Villa Dolores

By Rafael Sinclair Mahdavi

Villa Dolores is the moving story of the making of a painter.

After Rafael Sinclair Mahdavi’s birth in Mexico his American mother and Iranian father moved to Mallorca. The author’s island childhood was idyllic yet also crossed with violence and death. He later survived the brutality of European boarding schools. In Madrid his discovery of the paintings at the Prado became central to his coming of age as a painter, and as an exile from nowhere and everywhere. In Vienna when told he was about to die, he rejected the offer of last rites. Recovering in the Alps he lived a dramatic love affair. His educational odyssey ended when he returned to Villa Dolores for a last good bye.

The story ends as he is about to leave for America at the start of the nineteen sixties.

 

“Original, cosmopolitan, perceptive, these recollections make for a riveting read.”
Rory Brennan, poet and literary journalist

 

“Extraordinary... The story still needs telling, and you spare nothing in the evidence you give.”
Peter Abbs, author of Against the Flow

Design: Peter Macken Dialogo Design

Cover Photo: Rafael Sinclair Mahdavi

For more information about the author please visit www.rafaelmahdabvi.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Apr 27, 2018

Book preview

VILLA DOLORES

Rafael Sinclair Mahdavi

Also by Rafael Sinclair Mahdavi

Staying Alive/Permanecer en vida, photographs and poems in English and Spanish. 2010

Published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

4900 La Cross Road

North Charleston, SC 29406

U.S.A

Copyright © Rafael Sinclair Mahdavi 2017

ISBN 978-1548468040

ISBN: 1548468045

Contents

Foreword

Childhood Scenes Crossed With Tenderness and Violence and Death

Getting To Know The Enemy

Unvanquished

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Biography

For Euphrosyne Doxiadis

My memories are like an old puzzle. Some pieces don’t fit and others are missing.

Anonymous.

Foreword

The following pages cover the first seventeen years of my life. These years laid the foundation for what I have become.

I am now seventy years of age.

The memories that have survived the storms are the ones that matter. They have come to rest like offerings on the shores of my consciousness. The memories give me moments of happiness and help me slip away from the many waking hours I have spent thinking about my death and dreading its inevitability. I have loved my life up to now. I don’t want it ever to end. I wanted my youth and my middle age to last forever. Now I stubbornly want my old age to last forever too. I want to eat my cornflakes every morning forever. Surprisingly my awareness of my mortality has made me reckless at times and some of these times my recklessness has been exhilarating. I was driven by the self-destructive logic that if I risked my life I would appreciate it more. Death’s presence has kept me on my metaphysical qui vive. But I suspect that the end will catch me by surprise.

I will not pretend at my age to write about my youth with the mind of a teenager. To show why some early memories are germane a few thoughts and recollections of my life after my seventeenth year have gamboled their way into my narrative, skipping back and forth along my time line. In the ore of these memories is the iron by which I have lived, the stuff of my credo. Every one needs a personal metaphysics. The hardest thing to figure out has been this: What was vitally important to me, that is to say, what was worth staying alive for?

I am an atheist and as such I have often slept with the enemy, that seductive nihilism that caressed my body and brain and urged me to get it all over with. The unexamined life isn’t worth living as that veteran of battles of the mind Socrates said, but I sensed even as a young man before reading philosophy that the unlived life wasn’t worth examining. So yes, I’ve been busy living, but I do not consider myself a survivor of real hardships. And any suffering I have experienced is insignificant compared to that of survivors of the nationalist slaughters and genocidal wars and slave labor camps that have defiled––and continue to defile–– the world in my lifetime.

Because of my philosophical bent I have persistently asked myself questions about my life—as shop worn as this sounds. I have answered few of them. Among other things I have my doubts about free will and I don’t believe in the soul.

But I believe in luck.

Part 1

Childhood Scenes Crossed With Tenderness and Violence and Death

Chapter 1

Rattle And Die

My maternal grandfather Solomon Sinclair lived in Wichita, Kansas in the United States and in the nineteen twenties he bought a Model T Ford. On weekends he took his family on outings in the new car. One Sunday afternoon they came upon an accident. Solomon pulled over and got out to see what had happened. After a few minutes he came back, took his daughter Anne––my future mother––by the hand and walked her over to the wreckage. A woman lay by the side of the road. Her thigh was gashed open and blood was spurting forth over her torn dress. Close by a man sat on the asphalt leaning against the remains of his car. There was a crankshaft through his neck. As my mother stared at the scene her father announced that she would soon hear a death rattle. As if on cue, the man with the crankshaft through his neck rattled and died. Years later my mother went to college in New York and majored in English literature. After graduation she found work in Hollywood, writing for an outfit that produced B movies. I have often wondered if her scripts were full of gore and guts.

I have seen maybe ten photos of my mother as a young woman. She was slender, poised, and strikingly attractive. She once mentioned to me that in college she made extra money modeling her hands. The two or three photographs I have seen of her parents made a strong impression on me. They look straight at the camera; their faces are well modeled and handsome. Their eyes convey truth and courage and inner strength.

