My mother took a pilgrimage to see it along with Legrand and Konrad, and of course she chose to go when it was my time to be with Papa and Steph’s time to be with her. In any case, Legrand decided Ferdinand was a surrealist hero and he made all the other artists go down south to see it.
As I said, Konrad was very taken by this silent man. One of my favorite paintings by new father is of a winged postman crawling toward a chimney of a house that is slipping into a sea populated by mermaids and a pert white whale. It’s one of Konrad’s paintings that look sort of real when you step back from them—in this one, the gate in front of the house is an actual gate that is attached to the picture’s frame, and there is a real buzzer made of rubber near the door of the dream house for the postman to ring.
Unfortunately, Ferdinand suffered an emotional collapse because in order to finish the rock palace, he’d started working through the night. Legrand brought him to a sanatorium in Switzerland, but he missed his rounds.
I don’t know how they got Ferdinand to come to Mexico. He doesn’t seem unhappy. In any case, by the time we left Paris, they had stopped the mail.
WALTER FRITZ
Walter is big and nice and German, with a tall flop of white hair, and he can draw anything in the whole world. Walter was one of the most important artists to get out because he did all our exit papers. Not mine or Mum’s, of course, as we’re American, but you should see Ferdinand’s. His look realer than our real ones!
Walter used to come round the Paris house and draw pictures of the parties that Mum throws. He’d do her with her huge honk of a nose and she wouldn’t even care because he gave her such good eyes and a great figure, which is all she cares about. She keeps the one he did of her in her favorite cloth-of-gold dress and the shiny headpiece in her room.
When we’re at long dinners, Walter will slip me a cartoon to make me laugh. Sometimes he’ll put it in the bread basket and say, “Lara, are you sure you don’t want more bread?” Usually, the drawing is of something funny happening at the table: Legrand red with anger, his open mouth filled with ducks.
There wasn’t any of this fun on the way over. Walter’s worried they’ll come after him, the German customs agents, but mother says the Germans are too industrious to waste ten days on a boat.
BALDOMERO ZAYAS
I realize I’m still in the section of the artists that I’m fond of, but I can see Baldomero from the terrace where I’m writing; he’s painting on the flat roof of his tower so that everyone can see him paint. So I shall write about him now. Baldomero is the most pompous person I have ever known, and given our (eternal?) company, that is really saying something. He goes everywhere with a perfectly turned-up mustache—he actually has someone who does it for him, and his mustache man would be here too except that Walter refused to make a passport for him and Mumma wouldn’t pay.
Also, he wears a cape—a velvet one!—even though he’s sweating. He has the strongest odor, and the oil he uses on his mustache smells of the pine oil that Grandmum used to coat the furniture with every time that we had guests.
He’s absolutely despicable and he only eats shellfish. Normally there’s always a separate plate for him, so I guess he’ll either starve or learn how to get down to the beach himself. Or maybe he’s got all the staff with him in that tower, I don’t know, and I’ll never know, because I’m only too glad not to have to go anywhere near it.
Everyone hates him. I don’t even think that they’re jealous of him; he’s too famous and he does work rather hard. I suppose he thinks he’s outlandish with his odd tastes and his posturing, but when it’s every day like that, it’s just tiresome for the house. I think if there’s one person the Germans should have imprisoned, it is Baldomero. He does these paintings of unmentionables: men’s parts and the women’s, large and growing and covered in pink sand. Real Papa is a great hater of his paintings; he covered them with linens where they were stacked up in the hallway and would sigh each time Mum brought home another canvas. “Just another picture of a man cleaning out his rifle,” he’d say, to make her frown.
I am not supposed to understand, of course, but I’m not blind to the pictures, and even if there weren’t pictures, I have other people’s words.
I’ve heard Hetty gossip that this is why Baldomero always gets a separate place to live, because of the weird touching, but I also think it’s because he smells so much.
