A mysterious advertisement appeared in an Italian newspaper during the midsummer of 1921. The mystery is great, because the advertisement had very definite consequences, but years of diligent research have been unable to resurrect it from the morgues of the Italian press. It had been inserted by a Dutchman from The Hague and was addressed to the attention of an anonymous, Swiss—Italian art student whom he had met some months before while traveling by train from Paestum to Naples. The latter was requested to respond by mail. Every law of probability would have seemed to be defied by the chance that this advertisement might fall into the hands of the young man for whom it was meant. But Antonio Giacometti chanced to see the advertisement, chanced to suppose that it might be addressed to his young cousin, and took the trouble to send it on to Maloja.
Alberto was surprised and puzzled. However, he did recall having encountered an elderly man in a railway compartment the previous April. He thought that perhaps the man had lost something en route and hoped that a fellow traveler might help him to recover it. Since the request had by chance reached its destination, Alberto wrote to The Hague.
A reply presently came back from a man named Peter van Meurs, who wrote to say that although their previous meeting had indeed been brief, he had found the young artist an agreeable traveling companion. He proposed to renew the acquaintance. Enjoying travel, he explained, but being elderly and alone in the world, he preferred not to travel by himself. Therefore, it would give him great pleasure if Alberto should agree to accompany him on a trip, for which he would naturally pay all the expenses.
It was, to say the least, an astonishing proposal. It might have seemed more astonishing still if the recipient had known more about his would-be benefactor. Peter Antoni Nicolaus Stephanus van Meurs was born of Protestant parents at Arnhem in 1860, the first of six children. He studied law and obtained a degree but never practiced. In 1885 he accepted employment with the Central State Archives in The Hague, where his principal activity was to catalogue and conserve the municipal archives of southern Holland, and in 1913 he was appointed Keeper of the Public Records. In addition to professional duties, he assumed certain civic responsibilities, of which the most significant was as member of the board of directors of an organization formed to deal more humanely with delinquent young boys. He also belonged to the Society for the Furtherance of Sunday Rest and to the Dutch Alpine Society. He loved travel, especially in the mountains of Italy. He was a vegetarian, independently wealthy, and unmarried.
This was the man who after an hour’s chance meeting in a train had gone to extraordinary lengths to renew contact with Alberto and now proposed to take him on a journey. It seems a surpassing understatement to observe that the nineteen-year-old youth must have made a deep impression on his fellow traveler of sixty-one.
The idea of taking a trip appealed to Alberto. At the same time he didn’t know quite what to think of van Meurs’s offer. Since Diego happened to be in Maloja for a visit, Alberto turned to him for advice. There was no doubt in Diego’s mind. He felt sure that the older man was a homosexual who hoped to take advantage of the trip to have an adventure far from home with a young man unlikely to endanger his reputation. What other explanation, he argued, could there possibly be for the extravagant pains taken by this stranger to reestablish contact with someone he had known for an hour four months before? If his intentions had been innocent, why should he not have sought a traveling companion at home?
Alberto protested. He said that Diego had no right to make such discreditable assumptions, and he declined to take account of them. The fact was, however, that he had made the very same assumptions himself, but he did not choose to acknowledge them.
By nature contradictory, not to say contrary, he obviously wanted to accept the offer despite his misgivings. In later years he explained his acceptance by saying that he had been anxious to travel but was too poor to do so on his own. The explanation is as poignant as the proposition.
He wrote to van Meurs and accepted. The Dutchman was evidently in a hurry to take advantage of his good luck, because it was agreed that they should set out together soon. The itinerary apparently decided upon seems to demonstrate that the older man was eager to prove to his young correspondent that the trip would be pleasant. Their destination turned out to be none other than Venice, the city to which Alberto had longed to return since leaving it more than a year before with his father.
What Alberto’s parents thought of his plans we do not know. Perhaps they felt that Alberto was of an age to make decisions for himself and that they had best not interfere. But Alberto was not disposed to leave them out altogether. He took steps to make sure that if some difficulty arose en route he could count on parental assistance—not in person, of course, but symbolically. Before leaving Maloja, he took a thousand francs from his father’s drawer.
“If things turn out badly,” he said to himself, “if he becomes pressing, I’ll be able to get home on my own!”
