HOMO RODANS

TRIBUTE TO REMEDIOS VARO

Por: Guiomar Cantú**

1 INCARNATION

 Sketches of Centaur constellation were drawn in the firmament, influenced by Jupiter and fire, Cosmos baptized me Sagittarius. My mother had put herself in the hands of the Virgen de los Remedios. Her first daughter had died and I came out to be like a secret balsam. My father worked as a hydraulic engineer, circumstance that forced our family to move constantly, so we could be close to bridge and dam constructions  where he worked. During one of those journeys, on Winter, in a short visit to the city of Anglés, in Gerona, Spain, I was born on December the 16^th , 1908, and registered under the name of María de los Remedios Varo Uranga.

Childhood gave me the opportunity to observe the architecture, engineering, the beginning and the end of a sculpture incrusted in the planet´s body. We went all over Spain, Africa and Europe. I was one of those rebels that do not submit to religious academies, where I learned very well the meaning of God and guiltiness in hell’s existence. But my real alchemy education was provided by the apparatuses of my father, the drawing board, the magnetic needle, the maps, and the design and drawing manuals. On those pages my fate was wedged. I heard the voice of instinct. Drawing was going to be the only thing that would keep me alive.

2 INITIATION

 When I reached the age of twenty two, I married Gerardo to flee from home. Life was a strong canvas where it’s easy to paint the paradise. Love is believed real, passion is a killing arrow and talent is totally unconscious. A bubble of sacred images that hadn’t been blown out by the violent collision of reality. I´d just concluded my stay in the Art Academy of San Fernando in Madrid. Its scents were impregnated in my skin like millions of remembrances; they were visions of passion that is born from the depth of the legs. A heartbeat capable to burst my entrails.

I showed my paintings there for the first time. Having made the principal stroke in destiny’s canvas was the immense sensation of glory. Thousands of eyes drinking the brush-strokes of my veins. A not existing happiness. Hypereality with all of its chords, ecstasy with all its poetry. Suspended in the heart of the infinite, with the quiet feeling of emptying my ocean in between an orgasm.

My husband and I went to Paris, magic raised before me in a chant that I still carry on the edge of my lips. Surrealism was the wind that started to spin my shuttlecocks. Gerardo and I traveled, painted, peeped into all the art exhibitions and pretended to be interested in buying at the auctions. Our honeymoon lasted a comet, thirteen moons and almost two suns.

We returned to Spain. Settled in Barcelona, we installed an atelier. My life was exactly what I’d provoked and I don’t know in which moment something inside me just broke. Between the folds of the Gothic suburb and the Rambles, I met all the fury of the frozen embrace of loneliness. Constantly unsatisfied about everything I did. The irremediable pain of not having someone to rely on. Uncertainty. The precise calculus about soul earnings and losses.

3 DARKNESS

Intimate desire of escaping, of flying, of dying. Of building a house that could take me on its wheels to other dimensions. To be, in the world which I used to belong since the beginning. To despoil myself from anything earthly and  contemplate the perpetual equilibrium in cosmos’ entrails. My pain was turning itself more dense, as I couldn´t decipher the exact moment I had mistaken. More than repentance, doubts monopolized me, confusion translated in suffering. Marriage hadn’t been what I´d dreamed of, decadence had entered violently as a lethal virus disintegrating everything.

Disappointment was my own lack of encounter. Then I met Esteban. We started sharing the painting studio, then the wine and bread; the nights, the bed; and without realizing it, we were already uprooting lives. Lovers in a lost Eden where not even God was witness. The muses, the oils, the canvases, clothes scattered all over the room, the goblets, the books with their closed mouths and the outlines of salty bodies in the early morning; the aphrodisiac moon, candles, turpentine and old coffee odor, the pencils tinged with colorful fingertips, clothes, the sexual steams and the disorder. Sentimental chaos was dragging us to a passion that was condemned.

At twenty-four I was already separated from Gerardo, from my virginity and from my first brush-strokes. My love for Esteban was already part of my veins. Our union was product of a madness outbreak. We´d loved each other in another time, with different names, but with the same strength of kisses. Our meeting was really a re-encounter. The urgency of finishing something without end. Of taking over a lost and patient business waiting to be definitely concluded. So it happened. We gave everything to each other, until it wasn’t enough anymore. Passion lasted what an eclipse endures.

4 CREATION

My grief turned into labor. Once more I was being fertilized  by solitude. Day and night were dissolved in a wink. Images fluxed in the contemplation of mystery. My sawhorse easel filled with emptiness. My heaven darkened of birds and insects as supreme ghosts of desire. Frightened incarnation to fear they were. The virgin canvas was a home-coming lover without gestures yet, but that was longing for me. Which had seduced my flesh with breath of poison and shipwreck.

I used to paint naked, I drank. I rolled between insomnia bubbles facing upwards. Physic laws were dissolved allowing space for my new theories. Genetic Engineer of a race of  melancholic and profoundly powerful beings. Empress of a land that wouldn’t conceive more atrocities. Child´s nurse that fed mouths of everyone´s yearnings. My characters appeared so to paralyze the Falling. To force the spirit to Biological Multiplication. My bearing was incrusted in the canvas as a dry waterfall of silence.

