Auntie Kay and the poet.

Leonard Cohen reminded me tonight (funny how people can do that from beyond the grave) that my great aunt (but only by marriage, and my grandmother never allowed anyone to mention her) used to dance in cafés with Pablo Neruda. Not as an entertaining performance of course, just as friends. He was working as a diplomat in Madrid just before the Spanish Civil War and was between wives. It was Cohen performing "Take this Waltz" that sucked this piece of information fresh into my thoughts. My own generation of this family is nowhere near as scandalously outrageous. They are both dead now of course, but when I was in Madrid a few years ago I sat in cafes and tried to imagine the two dancing together, but the thought of my uncle kept getting in the way. This is the aunt who, as a not so young woman, manned barricades in Paris in ’68, and when I think of her I see a troubling vision of a surreal poem written on a lampshade in purple lipstick