by Allegra Jordan, Christmas Day, 2023

This is an imagined account of the beauty and suffering of the great artist’s last moments on Christmas Day, 1983. I thank Duke University Arts Librarian Lee Sorensen for helping me with this research. He is a phenomenal gift to our community, and certainly to me in this endeavor. 

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The Escape of Joan Miró
by Allegra Jordan

Is it time?

Joan Miró i Ferrà’s cloudy eyes stared into the doorway as Flora entered his bedroom that Christmas morning. Though the window was closed, his room filled with scents of his Catalan youth: the sun-baked soil, the wet ditch on his beloved farm, carob musk, jasmine vines, and yellow albaida bushes. 

Miró’s wife, Pilar Juncosa Iglesias, stirred in a rocking chair beside his bed. Her plump shoulders were wrapped in a royal blue shawl, her short gray curls untamed. 

“Do you need something?” Pilar said, unaware of Flora’s presence.

He gave a slight shake of his head. His wife shifted in her rocker and fell back to sleep. 

The artist looked over to Flora and raised one of his wispy white eyebrows. His eyes smiled, though his lips were too weary to join them. His chest felt so heavy. 

Flora stretched her hand upward. Joan saw a ladder appear, vibrant red and glossy black. It had one blue rung. 

He knew the ladder well. He painted it after his family escaped Nazi-occupied France. They’d returned to Mallorca to live in anonymous poverty while Franco’s White Terror ravaged Spain.

That Christmas morning, Pilar had dressed her husband elegantly. He would go into the next life in a crisp cotton shirt, his loosened tie a genteel green. It was the same conservative style he wore to meet the great artists with whom he crossed paths in his ninety years: his brilliant friend, Pablo Picasso, the Parisian poet André Breton, American sculptor Alexander Calder, musician John Cage, or Max Ernst, a German painter with whom he designed sets for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. He’d even worn a tie when Ernest Hemingway came to buy one of his first major works, The Farm. 

Flora’s heart broke when she saw how emaciated Joan had become in such a short time. His tailored shirts fit so well before his hospital stay a fortnight ago, but it now engulfed his body, as death would within the hour. 

Flora was not stooped like Mirò, but tall and willowy. Her dark hair was as long and lustrous as his was thinning and gray. Her olive skin was fair and smooth; her cheeks touched with pink. Joan’s once handsome face, with its square jaw and wide cheekbones, was now a mosaic of browns, taupes, and cream, the paints of nature on an aging human. A priest had painted a cross on his forehead in oil. Its sheen began to fade as his body grew colder. 

His hands–those marvelous co-creators–rested on starched white sheets that had been changed that morning. His bluish nails were neatly trimmed. A simple gold wedding band adorned his hands. He no longer smelled of oil paints and turpentine.

His bedroom, this sacred, quiet place, would soon be vacated. He would no longer need his wedding photograph on his dresser or the knick-knacks he had held onto as if they were India’s Koh-i-nor diamond: a piece of driftwood and shell, a clump of dried grass, a pod from a carob tree. His well-thumbed Bible–one Miró kept open when he painted–was now closed for eternity, along with a thin book of poetry by the mystic St. John of the Cross.

Mirò knew well the story of St. John of the Cross. The Spanish monk, imprisoned and tortured by his fellow monks three centuries ago, had written for Miró a spiritual blueprint to escape despair. It was a poem the painter knew by heart.

…I went out unseen,
my house being now all stilled.
In darkness, and secure,
by the secret ladder, disguised
-ah, the sheer grace!-
In darkness and concealment,
my house being now all stilled.

Joan clung to that spiritual ladder as he emerged from depression and illness, fleeing a dictatorship in Spain for France and in the lonely years after he returned after Hitler’s tanks rolled into Paris. 

Back in Mallorca, Mirò found himself living on the charity of his wife’s family, a poor fool whose paintings no one understood. Joan had no language for the defeat he felt. What good was art against such darkness?

Flora stroked the dying man’s hair. He was now one of the great masters of twentieth-century art. She remembered the war years when they’d sat together in a darkened cathedral listening to the organ music while he smoked a cigarette. A smile came to her lips as she recalled the sun’s light refracting through its stained-glass windows. One day, the cigarette practically fell out of Joan’s mouth as he stared in wonder at the color and dust suspended above him. It was as if he’d seen light for the first time. 

Sometimes, he would attack his canvas with rage, as if he were screaming to a waxing moon that did not give a damn. But other times, he would lure the world with his shapes and colors, re-enchanting it all over again. 

Little by little, Flora had watched him straighten up from black depression. She remembered with great delight the day he told her he’d decided to create soundless music like John of the Cross, with art that would give birth to a new world, radiating sparks “like the flints the shepherds in the Pyrenees use for lighting their pipes.” He told her he would paint “the noise hidden in the silence, the movement in stillness, life in the inanimate, the infinite in the finite, forms in space, and myself in anonymity.”

Miró’s lungs were now filling quickly with fluid. He looked at her as if to say, Will I go alone? Join me, Flora.

She bent down to kiss his forehead. 

