Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

Leonora had not been pleased to find Mabille confusing the Irish with the Scottish and the English, but the Surrealist doctor’s poetic strength and good looks persuade her to confide in him.

‘Pierre, I am an addict,’ and Leonora embraces him.

‘Don’t you think that what you do is to let your emotions go up in smoke? If you’re able to paint with a cigarette in your hand, you are bound to be able to write about whatever happened to you in Santander.’

‘No, Pierre, I can’t. I wrote it all down once in New York, but I don’t want to go back to talking about it any more.’

‘If you don’t express it in words, your body is liable to explode. The whole world is possessed by madness. Where I’ve just come from, in Haiti, Voodoo is a liberation. It seems as if insanity is the norm there. In the north of Mexico, the Rarámuri have ceremonies that go back thousands of years, and their dances create catharsis. It makes no difference that if their interminably repeated dance steps appear meaningless to the casually curious passer-by, they have a function in ridding them of any torment.’

‘Would you like me to dance?’

‘I would like you to write down your experiences in Santander, and I’ll help you. What has happened to you happens to many more than just you. You have no monopoly on insanity.’

‘That was all three years ago. It’s impossible to live through it all again.’

‘In order to forget, it is necessary first to remember. What was published in the magazine VVV when you were in New York is barely more than a sketch. Don’t be such a narcissist, or you’ll turn into a new little Saint Thérèse. The virgin from whose mouth roses issue is such a commonplace in the magical thought patterns of the people, just like tears that fall as pearls and drops of blood as rubies. But the story of a woman who returns from hell — the inferno — and can tell us about it is a gift to both psychoanalysis and to philosophy.’

‘I’m afraid.’

‘You are afraid of society. Forget all about that, it only gets in the way of artistic development.’

In August 1943, Leonora descends into the inferno and writes a 100-page draft called Memories of Down Below , with assistance from Jeanne, Pierre’s wife.

‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to express the horror of that period; what I can assure you of is that I wrote it in a trance and suffered the agonies of a Prometheus.’

Pierre Mabille tells her he should be back a few days later, and when he next sees her, he embraces her with emotion:

‘You are a visionary, your book reads like a treatise on suffering.’

Leonora shows him the page on which she drew Doctor Luis Morales’ portrait, along with the map of the asylum with its railings, fortress, apple orchard and chained dogs, and signs she deems to be alchemical symbols, a horse on its knees — ‘Can that be me, Pierre?’ — and a coffin containing a body with two heads.

Mabille’s pronouncement is definitive:

‘They should never have injected you with Cardiazol, Leonora.’

IN THE EVENING, LEONORA greets Renato with the customary reproach: ‘You spend the whole day long at the newspaper.’

‘And you clearly take my advice to heart, since there is not a single new brushstroke on your canvas.’

‘What an arsehole pendejo you are. So now you’ve become an art critic?’

‘How good you’ve become at throwing insults in Spanish!’ Renato replies, in mock wonder.

‘I feel that I loathe you; you’ve no idea how much I loathe you, and I dislike doing so. I am deeply disgusted with myself for my terror of being alone, and I loathe myself for that, too.’

Renato slams the door, and departs muttering: ‘You’re crazy.’ Leonora is flooded with resentment.

‘I’m leaving,’ she manages to shriek after him.

Elsie receives her with open arms at her house on Durango Street.

‘Of course you can stay here with me.’

In the house on Calle Gabino Barreda, the last things they want to hear about are fights, weapons, revolution. They can’t bear to hear descriptions of any form of cruelty, and Elsie provides Leonora with renewed strength, thanks to her sound judgement. The garden surrounding her house is temperate; it calms Leonora’s nerves.

Elsie at once invites her out to brunch: ‘Come on Leonora, at noon we’ll go to the Casa de los Azulejos and eat scrambled eggs. Then you’ll see how well you sleep here tonight.’

The next morning at breakfast Leonora announces:

‘I’m going back to Renato.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I don’t know how to sleep alone.’

‘Yesterday you wanted to leave him for good.’

‘And today I don’t. I want to catch him before he leaves home to go to the newspaper office.’

When she appears at the flat on the Calle de Artes, Renato is still in the shower, and she calls out as if nothing had happened:

‘Renato, Remedios and Benjamin have invited us to dinner.’

‘Fine, I’ll stop by and pick you up at eight o’clock.’

‘You are hopelessly unpunctual and it drives me to distraction.’

It is past nine o’clock, and Renato still hasn’t arrived. So Leonora decides to take her pets Pete, Dicky and Daisy with her to the home of her friends. Kitty is fine on her own, since she spends most of the time asleep. Three hours later, Renato gets there to find Leonora chatting with a Hungarian photographer who has just arrived in the country. His name is Imre Emerico Weisz, known as Csiki, converted to Chiki thanks to the Mexican way of turning cs into ch .

‘He was in a concentration camp where he nearly died and where his brother was killed. Robert Capa introduced him to me in Madrid,’ Kati informs her.

Renato and Benjamin Péret were recounting their experiences in the cabaret known as La Cabana Cubana , where sensational black women performed all kinds of dances. ‘I took Picasso there, and it was a huge success.’

The Hungarian is handsome, he has red eyes, and describes his flight from Europe with a mathematical precision which Leonora finds emotionally moving.

All of a sudden, for no better reason than their shared reminiscences of the war, the two find themselves apart from the rest, outside the bubble of the ongoing party. The further Chiki gets into his story, the more sharply Leonora finds she has to draw in her breath.

‘Do you know the day when the course of Imre Emerico Weisz’s life was decided?’ Chiki asks her.

‘No, when?’ Leonora responds flirtatiously, half-anticipating a reply along the lines of ‘the day when I first met you’, but his look grows darker as he explains: ‘The day my mother handed me over to the orphanage.’

‘Whenever was that?’

‘When I was four years old. She had three children and one had to be picked out. That one was me.’

Leonora pictures the scene of the sleeping child whose mother pulls him from the bed to dress and then bring him to a big building in front of which there’s a line of many mothers with their children. Chiki disappears behind the high railings, they shave his head and, as he is the smallest one there, a prefect dresses him in striped trousers and buttons his jacket, which has the number 105 sewn on the breast pocket.

‘Go outside again and give your mother back the clothes she brought you in.’

His mother kneels down in front of him, and tells him that he is going to learn all sorts of useful things.

Chiki bursts into tears. His mother wipes his nose with a hanky: ‘From now on into the future, you will need to blow your own nose.’

‘Why did you bring me here?’

‘Because you were the chosen one. You should be as proud as when Abraham picked Isaac. You too are a Jew and don’t you ever forget it.’