A Love Letter from a Stray Moon (7 page)

There is a myth that all things wasted or lost on earth are treasured on the moon, which is why all the lost boys end up on the moon. The moon is always what might have been, and I do treasure what is lost, so when the Amazon is gone, it's only me who will remember it, when whole countries are submerged under the sea, it's only me who'll still know their names. I will record it all,
re-cordis
, from ‘heart' in Latin; it will pass through my heart again and again and again. I was, before god was or you, and I'll be there afterwards, Scheherazade of the stars, full of stories of shamans and jaguars and polar bears and firecrackers. I'll be the storyteller of all that happened on earth, but my priceless, precious one, my understander, will be long gone.

It isn't often that I want to tell a story from the land of the future because I do not want to overshadow love with despair, but let me describe what will happen to my changeling child. I knew him when he was a nine-year-old Indian boy from Oaxaca, and he was my disciple, coming to watch me paint. In a few years, he will be orphaned, without family or hearth, becoming a smiling exile, surviving by his loveliness alone. He turns up in a village one day, a refugee from drought and flood, and, smiling, asks a villager where he can sleep. The villager is harrowed with anxiety, his face crossed with worry and sleeplessness, hunger and grief, but this smiling lad is hardly more than a boy—and he will help if he can.

‘I have a boat,' he says, ‘you can sleep in that.'

So in the daytime, the villager fishes from the little boat and at night the boy makes his bed in it, and is rocked to sleep on peaceful waves. He makes a little money begging—enough to eat tortillas, not enough to build himself a roof or a house. One evening towards sunset, at high tide, an unnatural storm blows in. No storm like this was ever recorded in the village. His boat shudders, gulping in the waves. In one violent surge, with a shriek—no warning, no time—the boat is torn from its moorings, and flung loose to the ocean. The storm rages furiously inland, the child sees all the roofs ripped off from the houses, and the walls crumple like paper, but he can hear no scream, no shout, no panic, for his boat is cast further and further out to sea.

Is there another word for sunrise? the child thinks, but there is no one to answer and, as the night falls deep, the black clouds roll back and it is a full-moon night so he tries to smile at me, but this time he cannot. For the only time in his life, he has stopped smiling, and now he knows exile from everything, even land, and in his strange, sad voyage he wonders now if it could have been different. He blames no one but he wonders. And he cannot smile. His story is unfinished and he asked me to keep his story safe and—as he was a child of all new beginnings—he asked me never to write the ending as he slipped into an unsmiling sleep.

Shakespeare knew this story, though it was one he hadn't yet written. He knew my lovely little Indian boy, and lent him to Titania, and he knew the chaos, writing it into the play in which he gave me a starry role. When Titania and Oberon were separated, sundered as Diego and Frida, a rift was written in the weather. Unnatural winds rise ‘as in revenge' and the rivers ‘have overborne their continents' while ‘the green corn hath rotted' and the field is drowned. He said that I was ‘pale in my anger', and, yes, I must admit to some of that, although there is far more sorrow than rage in me. The seasons alter, he said, with frosts on roses, and sweet summer buds open in winter. ‘The spring, the summer, the childing autumn, angry winter, change their wonted liveries; and the mazed world, by their increase, now knows not which is which.'

The childing autumn, I bite my lip to eclipse myself. I do not want to talk about that any more. It is too late.

I swim towards you, drowning in sky.

My mother's skull is wreathed in smiles.

A weird light is brightening me now, a lightness at noon; in the midwinter, there is a twilight which frightens me as the horizon glimmers and, if light could ever seem sinister, this light does. My heart is lit like this, lit with drugs and alcohol, and I hallucinate with images from the future as well as the past.

With my friend the fawn, we pretend to be reindeer migrating, we run on ice which should have been firm, but now suddenly the ice is cracking, splintering and giving way. Falling, my legs are broken in the shards and plates of broken ice and the fawn snorts with fear, its trusting eyes chaotic with panic. Rolling fissures of ice crack and break with appalling frequency, bombs of ice explode, a soundtrack of war. I cannot tell if this is inside my head or outside.

