VALENTINE PENROSE(like the figure of Salvador Dalí), but which takes on gigantic proportions as soon
as it gets through the door, filling the room to the ceiling. An amorphous con-
struction, it ends in one place like a woman’s shoe; the construction is walking on
the shoe at that end and on the point of something like a nose. I say to the man I
am lying down with that I don’t love him any longer. He says: ‘‘Then go take one
of those Greeks!’’ I get up, go toward the wall, and pull at the leg of one of those
young men in marble. He gets down from the wall. We leave together, we walk
along in some countryside. The man I am walking with suddenly becomes my
father. We are walking side by side on a plateau. Lower there are some fir trees
only the tops of which are visible. My father points out one cluster of these fir tree
tops (on the south slope) which are tossing about, and says: ‘‘Over there is where
I knew your mother.’’ I say: ‘‘Over there is my murderer!’’
I descend the slope, I think now it’s the north face, down to the foot of those
fir trees. There, sitting against a tree trunk is an aging man, dressed very sportily,
with a rust-colored tweed jacket, his grey hair very short. He draws a knife on
me. With the tip of my index finger, I touch the point of the blade, and with
the other index finger the end of the handle. I turn the knife around and get ready
to stab this man when my father, beside me, says: ‘‘That just isn’t done.’’ At which
I stab the man, who falls down the slope. He rolls over on himself, touching
his forehead with his index finger and looks like the Ouroboros serpent biting
his tail.
—mary ann caws
Valentine Penrose 1898–1978
condom-sur-baïse, france
P
enrose was part of the Surrealist movement in the 1920s and was adept
at the creation of remarkable images through the automatic process. In
1925 Valentine Boué married Roland Penrose, who, with David Gas-coyne, is credited with bringing Surrealism to London. The three moved to Spain
in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. Penrose later produced a graphic biography
of Erzsébet Bathory, the sixteenth-century Hungarian countess who had hun-
dreds of young women put to death, believing that bathing in their blood would
enable her to keep her beauty and youth (Erzsébet Bathory: La Comtesse san-