“That trip I made in 1921 (the death of van Meurs and all the events surrounding it) was for me like a hole torn in life. Everything was transformed and the trip obsessed me constantly for an entire year. I talked about it tirelessly and often I wanted to write about it; that was always impossible for me.”
The experience would demand other forms of acknowledgment for twenty-five years before Alberto was able to allude to it in writing. Conversation was only one of these.
At the time when Alberto returned from Venice to Maloja, he was sharing with Bruno a bedroom in the family’s summer home. The fourteen-year-old boy was startled and annoyed to find that his older brother had acquired another nocturnal eccentricity while away. Not only did Alberto continue to arrange his socks and shoes with the same obsessive precision as before, but now he refused to sleep without a light burning in the room. Bruno protested, but Alberto would not give in. If a dispute ensued and was referred to Annetta for arbitration, the first son, as usual, had his way. In this case, perhaps, she sensed that as a mother she had cause to be more than usually sympathetic. The light in Alberto’s bedroom remained burning.
It remained burning, wherever the bedroom happened to be, and whatever the circumstances, for the next forty-four years and four months. “It’s childish, of course,” Alberto was the first to acknowledge. “I know perfectly well that one is no more threatened in the dark than in broad daylight.” But the light remained burning. It was symptomatic of anxiety, and where there is anxiety there must be something of which one is afraid. What had happened at
Madonna di Campiglio had happened in reality, not in the fantasy of a child or the dream of a grown man.
The cane which Alberto had carried with such pride in Rome, tapping it constantly around him, “always endangering someone’s life,” as he said, did not seem appropriate in Stampa. Nor did the fashionable clothes of which he had formerly been proud. He gave them up. His period of sartorial self-satisfaction had been brief. Once he had come home, simple, homely attire seemed suitable. He never again showed any interest in fine clothes. In fact, it sometimes appeared that he went out of his way to be dressed shabbily.
A decision had to be taken as to Alberto’s future. It was clear that he was on his way to becoming an artist, but the course of his artistic formation remained uncertain. Everyone, in any event, realized that he could not remain in Stampa. Where was he to go? Rome? Paris? Vienna? What was he to do? Sculpture? Painting?
It must have been at this juncture that Alberto made up his mind to apply himself above all to sculpture. The decision itself had been made many months before in the basement of the Villino Giacometti.
“I began to do sculpture because that was precisely the realm in which I understood least. I couldn’t endure having it elude me completely. I had no choice.”
Giovanni suggested to his son that he should go to Paris and enter an academy where he could receive guidance and instruction from a recognized master. He recommended the class of Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière.
On the 28th of December 1921, Alberto left Stampa and traveled by way of Zurich to Basel, where he would be obliged to obtain the visa for entry into France. He was met at the station by Diego, who by that time had moved on from Chiasso and found employment with a manufacturing company. Alberto was gratified to discover that his nineteen-year-old brother seemed to be applying himself conscientiously to the job, and had become something of a dandy, making a considerable impression on people in Basel. The impression may have been due in part to the fact that he had turned out to be strikingly handsome in the style of matinee idols of the twenties. This was the beginning of a dapper, even flashy,
period in Diego’s life. As it happened, his industry was not devoted solely to the interests of his employers. The habits he had formed and the lessons he had learned while in Chiasso were not allowed to remain dormant in the frontier city of Basel, and so a bit of smuggling still went on. No doubt the proceeds from such operations helped the elegant, good-looking young man about town to impress the solid citizens.
Formalities delayed the delivery of Alberto’s French visa. He looked forward impatiently to Paris. Two nights before his departure, he dreamed that he was already in the train and on his way, that everything was beautiful and the railway cars of fabulous size.
On the evening of January 8, 1922, his dream came true. Traveling alone, Alberto crossed the border from Switzerland into France for the first time. As the night train rolled westward through the Vosges, perhaps its railway cars did not seem so fabulous, after all. But their destination was.