Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘Let’s leave Paris, and go to St. Martin d’Ardèche, I don’t think I can stand her another minute. I’m also sick of all the arguments and lawsuits between the Surrealists.’

Leonora agrees at once. What she does not know is that her lover discovered this village beside the river thanks to Marie-Berthe, nor that she was born in the Aurenche family home right there, in the Ardèche. In spite of all the worry caused by the mental collapse of his second wife, he has no hesitation in taking refuge at her place of birth with another woman.

‘I think it is better for you to go now to the Rue Jacob to pack your case. I’ll come by for you at half-past six. The best thing would be for us to get there as early as possible.’

‘Did Marie-Berthe suffer a genuine seizure?’

‘You saw her there in a dead faint on the floor.’

The Surrealists drown in orgies of emotion. The shop window where they display themselves is at breaking point. Everyone in the group criticises, destroys, and splatters each other with blood and saliva: ‘Cocteau is a chameleon,’ ‘That Romanian Tzara is on the skids and can only speak as if he were inside his book, Parler Seul. Ever since he got married to his Swedish Nobel he has become insufferable.’ ‘Soupault has become petrified in automatism and has written nothing of merit since Le Grand Homme ;’ ‘Duchamp did the right thing in making a mockery of Cézanne and then, after three or four chefs-d’oeuvre, to exchange his paintbrush for pawns on a chessboard, because by then he had said all he had to say,’ ‘Giacometti, bottle in hand, threatened to throw himself down off his terrace on the Rue des Plantes,’ ‘Dalí is nauseating, he has sold out, he’s a whore,’ ‘Leonor Fini thinks she is the empress of the gauchos. She should be packed off to Patagonia to shear sheep.’

The group is a runaway stallion and Leonora, excellent Amazon that she is, almost impossible to unseat. ‘I came to Paris to paint,’ she repeats to herself over and over again, even when Marie-Berthe’s dramas disrupt everything.

THE BICYCLES TRAVEL WITH THEM, tied to the back of their convertible car. The French are fanatical about cycling, and Leonora baptises Max’s red bicycle Darling Little Mabel and gives her orange one the name Roger of Kildare, four wheels rolling as one, on towards freedom. Watching the countryside beside the main road passing the car window relaxes them, after all Marie-Berthe’s scenes. Leonora’s lover tells her how Jean Arp, the friend of his adolescence, saved himself from prison when he stripped off his clothes in front of the authorities: scandal disarms the fearful and prudish. Leonora recounts how as a child, she could hardly manage to distinguish between the French verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to have’ and that Mlle. Varenne had her repeat them along with her multiplication tables.

The heat makes them open the windows, and the song of the crickets lets them know they have reached the south. The air is heaving with the heat, and Leonora feels it too. ‘This is me’, and she suddenly recognises that she can’t bear to lose a single second of what she is living, that Max is enormous and envelops everything, that her entire life has been lived for this very moment, that to make a false step or to look behind her could cause her instant death, that nothing to do with Max will ever leave her, not even a single white hair of his head, that his hands on her belly are just like those of the eagle on its prey, and that he won’t ever let her go.

Leonora is driving: ‘I don’t feel too secure here. In England, Ireland and Scotland, the steering wheel is on the right.’ Her lover gives her directions. They cross a long narrow bridge, turn off to the right, and arrive at St. Martin d’Ardèche. There is just enough light for them to notice two squashed hedgehogs in the middle of the road.

‘At long last, you and I are going to live alone together,’ says Leonora joyously. ‘I am ready to die in your arms.’

‘I too would die for you. But before I eat you up, let’s find somewhere to have supper.’

‘Always so practical.’

They are greeted by the sounds of an inn heaving with breasts and buttocks on the eve of the local fete. The lovers walk towards it hand in hand.

‘I have a room with two beds, without bathroom or board,’ Alphonsine, the owner, yells at them as if the pair were deaf.

‘What do you mean? Don’t you eat here?’

‘Yes, of course I eat,’ she guffaws loudly, ‘it’s you two who don’t. My mother is too old now to cook, and I don’t plan on doing any more work than necessary. You can eat next door, in Marie’s house, where she also sells cigarettes.’

‘It’s true, I only have a few cigarettes left.’ Leonora is getting worried.

‘Perhaps it’s better that you start by showing us the bedroom,’ orders the painter.

‘It’s dirty. After the last five guests, the sheets now stink of bacon.’

Alphonsine spies the bicycles.

‘Those are magnificent. Would you lend me a bike one afternoon, to visit a lover who lives eight kilometres away?’

‘Of course,’ replies Max.

An army of flies and any number of spiders have taken up residence in the room, furnished only with a sack of potatoes, a string of garlic and a disused stove.

‘It’ll do for now. Let’s go and set up camp across the river.’

Marie has a wart just like the Reverend Mother’s, back in the Convent of the Holy Sepulchre.

They eat river fish and eels with mustard. They drink wine, but in reality Leonora wants only to drink in her lover, whom by now she can no longer distinguish from herself. The peasants tell them of the annual surges of the Rhône that sometimes flood the village. ‘This year we had a good crop of cherries, and we’ve also bottled fruit and made jam for you to enjoy, along with a vast quantity of olives in brine.’ ‘You must visit the Pont Saint Esprit.’ The inhabitants are friendly and, as the couple are a novelty, they watch them walking arm in arm and kissing on street corners. After a while Alphonsine, whom they call Fonfon, knows all about the lovers and becomes their accomplice. Not only does she come to live Max and Leonora’s life as if it were her own, but she is also well aware of the dangers stalking them. The presence of the Englishwoman and her lover in St. Martin is the best story she has ever come across.

‘Last night when you were out, a woman phoned you from Paris. She is now on her way here.’

‘It’s her. Let’s go to Carcassonne, to Joë Bousquet’s house. France is large enough for us to find somewhere to hide.’

On the 27th May 1918 at Vailly, near the end of the First World War, twenty-one-year-old Joë Bousquet took a bullet in his back. He now lives with all the windows in his house shuttered. The bullet in his spinal cord restricts him to his bed and to opium for the rest of his life. He claims that thanks to this wound he has learnt that all men are wounded. He writes: ‘Who am I? I float between two personae, that of my heart and the other of my death.’

He is preparing little balls of opium. Max and Leonora smoke with him as their guide. Joë Bousquet, propped up on his pillows in his room, in the perpetual twilight that admits no rays of sunlight, speaks very slowly. Leonora asks him if he does not feel angry at his fate and he replies that even before his accident on the battlefield, he was a lost man.

‘Why?’ asks Leonora.

‘Because I was already an addict.’

His life might as well have been ended by the bullet.

‘I am a man blown by the winds, imprisoned by silence and solitude.’

Leonora discovers that Max, in calling her his ‘lover of the wind’, uses a title he took from Joë Bousquet — who writes metaphysics and composes allegories for a number of magazines, such as the Cahiers du Sud.