by Zoe Valdes
The first police appeared right away, and then two truckloads of “spontaneous crowds”: members of the Rapid Response Brigades. Yendi slipped away, moving farther and farther from us until she surreptitiously joined the crowd of repressors.
We hadn’t marched even fifty yards.
“Someone tipped them off before we got here, that’s got to be it, maybe someone who’s taking part in the protest right now,” Lena whispered.
“It was her,” Apple Pie pointed at Yendi.
We didn’t stop. For a few short minutes, we, the police, and the “spontaneous crowds” watched each other like tigers on the prowl.
One of the police approached us, and the march ended.
“You can’t do this,” he ordered.
These words had hardly left his lips when the “spontaneous crowd” jumped out of the trucks armed with clubs, brass knuckles, and pipe wrenches and ran at us. We started running away at top speed, scattering like a bucket of marbles.
They began hurling huge rocks, some of which hit us. I saw them beating people all around me, and I got beaten as well. Yendi vanished into a military jeep.
I managed to slip loose from one of the paramilitaries, who had grabbed me by the back of my blouse; I ran and ran until I was about to faint. I ducked into the courtyard of some apartment building. A curtain opened and a hand pulled me inside. The woman hid me under a bed. My pursuers entered the courtyard, but they didn’t dare to search the building.
Apple Pie, Lena, and I regrouped two hours later in the basement of my house. Apple Pie had gotten a good drubbing on her back. Lena had a bloody lip and nose. My lower back was throbbing, and my shoulder was dislocated. Lena set it right with a tug; I saw stars and a flash of pain.
Lefty Sotera joined us in the apartment about three hours after we arrived. He was missing patches of hair, they had knocked one of his teeth loose, and there was a swollen black welt on his lip, topped with a dot of clotted blood. His clothes were in tatters, and his knees had huge abrasions that left bloody halos on his torn pants.
“They grabbed me around Calle San Lázaro and laid into me good with their sticks and clubs, bashed me all they wanted. Luckily, a bus full of people stopped at the same spot where they were working me over, some of the passengers got off and defended me, just imagine, people who know me from my bus route, so I managed to escape. The police never showed up, and in the middle of the brawl one of the attackers turned his back for a second and I took off running, I ducked inside a building I know by heart, like the palm of my hand. I went up to the rooftop and from there I started jumping roof to roof. Now you can call me the Wild Cat, the Malaysian Tiger.” He laughed. “They couldn’t lay a hand on me!”
We listened with rapt attention, lost in a haze, to his description of this episode. I went to the medicine cabinet to get what little we had: iodine, Mercurochrome, gauze, cotton; at least it was something. Luckily, one of my neighbors, who worked at a hospital, kept me supplied with some of what she pilfered. We treated each other’s wounds as best as we could.
I was afraid my friends would go outside, I asked them to stay and keep me company. And so we kept anything terrible from happening to them.
Night fell.
I boiled some potatoes and fried some eggs: dinner.
Another neighbor loaned me a few spoonfuls of his coffee ration. We had hot coffee with sugar: heaven!
“Next time we can’t make the mistake of inviting so many people we don’t know,” Apple Pie commented.
Lefty Sotera flew into a rage. “Then we shouldn’t call it a ‘protest against the dictatorship’! Then it’ll be like a harmless little stroll in the park! You’ve got to be fucking joking!”
“I agree with her,” Lena said. “Don’t you see, we can’t even count on the foreign press to protect us?”
“Did you invite the foreign press?” I asked while I lit a joint. “We can’t afford the luxury of letting assholes like Yendi be in on it.”
“Of course we invited the Yankee press agencies, but they didn’t bother to show up. Journalists live in fear of being expelled from Cuba. That Yendi’s an informer; who invited her?” Lefty Sotera pricked his lip with a red-hot needle, dark blood oozed from the nick. I passed the doobie to Lena and helped my friend out, washing his wound with water from a small pitcher. “Who the fuck invited her?”
We looked at each other shrugging, nobody knew. It hadn’t been any of us.
“What a piece-of-shit country,” Lena sighed.
