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Ilya Ehrenburg, People and Life: Memoirs of 1891-1917. Anna Bostock and Yvonne Kapp, trans. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1961, p. 190—
I was sitting in Diego Rivera’s unheated studio; we were talking of the clever way in which the authorities had learned to camouflage tanks and “war aims” alike. Suddenly Diego shut his eyes. He seemed to be asleep. But a moment later he got to his feet and started saying something about a spider that he hated. He kept repeating that in a moment he would find the spider and crush it. He advanced toward me and I realized that the spider was myself. I ran into a corner of the studio. Diego stopped, turned and came towards me again. I had already seen Diego during fits of somnambulism; he always fought with somebody; but this time he was out to destroy me. To wake him was inhuman: it gave him an unbearable headache. I darted about the studio, not like a spider but like a fly. He always found me, although his eyes were closed. I only just managed to escape on to the Ianding.
Diego’s skin was yellow; sometimes he would turn up the sleeve of his shirt and tell one of his friends to draw or write something on his arm with the end of a matchstick; the lines or letters stood out in relief at once [called dermatographia]. (At the Calcutta botantical gardens I have seen a tropical tree on the leaves of which you can also write with the end or a matchstick; the writing gradually stands out.) Diego told me that the sleepwalking, the yellow skin and the letters were all the result of a tropical fever he had had in Mexico. I speak. of this because l am thinking of Diego Rivera’s life and art: he often went for his enemies with his eyes shut.
