“What You See” by Susan Daitch, page 4
Lenny quoted the movie where Leslie Howard pretends to be an English fop, actually a swashbuckler, daring and intrepid, who secretly rescues French aristocrats from the guillotine, and I laughed at his imitation.
"Eventually Claudine grew suspicious and then angry. The visit with Cocteau was a test to see if I shared his proclivities. I remember looking at her hair frozen in curls at her temples. Her head looked like an Ionic column. So what if she thought I was Cocteau bait? I had to do anything to avoid..." He made an obscene gesture with his arm.
After about a year with Claudine he became the man who knew too much about the traffic of ex-Nazis to Latin American via the Vatican and about the fate of what he correctly guessed was looted art. Several times a month Claudine, with Lenny in tow, made trips to the villa to greet special guests. They weren't called shoppers, they were called collectors. They arrived in Fiats and Mercedes armed with lists of names: Paul Rosenberg, Levy de Benzion, David-Weill. Under the names were columns of titles. He'd seen the lists. Claudine told the collectors that according to Swiss law once you owned a painting for more than five years it was considered yours regardless of whether or not it had been stolen from its original owner. Claudine knew who drank what, she knew the names of their wives and children if there were any. She spoke their language, but she also could swear like a Tuscan making reference to various parts of the Madonna's anatomy. Although Claudine had a particular pedigree, she also had a gang of waterfront thugs at her beck and call.
"Like many fascists she was a combination of filigreed hysteria and the razor sharp self defense instincts of a cornered animal. At any rate Claudine would not take kindly to being tricked, especially by a Jew. I still couldn't return to the United States, so in 1963 when Marseilles got too hot, I left for Mexico. I kept remembering a line from a Kafka story I'd read in the importer's library: an educated ape tells the assembled academy that he has learned as much as `the average cultured European.' I'd had it with Cocteau, Pound, and Celine, the lot of them. I wanted to go back to the Marlboro Man with a vengence.”
"If Mexico City was good enough for Trotsky, it was good enough for me. Some atavistic urge was satisfied by the heat and the desert. I felt I had come home."
Lenny could easily pass as north Mexican Ladino, and he delighted in this guise, sometimes believing he had actually found his true identity. One morning at his local bakery he got into an argument with a woman who butt ahead of him in line. It was crowded in the morning, and he had been standing around daydreaming for a moment, but suddenly he suspected everyone was getting ahead of him. He felt invisible or at least that his disguise was slipping, and he was being treated like an American tourist. When he thought he was being overlooked his frustration increased, and Lenny was not gentlemanly. He argued with the woman who butt ahead of him, thinking he could be as rude as he liked, he'd never see her again, but weeks in the weeks that followed he kept running into her in the neighborhood.
"The woman's name was Esperanza Goldberg. Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? I'd heard of Two Gun Cohen (bodyguard to Sun Yat Sen) and Tiger Schulman (karate champion), but this name really made me laugh. She thought I was a jerk, but we began to see more of each other."
They married a few months later. Her family was very pleased with Lenny although they knew little about him or what line of work he was in. The answer at the moment was: nothing. His father-in-law had left Vilna for Mexico, just as Lenny's father had left it for Brooklyn, and offered him work with this relative or that. Esperanza's mother was from an old Marrano family and stories of his mother-in-law's ancestry obsessed Lenny with the rumors of hidden rooms, Friday night rituals with candles and wine that had lost their meaning after generations of desperate obfuscation. Passing was a theme that dominated Lenny's life and his work, and in the Marrano history in Mexico he found a gold mine. Soon Esperanza and Lenny had a daughter, Mili, now a court translator in Los Angeles. These were the most peaceful years of Lenny's life, and this is when he began to write his first book, XYZ.
XYZ, a surrealist novel was, from what little I was able to read of it, an early work. A futuristic story about an urban dystopia, the Brooklyn of Lenny's childhood as painted by de Chirico, it was written in English, Spanish, French, and Yiddish. A friend printed a small number of the copies of the book, and they were stored in a box on top of his refrigerator. He showed me a single copy, illustrated with found photographs and ink drawings. I paged through it, thinking I'd have other chances to read it in the future.
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