Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘So in the end, Capa, Taro and Chim Seymour, as well as Maurice Oshron, all sent their copy back from Spain to Paris, and I would print it up in a darkroom, and archive all the negatives. Capa’s photos got mixed up with Gerda’s; Chim’s with Maurice Oshron’s. Yet the bye-line was always Capa’s and, in those days, the bye-line was the last thing anyone ever thought about. Anyone could die in the blink of an eye, or a click of the shutter.

‘There were two more photo magazines as well as Vu and they were called Regardes and Voilà. This multiplied our outlets — and the amount of work involved. I had never sought to stand out. On the contrary, I had learnt that the best way of surviving was to keep well away from the winners. I kept all 127 rolls of negatives in small compartments inside three cardboard boxes with little niches inside, like a honeycomb. Each one was marked with a sticky label giving the place, date and subject. There must have been well over three thousand negs that I guarded like the apple of my eye.’

Leonora considers how Csiki’s capacity for devotion has no limits.

‘Ripped apart by a Republican tank, Gerda Taro died at Brunete, her sole weapon the camera over her shoulder. Robert Capa never stopped blaming himself: “It should have been me who died.” I just carried on developing, printing, archiving, hoarding, and I thought about Kati, so small, there all alone — or perhaps not so very alone — for a twenty-year-old woman can make men turn and stare, and all the more so when they feel surrounded by death. Inside his rolls of negatives, Capa hid the message: “Things are going really badly.”’

‘It’s unbelievable that you have lived through so much!’ Leonora cries out in distress.

‘You know the rest, Leonora. The Republicans lost the war, and the chaos at the end of it all was terrifying. Chim Seymour caught a ship out to Mexico, he came out aboard the Sinaia . And Esdras Biro, despite his advanced years, was thrown into prison. The day that Capa left for New York, I took a train down to Marseilles, with all the negatives in my suitcase. “If I can’t save myself, at least I can preserve the evidence that we put up a fight.” Once at Marseilles, I handed over the case to Francisco Aguilar González, a Mexican diplomat. “Your country is the only one to support us Republicans,” I insisted. Soon afterwards, still in Marseilles, the French Vichy regime deported me to a concentration camp.

‘At Casablanca I set sail for Mexico on board the Portuguese ship Serpa Pinto , the same one that Remedios and Benjamin went out on. I had no passport, no money, and from Veracruz I travelled on to Mexico City by train only because a Spaniard bought me a ticket.’

Chiki sits there in silence.

‘Good. Well, I think that’s all.’

Leonora looks at him in admiration: Chiki is a Stoic. To place her trust in him seems the most natural thing in the world. How utterly different to her, fleeing Lisbon on the arm of a handsome diplomat! Her situation was vastly privileged compared to his. His simplicity overwhelms her. She looks at him as if he were a mythic character. A man of that degree of integrity is what she needs, a man with the same European roots as her, someone who has suffered as she has.

‘On top of all that, he’s good-looking,’ Kati tells her with a smile.

Leonora exaggerates everything she says about him, inventing her own version of Chiki.

When Renato tells her it is now time to leave the party, Leonora returns as if from another world, and Remedios notices the gleam in her eye. It’s possible that Renato too might have noticed it. From that first conversation onwards, every night before she falls asleep, Leonora sees the Hungarian’s face before her eyes, and his voice echoes deep inside her head.

IN MEXICO, LEONORA GOES ABOUT UNNOTICED, even more so now she is at Chiki’s side. Nobody had turned a hair on the busy streets of New York either; here, when they see her, they lower their gaze. They might even timorously step aside.

Her new suitor collects her from the Calle Artes and, since neither of them have any money, they go out walking together with the dogs, something that Renato would never do. Tall, slender and with a large nose, Chiki’s wide smile never fails to comfort her. He must be the most attentive man on earth.

There is something inherently defenceless and modest about the way he looks. Just like the Mexicans they pass in the street, it seems as if he’s apologising for his very existence. Leonora forgets all about the straw hat she bought on the market to protect her face from the glare and confronts the sun, extending her arms as she does so. ‘It won’t matter. When I was a girl in the convent school, I stopped the sun in its tracks, and today I’ll do it again.’ They talk in French, or walk on in silence down the Avenida Álvaro Obregón, which seems to them the most Parisian of all the avenues in Mexico City. Leonora issues orders: ‘Stop’; ‘Go’; ‘Good boy’; ‘Good girl’ and the dogs look back over their shoulders at her in gratitude. The photographer Semo had given Chiki a camera, which he now wears slung around his neck.

He learns Spanish faster than Leonora, because students and young lovers ambling along the avenues keep stopping and asking him: ‘Please can you take our photo?’ or ‘Where do you come from?’ before pausing to chat with him.

Since almost no-one can speak Czech, Polish, Hungarian or Russian, Slavs are bound to have to learn new languages, and within three months Chiki can make himself understood considerably better than Leonora.

Meeting up with him in the afternoons makes life more bearable. Plus there is the fact that Chiki regards her with something approaching veneration.

Leonora is no longer affected by the whirlpool of appointments and excursions revolving around Renato. The less she sees of him, the better off she is.

‘I would love to fly through the window mounted on a white horse.’

‘So now you have found yourself a Hungarian mount, haven’t you?’

‘Yes. I have more in common with him than I do with you.’

‘And is that lowlife going to help you to paint?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘The only things that struck me about him are his bloodshot eyes and his equally red nose.’

‘He knows André Breton.’

‘Well fancy that! Some recommendation!’

‘He has suffered enormously.’

‘That’s no kind of reason to get married.’

‘I have suffered a lot myself.’

‘Oh no, now you’re becoming a pain in the balls, it’s high time you stopped repeating that same tired old story.’

‘I don’t want to live with you any more.’

‘As far as I know, this is the only floor you have to sleep on.’

‘I’ve already spoken to Elsie Escobedo and she has invited me to stay at her house.’

‘You’re crazy! Where on earth are you going to leave your animals?’

‘I shall take them with me.’

‘Leonora, I can’t leave my job or we’d both die of hunger, you need to pull your weight.’

‘Yes, I shall pull my weight by getting myself out of here!’

Renato goes out, slamming the door as he does so, and Leonora packs up her case, her dogs and her cat, and Don Mazarino’s cage, closing the door behind her. It is over now, for certain. The only creature she leaves behind is Pete, for she intuits that Renato loves him, so as she leaves, she bids him farewell saying: ‘You belong here in this house.’

‘If only there were enough space here in the Gabino Barreda, I’d invite you to stay. But there’s scarcely enough room even for me and Benjamin,’ Remedios Varo tells her. ‘You can leave Kitty here with the rest of my cats, if you like’.