My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More) (26 page)

Everything is ready.

But having several times altered the sequence of his paintings, the Master can no longer remember which is the original, particularly since, in the confusion, he has painted over it as well. Finally, he piles up the paintings one on top of the other as though they were a pack of cards, and gets his dog, obviously blindfolded, to pull it out of the pack with his teeth.

*   *   *

But I did not always perform on my own. Often Emilio Tadini came to my aid and took over with his splendid repertoire of old Neapolitan numbers, accompanying himself on the guitar. Then Busnelli, a born acrobat, would execute on the spot, in the middle of the street, his own incredible series of cartwheels. But the greatest fun we had came from the big practical jokes we devised, like the one we set up to celebrate Pablo Picasso and his first visit to Milan. An extraordinary affair!

A group including Morlotti, Peverelli and others had managed to arrange a meeting with the great Master in his atelier in Paris. Picasso greeted them with great cordiality. It was known that the Galleria Manzoni in Milan was about to reopen with an exhibition of many works by the Spanish Master. When invited to come to Milan for the inauguration, Picasso had replied: ‘I might be able to manage, but I can't give any guarantees.'

A few journalists, desperate for a scoop at any cost, got to know about the conversation in Paris, and quite calmly wrote that Picasso's arrival in Milan for the opening could be regarded as a done deal.

Other newspapers picked up the story, which was then broadcast on the radio. We, in our turn, decided to do our bit for the supreme artist: ‘We'll see to it that he really does come. Picasso will be in Milan in flesh and blood.'

The cornerstone of our project was Otello, the janitor at the Brianza, who helped out with casting operations in Marino Marini's studio. Around fifty years old, squat in stature, robust in build, skull embellished with stray wisps of white hair and face identical to that of the leader of the Cubist school. In other words, the spitting image of Picasso.

It was decided. We coaxed the janitor to join our game. By the purest good fortune, Otello had worked for ten years in Marseilles and spoke near-perfect French. Picasso is to arrive on the 11.30 Paris-Milan express. We spread the news through the agencies and gave it directly to the radio and newspapers. We got hold of a white trench coat and made our janitor put it on. We turned up at the Stazione Garibaldi a good hour early and made him, accompanied by Alix Cavaliere, Morlotti and Bobo Picccoli, get on the train for Gallarate. At the station at Rho, they got off and waited for the train from Menton, which was due to stop, as it always does, at that junction of the four lines.

At the Central Station in Milan, platform ten, there was a great crowd: journalists, photographers, newsreel cameramen, students, artists and intellectuals. There was even one red flag.

The train drew in and the crowd surged forward to greet the artist.

‘Do you think he'll be in the first coach or nearer the back?'

The passengers got off.

‘Did you catch sight of Picasso in one of the carriages?'

The train was emptying. No sign of Picasso.

‘There he is!'

Yes, it was him all right. He leaned out of a window, gave a wave then disappeared and got off at the platform opposite. ‘He's an original, eh!'

People climbed aboard to get off on the other side. He'd vanished.

‘He must have slipped into an underground passage.'

The photographers and journalists gave chase. A voice called out. ‘Take it easy, he's not run away. It's just that the sight of a crowd makes him panic. If you want to meet him, come along this evening to the rooms of the
Filodrammatici
theatre company, beside La Scala. There'll certainly be refreshments as well as a more relaxed press conference which promises to be historic.'

The
Filodrammatici
space was a kind of hangar used as a rehearsal room. They were restoring it, so it was crammed with scaffolding and planks under a pseudo art nouveau style cupola, but the iron structures were also ideal for hanging the back-cloths of a stage set. For this purpose, we had enrolled stage-design students and a couple of set designers from the
Piccolo Teatro.
They had procured some unneeded materials from past productions: a couple of papier maché statues, a dragon and rearing horse, all on wheels. The first to turn up that evening were the musicians from Santa Tecla, who took up their position on a raised platform while the lights were still being put in place. Not long after, a group of girls from the
Scuola Lambro Dance
made their appearance, prancing about and trying out the parquet flooring with their footwork.

