A Love Letter from a Stray Moon (2 page)

We curled up in libraries eating sherbet, we flirted and argued and set fire to everything which offended our souls. That was how Diego Rivera first heard of me. ‘Arm yourself to deal with these kids,' he was told by the other painters. He laughed, incredulous, as they told him what had happened to them. The other muralists had come and painted garbage on our walls; they built a scaffold to overreach themselves and underneath them were wood shavings, paper, bits of oily rags, so we'd set them on fire, obviously. The paintings would be ruined, the painters so pissed off that they took to wearing pistols.

I never needed to trace my roots; I could feel them, inside me, my fallopian tubes were grinning like tendrils of vines, my veins as tough as lianas while my legs grew from the earth, twining up into my body, and my fingers were leaves asking questions of the world of spring, those fingers which would one day find his. My heart turned, heliotrope to the sun, wherever sun was.
El ojo verde
, the green eye, all the Amazon was winking within my eyes, and my mouth was full of
Das Kapital
and poetry. Oh, and the faun, I forgot to say, was my friend. I suckled from the breast of Mexico, before gringos, before Columbus, the milk of the Olmec and the Aztec; my blood is the sap of Mexican plants and my mind is metamorphosing from caterpillar to butterfly, symbol of the psyche.

I was drunk on life, drunk on night which was wicked with scent, night which lay across my body like Othello's heavy love over Desdemona's sleeping, breathing, dying body. I sucked all the scent from the orange blossom, and the
datura
gave itself to me. I could smell everything; I could smell thoughts and words and colours, vanilla days, vermilion nights. Believe me, I could smell the very sky—
with my teeth
.

I grew up in rays of love from the sun, my father. I lived in the sky (why not?) for my father's house was Casa Azul, the blue house, the house of sky. In those days there was enough sky for everything to fly, and I was always the first to jump.
Eh, muchachos, saltar!
My father's town was called the ‘father of springtime' and, as he was the father of my springtime, I was sprung. Those were the days when everything could fly. The curled leaf in spring is sprung in its flight to sunlight, and kittens, cantering up gardens, dew drops from long grass all over their noses and paws, felt their kitten-hearts bursting with sun and life because they knew they could fly. To me, all words were winged and all flight was minded and, since I lived in overflow, I overflew. In those days, I understood Icarus, daring, defiant darling, and maybe like him I flew too high, but the Inca doves cooed me, the crested caracara called and I was caught in a cascade of parrots, a whirring of hummingbirds, whose hearts could beat, like mine, over a thousand times per minute.

And, in one hummingbird heartbeat, it was all over.

I was eighteen. Just a day; the sun rose, the earth turned, but something terrible happened. Did the earth turn too fast, or did I?

Alejandro and I were on a bus. ‘Dammit,' I said, ‘I forgot my parasol. I must've left it somewhere, let's get off.' We did, and leapt on another bus; that was the reason I was on the bus which destroyed me. I was searching for a
para-sol
, something to shade me from the sun. What on earth was I doing searching for a parasol? If only I knew the truths of my own metaphors; I am the moon, and the entire earth is my parasol, protecting me from the sun's rays.

A tiny ex-voto painting, a good-luck charm of the Virgin, swayed by the driver's head till Our Mother was dizzy. It was raining a little outside, and the bus was packed but Alejandro and I managed to find seats at the back. I sat with my hand running dangerously close to his balls, and he was wincing between acute pleasure and acute embarrassment, as several old ladies turned to stare, not quite believing that I was tickling his chestnuts on the bus, and I was starting to giggle at the outraged expressions of the
señoras
.

We were approaching a marketplace which was teeming, even in the rain, and there was a painter on the bus, carrying a packet of gold powder, while a tired child was nudging his nose into the sleeve of one of the cross old ladies, and not one of us knew that this was the moment of scissors, which would cut our lives in two. The route of our bus crossed the tramlines, and a tram—a trolley car—was bearing down on us, as if neither could brake, as if it were all in slow motion, as if it were as inevitable, ineluctable as
La Destina
.
La Destina
held the scissors, one scissor blade the tramlines, one scissor blade the route of the bus.

The bus withstood the impact for a long engulfed moment and then cracked apart, shattering into a thousand pieces, and the handrail broke and speared through my body, piercing my pelvis, and my clothes were torn off me and the painter's gold spilled all over me so I lay like a still life, or an icon, half-dead, half-alive. White skin, red blood and covered with gold, I half-heard someone sob ‘look at the dancer,' thinking that I must have just come from a performance, and that the gold was part of my role. A dancer. Never to be that. My Golden Age was over.

The accident was like a hammer breaking my spine, a chisel carving my life to the bone. The steel handrail which entered my stomach came out through my vagina and my screams were louder than the siren of the ambulance.

All of my afterlife referred always to that
now
, that moment then. Then, when with a shriek, twisted metal and hips, a torture of pulleys and a pool of blood, I was flung away from all I knew and all I had been. The ferocious wrench, the shattering of me. I was flung into the darkness of outer space, injured, lonely, and part of me died—I became the strange and limping moon you see every night. Before, I had been part of earth, as young as life itself and I had known dance and freedom. After, I was unearthed, old as death, and caged in days.

