Alchemy of a Blackbird: A Novel

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For Remedios Varo,

in memoriam

and for

Mac and Flora,

may you always heed your call

"… From the river of moth dust we float on at night

Hand in invisible hand saying

Go and be

Build your impossible fort full of secret magics

Designed to let others in"

—You are Invisible. Go Visible.

JANAKA STUCKY

PART I

FRANCE

October 1939

CHAPTER ONE

Remedios had been looking for a friend like Leonora her whole life. She linked elbows and drew her close while they walked along the bank above the Seine, their legs syncing as they increased their pace.

Have you been painting at all? Leonora asked.

Months ago at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, their paintings had hung near each other. That was how they’d met.

Remedios didn’t want to admit that the only things she’d been painting were forgeries for Oscar Sanchez, who then sold them to aristocrats with more money than sense. She wasn’t sure how Leonora would react to such a thing. Not because Leonora would oppose the illegality of it; Remedios had met very few people as unconcerned with convention as Leonora. And not because she’d object to Remedios taking the money; they all needed money. Remedios suspected it would be the inauthenticity of aping someone else’s artistic style that Leonora would object to.

Yes. Every day, Remedios said, leaving out exactly what she’d been painting.

Me too, Leonora said, hugging Remedios’s elbow to her side. Leonora smelled of cigarettes and an old-fashioned violet perfume that made a striking contrast to her generally rebellious attitude. Dailyness is the most important thing. Creating that time every day for the muse to come through. Even with everything we’re facing.

The muse. Leonora spoke as if she were on intimate terms with inspiration, as if her muse were a constant companion, like a well-loved pet or guiding angel, and not something smothered by faking another artist’s muddy color palette and depictions of stolid masculine buildings.

Yellow leaves windowpaned the dark pavement, wet from an early fall shower. Remedios pulled Leonora toward a bouquiniste, one of those bookstalls that had lined the river for centuries. An old lady in a man’s canvas jacket with a bright blue foulard at the neck, the vendeuse, smiled at them. Remedios was aware of the picture she and Leonora were creating—two young, fashionable women, some might even call them beautiful, untroubled in the face of war. Sometimes it thwarted Remedios to be thought of as just another pretty young woman. Today she enjoyed the buoyant image she and Leonora projected together, the fleeting sort of power it gave her.

Or maybe it was being with Leonora that lifted her, Leonora who radiated a unique kind of magic. Everything from the lazy accent with which she pronounced her French to the pendant from her Irish nanny that she wore around her neck was the product of an upper-crust British background she’d rejected with the blithe self-assurance of someone who had always had more than enough. She’d run away from art school with Max Ernst and come to Paris where her behavior quickly became notorious. Once, she’d taken off her shoes and painted her feet with mustard at a café. Another time, in the middle of a party, she’d taken a shower fully clothed and then attended the rest of the evening in clinging wet clothes. Max called her la petite sauvage.

And maybe to seem a little savage herself, or maybe it was the coming crisp autumn air, or maybe because she’d been searching for a breakthrough in her own painting wherever she could find it, Remedios picked up a deck of tarot cards from the bookseller’s stall. She needed something that would help her reach the next level of her art. She wasn’t sure what her art was anymore, since she’d spent these last months imitating de Chirico’s. She was still trying to decide if it had improved her skills or knocked the originality right out of her.

She’d come to Paris to be with her lover, the poet Benjamin Péret, who’d bombarded her with an arsenal of poems when they met in Barcelona. Poems so ardent that after two months she couldn’t remember why she’d ever resisted him. This she had in common with Leonora. They were both in love with famous, much older, married, intellectual men. But while Leonora spent her time in a spirit of rebellion and pushing boundaries, Remedios existed in a state of perpetual searching and absorbing.

Let me buy those for you, Leonora said, as reflexively generous as only those favored by fortune can be. Nanny knew about these things. She told me you should never buy tarot cards for yourself.

You had someone who taught you about the tarot, mademoiselle? asked the vendor.

Only a very little bit, but she taught me that.

But this is a very old superstition, meant to keep women away from a source of knowing. Anyone who desires the knowledge of the tarot can buy a deck of cards for herself, can avail herself of that power. The seller turned to Remedios. Buy what you wish, mademoiselle. No need to wait for someone to give you what you need. You must acquire your tools for yourself. You are the agent of your destiny.

And even though this speech was likely part of the seller’s skills refined by years of surviving off the little stall, Remedios dug a few bills out of her deep pockets and handed them over. With her first touch of the cards her shoulders lowered, something settling in her, and she exhaled with the rightness of a key fitting into a lock.

