before me, these were the most vivid, most stunningly living images I had ever viewed. All of what it was to be human was contained, everything of fear and desire, of suffering and the desire to be immortal. To be remembered.
How long I stood before them, transfixed, I do not know. Only that Duchamp broke my communion by ushering over the subject of the portraits that had consumed me.
In the flesh, Frida Kahlo was as powerful as her work. Even she herself could capture only a pale imitation of her intensity in her eyes. I was shocked at how tiny she was, and thought that so much passion, so much fire condensed into so small a frame could only result in a volcano.
She wore the colors of a volcano, large yellow and blue flowers in her braided hair, and her blouse and shawl were embroidered with vines and trees and birds. A volcano at rest, seething underneath, Vesuvius biding its time to explode again. She was the only being in the room wrapped in red and green instead of the ubiquitous black, like a Madonna amid the saints.
“Frida, may I present Adam Mersel?” Duchamp was saying. “Adam is our conscience, which is to say, he will scald any painter whom he does not regard as honest. Unfortunately, we are all a passel of rogues. But we are fortunate that he is too erudite to descend from the Olympus of his taste to berate us for our inadequacies too often. So we invite him and keep his glass full and introduce him to the most beautiful women in the hopes that he will be too busy to write another one of his cruel and brilliant reviews.”
“Marcel, I protest,” I exclaimed. I would have said more had Frida not laughed just then.
“Well, then,” she said, slipping a delicate hand over my elbow, “we shall have to make certain that you are suitably convinced that all dishonesty among the artists here is only in bed and never on canvas. So tell me, honestly, what do you think?”
I drew a deep breath and stared deep into those burning eyes. “I think that yours is the most brutal and terrifying and utterly unforgiving work I have ever seen. It is also among the most beautiful.”
She searched my face for something, some hint that I was merely flattering her or lying.
“I have been accused of many things, and most of them are true,” I told her. “But I have never, in any way, been less than perfectly candid in my opnions about art. Ask Duchamp, if you like.”
“You would not be kind to a woman because you wished to seduce her?” Her voice was merely curious; there was no hint of judgment in her tone.
It was my turn to laugh. “I have rarely been called kind, and have never noticed that it would help a seduction in any case. No, if I want to seduce a woman I might flatter her beauty, but not her work. Usually it is best not to speak at all,” I told her. Strange, I thought at the time, that I felt so free to speak with candor.
“Yes,” she agreed thoughtfully. “Yes, you are right.” And then she laughed, rich and raucous, and grabbed two glasses of champagne from the waiter. She tossed one down her throat and raised an eyebrow when I did not do the same.
“Is there tequila in Paris, M. Mersel?” she demanded.
“There must be,” I answered carefully. “Everything eventually comes to Paris in the end, as it used to go to Rome. So if there is tequila in the world, there will be some in Paris.”
She took my glass from my hand and drained that as well before she spoke again. “At least you do not look like a banker,” she said, appraising me. “Too many of these Surrealists and Dadaists look like bankers.”
“Magritte certainly looks like a banker,” I agreed.
“He is Belgian, he can’t help but look respectable,” Duchamp said, having overheard us. “It isn’t his fault. Come on Adam, you cannot monopolize the lady of the hour. And you haven’t seen my latest yet.” I let Marcel steer me away toward his assemblage, a suitcase with sixty-four miniature reproductions of his earlier work. Ah, Marcel, if only you hadn’t stopped painting. Marcel Duchamp and Mary Reynolds are good people, and they are not so pretentious as most of their peers. Still, while I understand that it is sometimes necessary to break down meaning to break through it, I cannot find meaning itself entirely unnecessary. Dada in some form is adolescent, and Duchamp is so much better than that.
At the end of the evening I went to find Frida, to say good night, to ask where she was staying and if she might like to go for a drink some time, but she was already gone. “She went home early with Mary,” Duchamp told me. “Do you think I should worry? Frida likes women as well as men.”
“Ah, but does Mary?” I rejoined, and was rewarded with Duchamp’s smile. His mistress may not be entirely conventional, but he has no reason to doubt her loyalty. “She is staying with you and Mary, then?”
“For a month at least,” he told me.
“Well, I shall come and take her off your hands some time, then,” I said lightly. We both laughed, Marcel because he was still just a little drunk and me because I had not lost her.
Over the next two nights I wrote my column, combing the words, reworking the phrasing. I wanted to impress the artist as she had impressed me. I wanted to show her the depth of my appreciation, and to explain to the sophisticated of Paris that she was nothing of a Surrealist no matter what Breton might say. Surrealism is an intellectual pursuit and Frida’s paintings came from the fusion of heart and mind and faith altogether, something the world had lost since the death of Fra Angelico.
Over the period of two nights that I wrote I did not hunt, nor was I aware of any hunger. The art had been richer than any meal, than any night of blood, and so it was not until I had finished and sent the article to my editor that I realized it had been many days since I had last taken physical sustenance.
And so I hunted. It was not half so satisfying as looking at a truly good picture, but the body has its own demands. I took what I needed from a dark-haired girl in the Metro, staggering home after an evening of too much wine and too many cigarettes. If she noticed anything the next morning, she would ascribe it all to the late night and brilliant company.
On Friday, the magazine with my article appeared and its full printing, all four hundred copies, were gone before I even woke to the twilight. My own copy, delivered with the mail, lay on the table in the front hall. I phoned Duchamp, and he and Mary and Frida were just dressing to go to dinner with some American novelist whose name I have forgotten. Frida agreed to meet me later at a decently late hour, not that Americans care for such niceties. When I put down the receiver I felt like I had when I was still young and mortal and nervous and in love.
I showed Frida the city that night, my city, the secret Paris that breathes in the hours after midnight. We went down to the Quai d’Orsey when the moon had set and the Seine flowed like ink, lapping the stone and echoing under the arched bridges. I told her of the morning that river had turned red, choked with the bodies of a thousand wedding guests who had been massacred by their King four hundred years before my birth. We went to Montmartre and climbed the hundred white steps in the starlight, then turned to look at the city lying asleep before us.
“Have you always lived in Paris?” she asked, and I could see in her face that she understood that ‘always’ was far longer in my case.
“No. I was born in Germany and worked in Rome when it was the center of all things. Some day Paris will no longer be the center, it will be New York or Mexico City and I will move again.”
She nodded, and was for a brief moment sad.
I
