A Love Letter from a Stray Moon (3 page)

And I am Frida but also I am not Frida. I am her paintings and the nature of her love. I am her shadow. I am many women, I answer to many names, any who knows grief. I am all the phases of the moon, I am all her qualities. I am
El Duende
, I am the light of the psyche, writing from my soul, speaking to the psyche of humanity, the psyche which is shaped like the wings of a butterfly or a moth; fly closer, fly nearer to me. After the accident, I was caged in plaster casts for months and on this hard shell I drew butterflies as my first votive painting, encouraging the soul to crack the carapace one day and fly free to the moon.

Years afterwards I met him again, so long ago that it was only yesterday or tomorrow even. I went to ask his advice about my paintings. He marked me and told me later that I looked brilliant as an eagle, my eyes were talons to catch the world I painted. Stock-still, he gazed at me as if there was an entirely new light in his mind's sky. My mind staggered a moment at the acuteness of the sight, the sudden prospect I had not known, seeing his eyes so undefended, so open, sweet as a child and ungated as the Amazon. The door is never locked so I walked straight in.

On the instant, I knew that his soul was of ferocious consequence to mine: I knew that his meaning endlessly mattered to my mind. Something leapt in my womb, like a turning tiny baby. So young his huge eyes, shining and laughing; babyface, moonface, my father, my child—he was all generations to me, all but one.

When I first saw him, I loved him, Prometheus, Maui the Trickster who steals fire, flame-stealer, fire-smuggler, I remember no spark, only fire from the start. He was feral and full of furious love, his words had teeth, his curiosity was a monkey wrench, tearing up half-truths, forcing open unknowns. He defied the standard, dared to detonate the paved path and find the green roaring beneath, he exploded his own mind (because it was there). He refused obedience. No one could ever tell him what to do, so he authored every word of his life, carving the ceaseless demand of the self's absolute authenticity onto the stone of every single day.

‘Every time he turns a corner, he is moonstruck, and you would be the moon,' my friend said to me. He dared to stare at the moon and I silvered his eyes, but I also gazed back, unable to look away, mesmerised by him. If he was moon-struck by me, I was lightning-struck by him, with his lightning cast in passion, electric in his hand, a stave thrown in love across the moon-mad miles, so he cracked my breastbone, broke open my heart, made it bigger for love of him.

I fell for him. ‘
Mamá
, look, the moon's fallen out of the sky.' And there it lies, surprised, swollen on the edge of the world, the lip of the moon kissing the horizon's smile. A man I could cradle, plump as the Buddha, in my arms. Diego, your name means ‘supplanter, he that replaces'; he supplanted my loneliness and replaced my exile with love.

I was captivated. I walked across the sky, we talked for ten hours and then I put my hand on his arm and finally said what I came to say: I demand to know you. A demand of my daemon, to find my own shamans, to love the oceans and to know him. A polite but non-negotiable demand.

I should never have come but I had absolutely no choice. It was dangerous enough to meet him once and it was a hundred times more dangerous to walk the road to his door to begin a magnum opus of the soul. I was his lodestar as he was mine, we pulled each other with an ineluctable magnetism and, although it was an almost unbearable love, it was inevitable, for how could his singularity not have cried out to know how my strange and single light shines? How could I, parched, thirsting for life so near me yet so far, not have wanted to drink his liquid mind? I held his face gently in my two cool hands, tilted it towards my lips and drank and drank, but this was not a thirst I could slake and I was as insatiable for him as the moon is for water.

The song of my desire was louder than I could contain, like a wren, seemingly too small for the hugeness of its elation. My mind flew to him habitually, flitting always to the same branch of the same hedge. The blackbird must sing the dusk and the clouds must fill and swell till they ache and rain, and the tree root must crack whatever clay is in its way. So must I, so must. The smell of him. Must must have its way, in urgent, argent, silver desire.

Every month I dazzled him, making him sleepless with desire. I aroused him and crazed him and unminded him. I didn't suggest: I demanded, and this demand was dementing. He ransacked the moon, every muscle of mine he wrung for its pleasure, and afterwards was left only sweet lassitude and a smiling sleep, and my glistening cunt was moonlight shining its own silver in the same night. (My body paints, every month, a still life. Just one red streak of blood across a white page.
Still death
. It is part of my bleak fiesta, my mordant carnival.)

