Down Below

by Leonora Carrington

  Outraged, I shouted at him: “You who possess so many apples! With such morality, no wonder the world is ‘jammed’ and miserable. But I have just broken your wicked spell in the tower, and now the world is liberated from its anguish.”

  The grandson of the Marquis da Silva went by at a run, and God the Father, reassured by the presence of such a “well-brought-up” child, smiled at him kindly.

  I returned to Egypt, rather disgusted with the Holy Family. . . . From the bathroom window, I gazed for a long time at a sad, green landscape: flat fields stretching down to the sea; near the coast, a cemetery: the Unknown and Death.

  I learned from Asegurado that Covadonga (Don Mariano’s daughter) was buried in that cemetery. Frau Asegurado often spoke to me of Covadonga, surrounding her death with mystery; I believed that Don Luis had killed her through torture, to make her more perfect, as he had tortured me. I believed that Don Luis was seeking in me another sister who, stronger than Covadonga, would withstand her ordeals and reach The Summit with him. For this I was relying not on my strength but on my skill. I believed I had been mesmerised in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche and drawn to Santander by some mysterious power.

  One day Don Luis tried to get me to sketch a map of that journey. As I was unable to do so, he took the pencil from my hand and began to draw the itinerary. In the centre he put down an M representing Madrid. At that moment I had my first flash of lucidity: the M was “Me” and not the whole world; this affair concerned myself alone, and if I could make the journey all over again, I would, by the time I reached Madrid, get hold of myself, would re-establish contact between my mind and myself.

  Soon after my visit to Down Below, Don Luis decided to install me in Amachu; this was a pavilion outside the walls of the garden; there I would be alone with my servants. Why did I find myself “jammed” once more and in great anguish? Why did I imagine that I had been deemed unworthy to live in the Garden of Eden? After all, I was leaving behind me the sufferings endured in Egypt, in Covadonga.

  The name of my new house—Amachu—and the fact it was a wooden building, made me think of China —halfway between Covadonga (Egypt) and Down Below (Jerusalem). I still had with me Piadosa, José, and Frau Asegurado; and Don Luis had told me that he did not believe it would be necessary to continue giving me Cardiazol. He had added: “This house will be your own, your home and you will be responsible for it.” I, however, gave the word home a broader, cosmic meaning, which was represented by the number six.

  Despite the confidence Don Luis had placed in me, despite the commonplace appearance of the small bungalow, which aroused no mistrust in my mind, I felt, upon entering the inner corridor that separated the various rooms, as though I was caught in a labyrinth, like a rat. The doors in the corridor looked as if they had been cut out of the wall and were part of it, and became almost invisible when closed. So here I was, confronted with a Chinese puzzle which I had to solve with the knowledge secured in Egypt.

  One day Don Luis announced to me the visit of Nanny, who had been with me till my twentieth year. She arrived in great exaltation, after a terrible fifteen-day journey in the narrow cabin of a warship. She had not expected to find me in an insane asylum and thought she was going to see the healthy girl she had left four years ago. I received her coldly and mistrustfully: she was sent to me by my hostile parents, and I knew that her intention was to take me back to them. Upset by my attitude, Nanny became nervous. Frau Asegurado considered her arrival a regrettable event, though not dangerous for me. Nanny was mortified and horribly jealous because another woman had taken her place by my side. For me their jealousy became a cosmic problem, an almost impossible task that I had to solve, at Home, Amachu. When I left with Frau Asegurado for the big garden, I would give Nanny some task to keep her indoors. This happened every morning, at eleven, according to ritual.

