Bianca was the eldest of the six children of Antonio and Evelina Giacometti. Lively, saucy, and pretty, she was fifteen when her nineteen-year-old cousin from Stampa arrived in Rome. She didn’t like him, and he quickly fell in love with her. It was the first overt, unhappy love of his adult life.
Everyone in the Giacometti family and among their acquaintances liked Alberto, admired him, and made much of him. Except Bianca. She was interested only in what could amuse and entertain her. Art didn’t. Upon occasion, when it suited her fancy, she was willing to go out with Alberto or allow him to make her a present. She soon discovered that she could get almost anything from him if she went about it in the right way, which was by playing the innocent, and she slyly saw that he enjoyed being taken advantage of.
Alberto became Bianca’s slave. He worshipped her, but from afar. The relationship was highly unsatisfying, Bianca indifferent or impatient, Alberto miserable. He tried to arouse her interest by going out with another girl. She took no notice. He bought her candy and ice cream and escorted her around the city. She would not offer him even an illusion of satisfaction. That was all she could have offered, in any case. Of course, it was all he wanted.
Evelina Giacometti was a warm-hearted, understanding woman. She liked Alberto, and in the absence of his own mother, she tried to be motherly to him. Wanting her daughter to be more considerate of the love-sick cousin, one day she ordered her to go out walking with him. Bianca protested and when her mother insisted she had a temper tantrum and burst out crying. Alberto
was present during this scene, but instead of being upset by it he sat down and made a drawing of Bianca in tears.
During the first eight weeks of his Roman sojourn, Alberto made no sculpture. Shortly after the middle of February, he felt a desire to do so. It was motivated in part, perhaps, by the hope that if he again paid attention to another girl, Bianca might become more interested in him. The model was a beautiful young woman named Alda, with fine features and lustrous hair gathered in a pompadour on top of her head, a sister-in-law of the Giacomettis’ maid. She posed in a basement room of the Villino Giacometti, where Alberto had installed a makeshift studio. The sessions went well. The artist and his model talked and laughed constantly, and Alberto portrayed Alda with a smile on her lips. In a week, the small bust was finished and turned out to be an excellent likeness. The model declared herself delighted and added that she would be glad to receive the sculpture as a gift. Alberto was pleased, too. The clay was cast in plaster and Alda happily carried off her portrait.
If he had hoped to make Bianca jealous, he failed. She was not a bit interested in what was going on in the basement between her cousin and the maid’s sister-in-law. Before the bust of Alda was finished, Alberto determined to make one of Bianca as well. Evelina must have prevailed upon her daughter to pose, for she had no desire to do so. Work began immediately, and one may assume that the relationship between artist and model was less carefree and merry than the week before. Alberto had allowed Bianca in other circumstances to twist him around her little finger. Now he demanded that she submit to the strict regime of immobility which he always demanded when working from a model. This can only have seemed intolerable to a capricious girl of fifteen who didn’t care two straws either for the artist or for his art. She fidgeted and squirmed. Alberto must have been uncomfortable, too. How could he hope to see her with the necessary objectivity of an artist when every glance aroused the feelings of an unrequited lover? Under such conditions, it is easy to imagine that the bust which stood both literally and figuratively between them may have seemed to be more a representation of conflict and dissatisfaction than of Bianca.
At the same time, however, Alberto may have sensed that if he could succeed in making a portrait of Bianca as satisfactorily as he had made the one of Alda, his model might respond more favorably to his romantic yearnings. The work went badly from the beginning. Bianca sat before him, but she remained aloof, distant. So near, yet she was far. “For the first time I couldn’t find my way,” he said later. “I kept getting lost, everything escaped me.” He was unable to reproduce what he saw. The sense of ineffectuality was devastating. It destroyed in an instant all his confidence and zest. “The head of the model in front of me became like a cloud, vague and boundless.” He couldn’t understand what had happened. He felt baffled. But he was tenacious. He refused to submit to this seeming impossibility. The sittings dragged on for weeks, the weeks became months.
