That afternoon was cloudy and cool. Isabel happened to be in Paris, staying at a hotel on the Right Bank. She came to Alberto’s studio to pose. While she remained motionless, he walked back and forth, observing her. He said, “Look how well one can walk with both legs. Isn’t it wonderful? Perfect equilibrium.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, turning abruptly, marveling at the ability. However, his sense of inner equilibrium was neither confident nor marvelous. Isabel was there before him, yielding to the artist’s gaze; but to the man she remained remote and intimidating. He still did not know where he stood with her. Their relationship had gone on for almost three years, and nothing had come of it. He was in love with her, but they were not lovers. To be sure, this was largely his own fault, as he could not bring himself to make overt gestures or commitments.
That evening Alberto and Isabel went to dinner, and afterward to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where they ran into Balthus, his wife, and a few other friends. At midnight, Isabel decided to return to her hotel. Alberto accompanied her. They went on foot. As they walked, Alberto felt that the inconclusiveness of relations had become so demoralizing that he would have to break with her once and for all. Trying to explain his feelings, he said, “I’ve absolutely lost my footing.”
To walk from Saint-Germain-des-Prés to the rue Saint-Roch, where Isabel’s hotel was located, cannot have taken more than fifteen or twenty minutes. That length of time was evidently too short to accommodate the consummation for which Alberto wished. When he left Isabel at the door of her hotel, he was unable to make
the advances which might have led him upstairs to her room, but he could not bring himself to make a definite break, either. As he turned away in the chilly dark, it must have seemed that his predicament was virtually crippling.
The rue Saint-Roch at its southern end gives into the rue de Rivoli. Turning left under the arcade, Alberto came to the Place des Pyramides. This is a small square, opening toward the Tuileries Gardens. It was created by the greatest man of action in French history, Napoleon, and named to commemorate his recent victory in Egypt. In its center, on a high pedestal, stands the life-size equestrian statue of another unhesitant molder of the French destiny and spirit, Joan of Arc. Of gilded bronze, it is the work of a plodding nineteenth-century sculptor named Emmanuel Fremiet, now forgotten. The virgin-warrior visionary-martyr is seated astride her war horse, clad in armor, holding aloft a banner. Despite its academic execution, the group conveys an unusual sense of forward motion. Round the base of the pedestal is an oval sidewalk barely six feet wide. It was to this spot, charged with such a variety of associations, that Alberto came in the middle of that October night. He stood on the narrow expanse of sidewalk directly in front of the statue.
Suddenly an automobile came speeding along the rue de Rivoli, swerved toward him, careened onto the narrow width of sidewalk, and grazed him. He fell. The car hurtled onward. There was a shattering crash. Alberto lay on the pavement. He felt calm, peaceful, looking at the scene—the car had gone in under the arcade and smashed through a shop window—and his right foot, which had a peculiar shape, and his shoe lying at a distance. He didn’t know what had happened. He felt no pain. Still, he realized that something was wrong with his foot.
People came running. A police van arrived, siren blaring. Alberto retrieved his shoe. Seizing his strangely shaped foot, he forced it into its normal position. It began to hurt. The driver of the car, extricated from the wreck, turned out to be a woman, an American. Alberto thought she seemed half-crazy. In fact, she was drunk. He wanted to go home, but the police insisted that he and
the woman must both be taken to the emergency room of the Bichat Hospital to see whether either had sustained serious injury. They were escorted to the van.
It drove very fast through the night streets. The police had some difficulty finding the hospital. The ride lasted longer than it need have, long enough for Alberto to have a vivid but strange impression of the woman whose careening vehicle had injured him. She asked him for a cigarette. The request can scarcely have seemed improper, especially to Alberto, who smoked incessantly and was never without cigarettes. But he was taken aback by it, did not comply, and concluded that the woman must be a prostitute. At the same time he felt strongly attracted to her, as if he were falling in love. It was a bizarre moment, fraught with imponderable feelings and meanings.
When they arrived at the hospital, the woman, who was named Nelson and came from Chicago, was found to be uninjured, though drunk, and required no medical attention. Alberto, however, seemed to have sustained an injury which might be serious. His foot was swollen. Only X-rays could show whether this was due to a sprain or a break. The foot was tightly bandaged and the patient put to bed in a ward on the second floor. He could not sleep. Toward four or five o’clock in the morning, he began to feel considerable pain. When daylight came, he found that he was one of twenty men in the ward. He was reminded of his appendix operation, and felt strangely pleased to be in the hospital again, though worried about his foot. Wanting to get word to Diego, he persuaded one of the nurses to call Jean-Michel Frank with news of his accident. Later that morning, X-rays were made.