“What a piece-of-shit world, you mean!” I couldn’t contain my anger.
“You call this a country? A pigsty of an island is what it is, but it’s what we have to deal with.” Apple Pie wept in frustration.
Lefty Sotera noticed the photography book lying on top of a pile of books in a corner of the living room. Sitting down on the cold tiles of the floor, he leafed through the pages.
“Look.” He pointed to the photo of Assia by Dora Maar. “Looks like you, Lena.”
Lena clicked her tongue. “Maybe I look like her shadow,” she joked.
“Yeah, if we keep on eating sweet potato bread we’ll all end up fat,” Apple Pie yawned.
“Sweet potato isn’t fattening, it’s better than flour, especially for maintaining a healthy scalp,” I said.
We went to sleep; the women slept in the bed. Lefty Sotera slept on a cot, uncomfortably enough. Around midnight he moved to the bed, with us. He was on fire.
We made love and wept in each other’s arms. We were still young, we were full of desires, and we had a feeling we’d never be free.
Bernard lifted the glass of Demoiselle champagne to his lips (Dom Pérignon wasn’t on the menu at the café that day) and swirled the cold liquid in his mouth, savoring it.
“You’ve gone to bed with girls? So you’ve gone to bed with girls.” His eyes gleamed malevolently.
I chose to remain silent; I had no reason to answer.
“Your silence is tantalizing.” He smiled maliciously but immediately changed the topic: “I’ll continue my story, if you’re still interested. The second afternoon, we were sitting on the steps of a palazzo, tired from hoofing it around Venice. That morning we had visited the Basilica of Santa Maria, and from there we’d gone on foot to Peggy Guggenheim’s residence—she was opening her house to the public as a museum. James wanted Peggy and Dora to meet, but it didn’t work out well, they didn’t hit it off.
“Dora was absolutely astonished by the Henry Moore statue that still stands by the entrance. We couldn’t take photos of ourselves that time, we’d forgotten the camera, but it was a shame to lose that image of Dora studying the sculpture, rubbing the bronze with her hand as if trying to make it even smoother.
“Then, that same afternoon, sitting at the bottom of those steps, we got her to start talking about her work as a photographer. She had never talked about it so openly before. James and I were stunned, really stupefied; we were all ears. I don’t remember what James did to get her talking like that about her flings with Assia. Photographic flings, lesbian fascination; she may have felt the same with the Surrealist painter Leonor Fini, whom she photographed half-undressed, holding a cat between her legs; and she certainly did with Nusch Éluard. Dora had been a daring, free-spirited girl. Our Dora, without realizing it, had been a forerunner, a driving force behind so many artistic and sexual trends. I was very good friends with Leonor Fini, who organized some very entertaining, lavishly theatrical Surrealist gatherings in Corsica.”
“Do you know if Dora knew Remedios Varo, the Spanish Surrealist?”
“She must have, but she never talked to me about her. The thing is, before the Venice trip I wasn’t very close to Dora, not really even as friends, even though I knew a lot about her and enjoyed seeing her now and then. I didn’t have much to do with Remedios Varo either. With Dora, just those five days in Venice, where each minute felt like centuries to us, and the three days back to Paris by car. I don’t mean we found her boring to be around, not in the
least. Quite the contrary, for me each minute with her was timeless, never-ending. I don’t know if she had the same experience, but for me, with my sense of time, it meant a lot, it certainly did. I can remember her in such vivid detail that even now I see her image superimposed over yours, as if she were really here.”
He rested his head in his hands, his eyes fixed on a private moment from the past.
“We returned from Venice by car. It rained a lot. Dora and James argued the whole time. I did the driving, and every time the car broke down it was up to me to fix it. She would get out and hold a huge umbrella over me as I worked. We got soaked on that trip, it rained so much. And that was how I began to love her. And I think she also loved me. We began to love each other at the very end. When I first came to know her, Dora impressed me as an egotistical woman. I had only seen her a few times, but I knew all about the strangeness of her relationship with James, who I always told to be careful, since his ambiguous signals might get her to make a fool of herself if she clung to a false illusion. Dora was ambivalent, and she could be very stingy, proud, bad-tempered, domineering. Intrigue fascinated her.… And yet she was the most charming, seductive person I ever knew; I found her enchanting. An exceptional woman who didn’t have the slightest idea how exceptional she was, and who wore herself out as a result, trying to become what she already was. More importantly, she was an artist with a uniquely generous soul.”
