A Love Letter from a Stray Moon (5 page)

The years yearned their turnings into love, layer on layer of love laid down in leaves and straw, layers of books re-read, well-loved jokes re-told, boots lovelier with age and use. And for me too he laid layers of love, making tortillas, holding my frightened hand, yelping with glee in the rain, stroking away a headache, cooking me supper, teasing me, enchanting me in glades of twilight, keeping me company in coffee, in toast, in wine, in sadness, in candlelight, in kindness, in carouse, in sobriety, in the most ordinary and therefore the most extraordinary handmade and weatherworn days of home. It was all I wanted, all but.

I lost a child. I had always imagined that my womb was like a verdant bed of green leaves, glistening, but now I have learned that it's more of a bomb site, the broken glass and concrete of my shattered pelvis stabbing any tiny baby who tried to nestle a moment there. Bleeding and weeping, I painted that loss. I made history, as he said: ‘Never before had a woman put such agonised poetry on canvas.'

Everything I love is tied together, and the world is threaded with roots, filaments, fingers, the veins and bloodlines, those ancestral ribbons, tying grandmothers to granddaughters. From life death blossoms, and from death life engraves itself again, but not for me because I am entirely cut from that tapestry now, outside that cycle, further than I can tell you. Those scissors in the hand of
La Destina
, one scissor blade the tramline crossing the blade of the bus, cut the red ribbons of the generations within me. I could have been not only a mother but a grandmother, and an ancestor too, one who would have shone. I could have been part of life's veins and promises.
La Destina
refused.

I watch my sister now, knowing all her little deaths from which more life comes, but mine is a breathing death, an elliptical life, foreshadowed before my time, lit silver when I want to be green. The vine of the ancestors twists up from earth towards me—two little children who adore me as aunt—and I lean as far as I can without falling, but it is hopeless. The green and the red will never know me now.

So, then, I have no child and the terror of that loss I cannot face but I have to see it every day and every night, gazing on my sister earth, mother of all that I would love. I circle her, pale and beyond envy for what I cannot have. She has surpassed me in almost every way, in profusion, in plenty; the primordial sculptor. How she is fecund, how she is happy, while I am empty and barren as Lorca's orange tree. Though I turn the cycles of warm time for all women, I am stuck in a coldness, as if winter had welded itself to the axle of the year and the wheel had stopped turning and spring wouldn't come.

I loved her before humanity existed. I grew up with her, nestling planets held in the gravity of love. Earth, my luckier sister, my happier sister, my sister of rivers, my sister of the green-velvet dress, my sister trilling children quicker than you could sing half an aria from
The Magic Flute
, my sister of sunfuls of warmth, my sister of all fertilities, my wet, wet sister, rich with, oozing with, glistening with. Moisture, life and springingness.

I am not jealous, I have never been envious. I wish her only more blossom, more oranges, more goats, more children, but my grief becomes inconsolable every month. So inconsolable that I drench the earth, for if I must weep with loss I will not bleed alone—I will tip the oceans sideways so they share my kinetic, mad, electric blood.
La Llorona
, the woman weeping by the river, looks to me and, when I cry, the rivers burst their banks. I have no soil for seed, not a drop of water and I know no harvest. Though I bring all things to their fullest potential, in me there is no quickening life, no possibilities. I applaud my sister but I am anguished for more than my narrow slice of sky.

I would have chosen to be Cuaxolotl, goddess of the hearth, but I was made Coyolxauhqui, goddess of the moon. As such, I am always exiled, on the brink of mind and light. Does it matter how I yearn for the hearth or for green day and fullness, round belly and fruitness? He came to love my lips for the language they write across the sky in the mind's light—I have lips, yes, but no smooth pelvis to hold the thunder of birth. It is already cracked. I have the hips of a boy, and I am vividly barren, my eternal, strange unfuckedness.