Diego arrived in the early afternoon with an associate of Frank’s named Adolphe Chanaux. The hospital may have pleased Alberto, but his visitors were unimpressed and urged that he should move as soon as possible to a private clinic where he would receive the best care. Frank, who appears to have known in almost every realm who and what was best, made the arrangements. Promptly the next morning, Alberto was transferred from the Bichat Hospital to the Rémy de Gourmont Clinic in a quiet residential street of the
same name near the Buttes Chaumont, an out-of-the-way area close by a charming park in the 19th arrondissement. The man in charge of this establishment was one of Paris’s most eminent surgeons, Dr. Raymond Leibovici.
The metatarsal arch of Alberto’s right foot had been crushed, with breakage at two points, but the displacement was not so important as to require surgery. Dr. Leibovici determined that a plaster cast would be perfectly sufficient to ensure normal healing of the breaks in their proper alignment, and he declared that within ten or twelve weeks the injury would be entirely healed, leaving no aftereffects. The broken bones were set and the cast applied without complication. By the next day Alberto was feeling well, rested, eating with appetite, very pleased with the clinic and the good-looking nurses. There seemed no cause for worry. But Alberto was worried about his mother. Always anxious to protect her from knowledge that might be troubling, he thought first of how to reassure her. But it may have been he, in fact, who needed reassurance. Annetta was far more sensible than her highly imaginative son.
Isabel came to the clinic as soon as she learned of Alberto’s accident and whereabouts. We do not know whether they talked about the topic which had concerned them just before the accident. If they did, it was with a marked change of heart on Alberto’s side. He no longer felt tormented by the inconclusiveness of the relationship. The elusive or menacing aspect of Isabel appears henceforth to have lost its troubling power. The injury to his foot made the difference. Isabel came daily to the clinic. She brought a present, a translation of Moll Flanders, and news of Montparnasse: what Tzara had said to whom, what someone else had said to Tzara, Gruber’s opinion of Balthus’s latest, and plenty of other gossip, all of which they laughed about for hours with newfound delight. So much merriment in a clinic was unusual, and the nurses were impressed by their patient’s ability to accept his misadventure with such happy nonchalance. Alberto went out of his way to make the best of what had happened, and with some insistence declared, “I feel better than before this adventure,” though he failed to say why.
When not laughing with Isabel, reading, or seeing other visitors,
Alberto drew. Diego had brought paper and pencil. What the artist found most interesting to draw while at the clinic was a cart or wagon used for carrying medicines, wheeled from room to room by the nurses. A curious, intriguing vehicle, a kind of chariot, it had two large, fixed wheels at the back and two small, mobile ones in front. When propelled by one of the women in white, it was accompanied by the clanking, tinkling noise of bottles and glasses in their metal racks. A number of drawings of this peculiarly wheeled vehicle were made. None have survived, unfortunately.
When the swelling of Alberto’s right foot had subsided, the first cast was removed and replaced by a heavier one, which would remain for several weeks until the broken bones were knitted. Dr. Leibovici informed his patient that he would be able to return home shortly, repeating that there would be no aftereffects.
Meanwhile, consequences of the experience were not confined to psychological conjecture, aesthetic perception, or good times with Isabel. There were practical considerations. It was all very well to feel that the accident had had beneficial effects. There were costs, too—monetary costs—and these would have to be paid. Alberto was not legally responsible for what had happened. It seemed logical to seek financial compensation. As nothing further had been heard from the woman who had driven the car, he retained a lawyer, a well-known attorney named Gaston Bergery. Investigation disclosed that although the woman from Chicago may not have been, as Alberto supposed, a prostitute, she was not a lady, for she had unceremoniously absconded from the scene of her misdemeanor, leaving Paris the next day. A number of letters were eventually sent to her, claiming damages, but none of them ever brought a reply, much less a remuneration. It turned out that the car had been rented from a local garage, which had allowed its insurance to lapse, soon declared bankruptcy, and went out of business. Gaston Bergery was an efficient lawyer, but there was nothing he could do in the absence of anyone to assume legal responsibility. Despite all efforts, Alberto never received any compensation for his injury. Financial compensation, that is. If the injury could be seen as beneficial, then it would have to be its own reward.
A week after entering the clinic, Alberto was released. On crutches, he returned to the rue Hippolyte-Maindron. Though he cannot have foreseen the future, he was right in thinking that his life had taken a decisive turn, for the manner in which he was to make his way through it had changed forever.