In the cinema, I watch a newsreel about the Spanish Civil War and they play it with Wagner as the backing music. ‘The Ride of the Valkyries' swoops through my head, winged and terrible. The Valkyries, the warrior maidens, gallop together, meeting on a mountain, each with a dead hero in her saddlebag, Valhalla's army, and I think of Parsifal who does not know his own name and his son Lohengrin who is forbidden to reveal his. I have not always known my own name, and Subcomandante Marcos, my son by another name, forbids himself to reveal his.

I came out of the cinema humming this music, even while I was frightened. The Twilight of the Gods was happening in Spain, it was as mythic as that, and I could see a red bandana, a red ribbon running with blood, rippling with pride from Mexico's past revolution to the pride of Mexico today (one of only two countries in the world to recognise and support the Republicans) and to the pride of Mexico's future, where Marcos is holding the faded and torn bandana, with a handful of dry earth. The anarchist-intellectuals flee, eventually, running for their lives from Franco, and where do the luckiest find exile? With me in Mexico, by the light of the sunniest moon.

Stalin drove the communists to murder the anarchists, and began the killings of millions while Trotsky, in exile, came to stay with us. I fucked him. He too had seemed like a kind of destiny, for I was born to the Mexican revolution and as the moon I was born of cosmic revolution and the chief revolutionary of our age couldn't help but feel the pull of me.

Then Diego gave Trotsky a skull of purple sugar with ‘Stalin' written in icing sugar on its forehead, a morbid cartoon. Bless him, he didn't see the funny side at all. Me and Diego, though, we pissed ourselves laughing, but not for long, because soon after Trotsky left our house he was assassinated—one of Stalin's agents put an ice-axe through his skull.

I was dying to go to Spain myself, to be part of that theatre of the soul. It was our last chance to halt fascism, but deep within me I knew Capa had glimpsed the future. The first picture of the moment of death was taken in the Spanish Civil War, and Capa photographed a Republican soldier, shot by the fascists, his arms flung wide open as you would hug a beloved child after a long absence. This was the moment of death for us all.

The Republicans were always short of water, and it was a sere symbol to me, for all the well-waters of freedom were running empty, and the totalitarians, Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Mao, were setting the century on fire, in an inexorable burning world of holocausts. I see the beginning now and dimly I can see the end. It is written. It is written. An apocalypse even of the silky Amazon. A holocaust of all that is moist and green and gladed.
No pasarán!
They shall not pass. It shall not come to pass. If wit and beauty, if grace and poetry, if
La Vida
has anything to do with it. It is written, maybe, but may it not come to pass.

The gentle honeybees in the courtyard have a mysterious illness and are sickening and dying. The Age of Loneliness starts this way, the extinctions of one kind of life after another. The earth is really showing her age, her lands and seasons are out of kilter and her oceans stoned with tempest. The future is galloping towards us, the Four Horsemen, and the apocalypse has escaped like some terrible virus from the back of the book, and is infecting us all. This is a strangely mythic age. Scientists speak of a law of the conservation of energy, but I think there is a law of the conservation of meaning. For four hundred years, myth and metaphor and the meaningful world have been discounted, and only the material was considered to matter, but, believe me, myth will force its way back in, because the mind needs myths, good ones, and it is a matter of mind and mindedness.

Perhaps it began in a kind of leaping innocence; I can believe that—it was a passion for flight above all, the Icarus within. More moon! More sun! Nearer to the flame! The feathers of mind rippling in flight. Desire in the wingtips. Reckless Icarus, yes, blinded by his flight, yes, but oh, what suns in his eyes, wanting to look down and gasp at the lovely turning world, wanting to seize the heavens in courage and defiance, his flight so beautiful and so eloquent. Mankind was made magnificent enough to wrestle with angels, alone, in a long night of the soul, to wrestle with angels and win.

Me, though, I am sick and lame. It is the beginning of the end, I know. Children come to visit me, and I love their visits. Often their parents would say: ‘It's because she has none of her own, poor Frida, so she is a devoted aunt,' and send their children to me with twice the alacrity.

I have become so sensitive with illness that even the whine of a mosquito is the Last Post and a siren call. I am juggled like a helpless ball in the hands of Old Baldy, that malignant conjuror, death. I can almost count the number of songs I have left in me. I think of suicide often, these days, and I take more and more drugs to cope, but they make me hallucinate. They also make me long-sighted, and I rekindle my girlhood sense that I will go to the moon one day.