5 RUSH

Unexpected success acted as a momentary countervenom. My signature started to be appreciated. I met Benjamin. I didn´t want to trust. Without realizing it I was already possessed, trapped within his spider-web mouth. I’d never traveled in the wings of a poet. Nor my legs had been varnished with metaphors. In his kisses I sensed the taste of Poetry.

It was 1936, Civil War had just exploded. Lorca’s death devastated us. The creations started to stain powder and blood. Benjamin and I, as soon as we could, moved to Paris. He confronted me. He was my friend and my teacher. Lover in which I prayed thousands of secret formulae. Skin of a stage of deliriums. The source where tattoos and letters were born.

He guided me into Surrealism in the eyes of Breton, Ernst and Miró. We spent nights of madness where Manifestos and Philosophies emerged. Substances served as doors to other realities. The perception bloomed, sensibility was expanded and the body passed to be just an instrument of instinct. Textures and forms were invocated independent from the vacuity; colors, music, delirium and ideas.

On the canvas my signs were emptying, the echoes of my laws, the songs of my lost angels. I was going through spaces that were not accessible to fingers. Breathing was the heartbeat of all creatures. Sensualities emerging from the power of the universe. I didn´t stop until I got the painting-sight, using all senses, until I managed being color. Presences spoke me, inhabited me. I transcended the Image. I arrived to the spaces between the soul and the eyes, and I kept the answers, the visions, to recreate them for the rest of my awakenings.

Barefoot in front of the canvas during the dawns, between cats, wine and a mountain of cigarettes in each ashtray. The whirling spiral of my brain was being made slow outline, dreamlike, ethereal. Crystals inside my eyes were microscopes and sometimes telescopes. Every painting shot forth in every single spin turn of the kaleidoscope oriented towards stars, to the body’s galaxies, towards the presences. My paintings traveled to Amsterdam and Tokyo. I was illustrating The Surrealism Dictionary.

6 THE LABYRINTH

I was twenty nine. Nobody ever knew, the nightmare savagely encrusted in the middle of my forehead. Hitler’s troops entered to Paris. Benjamin had been already in jail for several months. I had not forgotten him.

Without knowing how, I had fallen in love with one of those creatures whose beauty overpasses human canons. We made love like angels gestated by the whip of fire. With lust in our mouths and hands speaking the blinds’ language. Passion oscillated between terror and desperation. Nature’s laws  drained at the limits of the body. Gallop of swans persecuted by War. Ecstasy of living water in the muscle and the kiss.   Flesh modeled by gods’ incense breath. Unique delirium in the volcanoes of encounter.

He took shelter at my place and Germans discovered him. I didn´t see him, but I heard how he was murdered. They took me to prison. I couldn’t understand the power of dismantling freedom. Hell. The dried yell when his body collapsed. His warm mist snowing my eyelashes. His hands still full of my desire. The soldiers possessed by the rage. Torture. Agony. Cold. Pain that is not enough so as to repeat it with words.

My crying crowned insomnia with thorns. I was getting old. In fall, faith was almost ready to dry and finally they took me out. I knew that a part of me was already terminated. 

7 THE DELIRIUM

Heaven brought Benjamin back, when I looked to myself again in his eye’s pupils darkness managed to dissipate. We abandoned Europe and its terrors. In 1941, México fecundated me as an alchemist during Winter. Since my arrival, this country hugged me with corn and amaranth love. Its colors were the outer memory of the new architecture of mine.

And of course Eva, that Swiss woman who loved artworks born from lack of hope. She performed as my sister and producer. Intellectual class glamour in the body of a millionaire female. Muse that inspired myriads of visions. We used to spend hours analyzing art and consciousness. She smoked while my brushes licked the purpose of making her mine. Equal naked reflex bloomed orchids to dress the skin of my spectres. Centuries of sighs trapped beneath the skirt came out from her throat. Bodies moaned under the moon like pearls linked by the needle of a jeweler. She used to submerge in my womb. Making my land wet with her wings. We were mesmerized by perverse spirit chants. Possessed by thirst known only to those who had drank the poison of the flowers.

As if somebody led the steps of my body, I abandoned myself to the erotic turn of the soul, to the place in which equilibrium meant just a mirage. Ferocity of desire left me in a desperate top of insomnia, and a book appeared to save me. A knitted web of printed lines supported the falling of my acrobatism. From Freud’s hand I entered Apocalypse. I needed to fill my emptiness with reasons. Loving Benjamin had no longer sense, and in a black flapping, just like that, we fulminated it.

8 STRATEGY

I devoured everything Freud signed. I flooded myself in his boxes of answers, I arrived to the lakes of Jung and Adler constellations. Fountains of light to exorcize conscience. My pains at last had gotten a name. As I comprehended, my cupules were bursting. Loom of my infancy recovered its luminosities. I learned to accept me in Dementia. Between intimacy and mirror I devoted to energy. I contemplated myself differently. I recognized my planet.