THE SUN—Sabina Cherugi

The Sun card depicts a naked, smiling child riding on the back of a white horse, a red banner unfurling behind him while sunflowers bloom. The sun shines down brightly, filling the upper half of the card. This is the card of illumination so that all can be seen and therefore put on a more solid footing. Something that has been in shadow comes into light and gains certainty. It is also the card of being comfortable with shining out and being seen. The card, like the child, says, Here I am and here is what I bring. The Sun offers a signal to consider what has recently become more visible and invites considered action to sharpen that clarity.

My family has owned this stall since the 1600s. Cherugi women have made a living for generations along the banks of this river selling secondhand books, and old maps, and other bits of aged and valuable paper. My family has traded in other, more secret knowledge too. My mother read the cards, and her mother before her, and her mother before her. Now I do too, though it is best not to advertise. Even before the coming threat of the Nazis, as superstitious and obsessed with the occult as I’ve heard they are, divination was always a word-of-mouth business for my family—our name whispered in kitchens and nurseries and on children’s playgrounds.

I usually didn’t sell tarot decks, but kept a few tucked away for customers who wanted their own cards, a rarity now. I’d heard that in Germany they’d started arresting fortune-tellers and astrologers regularly, and burning books by the heap. So I was a little surprised when the two friends arrived, and one of them homed in on the little bin of cards I kept under a folding table.

They could have been mistaken for a pair of glamorous sisters—dark eyes, thick hair, and delicately rouged lips. But the one who picked up the tarot had wavy, reddish hair, almost standing away from her head, alive with the fire of intellect and mental curiosity. I saw right away that the cards fit her. Then her friend said that old lie about not buying your own deck, and I had to speak up.

Of course she bought them. As I handed them over I said, No power inhabits a deck of tarot cards beyond what you, as the tarot reader, bring to them. There is no doctrinaire meaning for any card and no authority on high handing down pronouncements. There is only your knowledge of myth and symbol. These things you may consider through the study of classical Greek and Roman myth, physics, all forms of mysticism and occultism, even psychology. You combine this with your own life experience as a Sagittarius and bring it to the cards.

How did I know she was a Sagittarius? A lucky guess, some call it; others call it intuition.

You’re an archer, and you have been aiming your arrow for a long while now, I continued. Perfecting your aim, aren’t you? Anyone with eyes could see she was a young woman of promise and that she was in the knowledge-gathering phase of her life. Before you let that arrow fly.

She told me her name then, Remedios.

The remedy! Delightful. And you are one, aren’t you? Not only to your mother who experienced loss before you. She looked at me, amazed that I knew this. But really, why does a mother name her child Remedy if she hasn’t had a heartbreak in need of healing? But to others as well.

My sister, Remedios said. She died as an infant. My mother never stopped grieving her. She prayed and promised Our Lady of Remedios that if she had another baby, she’d name the child after her. That’s me.

Know that your role with your mother is completed. You have remedied all that you can heal for her. I took my own tarot deck out of my pocket, where I kept it constantly. Anyone who buys the cards gets a free reading. This I made up on the spot solely because I wanted to see what the tarot had to say about this Sagittarian woman. Choose three cards, I said, handing over the deck. Remedios’s friend drew in a breath. What? I asked, turning to her. Did Nanny have rules about this too?

She did, actually, she said. She was not in awe of me, the friend. She never let me touch her cards. She said only the tarot reader touches her own cards.

Let me guess, you were a very small child when she said this?

She nodded.

I suspect your nanny’s rule had more to do with keeping an unruly child from messing her cards than anything else. I turned back to Remedios. Pick your cards.

The tarot is no mind-reading exercise. It does not offer easy validation to those who come, arms crossed in withholding, demanding proof of its accuracy. In its highest form, a tarot reading is a conversation between a person with a question, a trusted guide, and the universe through the synchronicity of the cards.

I give the querent the cards when I want to observe how someone goes about choosing. So much is learned from how they shuffle, cut, and pick. Some take their time quite painstakingly, some rush through the process, and some just hand me the first cards off the top of the deck with no preamble and then shove the cards back into my hands as if they’re on fire.

Remedios took a breath, calmed herself, even closed her eyes. She split the deck and folded it over on top of itself, once, twice, three times. Then she chose a card at random from the middle of the deck, took the one off the top and the one from the bottom, and handed them to me. Only then did she open her eyes.

I flipped the cards over and laid them out on the wobbly folding table. King after King. King of Wands with his call to action, King of Cups with his emotions setting him out to sea, and King of Swords. I pointed to this last. I knew he’d be here, I said. Present in this reading as he is present in your life. A man of intellect. He lives in his mind. The girls smiled, nodding. He has trouble getting out of his mind and into his body. That’s where you come in. Remedios actually blushed when I said this.