  I would get ready to enter the gate of Paradise; from the threshold, we overlooked the entire estate and the valley; my joy was so complete that I would be compelled to halt for a few minutes and turn enraptured eyes toward a very green spot of grass where a small boy armed with a stick was watching over some cows. Then we would follow the wide alley leading to Down Below; we walked through a bower, in which I sat down; all around me was the Garden of Eden, to my left Don Luis’s garage, where I always hoped to see him arrive. I would remain there, watchful and quiet, and allow Frau Asegurado to enter Down Below. She would come out a few moments later, laden with a tray on which stood a glass of milk, biscuits, honey, and a cigarette of blond tobacco: the food of the gods, which I savoured in ecstasy. I was beginning to get fatter. Then I would go into my dear Down Below; I would go straight across the hall to the library: this was a rectangular room furnished with a writing desk and a small bookcase. The room opened into two other rooms: one day when the door to the left stood ajar, I recognized the room from the vision I had had in Covadonga, a room with a vaulted ceiling, painted to represent the sky. Immediately I called it my room, the room of the Moon. The other room, the one to the right, was the room of the Sun, my Androgyne. I would sit at the desk after choosing a book by Unamuno in which he had written: “God be thanked: we have pen and ink.” At that moment, Angelica, the Gypsy (in fact a nurse) who lived in Down Below, would bring me a pen and some paper. I would make out the horoscope of the day and entrust it to her, to give to Don Luis.

  The library gave out onto a large terrace, where I would rest a moment. There, sitting above the Moraleses’ dining room, I absorbed the atmosphere of Down Below. Then I would go down the stairs to the left, which led to the back part of the garden; on a mound stood a rather dilapidated bower; Frau Asegurado would bring me a chair and I would sit there, gazing at the valley over the iron gate, then set to work on the three figures which continually obsessed me: 6, 8, and 20; after lengthy calculations, I would get the figure 1600, which called to mind Queen Elizabeth. . . . I thought at the time that I was her reincarnation. I would then come down from my bower and go around the mound, behind which a sort of cave had been dug for garden tools. Dead leaves were heaped there, and in my mind the heap took the shape of a tomb, which became for me Covadonga’s and my own.

  One day, on the path along the back of the garden, I met Don Luis and I asked him if he wanted to go to China with me. He answered: “I do; but you mustn’t say so to anybody, you talk too much. Learn to keep inside you the things that occupy your mind.” (This was the signal for my first inhibition, my entry into hermetism.) Then he gave me a stick, which he called my Stick of Philosophy. It became a companion on all my walks. . . . Then I went into the garden, under the apple trees, and returned to Amachu in time for lunch.

  In the evening, I would call on the Prince of Monaco, in Villa Pilar; we would listen together to Radio Andorra. I sat there happily as the Prince typed endless diplomatic letters at a furious rate. Whenever he stopped, we would exchange ideas with the utmost seriousness. His room was plastered with maps; the one that interested me particularly was a map of France and northern Spain on which my journey was traced in red pencil. I believed that the Prince was teaching me about my own journey.

  Don Luis would call on me at midnight; his presence in my room at that hour inspired me with a desire for him. He talked to me gently and I believed he was coming to examine my delusions. Without waiting for his questions, I would say: “I have no delusions, I am playing. When will you stop playing with me?” He would stare at me in amazement at finding me lucid, then laugh. And I would say: “Who am I?” while thinking: Who am I to you?

  He would leave without answering, completely disarmed.

  In a moment of lucidity, I realised how necessary it was to extract from myself all the personages who were inhabiting me. But the determination to expel Elizabeth was the only need that remained with me: she was the character I disliked most of all. I conceived the idea of constructing her image in my room: a small, three-legged round table represented her legs; for a body, I placed a chair on top of the table and on that chair a decanter which
represented her head. Into the decanter I stuck dahlias and yellow and red roses—Elizabeth’s consciousness; then I dressed her up in my own clothes and placed on the floor, by the legs of the table, Frau Asegurado’s shoes.

  I had reconstructed this image so that it might leave me. I had to get rid of everything my illness had brought me, to cast out these personalities, and thus begin my liberation.

  Happy with my success, I was on my way through the garden to Down Below when I noticed an enormous tuft of reeds which had grown in an old shell hole; spontaneously, I called the place Africa and set to gathering branches and leaves with which I completely covered myself. I returned to Amachu in a state of great sexual excitement. It seemed only natural to me to find Don Luis in my room, busy examining Elizabeth’s dummy. I sat down next to him and he caressed my face and introduced his fingers gently into my mouth: This gave me real pleasure. Then he took my notebook and wrote down on one page: “O Corte, o cortijo” (You belong at court, or in a farmyard). Whereupon I took to wanting him terribly, and to writing him every day.