I painted my barrenness and the fertility of the earth. ‘Children are the days, and this is where I end,' I wrote, but it wasn't true, and anyway children adored me: I treated them as equals and they in turn—with greater generosity—treated me as an equal of theirs. I masked my longing with pets: dogs and cats, monkeys, doves and parrots, an eagle and a deer.

Cosmic and telluric, external and internal, I painted my own myth, that I must give birth to myself. If I can't physically be a mother then I must begin my motherhood in the most metaphysical way possible. I painted like no one else and, as a painter, I gave birth to myself. My paintings, he said, were ‘acid and tender, hard as steel and delicate and fine as a butterfly's wing, loveable as a beautiful smile, and profound and cruel as the bitterness of life.'

I painted the desert of my days, for I was deserted and lonely, limping through my life. Limping? Did I say limping? Not limping but striding firmly from crisis to crisis. And when my pain made him sad and guilty I'd draw mischievous pornographic sketches which made him snort with laughter, bullfrog honking in the pond.

The left side of my body is painted darkly now, with the moon in tears by my head. Once, I painted myself holding my palette in the form of my heart, painting my vulnerability with my heart's blood. Now it is different. I paint myself, holding my palette as if it were a shield. My art alone is my protection, shielding me from the pain of loss.

If You are Too Easily,
Dangerously,
Enchantable

I
created a bed, a four-poster bed with skeletons on top, surrounded by shells and under the canopy I put a glass-covered box full of butterflies. Whitman, his beard full of butterflies, said Lorca, whose mind was full of moonlight.

Diego created a garden, more beautiful than any I'd seen, and created a home into which everyone could come. My Diego. He was never mine: he belonged to himself, and he was too generous, too universal in his love to belong to me or anyone and, in that generosity, the trap was set. A wall of organ cactus grew between us, and the fountains in the courtyard played instead of us.

In the beginning was the word, right? Wrong. In the beginning,
I
was. I sang one pure white note into the black silence. It was I who let there be mindlight—other light more magical than the sun's, in those lovely days when the world was young. Young it continued to be for aeons: young it could have been forever. In those lovely days, he used to come to all my parties, he drank too much, he fucked, he jumped burning embers, he played, he stayed up all night and I beamed with pleasure, for then he was truly enlightened: delight lit him, he shone in my light. Now he shuts the curtains, walls me out, he will have no tryst with me. He did not leave me for another woman but for
every
other woman. This was his nature.

All those who are exiled look to me for their primal simile and I am pale with exile's hunger, having no barley, no hops, no hearthside, no ruddy cheeks. I am sick with an exile's thirst for the bucketloads, oceanloads of water tipping around in giant puddles on earth. Coatlicue is the goddess of all exiled women, all those who shine with too much silver, goddess of both birth and death, her skirts rattle with skulls as she walks and those skulls shine with moonlight and knowing.

My exile forced me to be nomadic, limping across the heavens with bare white feet and, since I never wore shoes, after several millennia my feet bled from walking. I leave bloody footprints now across the sky, and I leave bloody footprints on earth, across the world a million bloodstained bedsheets every month, the footprints of my nomadic courses, which is why still today you can see a million women by a million wells at dawn, washing out the bloody footprints of the moon. I am so tired of walking alone. There is a pair of parakeets at the gate, here a family, there a marriage, with a nest of children, and everywhere they lie in twos while I shine with solitude, bright with its utter light.

But if you look carefully when I am crescent you will see a strange glimmer, the faintest trace of light which only the most observant see at the edge of my circle, the low light of my liminal love, only just visible, only at night, my only intimacy described in shadow terms, like the moon in love with man on the dark side only, on the far and other, the only unlonely side, and only for moments, for when the moon turns a half-inch in her sleep she half-wakes and knows she is alone again, holding herself only in her own arms, morning after night in the bruised edge of the sky.

