chest. “Did you call a doctor?” he asked the concierge.

  “Doctor Villesboniet, who lives next door,” replied Madame Soulimant.

  On the small nightstand by the bed were the envelopes with the three letters, a glass holding the violets with their now withered petals, and a dark blue case against which were gleaming the gold initials of the République Française.

  Lompré opened the case. Lifting up a small red ribbon with two fingers, he observed for a second the insignia of the Légion d’honneur, the five-armed Maltese Cross, in silver plate enameled white. Then he gingerly replaced it in the case.

  “One is for you, commissioner,” said the agent, handing him the envelopes.

  The commissioner opened the letter that Rembrandt had addressed to him. A few lines that Lompré read without betraying any emotion. In the meantime the doctor had arrived. He approached the bed, looked at the outstretched man, and said, “He’s too long for the coffin.”

  “His heart is still beating,” said the commissioner.

  “Yes, it’s still beating,” confirmed Doctor Villesboinet, removing an immaculate handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and forcefully opening Rembrandt’s mouth.

  “There’s a car downstairs. We’re taking him to Laennec’s.”

  Then, with his fingers wrapped in the handkerchief he grabbed hold of Rembrandt’s tongue and started to pull it. Short repeated tugs.

  “There’s no time for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” said Villesboinet to the commissioner, who was only half listening, drawn as he was to the enormous wooden cross against the wall, in the advancing darkness of the room.

  BUGATTI’S
BODY, STILL hanging on to life, arrived a short time later at the hospital that bore the name of René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec, the inventor of the stethoscope.

  At first air was pumped into his lungs with an artificial ventilation machine, then he was bled, and finally he was given a shot of camphor oil (Villesboinet’s suggestion of cold compresses on the neck was ignored). Rembrandt Bugatti, without ever regaining consciousness, passed away during the course of the night.

  Two days later, Le Petit Parisien published a long article, Mort dramatique du sculpteur R. Bugatti, in which the reasons for his suicide were generically indicated as the atrocities and horrors of the war. To read the most emotional and perhaps most exact obituary of Rembrandt one would have to wait for the words of Giulio Ulisse Arata who, a few weeks later, wrote in the pages of an art magazine published in Milan, “Bugatti lived life as a stranger, and he died as an unknown man erasing behind him every trace of his existence.”

  The Funeral Mass was celebrated at ten o’clock in the morning on Thursday, January 13, in Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Although when confronted by those who deliberately take their own lives—out of revulsion at life, to escape from scandal or illness, or maybe out of a morbid fury at the void—the Church did not, as a rule, provide for a Christian funeral and burial; in the case of Bugatti, “in consideration of the fairly subtle canon law,” as acknowledged by Cardinal Amette, the Archbishop of Paris, an exception was granted. This unusual, and in certain respects unexpected decision of Monsignor Amette left an impression on the few persons who gathered for the ceremony in Notre-Dame-des-Champs. During his homily, the celebrant, Abbé Genevray, did not fail to remark that funeral services should be considered above all a sign of compassion, an appeal for divine intercession for the salvation of the soul, and ultimately, nevertheless, a mystery of the faith. The following day the corpse of Rembrandt Bugatti was transported to Milan. Beneath a violent downpour, in the presence of his father, his mother, his brother, Ettore, his sister-in-law and his nieces and nephews, his body was buried without ceremony in the family plot. Only after the war would it be exhumed to be buried in Dorlisheim, where it rests today alongside the other four men who bear his same name.