The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington

by Leonora Carrington

  They jumped into the fire and ascended in smoke through the shaft in the roof to join the Evening Star. Juan-Mari, they were one whole being. They will return again to Earth, one Being called Quetzalcoatl.

  Juan-Mari keep returning, so this story has no end.

  (1970s)

  ET IN BELLICUS LUNARUM MEDICALIS

  “Russia Donates Team of Trained Rats. Experienced in Operating on People. Due to the Recent Strike of Doctors, the Russian Government Has Graciously Donated a Team of Rats Highly Specialized in All Types of Surgery and General Practise.” The news appeared in the Great Metropolitan Newspaper.

  Naturally.

  And so there was a reunion of State Ministers, Doctors, Bankers, Priests, and other politicians.

  It became evident that the idea made them uneasy. The famous Dr. Monopus announced: “This move cannot inspire the necessary confidence in our patients. An operation is too delicate a matter to be undertaken by rats. Moreover, it would not be hygienic.” A government minister wearing an English suit stated: “Soviet rats are always sterilized before operating on a patient’s body. Besides, if we don’t make use of these rats, the Russian Government will be offended.”

  A disagreeable silence overtook one and all.

  Señor Alcaparras, a powerful banker well-known for his democratic attitude, had the courage to break the silence: “Gentlemen,” he said with his habitual smiling suavity, “there is no problem here. We will simply donate the rats to the President of the United States, and thus we can please everybody. The Americans, just like the Russians, are very modern.”

  “I don’t believe it is correct to give gifts as a gift,” said a priest, Father Podmore, confessor to ladies of good society. “I myself am modern and a complete atheist like all enlightened ecclesiastics, but … even a man as open as I am becomes perturbed by a lack of good manners.”

  “He’s right,” said the government minister. “No one wants war against the Russians and the Americans at the same time. They’re armed to the teeth, as they say.”

  “I’m against substituting rats for human beings in the hospitals,” said Dr. Monopus firmly. “Better to make an official donation of the rats to the Psychoanalytical Association.”

  The imposing Institute of Semi-Applied Sciences and Other Metaphorical Activities covers several square kilometres in our city and is surrounded by a lovely park with fountains that occasionally spout water. This was the place where the Great Soviet Gift would be presented. There was music, flags, French cooking enveloped in gelatin: the enchiladas à la Bordelaise enjoyed special favour.

  The physicians themselves presented the wise Rats, amid music and speeches, to the psychoanalysts.

  The Head of the Psychoanalytical Association, Dr. Siegfried Laftnalger, received the gift of the Rats in the shadow of the Monument to Semi-Applied and Metaphorical Science. This monument, recognized throughout the world as unique, consists of three heroes and a horse triumphantly penetrating a streptococcus culture.

  Standing under the monument, Dr. Laftnalger received the gift with bowed head, murmuring, “Ai Chingao,” vowing revenge against his enemy Dr. Monopus.

  Following the banquet the psychoanalysts gathered at a secret place in the hills of Las Lomas to contemplate the Soviet Bequest. “I don’t wish to speak against a medical colleague,” said Dr. Laftnalger, “but Monopus is a goat. Now how are we to use these rats in analysis?”

  “It’s an insult,” said Dr. Von Garza, “an open declaration of hostility and aggression, a palpable rejection.”

  “Transference from patient to rat will present unprecedented difficulties,” said Dr. Zodiac Pérez, an ugly man who thought a lot about transference. “One cannot conceive any practical use for these animals in dealing with recalcitrant neuroses. We should not forget that patients, too, are human beings.”

  “Hear, hear!” cried several doctors who spoke good English.

  “Should we charge the same rates for sessions with rats, or only half?” said Dr. Benito Wurst, who had a problem of insecurity as well as a tic nerveux and six children who ate a lot.

  No one knew the answer. At length Dr. Laftnalger said: “Quatch!” and then, with a slight smile, added, “We’d be better off to give the rats to the gynaecologists.” Some laughter followed this gloomy joke.

