Down Below
Page 8
It was New Year’s Eve, I remember it very well. It was extremely cold, and we got held up in Avila, where Santa Teresa was born. There was a long train with many trucks full of sheep, and they were all crying from the cold. It was awful, the Spanish can be so terrible with animals. I’ll remember the suffering sheep to my dying day. It was like Hell. We were held up, I don’t know why, for hours, listening to this absolutely hellish lament, and I was alone with Frau Asegurado.
Then we arrived in Madrid, and were staying in a large, rather expensive hotel. It is sort of tricky to talk about this period, because Imperial Chemicals were really up to all kinds of things. The man who ran it reappeared, and he was allowed to take me out to lunch, without Frau Asegurado, and sometimes in the evening too. One night, he and his wife had me to dinner, and they were afraid of me, because I’d just come out of the madhouse. I could see she was hesitating to give me a knife and fork. It was all I could do not to crack up, it was so funny. She was absolutely petrified of me; they both were. Then she didn’t want to see me again. I was much too alarming to have around in the social life of Madrid.
One night it was very windy—this was winter, remember, and it’s very cold in Madrid then—I went with him to a very expensive restaurant, and he said, “Your family have decided to send you to South Africa, to a sanatorium where you’ll be very happy because it’s so lovely there.”
I said, “I’m not sure about that.”
He added, “I have another idea, personal, of course: I could give you a lovely apartment here, and I could see you very very often.” And he grabbed my thigh.
So I was then in front of a huge decision. Either I was shipped to South Africa, or I was going to bed with this appalling man. I quickly went to the lavatory. But I still hadn’t decided when I came out. We were about to leave the restaurant when there was a tremendous gust of wind and the metal sign of the restaurant fell just in front of me, at my feet. It could have killed me, and so I turned around to him, and I said, “No. It’s no.” And that’s all I said. I didn’t have to say any more than that.
“It’s going to be Portugal and then South Africa for you then,” he said.
They got everything ready to send me off, and Frau Asegurado went back to Santander. I was put on the train, with my papers, whatever they were. I’d given them all away but they seemed to turn up again. I was being shipped out. They were ashamed of me.
I was telling myself, “I’m not going to South Africa and another sanatorium!” Yet it didn’t occur to me to get off the train before getting to Lisbon.
I descended in Lisbon, and was met by a committee from Imperial Chemicals—two men who looked like policemen, and a very very hard-faced woman. They said, “You’re very lucky, you’re going to live in a lovely house in Estoril, with Mrs. Whatever-Her-Name.”
I’d learned by then, You don’t fight with such people. You have to think more quickly than they. So I said, “That will be lovely.”
We arrived in a house in Estoril, a few miles from Lisbon. There was barely a half inch of bathwater and a lot of parrots. I spent the night there and I did a bit of hard thinking, and the next day I said, “The weather’s going to be terrible for my hands. I must have some gloves. And I haven’t got a hat.”
I was thinking, Get to Lisbon. It worked. She said, “Of course you must. Nobody goes out without gloves.” So off we went. We reached Lisbon, and I said to myself, “Now or never.” I had to find a café that looked big enough, and then, “Aargh!” I cried, clutching my stomach. “Got to go to the bathroom.” “Yes, immediately,” she said. She conducted me inside. I had judged correctly: it was a café with two doors. I nipped out, got a taxi—I must have had a bit of money for buying the gloves—and I told the driver, in Spanish, “Mexican Embassy.”
I’d met Renato Leduc, again, in Madrid. I’d run into him at a thé dansant. I was allowed to watch the other people dancing, though I wasn’t allowed to dance, of course. I was with my keeper, Frau Asegurado—I knew Renato from Paris. He was a friend of Picasso—I told him what had happened, and I asked, “Where are you going, for God’s sake?” We had to talk in shorthand in French, which she didn’t speak. Renato told me then, Lisbon.
So I landed at the Mexican consulate and there were a bunch of Mexicans I’d never seen. I asked them if Renato was there, and they said, No, they didn’t know when he’d be in. I told them I was going to stay and wait. They protested, “Señorita, but . . .” This and that. So I said, “The police are after me.” Which was more or less true. So they said, “In that case . . .” Wink, wink. “You can wait for Renato.”
The ambassador was wonderful with me later. I must have gone in to see him, and he said, “You’re on Mexican territory. Even the English can’t touch you.” I don’t know when Renato appeared. Eventually, he said, “We’re going to have to get married. I know it’s awful for both of us, as we don’t believe in this sort of thing, but . . .” At that time I was as frightened of my family as of the Germans. I’d found Renato attractive when I first met him, and I still found him very attractive. He had a dark face like an Indian’s and very white hair. No, I felt perfectly sane. I was just feeling that I would do anything not to be sent to Africa, not to fall in with my family’s plans.
Then Max appeared, with Peggy [Guggenheim] and we were always together, all of us. It was a very weird thing, with everybody’s children, and ex-husbands and ex-wives. I felt there was something very wrong in Max’s being with Peggy. I knew he didn’t love Peggy, and I still have this very puritanical streak, that you mustn’t be with anyone you don’t love. But Peggy is very maligned. She was rather a noble person, generous, and she never ever was unpleasant. She offered to pay for my airplane to New York, so I could go with them. But I didn’t want that. I was with Renato, and eventually, we went by boat to New York, where I stayed for almost a year, until we left for Mexico.
That was the story.
My mother came to Mexico when my son Pablo was born in 1946. But we never talked about this time. It’s the sort of thing English people of that generation didn’t discuss. That was one side of my mother’s peculiar and rather complex character.
One would have thought they would have come themselves to Santander. But you know, they didn’t. Nanny was sent. You can imagine how much Spanish Nanny talked. It’s a wonder she ever got there. What is terrible is that one’s anger is stifled. I never really got angry. I felt I didn’t really have time. I was tormented by the idea that I had to paint, and when I was away from Max and first with Renato, I painted immediately.
I never saw my father again.
As told to Marina Warner
July 1987, New York
NOTE ON THE TEXT
First written in English in 1942 in New York (text now lost). Dictated in French to Jeanne Megnen in 1943, then published in VVV, No. 4, February 1944, in a translation from the French by Victor Llona. The original French dictation was published by Editions Fontaine, Paris, 1946. Both the French dictation and the Victor Llona translation were used as the basis for the text here, which was reviewed and revised for factual accuracy by Leonora Carrington in 1987.