He picked up a pencil himself then and created an entire character, half drawing, half collaging, using dry grass for a mustache and red-wine-stained bits of cork for eyes.
“Hitler,” Jacqueline said, and everyone chimed in, yes, Hitler, setting Dagobert, who’d been left up in Nanée’s room with a soup bone, barking like mad. It was indeed a comic Hitler—one that could get them all arrested if ever it was found. André labeled it Teppichfresser, “Carpet Chewer,” for Hitler’s rumored tendency to foam at the mouth, fall to the floor in his fury, and literally chew the carpet. André would have tacked it up beside the comic Pétain on his tree, but the glue wasn’t dry.
They began putting together collages to form prominent people and guessing who each was meant to be. It was seldom obvious, and yet they never failed to guess. It was fun, and exciting, and dangerous.
Oscar Domínguez—the artist who, with Pablo Picasso, created Never, that gramophone devouring mannequin legs that had emitted the haunting laughter at the Surrealist exhibit in Paris—presented the group with Freud. It looked like a playing card, giving André the idea they ought to design a new deck. Not a Tarot deck, but an ordinary playing deck they could have fun with.
“We’ll start with Oscar’s Freud here.”
“He can be our king,” Varian said.
“Did you know the deck of cards has its roots in the military?” It was not a question, but rather knowledge André was going to share. “The clover suggests military pay, the heart soldiers’ love. We’ll have to do away with the military and royal slant for our game, though. No kings and queens and jacks we don’t believe in.”
They needed cards that would reflect their own heroes and values, they all agreed.
“Instead of king-queen-jack, we could have id-ego-superego,” Jacqueline said.
“You’re missing libido,” Oscar Domínguez said.
“Genius,” André said. “Freud can be our Genius.”
“Instead of jacks, we could have jokers,” Danny suggested. “Or magicians.”
“Sorcerers,” Nanée offered.
“Magus,” André said. “Like sorcerer but without the evil.”
“With a religious tone, though,” Nanée said. “I thought you weren’t much for religion, André.”
“But I rather like the idea of wisdom,” André insisted, and no one objected. It was Andre’s idea. André’s game. André’s salon.
“If you don’t mind religion, I nominate Joan of Arc for the third face card,” Nanée said, remembering Joan of Arc and King Arthur and her failure of a tin-foil suit of armor. What protection had she meant to gain by it? “A warrior woman the Catholic Church refused to recognize for centuries and the English condemned for heresy and cross-dressing—which I’d think would stand her in good stead with any Surrealist.”
“No saints,” André said.
“Dosis sola facit venenum,” Jacqueline said. “The poison is in the dose.”
“Ah yes, Paracelsus,” André said. “The Swiss doctor, alchemist, and philosopher of the German Renaissance, who gave us the value of observation in combination with wisdom.”
Jacqueline proposed Paracelsus as the genius, rather than Freud, and soon they’d decided they could have a different genius for each suit, Freud and Paracelsus.
“How about a siren for the third character?” René Char offered.
“A singing temptress?” Nanée said doubtfully.
André said, “I would think you would like a siren, Nanée, for her power over us men.”
She was outvoted. A siren it was to be.
They went on from there to reimagine the suits. In place of the spade, they considered a key of knowledge, then settled on the lock itself, the keyhole, the space that appeared empty but in fact held the hidden mechanics the key must turn. In place of the heart, the blood-red wheel of revolution.
“This begins to sound like a Communist game,” Varian objected.
“You may call it ‘the blood of change’ in the United States,” André assured him. “If you can get us there, we bequeath you renaming rights on the wheel.”
Black stars for dreams—which seemed nonsensical to Nanée. “Stars aren’t black; the sky that holds them is. And black would be for nightmares.”
“Speaking of nightmares,” Victor Serge said, “is it true Walter Benjamin’s death was suicide?”