Elena Palumbo-Mosca

I went to Spain as an interpreter as Spain was entering the European Union. I’d enrolled as a free student at the University of Grenada—and also because I was tired of reading Borges in the translation. I said, ‘I want to read the original’.

Yes. They sent some interpreters to practise in Spain. Most of my colleagues enrolled at political sciences faculties. But I’m also passionate about flamenco. So I went to Grenada, where the people who sing and dance flamenco live. My professor there was exceptional; he taught me how to read Borges with sensibility. And his wife, Ángeles, is the poet that I was privileged enough to translate, for the first time, into Italian.

Yes, and we’ve been friends ever since. I’d already translated one of her previous poetry collections, and would like to revise that work now because it also offers some really extraordinary poetry. She speaks of nature, of the body, of the deep reality of existence with pleasure and pain—of ethics, too. I think it’s very interesting to see how women write now, because in the past very few had the freedom to write about these subjects, which might have been considered a man’s territory. Ángeles is able to be explicit about the pain in her childhood. Before, women were perhaps too busy in the kitchen to write.

Unless they belonged to the aristocracy. So what does a woman write today? This is interesting. How do you become a person who thinks like this and who writes like this? If they bring you up nicely, working with a needle and making pretty things and everything is always quiet for you, I don’t know if you can reach this sort of sensibility and awareness.

My mother was very much an intellectual. I can show you her letters, beautiful letters full of humour and wit and elegant prose. After the war, we became poor, so she started to do the housework but never asked me to help. She wasn’t brought up cooking or cleaning, so she would make us an omelette once in a while—simple, healthy things.

Not at all. We weren’t baptised. In a way, I was brought up like a little pagan girl by a mother who just told me not to destroy flowers and plants.

My mother was a very sporty woman. She was a skiing champion and she was a very good swimmer too. So she encouraged me to swim. But also, up in the mountains in front of Mont Blanc, skiing was the only way to move around in winter. We went to school on skis.

I chose diving, and I see more clearly now that that too was a desire to jump into the void, something I shared with Yves. I think she did a really great thing, my mother. She taught me never to be submissive—not in so many words, but we were always equal. I wonder if it was from a place of purity too. I’ll be forever grateful to her for this.

I’m not sure she was proud, but she sure had a good sense of humour. I remember when a well-known Italian newspaper published a huge photograph of me on the front page, swimming naked with Yves’ blue paint on my body over a large cardboard surface. Her comment was simply, ‘Don’t you think you might be slightly overdoing it in Paris?’ In Turin we have an expression that is specific to that part of Italy, ‘esagerum nen’, or ‘let’s not exaggerate’.

Well, in my day, when you had no money it was the only way to get out of the country. And yes, I was curious. I managed to get a little money to buy myself a one-way ticket, the equivalent of 50 euros. And I never went back. First I went to London with a girlfriend from Aosta. We found an employment agency and they allocated us to a family. I was quite lucky; mine was a very kind, Jewish family. I had to learn the rituals, the way to cook, to set the table. It was complicated because you couldn’t use the same chinaware or silverware for products containing milk and meat. I was about 20, more or less. I stayed with them for a year, and then I found another family, a very upper-class, intellectual family in South Kensington.

The cooking was done by the lady of the house, but all the rest was me. It started early in the morning because they wanted tea in bed at 5am. I learnt to do all those housekeeping tasks that my mother had done without me ever realising. She was determined to give us the freedom to study and explore. Thinking of it now, I’m ashamed I was unaware of how much she had done for us.

I was just working there, learning and living with other human beings, in a different culture, with radically different habits. I peeled potatoes, I learnt to cook, to clean toilets, to light fires in the chimney places in the early morning, and to get the coal from the garden. In winter, it was covered with snow; that’s why my hands are a bit destroyed now. In fact, I have a problem with my hands because I lost sensitivity. I’ve worked a lot with my hands in life. Yves’ wife, Rotraut, has a similar problem. Sometimes we look at each other’s hands and laugh, ‘Yes, we really did work hard’. We’re great friends; she lives in Phoenix, but with WhatsApp we can communicate.

I was happy at Arman and Éliane’s place, but after a while I wanted to be in Paris. So they called a new girl from Germany, and it was Rotraut. She came and replaced me, and we would drive around, to the coast, to Italy, on my motorbike. She’s a great artist. I really love her work.

I chose; I found Arman and Éliane through an ad in the newspaper. I wasn’t interested in going to a bourgeois family or into an aristocratic environment because I’d get bored there. But when I saw these artists, I said, ‘That’s where I belong’. So, that was that. People think things happen just by chance, but they don’t. My life is a result of my choices. Because it’s true that I’ve lived most of my life with artists. I could never fall in love with a businessman.

