The valley had hardly emerged from the shadow when Annetta Giacometti once more became pregnant. This new pregnancy caused her to wean her firstborn. Weaning at six months is not unusual. At any age, however, it may bring a loss of that sense of primal security, of physical certainty and delight, which every infant experiences through contact with his mother’s body.
On the 15th of November 1902, a second son was born to Annetta and Giovanni Giacometti. He was named Diego, after Velázquez, whom his father admired. By a strange irony, this second son encountered at his mother’s breast an experience contrary to the normal expectations of infancy. He was unable to accept her milk. It made him sick, and Annetta was compelled to substitute a vegetal formula. The aversion proved lifelong. Even when milk was prescribed many years later as treatment for an ulcer, Diego could not digest it.
The very earliest memory which in later life Alberto retained of his childhood was an image of his mother. Many years afterward he wrote: “The long black dress which touched the ground troubled me by its mystery; it seemed to be a part of the body, and that caused a feeling of fear and confusion; all the rest vanished, escaped my attention.”
Alberto could not have been less than a year old, and probably he was rather more, when he formed this image. Annetta was thirty-two. The child’s reaction is surprising. Confusion and fear are not feelings which most people associate with childhood memories of their mother. Of course, powerful psychic forces from later periods always shape and color the memories that seem to remain from childhood, and though children’s memories do
retain what is important, a kind of symbolic representation often occurs which is not unlike the symbolism of fantasies or dreams.
Diego was not yet a year old when his mother once again became pregnant. This occurrence does not seem to have been charged for him with any traumatic effect. But it did create a practical family problem. On May 31, 1904, a daughter was born. She was named Ottilia, after her father’s mother. Now the family numbered five. The lodgings in Borgonovo were no longer adequate. In the late autumn of 1904, Giovanni moved his family down the road to Stampa.
On the day of the move, an incident occurred which formed Diego’s first memory; he was then not quite two. In the confusion, he wandered outside unnoticed. The street was full of milling sheep, and he became lost among them. All around him, the sheep’s legs crowded close, stamping up and down. Alone, helpless, terrified, Diego began to scream and sob. A girl came to the rescue, lifting him up from the flock of sheep, and he saw his mother at the window, laughing. He was unharmed, but after those few minutes of fright the world never again seemed quite so safe or secure.
After a year and a half of temporary lodging at the Piz Duan Inn, the family moved across the road into an apartment on the main floor of a large, rose-colored house, with hay barn and stable immediately adjacent. They never moved again. The quarters were not spacious, consisting of two bedrooms, living room, dining room, and kitchen. As to modern “conveniences,” there were none. Water had to be carried from a fountain by the roadway. The adjacent barn was converted into a studio for Giovanni. Only it and the living room were heated in winter. The windows faced north across the valley with its rushing stream toward the sharp summit of the Piz Duan. Fortunately for all the family, the father’s studio served as a kind of extra living room, and the artist found his wife and children willing models. Alberto in particular seemed to enjoy the studio atmosphere, the smell of turpentine and paint, and the opportunity to pose.
He was a shy, gentle child. His dearest and most intimate companions were by his own account inanimate objects. “Between
the ages of four and seven,” he later wrote, “I saw only those things which could be useful to my pleasure. These were above all stones and trees.” There was one stone, and above all the cave which erosion had formed beneath it, that became the principal hiding place and sanctum of Alberto’s childhood. He was four years old when his father first took him there. The stone is an immense boulder in a meadow about 650 yards from Stampa. The cave beneath it is high enough for small children to stand upright. At the rear, a crevice narrows into the earth. The entrance, formed by an overhanging lip of the boulder, is long, low, and jagged, like an enormous open mouth.
This cave was well known to all the children of Stampa. But Alberto had an exclusive feeling for the place. To him, it had a meaning and an importance not shared by his brother or other playmates. Many years later, when he was over thirty, he felt impelled to describe the cave and the intensity of his attachment to it in a short memoir which he wrote for a Surrealist publication and entitled “Yesterday, Quicksand.”
“From the first,” he says, “I considered that stone a friend, a being full of good intentions toward me … like somebody one has known long before and loved, then found again with surprise and infinite joy.” Every morning when he awoke, his first concern was to look out the window to make sure that the stone was still there, and even from a distance he seemed able to distinguish its tiniest details. Nothing else in the landscape interested him.
For two years, the cave was for Alberto the most important place on earth or, one should say, in the earth. His greatest pleasure, he says, came when he penetrated as deeply as possible into the narrow crevice at the rear of the cave. “I attained the height of joy,” he wrote. “All my desires were fulfilled.” The fulfillment, to be sure, was symbolic, but the desires were not. They are felt by all children, though in varying degree. Alberto’s case was exceptional. It called for expression. One day, while curled up securely in the depths of the cave, the little boy thought that he might want some nourishment. So he stole from his mother’s kitchen a loaf of bread, carried it to the cave, and hid it deep in the recess at the rear. Once he had done that, his satisfaction must
have seemed the greatest that life can give, for in a sense he never got over it.
Once, while playing near the cave, Alberto wandered a bit farther than usual. “I would not be able to remember by what chance,” he wrote in “Yesterday, Quicksand.” It’s odd that he felt compelled to preface his account with a failure of memory and an element of chance. “I found myself on a rise in the ground. In front of me, a little below, in the midst of the brush, rose up an enormous black stone in the form of a narrow, pointed pyramid, of which the sides were almost vertical. I cannot express the emotion of resentment and confusion I experienced at that moment. The stone struck me at once as a living being, hostile, threatening. It threatened everything: us, our games, and our cave. Its existence was unbearable to me and I felt immediately-being unable to make it disappear—that I must take no notice of it, forget it, and speak of it to no one. Nevertheless, I did go close to it, but this was with a feeling of surrendering to something reprehensible, secret, improper. I barely touched it with one hand in disgust and fear. Trembling at the prospect of finding an entrance, I walked around it. No sign of a cave, which made the stone even more unbearable to me, and yet I did experience one satisfaction: an opening in that stone would have complicated everything and I already felt the desolation of our cave if it had become necessary to be concerned with another at the same time. I ran away from the black stone, I didn’t mention it to the other children, I dismissed it and never went back to see it again.”
A time came when Alberto no longer found the cave so irresistibly desirable or satisfying. In the natural course of things, he developed other desires and sought other satisfactions. “I awaited the snows with impatience. I was not content until I calculated that there was enough—and many times I calculated too soon—so that I could go by myself, carrying a sack and armed with a pointed stick, to a field at some distance from the village. (The work in question was to be secret.) There I attempted to dig a hole just large enough for me to penetrate into it. On the surface was to remain visible only a round opening, as small as possible, and nothing else. I planned to spread the sack in the bottom of the hole
and once inside I imagined the place would be warm and dark; I believed I should certainly experience great joy. I was entirely absorbed in the pleasure of having my hole completely installed and entering it. I would have liked to spend all winter there, alone, enclosed, and I thought with regret that it would be necessary to return home to eat and sleep. I must say that in spite of all my efforts, and also probably because external conditions were bad, my desire was never fulfilled.”
In later life Alberto spoke repeatedly of his carefree, happy childhood. He often said that in many ways he felt himself to be still a young boy. And he was, though it took a lifetime of labor to become so. Perhaps his childhood had, in fact, been as happy as he always said. After all, the deep desires he felt and the satisfactions he craved were the same throughout his life. But they were strained and transformed by experiences to come, and so was he. As a child he was able to live with his longings, no matter what they were, in pleasurable, carefree compatibility, which is not a bad criterion for happiness.