“It never begins and it never ends. What is it?”
“I am what I am!”
“How does the intellectual learn to die?”
“He changes all his words into a black dog that follows him around!”
“Do the shadows of the pines depend on the moonlight?”
“Pine roots have no shadow!”
“Is the Buddha old?”
“As old as I am!”
“What do you do when it cannot be done?”
“I let it be done!”
“Where will you go after death?”
“The stones of the road neither come nor go!”
“If a woman advances on the path, is she your older or younger sister?”
“She is a woman walking!”
“When the path is covered with snow, is it white?”
“When it is white, it is white. When it is not white, it is not white!”
“How do you escape when you are imprisoned in a block of granite?”
“I leap and dance!”
“Who can remove the collar from the ferocious tiger?”
“I will take it off myself!”
“Can you say that without opening your mouth?”
“Whatever I say or do not say, keep your mouth closed!”
“How many hairs are on the back of your head?”
“Show me the back of yours, and I’ll count them!”
“All the Buddhas of the past, the present, and the future: What do they foretell right now?”
“Now I yawn, because I’m drunk!”
Holding each other steady in order not to stumble against the walls, we walked out into the street. We mimicked pissing against a post. Ejo lifted a leg, imitating a dog. “The Buddha has dog nature!” I imitated him. Then we were both seized by a long fit of joyous laughter. When we calmed down finally, he bowed good-bye to me. Then he said: “Art is your path. Accept my friend Leonora Carrington as your teacher. She doesn’t know any koans, but she has resolved them all.”
3. A Surrealist Master
Everything consisted of a murky, infinite call which, little by little, was stifled by the shadows of the night.
SILVER KANE, VERDUGO A PLAZOS
(HIT MAN ON CREDIT)
When I woke up after a ten-hour sleep, I called the master.
“Ejo, do you remember the last thing you told me yesterday? I was wondering if perhaps too much sake was. .”
He interrupted me. “A great Japanese poet wrote: ‘To remain silent in order to appear wise is despicable. Better to get drunk on sake and sing.’ A poet from your own country, Pablo Neruda, once exclaimed: ‘May God preserve me from fabricating things when I sing!’ What I told you yesterday, I repeat today. Go see my friend Leonora.”
“But Ejo, it is you I want to study with!”
“Do not be deceived, Alejandro. Empty mind does not mean empty heart. Perfection is empty mind and full heart. You can rid yourself of concepts but not of feelings. Little by little, you must empty your head and go into your heart, gathering and refining, until you arrive at that sublime state which you call happiness. According to what you have told me, you have not yet finished with the bitterness you harbor toward your mother. Feeling deprived of this essential tenderness, you are still an angry child who rejects women in every domain except that of sex. You think that you can learn only from men. The archetype of the cosmic father dominates your actions. The Great Mother is still surrounded with shadows. . Before continuing to unravel koans, go and lay down your sword before the flower; bow down to her. Without knowing it, you have always been waiting for this. You are an artist, as is Leonora. She is the being appropriate for you. Let her give you the inner woman who is so lacking in you.”
The little I knew about Leonora Carrington was gleaned from what I had read in André Breton’s Anthologie de l’humour noir. He described her in these terms: “Those respectable people who, for a dozen years, had invited her to dine in a prestigious restaurant have still not recovered from the embarrassment when they noticed that, while continuing to take part in the conversation, she had taken off her shoes and meticulously covered her feet in mustard.”
I also knew she had been the mistress of Max Ernst. When the painter was imprisoned in Spain by the Franco regime, she underwent a crisis of madness. After recovering from this, she described it in her book Mémoires d’en bas. From that time on, she had abolished definitively the walls that separate reason from the realm of dreams. She had a mythic reputation among Mexican painters; she was an incarnation of the most extreme surrealism. During a party, Luis Buñuel, seduced by Carrington’s beauty and emboldened by the notion that she had transcended all bourgeois morality, proposed (with his characteristic bluntness) that she become his mistress. Without even waiting for her answer, he gave her the key to the secret studio that he used as a love nest and told her to meet him at three o’clock the next afternoon. Early the next morning, Leonora went to visit the place alone. She found it tasteless: it looked exactly like a motel room. Taking advantage of the fact that she was in her menstrual period, she covered her hands with blood and used them to make bloody handprints all over the walls in order to provide a bit of decoration for that anonymous, impersonal room. Buñuel never spoke to her again.
When I arrived at her place, a house with no facade, just a bare stone wall with a high window and a narrow door on Chihuahua Street, I was surprised to notice that I was trembling from head to toe. An absurd, uncontrollable shyness made me unable even to ring the bell. I remained standing, petrified, for at least a half hour. I knew she was waiting for me, but I felt incapable of taking action before this prisonlike dwelling. There arrived a small woman with a strong and youthful body, pulling a little cart full of vegetables, fruits, and cigarette cartons.
“Are you the mime that the Japanese sent to us? I’m Kati Horna, Hungarian photographer, and I’m Leonora’s oldest friend.”
She lit a cigarette and began speaking rapidly, without waiting for any response from me. She paused in her talk only to take quick drags from her cigarette. Her Spanish was poor, and she punctuated her verbiage with many large gestures.
“Last night I dreamed of three phrases. When I woke up, it was as if I had brought them into the light. They were already in my life, like a sort of cyst. Everything I know, I receive in dreams. Sentences come to me fully composed. When I wake up, my behavior changes — I leave a country, sometimes I try to kill someone. ‘Live like a star!’ ‘Eliminate the superfluous!’ ‘Concrete manifestation!’ What do you think about that? The stars shine without worrying about the darkness of the planets. The sun and the moon use no ornaments. Matter contains everything. . By the way, I have some of my photographs in this envelope. Would you like to see them?”
Without waiting for my answer, she brought them out and displayed them one by one with great rapidity. They were portraits of beggars, survivors of concentration camps, the mentally ill, women of the Spanish Civil War, and children in misery. All of them seemed to have the face of Christ, all of them seemed to be waiting, certain of not being disappointed.
“Good dreams always come true in the end.”
Then she rang the doorbell herself, murmuring: “To want. . to dare. . to be able. . to obey. .” Her skirt, made of ordinary cloth, was blown up by the wind, but she paid no attention.