A Love Letter from a Stray Moon Read online

  ‘Jay Griffiths’ A Love Letter from a Stray Moon is a stunning allegory about love, art, and revolution. She makes every word, every scene, in this passionate narrative count. It’s brilliant work.’

  BARRY LOPEZ

  ‘Frida Kahlo’s life and work were indivisible, and with a power worthy of her subject Jay Griffiths has found a way of writing Kahlo’s broken, prolific life. Through Griffiths we hear the voice of Frida Kahlo herself, as if she were speaking directly to us. It’s like reading poetry inside a great biographical novel. I absolutely devoured this wonderfully perceptive and sensitive book. I already knew a lot about Kahlo’s life but rediscovered her in these pages from the inside out.’

  MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ

  ‘An extraordinarily beautiful and sustained prose poem, a call for engagement with the world, and a powerful and astonishing feat of literary and retroactive telepathy. It is a book about possession, in many forms, each of which is sparked by a particular urgency: to comprehend, to celebrate, and to endure.’

  NIALL GRIFFITHS

  ‘A rich and extraordinary vision. It’s unrestrained; it’s as if Jay Griffiths had decided to put everything she knew and felt into this passionate poem of admiration and love for the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. There’s something entirely tropical about the uncompromising richness and intensity of the story, and yet it is a story: there is a strong narrative pulse. There are few people who can write stories like this, though. Jay Griffiths is a fearless adventurer with words and images. I salute her courage and the splendour of this vision.’

  PHILIP PULLMAN

  Photo: EDWARD PARKER

  Jay Griffiths is a British writer, author of Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time and Wild: An Elemental Journey. She is the winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for the best new non-fiction writer to be published in the USA and the inaugural Orion Book Award, and has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and a World Book Day award.

  jaygriffiths.com

  TEXT PUBLISHING MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  textpublishing.com.au

  Copyright © Jay Griffiths 2011

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in 2011 by The Text Publishing Company

  Cover and page design by Susan Miller

  Typeset in Mrs Eaves by J & M Typesetting

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Author:Griffiths, Jay.

  Title: A love letter from a stray moon / Jay Griffiths.

  Edition: 1st ed.

  ISBN: 9781921758027 (pbk.)

  Subjects: Kahlo, Frida--Fiction. Rivera, Diego,

  1886-1957--Fiction.

  Dewey Number: 823.92

  Contents

  Exiled from Casa Azul

  The Moon's Instructions for Loss

  To Diego and All Who Have Wings

  If You are Too Easily, Dangerously, Enchantable

  My Changeling Child in a World Mad with Grief

  Risorgimento

  Acknowledgements

  Exiled

  from

  Casa Azul

  I have always wanted wings. To fly where I belong, to become who I am, to speak my truths winged and moon-swayed.

  When I was a small girl, I rehearsed my flight. I dreamt of flying. I jumped off walls and flew, but only down. I wanted to fly up; I needed wings. My hope was winged but it wasn’t enough. I jumped when I walked and I photographed myself just by blinking, catching the bright flight of the moment, airborne, between each blink. My friends said that I was graceful, that I made little leaps as I walked, so I floated like a bird, but they also teased me terribly, my friends, and cut me out of their games because polio had damaged my leg, and they called me peg-leg. I learned to swear and practised on them as much as I could, telling them they were hijos de puta and I was going to the fucking moon.

  One evening, the moon rising, I was out playing in the courtyard and my father called me in, his eyes intense, brimming with the pleasure he knew he was about to give me. My mother hugged me and set me on the floor in front of her.

  ‘My little angel,’ she said, and gave me a wrapped box to open. Never patient, I ripped off the packaging and there inside was a white dress with wings like an angel. I gasped with delight—they knew, they knew! It was as if they had looked into my heart and seen what I longed for. I tore off my clothes, flung them into the corner and put on the dress, the wings white and perfect at my shoulders. In the soaring moment, with all the transfixed delight which a child can feel, my spirit as fluent as the Rio Grande and my arms unfurled like an eagle’s wings, I ran to the courtyard, knowing that I would fly, so I jumped for the moon. And fell to earth, horribly.

