Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

Tea is construed as a slow, liquid ceremony, and Leonora’s hands resting on the oilcloth covering the table are beautiful: small, with no rings on her large, strong fingers, the tools of a woman who suffers and has no control over her nightmares.

‘Listen, have you mastered your dreams?’ she asks him, offering a second cup of tea.

‘Not yet. Do you know what, Leonora? I too had a nanny. My first journey abroad, to San Remo, took place when I was four years old. I remember a whole army of servants, nursemaids and secretaries, huddled together on the boat and, once on dry land, almost filling up an entire busload. Nursemaids are wholly indispensable in the lives of children belonging to our social class. My mother was accustomed to saying to my nanny: “I’d like one of the children to take to Mass with me.” “Which one, madam?” “The one whose dress best matches mine.”’

‘My nanny introduced me to the sidhes .’

‘I know very well who the sidhes are. I would love to see the inside of your studio, Leonora.’

‘I’ll show you. Let’s go.’

They go upstairs to a broom cupboard no bigger than a dovecote. Up until now, the artists James has visited painted in workshops worthy of their work and their fees.

‘Is this your sancta sanctorum ?’ asks James in surprise. ‘I can’t believe it. Do the paintings that so seduce me emerge from here? Out of this keyhole of a place? This is really your atelier ?’ He asks over again, still incredulous.

No-one but Leonora would call it a studio. Ill-lit, narrow, rickety, where the visitor is forced to squeeze himself against the wall when a girl with a broom comes towards him.

‘Oh no, don’t clean now, today we have a visitor,’ Leonora tells her. James turns sideways to let her pass, filled with emotion: Leonora is even more fantastical than the creatures she paints. Abandoned, orphaned of light and air, this hovel-like box room exults James: on a table lie curled-up tubes of paints, squeezed nearly empty beside the palette; an ashtray overflowing with cigarette stubs; a spider weaving its web. Leonora is a reliquary for every kind of orphanhood, she could paint inside a dustbin. This attic lends itself to the most bizarre mental constructs, and both disturbs and fills him with new energy. People had said that Leonora was a one-off, but he never thought that she assumed such an admirable form. Nothing contaminates her, she does not imitate Ernst, her interior world is hers alone. The only footprints on the way to these gallows are hers alone. A prisoner of herself, she is condemned to be a painter.

Motherhood swallows her up. Nappies, feeding bottles, the ‘What’s the matter with baby?’ refrain, to the astonishment of Chiki, who always hangs back — it all conspires to keep her living on a knife-edge. There is her canvas, stretched on the easel. She has never felt herself to be more productive than here and now.

James is captivated, and offers to buy four paintings for a derisory price. Leonora angrily shows him the way out, without registering that such a gesture only enhances her magnitude in his eyes for, despite having his own full share of caprices and flouted conventions, Edward James knows full well that Leonora’s rebelliousness goes well beyond his own. From the word go, Leonora has been confronting authority, defying whatever goes on around her, with a sense of liberty unknown to James. With what a noble bearing she had shown him the door! He returns the next day and offers Leonora his apologies, which she accepts with another: ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

Leonora embraces challenges beyond the norm, her painting comes only from inside of herself, and she makes fun of the intricate system of social privilege and delights her listeners with a high sense of irony. The painter is a free woman, and James confuses delirium with creativity, witty remarks with ideas. He also shares in Leonora’s Irish myths and so can enjoy her company even more than anyone else. In return, he introduces her to the wisdom of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. His one regret is that she wastes so much time looking after the baby. When he tries to have a conversation with her, Leonora continually warns him that she has to attend to Gaby, or take out the dog, or prepare dinner, or go into the city centre to purchase a canvas measuring precisely 75 by 40 centimetres.

Her house is bare of occasional tables, footstools and trinkets. She was very young when she broke her links with her past, and is determined that nothing at all will cross her. It would never occur to her to decorate the bathroom at Wimpole Street as James did when he commissioned Paul Nash to design it. Her creative impulses erased the past with a single brush stroke, and she excavated her own way forward like a miner in his coal shaft.

Leonora can discuss any topic with James, secure in the knowledge he understands what she is talking about. What’s more, James is a seducer. Leonora is astonished at how much he knows about art. And as for James, his breath is taken away by the manner in which she pays attention to him, observing him with those intelligent eyes, fixed on whatever words fall from his lips. He wants to buy up her entire stock, including work she didn’t paint herself. He spends hours in front of the easel and more often than not has a point when he makes an observation such as: ‘In my opinion, that figure would look better standing up.’ Chiki would never dream of daring to give her any such advice. Leonora is superior to him and Chiki, overly modest, recognises her genius.

Edward James becomes a part of the family. He appears without warning, comes into the studio, examines the painting on the easel, opines that really the blue needs to be a stronger shade, and a few additional coats of red would work wonders for the people in the right-hand corner — or that, on the other hand, the addition of an animal would greatly enhance the bottom left-hand corner. The most important thing of all is to start giving each painting a title, writing it on to each canvas. Leonora consults him. No-one has ever done as much for her before.

‘Admirable, admirable! You are making my whole trip to Mexico worthwhile.’

‘What kind of a title do you think we ought to give this one?’ Leonora asks. His influence is so obvious that she consults him even when she has her paintbrush in her hand. Even while she is painting, James stands at her side, almost without breathing.

What Leonora loves about him is his passion for her, he watches her with an immense curiosity, waiting for what she’ll do or say next. He hangs on every word she says, storing them away one by one. Being able to hold a man within such a web of fascination is one more reason for her to consider that she’s on the right track. For the first time since she came to Mexico, Leonora finds someone who gives her encouragement. Max always did things differently. Edward confirms that her art is for real, that Leonor Fini does not even come up to her ankles. He buys a few paintings from Remedios, and keeps Kati and José happily on board with projects for the future; but it is Leonora whom he considers the true artist.

James understands her, he is just as much of an eccentric as she is, he values her more than anyone else in Mexico, it’s all down to her and her immense talent, a talent that also includes writing, for her short stories touch him to the core.

‘I too know what it is to descend into the hell of depression, Leonora,’ he says, referring to her Memories of Down Below.

Despite all that has happened to them, neither of them has ever flirted with death. Back in France, in 1937, Leonora heard that some Englishman named Edward James had bought a painting by Max Ernst — Antipodes of the Landscape — in the Mayor Gallery in London’s Cork Street. This was the first time she had heard of him, when she still had no notion of what a patron might signify. Her only reference point was her image of Peggy Guggenheim, surrounded by dogs, buying the work of another dog, albeit one on two legs, with his tongue hanging out, and with much more of the look of a lapdog about him.