Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

Back at her easel, Leonora paints The Temptation of Saint Anthony , as viewed by Bosch and by Peter Brueghel the Elder. She situates the hermit at the waterside with a pink and black piglet. She draws the saint with three heads. A bald young woman, wrapped in a red gown, combines sensuality with the delicacies of the dinner table and is busy preparing a hotpot filled with lobsters, turtles, chickens, tomatoes, mushrooms, Gorgonzola cheese, chocolate, onions and peaches bottled in syrup. The Queen of Sheba, wife of Solomon, and her train of maidens are approaching the hermit, whose sole daily fare is dry pasta and tepid water.

A carrier pigeon flies between Kati’s and Leonora’s house. Kati has trained it.

Leonora paints feverishly, but has no idea what to do with her finished canvases. The first task is to pay for the doctor and midwife.

‘I am strong,’ is her assumption. ‘The day after the birth of my child, I’ll sit down in front of the easel again.’

‘You have no inkling of the amount of time a newborn can take up,’ Elsie Escobedo scolds her.

‘Do you like children?’ asks Remedios.

‘No.’

‘And does Chiki like them?’

‘Not as far as I know.’

Two days before the birth, Leonora completes L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle , its title from the final line of Dante’s Paradiso. A golden carriage — taken from one of the tarot cards — announces their new life. The couple, clothed in red, their arms raised, perform a dance to love and light. On the eve of the arrival of their first child, the painter — who had never previously had recourse to religion — is clearly evoking Ezekiel’s vision of God enthroned in the temple among the heavenly host.

When a red bundle is placed in her arms, a diminutive scrap who breathes and opens his mouth, Leonora is stunned. Her heart has never beat so hard.

‘Here is your son,’ the woman in white tells her. ‘Take him.’

‘How?’

‘Put him to the breast.’

The infant is the most beautiful charge there is.

‘He looks just like you,’ the nurse confirms.

On 14th July 1946, Bastille Day, Leonora goes through the looking-glass, entering a space she had never previously envisaged: that of motherhood. ‘I never thought I would feel like this.’ But in the clinic she was already worrying. ‘Will he feel cold or hungry? Will he sleep through the night?’ Remedios is worried, too, and goes out to smoke in the corridor. Not to mention Chiki, who is anxiously conferring with Kati in Hungarian.

‘He will be called Harold,’ announces Leonora.

‘Why Harold? Aren’t you are at war with your father?’ exclaims her husband.

‘I want him to be called Harold.’

‘He cut you off penniless.’

‘I want him to be called Harold.’

‘Fine then, Harold Gabriel,’ Chiki intervenes.

‘Everyone in France is celebrating his birth,’ Kati responds, smiling.

In the morning, Chiki would go out to take photographs for the Rotary Club, whose meetings are social events staged in order to fund-raise and endow schools with drinking-water fountains and teaching materials, along with meals delivered to old people’s homes. Chiki looks on in surprise as over-made-up women, straight out of the beauty salon, throw themselves on the trays of canapés and glasses of wine, and recalls the bread distributed to the refugees in Madrid. On every image, another is superimposed in his mind: ‘Why am I doing this to myself?’

When the journalists are unleashed upon a personality, the sound of bombs dropping over Madrid thrums in his ears. A gossip columnist notes down their names, repeating: ‘Yes, a graduate, as you say, with a BA,’ because there’s nothing better than to be graduate Gómez, Sánchez, López, González or Rodríguez, this or that … Their embraces are always loud, their glasses clink ‘cheers’, and Chiki hears the sound of window panes breaking in the Calle de Bravo Murillo, in Madrid. Incredulous, camera in hand, he lives the results of the Mexican Revolution.

‘Did you learn anything worth remembering?’ Leonora enquires on his return.

‘I heard a lady say that she owns nine cars, one for each of her sons, and I saw a member of the National Assembly showing a Rolex to his secretary, saying: ‘Look at this watch! It never fails me.’

‘What was he talking about?’

Chiki changes the subject and insists that his wife ought to give up smoking.

‘That’s one thing I can’t do. What I most need right now is a nice cup of tea.’

The birth of Gaby returns her to her years in the nursery at Crookhey Hall. Leonora stitches him a mermaid out of red velvet, fitted with little pockets to store centavos , buttons, marbles. In motherhood she finds herself inclined to make things for the home. She sews, sitting beside the cradle.

‘Just think, I bumped into Renato, and he gave me this poem to recite to you,’ Kati tells her.

‘When you came

when she went

we looked — or did we look? –

with a look that gives nothing away

delicate tea cups

and a lump of sugar

and the tea’s amber bubbles.

Forefinger and thumb

so slender, so fine

that seeing them raise the cup of tea

I tell myself:

these fingers will snap …

Where were you? …

Forefinger and thumb raise the cup of tea.

You answer me with those eyes of yours

deep, astonishing,

according to confirmation by the child-god.

Forefinger and thumb

slowly lower the cup of tea.

Where were you? …

And your voice: do you know? …

I burnt myself …’

‘I shall invite him to dinner!’ Leonora says with a laugh.

Esteban Francés tells her that the great collector Edward James admires both her work and that of Remedios too.

‘He saw you with the Escobedos on the beach at Acapulco and you took not the least notice of him; all you did was read.’

‘And what is that Englishman doing in Mexico City?’ asks Leonora.

‘You already know. He’s a rare beast, travelling wherever the mood takes him. In New York, Peggy Guggenheim and Man Ray talked to him about you. To painters like us, Mexico is a tomb; you have already put down roots in this well of anguish and I can’t tell what is going to become of you or your son. You, who sell nothing that you paint, need to find yourself a patron like him. René Magritte, one of his protégés, painted him from behind as he looked into a mirror, and drew every single hair on the back of his neck, calling the painting Not to be Reproduced.

Little by little, Leonora begins to see what they have in common: he is as British as she; as aristocratic as she; as dissatisfied as she; and the owner of a castle in England. Again, just like her, the society photographer Cecil Beaton had taken his photograph; the only difference is that Max Ernst had never painted him in the morning light. West Dean House bears some resemblance to Crookhey Hall and in Monkton House, decorated in style by Dalí, Edward James has installed two Dalí sofas of pink satin, representing the lips of Mae West, and Dalí has converted a telephone into a lobster.

But Leonora’s flat on the Avenida Alvaro Obregón is the antithesis of all that is familiar to James. You enter down a dark corridor that leads directly into the kitchen. Leonora offers him a cup of tea, and sits him down on a hard wooden chair.

‘What are you doing in Mexico?’ she asks, as she puts water on to boil.

‘Geoffrey Gilmore, an old friend from Oxford days, invited me to stay at his house in Cuernavaca and I took the opportunity to come and visit you. Is this your living room?’

‘Yes. Remedios Varo calls it my magic grotto. She has even produced a painting of it.’