In any case, Mum is fond of mentioning how many Baldomeros she has in her collection and how very much they’re worth. I guess he is her hostage, in a certain sense.
C.
Sometimes I want hair like hers, so fluffy and dark, it kind of floats around her face like an evil halo. I love that in the evenings, she paints her lips with red, but the rest of the day she stomps around looking like a peasant. C. writes all day, every day. She takes only two breaks for a quick walk, and she never stops for lunch, although she always stops for cocktails—that’s when she ends her day. Or that’s not true, exactly, because at some point, she’ll ride the horses they have here. I just don’t know when yet. I guess at her place in England, she has horses at the house. I don’t think she sleeps a great deal, and she drinks like all the rest of them, but her voice is always nicely toned and she is levelheaded, with a good sense of humor, which is why Mum is fond of her, despite herself.
Undecided:
CASPAR DIX
Caspar is the photographer from France, the one who got the soup on his nice shirt. I guess Caspar was in trouble too because he took photos of the “degenerates” back home and sometimes in the nude. I’m not sure if it was only Baldomero who brought him or if Mum helped, but someone is lording over him; he has that sludge about him. You know the people who are resentful, even if they get to be in a nice place. Probably he thinks that this work is beneath him, trying to get a portrait of Baldomero with a wild monkey. In any case, I heard him complaining in French to Mum about how he’ll never be able to develop anything because Mexico’s too bright.
KONRAD BECK
He’d be so beautiful if he were happy. Sometimes at the parties when I catch the way he is with C., I hate my mother for the way she has to have the things that everybody likes. They weren’t that awful together, before they were married. There was a time, actually, when Konrad was nearly affectionate with her!
But she had to win, as always. She still buys his art! That’s how much he loathes her: nothing is ever free. When we go out to restaurants, just the three of us, she asks him to pay the bill, and makes the waiter wait while he closes his eyes because he knows exactly what is coming, mother making quite the show of saying, “Oh? You still don’t have any money? I’ll pay.”
Konrad does paintings like Baldomero’s, except they never make you want to laugh and they’re much harder to discern. I’ve been in some of his pictures. We both have. I was painted as an angel. Mum had the head of a horse.
Loathe!:
HETTY COLEMAN!
You know that Hetty cried today about the water? Said if she had to spend a full hour waiting for the water to boil, how in the world was she ever going to have time to write? And that she can’t work without her tea. I’m not convinced that Hetty has ever written a single word of her great novel. But she certainly speaks a lot about the things that are keeping her from writing it.
I will say one nice thing, and that’s that I like her figure. It’s very charming and welcoming, if she weren’t just so awful! What I mean by this is that she has a delightful bosom. Mumma has no chest at all, and C.’s is far too large. Hetty is the kind of woman you would want to be held by, if you could.
ANTOINE LEGRAND
Is the Father of Surrealism, and also a communist, although a bad one because he pushes his ideas on other people and never listens to theirs. He lived with us in Paris while he was publishing his manifesto on surrealism, which he has already changed a hundred times. Legrand makes useless objects and then he calls them art. He hammered a bunch of nails into Mum’s electric iron, the part that�
��s supposed to do the clothes. And although it’s kind of funny, it isn’t as if Legrand doesn’t like nice things too. Also, he ruined Mum’s iron and the maid got shocked.
Like the entire lot of them except for my own mother, Legrand doesn’t have any children and I don’t know if he cares for anyone in the way that makes it difficult to think of anyone else. Mostly, I think he needs my mother because she finds him fascinating, tells everyone he is.
Legrand owns nearly as many Baldomeros as Mumma and is constantly asking her to sell him the one of the elephants on circus legs that he told her to buy.
Stupid stupid Antoine Le-Grandest is everywhere around. He got Mumma into all the artists. She wanted to be a nurse before she met Antoine Legrand!
