Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘I refuse to submit to discipline,’ avers Max.

His spirit of rebellion is so strong, his brushstrokes pour out his rage against militarism as a way of life. Four years spent in the cavalry artillery and he constantly remembers the sergeant major bawling out: ‘No-one can take our goose step away from us!’

Max cradles nature and, when he tires of doing so, emerges to play bowls in the evening with the plumber and the carpenter who await him in the shade of the lime trees. Meanwhile, Leonora sets the table, and opens a bottle of wine so that at dinner time it will have reached the same temperature as her own blood.

Leonora works from morning till night like one possessed. Nothing escapes her. As well as painting together with Max, she poses in the early morning light in the garden for Leonora dans la lumière du matin, and when the sun shines in the middle of the sky, they both seek out the shade and she assists her lover in painting Europe after the Rain and Swampangel. Max can do anything he pleases. She is there as his anchor, the woman he calls Tannhäuser. Unwilling to be left behind, she types up her book on the Remington. It is The Oval Lady for which Max makes her engravings of La Débutante, Pigeon Volé, The Fascinating Cypress, and The Robing of the Bride.

There is a fire burning in Leonora’s belly, and she has never known anything like it before.

‘Is this love?’

Max replies that love is born of the desire for another person, and that Nietzche tells us: ‘When we are in love, we have a tendency to endow the beloved with every perfection.’

‘Then what happens when we come across an imperfection?’

‘That’s when falling-out-of-love comes in.’

What has happened to Marie-Berthe will never happen to Leonora.

LIFE IN ST. MARTIN is not without its mysteries. A young man beats a drum to announce that tonight the great Kaffir, famous the whole world over, and his medium, Olga, will disclose the secrets of the universe in the courtyard of the Hôtel du Centre, where their circus will be performing.

Leonora and Max watch the show through a rip in the canvas of the Big Top. ‘We could do better than this’ is their conclusion, and they suggest to Alphonsine that they provide a show in which a third member of the cast will participate: their friend Drusille, the spinster daughter of the owner of the castle at the top of the mountain.

‘If someone in the village lends us a gramophone, we could do far better than this insipid session of mass hypnosis. I am going to paint my face and hair blue which will make me the great Indian cockroach, and Leonora shall dance on the tables while I perform a number of miracles with her.’

‘What kind of miracles?’

‘Firstly, the miracle of resuscitating her. Then I shall hypnotise the audience. Leonora, do you know the spell to hypnotise a wild panther? And Drusille’s secret turn will leave everyone open-mouthed.’

‘You know they say that this Drusille has a screw loose,’ Fonfon protests. ‘Don’t let her go and break all my crockery. It’s because her mother abandoned her, and her father — the Lord Viscount — sleeps all day and reads all night, locked inside the castle library.’

‘Max has mastered Drusille,’ responds Leonora. ‘You don’t need to worry about a thing.’

‘And me, what I am meant to do?’ asks Fonfon.

‘You’ll probably be asked to play the little dwarf. But put on your best dress, because today you are first of all going to be selling a large quantity of wine.’ The order comes from Max.

He is proved right. Not much goes on in the little villages around here, and Max and Leonora are daily news from the minute they get out of bed: whether they walk hand in hand down the street to the river; decide to take a bicycle ride; or he takes her in his arms and kisses her in the middle of the bridge; even if they then buy cheese and a couple of bottles of wine … Of course the public will come in droves to bear witness to their miracles.

More and more people crowd into the café. Max is a terrific mime artist. Leonora’s role is to play the patient, with Max as the surgeon. Leonora complains loudly, both her hands clutching her belly. Wrapped in a sheet, she lies down on the table, and Max transforms the café into an operating theatre in which he slits her stomach open with a knife. Leonora screams with pain and from her intestines Dr. Ernst removes tomatoes, nails, a hammer, ears of corn, apples, chains, shoes, an alarm clock, aubergines and sausages, which he lifts to his lips and starts chomping, while displaying his findings to the festive audience. Finally, he pulls out a handful of little snakes, also from inside his patient’s abdomen. Leonora, miraculously restored to health, leaps up from the operating table, landing lightly on her bare feet with one bound, and takes a bow to popular applause.

‘Leonora, stand over here without moving,’ Max instructs her, and the Englishwoman stops stock still, and lets fall the sheet that has been covering her, as the audience falls silent. No-one moves. Leonora is ethereal. Sometimes, nudity can take people’s breath away.

This couple are original: no doubt about it. He, tall and aquiline, with a halo of sanctity encircling his white hair; she, tall and slim, with burning eyes, a woman ripe to the point of bursting. Her mass of black hair is filled with nesting birds. The rumour has gone round that Drusille, the mad daughter of the local viscount, is also going to perform, and the announcement stirs the morbid fascination of the local peasantry, who are sure they’ve seen her whipping her animals while naked.

The grand finale heightens the public’s tension and inclination for another bottle of wine, while Drusille displays her charms and Ernst — his face running with blue paint — entertains the public, until a whistle from the kitchen prompts him to put a record on the gramophone, and Drusille makes her entrance dragging a terrified black goat. The Amazon is wearing a leather corset and thigh-high black boots. She opens with a Satanic dance, in which it is impossible to distinguish woman from goat. The petrified audience watches as the goat stands up on its hind legs. Then, in a desperate bid to escape, the billy goat frantically leaps onto the record player, which zooms over the heads of the spectators, before dragging the Viscountess of Guindre offstage on her tummy.

The audience overturn bottles, glasses, hats, chairs and start screaming in the midst of the chaos of broken bottles and upended chairs:

‘I am the Harlequin of the fete,’ shouts one, swaggering with his hips thrust forward.

‘I am Blue Beard and I’m looking for a new wife,’ announces a fat little fellow.

A woman swathed in a shawl proclaims: ‘I am the Queen of England, and the proprietress of St. Martin d’Ardèche.’

Leonora disabuses her: ‘You can’t be the Queen, because I’ve seen her as plain as I am looking at you now.’

The woman at once stops laughing, and curtseys politely.

Pierre, the grape-picker, is dressed as a frock-coated dandy and raises his glass too high and too often to toast what’s happening. He seizes Fonfon by the hands: ‘You are no peasant, you have the fingers of a princess, and I shall present you with a diamond.’

He kneels and declares himself the Prime Minister of France.

‘Where has the Viscountess gone?’ asks old Mathieu.

The goat has also disappeared. The whole of St. Martin d’Ardèche is playing at role reversal, safe in the knowledge that tomorrow everything will be back to normal.

‘They liberate their unconscious, performing Quasimodo in a fete of lunatics,’ Max seeks to calm Leonora, who can’t see the Satanic Amazon, still less her goat, anywhere at all. ‘Don’t worry,’ Max whispers to her, ‘tomorrow the locals will all return to the vineyards, the river, the white rocks or their aubergines, or to shooting the rabbits you see fleeing with their ears down. As for Drusille, only a moment ago, I heard the gallop of her horse on the bridge, and she must by now have reached the final slope leading up to her castle.’