Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘I can’t.’

‘Stand up properly, I tell you!’

‘I swear to you I can’t!’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘Because of my impotence in the face of the suffering I saw on the main road as we came here.’

Anguish prevents her from coordinating her mind and body. Not one intended action can reach its logical completion, she is asphyxiated by anxiety and can’t move a single finger on her right hand, nor on her left: all this affliction is borne by a woman who can write and paint using both cerebral hemispheres. Her mouth has become twisted, and it makes her embarrassed to speak. She attempts to understand why her body won’t take orders, and decides it is because it is in rebellion. As her will is rendered powerless, her first recourse is to seek an accord with nature, starting with this wooded hill she is trying in vain to scale.

‘Mountain, help me, please don’t send me away, make me walk again! If I could only walk, I should be saved!’

She takes a couple of steps and falls to the floor.

‘They have emptied my mind, and the only thing left imprinted on my memory is the image of the Germans mounted on their motorcycles, with the sun shining on their black goggles!’

A barking dog returns her to reality, and she drags herself back to the hotel.

But she can’t sleep at all, and can hardly manage to eat.

Leonora takes refuge in the discipline she has inherited from her parents, and each morning strives to walk, whatever the cost.

‘Dear Mountain, I want us to reach an agreement: please grant that my mind and body are united with you.’

She lies face downwards, her head buried in the grass.

‘The earth absorbs me, the earth desires to communicate its strength to me.’

She raises herself up onto all fours, leaning heavily on her elbows, lengthening first her left leg, and then the right, scraping her elbows. At long last she straightens herself up and stands erect. Little by little, with huge effort, she takes a little step, then another, and finally trusts that she will be able to walk once more.

‘Tomorrow I shall try again.’

Catherine and Michel want nothing more to do with her.

‘This woman is wrecking all our lives,’ Michel says.

‘She has become a burden on me, too. Once I have been able to hand her over, I shall never see her again.’

On bumping into her one morning at the hotel entrance, Catherine enquires:

‘Is the crab going out today, then?’

After ten days of submitting herself to training, Leonora succeeds in climbing the hill. She slips and falls, but no matter: she has recovered the use of her legs.

‘I have never before had such power and control over my own body,’ she tells Catherine and Michel, who make fun of her.

Leonora is not conscious of the effect her behaviour has on others, nor of how strange she must appear. Catherine and Michel pretend not to know her and go out for walks alone. Sometimes, by way of compromise, she follows in their wake. After all, she is their guarantee of safe conduct into Spain. The heiress is utterly unconscious of the fact that those who have strings to pull are those who always ultimately win the day.

After several hours up on her hill, Leonora spies a herd of horses in the distance, all turning their heads towards her and, without more ado, she heads off towards the green meadow where they are grazing. They don’t move away and she caresses them, sniffs them, speaks to them. She is but one more horse, refreshing her face on their lips, combing their manes, wiping their eyes clean of sleep, and is on the point of mounting a yellow stallion who awaits her, when Catherine and Michel frighten them off, simply by turning up in their midst.

‘Don’t you see what you’ve done?’ Leonora asks them accusingly.

‘Then go off with them if you want to!’ Catherine yells at her.

‘That’s quite enough! Tomorrow we are going to try and cross the border into Spain,’ Michel interrupts.

‘I have more in common with the horses than with you!’ Leonora struggles to free herself from Michel’s restraining hand, and he sees something in her eyes that makes him withdraw it at once.

Thanks to the documents and the money sent from London by Harold Carrington and handed over by the Jesuit emissary in the service of Imperial Chemical, Catherine positions herself behind the steering wheel of the Fiat once more. Michel has no safe conduct, however, and will catch them up in Madrid; what is most at stake at present is Leonora’s health. The Jesuit sits down beside Catherine and the three of them set out for Seu d’Urgell.

‘This woman is the death of me, my nerves are shot to shreds,’ she advises the Jesuit. ‘I’ve no idea if we will get her even as far as Arinsal.’

‘She looks tranquil enough.’

‘Every single thing she does is atrocious.’

Leonora has become as unbearable to Catherine as the war.

‘This is my kingdom! Its earth is reddened by the dried blood of the Civil War, and this is where I shall find Max,’ Leonora shouts.

‘If she carries on shouting like this, they are bound to detain us,’ the mysterious Jesuit agrees.

‘Or else she’ll drive me as mad as she is,’ Catherine adds.

AS THE DAYS GO by, Catherine understands her friend less and less; she had never thought Leonora might put her in danger. Her company becomes more intolerable with each hour that passes. One hundred and ninety-seven kilometres of madness, accentuated by the Jesuit, because he never once raises his voice. Eventually, Leonora proposes abandoning the Fiat and continuing by train to Madrid. Catherine sighs with relief. At least she would not be driving accompanied by the lunatic shrieks of her friend. The Jesuit bids them farewell. Here, in the branch office of Imperial Chemical, their mission is to be accomplished.

Leonora endows every word she hears with a significance she alone can decipher. It becomes the key to pursuing their journey in a landscape strafed by bombs.

On the first night they put themselves up in the Hotel Internacional, close to the station. Although meals are only served in the dining room, Leonora’s beauty and her deep eyes persuade the staff to bring her dinner up on to the roof garden, so that she can look out over the rooftops of Madrid.

They move to the Hotel Roma. Catherine sends telegram after telegram to Michel and when, after six days, he appears, she throws herself into his arms.

‘I am dead. Every day she gets more impossible. You try looking after her.’

Inside the Hotel Roma, Leonora again demands her dinner on the roof terrace. She shouts aloud in a state of euphoria: ‘As soon as all the suffering that has accumulated in my guts is dispelled, Madrid will also become calm again. Madrid lives in my belly and I shall return health to this city!’

‘Madrid is the stomach of the world,’ the porter advises her.

She spends the night seated on the toilet with a catastrophic bout of diarrhoea. Next morning she happily announces that in voiding her guts, she has liberated Madrid. Her belly, now cleansed of the least residue of slime, can reveal the full bounty of humanity.

As soon as she can gather the strength to do so, she yells: ‘The war is over!’

Catherine and Michel opt to lock her in her room.

‘I have to take Max’s passport to the Foreign Ministry, in order to obtain a visa for him.’ Leonora is adamant. Realising she will not be able to leave by the door, Leonora exits by the window and, at great risk to her life, steps out along the roof cornice. She walks in through the lobby, cleaving a path between the guests before her, to be intercepted by a tall, blond Dutchman, who immediately stands in her way:

‘I am Van Ghent.’