Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘They believe that I am Covadonga,’ Leonora says to herself. ‘I have come to replace his daughter. That is why they want to make this place my sepulchre.’

As well as an automobile, the Morales have a private dining room. At midday a nauseating smell permeates Leonora’s bedroom. The gardeners are spreading manure on the lawn. Leonora cannot comprehend how Mariano Morales, God the Father, gives his consent to her food being thus contaminated. She rises indignantly and, followed by her nurse, enters the private refectory. The two doctors ignore Leonora’s impertinence and Don Luis addresses Frau Asegurado in German. Leonora is irritated by the fact that he only speaks to the nurse and only in German. She seats herself between the two of them, and is crossed by an electric current flowing from one to the other. When she gets up the current switches off. ‘This current is the flow of their fear of me.’

The doctors look at her with apprehension; in the asylum, fear travels from one person to another: the insane are capable of anything, so the doctors tranquillise them with injections. Cardiazol is also good at covering up the doctors’ own shortcomings.

As Don Luis continues eating, Leonora asks José for pen and paper and draws the Cosmos (the father), the Sun (the son), and the Moon (herself). She holds the sheet of paper out to her doctor, who returns it to her without saying a word. Disappointed, Leonora goes to the library in the Villa Covadonga, chooses a book by Miguel de Unamuno, and opens it at random: ‘Thank God we have pen and ink.’ She is convinced that this is a message from the Cosmos.

A dragonfly lands on her hand, settling in place as if it never wishes to move on. Leonora looks at it without moving until it falls on to the floor tiles, dead.

‘It is the hand of Don Luis who wants me dead. I shall be sure to anticipate his desire for me,’ she assures the German nurse.

She endows anything that happens with a transcendental significance. If a sudden gust of wind blows the door open, it is because the garden is calling to her, and she must go out at once.

In order to go out walking, Don Luis gives her a cane which she looks after carefully as it is now her sceptre. Leonora’s mind is filled with scenes from Alice and the Irish fairy stories in The Crock of Gold. She labours over three numbers that have come to obsess her — six, eight and two — and arrives at a total that reminds her of the consort queen, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.

‘I am the Queen of England.’

‘Tell that to the doctor!’ growls Frau Asegurado.

Leonora runs to the consulting room:

‘I am Elizabeth, Queen of England.’

‘No, Leonor, you are Leonor Carrington, and you have no need to be queen of anywhere.’

‘What I need is to get rid of all the characters I carry around in me, and the one I dislike most of all is Elizabeth of England.’

‘Then leave, and be sure to exclude her from your life.’

She constructs an effigy of the queen in her room. A three-legged table for her legs; a chair poised on top of the table for her body, and on top of the chair she places a decanter with three red roses in it: the crown and conscience of Queen Elizabeth. To top it off, she dresses it in her own clothes and places the table legs into some of Frau Asegurado’s shoes.

Satisfied by the figure she has created, she runs into the garden and through a place she calls Africa, an enormous reed bed growing in the crater left by a hand grenade. She gathers their leafy plumed stems, which she uses to cover herself up completely, then wriggles on her stomach to the door, only to discover that it is firmly locked. She returns to the pavilion in a state of high sexual excitement. So it seems to her entirely natural to find Don Luis standing in front of the effigy of Queen Elizabeth of England.

‘Congratulations: to pull out inner characters that are inessential to one’s core is a symptom only of sanity.’

Don Luis caresses her cheek, then introduces one of his fingers into her mouth, which clearly gives her pleasure. Leonora becomes excited. He picks up his prescription book and rips out a page:

‘A palace or a pigsty, anything but mediocrity.’ From that moment on, Leonora starts to desire him, and writes to him every day. ‘Doctor, what does it mean to be reborn? Something is growing inside me. You are responsible for provoking what is happening within me.’ ‘Doctor, do you think I’ve made good progress and can now move to the pavilion Down Below?’ ‘Open the door to me. I’m alone.’ ‘I am yearning for you.’ ‘I am not a woman, I am a mare.’ ‘There’s no-one else in this garden apart from you and I, Doctor. Take me now or I’ll go mad.’ ‘My madness is my unconsummated desire.’ ‘I can’t stand myself, look at the state I am in, consumed with desire.’ ‘I admit defeat, you and the rest of them are all stronger than I am.’ ‘Who would believe that you could inflict such torture upon me?’ ‘I am your slave. I am the weakest woman in the world, and I am here only to serve you, I can satisfy all your desires, whatever they are, I’ll lick your shoes.’ ‘I am prepared to die for you.’

Luis Morales stays quiet and avoids meeting her alone.

‘Are you going to take a holiday from yourself, or have you become as mad as your patients?’ Leonora asks him five days later, from her perch on top of the wardrobe.

Dishevelled, agitated, having lost his self-control, the doctor goes hither and thither accompanied only by his dog, Moro. Leonora suspects that at this point in time Moro has all the powers of his master, and that were she to try and escape the dog could prevent her. She is happy at the thought Don Luis has gone mad.

‘How does it feel to be on the other side, Doctor?’

‘Give the Englishwoman a bath, that should calm her down.’

Frau Asegurado gives her a cold bath and puts her to bed. Leonora reflects on this: ‘They are preparing me for my wedding night. Although his face belongs to that of his dog Moro, the doctor has the body of a man.’ She closes her eyes and now the doctor has Moro’s body. ‘This is all for my triumphal entrance into Down Below.’ The doorway is lit with an orange light, so marvellous that Leonora has a presentiment of the exit. Later, José brings her her cigarette and gives her a goodnight kiss.

She has slept for twenty-four hours, no doubt about it: an old man is observing her, he is the director of the asylum, the lord of hallucinations, the owner and master of the inferno. The pupils in his eyes resemble Don Luis’. Mariano Morales speaks to her politely in French, something to which she has still not grown accustomed.

‘Do you feel better, Mademoiselle? I no longer recognise the lioness who arrived here forty days ago. You have become a lady.’

The old man orders them to take her to the solarium. Leonora obeys like a lamb going to slaughter. Awakening to the life of the sanatorium, following the shock treatment, is far worse than being tied up.

Leonora dreams that plants grow out of her hands, then twine all around her body. Max painted her in the middle of the jungle when they were in St. Martin d’Ardèche and when she saw the completed canvas she felt afraid: ‘Your creepers and branches will devour me.’

She forgets to remind Don Luis to cure her leg, which continues to be inflamed, and gets involved in a heated political debate in the course of which she insults Franco. While she rages, she finds herself in a garden similar to the one she dreamt of the night before, sitting on the ground, washed and dressed:

‘I can do as I wish, thanks to my wisdom and my philosopher’s staff,’ she tells him contentedly.

‘Then turn me into the best doctor in all the world,’ jokes Don Luis.