Then, Psychology regained my original vocation for science. She took me to my mother´s eyeballs, to the maps of her consumed face by erosion through the time waves. Her perfume trembled my bones when her embrace made me feel petite. It occurred in Venezuela. I was just thirty nine. My brother worked on a campaign against malaria and I went there to illustrate it.

I came from México escorted by the white hand of Jean Nicolle, an eye-cat pilot with mouth of summer. While I was working, he was flying over the jungles, my body and the mountains. I lived under the flavor of my mother´s hands, in the middle of stories and chants curded by the years. Paths that had separated us were now making us remember. Journeys through the tunnels of microscope were the daily exorcism to insects that even then had populated my dreams of torments. When the campaign ended I met Nicolle in the shore of The Amazonas. We navigated through the groves of mangrove-trees and we fondled the savage heart of Earth. We went to The Orinoco to look for gold  that could pay our coming-back, but its river bed was tarnished by vacuity. Despite all this we achieved to return. The farewell was raw, I intuited that I would never see gardens in my mother’s eye-glasses again.

9 CONSCIENCE

In México I reached the age of forty. I stared at myself in the lips of the mirror, and they whispered how much I had changed without realizing the speed of time. My body had acquired different dimensions. My being evolved without my permission. My thoughts had tints of maturity and always of insanity. I loved the dreams I had already fulfilled. Above my hands the resolutions that had been taken me marched naked. I didn´t know exactly when I forgot that my womb could develop passions. I asked myself why I hadn’t gotten pregnant. Why my blood hadn’t multiplied and consequently, performed metamorphosis mutating into the ink of enchanted Surrealism.

I cried for the laughter of sons that never hugged me. Girlish sensations assaulted the wells of my canvas. A Never’s and Would’s revolution. Chaos oscillation, a Holocaust. The soul bounced, and came out of the chest returning suddenly to the bottom of my body. The desire of painting constituted my unique excuse. Abortion existed or was imagined. The void inundated all of my senses. My howl went through the walls of my temple. I changed my lineage for transcendencia on Art. I went crumbing on myself as my chest knots were dissolved. I forgave myself. My soul turned lighter in an earthquake of weeping and ancient pain. Ages went out through my body.

Friends were the open window, Gerzso and his divine power over space enchanted my soul like a wind angel with his flute. In his breath the forms, the laws, the instincts were fragmented. Octavio´s ink provoked ecstasy labyrinths in drops of poetry over the paper. With Arreola the space was made history. Beside them, I rode with the evolution, the music, the now time.

10 LIGHT

With Leonora I shared my being. The search. The discovery. We opened together channels of the spirit and went over the magic pavilions. We sculpted images picked up in orchids’ tunnels. On secret rites we made ourselves sisters. We entered the woods and drank the designs. In her my being was unfolded. We went through the Shadow, shared the fire, decoded the sacred divinations. We wove with our own hands the duration of space to find consciousness in signs. Love appeared with the name of Walter swinging on the moon. I stopped being errant to settle myself in the fatherland of his bed. With the destiny in his skin I planted my story. I assumed myself free. I reconstructed my being between his arms. I experienced that special kind of love that had been pursued all through the galaxies. I just wanted to paint, to name with my fingers the colors that Heaven hadn´t yet. My painting seduced galleries, conquered souls of collectors.

I´d been told that success intoxicates the senses and that certainty could strangle you. Thus fame dazzled and its shine would make equilibrium to darken. That you could turn deaf of delirium. Reality diffracted and at the window, the images impersonated the abyss. That a Still Life couldn’t resurrect.

My entrails became art-makers. Success was the result of Day´s journeys with early rising coldness, of my trip to white light and black light, my pain sublimated on watercolors, the translation of the orgasm and its visions. I lived just for creation. For the daydreaming travels to a land that could be only of my own. The place to weave a house with roots of universe. To spill myself in comet´s instants, dismember chaos and navigate the skies of enchanted kingdoms.

It was Autumn, I´d started to paint at dawn, a smell of cinnamon impregnated my heart´s home , and a violin floated on silver liquid steles. I worked on the project Forest Music. Brushes danced bewitched by rays of aphrodisiac moon. Time was breathing.

With spiritedness under a silence outline, I was penetrated by sharpened chords. In absorption by tunnels towards Cosmos, color shot forth like a waterfall between my fingers. A pain in the chest moaned, strangled my sun, I drank the desert. An ink scratch got encrusted on my canvas to decapitate Reason just with one blow. A mortal wound looked at me with no eyes, caressed me without skin and a meteor rain spilled from Heaven up to my back. Walter came or had gone or always had been inside. Matter-departure. A light screamed from between the crevices of time. Hour of the already consecrated ascension. I went inside and through the temple of my body. My life had arched so to rise the soul to Heaven´s mountains. Goddess covered me beneath her mantle of silence. On October the 8, 1963, my heart ended believing it was dead.  

**Guiomar Cantú(Esta dirección de correo electrónico está siendo protegida contra los robots de spam. Necesita tener JavaScript habilitado para poder verlo. ) es escritora y artista multidisciplinaria, egresada de la Licenciatura en Literatura Dramática y Teatro de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Sabersinfin.com agradece a Guiomar Cantú la autorización para publicar el presente trabajo.