1913issue6online

18 them, and no formula for their whereabouts. Between the wars, Mary’s garden grew familiar, with frequent visitors: Brancusi, Man Ray, Breton, Barnes, Éluard, Mina Loy, Joyce, Cocteau and Beckett. At Mary’s, Duchamp papered a wall with maps and studded another with tacks connected by string. He mapped her house with lines, but she was the one who stayed in the Paris occupied by Germans. When Holland fell, Duchamp fled for Arcachon, southwest of Bordeaux, and then to New York. Mary remained, maybe because of the cats. This nonsense stuck Duchamp waiting on the bridge besides, between sides, recalling her garden and her food. She wasn’t uncomfortable, only hoped to bind the covers of books. This was part of her Resistance. (The portmanteau will crack the mind. Leave and Remain = Releave. To be relieved, released.) Think two words and say them at the same time. «She left her home dressed in ordinary streetwear and went across the street to a French residence where, an hour later, she saw two carloads of armed German Gestapo surround her house.» (Letter from Frank B. Hubachek to M. L. Boynton, May 13, 1963.) Hubachek also wrote that Reynolds›s home «became the gathering point and the dispatching point for the spy poste. It was also a Paris station for the escape route. There was a continuous procession of individuals, microfilm, used parachutes, and so on.» At Mary’s, secreted fleeing people hid, and collections of information for the Allies, papers and documents, lay around in her map-house in forged uselessness; treasure-coded. She saw how many things hide in a line of sight. They knew her as Gentle Mary, who sees everything moving and says nothing from the front. At the last moment she escapes through a sort of double door. There’s window-doors and door-windows, and door-doors, and door-walls. We saw them watching her through all these,

1913issue6online

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