Finally, people started to arrive. We were busy putting out the seats in a truly chaotic order. The Santa Tecla band struck up a well-known piece –
All God's Children Gotta Shoes.

There were more people than we had expected, including some very well turned-out ladies. Many of them had plainly deserted the first night at the opera. Schwarz, the king of art dealers, was there with his whole court. The audience was not quite seated before the first of the comic turns took place: up above, clinging onto the scaffolding, a painter in a white overall started screaming for help. It was Busnelli doing a bit of clowning: he let himself slide down a wire, then began to sway wildly backwards and forwards. He's falling! No, he's clutching a plank. Some firemen, among whom I made out some young actors from the
Fantasio Piccoli
troupe, clambered up a ladder. They told the audience to stand close to the walls: ‘It's dangerous,' they shout, ‘clear the centre of the hall.' In fact one set of ladders did fall, yet miraculously did not crash to the ground but remained dangling from a rope. The rearing horse on wheels came careering towards the audience, followed by the dragon spinning on itself. The carousel created havoc and some of the ladies uttered shrill screams which tuned in perfectly with the jangle of sounds coming from the orchestra's saxophones and trumpets.

One of the guests, jumping out of the dragon's way, asked in a loud voice: ‘When is Picasso coming?'

‘Relax! He'll be here any moment.'

A siren was heard and a door was flung open: from the far end of the hall, a policeman on his motor-bicycle made his entrance and asked for silence: ‘What is this madhouse? Have we all gone off our heads? Do you have permission for this show? Who is the director, the producer? Can you tell me what you're doing here?'

‘We're waiting for Pablo Picasso.'

‘Pablo's coming here?' whinnied the motorcycle policeman. He let out a scream, revved up his bike, then sped off at top speed, nearly knocking over the dancing girls, who leapt into the arms of the firemen-clowns.

*   *   *

The orchestra was getting more and more frenzied. Five painters and decorators entered and made out that they were there to get on with the work. I was one of these clown-painters. We dragged in an enormous canvas, the kind used to throw over furniture to protect it from dripping paint, and forced the audience to file under it. Two elderly ladies asked loudly: ‘But when is Picasso due?'

‘He's coming, he's coming.'

Meantime, the decorators had taken to throwing buckets at each other, soaking themselves with lashings of paint (of course, it was the usual coloured soap). A large part of the audience now got the joke and joined in: many girls grabbed hold of the canvas covering and started shaking it about. No one paid any heed to the splashes of the painted soap any longer, apart from some ladies who lamented: ‘Oh no! That's enough of this paint. When's Picasso going to arrive?'

‘He's coming, he's coming.'

The orchestra struck up a triumphal march, the trumpets blared out a thunderous entrance tune worthy of a circus, and fireworks went off.

‘Right, Picasso's finally arrived!'

And there he was. Through the smoke and bangs, the profile of Otello, still in his white trench coat, could be made out.

Applause.

‘It really is him!'

Otello was about to speak:
‘Mes amis, je suis ravi d'être ici…'

One of the firemen-clowns was holding on to a large water pipe, which split apart. Disaster! A jet of water of apocalyptic proportions poured down on us. We were all soaked.

Picasso yelled out: Ah no, fuck it!'

Rush for the exits … some oaths, but much laughter. A splendid, very wet lady, who seemed to be emerging from the waves after a shipwreck, appeared contented enough but was heard to make the comment: ‘I'll remember this occasion as long as I live. But was that really Picasso?'

