Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘This is going to be your home. Be sure to make yourself responsible for it.’

‘At one point in my life, I knew how to speak Chinese, but now I don’t even know where China is. Are the patients here Chinese or Jewish?’

Leonora answers her own question, deciding that the occupants are Jews and that she is here in the asylum to take revenge on behalf of Max and everyone else she saw behind the wire fence at Les Milles.

José, the nurse, arranges to meet Leonora at their rendezvous as far away as possible from the main garden.

‘Leonora, where on earth are you?’ calls her nurse.

Hurriedly, hurriedly, kisses fall from the corners of their mouths. There is never enough time.

‘Kiss me again before they discover us.’

How awkward it is to be kissing with the enemy lying in wait!

José gives her cigarettes.

‘If you weren’t so dotty, I’d marry you.’

DON LUIS ANNOUNCES NANNY’S ARRIVAL from England. After a fortnight’s journey in a cramped cabin aboard a warship, Nanny reaches the asylum disorientated and in a state of exaltation difficult to control. ‘Who on earth had the idea to send an elderly employee who speaks not a word of Spanish to Santander?’ the Morales ask each other. Nanny scurries from one side of the room to the next like a scared rabbit, with no-one so much as offering her a cup of tea.

Leonora, who knows how to be hurtful, receives her mistrustfully.

‘My parents sent you here in a yellow submarine so that you would take me back to Hazelwood, is that it? If they’re so worried, why didn’t they come for me themselves?’

‘Prim, I came here because I love you and I haven’t seen you in four years. Where do you think I might find a cup of tea?’

‘Go off back to England. They might give you one there.’

Leonora’s hostility only grows more acute. Nanny hears her cough, and tries to bring her a glass of water but, not knowing where to find the kitchen, she gets lost. Every time she plumps up the pillows, Leonora curls up and turns her back on her. Nanny wants to supplant the nurse, and Leonora delights in the inability of this diminutive, wrinkled old woman, her grey hair knotted in a bun on her neck, to do so. She does not ask how she got to be there, whether she may be hungry or tired, where she’ll sleep. The only thing bothering Leonora is to find out why she has come. ‘What are you here for? My father sent you.’ Let the Carringtons all drop dead! Nanny drags her back to her childhood and her presence intensifies the confusion inside her head. ‘Behave, Prim, behave,’ she tells her every time she pushes her food away. If she cries or throws a tantrum, Nanny sits down on the edge of her bed:

‘Prim, when you used to want something, you always knew full well how to fight to get it.’

Occasionally she mentions the name of Black Bess, her pony, or Winkie, her mare, or of Tim Braff, the chauffeur’s son, whom she had held in affection. ‘He’s married now, and his wife is expecting a child.’ Or of Lassie, the dog whom Harold especially favoured, and who now lies beneath the ground, or of the new bishop, who wishes to modernise Church services and has Republican sentiments, for he knew Julian Bell, Virginia Woolf’s nephew. How intense she is, how fresh is her memory, how irresistible the attachment to childhood! Gerard, Pat and Arthur’s faces dance in her mind, cloud her vision.

‘Hush now, Nanny.’

Acutely wounded by her mistress’ behaviour, Nanny retreats with her tail between her legs.

‘Nanny is a woman lacking either significance or authority,’ opines Frau Asegurado. Mortified at finding her place at Leonora’s side taken, the nanny becomes jealous and makes one mistake after another. ‘Let me do it, I can take care of her, I know her better, her parents sent me here to do this,’ and the only outcome is that Leonora refuses even to let her come into the bathroom with her.

Nanny irritates Leonora with her overflowing tenderness and her furrowed brow. Her eyes fill with tears at every rejection, which further exasperates her mistress. What is this slow emissary from the past doing here, turning up to impose restrictions, taking her by the hand as she used to do when Leonora was a child, in order to drag her back to Lancashire? She feels a sense of revulsion whenever Nanny so much as takes her arm:

‘Don’t you dare touch me. You are the Carringtons’ accomplice.’

Leonora treats Nanny in exactly the same manner as she was treated when she entered the asylum: she humiliates her. The only thing missing are the Cardiazol injections.

‘I came here to help you. Why is this German woman always interfering, Prim?’ Nanny asks.

‘Because she is a professional nurse and you’re not.’

‘But I’ve known you since you were a child.’

‘Nanny, stop it, you’re making me nervous.’

For Leonora, Nanny’s jealousy is translated into a cosmic problem, as insoluble as all the rest. The first one concerns her transfer to the Down Below pavilion, where the residents are always happy, since they know they will soon be set free.

In St. Martin d’Ardèche she used to dare to appear nude, sure of her beauty, but now she is a skeleton. You could count her ribs; her skin is taut across her collarbones; her hip bones resemble coat hangers; and her sunken stomach disgusts her, while her hollowed cheeks make her face look like a dried apricot.

‘Whatever have they done to me?’

The yellow skin stretched over her cheekbones looks as if it is on the point of cracking open.

‘I look like Frankenstein’s monster.’

Nanny weeps.

‘Your snivelling puts me on edge! Either shut up or clear off and cry somewhere else. I don’t want to listen to you, go back to Lancashire.’

Leonora’s narcissism means that her world revolves entirely around herself.

‘You have changed so much,’ Nanny laments, ‘you are no longer the Prim I knew since the day you were born.’

‘If I am no longer the same, what on earth are you still doing here? Clear off!’

‘Quite aside from coming on your parents’ behalf, I am here because I love you, Prim.’

Leonora’s rage is so immense she cannot manage to conceal it. She longs to pulverise Nanny and trample her ashes into the ground, to obliterate her very existence.

‘You are not allowed to come into the garden with me.’

‘Why not, Prim?’

‘Because my companion has to be Frau Asegurado.’

Each morning at eleven, when Leonora goes out with her German nurse, she ensures that Nanny is occupied with another task, so that she cannot follow her out.

Clearly, her nanny gets in her way.

‘I don’t want to have to think about you. If I can hardly cope with myself, how am I going to put up with your jealousies?’

Berating her has its compensations, since through Nanny she can get at her father, and be sure to offend him. If Nanny thinks she still has any kind of a hold over her, she has another think coming. There was a reason for her to be around during Leonora’s childhood, but no more.

Nanny has lost her powers, she has dwindled to nothing and is no more than a loose thread from the past. Humiliating her makes Leonora an accomplice of the Doctors Morales. If she submits to the doctors, they will transform from being her executioners to becoming her allies, and set her free.

Never in her worst nightmares did Nanny ever imagine that Prim would betray her.

‘There is no way I am going to return home with you, do you understand? Hazelwood is over. Now my goal is Down Below.’

Next to the Down Below pavilion, the garden opens out and, most importantly, a door leads into the garage, which Leonora spies on to see when Don Luis comes home and parks his car there. A few steps on and a cave serves as a storage space for the gardeners’ tools and a heap of the dried leaves they have swept up. In her mind, the pile of dead leaves is Covadonga’s grave, where the director’s daughter — who is also Luis Morales’ sister — lies.