My paternal grandfather Taghi Mahdavi hailed from the holy city of Mashad in eastern Iran. He was an enterprising man albeit a little shady and from the little I have heard about him he was a tyrant with his children and wives, for he eventually had four of the latter. I have never seen a photograph of my father’s mother and I have only seen one photograph of Taghi himself. He looked like the kind of man you wouldn’t want to antagonize in a dark alley. After he made his fortune in banking, farming, and road building he settled in Tehran, married, and had children.

My father Mohamed the first-born and his brother Abbas were from Taghi’s first wife, du premier lit as the French like to say. Years later, when Taghi learned that my father had married an American, that it to say my mother, Taghi disinherited my father for disobeying him; the old man had already––when my father was a child––chosen a bride for him. My uncle Abbas suffered from tuberculosis and he was sent to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. Transferring money from Mashad to Switzerland was a slow and labyrinthine process in those days because the money was sent through Russia, which had only recently become the Soviet Union. The Swiss sanatorium insisted on being paid on schedule every month. The second time the payment arrived late the clinic conveniently forgot about the Hippocratic oath and had Abbas thrown in jail where my uncle died of collapsed lungs.

Being a wealthy man Taghi decided his remaining son should have a European education. For reasons, which always remained obscure, he took his seven-year-old son to Vienna, Austria and placed him as a boarder in the prestigious Maria Theresa Akademie also known as Theresianum. This Realgymnasium only accepted boys ten years of age or older so Taghi had his son's identity papers forged and—presto!––my father was now ten instead of seven and that was that. Taghi returned to Iran and didn't see his son for fifteen years.

Chapter 2

Lost Birthday

My father never took the trouble to calculate how old he really was, given that the Islamic calendar was quite different from the Gregorian one. He never celebrated his birthday because he didn’t know when it was and didn’t want to know. He also never celebrated mine. He maintained that society wasn’t going to dictate to him when he should give his son presents. The same went for Christmas, which is perhaps more understandable because until he was sent away to Vienna at seven he was schooled in the Koran at home in Iran. I am pretty sure my father became an agnostic during his years in Vienna. But toward the end of his life I think he secretly reverted back to Islam. As for my mother she told me more than once that even her parents had been atheists back in Kansas and she was proud of it. As for me I became an atheist in my youth on Mallorca—quite some time before I became interested in science and philosophy.

My father recalled his years in the Austrian capital as one of the happiest of his life. He survived and learned German. He became a rebel and a loner and acquired the exquisite and sometimes haughty manners of a young gentleman living in the afterglow of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time he was finishing his doctorate at the university of Vienna the city was rife with anger and hatred. Street battles between communists and Nazis were recurring scenes.

Before the Anschluss Taghi came to Vienna for a few days to see his first-born. He arrived by train with numerous suitcases and his illiterate, kind and simple-minded servant Hamid. Taghi stayed at the expensive Park Hotel on the Ring, which had a spacious elevator and upon first entering it Hamid, mistaking it for his hotel room, unrolled his rug, and lay down to sleep.

After Taghi and Hamid returned to Iran my father left Austria armed with a student visa and a scholarship to an American university in Florida. After the sophistication of Vienna student life in Florida seemed vulgar and childish to him. And he hated being called Mo—short for Mohamed. He quit his studies, changed his name to Alex Nemo and hit the road. He became a hobo and hitched rides across America before it was fashionable or literary to do so. He hopped freight trains, was jailed for vagrancy in Alabama, and broke his nose in a fight in El Paso, Texas. He ended up in Los Angeles, California as a flower seller. One day his boss caught him giving away flowers to a couple of young women and fired him on the spot.

A few days later a shy friend asked my father to deliver a note to a young lady working in Hollywood. That is how my parents Anne and Mohamed met. A few weeks after their meeting my mother moved to New York to work at Newsweek magazine and lost touch with my father. A year passed and he moved to New York too and rented an apartment on Sheridan Square in lower Manhattan. He told me much later that he had nightmares every night in New York.

At a poetry reading at the YMCA on the upper East Side of Manhattan my parents met up again by chance. They bought a bottle of Scotch and checked into a hotel for a few days. Then they moved to Mazatlan in the province of Sinaloa in Mexico.

That’s how my mother told the story.

My father always changed the subject when that subject came up.

Chapter 3

A Killing Triggers My Birth

My parents first lived in a family run hotel with an enclosed garden where a python had chosen to make its home. The hotel staff fed and pampered the big snake. In the nineteen forties Mazatlan was a village off the beaten tourist path.

With their savings from New York my parents bought a bar, but some thugs from a competing bodega soon ransacked it. My mother, who was pregnant saw a man knifed to death in the brawl that night and the shock sent her into labor. I was born in the convent down the street where the nuns doubled as midwives. My brother was born the following year under calmer circumstances. He was named Conrad in honor of Joseph Conrad the writer. As to my name––well, that was never cleared up. Rafael means God heals in Hebrew and there is also the famous Renaissance painter by the same name. But as far as I know there were no doctors or painters in my parents’ family history. Later as a young painter in Paris people some times thought I was Jewish because of my first name.

There were flying cockroaches in our house in Mazatlan. At night my father would place a basin of water on a table in the middle of the nursery. He left the light on and covered our cribs with mosquito netting. In the morning the water in the basin was