Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘Leonora are you ready?’

The sculptures ranged along the walls watch their departure impassively. Nor could Leonora succeed in moving an equally uninterested Rose Vigne, the hotelier’s wife, when she went to bid her farewell and entrust the house to her:

‘Look after it well, it is our home, and we’ll be coming back. I am this house, it means my life to me.’

Catherine seats herself behind the steering wheel, with Michel next to the window. Scarcely has she started up the engine, than the Englishwoman transforms herself into the Fiat. Tense to the ultimate limit of every muscle, she never takes her eyes off the road, and she is possessed of the strength of an engine. When her friend accelerates, Leonora’s right foot also presses down on the floor. Twenty kilometres outside St. Martin d’Ardèche, the clutch locks and Leonora announces: ‘I did that.’

‘What do you mean you did it? How could you have?’ Catherine is growing increasingly irritated.

‘Because I can move the energy of the Earth, I radiate a magnetic force I never imagined possible. It was I who gave the car the order.’

Astonished by her own power, she blames herself for the stuck clutch: she is the car, the battery, the clutch , the steering wheel and the radiator.

‘Well, if you’re so all-powerful, you’d better fix it quickly, because here come the Nazis.’

‘My solar system will give the order to the Fiat, and the clutch will come unstuck again.’

The car at once resumes functioning, without anyone having the least idea how.

The journey is sheer hell, because Catherine and Michel’s patience has reached its limit. Catherine beseeches Leonora to keep quiet, and not to make their life impossible.

The woman riding in the back seat of their car is transparent and dishevelled, with wild hair and special powers: she orchestrates the inner workings of the world, arranges the patterns of traffic, has the capacity to stop the car in its tracks; she is a woman responsible for the rising of the sun and with the authority to end the war. She hates the Germans, and winds down her window and yells, with all the force of her lungs: ‘Hitler must die!’ Catherine winds the window back up. The pitch black night does nothing to impede Leonora’s vision and, every time they encounter another car, she shouts: ‘Hitler is a murderer!’ Then she sits back down on her seat, shuts her eyes, and reopens them to stare at rows of coffins lining the road. Obviously they belong to French citizens massacred by the Nazis. The violence of the war seeps into her every pore. She sees piles of corpses stacked in military lorries, their arms and legs dangling. Catherine and Michel either can’t or don’t want to see them. Leonora winds the window down once more and yells: ‘The Germans are murdering France, the whole place stinks of death!’ In this case, she happens to be right, since Perpignan is the site of a vast military cemetery.

‘We are going to stop here and sleep for a few hours,’ says Michel. But not one hotel has a single free room.

Leonora gets out of the car, and asks where the Nazis are. She stops the waiters, the shoe-shine boy and the postman, intimidating them by her tone of authority and the madness lurking in her black eyes.

One of them eventually answers her: ‘The Germans have gone through France like a knife through butter.’

Another then confirms: ‘I saw them come in. Riding their motorbikes with the sun reflected in their sunglasses. There’s no room for even one more person in Bordeaux.’

Leonora always gets herself noticed and in occupied territory it is risky to stand out.

‘Get back into the car and we’ll be off, Leonora,’ orders Catherine.

Leonora’s anxiety grows in relation to their southward progress. She is trembling like a leaf except when she is yelling, or talking loudly to herself. It is quite impossible to control her. The main roads, overflowing with people in flight, have become impassable. The sound of car engines revving is constant and drills into their eardrums.

‘What about all these people? Do they know where they are heading?’ Leonora asks.

‘Of course they don’t!’ Catherine yells back at her. ‘We are all fleeing. The Germans have bombed France, or perhaps you haven’t noticed?’

Leonora proclaims she has reached the only possible decision under the circumstances: to kill Hitler. Catherine shuts the window, and Leonora immediately opens it again:

‘There’s nothing worse than to invade another country and all soldiers are pieces of shit!’

Catherine winds up the window again. With hitherto unknown strength, Leonora winds it down again:

‘Down with the invaders! Long live Free France!’

‘Shut up!’ Catherine tells her.

‘If I tell all these people that I can hold back the war with the power of my mind, then the war will be over, and if I tell them I have psychic powers, they will stop being afraid; lots of people tell me that my eyes have a power in them, so if I confront the Nazis, they are bound to understand that they have to get out of the country.’

‘I really can’t cope with you any more,’ Catherine is imploring her with tears in her eyes. ‘Please stop yelling, you will end up giving us all away, and Michel doesn’t have any papers.’

‘But you are my responsibility, and I am in the process of saving you,’ Leonora protests.

She goes back to repeating to anyone with ears to listen that she is Joan of Arc.

‘If you want us to get to Andorra, don’t say another word. If you do, everything will fall apart, things are getting too serious, Leonora, and our lives are at stake.’

‘Would you like me to slip into a voluntary coma?’ Leonora sits rigidly and bites her lip until it runs with blood.

Catherine and Michel cannot begin to relax until they have reached Andorra, a country the size of a bread crumb that has fallen by chance between France and Spain.

On getting out of the Fiat, Leonora can no longer straighten her back.

She has lost control of her movements, and advances sideways like a crab. She attempts to climb the hotel staircase, and her legs trip her up. Catherine becomes annoyed again.

‘It’s just that my body won’t obey the orders given by my brain. I need to erase all I’ve learnt in order to eliminate the old formulas causing this paralysis of anxiety.’

‘What’s really happening is that you are going to stuff us all.’

Once inside the Hôtel de France, the only employee is a young girl who hands them the key to a room at the end of one corridor, then another to one on the second floor.

‘You are the only guests,’ she explains in Catalan.

In the hall to the empty hotel, Leonora takes a few hesitant steps and attempts to straighten up. Michel and Catherine, utterly fed up with her, shut themselves away in their room. Every man for himself, they decide. If the Englishwoman wants to be shot of life, that’s her business, but for the time being she still needs them to save her. Leonora eventually gets into her room on the second floor, opens her window and, two by two, a line of unusually tall pine trees advances on her.

After the first night Michel, in a somewhat improved mood, tells her he is going to the post office to send a telegram. The English-woman is unaware that it is to her father, who has sent some money out from England. Within a few days, his emissary is due to arrive in Andorra: he is a Jesuit who will obtain their visas to cross into Spain. The power of Imperial Chemical is immeasurable.

Leonora manages to stand up and to walk but, when she tries to walk up the slope behind the hotel, she seizes up like Catherine’s Fiat, and is unable to straighten herself up.

‘I can’t believe you’re doing this to us. Stand up straight,’ and Catherine attempts to lift her up.