  I was shattered and broken-hearted, and I sobbed while my parents laughed kindly, ‘Oh, Frida, Frida, of course they are not real wings— how could they be real?’ How could they not be real? I thought, because flight is real and hope is real and magic is real, and I cried furiously. These were more real to me than anything, and I had no wish for substitutes. They ask for flight, kids do, they ask for flight and only get straw wings. I could not fly and it felt as if there were ribbons from my skirts which were nailed into the ground. I could not fly but I had to.

  My first memory was of the idea of the moon. Our schoolteacher was weird, with a wig and strange clothes, and she was standing in a darkened classroom while we were hushed with surprise as her face was lit from underneath by a candle she was holding. It jagged her features and jangled her face to a skull, like children on the Mexican Day of the Dead turning themselves into spookies by shining torches up under their chins. In her other hand, she held an orange and she told us that the sun (the candle) lit the earth (the orange) and the moon, but she didn’t have three hands and the moon was pure idea, an exile present only in its name. (Present in my mind, though, full and shining.) This was the widening universe, so overwhelming that I pissed myself. The teachers made me take off my wet dress and put on some clothes from another girl and I hated that kid from then on. That night I stared unblinking at the moon until my eyes were watering and I knew I would fly there one day.

  Before I flew to the moon, though, I dragged that girl across the road and started strangling her and to this day I remember her tongue writhing out of her mouth. The baker came by and yanked me away from her but I didn’t care because I knew I would fly to the moon and she wouldn’t.

  I recovered from polio, and I grew fierce, boxing, playing football and swimming, and I remember those days of skates, bicycles and boats as if it was a girl’s boyhood, those days when I was as sleek and disobedient as an otter, tempestuously playful and revelling in it. I was sent to catechism class with my sister and we escaped and went to an orchard to eat quinces. I will never forget how sweet was the fruit of our disobedience in that orchard.

  I scampered quicksilver through my childhood, out to being a naughty teenager when everything tasted of wine, melons and chilli. I wore a peaked cap and men’s suits so they tutted, the neighbours, who does she think she is? I scorned them—I scorned all those who scorned me—and I took a cigarette lighter and darted towards the hems of their shawls till they squawke
d and flapped my hands away. (And the trompetilla sniggered to the cactus.) In my gang at college we played havoc, in all the keys of chaos. Cleverer, quicker, droller and better read than most of the teachers, we exploded with anarchy and mischief. We got hold of a donkey, one day, and rode it through the college, falling about laughing at the stale-faces who tried to tell us off. We caught a stray dog and tied it up with fireworks, and lit them so the dog shot off dementedly around the corridors. Poor dog, I thought later. At the time, I was drunk, giggling like a skellington in wellingtons, flowers sprouting from my skull. What flower? Ix-canan, in its Mayan name, the guardian of the forest, which they also call the firecracker bush.

  I was fifteen and I carried a world in my satchel: books, quotes, notebooks, butterflies, drawings and flowers. I cut my hair like a boy, wore overalls, and my eyes shone with devilry and love. The stale-faces called me irreverent. Absolutely not, I snapped, I revere Walt Whitman, Gide, Cocteau and Eliot, Marx, Hegel and Engels, Pushkin, Gogol and Tolstoy. We were terrible show-offs: ‘Alejandro, lend me your Spengler, I don’t have anything to read on the bus!’ I cried to my clandestine lover. We went busking, playing the violin in the Loreto Garden, listening to the organ-grinders and skating at dawn. In imagination, we climbed the Himalayas, rowed down the Amazon and sauntered across Russia. I read the imaginary biography of the painter Paolo Uccello and adored it so much that I learned it off by heart.

  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.