  One day at lunch I was upset by a nauseous smell in my room—they were spreading manure on the neighbouring fields. I could not understand why God the Father should tolerate that my meals be poisoned. Indignant, I rose from the table and, followed by Frau Asegurado, proceeded to find Don Mariano in his own dining room. Don Luis turned to my nurse and addressed her in German; irritated because I could not understand what he was saying, jealous because he was talking to her and not to me, I sat down between the two of them. I observed very clearheadedly that I was being run through by an electric current that went from the one to the other. To make sure I stood up, drew away from them, and felt immediately that the current had left my body. I knew that this current was the fluid of the fear they both had of me.

  Don Mariano gave me his permission to move, and this is how I was admitted into Down Below. Frightened by the idea of living in the big garden, where she was afraid of meeting madmen, Nanny tried to dissuade me from installing myself Down Below. It was, she said, a dangerous and evil place. I insisted so much that she ended by yielding.

  I arrived at last in the room with the vaulted ceiling, which I had seen in a vision at the beginning of my illness. The room was just as I had seen it, only smaller, and the painted ceiling was in fact flat, not vaulted; I entered there without emotion, almost with a sense of disappointment. I was examining the windows attentively, for I wanted to make sure that no microphones had been attached to them, when a large dragonfly entered and sat on my hand, its feet clinging to my skin. Its wings were trembling, it clung to me as if it would never again detach itself. I spent several minutes looking at it in this way, holding my hand motionless, until the dragonfly fell dead onto the tiles of the floor. . . .

  That evening at dinnertime when I entered the circular dining room at Down Below, I was told that I could select my table; I realized that I had to find my place in the circle, and sat at 45 degrees to the left of the door, which seemed to me the place where I could best intercept all interesting currents in the room.

  A few days later Don Luis proposed to me my first outing: we drove out in an automobile to pay some calls. We went to see a pregnant young lady to whom he had to give an injection (I believed it would be an injection of Cardiazol, and that I was the child she was bearing). She gave me a package of cigarettes and they left me alone in a dark drawing room. I rushed to the bookcase and found a Bible, which I opened at random. I happened on the passage in which the Holy Ghost descends upon the disciples and bestows upon them the power to speak all languages. I was the Holy Ghost and believed I was in limbo, my room—where the Moon and the Sun met at dawn and at twilight. When Don Luis came in, accompanied by the young lady, she spoke to me in German and I understood her, though I do not know the language. She gave me the Bible, which I pressed under my arm, eager to return home and hold my Stick of Philosophy, which Don Luis had not allowed me to take along.

  When I entered the library of my pavilion, I found Nanny armed with my Stick. She needed it, she said, to defend herself against the demented inmates. How could she expect to put to such use my dear companion, my surest means of Knowledge? At that moment I hated her.

  My second ride was in a horse carriage. Don Luis took me to the undertaker’s, in Santander, where he rented me a carriage pulled by a small black horse. A very small boy sat down next to me, to keep me company. I drove the horse very fast and finally attained what felt like a dizzy speed, while the excited child cried out: “Faster! Faster!” In a wide avenue, we caught up with a company of soldiers who were singing: “Ay, ay, ay, no to mires en el rio” (Don’t look at yourself in the river). I returned, convinced that I had accomplished an act of the utmost importance.

  One morning, Don Luis advised me to start reading. He gave Frau Asegurado a list of books and told her to take me to the bookstore. I was quiet and very happy before such a quantity of books, among which I expected to be allowed to choose freely. But I felt my hand reach in the opposite direction to the one I intended, and pick up books I had absolutely no desire to read. At that moment I noticed Frau Asegurado standing behind me; she felt to me like a vacuum cleaner. Every time I got a book off the shelves, I would consult the list, hoping that its title would not be there: but there I would find it every time. I begged her to leave my brain alone, demanded the freedom of my own will. I returned home in a rage. Frau Asegurado remained passive, unmoved, as if withdrawn from the scene. Don Luis showed up in my room immediately upon my return. I yelled at him: “I don’t accept your force, the power of any of you, against me; I want my freedom to act and think; I hate and reject your hypnotic forces.” He took me by the arm and led me to a pavilion which was not in use.

