Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

I wish also to express my gratitude to my editor and close friend Braulio Peralta, and to Gabriel Sandoval for their encouragement and their faith in this book, which could not possibly have reached completion without Mayra Pérez Sandi Cuen, who never let up in pursuing her fervent and tireless reading of one chapter after another; and to Rubén Ángel Henríquez Serrano for his splendid suggestions and the care with which he checked the book line by line; and to Yolanda Gudino for her discretion, loyalty and love for Leonora, and to the Benjamin Franklin Library, who lent me material from their special collections.

Thanks are also due to Marta Lamas for always being at my side; María Consuelo Mejía for her solidarity; Philippe Ollé-La Prune who provided me with an out-of-print book; the film-maker Trisha Ziff, who rescued the case containing negatives belonging to Robert Capa and Emerico Weisz; to Mary McMasters for having pursued the pictorial images of Mexico with loving solicitude.

It opens one’s eyes to read whatever the critic and scholar Tere Arcq has written. The outstanding interview with Elena Urrutia on the subject of Leonora’s doll-making opened a new door on the full set of this painter’s skills. Daniel Centeno, in El Paso, Texas, made himself responsible for calling in books impossible to find in Mexico.

In addition to all this, the names of the talented writer Alain Paul Maillard; the art critic Luís Carlos Emerich, also curator of the vast exhibition mounted at MARCO in 1994; Juan Antonio Ascensio, who loaned me a Dictionary of Surrealism and a disk on which I could hear the voices of André Breton and Angelica Abellyra, and his articles in La Jornada are all names that come easily to mind.

I am also grateful to Isabel Castillo González; to my indispensable Chabe, who fifteen years ago knitted me the red sweater which protects me from the cold when I am at work in my little study; to Martina García Ramírez, whose strength and intelligence work hard to protect both humans and animals; to Paula Haro, my daughter, who read the early chapters and sharply proposed a number of corrections; and to Mane and Felipe, for picking me up each time I was starting to go under.

Birds regularly arrived at my study window just as dusk fell, and their racket made me think that if Pisanello had already painted every single one of them, Leonora hatched them all over again, in order to bestow on them the face of a zenzontle bird, or of a canary, or a hen, and so create a new reality for them. Horus’ own sparrowhawk flies through her paintings dressed as a Harlequin, while Ur Jar traverses the skies in a hot air balloon; in Are You Really Syrious? the hanging star interrogates us and plays with the meanings of language; the sidhes and the Tuatha Dé Danann, are spherical and intangible, the Celtic and druidic White Goddess, lunar and so before all time, revolves — as she does in Samain and Pastoral — in order to render visible the invisible past, and instruct us in the vast zoology we all contain within ourselves.