PART II
I’VE SET DOWN ALL MY TEARS IN WRITING
Dora and me. Venice, 1958–Paris, 2009
Dora haunted my dreams. In the misty gloom of night her hands wrung each other and wrung mine. Hands with long thin fingers that she constantly rubbed, one hand against the other, gently; she also inspected them closely, tracing the arteries that showed through her translucent skin and following them as they ran into tiny veins that led to happier memories.
Georges Bataille described her as a woman incapable of love. Xénie-Dora, in response, wrote him an angry letter, insulting and reproaching him for understanding nothing about the years when her suffering turned her into a peerless, unique artist who loved others experimentally through art and the prism of her sadness. Bataille did not understood young Dora’s artistic love-play.
In fact, Bataille felt abandoned. His spiteful description of Dora was merely an expression of his bitterness, the reproach of a predatory seducer who had let his biggest prey get away, the woman he thought he had turned into an expert in sadism and masochism and a submissive object of lesbian love. But Dora would not be dominated.
Years later, just when she began to feel that Picasso was rejecting her, Bataille wrote to her again, this time appreciating her real worth. Now he was the one who felt like a damp shadow, a vanishing presence. Sadness fit him like a glove; sick and frail, he hoped his former muse’s friendship would make him feel better. And it did. She went straight to him, the writer who thought eroticism was earthy and childish, yet who hadn’t been able to decode the playful messages his lover had been sending him with her body and her art back then.
To stick to the real story, however, Dora hadn’t actually abandoned him, as he used to complain behind her back to their mutual friends. Contrary to what he told everyone, he had dumped her for the writer Colette. So Dora left, more heavyhearted than heartbroken, pretending she was the one dropping him so as not to come off looking worse. The breakup left no scars, at least not visible ones. Dora was young, she recovered quickly, especially since he wasn’t the god she was aspiring to worship.
The Blue of Noon, the novel where Georges Bataille introduced the character of Xénie inspired by Dora, who shared the leading role with Simone Weil and Colette, who ultimately betrayed her, was published in 1957. The next year Dora decided to go into seclusion decisively, serenely, and apparently without regrets.
Neither James nor Bernard knew if Dora had read Bataille’s novel. No copy of it was ever found among the piles of books in her library after her death to prove that she had read it. Perhaps she did so in secret. Keeping the secret even from herself, in a state of absolute emotional rapture and denial. Or she preferred to remain unaware, ignorant of the Dora she had been for Bataille and who now appeared in a novel, defined as a proud young woman whose spirit was spiced with unwonted perversity.
Her hands, back to studying them in close detail. Her hands bled while she, on her knees, anxiously awaited her punishment, the physical torture, the pinches, the blows.
Intelligent women, contrary to what one might think, are fond of cruelty.
Bataille tended to take a few liberties too many, though for Dora surely the hardest part was finding herself reflected in a character described as bisexual, rather banal, and even superficial, by someone she respected as a fine observer and literary luminary.
“I was the crowned queen,” Dora sighed.
Indeed, in 1935 and 1936 she must have been a queen of Surrealism; her photos were easily as good as those of the acknowledged masters.
Thanks to Pierre Kefer she was able to move her studio from 29 Rue d’Astorg next door to 29B, renting it from Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Picasso’s art dealer. She liked the neighborhood for its elegance as well as the fact that Picasso himself lived in a distinguished apartment not far from there, and also had his studio nearby at 23 Rue La Boétie.
The apartment at 29 Rue d’Astorg not only became Dora’s home; she also made it into one of the most famous and impeccable Surrealist images, pouring into it all her pain as a smothered daughter suffocated by her mother’s overprotective and crushing presence.
