Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

Ernst smears a leaf with paint and places a second leaf on top of it, then lifts the top one off and from beneath emerge cypresses, poplars, mosses, birds; they transmute into hybrid creatures in which skin, fur and feathers are indistinguishable. Ernst gives it the title Woman Turning into a Bird.

They spend two weeks living under the same spell. Among the women, the photographer Lee Miller is the person who most attracts Leonora.

‘I was Man Ray’s assistant. He also caused me to fall in love with him, and I took portraits of Picasso, Eluard and Jean Cocteau. I was the statue in Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet and the theatre critics agreed that mine was the best part in the whole film!’

It’s a fact that she has a model’s figure. ‘Did you know that Lee Miller did the adverts for Kotex sanitary towels?’ gossips Eileen Agar. Leonora is surprised to learn that her new women friends should have a life so rich in challenges.

‘I’ve lived nothing and know nothing,’ she tells Lee Miller.

‘It’s better that way, and you’ll please Max better too. He’s a Pygmalion.’

Eileen Agar, the Argentine, dazzles her with her audacity. Her daring is way in excess of that of the English girls up in Lancashire. She follows the sun like a sunflower; Leonora wants to be like these women, living deliberately open to magnetic currents. They talk of their lovers and boast of their nocturnal exploits and extol their emotions. These women certainly know how to live! Lee Miller grew bored in Egypt with her millionaire Aziz Eloui Bey and sent him packing, pyramids and all. She made him a long tie of the Nile and left him with his tongue hanging out on the river bank.

‘I arrived on a camel made of sand,’ she assures Leonora, who listens to her open-mouthed. Eileen Agar is capable of changing a quill into a spray of roses. The aim of life is not to prosper, but to transform oneself.

When you launch yourself into the unknown is when you are saved.

‘How do you manage to paint?’ Leonora asks Eileen Agar.

‘The first thing is to be receptive, and you are. Sometimes I just sit still for a quarter of an hour or more, asking myself what I am going to do, and all of a sudden an idea comes to me. Often it is nothing more than a title, a caption, or the germ of an image. I smear the canvas, giving form to my unconscious mind. If I get stuck, I take a little nap, and when I return to my easel, the idea flows again. I try not to be too alert, since being over-conscious is inhibiting.’

Just one thing dampens the passion of their surroundings. The Spanish Civil War, which Picasso indicts with his painting of Guernica , now on exhibition in Paris. In the house in Cornwall, the mural evokes more comment than the war itself.

‘I loathe men when they dress up as soldiers,’ says Eileen Agar, ‘I loathe weapons, I loathe war.’

‘I can’t return to Paris without your promise that you’ll come too, Leonora.’

‘What for?’

‘To live with me, paint with me, and die with me,’ says Max, by way of a farewell.

‘Now that I have met you, how can you imagine that I would leave you?’

‘Max, you are my Holy Grail.’

‘Max, you are my misfortune.’

‘You are my spoon.’

Ursula Goldfinger warns her:

‘Think it over carefully. He is married to a woman who is a gallery director in Paris. She is extremely well known, all the painters there owe her a great deal, she protects and even maintains some of them.’

‘Then she should be giving him a kick up the backside right now this very minute.’

Leonora thinks leaving a wife seems as simple as choosing another menu. Meat or fish? For Leonora, leaving everything behind is the easiest thing in the world, given how willing she was to send her parents, her brothers, Nanny and Boozy — her fox terrier — to the devil in both England and Ireland.

‘So you are set on doing exactly whatever you want,’ Nanny says, with a sad look in her eyes.

‘Of course,’ Leonora answers back, capable of surrendering herself without question and without thought for the consequences.

Back in Hazelwood, Leonora confronts her parents. Not only is she not about to have the wedding they have so longed for, it couldn’t even happen with the man she is madly in love with, since he is already married. And he is twenty-six years older than her, and she is on the point of being reunited with him in Paris.

‘Quite different structures underpin our sense of reality, Papa. Just like in painting: when you make a tracing a different image emerges. It’s called pentimento .’

‘What are you talking about, Leonora?’

‘I am searching for another way to live.’

‘Your way of life is conditioned by your birth, by the education we have given you, and by your inheritance. If you behave with ingratitude, you’ll pay dearly for it.’

‘No. Papa, I have learnt other ways of living in the world. I am not your creation. I want to reinvent my own self. I am leaving.’

Outdoors, her father’s foxhounds are barking, but with less fury than the pack baying inside Leonora herself.

The farewell is a declaration of war. How is it possible that he, the builder of a business worth millions of pounds, is being defied by a young girl? How will he get someone so ungrateful to submit to his control?

From the heights of his rage, Carrington yells at her from the bottom of his guts: ‘You are no longer my daughter! My door will never be darkened by your shadow again!’ Leaning on Maurie for support, he prophesies: ‘You shall never see me again!’

As Leonora rushes out to the station, intending to catch the train to Dover and from there the ferry to Calais, her mother catches hold of her: ‘Let me know as soon as you get to Paris. Whatever situation you find yourself in, I will always help you. What you’re doing is sheer madness, and you have no idea what may await you there.’

IN 1937 AND AT THE AGE of twenty, Leonora leaves her home never to go back. ‘I never left with Max. I went alone and every time I have ever left anyone, I’ve left alone.’

No sooner does she arrive in Paris than Mrs. Ernst, to whom Max has been married for ten years, appears, as sharply pointed and inevitable as the Eiffel Tower. She was at the exhibition in London, without Max ever mentioning her.

Impetuously, Leonora convinces herself: ‘It doesn’t matter to me. Max could have a harem of wives, all immense giants, bra size 42 C, armed to the teeth and determined to kill me; and I would stay with him regardless.’ She takes a taxi to his studio at 26, Rue des Plantes, in Montparnasse.

‘Whatever happens, I’ve come to Paris to paint,’ Leonora tells herself, and asks her mother to rent a flat for her at 12, Rue Jacob.

She tells Max all about her life. She assures him her father will pursue her even unto Paris and make their live together impossible.

‘It doesn’t matter if he does,’ Ernst replies. Carrington took away her beloved Tartar when she still so needed him.

Max contributes a rocking horse he found in an antiques shop, which Leonora paints alongside a hyena, her other self, in a picture she has begun called The Inn of the Dawn Horse. She gives the final brushstrokes to her white trousers and her jet-black hair. Tartar flees through the window towards the freedom of the trees. You have to fly above everything. Life explodes inside Leonora, there’s no way back, she gallops as she did on Winkie, sweeping all obstacles from her path. Dragons with long claws and monstrous serpents with boars’ snouts can tear at her flesh, but she gallops onwards. Nothing stops her. She is a mare, rearing, kicking up dust-clouds. Nothing restrains her. Her strength dumbfounds the painter, who day and night won’t leave her alone, following her closely and nervously; she must not escape him like the horse in her self-portrait.