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Then one day, when they were moving, I had to help Helba pack, and all her trunks were brought from the cellar, her costume trunks.One of them had to be opened, and out spilled a fur coat, dresses of all kinds, underwear, shoes, stockings, all her finery from the days she danced with the Ziegfeld show in New York.Handbags, handkerchiefs, belts, combs, everything which she could possibly need and which she had been hoarding like a gypsy while I stripped myself of all I had to dress her.Gonzalo's devotion to Helba touching.I feel the same pity when I see her smaller, shrunken, deaf, with hair hanging limp, her dead black hair, and no longer dancing but withering.She says: "My hair is falling off in bunches.My teeth are sore, and loosening.Gonzalo is mad.He seems changed only because he is leaning on you.He lets everything happen, and he says it's destiny.With his cigarette he nearly set fire to the apartment house.He threw the still-lighted butt down the garbage chute and it started a fire during the night.For a woman to love Gonzalo is not happiness.He is one who sacrifices woman to himself without knowing it, unconsciously.He is a child.I know why you want to give him a printing press.You want to keep Gonzalo from going to Spain to fight.You are thinking of me.The idea of Gonzalo at war, when I think of it, the whole beauty of this afternoon turns black."Sometimes I watch her gestures with horror.For at times she goes far beyond the dramatization which her dancer's training makes understandable.She is a theatrical character, she does express everything with her body, but in her dancing, when she danced with so much inwardness, I already recognized the gestures of insanity.She exaggerates her mimicry to express physical pain to a monstrous degree.For the pain of pleurisy, which I have known, she acted with her hands like the statue of the god whose entrails were being eaten by the ravens.For a stomach pain she mimics someone devoured by flames.Finally I recognized she had transposed her gift for theatre into a gift for dramatizing her illness so it would always seem like a state of agony just before death.This threat of her death hung over Gonzalo's head, giving him not a moment's rest.He could only forget her threats when drunk.To see these gestures border so often on the gestures made by the insane appalled me.There is insanity in caricature of gestures, grotesque deformations.If Helba's drama did not destroy Gonzalo, I could be moved by it, but I had to become the exposer of it to save Gonzalo's very life.Distressed by my timidity.Was introduced to André Breton and almost turned away in a panic.He awes me, because I am fully aware that his ideas have influenced all of us deeply.And he is a great poet himself.[Summer, 1937]Poverty is the great reality.That is why the artist seeks it.It was my only reality as a child.It gave me a closeness to human reality forever.I sought it out afterwards, voluntarily, to remain close to all my friends, Henry, Helba, Gonzalo, Moricand, who were all poor.Poverty also has a religious significance.It represents sacrifice, it is usually the outcome of a choice between artistic, spiritual values and the material ones.It has a spiritual significance.To protect the poor I have denied myself voyages, luxury, clothes, comforts.I have kept only the barest necessities.I have stripped myself joyously.I feel great joy thinking of Henry working in his studio, with his water colors, Helba able to go to the doctor, Gonzalo with paper to draw on, suits to wear.The fewer possessions I have, the richer I feel.I seek poverty.But when I see what it did to Henry, Gonzalo, and Helba, I wonder.Their health destroyed, their work, their life.Without protection, their dream destroyed.No food.No materials to work with.No paper, no paint, no typewriter, no costumes, no medicines.Yet I seek this.Every day I come nearer to it.To be nearer to spiritual values? Nearer to the defeated, the failures, because I feel they have qualities the others do not have, the rich, the selfish, the flattered, the recognized, the decorated? I am born under the sign of the giver, Pisces, I will have to give even more.I have to give up visiting my father in Caux, staying in Corfu with the Durrells, Montecatini with Hélène or Venice with my mother and Joaquin, because I have to pay for Henry's rent, Gonzalo's rent, and to feed them all.No rest.No seashore, no travel, no vacation.Voilà.No Heine's beach costume, no mountain air, no sun on the body.But I get pleasure from seeing how my children live.Gonzalo is so good for the present, he is good for life, but that is why he may be of less value in the eternal, in art, than Henry.He is immediate, and that is why he lives in politics.He lives so much in the present that he has the beautiful gift of direct emotion, as a woman has, a beautiful gift of responding with all of himself, as Henry does not Gonzalo lives so much in the present that when he gets cigarettes he forgets the matches, and he has to go out again.A moment later he thinks of coffee.As soon as creation begins there is a need for planning, for thinking of tomorrow.I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day.Gonzalo loves with devotion, fidelity, sacrifice, with a giving of the self.Henry loves in a primitive way, he enjoys, takes, uses, and never gives himself.It is all for him, for his work, for his benefit, for his career as a writer, for his appetites, his pleasures.My father is talking about the marvels of the microscope, about the scorpion he saw and studied, about the minerals, the gold dust [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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