The reunion of mother and son was joyful. They had never before been separated for so long. Being together again came as a relief as well as a confirmation. Alberto was happy to find her looking so young, and Annetta to discover him still the youngster who needed looking after. What a lot they had to talk about! She was no less eager and indefatigable a talker than he. All the news of Stampa and Paris. And more than anything else they naturally delighted in talking to each other about each other.
Annetta was not one to mince words, however, if something displeased her, and she did not like to see her son walking with a cane. She had seen it before, of course, but that had been shortly after the accident. Two years had passed since. Alberto walked with a slight limp, but he could not have been called lame, and had no need of a cane. Still, he clung to the age-old symbol of infirmity. His mother protested. Paying no heed for once, Alberto went right on using his cane. It made for a certain tension between mother and son at the outset of a sojourn which would be long and bring graver problems.
Dr. Francis Berthoud lived with his five-year-old son and his mother-in-law in a spacious apartment at 57 Route de Chene, which was then at the eastern edge of the city, though within walking distance of the center. Geneva in 1942 was not a big city. When Alberto first arrived, he stayed for a time at his brother-in-law’s apartment. He was amazed by the opulence of Switzerland, the abundance of meats and pastries in the stores, the plentiful American cigarettes. A scene from The Thousand and One Nights could not have seemed more fantastic, he said. Yet he also felt that the Swiss were too far removed from the reality of the war
to understand it, and that despite the relative hardship of life in Paris, it had, in fact, been a privilege to be there. His intention, repeatedly reaffirmed, was to return to France as soon as the visit with his mother had lasted long enough to allow for renewed separation.
Meanwhile, he wanted to get on with his work and resume a way of life as similar as possible to the one he had left behind. He couldn’t expect to work in the orderly apartment of his brother-in-law, nor could he presume to live as he pleased under the indulgent but critical eye of his mother. He would have to find a place of his own. The place he found was, of course, exactly what he was looking for.
Of the several cheap hotels in Geneva which rented rooms to women who made a profession of entertaining chance acquaintances, the Hotel de Rive was the smallest and shabbiest, also the cheapest, being farthest from the area where such acquaintances were made. Business cannot have been good, since Alberto had no trouble obtaining accommodation at a monthly rate of sixty francs. Cheerless and comfortless as well as disreputable, the Hotel de Rive was a small, three-storied building at the northwest corner of the rue de la Terrassière and the rue du Parc, thus on the main thoroughfare about halfway between the center of town and the apartment of Dr. Berthoud. On the ground floor was a homely cafe, while on the floors above were crowded a dozen small rooms, plus a few even smaller in the garret. Access to these rooms was conveniently provided by a back doorway. Alberto’s room on the third floor, at the top of the circular stairway, measured ten by thirteen feet. It had a single window facing south above the thoroughfare; its sole furnishings were an iron bed in one corner, an ancient and inoperative porcelain stove, a rough wooden table which served as a washstand, and a couple of chairs. Cheap flowered paper covered the walls; the wooden floor was bare. One toilet and one faucet (supplying cold water only) were located outside in the corridor. No heating facilities existed, with the result that overnight residents in cold weather had to sleep fully dressed, and in the morning the water in pitchers or basins would be frozen.
Such was the dwelling, and working, place Giacometti chose for the duration of his stay in Geneva. With visionary resourcefulness, he had contrived to install himself in an abode even smaller and, if possible, less comfortable than the rue Hippolyte-Maindron. He thought of the accommodation as temporary, for he expected after a few months to return to Paris. Having been allowed to leave France, however, he was unable to obtain permission to return. How hard he tried we don’t knows. But we do know that he was not a man given to evading hardship or material deprivation, of which he would find plenty during three and a half years at the Hotel de Rive.
Geneva had been familiar to Alberto since the age of eighteen, but it was not a place he ever found congenial. It offered few of the amenities of a capital like Paris. The only part of the city that could pass as a substitute for Montparnasse or Saint-Germain-des-Prés was the neighborhood around the Place du Molard. A poor pis aller in time of war, it would have to do.
Giacometti’s arrival in Geneva did not go unnoticed. Among those interested in contemporary art the sculptor was welcomed with respect, as his Surrealist work was not forgotten. One of the most eager to greet him was Albert Skira, the publisher. He had known Alberto in Paris and introduced him now to the painters and writers who met regularly in his office or at one of the nearby cafes. Though the artist’s essential solitude remained entire, Alberto never had trouble making friends. Before long, he found himself at the center of a small group of young artists and intellectuals.
