Amulet

Nine

After that I came back to the world. I've had it with adventures, I said in a tiny little voice. Adventures, adventures. I had known the adventures of poetry, which are always matters of life and death, but when I came back to the streets of Mexico, I was content with everyday life. Why ask for more? Why go on fooling myself? The everyday is like a frozen transparency that lasts only a few seconds. So I came back and saw it and let it envelop me. I am the mother, I told it, and honestly I don't think I'm cut out for horror movies. Then the everyday began to expand like a soap bubble gone crazy, and popped.

I was back in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature and it was September 1968 and I was thinking about the adventures of Remedios Varo. There are so few people left who remember Remedios Varo. I never met her. I would sincerely love to be able to say that I'd met her, but the truth is that I never did. I have known marvelous women, strong as mountains or ocean currents, but I never met Remedios Varo. Not because I was too timid to pay her a visit at her house, not because I didn't admire her work (which I admire wholeheartedly), but because Remedios Varo died in 1963, and in 1963 I was still living in my beloved, faraway Montevideo.

Although some nights, when the moon shines into the women's bathroom and I am still awake, I think, No, in 1963, I was already in Mexico City and Don Pedro Garfias is listening distractedly as I ask him for Remedios Varo's address. Although the Catalan painter is not a particular friend of his, he knows and respects her, so he walks somewhat unsteadily to his desk, takes a slip of paper, a diary from a drawer, a fountain pen from his jacket pocket, and ceremoniously copies out the address in his beautiful handwriting.

So off I go flying to Remedios Varo's house, which is in Colonia Polanco, isn't it? Or Colonia Anzures, perhaps, or Colonia Tlaxpana? Memory plays malicious tricks on me when the light of the waning moon creeps into the women's bathroom like a spider. In any case, I rush headlong through the streets of Mexico City, which flash past, changing as I approach her house (each change building on the one that went before, each a sequel and a reproach), until I reach a street where all the houses seem to be ruined castles, and then I ring a doorbell and wait a few seconds, during which all I can hear is my heart beating (because I'm silly like that-when I'm about to meet someone I admire, my heart starts racing) and then I hear faint steps and someone opens the door and it is Remedios Varo.

She is fifty-four years old. Which means that she has a year left to live.

She invites me in. I don't have many visitors, she says. I walk in and she follows me. Go in, go in, she says, and I proceed down a feebly illuminated corridor to a large sitting room with two windows facing an interior courtyard, their heavy, lilac curtains drawn. In the sitting room there is an armchair, in which I sit down. There are two cups of coffee on a small round table. I notice three butts in an ashtray. The obvious conclusion is that there is a third person in the house. Remedios Varo looks me in the eye and smiles: I'm alone, she declares.

I say how much I admire her, I talk about the French surrealists and the Catalan surrealists, the Spanish Civil War, I don't mention Benjamin Péret because they parted in 1942, and I don't know on what terms, but I talk about Paris and exile, her arrival in Mexico and her friendship with Leonora Carrington, and then I realize that I am telling Remedios Varo the story of her life, I'm behaving like a nervous schoolgirl reciting her lesson for a non-existent board of examiners. And then I go red as a tomato and say, Sorry, I don't know what I say, I say, Do you mind if I smoke? and I look for my pack of Delicados in my satchel, but I can't find it, so I say, Do you have a cigarette? And Remedios Varo, who is standing with her back to a picture, a picture covered with an old skirt (but that old skirt, it occurs to me, must have belonged to a giant), says that she has given up smoking, that her lungs are delicate now, and although she doesn't look like she has bad lungs, or has even seen anything bad in her life, I know that she has seen many bad things, the ascension of the devil, the unstoppable procession of termites climbing the Tree of Life, the conflict between the Enlightenment and the Shadow or the Empire or the Kingdom of Order, which are all proper names for the irrational stain that is bent on turning us into beasts or robots, and which has been fighting against the Enlightenment since the beginning of time (a conjecture of mine, which the official representatives of the Enlightenment would no doubt reject), I know that she has seen things that very few women know they have seen, and now she is seeing her own death, which is set to occur in less than twelve months' time, and I know that there is someone else in her house who smokes and does not want to be discovered by me, which makes me think that whoever it is, it must be someone I know. Then I sigh and look at the reflection of the waning moon in the tiles of the fourth-floor women's bathroom, and, overcoming weariness and fear, I raise my hand, point at the picture behind the giant skirt, and ask her, What is it? Remedios Varo smiles at me, then turns around; she turns her back on me and for a while she examines the picture, but without removing or drawing aside the skirt that shelters it from prying eyes. It's the last one, she says. Or maybe she says, It's the second-to-last one. Her words reverberate off the tiles scored by moonlight, so the second might have been smothered by an echo. And in that phase of radical insomnia I see all of Remedios Varo's pictures passing one after another like tears cried by the moon or my blue eyes. So, honestly, it's hard to notice details or distinguish clearly between last and second-to-last. And then Remedios Varo lifts up the giant's skirt to reveal an enormous valley, viewed from the highest mountain, a green and brown valley, and the mere sight of that landscape makes me anxious, because I know, just as I know there is another person in the house, that what the painter is showing me is a prelude, the setting for a scene that will be scorched into my soul, or no, not scorched, since nothing can affect me like that any more, what I sense is more like the approach of an ice man, a man made of ice cubes, who will come and kiss me on the mouth, on my toothless mouth, and I shall feel those lips of ice on my lips, and I will see those eyes of ice a few inches away from mine, and then I shall faint like Juana de Ibarbourou, and I will murmur, Why me? (a coquetry for which I shall be forgiven) and the man made of ice cubes will blink, and in that blink of an eye, I shall catch the briefest glimpse of a blizzard, as if someone had opened a window and then, on second thought, shut it again suddenly, saying, No, you shall see what you must, Auxilio, but all in good time.

