Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘My father, Carrington, prevented me from growing, and I wouldn’t let him. Now that time has gone by, I no longer think he was such a serious enemy, because I was enabled to do what I did in spite of him.’

She falls silent. It’s a shame not to have seen him before he died.

‘My father believed that his children were members of a society whose rules must never be broken. Imperial Chemical dictated our behaviour first at home at Crookhey Hall and then at Hazelwood. He represented the success of a dynasty: first my grandfather, then my father.’

‘Did you know your grandfather?’

‘Yes, he was a textile engineer. He invented a fibre that made the family fortune.’

‘Perhaps your grandfather is also the godfather of condoms.’

‘What?’

‘Yes, I carry around a dozen with me in my bag.’

‘Condoms?’

‘Yes, contraceptives. In order not to fall pregnant.’

‘Pepita! I lived in an age when we danced Viennese waltzes with handsome officers, what do you think you are talking about? Now it’s my turn to tell you something: you possess extraordinary powers but you are doing all you can to use them to destroy yourself.’

‘Really?’ Pepita sounds genuinely surprised.

‘Why don’t you live in a cabbage?’

‘Why in a cabbage?’

‘Because that’s where infants are born, so that’s where you should return.’

Pepita takes her to the University Museum ‘so that you can get to know the latest contemporary art. You’ll see what good vibes you get from it, woman, you need to wake up.’ The artist arrives on the arm of her young friend and descends into the luminous expanse of the museum. Leonora, who had only caught the word ‘museum’, anticipates visions of sixteenth-century Flemish paintings: the temptations of St. Anthony, and the gardens of delight; triptychs by Hans Memling and Roger van der Weyden, Hieronymus Van Aken or Hieronymus Bosch, only to find herself suddenly blinded by green, amber and red traffic lights flashing on and off and crisscrossing the space like flashes of lightning. The noise magnified through a massive sound system is infernal.

‘What is this?’

‘An installation. Do you like it?’

‘It’s horrible,’ Leonora cringes.

In the beautifully proportioned adjacent hall, the only thing that interrupts its cavernous void is a shoebox placed on the floor at the foot of a tall white wall.

‘This is another installation.’

‘I don’t understand. Is that rubbish really a work of art nowadays?’ The artist grows indignant. ‘Even Dalí’s crazes and Duchamp’s nudes resonate with me; this says absolutely nothing at all to me.’

‘It does to me.’

‘Why don’t you take off, silly Pepita? I am yesterday and today, but what I am not is rubbish. What you are showing me is the work of the Earl of Shitshire and his daughter the Whole of Arse.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Look, just take me home,’ Leonora is getting annoyed. ‘I need a good cup of tea.’

‘Ay, Leonora, don’t punish yourself! These artists are as undesirable as the Surrealists were! They are intellectual agitators!’

‘What? I’ve never heard anything so idiotic. There is a vast gap between intelligence and execution. These are throw-away objects.’

Despite the fact she exasperates her, the following morning Leonora recounts to Pepita how, in her dreams, Max Ernst appears, in the midst of birds extending their wings to him. He is busy painting their bellies, chests and sexual organs red. He is carving them on a surface until he turns them into bones.

‘You know he was fascinated by madness.’

Pepita sees that Leonora had taken the mortal leap, and had landed unconscious right at the bottom of the well. Religion did not enslave her, nor did she submit herself to any form of ideology, any schema of abstract thought, or any artistic trend: nothing had ever prevented Leonora from living her love outside time, outside society, a love born of passion, a love like an alchemical egg, a love that could be the wind, the wind of the North they call Boreas, who owns a dozen thoroughbred horses, the wind that could impregnate mares simply by their turning rump-first towards him.

‘In St. Martin d’Ardèche, Pepita, I discovered what the concierges of Paris call a folie a deux. Do you know what that is?’

‘Yes, I do know. I have also lived on the wild side, with my heart’s blood pounding through my body, I have loved with André Breton’s amour fou , even without André Breton.’

‘Oh yes, my girl? And you discovered that emotions are worth precisely sweet nothing?’

Pepita turns white. Her hands tremble as she raises the cup of tea to her lips.

‘Look, young lady, do you know how to bake bread? Do you know how to spend hours on end under the burning sun, cutting bunches of grapes? Do you know how to make your own wine? Do you know how to wash your lover’s sheets and make up a bed almost in the middle of a river? Just when I was on the point of metamorphosing into the womanly support for Max’s old age, preparing myself to be beside him his whole life through, a gendarme came into my kitchen and, over the cooking pot where our two loving hearts were simmering, asked for Max. Then, his rifle slung over his shoulder, he escorted him off to St. Cyprien. The war put an end to everything. In the end, my salvation has only and always been painting.’

In return, Pepita tells her that God holds her in his carelessness. Just like the Archbishop of Mexico and the President of the Republic, the Chief of Police and all prospective Members of the National Assembly.

‘So who do you believe in?’ asks Leonora.

‘In you.’

‘I don’t believe in politicians either, any more than I understand someone who runs after power. At heart, I am an anarchist, like Kati. Lord Acton, the first anarchist, declared that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.’

‘Do you know what else I believe in, Leonora? In myself, and in the loyalty of my two cats and my dog.’

‘What is your dog called?’

‘Drusille.’

‘How strange, that’s the name of a woman in one of my stories!’

‘That’s why I called her that. Would you have been the same, had you remained at home in England?’

‘No, I would have become more of a Celt, more Irish. Perhaps I would have lived in Westmeath. But, if I’ve got this right, Mexico made me who I am because had I remained in either England or Ireland, I would not have experienced the yearning for the world of my childhood as I did here … What I paint is my nostalgia.’

‘The weight of your forebears.’

‘I never read Mary Edgeworth, but I think that instead of having hair on my head, the green pastures of Ireland grew there.’

Pepita takes her to La Lechuza — the Barn Owl — on the Avenida Miguel de Quevedo.

‘Now we’re going to eat real tacos. ’

Leonora sits herself down on a low stool near a blazing open wood stove.

‘Do you see, sitting at that table is Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, who translated Homer and Ovid. One of his greatest books is De otro modo lo mismo, or Whichever Way is the Same . Doesn’t that seem a good title to you? Do you prefer tacos filled with chicken livers or mushrooms?’

‘Mushrooms have a soul,’ Leonora replies, as she attempts to use the cutlery.

‘Wait here for me, Leonora, I am going to greet the poet.’

‘Do you know him?’

‘No.’

Pepita gets to Rubén at the same moment he is putting a steak taco dripping red sauce into his mouth. A moment later, he is bowing to Leonora:

‘At your feet, Señora.’

Pepita distracts Leonora by saying: ‘Not all of us can be geniuses like you and Rubén, that much I know.’