Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘Max, if you leave, you won’t find me here when you come back.’

She spits it out at him, but with her head held high. There is no way this German man is going to humiliate her. If he wants to play the fool, believing she’ll come back to him, the more fool he. Leonora is a mare and she’s rearing on her hind legs, her front hooves ready to pound down on him. Max jumps backwards before the fury of the Englishwoman’s onslaught.

‘Do you take me for an imbecile?’

Alphonsine leans out of the window: ‘Your wife is pacing up and down like a caged animal.’

‘I promise I’ll be back in three days, little Leonora.’ Max embraces her.

‘Don’t call me little, I am not an idiot. If you leave now, then I’ll leave in the opposite direction.’

‘Where to? What will you do?’

‘That’s my business,’ she responds, incandescent with rage, while she ponders if she could find some menial job or other to support herself.

‘Wait here for me!’

‘Clear off.’

The last Leonora sees of her lover is his bowed head. His overcoat still hangs in the hall, and Leonora is on the point of calling him back — ‘Max, your overcoat!’ — but instead stands staring at it, as if the garment were capable of hypnotising her.

‘What a weak man!’ comments Alphonsine.

‘Help me pack. I’m off.’

‘Are you going to leave us too? I won’t let you go. A young woman like you, all alone, would be putting herself in danger. Just wait here for three days and he’ll be back.’

‘And in the meantime I am supposed to play the Lady of Shalott?’

‘Who on earth is she?’

‘Her body appears floating down all the rivers of England. Because her lover abandoned her, she decided to drown herself.’

Despite the fact that her hands feel icy and will hardly feel a thing, Leonora gathers up her possessions.

‘Look, my fingers have turned to stone.’

She can carry everything she has in one small bundle.

‘I’m done. Let’s go down to the café and get drunk.’

She sits down and starts on the cheap brandy known as marc . It instantly goes to her head.

‘Max has left poor little Leonora all alone,’ reconstructs Alphonsine. ‘Look at her now, bottle in hand …’

‘Don Pascual, the grape picker, has promised to take me to the train station at Orange.’

Fonfon tries to restrain her.

The stationmaster watches her walk down the empty platform.

‘The fast train leaves at half-past nine tonight,’ he informs her.

Leonora leaves her bundle of clothes in a station locker and sets off around the town. In a brasserie she orders one glass of red wine after another until she has drunk a whole bottle. She buys a book and sits down on a bench in the main square.

The hours stagnate as they pass and the afternoon grows cooler. She gives up on the book: it’s impossible to read as the twilight is making the letters merge with the page, and she goes back to the station. On the way she steps out in front of a car, trying to get herself run over:

‘Are you mad?’ the driver furiously shouts at her as he gets out of his car. ‘You stink of wine, young woman!’

Leonora shrugs her shoulders and walks across to the tobacconist. Then she sets off towards the ancient Roman arena, the biggest tourist draw in town. At the entrance, she realises she hasn’t got the strength to go in. She buys a newspaper and then throws it away. She longs to hurt herself. She scratches her left shin with her right foot. ‘If they poisoned Lucrezia Borgia, why not me?’ She goes into a café and makes a phone call to Alphonsine right in front of a couple of other drinkers.

‘Stay there until tomorrow morning,’ implores Alphonsine. ‘Or at the very least give me a phone number so I can call you back with any news.’

The café owner recommends a hotel to her. Hardly has Leonora installed herself there than she is ringing Alphonsine again, to let her know the address and phone number. At nine o’clock she retires to bed, but she can’t sleep and at dawn she is up and walking around the town once more. As soon as the first shops begin to open, she buys a bottle of Hennessy and goes back to her room hugging the bottle in her arms. From her window Leonora can see and count the roofs of Orange, as she slugs her way through half the bottle. At eleven o’clock there is a knock at the door.

‘Téléphone, mademoiselle, de la part d’Alphonsine.’

She can hardly speak, her mouth is burning from so many cigarettes.

‘Max called,’ Alphonsine tells her. ‘I told him you had gone to Orange, and gave him your phone number. I also warned him that if he didn’t ring you, you would probably leave for China or America. He said he would call you immediately.’

LEONORA DOES NOTHING except wait and smoke. No sooner does she let the waiters know that she is going to sit on the bench in front of the hotel, than she changes her mind:

‘I’ll be in my room.’

She goes upstairs to her room, and then comes back down again, finding it unbearable.

‘Eat something,’ recommends the kindly waiter.

Rather than eat, she orders two black coffees and stares at her reflection in the mirror. ‘How pale I am, I look as if I am crazy!’ She relishes the thought. Perhaps she’ll die and the suffering will be over. Her eardrums pound and a vein in her left temple stands out. She rushes to the telephone every time it rings, regardless of who sees her.

‘It is not for you,’ the same sympathetic waiter is obliged to keep telling her.

At noon she has finished the bottle and thrown herself down on her bed, intending to go to sleep with it in her arms. An impossibility. At three-thirty in the afternoon she orders a taxi.

‘If someone called Max Ernst phones, tell him that I have not left for America, but I have left to return to St. Martin d’Ardèche.’

The waiters watch her leave with expressions of compassion, because Leonora has explained things to them: ‘The man whom I love has genital obligations to another woman.’

‘I don’t understand,’ her accomplice Alphonsine informs her. ‘He seemed desperate to know where you were. I do so hope nothing has gone wrong. The people in the village said he took a revolver with him.’

‘I don’t think so for a moment,’ Leonora replies angrily.

‘You look like some poor demented female, let me bring you up a cup of cocoa.’

‘As you wish. Meanwhile, I’ll run quickly to the phone box.’

She returns breathless and with her hair ruffled.

‘There’s no news.’

‘Help yourself to a freshly made cup of coffee,’ proposes Marie, ‘while I read your cards.’

She cuts the pack and starts to deal.

‘You will marry a dark-skinned man and be extremely wealthy. But difficulties will also await you along the way.’

‘Will Max return to me?’

‘The cards say no,’ answers Marie.

That evening some clients were drinking marc in the café while Alphonsine recounted the tales of the English girl’s fall from grace.

‘The way things look to me, I don’t think her lover will be back,’ opines Mathieu. ‘I’ll invite her to join us for a drink.’

Leonora canvasses support at one table after the next, and everyone offers her a drink. She puts through another call to Orange. ‘No, Madame, no-one has left a message for you.’ Instead of returning to Alphonsine’s café, she walks towards the river whose icy waters descend from the mountains. It has rained heavily.

‘It seems quite likely that the English girl will kill herself,’ Alphonsine comments to her neighbours, ‘and the river will carry her poor little body out to sea.’