The moon was homeless, and how many there were who wanted the moon unhoused, hurt by the road, gypsy of the sky whose freedom they could relish only with envy and admire only with resentment. Oh, the moon's used to it, she doesn't need a home, she's a natural nomad, they said, because they wanted her for a symbol of a life they were too mortgaged to lead. (Lorca knew the sadness of solitude, that gypsy grief, and we console each other. My Mexico understands exile, and has a proud history of giving a home to political refugees.) I am exiled from the simplest dream, to lie on a beach in the sun with my head in his plump lap, to swim naked with him, to hold his hand in a taverna in the evening and at night to feel his breath softly fanning my cunt to flame as one would blow on the embers to catch fire, and I can no more have this than the moon could crawl down a duckboard off the roof, balance her toe on the rainwater butt, and hop down to give you a quick peck on the cheek. So I must turn my face away and sing my solo to the cosmos.

I painted
The Two Fridas
, one of me in Tehuana dress, woven into the indigenous earth of Mexico, and the other in European clothes. (We both have hearts too open, and our human hearts are on the left, with its rightful political hint.)

Indigenous Frida holds a tiny egg-shaped portrait of Diego, attached to her heart by an artery which is also an umbilical cord. European Frida, meanwhile, is bleeding to death.

For Mexico itself, of course, it is the indigenous lands which are bleeding to death, and
The Two Mexicos
is the masterpiece being repainted now in the figure of Subcomandante Marcos, fusing the two. One Mexico is traditional and indigenous, speaking the language of land; the other is Western, speaking the urban poetics of the page. The two marry in the Zapatista rebellion of today, and together they write a message in blood from the open veins of Mexico's heart, for humanity and against neoliberalism, calling all grief-surgeons of the world to help stem the flow.

I have to tell you, because it makes me smile, that Subcomandante Marcos had a crush on me when he was just a teenager; he loved my revolutionary nature and my art. I died when he was still very young, but I passed the baton on to him.
Poet, revolutionary, romantic
.

In the genealogy of revolutionaries, I was fathered by Emiliano Zapata, and I was born in Mexico's earlier rebellion. In the register of births, Marcos was born during my lifetime but, in the register of revolutionary significance, Marcos says he was born in 1984 as the Zapatista insurgents moved to begin training in the Lacandon jungle. (We are all Zapata. We are all Marcos.)

I really only have one disagreement with Subcomandante Marcos, and even then it stems from an agreement. We both think that the moon has hope, but whereas he thinks that her hope is to escape her tie to earth, to fly away, maybe to Jupiter or Saturn, I think her hope is to be tied closer and closer by a sweet silk thread to humanity, and that her grief is because of the distance between them. Who is right, Marcos or me? Who knows? Well, without wanting to pull rank on this one—especially against the supreme commander of Mexico's rebel army—I do. I am the moon, after all, in one of her incarnations. Marcos once planned to send a message, on a little satellite, to the moon, saying: ‘It would do her good to know that someone understands her.' Yes, and you. It would do you good too.

‘It happened many years ago. It is a story of a love that was not, that was left unfulfilled. It is a sad story…and terrible,' says the
subcomandante
, pipe to his lips, eyes to the mountains now. He speaks for himself, for me, and for countless thousands, but beneath one ski-mask is another, beneath the Zapatistas of today, that earlier revolution, when my story began, my sad story and terrible, my story of a love not yet fulfilled.

Marcos, they say, is the most wanted man in Mexico. I can quite believe it. Women want him hard in bed, eh, Don Durito of the Lacandon? Kids put on ski-masks and want to be him. But a small and horrible bunch of bankers, bureaucrats and soul-murderers want to kill him, not because he is a rebel leader but because he is a poet. To them, I'd say: Be careful. Would you assassinate the moon? All that would happen is you'd shatter her reflection in the lake, scatter it in a thousand pieces. So too, if you murder Marcos, a thousand shiny coins of priceless heroism will put on ski-masks and climb the mountain under a moon of vehement poetry. Like Lorca, the
subcomandante
writes the poetry of the toreador, and he knows how the bulls of Wall Street have gored the
campesinos
.