Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

To Plutarco, this new arrival provides a novel spectacle. Tall and distinguished, wearing a yellow and gold Indian tunic, his wild gesticulations are those of astonishment and jubilation and his smile swings from one tree to the next.

Exclamations of ‘Incredible!’ and ‘Marvellous!’ are accompanied by further extravagant gestures. ‘I have reached the promised land! This is the ground upon which I shall raise my house!’

‘That’s what they’re all like, everyone who arrives here from across the ocean. No doubt Hernán Cortés uttered all the same expressions of astonishment,’ is Plutarco’s thinking. ‘This white man, despite his obvious enthusiasm, is yet another conquistador , one can only follow in his slipstream, and comply with his every whim, however bizarre they may seem.’

‘Here in my private paradise I can defy even death,’ shouts James, waving his arms in the air. In the evening he calms down and writes: ‘My house has wings and sometimes, in the depths of night, it sings.’

The inhabitants look on in surprise while the euphoric tourist takes his daily bathe in the nude down at one of the nine river pools, then spends hours on end seated beneath the trees, drawing in his sketchbook the monuments he has in mind to build in the midst of this paradisical garden.

James erects thirty-eight cement sculptures in Xilitla; immense flowers with stone petals, giant four-leaf clovers, rings and vipers. When Leonora tells him she would adore to be a bat, he has the bright idea of creating an Arcade of Bats in homage to her, as he also does to Max Ernst. He constructs the house on three floors with the potential to have another couple of storeys added, making five. He names them the House of Peristyles; the House of Plants; the Gates of Saint Peter and Saint Paul; the Terrace of the Tigers and the Summer Palace.

Nothing leads anywhere else, for James inverts arches, balances columns, has doors opening onto chasms, uses rods to reinforce the cement in a manner that defies logic, and leaves parts exposed to the most inclement variations in the weather system. Nothing lies on the far side of the bridge; balconies extend out over suicidally steep abysses; here all sense of the future is abolished, and nothing is guaranteed. His cement cobwebs spun out across a void have meaning only for him. At last he has achieved what he was never quite able to reach in his poetry: to reveal himself by announcing: ‘This is who I am.’ In the Huasteca jungle his cry is that of the avenged. Here his dreams and his creatures can roam free, and he can sleep soundly in the vast tropical hammock he has constructed beneath the stars.

‘Here is all that I love! This is my sky and my abyss, my heaven and hell. Piranesi and Gaudí, Escher and Chichen Itza are my masters.’

The astonished people of Potosí humour him obediently, as Don Carmelo Muñoz calculates the composition and dimensions of his rods, weights and levers. Under his guidance, they tip the cement mix into prodigious moulds made of wood, doubling the number of rods, transporting the cement in wheelbarrows, smoothing the bricks with a trowel, and going so far as to ask whether ‘the madman’ is going to build houses for them too. ‘Of course he will,’ responds Plutarco. He points James out to them, with a macaw on his shoulder he calls Eulalia, to whom he sings lullabies or recites his poetry.

The vast cloud of Monarch butterflies that seek sanctuary there is the icing on the cake. ‘If you stay silent, you can hear them flutter; they are more than likely your guardian angels.’ The cloud of butterflies is there just for him. The marvel is that they have had to cross more than four thousand kilometres simply in order to reproduce here, in Xilitla, just as he covered the whole of the Earth in order to embrace Plutarco. James, who comes from so far away, is feeling for the first time an insatiable love for this young man of the yaqui people, who gazes at him like a roe deer. What do infinite distances matter if at long last he has discovered his reason for living! Everything he has seen and loved is now incarnate in Plutarco. If copulation lasts an hour or more for the Monarch butterflies, James would make it last until the hour he dies. James grows crazy:

‘It takes between four and twelve days for the tiny egg to turn into a caterpillar. I shall turn you into the most dazzling, luxuriant and fresh butterfly ever, the only one to have access to the calyx of all the flowers. Within you shall all three kingdoms reside. Plutarco, you arrive at my domain in a mantle of butterflies, you are as noble and powerful as they, you reign sovereign over far distances, the king of kings, my emperor, the sultan of the desires I have harboured since childhood, an aristocrat with wings, the prince of fluttering wings. You are all I have ever dreamt of, you were the caterpillar in a body no more than five grams in weight and ten centimetres long, and now look what you have become! Until I found you, the world to me was absurd and senseless; now at last you demonstrate a world that is coherent and harmonious to me. Do you realise all this, Plutarco?’

He recites him the legendary poem, The Conference of the Fowls by the twelfth-century Persian poet Farid al-Din Attar, who describes the flight of the birds in search of their king.

‘You are my vale of dangers and marvels.’

There is no-one on Earth more desirable than Plutarco. To the yaqui , born in Sonora, all the rulers of the Earth will offer praise. ‘Plutarco in swimming trunks is the most perfect specimen of Yuku, the yaqui god of rain.’ James photographs him constantly; back in New York, he commissions Tchelitchew to paint his wonderful body in order to add the best model there is to his already extensive collection. ‘You will see what a man he is!’ He goes so far as to order Leonora:

‘You have to see him, Leonora. He is Adonis incarnate, the finest man ever created; you will never see anything more beautiful on Earth.’ He invites her to accompany him to Xilitla.

‘With Gaby and Pablo as well?’

‘Of course!’

By now, James has bought himself a trailer and they set out for Xilitla in the middle of a storm, which causes the water to rise as high as the mudguards. Leonora sits in the front, beside Plutarco, and the children go behind with James.

‘Ma, what are we going to have for breakfast?’

‘Two rhinoceroses, one tapir, one yellow bird, three fingers from a nun. You are then forbidden to swim in the river pools for at least an hour, in case you get indigestion.’

Plutarco dives in and emerges from the waters shining and muscular. Everyone applauds and he acknowledges the compliment with supreme graciousness. James runs over to him, holds out a towel, and turns him round to face Leonora, Gaby and Pablo. ‘This is the son of Tlaloc and Coatlicue and he is God.’ James bows to the ground, and affects to kiss his feet. Plutarco acts either timid or inhibited. ‘Foreigners never restrain their desires,’ he thinks, and Leonora comments ‘Edward is making a fool of himself,’ as she hints at a smile of complicity, or possibly of jealousy. James now wants everyone to dive into the pool as nude as he, and the villagers from Potosí shift quietly away to vanish from the scene. ‘Good grief, what kind of a mad goat is he?’ Yet James insists that all his employees strip naked and bathe together with him. Plutarco protests: ‘But it embarrasses them!’ Don Cipriano explains that the rich are like that, for they think that everything is permitted them. James has never been so happy, he talks like a parrot and goes around with a boa as a mascot wrapped around one arm, and a small crocodile on the other. Or perhaps it was an iguana?

Gaby is fascinated by the glow-worms, and Pablo by the grass-hoppers, which he stores in a metal box well away from the mad excesses of adults.