slender, stunning neck. The background was a hot pink. The model’s measured gaze made the picture alluring and alarming by turns.
“Did you hear the critics?” said Madame Amadora.
“They marveled, I believe it was, at your ‘take on classical figures,’ ” said George.
“It was a very good take, if I may say so,” said Amadora.
They further praised her composition, use of color, and imagination, all of which were clever, unorthodox, and daring. “These pictures,” they said, “change everything.”
George sat in the chair across from his wife.
“I’m doing the zodiac next,” said Amadora. “Then perhaps the tarot—”
“You put in everything,” said George, “the trip to Paris, I mean. The stuffed animals, the lipstick—even that picture of the sewing machine, the one with the naked woman sewing—”
“Machine Worker in Summer, 1937.”
“—what was the material? It reminded me of clouds—”
“Tulle.”
“—all that billowing tulle in those Marie Antoinette colors. The only picture where you used them.” George smiled. “Madame Amadora.”
He rose, went to her as she raised her arms to be lifted up. A happy, sleepy middle-aged couple who believed that maybe it was possible to change one’s world. If the war could refigure his worldview, then so could she. The Surrealists said that no one had ever seen the atrocities like the atrocities in the Great War; it was a place none of them hadever known. The only response was to harness these nightmares and call them dreams.
Maybe one could forget the war and reinvent a place where it had never happened. Madame Amadora directed all her talents, all her imagination, all her love for her troubled husband into her work. And on this August night in 1939, they both believed that she had succeeded. Their feelings of possibility and well-being about this world would last until September, when they would be completely, and permanently, forgotten.
THE SENTIMENTAL PROBLEM OF CLARA ARGENTO OR MELLA’S TYPEWRITER
I hoped, M., that you would enjoy a good laugh when you heard I was accused of participating in the attempt to shoot Ortiz Rubio—“Who would have thought it, eh? Such a gentle looking girl who made such nice photographs of flowers and babies.”
These were the words Clara Argento wrote to her former lover, Morris Elliot, in 1929 while incarcerated in the Penitenciaría in Mexico City just before her deportation by the Mexican government, before they loaded her onto a Dutch cargo ship bound for Rotterdam as if she herself were just so much cargo. The first port of call was in the Caribbean, where the ship delivered six crates rumored to contain artifacts of New World gold purchased by an island dictator with the usual monarchical aspirations. Clara was confined to her quarters for the time it took to unload the boxes. The second port was New Orleans, where the ship docked for five days to empty and reload its cargo. Clara was detained in a holding cell, which she described in another letter to Morris Elliot as a cross between a jail and a hospital with its long row of empty beds.
The good news, she wrote, was that New Orleans was nothing like the horror of the Mexican prison where she had been held for two weeks, with its iron bed and filthy toilet and endless darkness, which had taxed her inner resources, leaving her to wrestle with her own sanity. The window of this latest location looked out on what she said was an American lawn, complete with flag and flagpole and, she wrote, a sight which should—were I not such a hopeless rebel—remind me constantly of the empire of “law & order” and other inspiring thoughts of that kind.
She was reticent to write about how a rather exquisite thirty-four-year-old Italian woman, finely built, sophisticated, and full of grace, who’d first sailed to America from Italy in 1913 as another hopeful immigrant at age seventeen—could end up in a New Orleans prison, in the midst of her
“Did you hear the critics?” said Madame Amadora.
“They marveled, I believe it was, at your ‘take on classical figures,’ ” said George.
“It was a very good take, if I may say so,” said Amadora.
They further praised her composition, use of color, and imagination, all of which were clever, unorthodox, and daring. “These pictures,” they said, “change everything.”
George sat in the chair across from his wife.
“I’m doing the zodiac next,” said Amadora. “Then perhaps the tarot—”
“You put in everything,” said George, “the trip to Paris, I mean. The stuffed animals, the lipstick—even that picture of the sewing machine, the one with the naked woman sewing—”
“Machine Worker in Summer, 1937.”
“—what was the material? It reminded me of clouds—”
“Tulle.”
“—all that billowing tulle in those Marie Antoinette colors. The only picture where you used them.” George smiled. “Madame Amadora.”
He rose, went to her as she raised her arms to be lifted up. A happy, sleepy middle-aged couple who believed that maybe it was possible to change one’s world. If the war could refigure his worldview, then so could she. The Surrealists said that no one had ever seen the atrocities like the atrocities in the Great War; it was a place none of them hadever known. The only response was to harness these nightmares and call them dreams.
Maybe one could forget the war and reinvent a place where it had never happened. Madame Amadora directed all her talents, all her imagination, all her love for her troubled husband into her work. And on this August night in 1939, they both believed that she had succeeded. Their feelings of possibility and well-being about this world would last until September, when they would be completely, and permanently, forgotten.
THE SENTIMENTAL PROBLEM OF CLARA ARGENTO OR MELLA’S TYPEWRITER
I hoped, M., that you would enjoy a good laugh when you heard I was accused of participating in the attempt to shoot Ortiz Rubio—“Who would have thought it, eh? Such a gentle looking girl who made such nice photographs of flowers and babies.”
These were the words Clara Argento wrote to her former lover, Morris Elliot, in 1929 while incarcerated in the Penitenciaría in Mexico City just before her deportation by the Mexican government, before they loaded her onto a Dutch cargo ship bound for Rotterdam as if she herself were just so much cargo. The first port of call was in the Caribbean, where the ship delivered six crates rumored to contain artifacts of New World gold purchased by an island dictator with the usual monarchical aspirations. Clara was confined to her quarters for the time it took to unload the boxes. The second port was New Orleans, where the ship docked for five days to empty and reload its cargo. Clara was detained in a holding cell, which she described in another letter to Morris Elliot as a cross between a jail and a hospital with its long row of empty beds.
The good news, she wrote, was that New Orleans was nothing like the horror of the Mexican prison where she had been held for two weeks, with its iron bed and filthy toilet and endless darkness, which had taxed her inner resources, leaving her to wrestle with her own sanity. The window of this latest location looked out on what she said was an American lawn, complete with flag and flagpole and, she wrote, a sight which should—were I not such a hopeless rebel—remind me constantly of the empire of “law & order” and other inspiring thoughts of that kind.
She was reticent to write about how a rather exquisite thirty-four-year-old Italian woman, finely built, sophisticated, and full of grace, who’d first sailed to America from Italy in 1913 as another hopeful immigrant at age seventeen—could end up in a New Orleans prison, in the midst of her
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