I know that the landscape, the enormous valley, vaguely reminiscent of a Renaissance backgrounds is waiting.

But what is it waiting for?

And then Remedios Varo covers the canvas with the skirt and offers me a cup of coffee and we start talking about other things, aspects of daily life, although words from a different kind of context find their way into our conversation, like parousia or hierophant, like psychotropic drugs and elec-troshock therapy. And then we talk about someone who recently went on a hunger strike, and I hear myself saying, After a week without food, you don't feel hungry anymore, and Remedios Varo looks at me and says, You poor thing.

Just at that moment the heavy lilac curtain stirs and I leap to my feet and I can't (and won't) think about what the Catalan painter has just said. I go to the window, draw the curtain aside and discover a black kitten. I heave a sigh of relief. I know that behind me Remedios Varo is smiling and wondering who I am. The window gives onto a little courtyard with a garden where five or six other cats are taking a siesta. So many cats! Are they all yours? More or less, says Remedios Varo. I turn to look at her: the kitten is in her arms and she is saying, in Catalan: There you are, sweetie. Where were you? I've been looking for you for hours.

Would you like to listen to some music?

Is she talking to me or to the kitten? Me, I suppose, because she talks to the kitten in Catalan, although it's clear at a glance, to anyone, that the kitten is Mexican born and bred, from a line of Mexican stray cats going back at least three hundred years, and now that the moon is stealing from one bathroom tile to another with delicate feline steps, I ask myself if there were cats in Mexico before the Spanish came, and I answer in a dispassionate, objective, and even slightly indifferent manner, No, there were no cats; the cats came with the second or third wave of Europeans. And then, speaking like a sleepwalker, because I am thinking about the sleepwalking cats of Mexico, I reply, Yes, and Remedios Varo goes to the record player, an old record player, which is not at all surprising since we are in the incredible year 1962 and everything is old, everything raises a hand to its mouth as I do to stifle a cry of surprise or an untimely confession, and she puts on a record and says, It's the Concertino in A minor by Salvador Bacarisse, and, listening to that Spanish music for the first time, I begin to cry, again, while the moon jumps from one tile to another in slow motion, as if I and not nature were directing this film.

How much time do we spend listening to Bacarisse?

I don't know. All I know is that at some point Remedios Varo lifts the arm of the record player and brings the listening to an end. And then I go to her (I have to admit it, I don't want to leave) and, blushing deeply, I offer to wash the cups we used, to sweep the floor, to dust her furniture, to scour the pots and pans in her kitchen, to go out and do the shopping, to make the bed or run a bath, but Remedios Varo smiles and says, I don't need you to do any of that, Auxilio, but thanks anyway. I'm fine, really. I don't need any help. As she shows me to the front door I think, Liar! How can she not need any help?

And then I see myself in the hallway of her house. She is inside with her hand on the doorhandle. There are so many things I would like to ask her. For a start, if I can visit her again. Now the whole street is awash with sunlight like white wine. That sunlight illuminates her face and tinges it with a brave melancholy. Fine. Everything is fine. It's time for me to go. I don't know whether to shake her hand or kiss her on both cheeks. Latin American women, as far as I know, give just the one kiss. On one cheek. Spanish women give two. And French women three. When I was a girl I used to think that the three kisses stood for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Now I know they don't, but I still like to think they do. So I give her three kisses and she looks at me as if she too, at some point, had shared my theory. A kiss on the left cheek, one on the right, and a final kiss on the left. And Remedios Varo looks at me and her eyes say, Don't worry, Auxilio, you're not going to die, you're not going to go crazy, you're upholding academic independence, you're defending the honor of our American universities, at worst you might become terribly thin, or have visions, or they might even find you, but don't think about that, be strong, read poor old Pedrito Garfias (you could at least have brought something else to read, you silly girl!) and let your mind flow freely through time, from the 18th to the 30th of September 1968, not one day more, that's all you have to do.

And then, as Remedios Varo shuts the door, she darts a last gaze straight into my eyes, and it is implacably clear to me that she is dead.