I want to learn, she said.

Yes, and you are in the right place to do that. You are amassing knowledge from this man, this King of Swords, for a journey, lessons that will serve you throughout your life.

I mean, do you give lessons? I want to learn this.

I’ll admit I was offended for a moment. Did she think it was some simple mathematical formula that could be taught like an equation, 1+1=2, without the need for insight or spirit? The tarot is a deeply personal practice. Anyone is free to adopt or ignore any meaning given to a tarot card or come up with her own. Personal definitions often offer the deepest insights. To the extent a card’s meaning is widely adopted, it is because it is either useful or holds truth that resonates from reader to reader.

The tarot is available to all and yet obscure, I answered, as if I was a hermit in the woods offering a riddle.

I can’t pay, she said. Not with money. But I can barter. She reached deep into the pockets of her coat and withdrew a small black notebook. Maybe you could sell them in the stand and keep the proceeds.

The little book was filled with sketches of life in the streets of Paris—pigeons, fine gentlemen, ladies of ill repute, and more recent soldiers. Each had a fantastical twist. The soldier had the head of a death-eating raven. The prostitute’s legs were the posts of a bed. The pigeons had wind-up mechanisms and cogs in their breasts like a clockwork.

They were just the sort of thing I easily sold to tourists looking to take home a memento from the City of Light. I’d have torn them out individually and passed them off as my own, but there were no tourists anymore.

I’m not sure I can explain my ways, I said. If she was easily discouraged, then let her be. It’s not rational, or linear. It’s not something one can teach. I handed the sketchbook back. Like art. Art cannot be taught.

But that’s what I’m always telling you, the friend said, shrugging into her.

I attended art school, madame, Remedios said. You’re right, it cannot be taught, but natural abilities can be honed and guided, don’t you agree?

She made a compelling argument. And do you have natural abilities in the psychic realm?

The question was a test of sorts. Boast of her prowess and I’d know she was a fraud, claim she had no skill and it would be easy to refuse her. Admitting to one’s own inclination to psychic abilities out loud and to a stranger was daunting.

Some. Yes. Maybe, she said.

Ah, I said, taking her hand in mine. Then your first lesson is this. The tarot is like life. A set of cards to be played that rely on the skill, knowledge, and intuition of the reader to view the cards dealt, understand them, and react to them to the best of her ability. Like life, there is a random element to it, and like life, there is a synchronicity to it. And like life, what matters is the truth that can be glimpsed behind what is rather small and flimsy, in this case a card, and then what actions are taken in reaction to that truth. Understand?

She nodded. They both did, swaying a little from side to side, a bit breathless.

Bon, come back tomorrow. Then we will begin.

CHAPTER TWO

Remedios rushed home past the Place Vendôme, past the statue of Napoleon atop the tall column now sandbagged and covered in scaffolding to protect it from possible bombing. She wished for her own scaffolding, her own armor to protect her. Even statues needed such things, but all she had was her red wool coat, the one she’d sewn herself in midwinter on the heavy black sewing machine hunched in the corner of the flat, abandoned by the prior occupants. She’d bought a half bolt of wool at a discount price from a tailor who’d closed his shop and left the city. The majority of Parisians had fled once France entered the war in the fall. Still there were those who hung on—like her, like Madame Cherugi, who’d been giving her lessons in the tarot nearly every day despite the news.

Leonora and Max had left months ago for the countryside, and she missed her friend who’d come to the tarot lessons with her. She imagined them now, blithely unaware of anything happening in the city. She’d heard Leonora and Max rarely put on clothes, painting naked all day so that they scandalized the villagers. She wondered if Leonora’s carefree attitude was a remnant of her upbringing. If having been presented at court and coming from a landed and titled family allowed Leonora to believe that if the world descended into fire, it wouldn’t scorch her. Max encouraged this naivete. He enjoyed Leonora’s youth and beauty unsullied by fears, or cares, or strife. Watching them, Remedios sometimes wondered if Leonora’s nonchalance was natural or if she played it up for his benefit.

Her scrutiny of Leonora caused her to examine certain uncomfortable parallels in her relationship with Benjamin. Just today during her lesson with Madame Cherugi the subject of Benjamin had come up when they’d been practicing simple spreads.

Ask a yes-or-no question, Madame Cherugi said, and see if you can divine the answer. The tarot is usually not the best at direct answers, but sometimes it can add clarity.

