. . .
He has probably killed the others. Killed them with my mother. It wouldn’t be impossible, especially because he believes that nothing is.
Martes
Another thing. The other night at dinner, Legrand announced that he had urges for a painting. Something classical, a nude. “Of Flossy,” he joked, and we were eating shrimp. Legrand chews his with their skin on, by the way.
Day?
I’ve been trying to pretend about it, but there’s no use in it, especially as we’ll soon go. Jack did get the drawing that I left him in his saddlebag. I asked him by the cave when we went to look for Ferdinand. C. had gone inside with the turtle man who had come to help, and I’m afraid of cl
We were waiting for the turtle man, whom Jack had asked to help us, and C. was looking for a better place to tie the horses because even at the cliffs along Teopa, there isn’t any shade.
Jack didn’t say anything even though we were alone. And I felt sick for that. When people don’t say anything, it’s because they have something to say. To be truthful, I thought C. would come back and we’d still be in silence. And then he said the truth.
“I found your painting, Lara.”
“Oh?” I said, as if it had gone there by itself.
“I’m going to tell you something,” he said, and normally someone would pick at a burr or something, but he looked me in the eyes.
“You are good at drawing, but you might not be an artist. You know with Leonora . . . you would have to be the best.”
My throat was nearly flaming from my effort not to cry. What kind of person speaks like this, with no softness round their meaning? If C. hadn’t been too close for it, I think I would have screamed. Let me tell you what it is like to respond to something hideous when there is nothing you can say.
“Just let it be a pleasure. Let it be a special thing, make everything you want. But don’t make it for her.”
“I put it there for you,” I said too quickly, and of course I turned the color of the fruit names I have learned. “I thought you were a gentleman.”
“I’ve never been accused of such a thing,” is what he answered. “Lara, you have promise. You have the soul for it, the heart for it. But you’re painting for your mother.”
“I most certainly am not.”
“Listen.” He had his elbows on his knees now. “Have you ever tried to write?”
“I think I’ll just help Charlotte, actually,” I said, standing up.
And then he touched my hand. Or took it, I don’t know, it was a suddenness, like finding something in your bed when your arm goes out in sleep. Like something you might dream, is what I’m saying. Like something wonderful that has happened that you need to keep with you while you’re awake. And it was that line again, him on one end. And me on the other. And then it was done and my hand was alone again and C. was coming back.
“Lara,” he said, and my name was many openings. My eyes completely filled. “You have to leave.”
“Well aren’t you just a help,” I snapped, unable to look back at him. His insistence that we leave when I wanted to hear the opposite had me furious and who knew where was Ferdinand and the sun was very strong.
“Mother won’t, you know,” I continued, ashamed because he didn’t say anything and my voice had been too loud. “Not without her boat.”
“That boat,” Jack said, “is not going to arrive.”
“And where would you have us go then?” I asked, turning around.
“You could go to California.”
Well, isn’t it stupid to wish things? Isn’t the worst thing to have hope? Isn’t the worst thing to be someone who cries in front of people when she is already fifteen long years old?
“But don’t you find me interesting?” I blurted, like a fool.
“Maybe I care enough about you to not ruin your life.”
And what, diary, what should I make of that? I have let him matter. I can go on to California and pretend I matter back but you understand, of course, that none of it will matter because I have become fond of the one artist that my mother doesn’t control.
Precious little flower feather. Stupid bird in space. I was made fragile and most people like to see if I can break.
Can you love someone by making them feel that they are hated? Of course you can. My mother’s sister pushed all three of her children off a rooftop but she won’t tell you that. Is it even true? Papa would yell and yell that on the awful evenings: “Is it even true, L’nora, is it even true.” It’s the one thing Mum won’t talk of. So you know it’s true.
I wish I were a mermaid. I wish that I could swim. I wish that I could scream until my pores were tentacles and I pulled each and every person down with me until life was soft again. And then I would come up on the shore and I’d be human. And I’d know where to go.
Note from the author
While imagining a cover for this book, well-intentioned purists noted that there aren’t—that there were never—tigers in Mexico. Costalegre is a book where fact and fiction tussle. There are a lot of tigers in this Mexico.
The beginning of the Second World War is the historical backdrop for this novel, which is populated by fictional characters inspired by their real-life artist counterparts, some of whom would actually have been alive and working in 1937, others of whom would have not.