What I wish for my own paintings:
I would like for my art to be freer than it is now. I always feel like I am coloring inside the most childish lines. And even though the artists compliment my shading, it feels like a trick sometimes, how my artwork is realistic. You just don’t get the kind of feeling from my paintings that you do from Konrad’s. His work is probably the best if you take all the different aspects into consideration, the things he doesn’t boast about. Even with Baldomero, even though it is technically perfect, you don’t get that feeling that I long so badly for. As if something is intensely private, but also clearly seen.
Sometimes I think I am horrible and worthless. But then other times, I will really feel that thing inside, and everything falls back and it is as if I’m in the middle of a giant shell. I have been told that I have talent—Magda used to save my paintings and real Papa loved my colors. But no one says I have a gift.
Sometimes what I really feel is that I am burning up inside to have someone just for me, and that is what I am trying to get onto the canvas. Because that one time I had Elisabeth back when I was in school for just that while, that’s the feeling I had—the same feeling, that this was the right place, the only place that matters.
But Mumma will keep on moving if I can’t make something beautiful. That’s what I want. To make something truly beautiful. To make something that stays with you in that upsetting way.
She is elegant beautiful
She is slender
She is isn’t here
Miércoles
So it turns out that Ferdinand knows how to make coffee, and he even served us eggs. Baldomero wants the staff back because he found a scorpion in his room. There are small brooms by the beds for this purpose and you need to keep on shoes.
C. has already started up her schedule. I see her in the morning and then she locks herself away all day. I have seen her room and it has the most attractive desk that looks right over the ocean. I looked in during one of her walks around the property. She had a giant stone on all her papers so they wouldn’t blow away.
Viernes
The funny thing about the artists is they all look silly naked. Except for new father, who looks quite grand with height, and Mum, I suppose, who really is quite charming in her bathing suit. But C. goes in naked, and it’s an awful lot. There is just so much of her, is what I mean. Legrand is pudgy, like a little bear, and Baldomero is too “furnished” to ever go near water.
The odd thing about my mother, though. She loves life around the pool. What a time we had in California when she bought me that large hat! She loves to have a drink with ice in it and stretch out her long legs, which truly are so lovely. She is probably at her best when she is lounging in this way. The pool water doesn’t bother her, even if it’s deep. We can all go swimming. Not that anyone here really knows how to swim, except for C. of course, who knows everything. But Mum didn’t tell the new ones that they can’t go in the sea. Caspar didn’t know about the banishment and he got his head handed back to him this morning when he came home from Teopa with wet hair. Mum assumes that everybody knows in the way she assumes everybody knows everything she thinks. Poor Grandpapa went down on the Republic, so no one is allowed to swim inside the ocean. Even though she’s constantly boating on it or letting horses near it, her guests cannot swim. The ocean is a place that takes you. That is how it is.
So naturally Caspar is even more upset than before. Plus he can’t find a darkroom. He was setting up one of the maids’ rooms as a darkroom but now Mum says perhaps she’ll bring them back because she thinks it’s disheartening to sort out your own lunch. I don’t think Caspar speaks Spanish so I don’t know where he’d go, and Mum certainly isn’t going to pay for him to leave. The only town is Zapata and it’s really not that close. You couldn’t take a normal automobile there even if you had one; the road is full of holes and cows. There’s just a place to get tortillas and another where they’ll snap a chicken’s neck right there when you buy one, so aside from the funny children and the donkeys for his photographs, what would Caspar do? I guess he would take pictures. But the closest biggest town is Guadalajara and that’s days and days away.
Mum will have to go out soon if she doesn’t get the staff back, because everyone wants news about the art boat and the Führer. There are almost five hundred paintings on the ship, mostly Mum’s collection but some of Legrand’s too, and supplies that Baldomero and some of the other artists need. Mother is in a terrible state because Hetty says the boat could sink, and she keeps bringing it up when there is nothing else to talk about: Do you think that it could sink?
