by Whitney Otto
They walked the short distance to their home, down the empty street, Clara’s arm through his and pulling so close that her stride synchronized with his. Her breathing relaxed; she closed her eyes for a moment, relying on his guidance. They passed the bakery with its one lone light.
She heard the shots before they registered, then tasted the gun smoke. Later, she remembered heat and a flash, and then Juan Cristian falling from her arm, pulling her down with him. She scrambled to her knees, crouched on the stones of the street, yanking and tearing at his coat, as if to bunch it up across his chest and stomach to staunch the bleeding.
“Everyone hear this well,” he gasped. “The Cuban government ordered my death.”
And then Clara was screaming for help.
She sat, bloodstained, in one of the hard hospital chairs, waiting as she had waited for him in the telegraph office an hour and a half earlier. He’s young, she said to herself. He will come through the door. Love matters more than death. He will survive this.
Diego came, and journalists, and her friends, and Vidali (“When I arrived at the café, he was already gone” he told Clara), into whose arms she fell when the doctor emerged with the news that Juan Cristian had passed.
This time, Clara was as reluctant to leave Vidali’s embrace as he was to let her go. But he had to release her because the police had come and Clara Argento was under arrest for the murder of Juan Cristian Cruz.
The police held her for hours. Her clothes, stained with Juan Cristian’s blood, were unchanged. “Tell us again what happened,” the police insisted. “And again,” they said, until an exhausted, broken Clara finally said, “I can tell it twenty times and it will still be the same. If I could change this story, I would.”
The authorities responded by contacting the press and running the nude photographs that Morris Elliot had taken of her when they were first in Mexico and still lovers. She was nothing but an immoral Communist without a shred of modesty or fine Mexican virtues, they said. Whore. Femme fatale. Libertine. It was as if she were starring in one of her old Hollywood movies again.
Next they ransacked her house, claiming it was a legal search. They cried that this was clearly a crime of passion! Much was made again of her beauty. Perhaps it was a love triangle! Clara was in shock from the death of Juan Christian, having lucid dreams that she would return from the market to him sitting at his typewriter saying, “Clara, you must listen” and “Where have you been, mi amor?”—only for them to transform into endless interrogations. She would wake up to their repeated questions, their terrible scenarios of the murder, her cell, her filthy clothing, her wrecked home.
Another paper ran her picture of Juan Christian lying in the grass with a caption that read “Photographic study made by Clara Argento of Juan Cristian Cruz while alive, in order to give them both an idea of what he would look like after he was dead.” They called the case “The Sentimental Problem of Clara Argento.”
Diego and his well-connected friends got her out after five days. The truth was that no one cared about one dead Marxist revolutionary. Basura. Trash. There would be no real effort to find the murderer, something the murderer was experienced enough to know.
And Clara never, ever cried until she found the photograph that she had taken of Cruz’s manuel typewriter, upside down and kicked under a dresser, and then she wept.
Vittorio Vidali remained close at hand, in his here-and-gone way. Clara, no longer distracted by happiness, grew wary of Vidali; her belief in their three-way friendship had been compromised. Where was he that night? She remembered his saying to Juan Cristian that he thought “danger looks like danger” and the way he could appear and disappear. She read in the paper, and listened to the whispers at Party headquarters, about “activities” that often seemed to occur in places Vidali had recently visited. All this was complicated by rumors of the Communist Party’s displeasure with Juan Cristian’s popularity, and wasn’t the assassination attempt on the Cuban president an example of rogue, individualistic behavior?
Clara chose to handle Juan Cristian’s death by increasing her devotion to the Party, telling herself that her politics were inextricable from her love, and love was Juan Cristian. Loyalty to Communism was loyalty to Juan Cristian. And Vidali? The Party would never order the death of someone as true to its principles as Juan Cristian, and Vidali would never act against the Party. It was the vengeful Cuban president, she told herself, a man afraid of a better man.
