On the 16th of April 1925 a young woman from Denver, Colorado, arrived in Paris. Her name was Flora Lewis Mayo. Twenty-five years old, she had come to France in the hope of making a new life. Her past had given her good cause to long for a changed future.
Flora’s father owned a large department store in Denver. Prosperous but busy, he had had little time for his daughter. Unhappy, she took refuge in romantic daydreams. She wanted to live for the moment and live every moment to the hilt. At school the headmistress said to her, “You’re the kind of girl at whom the devil looks up from hell and says, ‘I want you down here.’” When she went on to college, young men paid attention to her at dances and garden parties. Famished for affection, she responded with reckless gratitude. People began to talk. Gossip reached Flora’s family, who believed it. She began to fear that her life was ruined before it had fairly begun, and dreamed that she was standing in the street watching a funeral pass by—her own. Her parents decided she should “marry and settle down.” An amenable young man named Mayo was found and after the wedding he got a good position in his father-in-law’s store. His bride despised him.
Having become a victim of convention, Flora presently supposed that she might have nothing further to lose by making fire where formerly, in fact, there had been only smoke. She took a lover. He was a White Russian who had recently escaped from the Bolsheviks by the simple expedient of walking eastward; when his shoes fell apart, he went on without any, crossing Manchuria barefoot. He, too, had suffered from fate. He sympathized with
Flora’s plight. Perhaps the readiness of his sympathy was sustained by the fact that her father was a millionaire. They ran away to New York.
She took a job selling books at Macy’s. She met the colony of Russian refugees, and all the erstwhile noblemen and their ladies said that she had a Russian soul, that she was like a character out of Chekhov. As a matter of fact, she was.
Mayo got a divorce. In the process of securing her freedom, Flora had sacrificed her prospects. Her lover did not propose. She didn’t know what to do with herself. Return to Denver was out of the question. Living alone in New York had become intolerable. For some time she had been studying at the Art Students’ League, as she had a facility for sculpture and enjoyed working at it when the impulse struck her. Paris was much in vogue just then as a place where romantic, artistic Americans could seek fulfillment. Flora advised her father that she wished to go to France. Mr. and Mrs. Lewis came on from Denver, and there was an unpleasant confrontation in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel. Flora’s parents did not relish underwriting what they felt sure would be a sinful life in a sinful city, but they deemed it expedient to keep their daughter away from home. She was allowed to sail with the promise of a monthly allowance of two hundred dollars.
Paris thrilled her. It was spring. In a rapture she walked through the city and took an open carriage into the Bois. Here, it seemed, she could make a new life. Like most of her artistically inclined compatriots, she soon found her way to Montparnasse, where she took a spacious studio in the rue Boissonade and enrolled in Bourdelle’s class at the Grande-Chaumière. The newcomer was welcomed to the academy. Anxious to be found likable and attractive, she responded with impulsive sociability. Too much so, perhaps. For one thing, she had never had an opportunity to form a moderate tolerance of alcohol, and drink made her even more impulsive. For another, her longing to be happy made her particularly vulnerable to the cafe Casanovas of Montparnasse, while her comfortable allowance made her particularly desirable. It wasn’t long before some of the students at the Grande-Chaumière began to say that she was indiscreet, if not disreputable. Flora, of
course, aware that she was again the object of gossip, began to fear that her new life would never come. She started drinking more than she should have and longed more than ever for a strong, understanding man to fulfill her dream of happiness.
Alberto met her when she entered the academy. Perhaps he found her appealing from the first, but for some time they remained acquaintances. This period of casual meetings was long enough to allow him to assume that she was an unconventional girl, not one who might turn out to be “clinging.” The gossip must have made her more attractive also, as he had an instinctive sympathy for those condemned by conventional society. One day when Flora, being sick, had not recently appeared at the Grande-Chaumière, Alberto went to the rue Boissonade to see her. He sat on the foot of her bed and looked at her, so it seemed to her, with such compassion that she held out her arms to him. He fell into them. It was not a lustful embrace. They held each other as if to express a boundless confidence. That was the beginning of their love affair. It was a very happy one—for a time.
While Alberto was finding happiness in life and fulfillment in his work, Diego still had found neither. Young Bruno, on the other hand, was growing up to be a responsible, attractive person and had already decided to become an architect. Ottilia, her education completed, remained at home with her mother. So the second son was the only child whose development caused concern. The dimension of the concern may be gauged in part by the step Annetta took in hope of ending it. She decided to send Diego to his older brother in Paris. Though reluctant to make Alberto assume a responsibility beyond his own activities, she knew his desire to protect the younger brother, and no doubt assumed that if anyone could help, it would be he. He suffered from no lack of purpose. Some of it, she must have hoped, might rub off on the irresolute sibling. Diego was not averse to going to Paris, where he may have foreseen that there would be plenty of opportunities for having a good time and getting into a bit of trouble. Alberto would gladly have welcomed the opportunity to try to help his brother while at the same time reassuring their mother.
Diego arrived on a cold, gray day of February 1925. He did
not find the dreary vista of the Boulevard de Strasbourg very inviting, but he probably cheered up when he reached Montparnasse. He had no thought of becoming an artist, but he found attractive the idea of a carefree, self-indulgent life.