I made a vow to stay. 

Please.

Joan, I participate in the suffering of the world. It’s where you were so many years ago in your green eyeshade adding columns of numbers. No. I will comfort another after you leave. 

The edge of Miró’s lips curled upward in a slight smile.

Flora, you damned well tried to kill me with plague and depression. You were merciless.

We use the tools we have.

You play rough, Flora.

Without confronting your death, would you have found the courage to tell your father you wanted to paint for a living?

He shook his head imperceptibly. 

Joan, you are most welcome for your typhoid and depression. And I thank you for painting and sculpting your wit and for painting all the fun parts and, yes, even the angry, fighting parts. But you did it all in a way that made people want to join you, smile, cry, and understand without words. You understood. And that has helped set right so many people’s spirits. 

He gave a painful swallow.

Flora, what will happen to you next?

The crescents under her bright eyes creased with joy.  I’ll find another gardener. It’s always a gardener. 

I work like a gardener, Flora.

Flora smiled, and suddenly the room smelled like a thousand almond blossoms of the Mallorcan spring.

The world has never seen a person like you, Joan. Being your muse has been the honor of my seventeen hundred lifetimes.

He nodded, his breath lighter, his panting rapid.

With an enormous effort, the old man lifted his arm to touch the ladder’s bottom rung. His gray hand passed through the rung and flopped back to the bed. He took a moment and struggled again. Again, his hand fell through the air.

Flora pursed her lips and touched the ladder’s rung. It felt sturdy. 

Joan, we need to do your life review. If you are ready, we can begin. 

            His eyebrows knit as if to say, “Judgment?”

            Have courage. 

            He closed his eyes and nodded.

Flora snapped her finger. The pair whirled down a rushing stream of memory: his depressive breakdown in the back office among ledgers, invoices, and a pile of bills. Next, he was lying in bed, doubled over with stomach pain, rose-colored splotches on his back and chest. She felt the day his vitality returned was like a thin tendril shooting up from a dormant seed. 

They watched Joan’s father sitting at his goldsmith’s shop, jeweler’s loupe in his eye, angry and stern, demanding Joan give up doodling and painting–a useless life! But Joan’s mother gave him the keys to the farm in Mont-roig. The room suddenly smelled of freshly tilled soil. In its fields were peas in full bloom, and the carob trees were heavy with brown pods. 

Flora took him to Mallorca, where his heart softened seeing his wife, Pilar, so young and beautiful in her white lace dress at their wedding. Women and men danced after they made their vows. The dancers’ spirits suddenly moved the figures into the sky, their exuberant display of the body and all its fun parts in glorious shapes and colors and transmutation made a constellation against the night.

The artist and his muse rode the stream of memories to Paris. They watched a much younger Joan hallucinate in his flat from hunger as the words of Paul Éluard and André Breton wafted through his threadbare curtains. Then, in the bohemian neighborhoods, they saw dancing and laughter and sex done badly and sex done well and sex as a jumble and sex as cruelty. He saw the sun and sky in cerulean blue and golden yellow and bright red.

There came the sounds of a baby girl, Pilar and Joan’s only child. Then they heard the clapping of flamenco and the glorious cathedral organ of Bach. And…and… a bass note that grew louder and louder. A snare drum commenced, and then many snares and a march – oh God, the awful ugly marching drumbeat of Franco and Hitler, death and greed, and the entire catastrophe of life: its grotesque, menacing teeth and phallic tongues, raping, burning, bombing, executing. The grisly contorted maw of evil destroyed everything it could reach in the beautiful gardens of Catalunya. They saw the abattoirs of Franco’s prison, where the beautiful Puig Antich was garroted in his cell. And he saw Puig’s soul escape, as Joan’s soon would.

Joan and Flora found themselves back in Mount-roig by the carob tree his father had planted. 

I feel eighteen again, but this time, I’m not sick! Joan ran to his beloved carob tree. He touched its roots and grasped a handful of soil that he placed in Flora’s hand.

I give you back your garden.

Suddenly, Joan and the muse were back in Joan’s Mallorcan bedroom. The red and black ladder beckoned as Mallorca’s cathedral bells rang out at the end of Christmas mass.

The ghost of Joan’s mother was now in the room, a wispy spirit of love surrounding her son.

His spirit began to separate from his body. 

John of the Cross appeared, joined by Alexander Calder. The sculptor balanced on the ladder’s luminous blue top rung. Calder stretched down to the dying artist, becoming long and thin and like a spoke of one of his famous mobiles. Near the bedside, Miró’s dead cat swatted at him while a young man with dark hair–it was Puig–appeared and guided his soul to the ladder.

            Miró grabbed Calder’s outstretched hand. Neither Miró’s hand nor foot passed through the rungs as he ascended. Moving faster and faster, he became a yellow and azure blue comet, racing to infinity. The spirits followed him. The cat reached down a curled paw and pulled up the ladder.

            Flora looked down at her hand. 

            There was a fragment of a carob leaf from Joan’s favorite tree.

Footsteps approached from the hall. As the nurse opened the door and Pilar awoke, Flora vanished.