I researched maniacally for this project, until some of the experiences I read about became part of my own makeup. It is a testament to the personality of the American art collector Peggy Guggenheim and the artists she supported that so many of them felt moved to document their time creating—and promoting—art under her protection, which is how I spent a fascinating year in the remembrances of writers such as Leonora Carrington, Djuna Barnes, André Breton, and Peggy Guggenheim, herself, searching for information about what life was like for Peggy’s late daughter, Pegeen Vail Guggenheim.
The names of almost all the artists in this book have been changed: Ferdinand Cheval’s has not. His rock palace really does exist in Hauterives, France, and the accompanying plaque that is translated into English on page 20 does, too: En créant ce rocher, j’ai voulu prouver ce que peut la volonté.
The real-life Peggy Guggenheim tolerated her various husbands’ and lovers’ infatuations with other artists in their social circle. So it was that she woke up in the middle of a cocktail party one evening in 1932 (having fallen asleep because the conversation bored her), to find her favored paramour, the notoriously unproductive British writer John Ferrar Holms, fiddling lasciviously with Djuna Barnes’s recently washed hair. In her memoir, Out of This Century, Peggy proudly recounts how she admonished John for his flirtation: “If you rise, the dollar will fall,” a priceless quip that is reproduced on page 36.
The high-profile female artists of this period worked hard to have a profile: they were bawdy, provocative, and wildly inventive in both their art and words. But fighting for their financial and creative independence did not always mean that they were equally generous in the art of sisterhood. Another retort that reflects the slippery stakes of friendship between female artists at this time appears on page 51, when C. applauds Hetty for being “such marvelous company when you’re ill!” This is based on something Peggy Guggenheim recalls Djuna Barnes saying to the aspiring writer and compulsive diary keeper Emily Coleman, whom Hetty’s character is based on: “You would be marvelous company slightly stunned.’’
The book Mexican Plants for American Gardens by the American geographer and botanist Cecile Hulse Matschat was a 1935 doorstop of a book I found in a Canadian bookshop in the Mexican sea town of Melaque. All of the sections cited in this peculiar book appear as they existed in the 1935 publication except for the chapter on the sandbox tree on page 101, which I wrote. I was desperate for something “extra” for the novel that I was researching while in Mexico, something from the time period that could help my privileged but undereducated fifteen-year-old narrator understand the environment and landscape she suddenly fo
und herself trapped in, and thanks to serendipity and the intrepidness of Cecile Matschat, I found it. Or rather, it found me.
On page 138, the character Konrad completes a dream brief which is based on a mural that the German artist Max Ernst completed in the home of the French poet Paul Éluard in the 1920s, taking its title from one of Éluard’s poems, “At the first clear word.” “The first youth is closed” is a rough translation of a French line from this particular poem that much inspired Ernst: la première jeunesse close.
On page 147, the character called “Papa” is remembered quoting, or rather mis quoting, his favorite poet, William Blake. The correct quote is from Blake’s 1803 poem “The Mental Traveller”:
Who nails him down upon a rock,
Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.
Peggy Guggenheim has experienced—perhaps even enjoyed—a contested reputation in the many writings about her life, including her own memoir, which she revised and republished numerous times. Whether or not sponsoring such an exodus served her own self-interest, Peggy deserves respect for helping numerous artists and intellectuals to flee Europe before the Second World War. In actuality, Peggy shepherded most of them to New York City, where they enjoyed her patronage and friendship. In this book, the artists are brought instead to a resort in the jungle of western Mexico.
Costalegre means the coast of joy, and it’s the actual name of the Pacific coastline that runs along the Mexican state of Jalisco. The resort that the artists are staying in is based on a place named Costa Careyes that still exists today. It’s a strange, inspiring location that isn’t easy to access for both geographical and financial reasons, and I will always be grateful to Daniele Ruais for opening her home to my family so that I could write this book.
Likewise, Jimmy Giebeler showed me a side of Careyes that I hadn’t known before, and encouraged me—perhaps without even realizing he was doing so—to make my characters artists. Felix Martinez, Eddy Martinez, Jomy Rosa, Alison Patricelli, Luis and Marcy Mejia gave me the confidence and stamina to see this project through by distracting me with sport, and Hilda Rueda has been nothing but good humored throughout my efforts to learn Spanish. To my friends in Careyes—Marco, Monica, and Melanie especially—I’ve loved every tope of this wild ride.