Another thing that no one has considered is how we are to post letters. Even if the staff was back to go in and out of town for us, how could something get from here to Stephan? It could take years with all the chaos, and by that time Stephan will have graduated and we’ll all be living somewhere together, probably stupid France. I’m still going to try, though. I’m still going to write him. He asked me to, you know.
One other thing that’s funny: Mumma had to fill the shipping crates in the big boat with household things from Paris in order to qualify for moving. I don’t know why but you can’t ship only art. So Mum packed up our piano and some carpets and a couple of chandeliers, and then we ran around the house together trying to catch Legrand’s gray cats even though I knew she wasn’t going to send them; Mum doesn’t really like cats but we had a laugh about them traveling across the ocean and how fat they are.
Of course, Baldomero is very eager to be photographed on the beach in his cape while playing the piano, but everyone else agrees that the best place for a grand piano is under the palapa, if they can get the piano up the hill to here. “The Rhineland’s taken, and you talk of a piano,” is what Caspar said to that. I actually think that he is Belgian, and not French.
Altercation
Hetty is worried that C. is putting things into her book that Hetty confessed to her in private. “I’ll burn it if you snitched!”
Now C. goes for her daily walks with Ferdinand’s mailbag, her manuscript rolled inside it. I imagine she sleeps with it underneath her pillow, the birds circling outside.
Altercation
Legrand played one of his stupid games last night. Everyone removed clothing until they felt uncomfortable. Of course, to prove who was the most surrealist, most of them ended up wearing nothing. New father was looking at C. with what Mum calls his “wet eyes.”
“If you rise, the dollar will fall,” she said.
Lunes
I’ve been down to see the horses. You know, we actually did a lot of riding when we were here last, because real Papa’s very good. I like horses, as long as they’re not too big, and don’t have a suspicious air about them, and don’t get those red nostrils. I would give anything to be like C., who can get on one from the ground, and who rides in her navy skirt. She looks so brave with her dark hair and her snug beige jacket, her hair touching her shoulders just so!
Mum calls it a hothouse, but I quite like the stables here, the big sky and all the fronds. There’s a polo field across the way that’s gone yellow from the drought, but I can hear the grooms shouting from my bedroom, “Abierto, abierto!” The horses have to be kept in good physical condition in case the ow
ners visit, so they play on despite it. Hetty, who is an animal lover, says that it’s a death sentence to play in such a heat, and that she is going to speak to the horses’ minders. “In what language?” C. teased her. “Body?” And Hetty turned bright red.
The stables aren’t like proper stables, not like in France or England. They’re not really stables at all, just bright cuts of fabric strung up in the trees, and ropes to mark the horses’ feeding places. At night, when they have the torches going and the stars are out, the shelters look like glowing kites. It’s romantic and gay, and what with the grooms always singing and joking in their Spanish, it’s really something fine.
I must get the courage to go riding alone lest I die of boredom. It wouldn’t be right for me to go with Konrad and C.; it would be like we’re a family, and we’re not. Mother can’t go anymore because of her poor ankles. I worry all the time that they will be coming for me too, but I’ve been doing the strength exercise on the steps just like the doctor told me: you stand on the edge of the step on tiptoe, and raise your body up and down using just the energy in your toes. It’s difficult and painful but it will keep my circulation healthy and my bones won’t deteriorate the way that Mum’s are doing.
Domingo
I find myself thinking a lot about my dear Elisabeth. What else am I to do? Of course, I think a lot about my brother, also, but I know what he is doing, so it isn’t as much fun. As for Elisabeth, I don’t even know what country she’s in; maybe she’s still in Hertfordshire, where it was so nice. Our house there was lovely, even in the damp, and there was almost always a sturdy fire going. Papa walked me to school, you know, and all the buildings were made of the roundest funny stones, and at the end of the day, Lisabeth would walk back with me, and Doris would give us steak and kidney pies, and then we’d go outside and throw sticks for the doggies, and Stephan would flirt with both of us a little, and we’d run up the rocks.
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