No time was wasted before getting to work. Change of scene had not changed the sculptor’s predicament. His figures kept on shrinking, as if by a will to become the least common denominators of the visible. Sack after sack of plaster was hefted up the circular staircase, but neither the size nor the number of acceptable works increased, while the accumulating residue gradually transformed the little room into a bizarre wilderness. Chunks and crumbs and flakes and dust of plaster settled upon every surface, clogged every crevice, filled every crack, seeped through every seam of the room itself and of everything in it, including the man
whose efforts had brought into being this weird, ancillary spectacle, by which he himself was transformed. His hair, his face, his hands, his clothes were so penetrated with plaster dust that no amount of washing or brushing could eliminate it, and for five hundred yards around the Hotel de Rive the streets bore the ghostly imprints of his footsteps. Alberto became a living image of the interdependence between the artist and his art, and from this period dates the physical resemblance which eventually came to identify the sculptor with his sculptures.
Days were spent at the Hotel de Rive, working. Toward the end of the afternoon, Alberto would go on foot or by streetcar to the Route de Chêne to visit his mother, nephew, and brother-in-law. Before his arrival, Annetta Giacometti took care to spread newspapers across the floor and on the armchair where her son habitually sat, so that the apartment should not be dirtied by traces of what went on at the Hotel de Rive. She may have guessed that the tiny figurines responsible for all that dust were to cause her far more trouble than inconveniences of housekeeping. Concerning the dust, however, as well as the cane, it can be said that if Alberto did not succeed in pleasing his mother all the time, his failure may have signified precisely that the desire to please was too strong.
The artist’s daily visits to the Route de Chêne were happy and animated. He and his mother were too important to each other for estrangements. Alberto’s family ties were a lifelong source of security and pleasure. He grew fond of his nephew, and young Silvio became devoted to his extraordinary uncle. An important aspect of the satisfaction Alberto found in family relationships may have been his freedom to enjoy them largely on his own terms. Unmarried, unencumbered by any obligation, he could come and go as he pleased. After his visits to the Route de Chêne he would head downtown to meet his friends at Skira’s offices or across the square at the Café du Commerce. There they would sit for hours, drinking coffee or an aperitif, talking about the war, arguing about politics, discussing poetry, painting, philosophy.
Between the Place du Molard and the Place Longemalle, a distance of no more than one hundred and fifty yards, there is a street called the rue Neuve du Molard. It was here that local
ladies loitered, waiting to make acquaintance in the propitious dark of the blacked-out city. They also frequented a number of bars in the vicinity: Chez Pierrot, La Mere Casserole, or Le Perroquet, where gentlemen had no trouble engaging them in conversations that might, if understanding ensued, lead to the nearby Hotel Elite. Alberto and most of his friends were enthusiastic habitues of these establishments. The Perroquet was the one he preferred. The walls were black, hung with dozens of paintings of parrots, and the artist was prone to discourse at length on their aesthetic merit.
Man’s inclination to sin was accepted with dour tolerance in Calvinist Geneva, but righteousness called for a modicum of expiation. The ladies lingering in the rue Neuve du Molard, Chez Pierrot, or at the Perroquet were occasionally rounded up by the police, along with some of their gentlemen friends, who might prove to be illegally resident in Switzerland, and carted off to the station, where they were held until their papers could be examined, a formality which invariably lasted till dawn. The officers in charge of these roundups knew by sight, if not by name, almost all of those whose turpitude might, in fact, be commensurate with the performance of duty, so that the ones carted to the station were almost always the same. Alberto was never one of those chosen. It became a feature of these periodic disturbances for the officiating policeman to call out above the clamor, pointing at the dusty sculptor: “Not that one!”
Failure to pass muster for a night’s detention by the police cannot have caused Alberto regret. But there may have seemed in the circumstances a symbolic allusion to ineffectiveness in other things. As always, he continued to experience difficulty in the pursuit which led him to find the Perroquet such a congenial place. This was the time of Giacometti’s life when he had to live most intimately with failure. At every step of his way, failure was with him, not only as a daily principle of work but also as the social and material context of it.
He was forty years old. There had been a time when he sought success, when he wanted to win admiration. He had attained it only to see that it was profitless. Then he had set out to
find new purpose in renewed vision. The years had passed. What had he to show for his pains? A few tiny figurines and a room full of dust. It was not much. Nor had he any assurance that there would ever be more. Yet he was prepared to risk his future on the chance that someday there might be. To him, the risk seemed natural. Those who will not risk much have little worth risking. Meanwhile, he cannot have failed to realize that in Geneva he was conspicuous, that most people saw him as a caricature of the half-mad but amiable and harmless genius, wandering about leaning on his cane, shabby and dusty, with a few minuscule sculptures in his pocket, a figure not only laughable but pathetic because the power of his intellect and the charm of his personality were spent to so little effect.
