Yours ever,
(and give my love to Papa)
Lara
Miércoles
The dream briefs continue. I tell the (almost) truth because I’m proud. I know that far away from them, Jack’s still making silent shapes. They think they are the artists, but I know what others don’t.
I tell Legrand that I dreamt of a studio filled with wood and limestone. That I could feel the charred chisel in my hand. The gold and tilting porpoise shape, up, up, and away. I draw a golden creature darting through the sea, all smoothness and possibility, as light as the comb jellies Jack showed me, the predators behind. But the porpoise is never caught because he can thrust himself away from them, high and long above the water, it is as if he flies.
Legrand was very moved to hear that my dolphin had no fins. “You are getting closer to the truth of this,” he said.
Viernes
Baldomero and Caspar six days gone now. Mum has sent Jose Luis to Zapata over and over, and he’ll leave for Vallarta soon to put a word in with the embassy. Legrand laughed about this, saying the Spanish rebels weren’t going to want a surrealist back during a civil war.
Ferdinand has started piling rocks outside his bedroom curtain. An idea I hadn’t thought of.
Domingo
C. is discontented. She has finished a first draft of her manuscript and she wants to go to Puerto Vallarta to have it typed. She wants to go herself. She doesn’t trust someone else taking all her pages. But she will need a few days in Vallarta and Jose Luis can’t escort her, Mum needs him here at Costalegre, so the situation can’t be resolved. She wants her novel on heavier paper, she says. It keeps blowing around.
She’s started up her walks again, so I go when she’ll have me, and I try to talk of other things but she isn’t a foolish person and so we talk of Jack. She knows now where I was that night; everyone agrees that it was gallant and unlike him. People asked what I saw inside his home and I said I couldn’t say. That there was a closed room. That I saw only sketchbooks.
I asked C. about the sketchbooks. I said I saw more than I did so she would talk as if I knew things, and then it was just a matter of stretching my mind to imagine what else I might have seen.
“You probably saw the old ones,” she said, her voice tired. It’s true that with Legrand insisting so much on it, we haven’t been getting enough sleep. “The ones he did at war. You wouldn’t have believed it, though, what he started out with. This was before everything, before I even knew him, his work was realistic. You know, almost pastoral, as the Führer wanted.”
She kicked a rock out of the way with her soft boot.
“They recruited people. To paint the Central Powers. Germany and Austria-Hungary, all of their fine boys. But they get there, all these artists, and they’re told they can’t paint bodies. That they must paint ‘courage.’ That they must paint ‘will.’
“So Heinrich started doing trees,” she said. “Trees like burning bodies. When he came back from the front, they couldn’t share the paintings. The German government. They were just too ghastly. So that’s one of the things that got him into trouble.”
Now I wanted to go through them. Go through all the paintings. My heart sprung to imagine that I had seen only the slightest bit of everything Jack had done. Even if it’s true that they have seen things, Mum’s loonies are so peevish, it’s hard to believe that they have been through something bad. With Jack, though, it is different. In this, he’s like Konrad. If there’s pain, he doesn’t talk.
“He wasn’t the only one discharged,” C. said, kicking at a twig. “Most of the paintings were confiscated, his and the other war artists’. They were probably burned. Maybe that’s what broke him, in the end.”
“Broke him, how?”
She looked at me as if my naiveté were taking up all the space between us.
“He doesn’t believe in it anymore. The art making.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said, without thinking first.
C. closed her lips together.
“He cares for you, how funny,” she said, plucking a closed bud from a tree.
Martes
Normally I just do scenes inside of houses. But I’m trying the outside. The lemons that the small goat cast down from the tree, and his blood on the white ground. The Montezuma cypress on the polo field that the horses gallop round. The outside of Jack’s cabin, with a sunset that’s half storm. I am thinking of the things inside his sketchbook that I didn’t see.
I am also painting because Jack hasn’t come. I imagine he is working with his sculptures, divining the weather from his horses’ tails. I’m sure if I actually tried to go back there, everything would be ruined. He heard me ask if I could come but he didn’t say I could. There is just so much in silence. If I don’t go back I can make Jack Klinger be anything at all.
Dear Lara,
I have found Magda for you. You’ll start lessons in the morning.
Dear Lara,
I have reached your father. He is safe but he’s regretful. Konrad has to go to the museum and your brother’s coming back.
Lara, love,
I would put bright flowers, also, around a mane, a horse.
Lara,
I know your mother means well because she told me that it’s true.
Lara,
I have seen the art boat. It will be there, soon.
Lara,
How embarrassing to lack even the imagination for the proper words! I will tell you what you’ll always be and it’s inconsequential!
POTOS FLAVUS
According to another book of Hetty’s, kinkajous have long prehensile tails that they can climb up if the other end of the tail is stabilized. They sleep all day and wake just as the parents are trying to put their children to night.
