Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘The yellow butterfly that flaps its wings across the dark face is me; it’s me burning,’ Leonora admits.

Remedios has her first show in the Galería Diana: ‘I’m scared. I’ve got no idea how they’re going to react. Walter calms me down but even so …’ The exhibition sells out within three days, and collectors are queuing up to join a waiting list.

‘We should celebrate!’ Leonora proposes. They eat out in a restaurant, and Leonora orders a bottle of Petrus.

‘Where did you learn to taste wine in such a professional manner?’ asks Remedios.

‘I first learnt when I was young, and I graduated with honours thanks to St. Martin d’Ardèche and to Max.’

All of a sudden, from one day to the next, a trunk appears in the middle of the room.

‘What’s this?’ asks Gaby.

‘It used to be our tea table. Let’s use it to travel to a place far away from civilisation,’ Leonora’s eyes are shining brightly. ‘To England!’

While she packs, their mother regales the boys:

‘I bought it in New York.’

‘It’s the size of a wardrobe,’ Pablo says.

Lined with a patterned wallpaper that would have delighted Max Ernst, it is so vast that it can hold canvases more than a metre in length, paintings and even a small easel, two umbrellas, since over there they are bound to be more expensive, a walking stick, a screwdriver, hammer and nails, numerous cords, some scraps that will doubtless come in useful to patch torn trousers, and an alarm clock that only the English will be able to repair. Leonora packs warm clothes, as the weather in her native country is so unpredictable that, at the least provocation, the skies fall in.

They take the train. Chiki brings them to Buenavista Station with his Basque beret on his head, and stays on the platform to watch them depart, his eyes even redder than usual.

‘Adios, Pa, adios, Pa. When are you going to come and join us?’

‘Hush, I’ve already got enough to do with carrying this trunk,’ Leonora gets increasingly annoyed.

‘I just don’t like seeing him all by himself,’ Pablo says.

‘He’s not all that alone, he’ll go round to Kati’s every day.’

In St. Louis, Missouri, they take another train to New York. Nobody seems bothered by the length of the journey. Leonora is a fabulous storyteller, and they learn how Alice dealt her pack of cards; all about the isle of the Lilliputians and the land of Brobdingnag, where everything is outsized, and of Gulliver’s terror of rats and mosquitoes, the greengrocer’s wife who turns into a creeper, the queen who goes crazy in the heat; and of Tartar, the magical horse of Lucrecia — Leonora, and all about Uncle Sam Carrington, who can’t stop laughing whenever the moon is full. Cabin Class is the best and sleeping in its bunks is sheer luxury. ‘Look, I can hardly even fit inside the toilet,’ says Pablo in amazement.

The top deck on the Queen Elizabeth is so broad and gazing out to sea such a pleasure. When she is not beside them, Leonora forbids her sons from leaning over the handrail to watch the water slapping the ship’s sides.

She remembers her outward journey to America. Every dawn she would unglue her body from Renato’s and go up on deck to ponder and conjecture her future, and to meditate on whether she might be mistaken in taking such a path into the unknown. One morning she meets Gaby, leaning on his elbows at the handrail, his eyes fixed on the horizon. ‘How like me this son of mine is!’ she thinks. His hair flowing in the wind, Gabriel Weisz resembles a figurehead on the prow.

‘I have never watched the dawn break before,’ Gaby informs her, when he notices her leaning on the rail at his side. ‘What do you prefer, Ma, dawn or dusk?’

‘Dawn: it’s the start of the world.’

Pablo is asleep while Leonora and her elder son stay up on deck. Leonora remembers that Renato warned her ten years ago: ‘You are coming to see the New World.’ And she followed his drift with: ‘Any moment now, the mermaids will put in an appearance.’

Calais is their port of arrival. From Calais they board another ferry to Southampton, and grandmother Maurie sends a car to pick them up and transport them to Hazelwood.

The symmetrical gardens of Hazelwood Hall were created by Thomas Mawson, the man who went on to design the Peace Palace gardens in The Hague. The children inspect both the house and its garden. They can also hear the sea, and at the first opportunity they race to the beach and hurl themselves into the water, regardless of how icy it is.

In Mexico, the climate is a miracle. In England, every time they go out they have first to cover up completely, and when they come in, to unpeel themselves in the hall, shedding outer skins as if they were onions. They miss the bare heat of the skies of Mexico.

Their grandmother’s spirit has become almost as free as her only daughter’s. She expresses her feelings openly and accepts or rejects whatever occurs with spontaneity. Leonora’s Irish side descends from Maurie, who says what she thinks and, if contradicted, exclaims: ‘Oh what a bloody nuisance!’

Hazelwood Hall, with its balcony overlooking the garden, bewitches her grandchildren: inside are its vast staircase, marble floors, and the medieval suit of armour which they believe to be inhabited by Harold Carrington, and the incredibly intricate barometer that transports them to Alice’s Wonderland. Even when Maurie calls them in to tea, they remain in the company of the Cheshire Cat. Three great arches in the lower half of the house intrigue them, because they are so dark they could well prove the entrance to hell. ‘Ma, are those the arches you paint in your pictures?’

Gaby and Pablo soon take note of the fact that, for their grandmother, each person has their own assigned space and that children are prohibited from interrupting the conversations of adults. Old Nanny, who raised Leonora, and who — despite the mistreatment she endured in Santander — is incapable of feeling resentful, continues repeating the same stories:

‘Cerrid Gwenn went to the woods and chose the healthiest walnut tree according to the great quantity of birds in its crown. He installed the most magic cauldron of all in its shade. Patiently, he blended eight drops of understanding, four rose petals, two drops of advice and a butterfly wing, a pinch of compassion, three trickles of knowledge, five stars from a comet’s tail, two teaspoonfuls of strength, then set all of them on to boil and stirred and stirred and stirred …’

‘Hey, Nanny! So what happened?’ Pablo is getting worried.

‘For the course of one year and a day and without pausing, he kept the flame alive beneath the cauldron. He refined the recipe and added four jasmine flowers. Finally, from the cauldron he withdrew a few magic drops, which he stored in a phial. When he tested out the formula, the effect was immediate: he discovered the secret of Wisdom and was happy from that moment onwards.’

‘I want to have that tiny flask, Nanny — then I wouldn’t have to go to school,’ Pablo says.

‘So then you have to go and look for it, because Gwenn hid it here at Hazelwood, but we’ll keep that for tomorrow, because it’s already tea-time,’ Nanny replies.

Pat and Gerard visit their nephews who have arrived from across the Atlantic Ocean. Pat bores them and Gerard reads his poems and laughs without stopping. Gaby concludes that he must be a good poet, and that living with him must be highly agreeable.

Leonora writes to James, who answers from Paris: ‘I am on the point of boarding the ship for New York, so we’ll see each other next in Mexico.’

They go out for a walk after tea. ‘Hazelwood is full of fairies.’ Leonora assures them her beloved fairies have nothing at all to do with Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy stories.