  The quandary thickened. After various sessions in the luxurious bronze mansion on the slopes of Las Lomas—all bronze, marble, ivory, and decorated with bisons—the psychoanalysts decided to kidnap Dr. Monopus and force him to take back the rats to work in the operating theatres of hospitals. Meanwhile, the rats were eating vitamins and taking orderly exercise in an electronic corral.

  In the end, it was Dr. Zodiac Pérez, disguised as a lass from Daxara, who was chosen to abduct Dr. Monopus, who was removed to a secret hiding place in the elegant basement of the Psychoanalytical Mansion…. He was to be kept there until he agreed to take back the rats once and for all.

  As a prisoner, Dr. Monopus displayed surprising resistance to the psychological ingenuity used against him. He denied all responsibility for the rats. “Though they are adept at bookkeeping, they are not, I believe, trustworthy and have no sense of responsibility,” he admitted after a triple electro-shock procedure and a treatment of subliminal persuasion over several nights. “I don’t want rats in the operating theatre. Period.”

  The prisoner’s diet consisted of strawberry-flavoured cornmeal gruel, without milk, and he grew thin. The fourth week of captivity was coming to an end when Dr. Laftnalger sighed and said: “There’s nothing for it, we’ll have to sacrifice both Monopus and the rats at the same time. We’ll deposit the bodies in an anteroom of the Ministry of the Interior so that the affair will come to public attention. We’ll let it be known that Monopus killed the rats and then committed suicide because he was a counterspy. Everything has a solution.”

  “Hear, hear!” cried those who spoke English. The rest feigned discreet coughs.

  They thought of mixing poison into the strawberry-flavoured cornmeal, which tasted bad anyway. “Let’s not make him suffer too much. Let’s use something quick. Quatch!”

  “Hear, hear!”

  In the meanwhile a shipment of arms was received at the border to capture the rats and send them on to the Pentagon by helicopter for military purposes. “Who knows,” said an American general, “they might be sent by submarine.” A civil war would have ensued, if it had not been for a fortuitous incident. In the bathroom of the basement of the Psychoanalytical Mansion the toilet got plugged up.

  How?

  The prisoner, Dr. Monopus, infuriated by his lack of liberty, had begun to throw all kinds of objects belonging to the analysts into the toilet bowl: watches, ties, shoes, and the complete works of Erich Fromm. It was soon obstructed. The Art of Loving blocked the exit from the main pipeline.

  They called the plumber. Señor Jasón Malvavisco, licensed plumber, arrived with his helpers. “You’d have to use dynamite,” he told Dr. Monopus, who now desired to use the facilities.

  “Such a solution won’t do,” said the doctor. “After all, I’m locked up in here.”

  Señor Jasón Malvavisco was an amiable man, full of good humour, and he offered the doctor a cigarette. “Are you a professional?” he asked Monopus.

  “I’m a doctor.”

  “Well, in a certain sense I’m a doctor, too,” said Jasón. “My friends call me Doctor, inasmuch as I’m responsible for the intestinal system of the subterranean tubes of the city.”

  “Very interesting,” said Monopus, “but I don’t think dynamiting the patient falls within the limits of professional ethics.”

  The plumber bowed to this logic. His own principles were well established. “In that case, there’s going to be a big stink. There’s no way …”

  At this point the Soviet Rats themselves appeared on the scene, trying out a new dance step, the Paso Doble Pancreas, a new therapy based on manipulating the digestive system by eating bricks instead of meat (thus also saving
money).

  Jasón was well informed on the psychological customs of the rats, and he knew how to communicate with them through symptomatic idiom.

  “They’re ready,” he finally told Dr. Monopus. “They say that to fix the toilet all they need are some pliers and a simple ladder.”

  The Soviet Rats disappeared quickly down the underground tubing. They never came back. They never appeared again in daylight or by the light of the moon.

  The toilet, however, was unblocked.

  As regards the psychoanalysts, they decided to wear uniforms of black velvet studded with buttons. Laftnalger announced: “We, too, have our dignity and our own organization. In spite of everything, psychology lives in the flesh. And without flesh we would have no patients. Thus, even a bone that talks is worth more than a rat that thinks.”

  Amen …

  Even though you won’t believe me

  my story is beautiful

  And the serpent that sang it

  Sang it from out of the well.