My beloved daughter, with her kindness and her humor, inspires me daily not to screw this motherhood thing up, and Diego, I would not have been able to sink into this book as deeply as I needed to if it weren’t for your support, your tejón-chasing skills, your love.
I must thank Rebecca Gradinger, whose mind was full of inverted question marks when I first shared this project with her. You said that you would follow me, and you did, and not every agent would do that, and that is why you are a cherished friend.
Masie Cochran, I knew I’d found my heart’s editor when you told me that you had a lot of questions, but you didn’t want any of them answered. I am a privileged writer indeed to be on this book’s ship with you.
Also at Tin House: Anne Horowitz and Allison Dubinsky, thank you for your time, patience, and artistry as I defended Lara’s syntax. Magic makers Nanci, Molly, Sabrina, Yashwina, Tony, Elizabeth, Alana, Jeremy, Miriam, and Morgan: thank you for believing in this book. And thank you, Miranda Sofroniou and Diane Chonette, for the perfect cover.
At Fletcher & Co.: Veronica, you’re an herbal tranquilizer for my neurotic soul. Melissa, thank you in a variety of languages. Dearest Sophie Troff, merci.
Dasha, a true artist and my imagination’s translator: your talent is as infinite as your generosity.
Pegeen: Your story wasn’t told much. I hope you forgive me for giving it a try.
“When young Lara finds herself in Costalegre, living with her mother and a gaggle of twentieth-century surrealist artists, wonder and mayhem ensue. With this slim novel, Courtney Maum has gifted her readers with a breathtaking meditation on youth, art, and the ever-mysterious bonds between mothers and daughters. Costalegre is a spectacular high-wire act that dazzles and devastates.”
—LAURA VAN DEN BERG, author of The Third Hotel
“Mesmerizing and unsettling, Costalegre is a wonder, and Courtney Maum shows herself once again to be a writer of many gifts. This is a book for anyone who’s ever loved, and not felt sufficiently loved in return; and for anyone who’s had to try to grow up; for, that is, everyone.”
—R.O. KWON, author of The Incendiaries
“Here is war and here is art. And here is a child trying to become an adult in the midst of a Mexican exile. Maum’s stirred a brew of careless bohemians, Führers and failed art students, negligent mothers and missing museums. Costalegre is as heady, delirious, and heartbreaking as a young girl just beginning to fall in love with the world.”
—SAMANTHA HUNT, author of The Dark Dark
“Courtney Maum’s Costalegre is a marvel—so lively, intimate, and strange, you don’t read so much as dream the voice and visions of Lara, our fifteen-year-old narrator, writing from a house full of surrealists in Mexico as they wait out WWII. This is a special book, by a writer who proves on these pages that she can do anything.”
—JULIE BUNTIN, author of Marlena
“This story of a daughter searching for connection all around her has a sharp cutting edge, a world which changes its mood in an instant; bleak as the dregs of a wine-soaked dinner, then bullish as a house of hapless surrealists attempting to boil an egg. Memorable and meaningful, Costalegre remains with me as a reminder of love in the agony of teenage years and art in the terror of war.”
—AMELIA GRAY, author of Isadora
“In this story where our fifteen-year-old narrator is more mature and intuitive than the adult artists who surround her, bursts of brilliance hit me—chapter after chapter—like waves crashing against the shores of this allegorical Mexican coast. With its captivating mix of true-to-life characters and WWII history, Costalegre is surreal, intelligent, and full of integrity.”
—MARK EISNER, author of Neruda:
The Biography of a Poet
PHOTO: COLIN LANE
COURTNEY MAUM is the author of the novels Touch and I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, the chapbook Notes from Mexico, and the forthcoming handbook Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book. Her writing and essays have been widely published in such outlets as BuzzFeed; the New York Times; O, the Oprah Magazine; and Modern Loss. She is the founder of the learning collaborative The Cabins, and she also works as a product and cosmetic shade namer from her home in Connecticut.
courtneymaum.com
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2019 Courtney Maum
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Maum, Courtney, 1978- author.
Title: Costalegre / Courtney Maum.
Description: First U.S. edition. | Portland, Oregon : Tin House Books, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019005789 | ISBN 9781947793361 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9781947793378 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3613.A87396 C67 2019 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005789
Interior design: Diane Chonette
Interior illustrations: © Dasha Ziborova
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