Even Annetta Giacometti had her doubts. As weeks and months passed, while empty plaster sacks accumulated at the Hotel de Rive (or in the studio at Maloja during the summer), producing more and more detritus but, if possible, less and less sculpture, his mother began to lose heart. She had been proud of the successes in Paris, the exhibitions, articles in the press, praise by fellow artists. Then had come the abrupt turnabout, for which there was so little to show that it seemed worse than nothing. Unable to understand, she criticized. She conceived a violent dislike of the tiny figurines. “You don’t know how much they displease and trouble me,” she said. “Your father never did things like that!”
It was a bad time, made worse by a precarious material situation. Alberto had no money and no way of earning any. He could hardly expect to find buyers for the few figurines which escaped destruction. He tried making decorative objects, vases and the like, but without Diego as a helper or Jean-Michel Frank as a salesman, his endeavors brought little cash. He appealed for loans to several wealthy acquaintances, who refused, thereby aggravating latent feelings of resentment against the artist’s homeland. Albert Skira helped with an occasional advance, but he was in no position to provide continuing support.
The only person to whom Alberto could logically turn was the one most logical. But her logic was not his. And yet he had
no choice. His needs were far from extravagant. He had to have plaster, rent, and the minimum of pocket money for a meal at the Brasserie Centrale and a few drinks at the Commerce or Perroquet. In short, he needed enough to live as he pleased. That was the problem. The way he pleased to live did not please his mother. It would, needless to say, have pleased her less if she had known more. Alberto’s Geneva friends were never permitted to meet Annetta, which they thought a little odd, because he was forever talking about her, extolling her character, and calling her “my pal.” But his pal was kept carefully out of sight. They also thought it odd that such an exemplary parent should do so little to help her son, whose resources were obviously of the scantiest.
Annetta Giacometti held tight to her purse strings, a habit formed in years when her diligent husbandry had helped keep the family solvent, allowing Giovanni to go about his work and the children to pursue their bents. Alberto had certainly pursued his. It had been rewarding for a time. Now things were different. His needs could be seen as self-indulgence, his work as proof of impotence. That is how Annetta appears to have seen things, which surely increased her son’s frustration. He was not indifferent to the facts of his situation, and his anxiety about it may have made him more than ordinarily eager to receive money from his mother. At the same time, he was the first to assert that his work was, indeed, a self-indulgence, because its sole purpose was to see how it would turn out—not to his satisfaction, of course, since he knew that in the absolute there could be none, but simply for the sake of the vision itself—to see, in short, how he saw. As for impotence, he affirmed it in more ways than one, though surely not to his mother. The crux of the problem was precisely that to his mother he had never, could never, and would never show himself entirely as he was, with the result that although she was the central figure in his life she was strangely remote from it, near and far at once, a beloved but intimidating figure which her indomitable character and forceful personality had perfectly prepared her to be.
It was an unhappy predicament. While Annetta could not allow her son to starve, she was reluctant to make it possible for him to continue such a wayward life. Besides, he had gone on
disregarding her express wishes in the matter of the cane. She did not stop giving him money, but gave only a little at a time, compelling him constantly to appeal for more, to acknowledge his dependence while at the same time asserting his will, but showing his gratitude and even, perhaps, in the labyrinthine tangle of contradictory emotions, making a kind of tacit admission that she was right because he could not do without her. The creative compulsion, however, was beyond the reach of reason; it dictated the conditions of his life, however troubling, and it was for him the justification of everything his mother deemed unreasonable. She did not agree. “You don’t have to tell me what art is!” she exclaimed.
Alberto fell prey to a sort of desperation, which expressed itself at least once in a manner so rare and singular as to be almost unbelievable. He provoked an open quarrel with his mother, demanding a large amount of money to be paid over all at once. She balked. He insisted, asserting that the demand was legitimate, that he was asking for no more than his birthright, since he had never received any inheritance, to which he was rightfully entitled, after the death of his father. The basis of the argument was too shaky to be bearable, which made things worse for them both, because they could hardly face each other in the open knowledge of what it meant. Annetta refused her son’s demand.
The tiny figurines which stood, as it were, between Alberto and his mother during the years in Geneva may seem emblematic of what existed between them always, a bond so powerful that disregard or disapproval could never break it, a barrier so strong that compassion could not overcome it. The power of the bond and the strength of the barrier contributed to the dedication of the artist and the devotion of the son. In the end, dedication and devotion turned out to have been the same thing. Alberto and Annetta may never have been so united as when they felt separated by the difficulty to which it seemed that each had brought an irreconcilable difference. The symbolic figurine stands as a kind of monument, commemorating the need to surpass human limitations by achieving what is impossible.