Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘I am not so sure about that.’

‘I myself have a different suggestion: I could buy you a flat here and visit you frequently.’ He places his hand on her thigh.

The alternatives are horrible: either she is embarked for South Africa, or else she has to bed this horrific man. In order to buy time, Leonora flees to the bathroom.

When they leave the restaurant at the end of the evening, the director tries to embrace her.

‘Come close, let me cover you up from the cold.’

Once outside, a terrific blast of wind unhinges the metal advert hanging over the restaurant and it falls right at her feet.

‘It could have killed you!’ His hug becomes even tighter.

‘No, my answer is still no,’ and Leonora pulls away.

‘Then go to hell! You’ll be sent to Portugal and from there on to South Africa.’

‘Portugal?’

The British consul and the director of Imperial Chemical put her on the train together with her documents, which seem to have magically reappeared. Leonora repeats to them both:

‘I am going neither to South Africa, nor to another sanatorium!’

At the station she is received by a delegation from Imperial Chemical: two men who look like policemen, and a woman with a vinegary expression.

‘You’re in luck, you’ll be living in the prettiest house in Estoril until your boat sets off to South Africa.’

‘It will be wonderful.’

Leonora has learnt how to use cunning to overcome the enemy.

The house in Estoril, a few kilometres outside Lisbon, has a bath tub you cannot fill with more than a centimetre of water, and two parrots jabbering in their cage. She spends the night devising her means of escape, and at breakfast she tells the vinegary woman:

‘It has turned very cold, and I need to keep warm. So I need to buy a hat and a new pair of gloves.’

‘Of course, no-one goes out without gloves and a hat at this time of year,’ agrees the vinegary woman.

On descending from the train in Lisbon, she sees a café. ‘It’s now or never,’ she thinks to herself. ‘I have only moments in which to act.’

‘I need to go to the toilet.’

She prays to the entire heavenly host that the café has a back door.

The vigilant minder awaits her at their table.

Leonora has got it right and the café has another exit, towards which she immediately heads. She is even more in luck, for a member of the heavenly host delivers up a taxi at precisely the right moment.

‘To the Mexican Embassy.’

She pays the driver with the money for her gloves.

At the Embassy she uses her asylum-learnt Spanish to enquire:

‘Might Renato Leduc happen to be in today?’

‘He doesn’t have a strict time of arrival.’

‘Then I shall sit down and wait for him.’

‘But, young lady …’

‘The police are after me!’

Several people are staring at her. At that moment, Emmanuel Fernández, the Mexican consul, opens his office door.

‘You are on Mexican territory and you enjoy diplomatic immunity for as long as you are here. Your compatriots cannot lay a finger on you,’ the consul assures her.

Is what follows true or is it a fairy story? Nobody maltreats her and the best of all is when Renato appears, and makes obvious his compassion for her.

‘Your troubles are over, Leonora, you need to unwind, and in order for this to happen you need a good meal and a good night’s sleep.’

He takes her to her hotel. Next morning, breakfast with Renato is sheer delight. Light-hearted and witty, his mere presence is enlivening and the horizon opens before her like the parting of the Red Sea before Moses. Leonora launches herself into a full gallop.

LEONORA HAD FOUND RENATO attractive ever since they first met in Paris, and he seems all the more so now, when her empathy for him becomes absorbed by his capacity to save her.

She finds his Mexican-inflected French accent particularly pleasing.

‘I was taught to speak French by my father, and I would always talk in it with him. In addition, I have always enjoyed travel — on foot, on horseback, by train, by bicycle, by any means of transport whatsoever. It’s something I carry in my blood. In another life, I think I must have been a cloud.’

Over the next few days, he surprises her with his sparkle, and the way he murmurs a poem into her ear, something that already feels like a ring upon her finger:

‘Negra su cabellera, negra, negra,

negros sus ojos, negros como la fama de una suegra.’

Leonora laughs aloud.

‘Have you ever had a mother-in-law?’

‘No, Max had no mother.’

‘Then you are quite right.’

Every day more men, women and entire families arrive at the Mexican Embassy, seeking safe conducts to leave the country. While Renato looks after them, Leonora goes on long walks, inhaling the salt air, smiling at the seagulls in flight and smoking cigarettes. The hotel where they are staying is clean, just like Renato. Clean in spirit. He asks nothing from her but offers to take her out to purchase canvas and tubes of paint, so that she can paint while they await their departure.

‘Who knows how long we’ll be stuck here? There are so many people waiting here and their situation is nothing if not depressing.’

‘War destroys everything, doesn’t it, Renato?’

‘Yes indeed,’ he responds gravely, as if she were a little girl.

Lisbon is a port of exit and not one solitary refugee more can squeeze in. The streets are crammed with people awaiting the journey as they smoke cigarettes and play blind man’s buff, a perfect game for wartime. Leonora ventures into the market and is suddenly turned to stone: it cannot be, or else it has to be one of her hallucinations, so many people look alike. But this tall man with his white hair resembles Max so much, and his straight back is surely identical to Max’s. That the gentleman is weighing a hammer in his hand just as Max would draws her magnetically towards him and he, on looking round, causes Leonora to tumble into the depths of his fishy eyes. Max Ernst gazes at her with identical astonishment. Neither makes the least movement towards the other: not he, hammer in hand, nor she, cigarette in hand; they measure up to each other, as if stricken with terror.

At long last, Max sets down the hammer and takes her by the hand. The knots in his throat are loosened and he tells her that on emerging from the camp at Les Milles he set out in search of her. Yes, yes, he did find her note on the kitchen table at their house in St. Martin d’Ardèche: ‘Dear Max, I’ve left with C. and I’ll wait for you in Extremadura.’

‘You went without taking a single thing with you, and you left the house in the charge of a wholly unscrupulous innkeeper. You abandoned the lot and the lot has been lost.’

‘Nothing is lost, if we have found one another.’ Leonora is trembling, but Max is not listening to her.

‘I went back to St. Martin d’Ardèche and you weren’t there,’ he insists.

‘How did the vineyards seem to you?’

‘They were in a lamentable state, they had been left to languish, that is just how the French wine-makers are. Not a single bottle of our wine was left, either. I stayed there, at St. Martin, for a few days, rolled up some of my canvases, and brought what I could with me. Alphonsine kept repeating: ‘ Elle a perdu la tête .’ You stopped by her café and called out that you were fleeing for Spain with another couple. Why didn’t you wait for me, Leonora?’

‘I didn’t know if you would come back, and the very thought of your not doing so made me ill. If Catherine and Michel had not come for me, you would have found me there, still waiting.’

‘So, instead of awaiting me, you vanished?’