Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘The hot chocolate is also good here.’

‘Corn-on-the-cob soup is good too.’

‘Popular art is also very good.’

‘And churros — doughnuts — dipped in hot chocolate are delicious.’

The aficionados visit local churches and make off with armloads of crucifixes and colonial paintings, without anyone raising a murmur of protest. As to all the ex-votos covering so many sacristy walls, what more can one say about them?

Eva Sulzer has been captivated, even subjugated, by Mexico. The Swiss millionaire quotes Dürer, who comes across pre-Colombian ceramics and jewellery for the first time when in Brussels and exclaims ‘All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things.’

In Texcoco, José Feher makes copies of the originals and they sell like hot cakes. His wife, Itza, keeps to European customs and force-feeds geese in order to turn their bloated livers into paté de foie-gras.

Leonora loves to climb to the top of the pyramid at Cuicuilco in the south of the city, because Gunther Gerzso — born to a Hungarian father and a German mother — knows about everything and informs her that at the centre of Cuicuilco there is a circular temple twenty metres high, from the top of which one can obtain an imposing view of the volcanoes.

‘Here is where thousands of people used to live until the Xitle volcano erupted and covered their farms in lava.’

He knows the whole history of Mexico and makes fun of the Big Three — the muralists Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco — for painting hideous big monkeys.

‘I’ll get my hat and come along with you, Gunther,’ Leonora answers enthusiastically.

Looking down on the land from the summit, Gerzso records it on his canvas and then cuts it into slices: here the yellow corn, there the green alfalfa, and then suddenly he scratches the smooth surface with his pen-knife; he tells Leonora that Mexico is an unexpected revenge.

‘A betrayal.’

‘Yes, the Mexicans are also traitors.’

‘Sometimes, when we go on these walks, I have a sense of vertigo.’

‘We are all fragile.’

‘But not the spaces you paint. You used to resemble Tanguy but now you are more like yourself,’ affirms Leonora.

Gerzso carries on walking, notebook in hand.

‘At the end of the day, the landscape is your personality,’ Leonora repeats to him.

‘And what is yours?’

‘It belongs to the world of my childhood, the sidhes , the horses, the Celts.’

Benjamin Péret tells how the first sun was a jaguar who devoured everything; the second a great wind that likewise did away with the planet; the third drowned all the animals, so that not even reptiles survived; and so on up until the fifth sun, which transformed all Mexicans into the people of the sun, a chosen people. The old world has still not noticed what it means to be the people of the sun.

‘Leonora, I have one Huitzilopochtli too many. Don’t you want to take it home?’

‘He frightens me. These figures that so excite you appear malevolent to me. Just one of these devils could destroy me.’

‘I have never seen anything more beautiful than Coatlicue,’ Paalen enthuses again. ‘She contains the whole primitive artistic genius.’

Leonora covers her eyes. ‘What a nightmare!’

The Aztec goddess rises before her with her eagle’s claws, a skull in place of a head and her skirt composed of snakes.

As far as Péret is concerned, Mexico should never have been conquered. Its past is far superior to whatever the pigs who vanquished it could possibly have devised.

On the Calle Gabino Barreda, they live as a family and play the Surrealist game they call ‘exquisite corpses’, involving both images and word-play. One person folds down the part of a sheet of paper on which they have written a word or drawn a picture, and others keep adding their contribution until all have done so and the finished text or image can be revealed. Remedios and Leonora also practise that other favourite of the Surrealists, ‘automatic writing’.

‘You have to start by first creating the sense of a vacuum within yourself, and then waiting. The drawing is born in your unconscious and its transferred expression on to the page is simply a physical movement, rhythm, incantation. It may resemble a scribble. You have already reached the preliminary stage, so now release and liberate your inhibitions on to your sheet of paper.’

Leonora returns home filled with enthusiasm. She has found her spiritual ambience, her true family; all that has landed in her lap she owes to Remedios.

Whether one likes it or not, the whole group goes back to Max. Péret remembers how insecure Max used to be, and how he felt himself drawn to people whom he regarded as living on the edge of what is called madness.

Mexico is the land of the future. André Breton wrote, two years earlier, that ‘in him all hopes are burning …’

The group of friends quote Max at every opportunity and Leonora thinks of all she has lost.

IN THE HOUSE ON CALLE GABINO BARREDA, the topic of the day is France, above all because Péret still resides there, in spirit if not in body.

‘Doesn’t anything of what goes on here interest you?’ Leonora asks him.

‘To tell you the truth, Mexico is Pompeii to me and I am simply one more corpse.’

‘Why Pompeii?’

‘Because if Vesuvius did for Pompeii, Mexico is also buried in lava and …’

Péret does not finish his sentence and diverts into discussing his obsession: Nazism.

‘How easy would it have been to assassinate Hitler before National Socialism spread as it has? Are Mexicans aware that they also admire Nazi-style discipline and applaud it during news bulletins?’

He keeps his distance from the muralists who, according to his point of view, celebrate violence. Péret knows enough about death to know that to die changes nothing.

‘The Revolution? All it left behind was corpses, orphans and widows. Then the Big Three annihilated what was left. Nothing can exist apart from them. Their catch phrase “No other way but ours” — the title of Siqueiros’ book on modern art in Mexico — is an ignominy,’ Péret alleges.

‘Herbert Read is right. Diego Rivera is a second-rate painter,’ Esteban Francés concludes.

Yet the country of Mexico is hospitable, for it opens its doors to refugees.

José Horna can put anyone in a good mood. He made numerous maps for the Spanish Republicans and has now stuck a number of them up on the walls of his house. He seems handsome to Leonora, and he amuses her when he says:

‘I always help anyone with anything, as long as they don’t make me get up before eleven in the morning.’

Leonora is charmed by the way he speaks and calls him ‘child’. Remedios translates Mexico for Leonora and teaches her how to pronounce Quetzalcoatl, Tecayehuatzin, Xicotencatl, Axayacatzin, cuetlaxochitl, and Leonora writes short stories populated by characters drawn from the covered markets on Jamaica and La Merced streets. The Sonora market is evil, for as well as plants and flowers, it sells herbs to bring about death or abortion, and women approach fearfully and ask for them in low voices. Bats hang on the stalls, their skulls knocking against one another. To the swearwords Renato has already taught her, Leonora adds the riddles she collects on the street: ‘A large ugly negress/who keeps her shape without recourse to food/she has everything but flesh/for the flesh am I/something I share with her./What am I?’ Both Leonora and Remedios are obsessed with the shadows of their characters.

‘So, let’s see if you can guess this other one: “I am a poor little negro/without arms or legs/I navigate over land and sea/and can hook even God himself.” What am I?’