Actually, once when I visited my mother’s house, I found some very clever texts in my childhood bedroom. I wondered who had written them, and it turned out that it was me when I was much younger. When you are 16 or 17, you are very receptive. And I had the chance of doing classical studies.

Yes. I believe that artists are almost like prophets; they can sense long before what’s going to happen. Living near them certainly helped me to develop a better sensibility. Their minds and hearts were open and subtle, we were speaking of ideas, the world, and beauty. I was living with them, so naturally you assimilate things. But I think I’ve always been so far from the average way of thinking and being, perhaps because of my mother’s influence. In the ‘60s in Paris, I went into show business to pay for my studies. It was the time of the Black Panthers, I loved jazz, so I was near them because of my love for their art, and when you know the people, you know that they’re oppressed. And so I’m always on the side of our friends. Of course I’d be on that side of the barrier.

Yes, of course. But I also had to work to survive.

It’s very frustrating. But I had to make money; I was fed up with being poor. So I learnt to stay cool. I always said, ‘This is what the speaker said’ at the end of any sentence I found unpleasant, as a way to disassociate myself. What I wanted to do was film directing, but I didn’t have enough money. The only thing I could afford to do was the interpreter school, which I enjoyed very much anyhow. I had a diploma and I liked languages and spoke French and English already. But, by the end of my career, I really couldn’t stand it anymore, having to be directly transferring the thoughts and decisions that arose from some of these politicians’ minds—sometimes so full of aggression or dishonesty.

Of course. They don’t fool me. They have to be for or against one or the other, like a football game. But it’s not a football game. We could have a nuclear war, which means the end of the planet. I know what it would mean in the case of a nuclear war; it would destroy everything if it gets out of hand, and it could. When I see this, in a way I’m happy that I don’t have any children. I don’t know. I never had the courage to make a child.

Yes, it must be very painful. I worked in a hospital when I was young, and I could hear all these women screaming when they were giving birth. I didn’t want to go through that. So, yes, I hated being in the middle of these politicians. It’s like something wrecking your brain somehow, if you believe in the things I believe in. When I worked for people I liked I was never paid, because they had no money.

That’s what I did, yes. And I’m not sure that everybody understands this.

Yes, or to be within the void.

He was certainly a good-looking man, with class, humour, and the typical refined French manners. The Frenchmen of that time had a very graceful way. Yves came from a very good family, so did Arman. So there was style.

I was about 23 by then, so Rotraut must have been 18. I actually introduced Yves to her. They fell in love immediately, but it was to be expected because they shared the same intuition and connection with the earth and elements. They became great collaborators too. I loved Yves, we had much mutual respect and understanding between us. But, in a way, he was closed within his culture, his sensitivity mostly went into colour. I was different; I loved jazz, flamenco, and warmer temperaments. Still, we would listen to Mozart together; I come from a family of classical musicians. Yves wasn’t really interested in other cultures. Japan was an exception. He found his own concept of the void there.

Exactly, there’s a lot of discipline. I think quite a few of his theories are the result of his life in Japan. For Japanese people, the void is the beginning and the end of everything, and this is the central concept in all of Yves’ work. I think until now, the importance of Shinto religion and Japanese aesthetics in Yves’ work has been underestimated. I think Yves was very influenced by Japanese minimalism, but it hasn’t been sufficiently underlined yet in the West. But it is true that apart from Japan, Yves was very strongly linked to his own French culture—whereas I’m very curious. I felt much closer, almost like a sister, with Arman. I think Arman and Yves were very complementary: Arman created a space full of objects, while Yves created the void. They practised judo together. But as far as I am concerned, judo is not a sport.

It’s a completely different thing. In fact, all of these techniques and practices that are called martial arts in the West are called budo in Japan: budo isn’t a sport, it’s a way to perfection.

More or less, yes, and I would certainly like to spend more time there and learn the language. But I couldn’t live in Japan, or anywhere else, for a long amount of time. There’s nothing you can do in Japan that isn’t subject to some strict rule. If I give you something, it has to be like this. Most of the time when I hurt myself, I’m doing something absentmindedly. And how would you like your eggs?

They’re supposed to be good eggs, laid by happy chickens and so on. I really think that I’m political because I was born with the war and lived through the war. Every action is political. My mother was in the Resistance because we had to flee from the fascists. So I have a tendency to think about what I’m doing, even if I’m buying a cucumber. I try not to finance capitalism, not to torture animals. 

