Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘Into the cold water with these lunatics!’

LEONORA LISTENS TO THE CRIES of her fellow detainees, the scraping of chairs on the floor, the rain against the window. Frau Asegurado’s tone of voice grates on her ears, unlike Piadosa’s and José’s. She responds to them by nodding her head, as she acknowledges they treat her with something close to affection.

‘You had better not leave off eating, as it won’t be long before you’re out of here,’ José tells her.

She wants to question him about the alarm that wakes her up every morning. Is it a factory hooter? A siren heralding a bomber? Is it war? Does it mean her mission to unleash the day has started? Or does she have to run to the Down Below pavilion and open the doors to let everyone out?

She climbs on a chair, steps out on to the wardrobe, and remains there vigilantly, almost holding her breath. It is always a great pleasure to her, being so high up. She is a high-flying hawk, her eyes glued to the door. A magnetic current holds her up there. If anyone came in she would plummet down on them.

‘Look at the sense of balance of the madwoman up there!’ Santos exclaims, coming through the door with a pail of water.

‘Don’t mess with me, I am a painter.’

‘Yeah, really? If you sleep in a puddle of shit, your pretensions will turn out shitty too.’

Leonora tenses. It could be that Santos wants to bring her down with a bucketful of cold water. What luck, he goes on with his rounds and it almost seems to her as if he’s smiling.

Piadosa comes in with a trolley on which Leonora makes out a glass of milk, some fruit and biscuits, a pot of honey and a mild cigarette.

‘Here’s your breakfast, little English Miss,’ murmurs Piadosa, without so much as raising her eyes.

Leonora descends and, on seeing the arrangement of food on the tray, she is convinced that the doctors are about to transfer her to the best pavilion, Down Below, as luxurious as the Ritz, with windows you can open with pleasure as there’s a tree growing in front of each.

She contemplates all possible means of moving to Down Below as quickly as possible, since it all depends on how the pips are distributed inside her apple; the rosiness of the stone inside her peach; and the grape skins on the plate Piadosa has prepared for her. She has to reproduce the constellations: here is the Great Bear, there the Pleiades, over here, the Little Bear, keeping the peach stone to the right and the green grape skins on the other side. Who was it that once upon a time told her she had the skin of a peach?

Her nurse draws a bath for her.

‘You can wash yourself on your own, the soap and sponge are over there.’

Leonora squeezes out the sponge, it’s a living creature that once used to float in the sea.

‘Have you finally finished? What took you so long? I am going to take you to the solarium.’

Naked, she dances with the towel and, when she lifts it up, Leonora observes that the entire firmament obeys her. That makes it essential for her to resolve the problem of her self in relation to the sun.

The solarium diffuses a blinding light; beneath such a light, Leonora leaves behind the sordid substances of matter and enters into a new space. She remains stretched out there for several hours and the rays reach her through the glass.

‘Come out of there now, or you will get sunstroke.’

‘Give me a pen and paper.’

The nurse tells her she can write once she comes out, but Leonora wins the match, and obtains her sheet of white paper. On it she laboriously inscribes: ‘I am the sun and the moon, I am man and woman, I am night and day, from now on there will be no more war, for from today everyone knows what war is.’

‘Take this message to Don Luis.’

‘First I am going to give you something to eat, and then I’ll take it to him.’

The Cardiazol forces her to obey and eases her resignation.

The Down Below pavilion is the promised land. It heralds arrival at the gates of Eden, and of Jerusalem, and it holds the door to freedom. The two Doctors Morales are God the Father and God the Son. When she recovers some lucidity, her nurses will take her to the Down Below pavilion, as the Third Person of the Trinity, for without a woman, the Trinity makes no sense whatsoever.

‘And the woman? I have to be the woman. The Holy Spirit is a female dove.’

From her perch on top of the wardrobe, Leonora tackles flight as the dove she is.

Frau Asegurado returns Leonora’s possessions to her, confiscated when she first entered the pavilion.

‘I have to get to work with them to combine the various solar systems and regulate the conduct of the world.’

A collection of French coins represents the fall of men due to their covetousness. Her quill, empty of ink, is her intelligence; her two bottles of Eau de Cologne are Jews and Nazis. Her little box with its black-and-white lid containing Tabu face powder is the eclipse. Two bottles of creamy lotion are man and woman. Her nail file is her talisman. As for the tube of lipstick called Tangee , no doubt that had to do with the conjuncture of word and colour.

Her various body parts lie on the floor and she neither knows how to piece them back together, nor what the key is to secure them from slipping away: an arm lies there, in the corner; her right leg, out in the corridor; her head rests on the bed. She yells out her ideas of how to end the war with all the strength in her lungs, and emphasises them with her facial grimaces and hand gestures while everyone else ignores her. After a while, Frau Asegurado tells her:

‘You’re pouring with sweat, you need to calm down straight away.’

Leonora feels uncontrollable longings to flee and gallop like the mare she is, until an annoyed Frau Asegurado calls Santos over, and the two of them get a grip on her:

‘Sit down and recover your breath.’

Even Dr. Morales emerges from his office in irritation.

‘Leave us alone for a moment, we already know how agile she can be. It is impossible to watch over her sixty seconds of every minute.’

‘Don Luis, last night I dreamt that I was on top of a little hill in the Bois de Boulogne, watching a gymkhana. I waited until two large hitched horses leapt over the stockade, and headed towards me. As they did so, they turned from two into three horses, as a white colt joined them and then fell over to die at my feet. I am that colt.’

‘The only equines we have here belong to the horsemen who turn up on Sundays. Now it’s better for you to return to your bedroom,’ answers the doctor.

Leonora decides on her own form of defence. She closes her eyes to avoid penetration by the most intolerable suffering: other people staring at her.

She keeps them shut for hours on end. Thus she expiates her exile from the rest of the world, it is the expression of her flight out of Egypt, as she calls the Covadonga pavilion, into China, the solarium. Shutting her eyes even allows her to put up with the pain of a second injection of Cardiazol, and she recovers so quickly that three days later she tells Frau Asegurado:

‘Get me dressed. I have to go to Jerusalem to tell them what I’ve learnt.’

The nurse takes her out into the garden. She leaves her outside the Villa Pilar, the pavilion where the Prince of Monaco is tapping on his typewriter. As the landscape becomes more beautiful, she knows she is approaching the pavilion Down Below.

‘I have triumphed,’ she tells the German woman.

If she stands on the toilet, Leonora can peep out of the bathroom window and look out on the seaside cemetery where Don Mariano’s daughter, Covadonga, is buried.

Piadosa and Frau Asegurada continue to take care of her. Don Luis informs her that for the time being it is no longer deemed necessary to administer further Cardiazol. Then he adds: