GREEN TEA
LEONORA CARRINGTON, 1942
Alright here we go. This story starts with a girl being presented at the court of King George V. Formal gown. Curtsy. The whole ritual. Her family is rich, industrial money, and the plan for her is pretty simple: court, marriage, done. Leonora Carrington looks at that plan and torches it. At twenty, she runs off to France with Max Ernst, one of the most famous artists in Europe, twenty-six years older than her. That's more or less the end of her and her father. Then the war. Ernst gets arrested, and her world caves in. She flees into Spain, coming apart the whole way. And in Spain, her family has her committed. An asylum in Santander. The treatment there is a drug called Cardiazol. It sets off seizures. On purpose. She's twenty-three. Now the story goes sideways. Her father sends her childhood nanny to collect her. The way it's always told, the nanny arrives by submarine. People asked Leonora about that for decades. She never confirmed it. Never denied it either. The family's next plan is another institution, farther away. The route runs through Lisbon. And somewhere in Lisbon, apparently she walks into a restaurant and goes straight out the back door. And runs to the Mexican embassy. Inside is Renato Leduc, a diplomat and a poet, a friend of Picasso. He marries her. On paper, for the papers. And she gets out. She lands in New York, and shortly after, she paints this. Look at it. A woman wrapped so tight she can't move her arms. Eyes closed. A crown of spikes. A white horse chained to a tree. A brown dog fixed in place, its tail turning into a trunk. And underground, along the bottom: bats, vultures, strange cocooned things. Even the buried creatures look trapped. Everything in this garden is held. Why Green Tea? Nobody knows. Carrington wasn't the explaining kind. But look at the wrap one more time. Wound that tight, it's one of two things. A straitjacket. Or a cocoon. And with Leonora Carrington, that's not even a close call.