It was very precise what we had to do, to do the right thing in the right way and not miss anything. I think the three of us were quite good.

No. We rehearsed the day before. We were used to strict discipline and performing on stage, to doing things with precision. I worked as dancer in various Pigalle striptease clubs.

It was funny. It wasn’t too risqué, as they say. In fact, it’s more emotional for me to read a poem in public than to take my clothes off. And anyway, when I took my glasses off I didn’t see anything. I didn’t see the public. I was in some sort of cloud all by myself. I think that made things very simple for me. I felt as if I was alone, in fact. Do you like jazz?

Do you know Dexter Gordon? Dexter was one of the greatest saxophone players.

Yes. Lets listen to ‘I Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Up to Dry’. He was a brilliant man, musician, and friend. So this was my stripping song. In those days, the girls would take a cassette to dance to. I never expected him to come and watch me perform. But then one night, there he was. He had no idea I’d be dancing to one of his songs! So I think he was quite surprised. He was such a brilliant man. I loved this time of my life, it was the time of Miles Davis, James Baldwin, Bud Powell, and Eric Dolphy, and they were all coming to Paris in those days, running away from the States.

Because I think that I belonged. You’re in the place where you belong. We lived in a small hotel on Rue de Seine, called La Louisiane. I wasn’t somebody who looked for money and glory or whatever, so I met and stayed with people who liked the same things I liked.

Well, everything will last as long as there isn’t a nuclear war. We’re just shadows passing by. I was under bombs as a child; every night when the sirens started ringing, we had to jump out of bed to hide in the cellar. I was maybe eight years old. So even now, even before this war story, if there’s a plane flying over at night, I wake up.

Oh, yes, the trauma is deep. It’s terrible to have to say this as an older human being to a young one, but at the moment I’m quite afraid that these people are criminal enough—the human being is so territorial. They can’t accept standing beside somebody who cooks and speaks in a different way, instead of saying, ‘Great, let’s cook together’. This is what’s happening everywhere. We’re going to destroy the planet if we’re not careful. So, I don’t know. I don’t know how Yves would react to this. He was an optimistic man. Did you know that he was planning a city of the future where everybody would be happy and full of love and the houses would have no walls, just coloured air to get your privacy when you need it, and transparency when you don’t. Public baths for everybody. This is part of Yves’ work that not many people know. There was this very—how do you call it? Thinking about the future.

It’s an important part of Yves’ work, this idea of having a future.

Of hope and peace and living without too many machines, where everything would happen naturally. We would have some passing air which would dance and move and change from warm or cold, according to our needs. The Anthropométries, which are mostly made by female bodies, represent a better humanity of the future.

I’ve had some discussions with different feminists who’ve said that they felt Yves was exploiting women during the making of the Anthropemétries. It makes no sense. If there was a man who really respected women, that was Yves Klein. His mother was a great painter and a great woman too. With me, he was always absolutely respectful. And of course, he was the same with his wife, Rotraut. He was helping her to develop her own art. These discussions, they bring the conversations about Yves to such a low level.

Oh, quite a while ago at the Tate in London, a journalist, with a slick look on his face, took me to one side after the interview and asked, ‘So, tell me, did you sleep with Yves?’ This made me so frustrated. We were working together. Can’t I have a male friend without sleeping with him? Or can’t I sleep with a man without being in love with him? What does my sexual life have to do with Yves Klein’s art?

People who do things perfectly are people who do just one thing, because they can concentrate all their energy into that. I like to be a gardener, I like to look after cats. My Japanese master gave me a surname that means I’m the one who establishes links between others. He told me that was my role in life.

I think more than being an artist myself, I’m somebody who brings it to others. You need everything in society. So I’m thinking about you and what I could give you, just one simple teaching about your posture. You could imagine that your pelvis is a flowerpot and that your spine is the stem of a flower. If the pot is tilted, the plant can’t grow properly. I taught functional movement, that’s why I noticed.

Your head—you have to correct it absolutely. It’s because of your form. I know because of Dexter; he was very tall, so he walked around with a stoop. We were all smaller, so he had to look down on us. And it’s nice that out of an awareness of the fact that other people are smaller, you tend to hold yourself like this.

Yes, so you must think about aligning it. You must always be sure that if you’re sitting, you must be on your sex, practically. 

Well, for those who are able and want to think—it depends on what they were taught when they were children, unfortunately. There’s a lot of rubbish. Just be yourself, I think. Optimism is a bit silly these days. If you want to be happy, go out and smoke a joint. I was lucky that they left me alone, letting me find my own way between cows and cats and chickens. And this is the advice: nature is the master. So we need to respect it, and with this, respect life.