Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘I am just about to set sail for the United States,’ Jimmy replies.

In view of the threat of war, a great many young people are preparing to travel on board the l’Amérique .

Max goes to the village for cement and clay, speaks with the people there, seducing them as he seduces the friends who come to visit them here. His French is impeccable and the wine-makers assume he comes from Paris.

Leonora asks her mother for money and buys the house surrounded by vines weighed down with bunches of fruit.

‘We can go ahead and make our own wine,’ Leonora proposes.

‘Yes, but we would need to grow more vines.’ Max is becoming enthused.

Leonora informs Maurie that: ‘An inscription over the door confirms that the house goes back to the eighteenth century.’

The peasants watch in astonishment as a Bentley saloon grandly descends the mountainside and a distinguished-looking woman descends from the car, leaning on the arm of her driver. The man then removes a number of leather suitcases from the boot, and Maurie heads towards the farm’s historic front door. Max bows to kiss her hand in greeting. For the next three days they don’t go out. Then one afternoon Leonora accompanies her mother into the countryside and points out the vast extent of the surrounding vineyards. Maurie nods in agreement.

On the fourth day she departs once more, driven by her chauffeur, who had been put up in the village inn for three days without being able to satisfy the innkeeper’s curiosity, since he doesn’t speak a word of French.

Ernst fills the entire house with his immense presence. As a workman, he has fun mixing chalk and sand and sculpting a mermaid and a minotaur on the back-garden wall. Leonora paints a bird-lizard inside the door, and Ernst buys a wooden ladder to climb and construct his concrete sculptures: a faun and a sphinx; another mermaid with wings, her head crowned with a fish; horses with bird faces, gargoyles with crocodile jaws, dragons ensnaring calves. Leonora sculpts a horse’s head, on which Max congratulates her.

‘I wish you would sculpt more horses.’

The grand bas-relief on the outside wall depicts Loplop. A mosaic with a bat decorates the floor and is complemented by a sculpted bench. The peasants gather curiously to see what will be the next imaginary creature to emerge from the walls of the lovers’ house.

‘What is all this?’ enquires Pierre, the grape-picker, at the sight of the sculptures.

Max explains: ‘These are our guardian angels.’

‘But they look more like devils.’

‘Not at all. They are benevolent spirits put there for the protection of St. Martin d’Ardèche! We are beautifying all our walls and doors with our mythical beings!’

Pierre warms to Max. Leonora goes to and from the village shop hardly looking to right or left. She doesn’t want to risk breaking the spell and finding out that none of it is true.

She is unaware they call her ‘the Englishwoman’. Thanks to the postman they know where she comes from; he has noted the British stamps on the envelopes he regularly delivers to the farm. They know, too, that Englishwomen are free and easy, that nearly all have a screw loose, and that this one runs around in a state of undress. One midday some local inhabitants come upon them naked on the river bank. As the couple walked beside the river they had stripped off their shirts and trousers, and now, having flung themselves down on the hot pebbles, they say that the water is cold and burst out laughing, running around and splashing each other. They spend all their time in one another’s arms, and their laughter echoes through the cobbled streets.

‘They are Romeo and Juliet, and their drama can only end in tears,’ says Aphonsine with ill humour, given that they now come to her café less often than before. Once upon a time, they would order red wine by the litre, often one litre apiece, although sometimes they drank as many as three.

‘Ever since the Middle Ages wine has been drunk in St. Martin d’Ardèche,’ Max explains. ‘Over in the Loire Valley, the future St. Martin had tied his donkey to a vine, while he made preparations for his journey, and Bourriquet nibbled some of the vine leaves. The following harvest the nibbled vine produced a bigger grape harvest. So from then on the peasants decided to spread the tale and carefully pruned back the vines.’

Leonora glories in the magical animals created by her painter and adds her plaster horse’s head to their collection of sculptures.

‘They are our saints, and are there to protect us from spurned wives, hostile fathers and bad-tempered Surrealists,’ as Max explains when he meets Fonfon on a trip to the village to buy bread and wine.

They watch the sky at night. Ernst knows the firmament of the stars well, for he had closely followed discoveries of the comets made by his compatriot Tempel. And Leonora always recalls Father O’Connor, her personal astronomer, which amuses him.

To paint together is to make magic together. Leonora begins her painting Loplop, the Superior Bird and Max asks her to paint the background to The Encounter. In addition to the bas-relief, Max creates cypresses using Oscar Domínguez’s technique of decalcomania. He applies black gouache to paper, then presses it hard against the canvas for as long as he feels like before lifting it off. His disciple tells him it looks like a sponge. Then he works on the imprints, using a finely tipped brush and retouching them until the cypresses — or other, still more unexpected — images emerge: perhaps the head of a bird, the right arm of a woman, a human body, or a wing.

‘Look Leonora, take hold of the brush and you’ll see how a forest grows for you too.’

‘What is a forest made of?’ Leonora asks.

‘A supernatural insect.’

‘What do forests do?’

‘They never go to sleep early.’

‘What does the summer mean to the forests?’

‘It means changing leaves into words.’

Together they create a new type of botany, a green and disturbing microcosm, cerebral and vegetal at one and the same time. He paints Un peu de calme and makes a number of versions of The Fascinating Cypress. Cypress trees become his obsession. They unite sky and earth, and their roots excavate so deeply into the ground they disinter the origins of psychic concepts. At first Leonora describes them as the guardians of the cemetery, and now Max starts to divide them into solitary, mineral and conjugal types. One cypress may embrace another:

‘According to a Chinese legend, if you rub cypress resin on your heels, you can walk on water without sinking.’

He also recounts how, at the Front during the Great War, he would imagine the forest as people, and that forests that were bombed were sacrificed humans:

‘You can’t imagine how sad those landscapes were, Leonora. The tree trunks were left still standing upright but wounded, and not even the weight of winter snow could protect them. A tree destroyed is a soldier killed by human stupidity.’

It makes Leonora realise that the desolate landscape they are painting in unison is a rupture with everything she has ever previously seen.

The cypresses follow her, they proceed together, envelop her in their embrace, she is so slender and refined that they gather her into them. Even if Leonora starts to run, the nearest cypress pulls itself up out of the ground and follows her. Should she pause, the cypress does the same, and its branches tremble as if it were out of breath.

‘Everything I do automatically becomes a forest,’ Max tells her.

A new variant of natural history is born on his canvas: moss, lichen, lianas overwhelm it, and it is easy to observe how they heal ailments of the soul, for their leaves bloom inside you. Velvety moss takes up the space like a sickly and tenacious invader that finally becomes a plague.