Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

Ernst despises the morality of the confessional and maintains, with Lautréamont, that his one and only task is to attack the Creator who engendered such scum on earth as man. Max discovered him thanks to Breton, who in turn knew him because Soupault obtained a copy of Les Chants de Maldoror (‘Songs of Maldoror’) which he took to the Front with him during the First World War.

According to Ernst, the Church’s confessionals were responsible for diminishing sexuality and repressing pleasure.

Max brandishes the cutting edge of his smile.

All this rebelliousness stimulates Leonora because it evokes something more within her; her energy is more ferocious than ever, and her ideas swim against the current like salmon. The more eccentric Max’s propositions become, the more attractive they seem to her.

‘Do you know that once upon a time I wanted to be a doctor? My intention was to cure minds. I felt myself to be capable of teaching men not to give in to whatever a scarecrow in a cassock told me about being an emissary of Divine Will. When you’re young, you’re like a billiard ball, always liable to bounce one end of the table to the other. I experienced mystical crises, times of exaltation and depression, even attacks of hysteria. I dangerously blurred the distinction between birds and humans because my pink cockatoo died the same day my sister was born. I buried her in the garden — the cockatoo not my sister — and then descended into a nervous breakdown; the same experience repeated itself when I was almost hit by a car in Brühl. I laughed and the driver cursed at me. I put my family into check-mate and I think I did them a favour when I left Germany.’

What Max fails to mention is that in Brühl he also left behind his first wife, the art critic Louise Straus, and his son, Hans Ulrich Ernst, known as ‘Jimmy’, aged only two. The boy came to visit in Paris and Max had no idea what to do with him. He hauled him around his friends’ houses to see Dalí, Masson and Tanguy. It was with relief that Max took him back to the Gare St. Lazare and put him on a train back home.

Now Jimmy was living in Paris with his mother, looking for work with the help of Marie-Berthe Aurenche, the woman abandoned. Since the painter had left his second wife, Louise and she had become accomplices in grief.

‘Leonora, paint what you used to think about as a child. Express all your inhibitions and your childhood fears.’

‘Then I would have to paint like a child and I’ve no interest in doing that.’

‘It’s the first step to liberating yourself; whatever you paint, whatever you draw, whatever you sculpt will be childish in content but will lead you into freedom. In addition, children arrive in the world with an impressive power of reason but then, through lack of experience, allow themselves to be repressed by adults.’

One morning Leonora snaps at him: ‘Marie-Berthe told me — or rather yelled at me — that you have a son. If you are so very interested in children’s fantasies, introduce me to Jimmy.’

‘What will you say to him?’

Jimmy is now seventeen and no longer a child. He has nothing in common with the collage his father dedicated to him fifteen years earlier, when he was about to turn two: Dadafax, minimus. He is a young man with straight fair locks that fall into his eyes, and which he keeps pushing aside with his hand. Leonora kisses him on both cheeks and Jimmy smiles.

‘The thing I like best in the world is chocolate cake, and I’ve just baked one. Would you like to taste it, Jimmy?’

Leonora sings and dances, laughs and makes him laugh. Jimmy feels more comfortable with her than with his own father.

‘Would you like a glass of beer?’

‘I would prefer a glass of wine.’

‘ That’s my boy, ’ replies Leonora, laughing.

‘Your son is more open than you are,’ Leonora tells Max when he returns.

‘To me he is a total stranger,’ Max replies.

LEONORA ASTONISHES HER LOVER with her culinary talents. She brings dishes out of the oven made to her own original recipes, and operates confidently in the kitchen. Their guests likewise get to savour her black eyes, wild dark hair, white arms, slim thighs. Her pronouncements express an innocence and authenticity that make her stand out from the ordinary.

‘It’s not feasible for her to be as ingenuous as she seems; in her case, ingenuousness can only be a perversion,’ claims the Surrealist doctor and great scholar of ancient civilisations, Pierre Mabille.

‘She is most certainly a genuine femme enfant, ’ exalts André Breton.

Leonora teases, provokes desire without meaning to, yet is too intelligent to be unaware of what she is doing. Independent-minded and combative, as her expulsion from several schools bore witness, the Surrealists melt before her. Breton, the father of Surrealism, finds her adorable.

‘Your beauty and talent have us all mesmerised. You are the very image of the femme enfant. ’

Leonora is annoyed. ‘I am not a femme enfant . I happened upon your group through Max, but I don’t consider myself a Surrealist. I have had fantastical visions and I paint and write them. I paint and write what I feel, and that’s all I am doing now.’

‘Say what you will, to me you represent the “child-woman” who, thanks to her own ingenuity, is in direct contact with the unconscious.’

‘All this deification of woman is a load of nonsense! I’ve seen how the Surrealists use women the same as any wife is used. The Surrealists may call their women muses, but it’s the women who still end up making the beds and cleaning the toilet.’

Her absolute self-confidence and natural impertinence are the consequence of her social class. Leonora had faced down her parents, the nuns, the Queen’s own Court; she had absolutely no reason to consider herself inferior. If she allowed herself to feel humiliated, her work would be affected. Nobody recognised the existence of women Surrealists. What in men is regarded as creativity, in women is regarded as madness. The more Leonora contradicts Breton, the more she attracts him.

‘I adore your English girl. You may have brought her here, but she has won her own position among us.’

Leonora is a delicately wrapped force of animal nature. When Joan Miró, another of Max’s friends, asks her to go and buy some cigarettes for him, and holds the money out to her, she is enraged: ‘You are perfectly capable of going down for your own cigarettes,’ and she walks off and leaves him standing with the note in his hand.

She refuses to pose for Man Ray, who is keen to photograph her. Instead, she is more interested in his girlfriend, Ady Fidelin, and cannot understand what she sees in the North American Surrealist. Picasso is a typical Spaniard who believes that any woman will faint at his feet with desire. She meets Salvador Dalí at Breton’s house in the Rue Fontaine, and is unmoved by being presented as ‘the most important woman artist’.

The Surrealists all have a secret passage leading to happiness inside them. Mockery is their most potent weapon. Their criticisms are implacable and they forgive nobody, not even themselves. Laughter is therapeutic, as every doctor affirms.

Breton is above all attracted by rebelliousness. In others, he looks for the red-and-black flag of anarchism and is elated whenever he finds it flying. Rebelliousness is a moral virtue. Despite her youth, Leonora recognises no limits, all she needs is to shout out her rage in a public square like they do. Max Ernst told her that at heart Breton is a solitary man because one afternoon, when they were playing the Game of Truth, Eluard asked him: ‘Do you have friends?’ and he responded: ‘No, my dear friend.’ Breton seeks out live interlocutors in order to confront them. A rain of insults and every kind of projectile, including shoes, end all his public appearances. Jacques Vaché, who died from an opium overdose, remains forever in his memory, and André conceals himself behind him: ‘He is my only great friend.’ For Vaché, other people’s enthusiasms, apart from being noisy, are detestable. When Leonora tells him ‘sentimentality is a form of weariness,’ she unites him with his memory of Vaché and surrenders to his intelligence.