We kissed under the streetlights and our passion was electric: each lamp we kissed under suddenly went off, and only when our lips parted did it switch back on again.

This was the Age of Cobalt: electricity, purity and love. I bent his bowstring taut, compelling his passion, in the tangent of aspiration, the tension of slant in the stretch of mind. In the furthest reach of the body, my orgasm in his arms made me arch my back like a jaguar; his psyche drew together with mine and we yawned like lions.

His reckless intelligence delighted me, his naughty clowning in the aisles for centuries till I split my sides laughing—he tickled my fancy, triggering a ripple effect across the whole of the Pacific, a million tiny waves rilling round a trillion tiny inlets. He was the starriest thing I could see in any direction. We were Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl but, in spite of our love, we were also catastrophic for each other; the second-greatest accident of my life was him.

He would walk even when he didn't know where his walking would take him, compelled to blaze his singular trail, taking a machete and carving his way through to tomorrow morning. His was a hunting mind, nomadic, curious, exquisite to me, sought after, sought out and, while my nomadism was forced on me, he chose his for himself, his superb, undestinationed journey, his utter faithfulness never to stop. And in this we co-fascinated. He, trapeze artist, soloist: I on the single swing of my trajectory. My arc of light in the sky, his pioneer path on earth. Yet he was so paradoxical—part nomad, part tree, becoming rooted in the earth, his deep and dear home, and anchored in myth, buying pre-Columbian idols of stone and clay, greedy for them as he was greedy for women. Not just me.

He was born with the wings of laughter and the gift of flame, fire-stealer for sure and hell-raiser by repute. I alone knew him as a hearth-maker. Wherever he went, he carried a hearth in his hands and a path in his mind, the hearth the always, the path the onwards, so he stayed forever in one place and was forever on the move. I loved him for his inflammability, because I saw his fire everywhere, even in the frozen north, igloos cosy within, glowing pale yellow from a lamp of moss and seal fat.

He played all parts, gardener and gypsy, carpenter and cook, artist of the ordinary, the nation's most famous painter, shaman and fool, physician and metaphysician, drummer of the night and dreamer of the day, a dangerous, beautiful creation, dissolute scamp, chief mischief-maker, wanderer, artist, tramp. His nomadic longing mind wanted more: more path, more sky, more moon, more myth, more women. He looked up.

I was mute except through mouths other than my own and my only voice was my light, my speechless eloquent silverlight, so words like wings alighted meaning on silent white paper. The moon was the first author, the writer who never spoke aloud, and man was full of language and my silence piqued him. What was my meaning and how did I voice my shine? How did I author the tides and spell my passion? With what gravity and what levity did I write my courses? How did I howl the wolf, and why the howl? (I can tell you: the wolf, then a sweet cub batting the violets with its too-big paws, is now an old wolf howling over the bones.)

His languages delighted me: bravura, plethora and plenty; Babel, cornucopia and harvest; barnfuls of abundance, basketfuls of onions and armfuls of icons. His mind was mint-green in every new trefoil of leaf, another mile, another language, and his words romped all over the world, rafting across Polynesia, drifting sacred in Sufi whispers, taking wing from the Amazon and rambling thoughtful across the grasslands of Argentina. I watched him for thousands of years, willing him on, disobedient, conscious, rude. Ignore the dumb god, get a stonking hard-on, smash the icons and die, if you must, with your panache intact.

I loved him entirely because that is my nature, whole and perfectly circled, and he asked me to marry him—so, on a sudden hillside, a sudden outlaw vow which was an eternal marriage and a lifelong separation too. I am seared by separation, as if there are square brackets round my heart, putting my love in parenthesis, punctuated by his other loves. They said ours would be a difficult love, perhaps an impossible one, because the man is not supposed to fall in love with the moon. The moon didn't mean to and nor did the man. It would have been tidier if they had never met, and more convenient, but the fire so flat, the path so unsung, the woods so unenchanted, the night so undrummed.

If Diego was in his studio, I took him lunch every day in a basket covered with flowers and I braided flowers into my hair, with rings on all my fingers, and I wore Tehuana skirts, embroidered and ribboned, dressing to make my presence defy my exile, to make my beauty defy my pain. At home, every day I made the table into a still life, piling painted bowls full of fruit which the chipmunk tried to snatch, filling clay pots with flowers which the parrot pecked at, displaying the tortillas on decorative plates which the dogs licked while the osprey watched from her perch on my shoulder. Even when I had no appetite, I feasted on the sight.