This photo, titled 29, rue d’Astorg, makes you feel queasy as soon as you look at it. An arcade as seen through a funhouse mirror; at the far end, a tiny door letting in a bit of light. And in the foreground, the grotesque body of an adolescent girl whose misshapen head resembles a pond turtle’s. She wears disheveled clothes and her arms, legs, and feet are elephantine, absurdly chubby. Sitting at a bench, the girl tugs at her dress; her feet, shod in school shoes, dangle bashfully. The bench looks ready to tip over, unbalanced by the stunted girl’s own shadow; she is taking off, rising from the ground, giving the bench a vibrant impulse to levitate. The girl’s long neck looks like a finger, but it can also look like an arm or a penis; the shape is undeniably phallic. It is a fascinating image, not only for its Surrealist content, but for the intimate perspective it affords, fraught with the heavy load of dreams and torments that hounded and pervaded the artist. In this photo, Dora produced a work of art inspired by adolescent desire, her initiation into erotic adventure, her maiden voyage into brutal sensuality; we witness an unstable trio, a dubious concoction, culminating here in a hellish nightmare.
Leaning against a window in the Bridge of Sighs, Dora now looks at her hands in the foreground; below them, in the distance, gondolas transport tourists through the gray Venetian waterways. Hers are the hands of a middle-aged woman, the hands of a woman who has no man’s body to caress. Hers were the first artist’s hands to love and pay homage to Picasso, the first to glide with mysterious force toward him, to find him, just as he found art: “I do not seek, I find.” She still had the scar from that wound, from the time she slipped while plunging a knife between her fingers into the wooden tabletop and cut herself.
But she had not come to Picasso on her own. Intuitively, she had been following the clues that fate and people had left along the trail that led to him. It was a woman’s voice that first set her on Picasso’s trail: the beguiling voice of Musidora.
Like André Breton, who said he had reinvented the feminine ideal through the exotic singer, Dora was enchanted by Musidora. Musidora was described as “a modern-day fairy, adorably given to wickedness,” with a seductively childish voice. Breton turned her into a divine and divinating figure, a martyr for all desires, a perverse everchild.
In Musidora, Dora saw an infinitely powerful audacity. Though she found something more: a message for herself, given that she took photographs with her eyes clear of recurrent vices, and she also focused
on her subjects using the unconscious. (All this would later appear in Alicia Dujovne Ortiz’s biography of Dora.) And her unconscious led Dora from Musidora to Picasso. Before that, however, her most loyal friend (or at least she was his), Paul Éluard, entered like a ray of light contoured by broken shadow, his face turned devoutly toward freedom, his wide, round forehead a prow searching forward. This photo no doubt inspired Picasso when he later painted portraits of the poet. Éluard illuminated the trail to Picasso; Musidora blazed it, step by step.
A history that swings both ways
The poet Éluard was responsible for something just as horrendous as Picasso’s treatment of Max Jacob. When Picasso was asked to do something to free Jacob from the transit camp for Auschwitz-bound prisoners, Picasso responded with a remark too trivial and evasive to count as poetic, at a time when even poetry was more often harmful than helpful. Jean Cocteau could have saved Jacob, but the letter he wrote that might have secured his release arrived too late.
Éluard, for his part, saved many people with his poem “Liberty,” and today its lines still inspire hundreds of thousands of political prisoners around the world. That was Éluard the poet. Éluard the Communist, on the other hand, informed on a friend and got him killed. He was expelled from the Surrealist movement, but he came back; same with the Communist Party; half-expelled, half-rehabilitated, but always coming back the same way he left: by constraint. It was a time when people didn’t know, or barely knew, that Communism was blameworthy.
Despite the known horrors and regrets occasioned by Éluard’s fickleness, Dora loved him like an older brother and a usually affectionate mentor; she admired him as the great Surrealist poet, because she understood him better than anyone.
The painter De Chirico, however, thought Éluard was a mystical cretin, and he thought the same of Picasso. But the stupidity supposedly reflected in Éluard’s face was exactly what had tenderly and sublimely seduced Dora.
