Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

On the wood-fired stove, Leonora is putting plums, peaches and quinces on to boil.

‘We shall gorge on fruit each evening in honour of Aphrodite,’ Max tells her.

Leonora rushes between the vineyards and the kitchen, from her easel to the store cupboard.

‘I am an ant among the cicadas.’

The kitchen becomes central to the expression of their love. Eating restores their energy, only for them to resume their love-making with renewed vigour. Leonora knows that the house is her body; its walls are her bones; its roof, her head; its kitchen, her liver, her blood and her heart. Its walls embrace her, and she caresses them in return as she climbs the stairs, places a sack of potatoes in its proper corner, or opens the windows to admit the morning.

Leonor Fini arrives from Paris with André Pieyre de Mandriargues and a heavy suitcase. They install themselves in the bedroom on the second floor, which they take over with their extravagant clothes. If it weren’t for her baby face, Leonora would get rid of the Argentine and her interminable monologues on the Marquis de Sade. She can speak French only by purring in a strong Spanish or Buenos Aires accent, and irrationally pursues her every whim: ‘I can’t take a bath, the soap just escaped through the window.’

According to Leonor, her mere presence is a guarantee that objects will start rebelling against their natural function. Just as the soap vanished, so Max’s bicycle was found one morning without wheels, and a full saucepan of water evaporated before the stove was lit, while not a single cushion was left with its feather stuffing intact.

‘Why didn’t you put any sheets on their bed?’ Max complains to Leonora.

‘Of course I made up the bed with fresh sheets,’ Leonora answers indignantly, and Fini chuckles with pleasure at what she has done.

‘They are the sails for my boat, and I took them up on the roof to see if they would billow in the wind.’

Just like Leonora and Max, Leonor also climbs up on to the flat part of the roof to sunbathe naked.

‘These Parisians always enjoy playing at Adam and Eve,’ the locals comment.

André Pieyre de Mandriargues writes seated in the lotus position, and fetes Fini’s extravagances, which cause him such intense emotion that he begins to stammer. Leonora asks him what he’s doing, and he answers that he’s reading erotic literature written by birds in the sky. Meanwhile he constantly repeats the mantra: ‘What time are we going to eat?’ Leonor Fini becomes the cats’ guardian as there are now eight of them consuming numerous litres of milk a day, despite Leonora warning her that they should only be served it mixed with water.

‘Why don’t we buy a cow, and keep her in the garden?’ suggests Leonor Fini.

‘Listen, we’re not living in the Pampas here,’ Max protests.

‘This place is ideal for painting watercolours,’ announces the Argentine, and takes possession of the kitchen table. ‘Look, Leonora, the watercolour does exactly what it wants. You only need to follow the course of painting through water, and you reach its source all on its own, and it takes you where it will, until the most unexpected thing occurs, far more beautiful than anything you’d hoped for.’

Fini takes up all the space, sets up an easel in one room, then abandons working on canvas in favour of returning to making her watercolours on paper.

‘We’re going to eat now, you need to move your things,’ Leonora pleads with her.

‘I want to paint you, Leonora, inside the house, so as not to compete with Max, who has painted your portrait in the jungle outside.’

Leonora finds Leonor’s unpredictability endearing. Despite the fact she has exhibited with the Surrealists, she is not one of them. ‘I am me.’ She is almost repeating the words of Jehovah to Moses when He tells him: ‘I am that I am.’ She declares Leonora a true revolutionary, and paints her portrait as half woman, half man, like a mysterious Joan of Arc from antiquity, her breast covered by a bronze breast-plate. Here, in The Alcove, an interior with three women , Leonora is foregrounded, while two more women, naked and holding hands, barely stand out from the sombre background.

‘I look like a medieval statue.’

André Pieyre de Mandriargues also becomes attached to going about in the nude and plans on going down to the river stark naked.

‘You can strip off when you get there,’ says Max.

‘Nobody will notice, I’ll go on Leonora’s bicycle.’

‘André, these French provincials are extremely conservative …’

In the kitchen, the two Leonoras lean over their bubbling saucepans, into which they throw garden herbs, hairs of the eight cats, locks of their own hair, mushrooms and flowers, all of which Leonora then serves up, dressed in her embroidered white blouse and a fringed shawl with little bells around the edges borrowed from Fini’s wardrobe. In their corner of the room, the potatoes wait in their sack on the floor. From the garden the Englishwoman brings in lettuces she calls ‘my lettuces’, and carrots that she also considers to be her own, but what most delight her are the heavy dark purple globes slowly expanding in the midst of their spiky leaves: aubergines.

‘You don’t know what it’s like to grow tomatoes on your own land, cut them through the middle, and bite into them.’

‘Is it like an orgasm?’ Fini asks her.

With her fingers, Leonora skins horse mackerels, shucks beans and shells lentils. Her hands are more than adroit: they are also wise. They race back and forth without once erring, not when they cut the tops off the corn cobs, nor when they slice carrots into neat rings.

‘No-one peels potatoes like you do. How come you’re so dextrous?’ André asks her.

‘Because I use both hemispheres of my brain.’

This dexterity has never been as much cause of wonder and rumination as now. Harold and Maurie complied with the nuns. André and Leonor Fini rejoice in Leonora’s exceptional faculties.

André Pieyre de Mandriargues cracks open a walnut: ‘This is what your brain looks like, Leonora.’

‘No, mine extends and extends until it pierces the celestial dome. Owning a telescope without its complement, the microscope, is a symbol of the most wilful incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to look through the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.’

‘Cartier-Bresson awaits us in Paris,’ trumpets Fini, ‘but before we leave, I need to satisfy my curiosity. Max, what is it you like to do best in life?’

‘To look.’

As they are on the point of leaving, Max paints his ‘lover of the wind’, and gives the finishing brushstrokes to La Toilette de la Mariée, which shows Leonora in the nude. Moss again invades the canvas, a dense vegetation that presses upon leaves and mist and interweaves them into minuscule organisms. Leonora in the Morning Light palpitates, its green that of primitive cells at the origin of all life. A goddess arises among branches and vine leaves, flanked by a unicorn and a minotaur, a celestial creature and a lover of the wind who might have been happy, had a heavy teardrop not left a damp blot on the sleeve of her dress, or a tiny skeleton weren’t dancing right before her eyes.

The Surrealists call Ernst ‘the superior bird’, and in tribute Leonora paints him with a large feathered cape rising to a collar of fishes. Behind the bird — fish emerges a frozen horse’s head — or could it be that of a mare? Again, in her short story, ‘Pigeon Fly’, Leonora describes an older man who wears striped socks and an overcoat of feathers.

When Leonora cannot express what she wants in her paintings, she writes it down instead. Her lover encourages her.