illustrate Clara wrings the throat of an imaginary father.
Clara gestures to the paintings on the four walls. She thinks the Velázquez has a quiet movement, but that the Picassos show a frantic mind. Velázquez was in favor at the time he painted, while Picasso was in exile. “His are nothing like the original, the original doesn’t matter. This shows what a different time we live in. For that alone it is important work.”
Clara stands resolutely in front of one of Picasso’s portraits of the Infanta Margarita Maria. A detail from the Velázquez. It’s the figure Arlette humorously compared herself with and, for me, becomes another coincidence. Clara standing there is a superimposition, one that removes the scene for a moment of private contemplation, a moment I don’t want to make too much of. Anyway Arlette was Velázquez’s version, not Picasso’s. Still I can almost see Arlette rolling her big eyes from side to side, ruminating aloud about dark backgrounds or negative space, her feet curled under her on the couch in her living room. She might like Clara, at least admire her will and politics, I think, if not agree with her approach to art. Clara’s body is still rigid with attention. She turns to me. Shall we go? she asks, taking my arm. Nowadays museums depress me.
I can hear Gregor in her voice, the way she thinks, as if he were her son. We drink coffee in an outdoor café in the center of the city, with trees and plants encircling us rapturously. The hours pass. Clara holds me in the grip of her narrative. She tells me she is an artist, a Communist and a lesbian, what she calls a triple threat. Clara married twice in New York, both times to a sympathetic man, another homosexual. She doesn’t use the word gay and articulates each syllable of homosexual distinctly, proposing it as the proper formulation, the more complicated one commensurate to the position. She tells me that in those days, the thirties, the forties, even the fifties, that’s what they did, marry each other. She describes our time as a crueler one. She moves from one cruelty to another. During the McCarthy era even though like many others she had torn up her Party membership card years before and wouldn’t be directly implicated, not asked to testify, she was out of the U.S. more than in it, establishing residence in Paris and Rome. Her last husband was rich and today she is a well-heeled widow—she first says high-heeled, then corrects herself—maybe a contradiction, she confesses wryly, for a lesbian Communist, but one she carries with dignity.
With Clara I venture into a disappearing world. It’s as if I were an extra in
Fantastic Voyage
, exploring an oceanic universe, or an archaeologist digging for a vanished civilization, congealed in Clara. She herself may be concealed in terms like “witness” and “survivor” which make her larger than life, her slice of life. lt turns out, not surprisingly, that she is writing her memoirs. Time is short and her memory, she reports, is not what it was even ten years ago. It seems sharp to me. The wine is warm now, she complains to the waiter in Spanish. Then she gives him a winsome look to soften the effect of her testiness. “People in that time—now too—they expose
Schadenfreude
. You know that word, it is joy, happiness in another’s loss. German is a wonderful language.
Schadenfreude
, that was also a part of that period.”
Clara clasps my hand and looks into my eyes. Let me interpret myself, she exclaims, I am so happy to be with a young American woman. She doesn’t seem to be ironic. This stated, or read into the record, she flies from one anecdote to another, eager to divulge her past as if I will capture what she releases, one repository to another. In one instant she is ebullient and the next, piqued or downcast. Like Zoran, she’s mercurial. Liquid and solid. The quicksilver god Mercury, god of luck and travel, may be at our table and if I’m lucky on my travels
Clara gestures to the paintings on the four walls. She thinks the Velázquez has a quiet movement, but that the Picassos show a frantic mind. Velázquez was in favor at the time he painted, while Picasso was in exile. “His are nothing like the original, the original doesn’t matter. This shows what a different time we live in. For that alone it is important work.”
Clara stands resolutely in front of one of Picasso’s portraits of the Infanta Margarita Maria. A detail from the Velázquez. It’s the figure Arlette humorously compared herself with and, for me, becomes another coincidence. Clara standing there is a superimposition, one that removes the scene for a moment of private contemplation, a moment I don’t want to make too much of. Anyway Arlette was Velázquez’s version, not Picasso’s. Still I can almost see Arlette rolling her big eyes from side to side, ruminating aloud about dark backgrounds or negative space, her feet curled under her on the couch in her living room. She might like Clara, at least admire her will and politics, I think, if not agree with her approach to art. Clara’s body is still rigid with attention. She turns to me. Shall we go? she asks, taking my arm. Nowadays museums depress me.
I can hear Gregor in her voice, the way she thinks, as if he were her son. We drink coffee in an outdoor café in the center of the city, with trees and plants encircling us rapturously. The hours pass. Clara holds me in the grip of her narrative. She tells me she is an artist, a Communist and a lesbian, what she calls a triple threat. Clara married twice in New York, both times to a sympathetic man, another homosexual. She doesn’t use the word gay and articulates each syllable of homosexual distinctly, proposing it as the proper formulation, the more complicated one commensurate to the position. She tells me that in those days, the thirties, the forties, even the fifties, that’s what they did, marry each other. She describes our time as a crueler one. She moves from one cruelty to another. During the McCarthy era even though like many others she had torn up her Party membership card years before and wouldn’t be directly implicated, not asked to testify, she was out of the U.S. more than in it, establishing residence in Paris and Rome. Her last husband was rich and today she is a well-heeled widow—she first says high-heeled, then corrects herself—maybe a contradiction, she confesses wryly, for a lesbian Communist, but one she carries with dignity.
With Clara I venture into a disappearing world. It’s as if I were an extra in
Fantastic Voyage
, exploring an oceanic universe, or an archaeologist digging for a vanished civilization, congealed in Clara. She herself may be concealed in terms like “witness” and “survivor” which make her larger than life, her slice of life. lt turns out, not surprisingly, that she is writing her memoirs. Time is short and her memory, she reports, is not what it was even ten years ago. It seems sharp to me. The wine is warm now, she complains to the waiter in Spanish. Then she gives him a winsome look to soften the effect of her testiness. “People in that time—now too—they expose
Schadenfreude
. You know that word, it is joy, happiness in another’s loss. German is a wonderful language.
Schadenfreude
, that was also a part of that period.”
Clara clasps my hand and looks into my eyes. Let me interpret myself, she exclaims, I am so happy to be with a young American woman. She doesn’t seem to be ironic. This stated, or read into the record, she flies from one anecdote to another, eager to divulge her past as if I will capture what she releases, one repository to another. In one instant she is ebullient and the next, piqued or downcast. Like Zoran, she’s mercurial. Liquid and solid. The quicksilver god Mercury, god of luck and travel, may be at our table and if I’m lucky on my travels
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