Jueves
Not exactly a confirmation, but money was given to a dock porter in Puerto Vallarta who said that a man fitting Caspar’s description had boarded the SS Mexican for a one-way trip to California. It was mother who gave the money, and Jose Luis who went to the dock. No passengers with capes or queer mustaches or monkeys on their arms, is the information he came back with. Konrad said that Baldomero probably went disguised as Caspar, and mother protested that she’d rarely seen Baldo as inspired as he’d been here, to which new father answered, “Your impressions are your own.”
Baldomero loves subterfuge. Baldomero loves disguises.
“But he left all his canvases behind,” said mother, “even his favorite comb.”
No one wants to think about what this means, but I think of it at night.
A bird flew in my window yesterday and died, even though there isn’t glass.
Calaway Jeune
(Calaway, très jeune!)
Season Opener, Christmas ? : Children’s Art!!
Principal: Little Lucian’s drawings, showing such great promise and the Sigmund link will make them flock!
Secondary: That handsome South African’s daughter—Tessa? Anna? The poet fellow. Wife?
Tertiary: ? Surely Legrand knows a lovely child.
Necessary: Lara’s. The ones of the women milking are actually quite good.
Calaway—New York?
Sábado
I think that mother should be more judicious with her notes!
Lucian Freud was my classmate when I was still allowed to be in classes and I will have you know he took a cat’s eye out with a pebble once!
And Anna Campbell is only interesting to mother because of her nice accent and her handsome father who is a COMMUNIST, I’ll add, and in another life—in another great one—my paintings will be quite necessary indeed.
Day?
I am just intelligent enough to realize that Jack hasn’t asked after me, and if there is one thing I’ve learned from watching mother it is that when you’re not wanted, you’re not asked.
I dream of him sculpting, regardless, and it shouldn’t be exciting (I’ve seen sculptures), but it is. He doesn’t care about u
s and it makes mother infuriated, but I am going to allow myself to believe he cares for me. What else is there to do.
In any case, it feels enough to paint for him. I’m sure that’s what he’d want. He definitely seems like a person who values artists working, instead of artists putting papaya mush on their nipples and throwing the maid’s bell in the pool. In any case, even if I wanted to be foolhardy (which I do not), Hetty has established a system wherein you have to ask her for permission each time you leave the house.
So even if I tried to go to Jack’s again (which I will not), Hetty would insist on going with me, and if she did, she’d see his work, and even though he acted as if he wouldn’t care if the others knew that he was sculpting, I think that he would.
When you are making something beautiful, you must be left alone. This is a posture mother thinks is rubbish but Konrad and C. don’t. Do you know, my diary, that Mum wanted school also? She has told me on the wine nights how terribly she wanted friends. I also know that mother gives Hetty 850 francs a month. She tells me things and she forgets that she has told me, and when I remind her of the worst things, she says I’m a “terrible delight.”
I have known chaos, but I’ve never known this chaos. Maria refuses to return to Occidente because she found a “Mariposa de la Muerte” in the kitchen, and mother lost her patience and said if Maria was so frightened of moths, perhaps Maria should clean better, and without Baldomero, there wasn’t anyone to understand the Spanish she talked back. C. speaks a little, but she’s in a trance about her book.
Regardless though, I have that light feeling, even with the mess. I feel calm and little and a little bit delighted, like very soon someone is going to show me what I need to do. In the meantime, I paint and I draw and I think I am improving. I think about the sculptures I saw in Jack’s glowing room, the leaning creature fleeing its own wood. The malted bits of stone discarded and the place where “Heinrich” slept.
Even though nothing ever gets here in the way it should, I think that maybe one day, when I am far away and schooling somewhere pleasant, that I can write Jack letters or maybe send him drawings—he needn’t ever respond. Wouldn’t that be something, Jack under his roof here confronting my improvement, while I’m wherever I have gone.
Plus, I have a secret, and sometimes (depending on the secret) secrets make me calm. I also saw the moth. My diary: he was beautiful, with a face on the back of his big body, brown and yellow like a tiny monkey head. I feel he chose Maria and he also chose my room, and I like to imagine that he has gone to Jack now, and said, “It is time to save them,” and that it will only be a matter of some evenings until there is an actual real car, or maybe a boat and then a car, and then I will have some of my things back because it must be clear now even to my mother that you can’t have a museum in a country where mountain lions howl.
Sábado
Walter is missing, also. And also, Ferdinand. The curtain blows into his bedroom and there isn’t anyone inside.
Hetty is in hysterics. Walter left all of his forging equipment and he can’t get back without it. Mother says of course he can, he already got everyone here and how much equipment do you need, really, to do cartoons? I don’t know how she thinks it all a joke. This is something that Papa was always yelling at her, you think it all so funny. But then he would be delighted by the way she saw things; it depended on his mood. He said the back of language broke on mother, that she was impossible to talk to. He said that she was moved by everything and truly moved at nothing. At dinner last night, Konrad told Hetty that my mother wasn’t intelligent enough to experience fear, that it was like cohabitating with a bovine, and mother said he’d lost his sense of humor in the internment camp.