Morris used to shake his head over her attachment to the Communists, reminding her that she was an artist, not a radical, to which she wondered if there was such a difference.
“Yes!” he said. “Me, for example.”
She laughed and said, “You, for example, are living in Mexico with a woman who is not your wife, for example, while your wife stays at home with your children, one of whom lives with us. For example.”
“True,” he said. “But socialism, Clara?”
“I know it may not be perfect, but at least the socialists seem to actually care about others, which is more than I can say for the capitalists, who only care about themselves.”
Now socialism was all she had left. And for this reason she refused to listen to rumors that the Party had hired an assassin to kill Juan Cristian, which meant she had to refuse to ask herself how Vidali knew to find her at the hospital that night.
The politics of Mexico shifted once again. The “good” president was out, and the “not as good” president was in. They were all the same to Clara, who spent her days taking pictures. Some for hire, and others of workers, rural women, bandoliers, corn, and scythes. She had more time to do so since the government had shut down El Machete.
Communists were so undesirable that if you weren’t a citizen you were always under threat of deportation, a fate that would be particularly dire in Clara’s case because, in 1930, she still carried an Italian passport. Mussolini’s agents in Mexico never missed one of her anti-Fascist lectures.
Though Vidali came and went, Clara had no man in her life.
A few days into his administration, shots were fired at the new president. The police decided to revisit the file of that alleged Red assassin, the glamorous, mysterious sexual predator Clara Argento, who thought nothing of gunning down her lover on a darkened Mexican street. This time they kept her in prison for two weeks with murderers and other criminals in for life. Clara constantly tried to talk herself out of her fear, though it seldom worked.
No one could save her, not even Diego.
When they released her, they informed her that she had two days to get her things together and say good-bye before being put on a beat-up Dutch ship, where she would be treated like the rest of the cargo. In each of their ports-of-call she would be put in jail, and when they arrived in Rotterdam she would be delivered to the Italian authorities, who would pass her on to Il Duce. Bon voyage, Clara.
A man came to see her in her New Orleans cell.
“Hello, Clara Clarissima,” he said.
“Hello.” She knew better than to say any of his many names. She didn’t question Vidali’s presence.
He leaned toward her. “You know they’ll be waiting for you as soon as the ship docks. Italy will be no good for the scandalous communista Clara Argento.” He laughed softly as he gazed at this tiny woman with her worn beauty. “I can help you, you know, but I’m unwilling to share you. Those days are over.”
Diego’s mural came to mind: her love for Juan Cristian and his for her as Vidali edged into the picture, waiting. She could be so right about the wrong thing: There was betrayal in Distributing Arms, but not where she had thought it lay. In the same way, her passion for a revolutionary had become inseparable from the revolution.
So unsentimental in love, Clara saved her sentimentality for politics.
She wrote to Morris one last time in 1930, before leaving her American holding cell. Speaking of my personal self—I cannot—as you once proposed to me—solve the problem of my life by losing myself in the
problem of art—not only I cannot do that but I even feel the problem of my life hinders the problem of my art.
In Rotterdam, she slipped away with Vidali, taking her single suitcase but leaving her Graflex behind. Those days, as he had said, were over.
THE ARTIST OF HER OWN BEAUTY OR OBSERVATORY TIME—THE LOVERS
The Girl in the Snow, 1915
After Alexander Van Pelt purchased a stereoscopic camera, no one in the family was safe. His wife and his twin boy and girl, already accustomed to his usual picture taking, now prepared to see their likenesses captured and printed in lifelike 3-D. They generally enjoyed his inclination for novelty, whether in gifts or in his own inventions. For example:
The downhill skis he brought back from one of his many business trips to Switzerland, unusual objects for provincial Elysium, New York, located seventy miles north of Manhattan.
The perfect steam engine train (large enough for an adult to ride) that ran ribbons around a good portion of the one-hundred-acre Van Pelt farm.
When Joseph, Ellen’s brother, decided that he wanted to build planes, his father designed a toy biplane with an engine powerful enough to get it airborne.