I was taken to hospital, and for long weeks the doctors did not know if I would live. My mind became stale with pain and I could smell no word, no sky, only the horrible hospital opposites of disinfectant and putrefaction. All the green
riqueza
of language in the body was cut down to the dull semaphore of pain while the vultures pecked my liver. If I could never be a dancer, death took on the role, death the dancer curtseying to me all my life as I lived dying. If I was going to fly, from now on it would have to be metaphoric.

Some time after the accident, as I was still in bed, sick and feverish, with paintbrushes in my hand, I suddenly saw in their delicate, feathered tips the tangent of my flight. My soul could fly with each brushstroke and my paintings could make visible all the universes which my soul held within it.

This was the beginning of my age of loneliness, my Age of Silver. Alejandro left me and my exile was extraordinary, my warm soul caged in a cold bedstead across a deserted sky. I paint in blood and silver, in love and exile. For love is my nature and I am red at heart, but my exile is silver. That is my contradiction and the source of my sorrow, the anguish of the Age of Silver, fallen from the Age of Gold.

I was the first exile of the solar system—a slip of earth, hurled into the sky, flung out alone, too young, too far, too dark. I have recurring nightmares of being cast into space once more, entirely alone, my ears ringing with the white noise of galaxies far beyond any hearing. A strange birth it was. The birth of exile, the death of home. The death of mothering and the birth of a stricken art.

The Moon's
Instructions
for Loss

I
was born by revolution. According to the register of births, I was born in 1907 but, according to the register of significance, I was the daughter of the Mexican revolution, born in 1910 at the end of dictatorship and the beginning of the peasant revolutions of Zapata.

In the earliest aeons, before she became solid, the earth was a ball of strange gases, and I imagine her like this: if you whistled to the Northern Lights they would swim together, circling in space like a shoal of colours, heat-wraiths stretching, suggesting, dancing backwards, some losing their contact and disappearing, a phantasmic flicker of possibility evaporating into blackness.

And the moon? In the revolution of the earth's turning—and I am a revolutionary—a shard of earth was f lung off, coalescing, reforming further and later, far off as the moon. But shard is the wrong word, too hard and substantial; so immaterial was this moment, so unearthly the earth, so unanchored the moon, what word would be better? The moon was more like Idea, more like Metaphor, or Time, Flight or Potential or Longing. A highly strung intensity of latency.

The moon, shining on the Lacandon jungle and Mexico City, on Havana and Madrid, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Montevideo and New York, is wearing a ski-mask and is rolling a cigarette with tobacco she nicked from the
subcomandante
while she writes a communiqué to earth. ‘Instructions for Loss,' it begins. There are many kinds of revolutions and many of these are invisible: when loss has razed the psyche and despair seems to have massacred the spirit, insurgents of hope sometimes arm themselves in the jungles of the heart.

Picasso famously said: ‘I do not seek, I find.' What about those whose distinctions are not between seeking and finding but between losing and being lost? Not caught between Picasso's optimism of seeking and success of finding, but stuck terribly between unfinding and breakage?

Instructions for loss: if you lose something you can find it fractally—and indeed you must find it like this. In order to avoid bitterness, you must find what you lost a thousand times over, in other faces in the moon, other disguises, under other ski-masks, other mountains, not in fractured crystal but in the perfect refraction of a rainbow and the reflection of mirrors, seeing you in myself, myself in you. It is, as it were, a Zapatismo of the human heart, an intuition of plurality which is a salvation, an aesthetic and a rebellion.

To Diego
and All Who
Have Wings

I
glimpsed Diego first when I was just a kid, long before the accident. He was painting
The
Creation
, and I saw him as a man unbowed by any god for he knew he was man the creator. I saw coasts in him, volcanoes and forests, a geography of mind painted in all time, from the long pre-Columbian
verde
of forest-mind in its thousands of generations before the peculiar regency of history. And that is the time in which I write now, to plead in those longest cycles of time, for now as I write this, my love letter from the moon to man, I am using my heart as a palette and painting in my own blood.

This is a love letter to Diego, and this is not a love letter to Diego. It is universal and wholly personal. It is dated Right Now, and yet it is as old as the primordial. You, Diego, it is to you. ‘Diego is the name of love,' I wrote. But I ask you to read it with many names, whatever your name is that you live by, and let me address myself to your soul, in the simplicity of love, in the generosity of life. To you, then, by all the names of man you ever took, before and before and before, pre-Columbian, pre-literacy, and yet readers too in the strange and unpredictable future, in tenses I am frightened to use. I know you by the flame in your heart, by the light in your eyes, and I write to tell you what I can see, so far from you in fact, so near to you in love. Diego is the name I use to knock on the door of your heart. Yet the door is not the door to his heart alone, but the door to any hearing heart. I take my guitar, and pick out the sound of his name by playing the strings which spell him. But I could play that tune in the key of any name.
Llamar o tocar a la puerta
.