Dora Franco

Dora Franco was born in Colombia. She was a famous fashion model. I met her in 1968, when, during my six-month trip across Latin America, I flew to Chile. Dora accompanied me on a poetic tour around Colombia. When I ended up in the United States, Salvador Dalí, having learned from somewhere about our close relationship, invited Dora to dinner in my honor at the Ritz—paying for her flight from Colombia and back.

At the dinner, a conflict took place, described in the poem “Beneath the Skin of the Statue of Liberty,” when Dalí toasted to Stalin and Hitler as the greatest surrealists. I quarreled with Dora, who for a while had become Dalí’s assistant. She left her boss after he drugged her beloved old tiger, got married, moved to the United States with her husband, and then later returned and raised their son alone. We met and made up again after a few years in Panama, but then we parted again—this time as friends.

Dora became a professional art photographer and now lives alternately in Miami and in Colombia. We met again after more than forty years at a poetry festival in Medellín (Colombia) in 2009, where I read poems and she showed her slides. She was just as beautiful, enchanting, and kind, as if those more than forty years had never happened. A rare case, like with Sophia Loren.

Yevgeny Evtushenko.