There were mechanical toys from Sweden, kinetic sculptures from Zurich, fabulous photographic lenses from Germany. The chemistry set from Berlin was seven year-old Ellen Van Pelt’s favorite present; from the minute her father brought it home, she was in love with all those perfect little bottles. The set was liquids, powders, smells, reactions. Life and combustion and color and vapor. Alexander Van Pelt told his daughter that he had met with a famous photochemist in Berlin, a professor who had taught the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz, as if the name Stieglitz would mean anything to a little girl, but that was how her father always talked to her. It was almost as if he refused to believe that she was child.
Mr. Van Pelt, an affluent candy manufacturer, designed candy molds full of stars and the emblazoned names of his children, and chocolate elephants and chimpanzees. He created a process to make dark-and-white-chocolate zebras, butterscotch tigers with thin stripes of licorice, and peanut butter giraffes. Mr. Van Pelt, never short on ideas, was always experimenting with machinery, taste, and efficiency at Saint Chocolat.
Both of Alexander Van Pelt’s children at one time or another followed their father into his darkroom (built in a converted bathroom, much to his wife’s dismay) to watch him turn blank sheets of paper into images of them. He gave Ellen a simple box camera (more magic! Light making pictures? Fantastic!). And his myriad inventions around the house furthered their belief that he was their own personal illusionist.
A can opener, a toaster, lights that came on in a room when a door was opened; a series of four cables stretched from tall tree to tall tree and fitted with a harnessed pulley, allowing the children to sail high above the ground, landing on mattress-padded platforms built in the cruxes of tree branches. The children were blessed with freedom on the farm, their very physical play punctuated by all the tinkering with machines (the train, the biplane), construction (a rather detailed wooden clubhouse), and chemistry experiments (Ellen).
Mrs. Van Pelt’s failed contribution to her daughter’s life was to try to encourage an equestrian hobby, with Ellen refusing to “ride on any animal’s back,” protesting to her mother than she found it “cruel.” She would add “demeaning” when her mother broached the subject again during Ellen’s early teen years. In the interim, Mrs. Van Pelt purchased a palomino pony, an animal that Ellen never once attempted to ride but treated like a rather large dog, allowing it to follow her around the farm, including the solarium of the house.
This rejection was hard for Mrs. Van Pelt to understand: All the best girls rode, and wasn’t Ellen enough of a wild thing to want to race around on horseback? If you asked Ellen about the girls who rode, she would shake the question off, saying that it was just more traditional female behavior masquerading as something “less girl.” She would say, “You can’t get more girl than riding horses.” Ellen was endlessly empathetic with animals forced into the service of other animals. The whole arrangement disturbed her deeply.
On the other hand, Mr. Van Pelt adored the contrarian in his daughter.
The success of the candy-making company was the reason for his triyearly trips to Europe, primarily Switzerland, once or twice taking the family along. It was unusual for someone in his position to do so much business travel, but then Alexander Van Pelt was an unusual man; his willingness to cross the Atlantic and the European Continent had as much to do with an interest in nearly everything as it did with an attraction to the more “sophisticated” cultures of Europe. It wasn’t just sex, though sex was a part of it. America, he felt, was a bit provincial for a man like him. His wife knew it; in fact, that had been part of their initial connection, though once the family became one of the most prominent in Elysium, Mrs. Van Pelt distanced herself more and more from her husband’s “interests.”
These interests included taking nude photographs: first, when they were engaged, of Mrs. Van Pelt, then of their daughter. It began innocently enough, when Ellen was a toddler running around the farm, swimming topless like her brother and his friends. And the pictures were occasional and without fanfare.
What he mostly captured on film during her early childhood was Ellen dressed in dungarees and a shirt or sweater belonging to her brother, usually with a satin ribbon knotted and hanging lank in her bobbed blond hair—more evidence of her mother’s failed attempt to feminize her.