  (early 1960s)

  MY FLANNEL KNICKERS

  Thousands of people know my flannel knickers, and though I know this may seem flirtatious, it is not. I am a saint.

  The “Sainthood,” I may say, was actually forced upon me. If anyone would like to avoid becoming holy, they should immediately read this entire story.

  I live on an island. This island was bestowed upon me by the government when I left prison. It is not a desert island, it is a traffic island in the middle of a busy boulevard, and motors thunder past on all sides day and night.

  So …

  The flannel knickers are well known. They are hung at midday on a wire from the red green and yellow automatic lights. I wash them every day, and they have to dry in the sun.

  Apart from the flannel knickers, I wear a gentleman’s tweed jacket for golfing. It was given to me, and the gym shoes. No socks. Many people recoil from my undistinguished appearance, but if they have been told about me (mainly in the Tourist’s Guide), they make a pilgrimage, which is quite easy.

  Now I must trace the peculiar events that brought me to this condition. Once I was a great beauty and attended all sorts of cocktail-drinking, prize-giving-and-taking, artistic demonstrations and other casually hazardous gatherings organized for the purpose of people wasting other people’s time. I was always in demand and my beautiful face would hang suspended over fashionable garments, smiling continually. An ardent heart, however, beat under the fashionable costumes, and this very ardent heart was like an open tap pouring quantities of hot water over anybody who asked. This wasteful process soon took its toll on my beautiful smiling face. My teeth fell out. The original structure of the face became blurred, and then began to fall away from the bones in small, ever-increasing folds. I sat and watched the process with a mixture of slighted vanity and acute depression. I was, I thought, solidly installed in my lunar plexus, within clouds of sensitive vapour.

  If I happened to smile at my face in the mirror, I could objectively observe the fact that I had only three teeth left and these were beginning to decay.

  Consequently

  I went to the dentist. Not only did he cure the three remaining teeth but he also presented me with a set of false teeth, cunningly mounted on a pink plastic chassis. When I had paid a sufficiently large quantity of my diminishing wealth, the teeth were mine and I took them home and put them into my mouth.

  The Face seemed to regain some of its absolutely-irresistible-attraction, although the folds were of course still there. From the lunar plexus I arose like a hungry trout and was caught fast on the sharp barbed hook that hangs inside all once-very-beautiful faces.

  A thin magnetic mist formed between myself, the face, and clear perception. This is what I saw in the mist. “Well, well. I really was beginning to petrify in that old lunar plexus. This must be me, this beautiful, smiling fully toothed creature. There I was, sitting in the dark bloodstream like a mummified foetus with no love at all. Here I am, back in the rich world, where I can palpitate again, jump up and down in the nice warm swimming pool of outflowing emotion, the more bathers the merrier. I Shall Be Enriched.”

  All these disastrous thoughts were multiplied and reflected in the magnetic mist. I stepped in, wearing my face, now back in the old enigmatic smile which had always turned sour in the past.

  No sooner trapped than done.

  Smiling horribly, I returned to the jungle of faces, each ravenously trying to eat each other.

  Here I might explain the process that actually takes place in this sort of jungle. Each face is provided with greater or smaller mouths, armed with different kinds of sometimes natural teeth. (Anybody over forty and toothless should be sensible enough to be quietly knitting an original new body, instead of wasting the cosmic wool.) These teeth bar the way to a gaping throat, which disgorges whatever it swallows back into the foetid atmosphere.

  The bodies over which these faces are suspended serve as ballast to the faces. As a rule they are carefully covered with colours and shapes in current “fashion.” This “fashion” is a devouring idea launched by another face snapping with insatiable hunger for money and notoriety. The bodies, in constant misery and supplication, are generally ignored and only used for ambulation of the face. As I said, for ballast.

  Once, however, that I bared my new teeth, I realized that something had gone wrong. For after a very short period of enigmatic smiling, the smile became quite stiff and fixed, while the face slipped away from its bonish mooring, leaving me clutching desperately to a soft grey mask over a barely animated body.

  The strange part of the affair now reveals itself. The jungle faces, instead of recoiling in horror from what I already knew to be a sad sight, approached me and started to beg me for something which I thought I had not got.