  “I am the master here.”

  “I am not the public property of your house. I, too, have private thoughts and a private value. I don’t belong to you.”

  And suddenly, I burst into tears. He took me by the arm, then, and I realised with horror that he was going to give me my third dose of Cardiazol. I promised him all that it was within my power to give if only he would desist from giving me the injection. On the way, I picked up a small eucalyptus fruit, in the belief that it would help me. He took me, vanquished, to the radiography pavilion. I resigned myself to take the place of his sister, to undergo the last ordeal, the one that would give him back Covadonga in my own person.

  The room was papered with painted, silvery pine trees on a red background; a prey to the most complete panic, I saw pine trees in the snow. In the midst of convulsions, I relived my first injection, and felt again the atrocious experience of the original dose of Cardiazol: absence of motion, fixation, horrible reality. I did not want to close my eyes, thinking that the sacrificial moment had come and determined to oppose it with all my strength.

  I was then taken to Down Below in a cataleptic state. Tirelessly, Nanny repeated, “What have they done to you . . . what have they done to you?” and wept by my bed, thinking that I was dead. But, far from being touched by her sorrow, I was exasperated by it, for I felt at that moment that my parents were still trying to pull me back through her. I drove her away; but from the next room, where one withdrew, I still suffered this suction of their will. I knew when she went away. At last I entered painlessly that state of prostration that usually follows this kind of treatment. Don Mariano was at my bedside when I woke up. He advised me not to return to my parents. At that moment, I regained my lucidity. My cosmic objects, my night creams and nail buff, had lost their significance.

  It was at this time that Etchevarría appeared. I was sitting in the garden when another inmate, Don Gonzalo, advanced toward me and gave me a book from a man named Etchevarría, who sent apologies for being unable to bring it in person, as he was ill in bed that day. Two days later, I met in the library a small man with a grey face, wrapped in warm clothes. This was Etchevarría. He spoke amiably about my country. He sat down in the dining room at a table next to mine, then gazed at me for a long t
ime, kindly, and said at last: “You will not remain here long.”

  A feeling of joy slowly grew within me: I was talking with a reasonable man who inspired no fear, who took me seriously and sympathetically. I spoke to him of my power over animals. He answered without a trace of irony: “Power over animals is a natural thing in a person as sensitive as you are.” And I learned that Cardiazol was a simple injection and not an effect of hypnotism; that Don Luis was not a sorcerer but a scoundrel; that Covadonga and Amachu and Down Below were not Egypt, China, and Jerusalem, but pavilions for the insane and that I should get out as quickly as possible. He “demystified” the mystery which had enveloped me and which they all seemed to take pleasure in deepening around me.

  After long conversations about desire, Etchevarría advised me to have sex with José. I ceased then being interested in Don Luis and began desiring José. I would meet him in various secluded spots of the garden and, spied on by Frau Asegurado and Mercedes, we would exchange quick and uncomfortable kisses. José was very fond of me. He plied me with cigarettes. . . .

  He cried when I went away.

  POSTSCRIPT

  I had a cousin in Santander, in the other hospital, the big, ordinary hospital. He was a doctor, Guillermo Gil, and I think he was related to the Bamfords, my grandmother’s family in Cheshire. He was half English and half Spanish. It was a coincidence. He arrived, and they didn’t want anyone to see me. But he was a doctor and he insisted, and so I had an interview with him, and he said, “I’d like you to have tea with me. They can’t refuse.” Which they couldn’t. And we chatted, and at the end, he said, “I’m going to write to the ambassador in Madrid, and get you out.” Which he did. They sent me to Madrid with Frau Asegurado, my keeper.