Diego tries to cheer me up by his fatso-dancing around my bed, pretending to be a bear, and I laugh but I am a dying bear limping to the beat of a tambourine I cannot dance to. (‘And all the time, we long to move the stars to pity.')

Night is falling in my life.

But from somewhere deep within is a voice which whispers: I refuse. Then it shouts louder: I refuse, I
refuse
. I will find my own
risorgimento
. The bear which cannot dance must fly, which was why I had painted myself in a robe of wings and given it to Trotsky, my dark lover.

At a restaurant one night, when a pissed idiot accused Diego of being a Trotskyite, he decked the man. His pal pulled a gun and I jumped in front of Diego, in protection, in mother-love,
kill me first
. I tied flowers and ribbons around a Molotov cocktail and threw it to the people on my last public appearance, when I dragged myself to the demonstration against the CIA, who had overthrown Guatemala's rightful government. But these were difficult attempts to make my body walk on the ground, and to keep my mind grounded in realities when it was sick and swimming in flights.

It seems almost a human universal, to wish at some point in your life that you could fly, to want to be a bird. Why couldn't we be content with the metaphor of flight? Why did we have to make it literal? Is this the downfall of the will to soar? Is it written into the story, like the meltable wax? Surely the flight of mind and the shapeshifting of the soul was the real juice of it, flight's true reality was never in its being made material. What is real need not be material at all. In fact, they are often opposites. Why do I need feet when I have wings to fly? I asked, after my leg was amputated. ‘For me,' I said, ‘wings are more than enough. Let them cut my leg off and I'll fly.' I try to fly by suicide but my wings are broken. I will have to wait for Old Baldy to visit.

I am at the break-point of the soul. For the upward swing of my life, the sheerness of flight, its upward curve into the sky, is about to crash. Flight began in beauty, the flight of the shaman, flying for the moon, the flight of Icarus, the flight of the lunatic who fell in love, who flew in love with the moon, the flight of art and angels.

All that is best in flight is over.

And now, truly, the fall.

I paint myself, I explained, because I am so often alone. How can one woman weep so much and grieve so much? It's easy if you're the moon. And they called me Frida, meaning Peace and Joy, when I knew so little of either, which is a bitter, if unintended, taunt. Someone commissioned me to paint my face inside a sunflower. If there was such a thing as a moonflower, it might have worked, but I painted it anyway, then took a knife and carved at it, scratching, annihilating my own work, my own self.

My hands have become so weak and shaky that when I put on my make-up I splatter it all over my face, and then I see in the mirror what I've done, and my grotesque reflection haunts me.
La Huesera
, the bone woman, is always with me these days, so I paint my own bones and here, in words too, I am painting my broken bones, my broken life, my broken narrative, the bones of my history, written for my indigenous ancestors as their stories lie in shattered bones. And my unfleshed love lasts and lasts like bones. It is over, how can it be? He is gone, but the bones are still with me. I don't know if
La Huesera
can breathe life into them.

They cut my leg off and gave me a wooden leg. I danced the
jarabe tapatío
. I was half-skeleton already and always
Mexicanista
; this was better than skeletons of candy dressed up like me.

I long for him still, and for the vitality I once knew. I ask them to move my bed nearer the garden, nearer the light, nearer the birds whose flight I envy. I am surrounded now by all my paintings, all my creations, at the opening of my first solo exhibition but I am falling and I know it. I have fallen ill, and I think this time it will be fatal. My night of sweetest triumph comes towards the end of my life, my solo show, sung to the cosmos, and the cosmos came to me, applauding, crowding round my bed, the stars loved me, the sun wept with pride. I am so stricken that I had to send my bed ahead of me, and I came by ambulance later, and was carried to my bed, where I lie, dressed in my exotic perfection, drinking and singing all evening long. I am broken, the crescent moon cracked, shattered, clouded with painkilling drugs but I drink and sing along with everyone, from my four-poster bed, calling on a friend to sing
La
Llorona
, the Weeping Woman. Whatever you do, do it gallantly. It's a strange place from which to see the world, a strange perspective, as far as the moon, and as lonely, but in my fallenness I can tell you that, everywhere I look, I see those who fall.