“So listen,” she said as she handed the canvas up to him.
Danny ignored the canvas. “You don’t really imagine an internment camp commander will just hand over his prisoners to you.”
“Not ‘prisoners.’ Just one.” She supposed it was Jacqueline’s little joke about being a fine whore that had put the idea in her head. “Varian won’t like it, though,” she said, already decided and wishing she could hurry down to the Marseille train station that very minute. But the effort would have to be more carefully planned.
“There is no chance, Nanée, that Varian would allow you to . . . to . . .”
“I believe the phrase you’re seeking is ‘jeopardize my virtue for the sake of nothing more than a man’s life.’” She smiled and again offered the canvas.
He only stared at her through his round lenses. She could risk her life delivering messages, and that was fine with him, but her offering a man a little insincere affection made him uncomfortable?
“Perhaps it’s prescient that I’m known as ‘The Postmistress,’” she said. “I’ll deliver the males.” She smiled wryly. “But really, Danny, I promise you that whatever virtue I have intact will remain so.”
She reached for a lower branch, affixed the twine herself, and eased the painting into place. Virtue was so relative, even in good times, and in any event not something she’d highly valued since she escaped that big house back in Evanston.
Friday, November 1, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Nanée stood under the plane trees on the belvedere, watching André greet each of the forty-some writers and artists arriving on the tram for this first salon as if the chateau were his. Many were on Varian’s list for American visas, including plenty who were radical in one way or another, while others, like André himself, were excluded as too left-wing to be palatable for Americans. “Villa Espère-Visa,” the Russian writer Victor Serge dubbed Villa Air-Bel that afternoon. Hoping for a Visa.
André began the salon with a reading by Benjamin Péret of a scatological poem, which was met with raucous whistles and cheers. He then led them in playing the word-game version of Exquisite Corpse, blindly stringing together adjective, subject, verb, adjective, and object to form crazy sentences. A sentence years before had given the game its name: Le cadavre | exquise | boira | le vin | nouveau. The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine. When Nanée was in the subject spot, the word kangaroo came to mind. Knobby knees. Fig leaf. She didn’t use any of them, choosing instead train and station, hurry, and imprisoned, thinking she ought to be leaving already to try to free Edouard Moss from Camp des Milles. But the game was unfailingly funny, and she too laughed. André would tack up anything that particularly pleased him on the tree trunk behind him. “So I’ll be able to find it later,” he said as he poured wine all around again.
They switched to the drawing version of Exquisite Corpse, creating bizarre composite characters—drawing but also using scissors and paste, fallen leaves and tree bark and twigs, a torn wine label, even scraps of food they incorporated into collages. One of the creatures looked so like a Surrealist version of the Vichy prime minister Philippe Pétain that André labeled it “The Prime Collaborationist” and tacked it up on his tree.
He picked up a pencil himself then and created an entire character, half drawing, half collaging, using dry grass for a mustache and red-wine-stained bits of cork for eyes.
“Hitler,” Jacqueline said, and everyone chimed in, yes, Hitler, setting Dagobert, who’d been left up in Nanée’s room with a soup bone, barking like mad. It was indeed a comic Hitler—one that could get them all arrested if ever it was found. André labeled it Teppichfresser, “Carpet Chewer,” for Hitler’s rumored tendency to foam at the mouth, fall to the floor in his fury, and literally chew the carpet. André would have tacked it up beside the comic Pétain on his tree, but the glue wasn’t dry.
They began putting together collages to form prominent people and guessing who each was meant to be. It was seldom obvious, and yet they never failed to guess. It was fun, and exciting, and dangerous.
Oscar Domínguez—the artist who, with Pablo Picasso, created Never, that gramophone devouring mannequin legs that had emitted the haunting laughter at the Surrealist exhibit in Paris—presented the group with Freud. It looked like a playing card, giving André the idea they ought to design a new deck. Not a Tarot deck, but an ordinary playing deck they could have fun with.
“We’ll start with Oscar’s Freud here.”
“He can be our king,” Varian said.
“Did you know the deck of cards has its roots in the military?” It was not a question, but rather knowledge André was going to share. “The clover suggests military pay, the heart soldiers’ love. We’ll have to do away with the military and royal slant for our game, though. No kings and queens and jacks we don’t believe in.”
They needed cards that would reflect their own heroes and values, they all agreed.
“Instead of king-queen-jack, we could have id-ego-superego,” Jacqueline said.
“You’re missing libido,” Oscar Domínguez said.
“Genius,” André said. “Freud can be our Genius.”
“Instead of jacks, we could have jokers,” Danny suggested. “Or magicians.”
“Sorcerers,” Nanée offered.
“Magus,” André said. “Like sorcerer but without the evil.”
“With a religious tone, though,” Nanée said. “I thought you weren’t much for religion, André.”
“But I rather like the idea of wisdom,” André insisted, and no one objected. It was Andre’s idea. André’s game. André’s salon.
“If you don’t mind religion, I nominate Joan of Arc for the third face card,” Nanée said, remembering Joan of Arc and King Arthur and her failure of a tin-foil suit of armor. What protection had she meant to gain by it? “A warrior woman the Catholic Church refused to recognize for centuries and the English condemned for heresy and cross-dressing—which I’d think would stand her in good stead with any Surrealist.”
“No saints,” André said.
“Dosis sola facit venenum,” Jacqueline said. “The poison is in the dose.”
“Ah yes, Paracelsus,” André said. “The Swiss doctor, alchemist, and philosopher of the German Renaissance, who gave us the value of observation in combination with wisdom.”
Jacqueline proposed Paracelsus as the genius, rather than Freud, and soon they’d decided they could have a different genius for each suit, Freud and Paracelsus.
“How about a siren for the third character?” René Char offered.
“A singing temptress?” Nanée said doubtfully.
André said, “I would think you would like a siren, Nanée, for her power over us men.”