  Puzzled, I consulted my friend, a Greek.

  He said: “They think you have woven a complete face and body and are in constant possession of excess amounts of cosmic wool. Even if this is not so, the very fact that you know about the wool makes them determined to steal it.”

  “I have wasted practically the entire fleece,” I told him. “And if anybody steals from me now I shall die and disintegrate totally.”

  “Three-dimensional life,” said the Greek, “is formed by attitude. Since by their attitude they expect you to have quantities of wool, you are three-dimensionally forced to ‘Sainthood,’ which means you must spin your body and teach the faces how to spin theirs.”

  The compassionate words of the Greek filled me with fear. I am a face myself. The quickest way of retiring from social Face-eating competition occurred to me when I attacked a policeman with my strong steel umbrella. I was quickly put into prison, where I spent months of health-giving meditation and compulsive exercise.

  My exemplary conduct in prison moved the Head Wardress to an excess of bounty, and that is how the Government presented me with the island, after a small and distinguished ceremony in a remote corner of the Protestant Cemetery.

  So here I am on the island with all sizes of mechanical artifacts whizzing by in every conceivable direction, even overhead.

  Here I sit.

  (1950s)

  THE HAPPY CORPSE STORY

  White girl dappled mare

  the stags and the ferns in the wood.

  Tuft of black hair caught on a thorn

  She went by so fast

  Now she is gone.

  The young man, dressed in purple and gold with a blond wig and carrying a jukebox, threw a tantrum and fell on the mossy knoll in a passionate fit of weeping.

  “She never returned,” he cried.

  “Sentimentality is a form of fatigue,” said the Happy Corpse, greyish, swinging to and fro on the gnarled elm, like a wasps’ nest.

  “Nevertheless,” shrieked the youth, “I must seek her, because I am in love.”

  The Happy Corpse laughed. “You mean your secret thread got wound around a galloping damsel. The thinness of it being pulled is a sinful waste an
d woeful want.”

  The young man’s wig fell off, showing a skull covered with black bristles.

  “However,” continued the Happy Corpse, “if you catch hold of me and ride on my back, I may help you to find this woman.”

  “Whoop!” yelped the youth and grabbed at the corpse, which fell into ashes and appeared on the other side of a brandleberry bush.

  “Not so fast.”

  Around and around the brandleberry bush they ran, and as the young man got nearer and nearer the corpse got thicker and thicker, till the youth leapt on its back; whereupon the Happy Corpse stamped its foot and away they ran.

  Thorns grabbed at the pair as they hurried through the wood. Great Scot, a nasty black-and-white terrier, ran constantly at the corpse’s heels, snapping. This mangy creature lurked the haunts where Happy Corpses abide, since one can hardly say live in this case. The dog smelled as bad as the corpse; it was practically impossible to tell one from the other. They just looked different.

  Being full of holes and dents, the corpse could talk out of any part of its body. “Now,” said the corpse through the back of its head, “I shall tell you a story.” The youth heaved a groan like a death rattle. He felt too preoccupied to listen. Nevertheless the story began. Think of listening to a story told straight into your face out of a hole in the back of the head with bad breath: surely this must have troubled the delicate sensibility of the young man. However, what can’t be cured must be endured.

  “The story,” said the Happy Corpse, “is all about my father.” As they unraveled themselves from the tendrils of some poison ivy, the story continued: “My father was a man so utterly and exactly like everybody else that he was forced to wear a large badge on his coat in case he was mistaken for anybody. Any body, if you see what I mean. He was obliged to make constant efforts to make himself present to the attention of others. This was very tiring, and he never slept, because of the constant banquets, bazaars, meetings, symposiums, discussions, board meetings, race meetings, and simple meatings where meat was eaten. He could never stay in one place for more than a minute at a time because if he did not appear to be constantly busy he was afraid somebody might think he was not urgently needed elsewhere. So he never got to know anybody. It is quite impossible to be truly busy and actually ever be with anybody because business means that wherever you are you are leaving immediately for some other place. Relatively young, the poor man turned himself into a human wreckage.”