Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘Tomorrow Mathieu will bring some figs, and a fat rabbit. I shall casserole it in its juices with rosemary, and it’ll taste exquisite.’

After buying two packets of rice paper, they return to their tent guided by the light of the moon. The waters of the Ardèche flow gently beside their path. Inside the tent the coals are still glowing under the little pot, which smells good. A curtain of steam rises when Max sets the pan down in the river in order to cool it.

‘Now the leaves are dried out and will be at their best.’ He transforms the concoction into cigars. ‘You can tell me just how good this is.’ Max lights one of them.

‘Who taught you how to do that?’

‘You have not the least idea of all I know. And with a dose this high, all my worries will go up in smoke.’

‘At least your wife won’t be able to find her way here. Will she?’

‘You don’t know Marie-Berthe.’

His wife has been left in the care of a semi-literate youth.

‘Do you think that if something happens, he will telephone me?’ Max asks Leonora.

‘I don’t know,’ she answers from far, far away, for the sound of her voice seems to be issuing several metres over her head. ‘I don’t think it really matters that much.’

‘Yes it does matter,’ replies Max. ‘The village is so small that if she turns up here, she’ll find us at once.’

‘It doesn’t matter, nothing matters now …’ Leonora assures him, by now having flown as high as a kite.

THERE’S NOT MUCH TO DO besides either walking or scaling the rocky heights. Max knows about astronomy, Leonora about the moon, which she believes waxes and wanes like a woman’s body, and governs her monthly cycles. Her master of astronomy, Father O’Connor, taught her the constellations which she now teaches Max. She also informs him about green, blue and grey crickets and, when a vulture swoops down out of the blue, announces sadly:

‘There must be an animal lying dead in a field somewhere near here.’

Max explains that the insides of particular mushrooms are like egg whites and, since Leonora relishes eating eggs, she eats the mushrooms. Max seems to carry a great burden inside him, keeps silent much of the time and, when he doesn’t, restricts himself to explaining to Leonora the tortuous and magical ways in which nature behaves.

Sometimes, while out walking, they meet a postman with a white moustache. In order to assume his profession, he was obliged to swear an oath. In France, postmen have to vow that every letter will arrive at its destination intact. They wear military-style uniforms: to become a postman is to undertake a sacred mission. Those who have no bicycles sometimes cross long distances on foot, following breaks in the lines of trees in order to reach their destination. The sun burns them, the rains soak them and the snows freeze them. The postman of St. Martin d’Ardèche has penetrating eyes half-hidden beneath his navy blue cap, and all at once Max is reminded of Facteur Cheval — ‘Postman Horse’ — and his expression alters immediately:

‘Let’s go by train to Hauterives, Leonora. Do you remember the poem that Breton read to you, dedicated to a postman? We are near Ferdinand Cheval’s Ideal Palace. It won’t matter how long it takes, nor the conditions of the journey, if we keep the prospect of that place in mind. You really must meet him.’

‘Is he a horse, like his name?’ Leonora claps her hands in anticipation.

On one of his deliveries, Ferdinand Cheval tripped on a stone that caused him to fall; he had never seen one like it, so he looked for more, and he found them. He was no longer a young man, already forty-three years old. First he kept the stones in his pockets, and then he began storing them in a barrel, until finally he took them in a wheelbarrow to the place where he was going to build his castle. ‘He has respected his name,’ Leonora thinks. ‘He has worked like a horse.’

With mortar and cement and over a period of thirty-three years, Ferdinand Cheval converted the stones into insects, feathers, palms, towers, draw-bridges, animals, waterfalls, star fish, angels, horns, roses … so building his Palais Idéal , which had a little about it of a Swiss chalet, a Hindu temple, and the niches and minarets of a mosque.

On top of the little wheelbarrow, Leonora discovers a plaque on which Cheval pays the palace due homage with the lines:

‘Now that its work is done

may it rest in peace from its labours

and in the house it built

I, its humble friend,

occupy the seat of honour.’

‘What did his neighbours make of it, Max?’

‘The same thing they make of us: they decided that he was weak in the head. Do you know that I dedicated a painting to him? To Postman Cheval .’

‘Where do you keep it?’

‘I gave it to Louise.’

During the return journey from Hauterives, Max reads and Leonora keeps her nose glued to the window, watching the children waving vigorously as the train goes by. Barely has she closed her eyes when a voice that seems to emerge from the depths of a tunnel awakens her: ‘St. Martin d’Ardèche.’

Leonora is respectful of her lover’s silences and amuses herself in recollections of the best times of her life at Crookhey Hall: the day she first went skating on the iced-over lake, the night she got drunk on tepid beer with Tim, the chauffeur’s son, in her father’s car, and the hangover that went on for so long that she vomited in front of all the guests on the tennis court the next afternoon.

Alphonsine knocks on their door in a state of high agitation to announce: ‘There’s a woman downstairs who insists she’s Ernst’s wife. She tried to snatch the tray I was holding in my hand: “ I’ll take his café au lait upstairs to him.” I wasn’t going to have that, though.’

‘Curses!’ The painter awakes. ‘I shall go down and see her.’

Leonora is left waiting for three hours.

Alphonsine comes back upstairs to tell her what has been going on in the living room: ‘He has taken her down to the river.’

‘What?’

‘Yes, the first thing he asked her was: ‘What are you doing here?’ He did not seem in the least put out, and suggested they take a walk together. They took the path that runs down to the Ardèche, and he was holding her by the arm.’

‘He was holding her by the arm?’

Finally, Max returns: ‘I have to take her to her aunt’s house over at Valence, not far from here, to let her calm down. If I spend three days there with her, she promises faithfully to leave us in peace.’

It is a blow for Leonora thus to discover the extent of Max’s weakness. There’s a sharp flare in her nostrils when he repeats that Marie-Berthe wants only three days of his time. Three days are not nothing; they don’t flow by like water.

‘What about me?’ cries out Leonora.

‘Just three days. You and I have our whole lives ahead of us, she has understood that I am going to leave her.’

Leonora looks him up and down, while he is begging her to wait there for him. Marie-Berthe is in a very bad way, and he has to accompany her to Valence. She, Leonora, is not in a bad way. Quite the opposite, she is a dynamo and a goat. The other woman is the desperate case. Leonora grows angry, he can take his ex-wife to the station, he can put her on a train; if Marie-Berthe has managed to find her way this far, she has sufficient strength to get back home by herself.

Leonora is besieged by the vipers of fear. Marie-Berthe will snare him, prevent him from returning at all costs. She is the one Max will leave behind, not his legitimate partner. The person who’ll lose in this game is her, the Englishwoman. The one who’s now set to win the match is the Frenchwoman, the one who belongs to him, the one on home turf, the one who supports Max. Maurie … Mama … where are you? Maurie, help me, what shall I do? And her mother’s voice helps her by aiding her anger.