Some time before his brother’s arrival, Alberto had had to move from the studio on the Avenue Denfert-Rochereau to a new one at 37 rue Froidevaux, only six or seven minutes’ walk from the former location and closer to Montparnasse. It occupied the entire second floor of a two-story building, reached by a narrow staircase, and consisted of the large studio room plus a very small kitchen. Measuring twenty-six by seventeen feet, the new studio was appreciably smaller than the other, with a much lower ceiling. As a working space it was less commodious, but it did offer more practical advantages as a lodging. The view, however, was not cheerful, for the two front windows looked directly onto the monument-cluttered expanse of the Montparnasse Cemetery. The brothers’ nearest neighbors were, thus, the dead, and on hot summer nights they could see flickering above the tombs the blue luminescence of combustible gas which arose from decaying corpses.
Diego was introduced to Bourdelle’s studio, but he showed little interest in what went on there. He got a job in the office of a factory in the suburb of Saint-Denis. That didn’t interest him much, either. What interested him was dressing in flashy clothes, hanging around disreputable bars, and visiting the whorehouses. It wasn’t long before he fell in with the sort of devious characters whose company he enjoyed, and who in due time would invite him to take part in their shady activities. He did not hesitate to do so. The nature and extent of these activities was obscure, as befitted their aim. Diego did not have a criminal disposition, but he was a bit irresponsible and had a casual attitude toward applied morality. An important aspect of those dubious doings in the early years is that they demonstrate a basic difference between the two brothers. Though worried about his safety, Alberto would not have been shocked by Diego’s happy-go-lucky involvement in a bit of smuggling or some petty thievery. He was too intelligent not to make a distinction between moral expedience in an industrial society and the highest standards of ethical judgment;
it was with respect to the latter that he attempted, often with excruciating exactitude and self-denial, to determine the proper course of his own behavior. When he failed, as he often did, he blamed himself all the more severely because guilt was a fundamental assumption of his existence. Diego’s behavioral frame of reference, on the other hand, was solely the domain of day-to-day morality, which he was temporarily disposed to disregard for reasons of which he probably had no inkling. It was this instinctive disregard rather than its outward manifestations which would have aroused in Alberto a deep concern, and strong protective need, because he could not help feeling, however unconsciously, that Diego’s unwillingness or inability to come to terms with everyday reality had some relation to himself and to the means by which he was endeavoring to do precisely that. He would thus have tended to associate the realization of his own endeavors with his efforts to help his brother, and even in a practical manner to interrelate the best methods of obtaining those seemingly divergent objectives. This was a mistake. Preoccupied by youthful ambition and blind fraternal devotion, Alberto couldn’t see it. Decades later he did, but by then the time for amendment had passed.
He bought a set of paints and some canvases and encouraged his brother to use them. Diego set to work with a modest show of industry. After a few days, he casually put down his brushes and said, “I’m going out.”
“Where?” Alberto asked.
“To Venice,” replied Diego.
Among the new pals Diego had made in Paris, the closest was a young fellow from Venice named Gustavo Tolotti. The two did a good deal of traveling together, most of it around northern Italy, and they got into quite a few scrapes. Their comings and goings were closely watched by the police. On several occasions they were ordered to leave within twenty-four hours the city or town where they happened to be. In Zurich, where Bruno was studying architecture, they were detained while trying to sell some diamonds of uncertain origin, and the well-behaved young student was alarmed by his brother’s rash conduct.
Once Tolotti and Diego traveled as far as Egypt, on a slow
ship from Marseilles. They must have been a suspicious-looking pair, for the police had them under surveillance from the moment they stepped onto the pier at Alexandria. In Cairo they seemed with disconcerting frequency to encounter well-intentioned strangers who warned them to keep out of trouble. They prudently took the advice. Having visited the brothels and the pyramids and gazed upon the Sphinx, they returned to Alexandria and embarked on the next ship back to Marseilles.
Alberto can hardly have been gratified by the associates and indiscretions of his brother. But he had no promising alternative to offer. One may be sure, however, that not a hint of Diego’s reckless doings ever reached Stampa. Still, Alberto couldn’t help feeling for his brother some of the impulsive admiration which a contemplative youth may feel for a man of action. In later years he often spoke of Diego’s early escapades, and particularly of the expedition to Egypt, with almost envious enthusiasm, as if they had in fact been deeds of daring and imagination. But by that time his need to think so had become nearly a condition of his survival.
If Alberto had every reason to consider Diego’s behavior with indulgence as well as misgiving, Alberto’s friends had none. They knew perfectly well what the younger Giacometti was up to. In the cafe and studio world of Montparnasse, everyone knew everybody else’s business, and the colleagues of the promising young sculptor had no use for his brother. Alberto could not have changed their opinion, and would have been too proud to try. Nor would Diego have wished to ingratiate himself where he felt unwanted. The result of all this was that Alberto had one group of friends, while Diego had another, and the two groups had nothing in common except the presence of a Giacometti in each. The same had been true at Schiers, and this dichotomy may not have seemed surprising at first, when Diego was often away. In any case, there was nothing to be done about it. But it did establish a pattern, one which in time added another singularity to the beautiful but strange relationship of the two brothers.