I wanted ribbons to tie myself to life. Look at all the ways we are tapestried into life, the delicate intricacy of the threads, vines, tendrils, ropes, tresses, cords, tubes, veins, strings and fingers. Words, too, are tendrils, reaching from my mind to his. I had a thought; a vine of thought curled around my psyche and I wrote to him—an offshoot of the vine—the words transposed into the thread of ink which twists up to his mind, making him smile, his smile a broad line across his face, and he telephones me, the telephone wires such sensitive threads that I can hear him smiling; come over, I said, he came, his quizzical fingers asking questions of mine, yes, my fingers answer, leading his down to the dark jungle vines of my sex, which telegram their delighted replies up to my brain. And after, eyes closed, the air has invisible skeins which link his heart to mine, while beyond me, beyond him, it is the same thread,
La Vida
, life itself which ties us to every plant, every animal. Under the different surfaces, the same thread of vitality, hence the Aztec prayer: ‘I am the feather, I am the drum and the mirror of the gods. I am the song. I rain flowers, I rain songs.' And the rest is just painted bread. I am this metamorphosis: I am a deer, I am a mountain, my fingers are vines, and flowers bloom in my hair.

Once, we arranged to meet at the movies, but the crowd was large and I couldn't find him anywhere. Then I heard someone whistling the first bar of the ‘
Internationale
' and immediately I whistled the second bar and stopped, my face gleeful; he whistled the third, I the fourth and so on until we found each other. The ‘
Internationale
'. The entire world. If I say he became the entire world to me, what does that mean? That everything I touch is him, everything I see is him. The colour of sky is him, the sound of the accordion and the blue guitar, the spikes of cactus, and the smell of cloves in the pillowcases is him.

He drew his hands around me, catscradling me without touching me, in strands of invisible silk, casting spells of protection and painting the air with strange patterns of healing, holding me as if I was an Aeolian harp and, without touching the strings, with his breath he sang my strings to song. I heard Orpheus those nights when we fucked, knuckled together like a chestnut while our eyes were bright like nutshine in the bedding leaves of the woods.

If there were too many clouds, he tore them down, Prospero to the task, a simple trick of the light, a conjury of the sun, because he was a wonder-worker, thaumaturge. I have watched him make matter out of dream, like the day when he pasted a rainbow on the sky because it was looking a bit bleak. He transformed realities, going under them to the poetics beneath, and under the poetics the physics, and under the physics the transmuting energies, that sound, for instance, can alter matter (and how he was a whistler of worlds), and always, though, under the transmuting energies, was the sweetest alchemy of love for all things. From soil he learned the truths of love and in the earth of his own heart he knew what slender epistles the seedlings write, appealing to the sun, and what need the human soul may have at different seasons, the greenhouse now, the prairie then, the dagger mountain from time to time.

So conjure me starlight, Prospero, and I will wear it like a jacket. Take a cloud, sewn with blossom, and I will sleep under it like a mohair blanket. Weave me a spellbound home and I will nest in it like a bird in its own spring. Throw me madness like dice, you clown, and I will wear my knickers on my head like a tea cosy isn't and use a biscuit for every other simile. Come to me cockhard and stun me with desire and I will outglow the embers for days. Kiss my lips as we part as they do parting joy from sorrow (
alegría, miserere
), and I will take the descant part on an old school recorder and play my way to heaven.

My passion electrifies the domestic and that is why, when he leaves, the candles gutter, the fire goes grey, the cats keen for him, and the flowers huddle chilly in the vase, when he leaves, when he leaves. How many times did he leave me before he left me?

To take his hand I would have to measure every inch in miles, but to take his mind there is no distance—all these moon miles between us are thinner than a leaf skeleton. He touches me more than I can say, floating his poems in the waters of my soul, lying circled wet and lovely in his dreams and, as I sway the tides without touching them, so I became influent in him. I cannot touch him now but I trickled into his veins and melted into his mind so I became his delicate intricate, his inner intimate, his co-inspirator. Am I still? I don't know. But I know that he is both the silk of my tears and the reason for them.