My Lady Green

Mimesis by Remedios Varo

Happy New Year and welcome back to The Fur Cup!

For my first surrealist adventure of 2025, I could not resist another gorgeous Remedios Varo painting, although this one is rather sad. The cat, which you can just see under the floor, is our guide and narrator in this unhappy tale but who knows, maybe there will be a happy ending and a triumphant escape.

This year I sense that hope will be the most precious thing of all, so I shall try to bring you the glory and imaginative power of surrealist art in an effort to keep joy and optimism alive.

Look out for the next Fur Cup encounter in a month’s time and I’ll hand over, now, to Cat.

Mimesis by Remedios Varo, 1960

She used to smile and stroke my fur. We were in sympathy with each other and when I felt playful, I would pat one of her cotton reels across the floor and make her laugh. She fed me cream. And salmon. That was in the early days when she and her mate would lie in the bed together gazing at each other’s faces for hours. Now he is not often home, which I prefer because I regard her as my own, but she stopped smiling when he began to stay away. And then an old woman came to live with us. She never smiled. This old one would shout and scold and, in the end, my Lady Green (I call her that because it is the colour she wears most days) began to stay in her room.

She told the old one that she had sewing to do and was left alone. My Lady Green began to spend most of her time in one chair which was decorated with heraldic lilies and with only her sewing basket and linen press for company, apart from me, of course. I began to watch her even more closely one day because a blue lily shape appeared on one of her cheeks. The next day it had spread to her neck. When she stroked me, her hands were no longer soft or flexible. Instead, they felt like pieces of wood with scrolled ends. And then came the sad day when she tried to stand but fell over immediately: her feet had shrunk away to pin-shape points like the chair’s legs.

It was then that the sewing basket became aggressive. I hissed at it but it lashed back, hooking her chair and sending a piece of cloth rearing up over her head like a flat, wind–filled serpent. I knew it was up to me to rescue her. She wasn’t able to fetch my cream or my salmon and I had long tired of catching hairy mice with sour innards to eat.

At first, I wondered if the wardrobe might form an escape route: it seemed to be connected to the sky outside, but another predatory chair had got it cordoned off and had the dirty habit of raking through the drawer of underclothes with its nasty, inquisitive leg. So I began to scratch and claw and finally bite the thin wood flooring by the wall. Every day I worked on it and removed a little more and it cost me a tooth and a couple of claws. But she just watched me with her new sad expression. No matter how much I mewed and sashayed around the tunnel entrance in that way that once used to amuse her, still she did not speak or smile.

When I leap up into her lap I try to knead her thighs back to warmth and good human flesh but with each passing day there is less of my lady and more of the dead hard furniture that was her sanctuary and is now her prison. Is it too late? Lady Green, I cry, let us pull up the rest of these flimsy floorboards and find a better place. I miss my cream and my salmon. And my smiling lady.