Alberto’s time and energies during that late winter and spring of 1921 were not solely devoted to the bust of Bianca, of course. He continued to paint landscapes and portraits, to make drawings from life at the Circolo Artistico, and to fill notebooks with copies of the works he admired in Rome’s museums and churches. With none of these, moreover, did he experience the least difficulty. The bust of Bianca alone withheld satisfaction. In the basement of the Villino Giacometti, wrapped in damp rags to keep the clay from hardening, the sculpture stood like an incriminating witness.
Needless to say, there was no physical intimacy between Alberto and Bianca. Alberto felt trepidation at the prospect of sexual experience, because it was related to notions of love and personal commitment. The painful bout of orchitis had probably left him with some sense of genital inadequacy, and perhaps of sexual futility. But there was something more, some interdiction that made the sexual act seem not only intimidating but frightening. Desire, however, overcame apprehension.
“I took a prostitute home with me to draw her. Then I slept with her. I literally exploded with enthusiasm. I shouted, ‘It’s cold! It’s mechanical!’”
This explosion, charged with the energy and release of a youthful orgasm, altered forever the configuration of Alberto’s inner self. The sexual act was mechanical, it was cold. Therefore,
it need have, it could have, nothing to do with love. It was not to be feared. It entailed no commitment of one’s identity. No dire consequences stemmed from it. A thrilling sense of freedom appears to have followed the cataclysm, and the enthusiasm with which Alberto greeted it can only be construed as a measure of the previous foreboding. He cannot, however, have imagined that the passion with which he embraced his liberation was in direct proportion to the dispassion with which he embraced his liberator. Yet that convenient fact bore with it the ironic possibility of an even more inhibiting servitude.
Alberto’s first mature sexual experience established a pattern. Prostitutes became the simplest solution to a problem that had no solution. It was not yet necessary to justify this expedience. Physical deliverance did that. But the time would come when he felt constrained to explain repeatedly in public and private why whores made the most satisfactory mistresses. It was courageous of him to do that, because, while the reasons he gave were serious and sincere, none of them hinted at the true reason. But perhaps he was in no danger of being obliged to understand. His work fulfilled the function of understanding.
It was while in Rome that Alberto began to smoke cigarettes. He also embraced the pleasures of tobacco with passion. He even made a drawing of himself in the attire of a dandy, holding in one hand his cane and in the other a cigarette, and inscribed with a phrase attributed to Oscar Wilde: “The cigarette is the truest delight.” However true the delight, Alberto remained an inveterate smoker for the rest of his life.
While in Italy, the young artist was anxious to visit Naples, Pompeii, and the Greek temples at Paestum. Traveling with a young English acquaintance, Alberto went south from Rome on March 31, 1921. He was delighted with Naples, which he found much more beautiful than he had expected. He visited the museum, where he was especially impressed by the Roman paintings and bronzes, and the two young men went for the inevitable boat ride on the bay.
From Naples they took the train to Paestum on April 3. In 1921 that site had not yet become a noisy attraction of organized tourism. The three Doric temples, as well preserved as any which
survive, stood in serene solitude among pines and oleanders. Alberto was very moved by that peaceful and forgotten spot. He felt more religious spirit there, he said, than in all the Christian churches of Italy, adding that Paestum would remain forever in his memory. It would, indeed.
After one night there, the two young travelers took the morning train for Pompeii. Alberto was reminded of his father, who had spent one of the most trying periods of his life nearby. They were not alone in the railway carriage, and presently got into conversation with one of their fellow passengers. This person was an elderly, white-haired gentleman, a tourist traveling alone and glad of a chance to chat with the high-spirited youths. The companionable interlude didn’t last long, however, as Pompeii is only forty-five miles from Paestum. Alberto and his English friend got off there, while the solitary gentleman went on to Naples.
The city of Pompeii made a deep impression, too. Alberto paid particular attention to the paintings, and recognized at once the grandeur of those in the Villa dei Misteri, which he felt to be very modern in form and lighting. A little like Gauguin, he said, but more complete.