A thousand Swiss francs was not at the time a great deal of money. Alberto had spent far more on new clothes while in Rome, and his father might well have given him such an amount if he had asked for it. But he didn’t. He made sure that he wasn’t, so to speak, starting out unaccompanied.
Exactly where in northern Italy the two met is unclear, but wherever the meeting occurred, it must have been a strange moment, tense with curiosity and ambiguity, as the two came face to face: an impetuous youth of nineteen and a staid, though fanciful, gentleman of sixty-one.
Van Meurs was not handsome. He had thick, fleshy features, and pronounced pouches under small eyes, but his chin was strong and his mouth firm. His shoulders were rather stooped, no doubt as a result of the decades spent poring over archives. If he was homosexual, as seems likely, there is no reason to assume he was an
active or even a conscious one. If there was any sexual motive for his interest in Alberto, he may have been unaware of it. He had grown up in a time when homosexuals were still hounded by the police and despised by the public. People were not prone to acknowledge such a tendency either to others or, if possible, to themselves. Lacking evidence to the contrary, it seems fair to assume that van Meurs’s attentions were innocent. Alberto never implied that the older man had attempted to have any kind of intimacy with him. Everything, in fact, that he subsequently said or wrote about van Meurs—and it was much—suggests that he regarded his companion as a kind and fatherly man.
The travelers set out on September 3, 1921, for a small village high in the mountains named Madonna di Campiglio. As no motorized transport yet existed in that rather desolate region, they took the post coach over narrow, twisting roads up the faces of cliffs and above precipitous gorges. Even in early September, it can get very cold up there. By the end of the day, when they had reached the little place in a fold of the mountains, van Meurs had caught a chill. They went to the Grand Hotel des Alpes, a rambling structure built on the ruins of an ancient monastery.
The following day was Sunday. Rain was falling on the mountainsides, on the forest, and on the fields around the hotel. It was cold. Van Meurs awoke unwell and in severe pain. He suffered from kidney stones, he explained. He writhed from side to side on his bed, banging his head repeatedly against the wall. The hotel luckily had a doctor attached to its staff. He was called, examined van Meurs, and gave him an injection to ease the pain.
Alberto remained by the bedside of the elderly Dutchman. Having brought with him a copy of Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, he began to read the introductory essay by Guy de Maupassant. In it there is a passage which may have seemed striking to the impressionable young artist as he sat by the bed of this sick man whom he barely knew.
Speaking of Flaubert, Maupassant says: “Those people who are altogether happy, strong, and healthy: are they adequately prepared to understand, to penetrate, and to express this life we live, so tormented, so short? Are they made, the exuberant and outgoing,
for the discovery of all those afflictions and all those sufferings which beset us, for the knowledge that death strikes without surcease, every day and everywhere, ferocious, blind, fatal? So it is possible, it is probable, that the first seizure of epilepsy made a deep mark of melancholy and fear upon the mind of this robust youth. It is probable that thereafter a kind of apprehension toward life remained with him, a manner somewhat more somber of considering things, a suspicion of outward events, a mistrust of apparent happiness.”
Outside the window, rain continued to fall on the wooden balcony of the hotel, on the few houses of Madonna di Campiglio, on the forest beyond. In the sickroom, occasionally van Meurs murmured, “Tomorrow I’ll be better.” But he showed no sign of improving. On the contrary. His cheeks had become sunken, and he was barely breathing through his open mouth.
Alberto took paper and pencil and began to draw the sick man: to see him more clearly, to try to grasp and hold the sight before his eyes, to understand it, to make something permanent of the experience of the moment. He drew the sunken cheeks, the open mouth, and the fleshy nose which even as he watched seemed bizarrely to be growing longer and longer. Then it suddenly occurred to him that van Meurs was going to die. All alone in that remote hotel, with rain pouring on the rocky mountaintops outside, Alberto was seized by blind fear.
Toward the end of the afternoon, the doctor returned and examined the sick man again. Taking Alberto aside, he said, “It’s finished. The heart’s failing. Tonight he’ll be dead.” There was nothing to be done.
Alberto waited by the bedside of the dying man. Nightfall came. Hours passed. Peter van Meurs died.