CHAPTER 27

In Paris

Each one of us in the Brera dreamed of making his own journey to Paris, the capital of modern art. Paris was for us what the Holy Land had been for Christians in the Middle Ages. It was the Mecca of every apprentice artist, painter, writer or poet. I, too, dreamed of making that journey, and it was ironic how it happened. It all began with a commission which was, to put it mildly, unusual, not least in the workplace itself: the Monumental Cemetery in Milan. The job was to do a fresco on the inner and outer walls of a grave … yes, a grave, a tomb of imposing aspect. An architect friend had designed and built a chapel with octagonal base, copper dome and red porphyry columns, a kind of mausoleum for the members of a wealthy family from the Brianza … Brustello or Brustelli, I can't quite remember. The patrons were very pleased with their final residence, but they found the inside too bare: it was all white, a bit too sepulchral. ‘I'm for something a bit more cheerful!' the most likely first guest of the mausoleum, the octogenarian pater familias, had insisted.

And so we, the band of the ‘Painting of Cheerful Death with mosaic tesserae', were brought in. In a few weeks, we prepared the sketches for the fresco which was to take in all seven walls (the eighth was the entrance). The tombs themselves were to be under the floor. We took our inspiration from the mosaics of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, with its tracery of stylised vine shoots and labyrinths of geometrical shapes twined round each other. The dome was to be painted in light blue with a scattering of cirri and wispy clouds.

I have to be truthful: it got you down to be living for almost a month among graves. Above all, just as you were beginning to get engrossed in the work, you would hear outside chants and litanies from priests, clerics and nuns processing with that day's newly deceased. Since we were behind with the commission, we had to work late into the evening. When the custodian came along to get us out, it was already night. Walking back through votive lamps by the hundred, rows of praying angels, distraught female figures, male and female saints with outstretched arms induced us, as Italian superstition requires, to cheerfully touch the bobbly, decorative parts of the male reproductive system. Within three weeks, the job was done. Our clients were highly satisfied. ‘Look, what a lovely little space it's turned out to be,' said the family's grande dame, ‘I might get another one built exactly the same instead of the bower in the park, then I could sit there gossipping with my friends as we sip our tea.'

Now I had a fair sum of money, enough for my travel.

Emilio Tadini, who at that stage had not yet started painting but who was writing subtle, intense poetry, decided to come with me.

Travel by train, obviously. When we reached our destination, we scarcely took the time to drop off our bags at the hotel before we were out on the streets in search of the museums. By the end of the week, we were like two punch-drunk boxers: out of one gallery, into another!

*   *   *

In the evening, to draw breath, we went to the theatre, avant-garde comic theatre, such as
La Pomme Rouge
or
L'ane en Chaines,
a cabaret of dangerously
osé
satire. I remember one scene in which six splendid girls appeared and with great elegance began to strip until they were completely naked, or nearly so. They were about to remove their G-strings when – whoops! – six dicks complete with decorative little balls! As the spectators guffawed in somewhat dismayed, indeed disappointed, laughter, the striptease girls peered in astonishment at those little appendages which had so unexpectedly protruded, and squealed in falsetto tones as they fled from the stage.

I swear that neither Emilio nor I ever understood if those penises were fake, and if we were confronted with enchanting transvestites or even with a sextet of carefully selected hermaphrodites!

In the following number, another nude girl appeared, totally intent on removing body hair with wax and tweezers … each time she plucked hair off, she uttered groans and incomprehensible oaths. Then she started squeezing imperceptible blackheads, while at the same time confiding in us, as though we were in her room backstage, about intimate problems to do with her profession as a striptease artist. She complained of a wicked headache and was really annoyed at having to make a living by exciting dirty-minded spectators, especially those who could not even take the trouble to conceal their nasty hand manoeuvres during her number. As she spoke, she was rubbing cream over her belly and buttocks, checking the result in a mirror. She continued to give vent to her irritation over her emotional life: she had a fairly well-to-do lover, but he bored her. Another rub of the cream, this time on her breasts, with a special touch of bright red for her nipples. Then she confided in us about the great love of her life: a right bastard, currently in jail, who exploited her, beat her, then kissed her gently, so that they ended up making love. As she described to us, with the aid of mime, their love-making, she filed the hard skin on her heels.

Finally she drew back a curtain, behind which a toilet seat appeared. She sat down on it and did a pee … she sighed and sobbed. She pulled the chain, and switched off the light. End of sketch.