Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘And she’s bound to need it. To me she looks as if she’s having a rough time.’

Leonora explains to Max that she has to remain at Renato’s side until they depart for New York.

‘To my mind your being with him is an insult, and I would prefer not even to see you.’

Laurence Vail decides to go to the beach at Monte Estoril; the crowd follows after him.

On the first night there, Peggy comes across Max in the hotel lobby, and asks for Laurence’s room number so she can go and wish him goodnight. Max gives her his own one instead. Peggy spends the night with him, and the couple resume their affair.

For the five weeks they spend on the coast, Leonora often comes over to spend the day with them. The riding club is magnificent; the horses excellent; and the ambience takes her back to her childhood. Children and adults ride all morning long. Leonora preens. If she could, she would whinny. The horse synchronises with her: she is a woman with a horse’s body, or a mare with a woman’s face. Her body is wreathed in waves of energy, the force of their furious gallop attracts attention. Children pause as if magnetised, their eyes fixed on the track. She is dazzling, her body lengthens, she jumps every gate, the hooves of her mount echo — they resound like bells, horseshoes bringing good luck. Nothing makes her happier than this equine flight which Max follows with his eyes like a bird of prey.

‘What are you doing with that inferior man?’ Max asks, seated astride his horse.

‘What do you mean?’ Leonora pulls up abruptly.

‘You know very well.’

Leonora spurs on her horse.

‘He is not an inferior man and I owe him my life.’

On another occasion at the livery yard, Max again rails against the Mexican.

‘Don’t you dare speak ill of him, I refuse to let you,’ and Leonora’s eyes cloud over. ‘I was devastated when I lost you, but that time in the asylum opened my eyes.’

‘That kind of experience is bound to change your life, I know, but from now on we’re going to live together, and paint together.’

‘And Peggy?’

‘I am not in love with Peggy.’

‘If you don’t love her you should not be with her.’

‘Peggy was my only way out. Do you love your Mexican?’

Desperate at the thought of losing her, Ernst overwhelms her: ‘Peggy knows that you are the only woman I love.’

‘That means you’re using her?’

‘And you are using your Mexican?’

‘My situation is different.’

‘No it is not. Peggy may get me out of Europe, but once in New York things will change completely.’

‘The war is driving us all mad. I owe my survival to someone else, and I am as yet unsure of what you and I can mean to each other.’ Leonora turns on her heel.

One Sunday she turns up in Estoril with Renato. He, too, is an excellent horseman, and he entertains them all with his tales of Pancho Villa, the one and only true Mexican, the Centaur of the North, the general who dynamited the train lines together with their wagons and everything on them; and who carried off women over his shoulder — all before going so far as to invade the United States. Leonora smiles and Max, furious, attempts to unseat her, while Peggy celebrates the Mexican Revolution: ‘Yes indeed, those are real men!’

The group observes that Leduc could equally well command a battalion, lay siege to a fortress, or cross the deserts of Antar at a gallop.

In the morning, Leonora opens her bedroom door. Her wet hair hangs loose over her shoulders.

‘I want to speak with you,’ Peggy tells her. ‘It’s time to come clean about our situation. Let’s go and have a drink.’

Seated opposite one other, the two women square up. Leonora opens her eyes so wide they flash daggers, while Peggy just turns up her nose at her.

‘Either you get back together with Max, or else you should leave him to me.’

‘He is all yours.’

‘Are you going to stay with the Mexican?’

‘That’s my business.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘For now, I won’t be returning to Estoril, although I shall certainly miss the horses here.’

Leonora rises from the table and leaves Peggy with words still on the tip of her tongue.

When Peggy tells Max, he is so angry that he obliges Peggy to write to Leonora to beg her to resume her visits to Estoril.

Leonora never returns.

‘No doubt the Mexican keeps her better entertained,’ Kay says, insinuatingly.

‘WAR CHANGES THINGS, Max!’

‘Don’t I know it? They banged me up in three concentration camps, one after the other. If anyone knows about those changes, it has to be me.’

‘And what about me?’ Leonora muses to herself. ‘Why does he never ask me about the time I spent locked up in the asylum? Why was the only thing he asked me when we were reunited how I could have lost the house and his canvases? Why does he only talk about himself and never listen to me? Even back in St. Martin d’Ardèche, the whole world revolved around him. When I painted him in his cape of feathers, as the superior bird, I felt the same shiver up my spine as I do now; when I thought he might end it with me.’

One night, Peggy hears a knocking on the door of her hotel room. She opens it to find Leonora and Max standing there.

‘Here you are, I am returning him to you,’ says the Englishwoman.

There can be no doubt that, in spite of everything, Leonora has much more in common with the group that revolves in Peggy Guggenheim’s orbit than with Renato Leduc. They speak the same language, walk the same streets, move in the same circles, read the same books, frequent Piccadilly and St. Giles, Hyde Park Corner and the Tate Gallery, attend Ascot. And they are all insatiable. They create the atmosphere of a gala performance, thanks to their ingenuity in criticising absent friends. Peggy Guggenheim praises Lucian Freud, and Herbert Read applies the brakes to her impulses to keep constantly buying up pictures.

In the course of her multiple acquisitions the millionairess has succeeded in acquiring a good eye. Of course she always has Herbert Read in tow to consult; yet on many occasions she makes a selection on her own, and hits the nail on the head. Kay Boyle complains that the war prevents her from writing, and gossips to Leonora that Sam Beckett was one of Peggy’s lovers, too.

‘I don’t know who Beckett is, but the worst part of this all is that I still haven’t read this Djuna Barnes of whom you all talk so much,’ Leonora apologises.

‘But you do know who Read is: he acts as a consultant to Peggy in all her purchases.’

‘Yes I know that much. He and I went for a walk along the esplanade the other day.’

Peggy offers Leonora a ticket to fly to New York with the rest of her retinue.

‘Thank you, but no. I shall travel by boat with Renato Leduc.’

‘So will you be leaving ahead of the rest of us?’ Max interrupts.

‘Yes, we’ll be departing on the Exeter .’

‘Do you think you could take some more of my rolled canvases, which I can’t manage to bring on the liner with me?’ Max asks, pale with anxiety.

‘Yes, I can.’

‘They make for quite a fat bundle. In it, along with the Loplop you painted, there is also my Leonora in the Morning Light. ’

Max oversees the packaging, ensuring that every care is taken in rolling up the canvases, which results in their being both heavy and awkward to carry.

That night in the hotel, Leonora says to Renato: ‘Max does not love Peggy, yet he is with her.’

‘And you, who after all married me, do you actually love me?’

‘Not yet, although I may yet come to,’ Leonora admits. ‘What do you make of Peggy, Renato?’