At the Posada El Castillo, where James lived with Plutarco and his family, Carrington, a frequent visitor, painted on the walls flanking the front portico two tall women-beasts with spirals for breasts—a joke, she told me, surprised to hear they were still there. She also recounted how James had been so exploited by friends and acquaintances as a wealthy young man that he became picturesquely tightfisted: at the end of a meal in a restaurant he would pull a wad from his pocket— bills individually wrapped in tissue, for he was obsessed with hygiene—and since there was never enough to cover the check, he would ask Leonora to pick it up. Once she decided to leave her money at home, and when the bill came, she said, "We'll have to wash the dishes, or you can go and get some more money."
In the documentary Edward James, Builder of Dreams, made by the current leaseholders of La Posada El Castillo, Avery and Lenore Danziger, there is a clip of Carrington at Las Pozas, a cloud of hair framing her long, beautiful face as she sketches on a canvas with James sitting nearby. She recites a fragment of "sinister poetry" retrieved from childhood: "When babies' cries were hard to bear, they popped them in the Frigidaire." In one scene, James has two green parrots on his head, another on a stick, one on an arm, and one in his palm. "I'd be like Noah with the ark, if I could," he says. Wearing a vermilion dressing gown, he feeds deer from a plastic bowl. James owned hundreds of birds and about 40 dogs, and once took his pet boa constrictors to the Hotel Francis in Mexico City. In the film, Carrington says of James, "He had learned the great art of treating animals as intelligent beings and that we are not necessarily superior to them."
"Surrealism," James said, "is a process by which the illogical becomes logical"—and thought frees itself of reason.
near the entrance to Las Pozas is a separate house called Homage to Max Ernst, which was left to one of Kaco's sisters and is now owned by an architect. The garden has 200 flowering trees and plants that give off a huelo de noche, a night fragrance. Next to it, Reed, the painter, built a house on another piece of land Kaco had given him.
"What room are you in?" Reed had asked me. I described the one overlooking the back of town. "Oh," he exclaimed, "I lived there for a year. One afternoon there was a terrible explosion and the windows shattered and fell on my bed. We never found out who the bomb was intended for." Before leaving, he took my hand, held it a moment, then remarked, "Long fingers—so Leonora Carrington."
On my last night in Xilitla, at four in the morning, there was a scratching at my window. It was raining hard, with thunder and lightning. I lifted a corner of the white curtain: hovering on the cement ledge on the other side, its head hunched into its shoulders as though to avoid the torrents, was a mouse, most human. So Leonora Carrington, I thought, and dropped the curtain. I opened the kitchen door, switched on the light: a velvety moth grazed my forehead. I went to sit beneath the portico, facing the gate and the giant white cast-cement pawprints of an imaginary beast leading up to me through the rustling garden. Xilitla is for children and Surrealists.
GINI ALHADEFF is a contributing editor for Travel + Leisure.
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