Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘It’s a phenomenal event. New York will fall flat on its face before us.’

In order to decorate the ugly interior of the Reid mansion, the painters have recourse to Duchamp, who is unable to tear himself away from his chessboard.

‘Marcel, you’ve lost touch with reality!’ comments his inseparable companion Man Ray. ‘Your life consists in sixty-four black-and-white squares.’

Chess is satanic. Duchamp spends weeks on end locked away, searching for new strategies. The thirty-two wooden figures are his father, his mother, his siblings, his friends and his lovers. Man Ray interrupts him and Duchamp grows annoyed, chases him away:

‘Leave me in peace, I am studying the relative advantages of the moves available to me, and the possibilities for castling!’

‘How can you possibly reduce your life to a few pieces of wood, when everyone is waiting outside for you?’

Finally, once Duchamp has completely run out of food, Peggy Guggenheim furnishes him with an advance to decorate the Reid mansion. Anxious to get back to his chessboard, Duchamp works like a slave, races like a horse, and in two days hangs up a gigantic spider’s web that reaches from one room to the next. David Hare’s wife, Susanna, helps him to unwind thousands of metres of string in order to weave a web covering the whole ceiling. At first it bemuses the assistants, until Duchamp’s immense creation flies high over their heads and sweeps them up in its movement, just like that of the nude descending a staircase.

‘Your cobweb is the work of a master!’ exclaims Herbert Read.

Leonora exhibits two paintings, and goes round to Duchamp’s house to tell him that the ceiling in the Reid mansion is a dream:

‘Do you know how to play chess?’ he asks her, before saying hello.

‘No, teach me.’

‘I have been playing for seven years.’

Duchamp, with the board on his table, explains that the pawns always advance in a straight line, two squares in the first move, then take pieces by moving diagonally to either right or left; that the knight moves in the line of an L, the castle in a straight line, and the bishop only diagonally, according to the colours on the board; the queen moves where she wishes and does what she likes, the same as every woman, and the king likes the high life: ‘As I wanted to be until Lydie checkmated me.’

‘You have a beginner’s luck.’

‘Just like in poker?’

In April, an issue of View magazine is dedicated to thirty pictures by Max Ernst, including a reproduction of Loplop, the Superior Bird.

‘This is our farewell, the end of the bird and the mare,’ Leonora warns him.

‘Max and Surrealism have changed your life irrevocably. To go to Mexico would be a mistake. We are going to miss you too much. Max is the superior bird. How will your story continue without him?’ Breton enquires.

‘It might be that this is when it all begins.’

She is worn out by the conflict with Peggy. Their friends discuss Max’s obsession with her, and the circulation of dollars that keeps Surrealism revolving around Guggenheim.

‘You are so crazy for Leonora, there’s no way you can conceal it.’

‘No, Peggy, you are my partner, Leonora was my disciple. What interests me in her is her talent.’

Max insists that the woman he lives and sleeps with is still Peggy.

The magazine VVV publishes Leonora’s short story ‘Waiting’; View publishes ‘White Rabbits’. New York renders homage to Leonora. Renato itches to return to Mexico and Max grows increasingly edgy.

‘I hope you have finally realised that your place is here. I can find other outlets that will publish you, get you a solo exhibition.’

‘I am going to leave with Leduc.’

‘Impossible! You will lose everything, it’ll be the end of your career, Mexico doesn’t feature in the art market, there are no galleries there, you’re off to bury yourself in a country that practises human sacrifice. The muralists are nothing but political propagandists. Nobody will be able to understand you, a true libertarian. How is it possible that you could want to leave just when you are beginning to become known here?’ Max is growing desperate.

‘This conversation is in bad taste and I refuse to waste my energy on it.’

Max is her maestro but deep inside herself, something — or someone — keeps repeating: ‘If you stay here you’ll be committing an act of cowardice, you will become paralysed in Max’s and in Peggy’s shadows, until one of the two of you gives up.’

‘You have turned to stone, Leonora.’

‘Suffering causes petrification.’

‘You only think of yourself.’

‘And you, who are you thinking of, Max?’

What would happen were she to find she was made of stone?

If she doesn’t flee as far as possible, she will once again become trapped by the rules, even if this time it’s those laid down by the Surrealists. Mexico is her escape route, the way out of a burning house.

After the war and her time in the asylum, she has come to know the extremes of irrationality and cruelty, the furthest possible point of man’s brutality.

‘Max, I still don’t know what the meaning is of my life, but I do know I want to paint and that I can only do this if I live according to my own rules; I need to explore something I began to discern while I was in the asylum, something that goes beyond normal experience, and that I can’t properly explain to you.’

‘It’s absurd for you to go.’

‘Well, I want to go beyond the absurd, drop down on the far side of logic, to find what the absurd has to offer, if indeed it can give me anything at all.’

Some of their number start to return to France. Breton doesn’t even make the effort to learn English; he leaves his wife, Jacqueline Lamba, to David Hare. Max stays glued to Peggy’s side; she, Leonora, is obliged to take a greater risk: that is the lesson she learnt from her stay in Santander. Surely not even Imperial Chemical would pursue her all the way to Mexico. Far from her father’s clutches and from Max, she could choose her own way of life, while remaining loyal to her vocation. Loyal, too, to the suffering of which no-one else had the least idea, and which one day — if only at the age of ninety-nine — she would forget.

‘I want to keep my soul alive and if I don’t succeed I’ll be lost. I have something very special inside myself, an essence that could either dissolve, or maybe burn until it turns to smoke, or else freeze me searing like ice — because extremes always meet and ice scorches just as much as fire. But if I stay here, in New York, Max, I shall never be more than your projection.’

Renato keeps insisting on how beautiful Mexico is: ‘It is a virgin country, Leonora, where whole regions remain to be discovered. Europe is a stew pot, un pot au feu , in which everything has already been cooked. Now, in New York, people are taking an interest in the Surrealists, but tomorrow, who knows? The Yanks change their tastes overnight. But Mexico is free of both snobbery and sophistication, we are still hungry in every sense of the word. New York is a total rat race, you have to come out ahead by whatever means you can. In my home country, the game has hardly begun; we remain more ingenuous and naive; and for the same reason, more brutal.’

‘And why would I want cruelty?’

To Leonora it seems that her time in the asylum rubbed her face in the earth until it bled. She suffered so much for Max in St. Martin d’Ardèche, and it went on until she reached Santander. Max wasn’t bothered by the fact that he was using Peggy, since he felt he deserved whatever came his way. All of a sudden, the cries of Marie-Berthe Aurenche echo back to her from the Rue Jacob; she recalls the fate of Louise Straus, arrested by the Nazis, and the stupefaction in Jimmy’s eyes. All this reinforces her decision. What would Mexico be like and how would Renato Leduc behave back home in Mexico? Would she be casting herself into the void? The Surrealists are her natural medium; they are her friends, accomplices, admirers, but Leonora is now a different woman. Santander has transformed her: it now accompanies and even awakens her every morning. It is forever present, within a hand’s reach, there on her pillow. Of course New York is the Mecca of new art, of galleries and cultural events, of the life that at once reasserts itself in the wake of the war. Its opportunities too, despite the fact that Leonora has no clear idea of what she has to do, apart from one: leave Max. He cannot restrain her, because she knows what madness is. Not the madness idealised by André Breton, not the madness preached by Surrealist geniuses, but a madness she can reach out and touch every day, as it pursues her, thundering through all her senses.