Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘If Remington rhymes with Carrington, your father must have been a typewriter.’

‘He was a machine that produced Nos: no, no, no, no don’t, no you can’t, no you mustn’t.’

Leonora is typing insistently on the same dining table from which she had obliged Leonor Fini to remove her watercolours.

Agatha, her protagonist, is experiencing a profound repugnance towards her husband, Celestin, who is gradually changing into a bird. In the meantime, she is becoming so obliterated that she can hardly see herself in the mirror any more. Her husband, mired in his egotism, pays her no attention. She writes: ‘Celestin came and saw nothing at all. He touched my face with his soft hands, hands that really are too soft.’ Yes, Max’s hands are too soft and there are times when Leonora would like to bite them.

In the village café, all the talk is of war, and Alphonsine is continually irritable.

‘Pétain, the hero of Verdun, will know how to defend us. He is a supreme strategist.’

In spite of their faith in the Maginot Line, the terrified peasants confer among themselves. Only Max and Leonora persist in dedicating themselves exclusively to their love.

‘Those two can’t see beyond the ends of their noses,’ Pierre says, as he passes the front of their house to take another look at the sculptures. ‘They make their puppets or doodle their pictures and are oblivious to everything else.’

Max remembers: ‘Before the defeat of the Republicans in Spain, I painted L’Ange du Foyer. Of course the title is ironic, a gob of spit in the face of a twisted idiot, a monster flying over the earth, annihilating all in its path: the monster of Nazism.’

‘And the terrifying lizard in the monster’s tail?’

‘That’s its creator. You bear your own lizard within yourself, and if you fail to identify with all your creations — or your creatures — you’ll never become a great artist, Leonora.’

‘The second monster I have known is you, and the first was my father. Your picture anticipated what would occur in Spain, and it is now happening across the whole world.’

Leonora renews her sisterhood with nature, as she used to when she was a child. The birds whose singing drowns out all else scarcely fly over the village any more. The peasants tend their vineyards like a favourite child, and Leonora is moved by their actions. For them, wine is the antidote to illness and infection: it cleanses the veins and helps the blood to circulate. They talk about Château Latour.

‘If the Germans come, I’ll bury my best bottles.’

‘In my case, wine is what penetrates my very soul.’

‘And in mine, my very heart.’

Leonora shares their devotion to the vines, and always carries a pair of heavy grape scissors in her apron pocket. Pruning is a splendid task, as splendid as the vineyard workers’ conversation. ‘Wine ages slowly, and the more slowly it ages, the more noble it becomes.’ ‘I grow older like a fine wine, because I improve with the years.’ ‘The wine reveals that our land has been here for ages before us, and will still be here long after we are gone.’ ‘Thanks to our wine, we have survived wars. Wine is what makes French people French. Their spirit derives from their wine.’

‘If it goes on raining, we are going to lose the harvest.’ Pierre the grape-picker raises his eyes to the heavens. ‘We shall have to get the harvest in before the Germans arrive and the vineyards become battlegrounds.’

The message goes round from one community to the next: ‘The fine wines have to be hidden. No Boche is going to get his hands on my vintage 1932.’

NOTHING TROUBLES LEONORA. Max and she are not man and woman, but bird and mare.

‘How oblivious you are, Max!’ Roland tells Max when he pays them a visit with Lee Miller. ‘The whole of France is talking about how imminent war is, and all you do is paint.’

It is extraordinary that Max, who suffered the devastations of the Great War, does not recognise what a risk he runs, being a German in France at this point in time.

‘You have to leave now, immediately.’

‘No, there’s no danger here,’ replies Max, irritated by all the letters written in alarm, including some from his son, Jimmy. ‘The French regard me as one of them. I am more French than German.’

In fact he is in so much danger that two gendarmes march him off to the concentration camp of L’Argentière, just outside St. Martin d’Ardèche, with a hundred other Germans. The foreigners are to be kept there under surveillance until further notice, all the more strictly if they happen to be Germans. To be held in custody means interminable waiting behind barbed wire. Leonora, being English, is not at risk. France and England are allies.

Leonora rents a room in L’Argentière and every noon brings Max food to eat, and puts fresh clothes and tubes of paint in his hands. She even obtains permission to accompany him on his walks inside the camp. She comes every day without fail, although the bread, milk and vegetables she brings grow steadily worse, both their quality and quantity severely reduced by rationing. Hans Bellmer, a fellow prisoner, comments on her assiduousness to Max, who seems to find it entirely natural that the Englishwoman should be there at his service.

Bellmer encourages Max to resume making decalcomanias. Neither the camp officials nor the soldiers used as prison guards are bothered by the two men painting pictures out in the prison yard. Max is nervous and depressed, and begs Leonora to go to Paris and speak to Eluard, to stir up their friends and the authorities, to request an appointment with the President of the Republic, or to run to the Archbishop and persuade him to knock at the heavenly gates to tug at the angels’ wings.

‘I shall obtain your freedom,’ she assures him, with blazing eyes.

‘Then it had better be soon, since I doubt whether I shall last long in here.’

Leonora goes to Paris and seeks out Eluard: ‘You alone can approach the President of the Republic.’

Eluard puts pen to paper and writes to Albert Lebrun: ‘Max Ernst is one of the most outstanding and respected painters of the School of Paris. He is considered a Frenchman and was the first German artist to be exhibited at a salon in this country. He has lived twenty of his fifty years in France. Sincere, candid, correct, proud and loyal, he is my dearest friend. If you knew him you would understand at once that his imprisonment is unjust. He has restored a house in a village near Montpellier, the peasants there care for him, he cultivates his vineyards, and you need to grant him leave to return to St. Martin d’Ardèche. I would put my hand in the fire for him.’

Marie-Berthe Aurenche is also busily calling on Senator Albert Sarraut. For whatever reason, Max is transferred to a camp at Les Milles, near to Aix-en-Provence, at a former brick factory where red dust infiltrates even the food rations, now still further reduced. The latrines are disgusting and their pestilence extends through the camp, where many prisoners contract dysentery. Once at midday and once in the evening, the captives queue up while a soldier dumps a ladle of food on their plates. Some of the German students interned by the French are treated as criminals. France, which once so loved them, now persecutes them.

‘I can demonstrate that I am anti-Nazi,’ Max insists. ‘That is precisely the reason I am here in France.’

Once again, the two painters are allowed out to paint in the yard, following another petition from Bellmer, the Polish Jew. He paints Max’s portrait in profile, composed of Les Milles’ red bricks, against a black background. Bellmer is in better spirits than Max and challenges him to paint. It seems as if creating so many of his mutilated dolls may have hardened him.