Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘Papa, this is about something deep inside me, something stronger than I am, something that I know I can’t betray,’ Leonora stares at him in desperation.

Her father attempts to mollify her:

‘Before getting married to Cedric Taylor, you could devote yourself to training the fox terriers and keep your painting for your spare time.’

‘Marry Cedric Taylor? Training the fox terriers? Why ever would I?’

‘Because you love animals and it is something you can get involved in, without running into problems.’

‘But I don’t love Cedric Taylor, Papa.’

‘You go out riding with him.’

‘That’s not the same thing at all.’

‘He is an outstanding candidate. You really have no idea what’s good for you.’ Leonora is disturbed by the sharpness of her father’s stare. ‘You are my daughter.’

He starts every sentence with you are my daughter. He emphasises the my . Leonora belongs to him, she is the apple of his eye, and yet he can’t manage to hold on to her.

‘Papa, don’t take away what matters most to me.’

‘Oh no? And what would that be?’

‘Painting.’

After every battle with her father, Leonora seethes with rage. This time she writes: ‘The only person who was there at my birth was our beloved, loyal and old fox terrier Boozy , along with a machine for sterilising cows.’ She does not come downstairs to eat until her father knocks at the door of her bedroom:

‘What are you doing?’

‘I am adding the next chapters to my manual of disobedience.’

HIS DAUGHTER’S RESPONSE AMUSES Harold Carrington. She challenges everything and everyone, including him. A man more accustomed to uncertain vacillation by way of reaction, he is always surprised that his daughter seems completely undaunted by him.

‘If you go off to London, I won’t give you a penny piece.’

Leonora is admitted to the Chelsea School of Art. She walks along the Thames, a river which is simultaneously spirited and noble. She too is a river: she has the force of one. She explores South Kensington all over again, and smiles at the memory of her former forays around it in a limousine. After attending Court and visiting the royal box, she has gone to live in a basement where she has scarcely enough on which to feed herself. Under orders from Harold Carrington, an employee of Imperial Chemical teaches her how to drive the Fiat her father has bought her. They make excursions to the countryside of an evening, and its gentle slopes are so smooth that Leonora thinks it good to be British.

It is always well worth living in South Kensington, despite having to subsist on a diet of eggs fried on the little gas hob. Serge Chermayeff — also looking out for her on her father’s orders — takes her to visit the academy of the French artist Amédée Ozenfant who, together with Le Corbusier, founded the movement known as Purism. With a great curiosity and self-assurance, the maestro studies her from top to toe. ‘From now on, you’ll be learning how to work,’ he pronounces in dry tones and a French accent, before seating her on a bench in a circle of students, each one facing their own easel.

‘No charcoal allowed! And no red chalk! Pencil, nothing except lead pencil!’

Leonora obeys him as she has never obeyed anyone before. He teaches her to draw an apple with a single line. If it doesn’t come out right, she has to repeat the exercise over and over again sitting in front of one blank sheet of paper after another, and in front of the same apple gradually rotting away before her eyes. Ozenfant never humiliates her, or makes fun of her ambitions. Serge Chermayeff lets Carrington know that his daughter has not missed a single class, and definitely has talent. The maestro has succeeded in taming her — and with excellent results. He has no idea that out of his sight and in her own room, the heiress of Imperial Chemical draws very different subjects to the rotting apple he obliges her to reproduce again and again. He is equally unaware that Leonora is romantically involved with an Egyptian who has a singularly prominent nose. ‘Such a pity I never went to Cairo when I travelled with my mother, we would have had so much in common!’

In her basement, she paints what surges forth from her imagination. She only shows the results to Ursula Goldfinger, the friend who meets her at the end of class each day.

‘So your husband is Hungarian?’ Leonora enquires.

‘Yes, and a great architect. You should meet him.’

Another friend, Stella Snead, amplifies by way of explanation: ‘You did know, didn’t you, that Ursula is the heiress to Crosse & Blackwell, the soup and condiments manufacturer, and she can afford to buy whatever she wants?’

What an effect money can have! Ursula, tall and strong, treats Leonora with affection because she is so unconventional and direct in her criticisms. During lessons she listens to their classmates with a gentle irony, and reports to Ursula: ‘Blessed is he who expects nothing for he will not be disappointed.’ Stella is inconstant, while in contrast Leonora never misses a class, and never once baulks at the discipline imposed. Ozenfant demands they all know the essentials of painting: what a pencil or a tube of paint or oils are made of. He obliges them to buy pencils as hard as steel and to paint free-hand, repeating the action until their nerves are frayed. Only once does Leonora dare to speak out:

‘The apple has gone rotten.’

‘Then do it from memory the way it was before,’ he commands.

At the top of a page, Leonora sketches the face of a woman, her line never trembles and is pure in its clarity. Leonora had never seen another woman naked, peeled of her everyday shell, but she achieves the outline at her first attempt. Leonora has none of the training in anatomy that the rest of the class has, but her drawing lives, in sharp contrast to Ursula’s, and even more to Stella Snead’s. Ozenfant congratulates her.

One afternoon, the maestro informs them that the model hasn’t arrived and that one of his female disciples should offer to pose. The one who does is so thin that she looks like a mass of hollows, and you have to seek out her eyes at the bottom of an abyss.

The next time the same situation arises, Leonora volunteers.

‘Don’t do it,’ Ursula advises her. ‘Do you know what he asked the last one who offered? He asked her “What do you think you are, a spider?”’

The maestro can be cruel.

‘Your work is worthless, and you’re not taking it seriously. If there’s no rapid improvement, you cannot possibly continue on the course. I’ll give you a week.’

Leonora comes across a young man copying a Whistler in the Tate Gallery. He paints as if his life depended on it, and his fervour illuminates the gallery. Leonora enjoys her encounters with him and a day when they don’t meet comes to seem like a day with something missing.

Ursula tells her that in other workshops, students are obliged to draw The Oracle of Delphi, Apollo or The Venus de Milo , subjects that bore her to such a degree that the pencil falls from her fingers.

On emerging from class with Stella or with Ursula, Leonora uses her savings to buy books on alchemy from second-hand bookstalls.

‘Alchemy,’ the aged bookseller informs her, ‘is a means to achieve total knowledge and leads to liberation.’

‘That is exactly what I am seeking: liberation. But I also want to transform my father.’

‘Your father will annihilate you.’

Leonora purchases a little amber-coloured bottle with the power to transform individuals, causing them to be reborn, while at the same time mitigating panic attacks.

‘That’s exactly what I most want. For Harold to be reborn.’