“What to think of it?” she answered, when Konrad had left the table, too tired to fight. She said that she could be paranoid, or she could be disinterested, and that neither attitude was bringing her any news about her boat, so if she chose to be amused by the fact that her guests found life in the jungle preferable to her company, so be it.
“But Leonora,” Hetty said, “what if they come for us? What if they come for Lara?”
“Even savages can be reasonable,” she answered. “There’s little that can’t be negotiated over good food and clean wine.”
“But the wine here is terrible,” muttered Legrand.
“My dear ungrateful comrade.” Mother smiled. “Perhaps you will go next.”
My Chère diary:
Nothing to do so I will tell you something else. The day I returned to Occidente with Jack, they did send out a search party. It of course became a real one, a real party like they do. I painted and I painted, making pouts up in my tower, but nicely, because I was sure that Jack would come to check on me and would see the things that I was painting and he would understand.
He did not come. Hours passed. I felt like screaming for it—was I truly so uninteresting that I didn’t make anyone curious?? I could have let the night come but I don’t think I would have survived it. So I took one of my new drawings, not the ones that Mum finds so naive. This was a scene under the ocean: jelly combs and anemones playing a type of house. It was really drawn quite nicely and a little strangely, and “strange” usually means best. Anyway, I took it and I made my way outside without anybody seeing me and I put it in the satchel that was attached to Jack’s fine horse. My heart was beating mightily and everything was lit up by the lanterns, and the sound of the artists laughing was both distant and quite happy; there was a calm again, you know.
On my way back upstairs I steeled my courage and went by the palapa to bid everyone good night, which is not something that I do usually, which my mother pointed out. Jack did look at me when I said it—you know, in that way that feels like something has been thrown directly toward you, as if you’re on the other end of a straight line. Back in my room, I waited. For some kind of . . . knotting. I fell asleep, eventually. At one point, there was someone. In the doorway. But it was someone else.
Sábado, still Sábado
Once upon a time there was a giant who put down a cement copa for the other gods to drink from, and they did drink, until there was no water in the sea.
Once upon a time there was a heartsick woman who drowned her children in a river to scorn the man who had left her, and this didn’t make him return to her, and all her children were dead.
On one of C.’s horse rides, she saw a rock formation that proves that Ferdinand is still here. But I’ve seen those rocks before. I saw them the other times I had to go to Teopa by myself, each of them pushed carefully into a certain plot of sand.
I don’t think he’s hiding.
The stories for the children are the saddest ones of all.
Lunes
We went back for Jack that day, the day after C. had gone out looking for Ferdinand because she’d seen the rocks. I finally told her that I’d already seen them well before he disappeared, and since she had put a lot of emotion into the proof of those formations, she decided that Ferdinand must be really gone or drowned, or in one of the caves here, and that Jack knows the tides well, so we could rely on him to pick the right times to go into the caves.
I am going to tell you something. C. asked me to come. I really think that she is sensitive, and that there is a part of her that understands. She didn’t even make it a question, she said, “We’ll go for Jack,” and diary, I felt very much the lady and even rode my horse well, so pleased was I at the thought of where we were going and to have somewhere to go.
Jack’s house was clean and very tidy; you forget how tidy something can be when you live with people who aren’t. The branches that had fallen had been stacked and burned. I can understand the tidy symmetry of a life lived all alone.
It isn’t that I want to live with him. I want to write that. Because I know that I’m not helpful. Not in the important ways, and I’ll never be strong. It’s just that there is something about Jack that makes me feel that I can be still for a while. That he will tell me something and i
t will be true, that he will continue to live in his small house day after sunny day, taking care of the animals and hacking into stone and wood and listening to people. I don’t think I have ever been contemplated. Or maybe I mean considered. Not even by my brother, who prefers a jaunty rope tow to writing me a letter. I’m just Leonora’s daughter, the one that has to go places, the more attractive child. The idea that someone thinks of me in private, thinks of how I could be happiest, fills me with both a name-day kind of excitement and a giant grayness. Because they’re never as good as you hope they’ll be, birthdays.
Lunes, later
We had tea and C. went through Jack’s notebooks. They talked in the way of people who know things about each other and I won’t write of that.
Jack did not let C. talk as long as she expected to, however. Do you see. Do you see he noticed that I had been quiet for some time.
Maybe one day my horrid mother will find my diary and tell Legrand and everyone that I am amoureuse. The surrealists think that passion is important, that nightmares are important. But they don’t value simplicity, which is how I think of love. This patient, tense, and quiet thing that is leaving someone alone.
Did I mention that the woman’s name is La Llorona and that she takes other people’s children to replace the ones she ended, but then she drowns them, too?
Isn’t it interesting. How much the loonies value children. But then it’s only mother who has any children at all.
Miércoles—I think
Delighted by the missing, Legrand has picked up work on his Surrealist Manifesto again:
Possibility is a torture that tortures not the dreaming man. You go where the mind says to. Fire cares not for delay! Singe what you don’t love, love what you will take. Everything is available, all paths at the same time. Your essence is inevitable, as are its desires.
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