Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

A year later, her second son, Pablo, is born. Leonora paints Chiki, ton pays. She revisualises the journey her husband has taken from Hungary to France, through Spain and on to Mexico. She again paints a carriage — red this time — red being the colour chosen by the two lovers, advancing down a tunnel, preceded by a jaguar skin, a creature of Mexican mythology. Leonora gives feet to Chiki and claws to herself.

Leonora is flourishing, the perfect model of maternity, and has never been as happy as now. The children appear out of corners, take over the whole house, clambering up the stairs, leaving the doors ajar, and in every window there’s a smiling face smeared with chocolate, in every smile milk teeth beginning to protrude.

CELTIC MYTHOLOGY IS LEONORA’S one religion. Mexico enters her system through her pores, despite the fact that its indigenous peoples live inside a closed world, whose secret even they forgot centuries ago.

Chiki also inhabits a secret place. Mexico is cruel and full of fury. To be a foreigner there carries a stigma.

Within the home, Leonora’s English past holds sway. Chiki’s Hungarian homeland is relegated to the darkroom. At lunch and again at supper time, the family discuss problems that have arisen at school and try to resolve them between the four of them. They speak French because Chiki detests English; Leonora insists the boys learn it anyway. ‘Their grandmother is waiting for them in Hazelwood, how on earth will they converse with her otherwise?’

Chiki confronts Gaby.

‘You have to learn to adapt to circumstances.’

‘That’s impossible. I didn’t choose this world and I can’t make head or tail of it!’

Leonora takes his side. Gaby finds maths difficult, and Chiki sits with him until the homework is done.

Chiki fears for his children and is more worried than any paterfamilias back in Leonora’s native Lancashire. Some don’t even bother to check their sons’ homework. But Chiki infects his sons with his nervousness.

‘You no longer have my permission to go to the cinema today.’

‘In any case, it is Mama who is going to take us,’ Gaby boasts.

In the Cine de las Américas they always show films of cops and robbers. Every bullet makes her jump.

‘Don’t be afraid, Ma, I’ll protect you your whole life long,’ Gaby assures her. Leonora stoically puts up with Westerns with their cowboys and smoking guns, their wagons under attack from Indians who gallop down from the high Sierra between volleys of gunfire. The sound of their horses’ hooves stimulates her memories.

‘I used to gallop better than that,’ she tells Gaby.

‘And did you save the young woman?’

‘If I couldn’t even save myself, how could I possibly save any other young woman?’

Afterwards they drink malted chocolate or strawberry milk-shakes or order banana splits while Leonora complains of the poor quality of her cup of tea.

When they get home, Chiki reads aloud to them from thick volumes published by an imprint called Labor. If they are not asleep by the end, he selects a religious text from the bookshelf, guaranteed to knock them out.

Pablo paints a watercolour that Leonora praises to the skies, and pins it to the wall with a thumb tack.

‘Ma, last night the girl I painted leapt out of the picture frame.’

‘No need to worry, the ones I paint often escape, too. Yesterday I dressed an old woman in my skirt and jumper, and she turned up at dawn to give me back my clothes: “I have now divested myself of you,” she told me.’

Leonora still suffers grave crises. ‘I can no longer draw,’ she complains and José Horna takes her to Cuernavaca to get some fresh air and be among trees.

Leonora, Chiki, Gaby and Pablo have no other family than their fellow refugees. Kati Horna is the daughter of a Hungarian banker and lost a sister when she was killed back home. Chiki has no reason at all to return to Budapest.

Increasingly desperate, Benjamin Péret rails at Remedios:

‘How can you live without even thinking of returning to Europe? Here I feel as if I am dead.’

‘Then leave. There is nothing and no-one to keep you here,’ replies Remedios impatiently.

‘Nothing at all, obviously, apart from the lack of money,’ replies Péret ironically.

Péret’s Surrealist friends in Paris stump up the cost of his fare. His departure comes as a relief to Remedios. A letter from the south helps her decide to move on to Venezuela where her brother, Rodrigo, lives together with his latest lover, Jean Nicolle, who is a pilot. ‘…I have a post at the Ministry of Health in Caracas … It will be a pleasure to share my free time with you both.’

Remedios bids Leonora farewell and promises to write: ‘I don’t know how you even get up the steps on to a plane, Remedios. It always gives me a panic attack.’

In Caracas, Bayer — the same pharmaceutical company as before — employ Remedios to create illustrations of their analgesics. They suggest she should take inspiration from methods of medieval torture. Remedios paints women stabbed and chained to a rack covered in nails, their faces grimacing with pain.

‘All I need to do is to look at your illustration for Rheumatism, Lumbago and Sciatica . My whole body starts aching and I’m dying for one of those pills,’ jokes her brother, Rodrigo.

Leonora realises that as the time goes by, her anguish is starting to return with ever greater force. She struggles to maintain her balance, but there are mornings when she has no desire even to rise from her bed. The sound of Gaby and Pablo’s voices is the one string that leads her out of the labyrinth. Then the painting on her easel summons her.

‘It could well be that your anguish is what makes you paint. Have respect for that anguish,’ Chiki suggests, in between fetching and carrying their sons.

‘And if I were to send it all to the devil and go back to England?’ muses Leonora. ‘What would that mean? Worse still, does this “all” matter so much alongside that of being in exile?’

‘We do nothing for ourselves, it all happens to us,’ Chiki says to her.

‘You’re the one who does nothing, and I’m sick of it,’ she answers.

They don’t speak to one another for several days.

‘There are these times when I feel like an uprooted plant. Max was right, I am “the lover of the wind”,’ she writes to Remedios.

‘I know all about malaria, I’m doing loads of drawings for the Bayer laboratories, I feel calm and have work, and no insect holds any more secrets for me, and that means that I am dedicating my time to entomology …’ replies Remedios. ‘I think I’ll soon be back in Mexico.’

‘How long two years can be!’ Leonora laments.

In the midst of all this, she paints Crookhey Hall, Seraputina’s Rehearsal, Kandy Murasaki, Plain Chant and Nine, Nine, Nine.

‘I’ve already had my first exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, and Edward James is enchanted by whatever I paint,’ she writes back proudly.

The births of her two boys and the interventions of Edward James both have a great deal to do with her productivity. When Remedios returns to Mexico in 1949, Leonora’s paintings astonish her.

‘So all the time I was busy doing illustrations for medical catalogues, you created this miracle? You have progressed so incredibly far!’

The women resume their friendship; they complement each other perfectly. The two heads of tousled hair, one red and the other jet black, promenade up and down Avenida Álvaro Obregón, and into the Sala Margolín, the only shop in town that specialises in classical music. Walter Gruen, now widowed, surprises Remedios with his knowledge.