Her mother, a devout Catholic who’d sent Remedios to convent schools and attended mass each morning during the forty days of Lent, would have been horrified to know her daughter was studying an occult practice. And so, much like that first time, each time Remedios picked up the cards she felt a centering—whether it was the result of this pleasing transgression or from the insights offered by the cards, she didn’t know.

She’d asked if Benjamin, or the King of Swords as Madame Cherugi called him, was her one true love. She thought she heard Madame’s exasperated sigh when she said this. Then Remedios pulled the Two of Swords in answer, which showed a woman seated and blindfolded, holding two swords crossed in front of her body.

So that is a no, Remedios said, looking at the card.

That is a block, said Madame Cherugi. The answer will not be given at this time.

Now Remedios continued swiftly home from her lesson along streets where blackout curtains hung in every window, giving Paris an oddly muffled, cozy feel. She opened the door into the courtyard of her building, rounded the corner, and began to walk up the four flights to the apartment she shared with Benjamin. She knew what she’d find when she got there. She could hear it from two floors below—the rumbling of male voices. She didn’t even need her interior key. The door was open, and when she stepped into her flat, she saw him.

André Breton sat surrounded, as he always was, by his intellectual admirers—Wolfgang Paalen and Victor Brauner, and of course Oscar Sanchez. They’d all made themselves at home in her home, the apartment she shared with Benjamin.

She’d read André’s Surrealist Manifesto in art school. Everyone did. So it never failed to be a pinch-me moment when she found him in her flat. His friendship with Benjamin was a comradeship, a meeting of minds. André thought the thoughts, and Benjamin put them into practice in his poetry and in his uncompromising behavior.

Dear Remedios, André called out as she entered the room. Benjamin just stepped out for more drinks. Where have you been?

She knew this was not a straightforward question, and she wasn’t his dear. He regarded her as a novice painter who distracted Benjamin from his more serious work. What’s more, he didn’t care where she’d been. His question was a demand to amuse him, to say something surrealist.

In the past, she would merely smile until Benjamin came to her rescue with a witty barb.

But Benjamin wasn’t there, and the circumstances offered no way to elude André’s scrutiny. What would Leonora have said She of the outrageous gesture—something confronting or at least bizarre. Remedios reached for the first surrealist image she could think of.

A cavalcade of cats alighted in my hair. I had to step into the hairdresser’s to have them combed out.

Well, next time tell those cats I said hello, André said with an approving nod.

Oscar got up and landed a deft kiss on each cheek and then to her surprise a quick peck on the lips. He’d always been as bossy with her as any older brother, and as protective too. When she first came to Paris, she’d been floating on a cloud of new love and sex, and it was Oscar who’d cushioned the blow when she came back to earth. She still remembered the first time he suggested she forge a de Chirico. She’d laughed, assuming it was some surrealist joke.

Look, he’d said, if Benjamin had even two francs in his pocket, there’d be something new under the sun. You’re going to need money. This is an easy way to make a lot of it fast. Your diet of coffee and cigarettes makes you look tired.

She refused outright. But over the course of months and as their financial situation became more dire, Remedios took Oscar up on his offer. Benjamin disdained such quotidian matters as employment, claiming a job was a bourgeois concept meant to stifle the creativity of the masses, and she had few other options for paying work. After she got over her fear of the illegality of it, she decided copying a master like de Chirico could only improve her skills, and she was always looking for ways to add to her abilities. De Chirico’s rigorous line work, his far horizons, his masculine palette of muddy, muted colors were all in stark contrast to her own more feminine painting. She told herself this forgery was an exercise that offered dimension to her work and new skills to her repertoire, along with the money. And besides, Oscar provided a luxuriously ample supply of paints and canvases, which were becoming scarce.

Strangely, she’d found the hardest part to imitate was de Chirico’s signature. It wasn’t a flourished or elaborate scrawl, but the idea of signing another artist’s name, the ultimate sham, stymied her. However, once she got the hang of it, she was able to paint never-before-seen masterpieces, all slightly different from their inspirations and all identifiable as de Chirico’s. Oscar sold them quickly.

Buyers think they’re getting a deal because a war’s coming, he said.

Tonight Oscar was at the apartment to pick up another fake. He’d been asking her to make them smaller, more portable, the better to travel with given that most everyone they knew was fleeing. To her dismay, Oscar took the most recent fake de Chirico off the easel where it sat drying and brought it to the middle of the room, flourishing it in front of André for his approval. It was all flat planes and plazas heading off into the endless horizon of infinity, and in the corner she’d painted a tiny shadow cast by an unseen woman fleeing just outside the frame.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was real, André said. Quite bold, Oscar, to imitate a living artist. What if he stumbles across one of them? What if he sends the police after you?

Remedios swallowed her reply that she was the