In that instant, everything changed for Alberto Giacometti forever. He said so, and never ceased saying so. The subsequent testimony of his lifetime showed that it was the truth. Till then he had had no idea, no inkling of what death was. He had never seen it. He had thought of life as possessing a force, a persistence, a permanence of its own, and of death as a fateful occurrence which might somehow enhance the solemnity, and even the value, of life.
Now he had seen death. It had been present for an instant before his eyes with a power which reduced life to nothingness. He had witnessed the transition from being to non-being. Where there had formerly been a man, now there remained only refuse. What had once seemed valuable and solemn was now visibly absurd and trivial. He had seen that life is frail, uncertain, transitory.
In that instant, everything seemed as vulnerable as van Meurs. Everything was threatened in the essence of its being. From the most infinitesimal speck of matter to the great galaxies and the whole universe itself, everything was precarious, perishable. Human survival above all appeared haphazard and preposterous.
“When I saw how that could happen, at the very instant when I saw how that person died, everything was threatened. For me it was like an abominable trap. In a few hours van Meurs had become an object, nothing. Then death became possible at every moment for me, for everyone. It was like a warning. So much had come about by chance: the meeting, the train, the advertisement. As if everything had been prepared to make me witness this wretched end. My whole life certainly shifted in one stroke on that day. Everything became fragile for me.”
Alberto did not rest well that night. He did not dare go to sleep for fear he might never wake again. He was also afraid of the dark, as if the extinction of light were the extinction of life, as if the loss of sight were the loss of everything. All night, he kept the light burning. He shook himself repeatedly to try to stay awake. Now and again he drowsed. Then suddenly it seemed to him in his half-sleep that his mouth was hanging open like the mouth of the dying man, and he started awake in terror. Struggling against drowsiness, he kept awake till dawn.
His first impulse was to run away, to leave Madonna di Campiglio as fast as he could. He wanted to escape from the scene of terror, the sense of fate, to forget what had happened, to return to the security and innocence of his former life. But it was too late. If he did not fully understand what had happened, he understood, at least, that nothing would ever again be as it had been. His whole life had, indeed, shifted.
It seemed there might be something suspicious about the circumstances
of the Dutchman’s death. A strange inflammation had been found on his chest. Alberto was placed under police guard until the exact cause of death could be determined. To be sure, the authorities may merely have suspected that van Meurs had died of some seriously contagious malady and wished, if so, to make sure that his young traveling companion should have no opportunity to spread it. Perhaps they entertained other suspicions. For Alberto, in any case, after the sleeplessness and terror of the preceding night, to wait in the custody of a policeman surely added to the shock of his experience. Detention by the police always smacks of crime and imputes guilt.
Examination disclosed that van Meurs had died, as the doctor predicted, of heart failure. Having spent a day in police custody, Alberto was free to go. His foresight in having stolen a thousand francs from his father seems uncanny, but that was probably an element of chance which he preferred to disregard. Instead of returning directly to Maloja, he decided—“in spite of everything,” he said—to go on to Venice, the destination planned from the start.
During this second Venetian sojourn, the young artist was not excited by the same exclusive and fanatic love which had so absorbed him sixteen months before. Instead of running from church to church to worship Tintoretto, he ran after prostitutes, spending his father’s money on them and in the cafes. Always dutiful, however, he sent home a postcard the day after his arrival. It was a photograph of one of the most celebrated sculptures extant, the equestrian statue of that great Renaissance man of action, Bartolomeo Colleoni, by Verrocchio. Assuring his loved ones that Venice seemed more agreeable than ever, an enchantment, where one heard whistling and singing all day long, Alberto added that the bad memories were fading away. It was not so.
One evening, as if to his surprise, he found himself running through the narrow alleyways of the city, along obscure canals, across out-of-the-way squares, clutching in one hand a piece of bread that he wanted to dispose of. “I went through all of Venice,” he wrote many years later, “looking for remote and lonely neighborhoods, and there, after several unsuccessful attempts on the darkest little bridges and along the most somber canals, trembling
nervously, I threw the bread into the stinking water at the dead end of a canal enclosed by dark walls, and I rushed away in a panic, hardly aware of what I was doing.”
But he could not throw away what had happened. Bread could have filled the canals of Venice to overflowing in vain. No ritual act could grant the deliverance he sought. It would have to spring from his solitary understanding.
When the money he had taken from his father was all spent, Alberto returned to Maloja. One month later, he celebrated his twentieth birthday.