Joseph was another story. If Alexander Van Pelt seemed much closer to his daughter, Mrs. Van Pelt spent all her energy on her son. It wasn’t until he was six years old that she cut his curls, took the ribbons from his hair, and finally put him in boys’ clothes. Though dressing a son like a daughter wasn’t uncommon for a mother with the time and the financial means, it was unusual when the mother actually had a daughter.
Neither parent commented on the particular attention that each lavished on the two children: Mrs. Van Pelt with her son in lace; Mr. Van Pelt with his tomboy girl.
• • •
Everything changed a month before Ellen turned eight years old. Alexander Van Pelt took his first stereoscopic photograph of his daughter, naked except for her shoes, standing in the April snow on the farm. Her smile belied the discomfort she must have felt, along with her determination to tough it out, staying as still as she could. Anyone looking on would question the parenting of a man who photographed a little girl in the snow, then developed the pictures to be viewed in three dimensions, as if she was right before you.
What the uninformed onlooker wouldn’t know was that this photo session occurred around the time Ellen’s father decided to take her to see a progressive psychiatrist in New York City, a doctor who believed in the benefit of teaching the girl to separate love and sex. “We will work to see that one has nothing to do with the other,” he said.
Someone may ask, Where was this girl’s mother during these sessions? When her daughter was photographed naked in the snow?
And the answer would be: by the side of her husband, taking it all in and trying to hold it all together.
The Girl in Italy, 1926
Ellen Van Pelt, nineteen years old, had been in and out of a number of boarding schools and day schools, unable to obey the rules. “They bore me” was all she would say. Mrs. Van Pelt had turned from the frantic mother of Ellen’s life before she turned eight years old (before the naked picture in the snow, in 1915) into an indulgent parent who had clearly lost her way in raising her daughter.
Town gossip chalked Mrs. Van Pelt’s relationship with her daughter up to the fact that, while Ellen had been a beautiful child, she had grown into an extraordinary young woman. It was impossible not to stare at her, with her lithe figure, her shining blond hair cut short and male, parted on one side and tucked behind her perfect ears. Her sky blue eyes, with their slightly heavy lids, were watchful and amused, which always made her seem as if she had just come from some very satisfying
erotic experience. More to the point, Ellen was aware of her physical gifts and made no move to hide her awareness of their effect on others.
And there were the rumors about her father and their relationship.
Mr. and Mrs. Van Pelt seemed to live separate lives. One would see Mr. Van Pelt with his daughter more than with his wife; or sometimes with other women—employees, young and powerless, though it wouldn’t be said that way in those days. It was known that he still took nude pictures of his comely daughter—in three dimensions—as if she was there for the touching. Sometimes of her friends too. He would speak seductively to Ellen’s high school friends, daring them to pose without ever explicitly asking or changing his tone of voice. His persuasion was in what they perceived as his objectivity, his distance from them as people, a reassuring lack of intimacy. He didn’t act like one of them; he was solidly adult, and this was the very thing that made them trust him enough to doff their clothes and intertwine with his daughter. Though, in truth, no girl even came close to Ellen’s shimmer.
There are photographs of an eighteen-year-old Ellen seated on the arm of a living room chair, the sheer curtains drawn behind her allowing in a kind of celestial light, though her pose—one arm behind her back, the other stretched and draped across the back of the chair—suggests nothing of angels. Her head, with its boyish haircut, is in profile, gazing toward the floor. In another, similar picture, she has her hands behind her back, as if bound by rope.
What was she thinking as her father photographed her, her naked body open to the lens, knowing that her portrait would be in multiple dimensions?
Ellen Van Pelt told her parents that she wanted to study art in Italy. She added that she wasn’t planning on college unless it was art school. She didn’t tell them that she was happiest when the family traveled to Europe the summer before that first nude portrait her father took of her, an eight-year-old shivering in the snow, trying to act as if the cold didn’t touch her. Before her father took her to the doctor who told her that it was possible to separate sex and love. Before, as her parents well knew, her life changed forever.
