Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘The ancient fairies here are even wilder than the Aztec chaneque sprites in Chapultepec. Gaby, you too have Celtic blood in your veins.’

Her sons rush on ahead of her. When they reach the end of the dyke, they run into a red ball that returns their gaze and they ask her what it is. It is the slowly setting sun. To Leonora, seeing the sun on the point of disappearing has confirmed her conviction that she has made a mistake. ‘What am I doing in Mexico? This place is where I belong,’ and she is invaded by the most tremendous sadness.

‘Tomorrow we are leaving for Paris, Ma.’

IN PARIS, ANDRÉ BRETON watches the family apprehensively as they enter the Rue Fontaine. Gaby and Pablo play his African drums and wear their masks. ‘Aube was never like this, your children are a couple of savages.’ His new wife, the Chilean Elisa Claro, makes herself scarce. ‘I can’t attend to your needs, I am in the middle of a poem.’

Everything has changed. Jacqueline Lamba and her daughter have remained in New York. Breton has remarried and so has she. Both their lives are moving on: it’s called old age. Duchamp has also stayed there, keeping company with his bishop, his queen and his castles on the other side of the Atlantic. Man Ray and Max Ernst got married in a double wedding on the same day, the former to Juliet Browner and the latter to Dorothea Tanning. Lee Miller, now separated from Roland Penrose, lives in Sussex with their son.

Breton is surprised that Leonora does not keep company with Diego and Frida, and only occasionally sees Victor Serge and Laurette Séjourné. Leonora tells him that Serge’s words on painting were just like Gustav Regler’s: ‘That worked very well for me.’ Lázaro Cárdenas is now no longer the President of the Republic and, ever since Trotsky’s assassination, foreigners are looked on askance. The Ministry of the Interior has become much stricter, and Mexico has become unworthy of the republic she once was. Residency visas are less and less frequently renewed, there are no longer trees in the streets, and the forests that once flanked the volcanoes of Popocatapetl and Iztaccihuatl have been felled. The city is becoming covered by a hideous cloak of Toltec cement and machines imported from the United States are tearing down the old mansions built out of tezontle, the native volcanic rock. Manuel Ávila Camacho, the new President, has a face like a pudding basin.

‘So Mexico is no longer surrealist?’

‘Not even the Surrealists are surrealist any more.’

‘What of Buñuel?’

‘Yes, I see him from time to time, but he never brings his wife with him. What do you think of men who never take their wives out with them?’

‘Don’t you start … You sound just like Jacqueline!’

Breton invites them to the Café de Flore, but there’s not too much to amuse children there. Or grown-ups, as Leonora can confirm. France has still not yet recovered from the war, and the French are already talking about getting the atom bomb.

‘Leonora, I have just made known my support for the recognition of an autonomous Celtic culture.’

Regardless of the fact that Sartre and Camus are the ones who hit the headlines, Breton is still copiously read by the French, and is in the process of preparing a collection of his poems. Interviewed on the radio, he is asked for his opinion on existentialism.

‘As you live in Mexico, Leonora, you can stay on the fringes of the latest fashions, and that’s a huge asset.’

Breton’s political disappointment is obvious and Leonora has no way of responding to his questions on the extent of Trotsky’s influence.

‘Do you know any of Trotsky’s followers?’

‘The only one of whom I know anything is Victor Serge, and he only lives to write.’

‘I still maintain that no man has the right to impose his authority on another.’

Leonora doesn’t answer. What for?

‘You have been the muse of superior men,’ remarks Breton, with a smile.

Leonora flies into a rage.

‘I never had time to be anyone’s muse. I have been fully occupied with rebelling against my family, and with learning how to be an artist.’

‘Your parents persecuted Max as though he were a psychopath who had to be expelled from society.’

‘Yes, they made his life impossible. But then that’s exactly what they did to mine, too.’

Conversation languishes, something unthinkable in previous times, and Leonora notes Leonor Fini’s arrival with relief.

‘Antonin Artaud is dead. I miss his devilish smile. I hardly see Péret any more. Nothing now is as it was before.’ And with these words Breton bids his farewell.

Leonor Fini invites them to Les Halles to buy snails, which she intends to serve at a dinner for them and Benjamin Péret.

‘No way am I going to eat those poor little creatures,’ protests Pablo.

‘They are escargots. You will be intrigued by them.’

Benjamin Péret takes Pablo by the hand to cross the Boulevard des Capucines. The boy, terrified by the traffic, gives him a kick on the shin, then bites him. On reaching the other side of the street, Leonora reprimands her son:

‘What’s the matter with you? Do you think you’re an Aztec?’

Leonor Fini, Benjamin Péret and Leonora eat every last one of the snails with garlic and white wine, but Gaby protests:

‘I am utterly disgusted with you, Ma, I thought you really loved animals.’

Just like Breton, Péret — now feeling listless — asks a number of times after Remedios and swears he misses Mexico terribly.

‘That will be because you always called it the saddest place on earth.’

‘I now think that I was the saddest thing about it.’

To the Surrealists, children were objets trouvés who had to be kept entertained by someone else, so they could be free to talk to their mother.

‘Look out, Pablo’s clambering up that Giacometti sculpture.’

‘Look at him, he wants to add his improvements to that Picasso.’

‘Leonora, if you let your sons loose, they will bring down the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame and the Arc de Triomphe.’

Leonora no longer calls them the Anti-Christs as she did when they were little, and takes them off to Hauterives and the Rhône Valley to sleep in a barn. Postman Cheval attracts her more than ever when she sees the interest Gaby expresses in him. Pablo takes out a notebook and sketches details of the sculptures. ‘They are better than Max’s,’ he thinks.

The vineyards and the wine harvest also work their spell. Leonora catches flu and the boys go out only when muffled in their newly purchased capes, and bring her herb teas and stewed fruit on her sick-bed. She anxiously pens a letter to Edward James: ‘Edward, Is there any way in which we might live in England or in France? Do you think Chiki could find work there? I can paint anywhere, but what do I do with Chiki?’

Edward replies that he will be returning to Mexico at the same time as she is, and shall give her his answer then.

Hardly has he entered the house belonging to Nancy Oaks and Patrick Tritton, on the Calle Marsella in the Colonia Juárez, than Edward fills the space with his guests. They revolve around him as their central figure, and his eagle eyes are ever-ready to pin down their prey. James goes from one side to another with a natural elegance that has them murmuring as he passes. ‘He’s a multi-millionaire’; ‘he’s an eccentric’; ‘he’s a man of the world’; ‘if he takes to you, he will give you whatever you want’; ‘his house in Sussex, West Dean, contains three hundred rooms and covers two hundred and forty hectares’; ‘his divorce from Tilly Losch has cost him an arm and a leg’; ‘all his money comes from Marshall Field’s’. The vast timber empire he inherited from his father has turned him into a Golden Calf and, as though it mattered, the gossips are certain he is the illegitimate son of King Edward VII, a matter he never took the trouble to contradict.