Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

Edward James, filled with emotion, invites Gastélum inside: ‘Little Plutarco, I shall now show you the wonders of civilisation.’

He introduces him to the trailer with its bath and kitchenette, lighting the gas flame, and Plutarco leaps backwards to exclaim: ‘Ooooh!’ Then he shows him the fridge and Plutarco again goes: ‘Ooooh!’

‘Come on, have you really never seen anything like this before?’ Pablo asks him.

‘Of course I have, and I’m no stranger to gas, iceboxes and electricity. But if it gives him pleasure, then I’ll play the fool.’

‘And everyone else here is also playing the fool?’ Pablo enquires again, who won’t let anything get by him.

‘No, they pass themselves off as smart, but I have them well under my control.’

Edward can no longer find further means to conquer Plutarco, and in addition to purchasing him forty hectares of land and building him a castle, he takes every opportunity to keep reciting the sayings of the Greek Plutarch to him, only to be greeted by his homonym with considerable scepticism. ‘To cling to every form of pleasure is utterly irrational, but to avoid every form of pleasure is utterly insensate’ or ‘I have no need of a friend who changes when I change, and who nods when I nod. My shadow does that much better.’

‘Did you know that Plutarch had a major influence on Shakespeare, my little Plutarco?’

Pablo trails after the adults, and Gaby isolates himself. He reads Tarzan — his book of choice — over and over again, because it’s so easy to picture his hero swinging from the lianas with Chita clinging to his neck, there at the heart of the rainforest.

What delights Gaby the most is not having to go to school in the middle of the exam period.

‘Do you like it here?’ he asks his mother. ‘This is paradise: but the gates to heaven are so close to those of hell.’

Whether the children miss school or not is a problem for Chiki alone.

When Pablo spots Edward asleep in his hammock, he picks up a caterpillar and drops it into his open mouth.

‘Did you see what your son just did?’ asks Edward as he wakes up, all the more annoyed because Plutarco is laughing at him.

Leonora, flushed with the heat, her hair electrified by the humidity, paints on a wall using a sepia palette, the picture of a tall and slender woman with the head of a ram, while her sons continue playing, and James falls asleep again, hidden beneath his straw hat.

James keeps paintings by Varo, Carrington and de Chirico in one of his houses. He stacks the pictures against the damp walls, among the moss and roots, at the risk of ruining them. The floor is made of compacted earth, and fungi sprout in its corners.

Of Leonora’s two sons, James prefers Gaby and lets it be clearly known. He gives the elder son a puzzle with more than a hundred pieces and a picture of a trailer on it. ‘What a beauty!’ In contrast, Pablo is given a badly wrapped package. When he opens it he asks: ‘Why has he given me a china doll when I’m not a girl?’

When James bids farewell in order to embark on one of his many trips to the United States, England or Italy, he assembles the sixty-eight builders and puts them in charge of the orchids.

The variety of flowers in the rain forest is phenomenal. Edward tells his men: ‘Look at these roots. Don’t they look like testicles to you? Look after them carefully, and take note that they are extensions of myself.’

They all nod solemnly together.

That year, eighteen thousand orchids are killed by frost.

WALKING DOWN AVENIDA ÁLVARO OBREGÓN and sipping tea deep within the warm grotto of her dark kitchen evokes for Leonora the flavour of London. When she emerges for her afternoon walk in the rainy season, the scent of freshly mown grass transports her back to Hazelwood.

If living one’s life is hard work, maybe that is a reason why so many exiles regard having recourse to a spiritual guide — whether a guru, a psychiatrist, or a father figure — as a basic necessity. Nostalgia for a land left behind can poison one’s whole system.

‘Do you identify with that line of maguey cacti advancing across the Mexican plains like a green army, Leonora?’ Remedios asks her.

‘What I mostly identify with is tequila.’

Even now, she is not acclimatised to the noisy shouting that greets Independence Day every 15th September, nor the quantities of street children, dogs that never sleep, or fireworks let loose on saints’ days, the continuous abuse of authority, pilgrimages on 12th December, still less the laconic tolerance of extreme unpunctuality, the expression ‘What may I do to assist you?’ cravenly summarised in the single word ‘ Mande ?’ She lives with one foot on the land where she was conceived, from where an ocean now separates her.

The day that a Mexican state functionary gives up his uniform and walks among the people like one of them, or the day when a woman stands up to her abusive husband, Leonora will feel more at home in Mexico. This is a country crawling with paper-qualified bureaucrats: they spread like fungi in the court rooms, the registry offices, and in the Church. The queues to renew every kind of document or registration paper run the length of the Calle de Bucareli and are a source of absolute torture: ‘I cannot possibly extend your visa. You are obliged to first leave and then re-enter the country.’ ‘We shall have to impose a fine on you for failing to inform us of your change of address.’ ‘But that’s not my fault! The street’s name was changed by order of the government.’ ‘Then that’s the government’s business, and you need to take care of your own.’ ‘What’s this? Don’t you have a mother? Why do you give me your documents with only your father’s surname on them?’

‘There’s a monologue running around my brain that I can’t silence and it’s killing me,’ she tells Remedios. ‘It never gives up, but just repeats and repeats and repeats, and no matter what I try it keeps spinning round in my head. It accompanies me everywhere from the moment I wake in the morning.’

‘Then jump out of bed and go for a walk,’ Remedios recommends.

‘I can’t stand Chiki any longer, and I can’t even stand myself any more. I’m in bits, my body feels fragmented, and I don’t know how to piece it back together again.’

‘You did the right thing in marrying Weisz. He is a good, sound and intelligent man. It was thanks to him that I got Lizárraga released, once I recognised him as an inmate in the concentration camp that Chiki filmed in France.’

‘Well, Chiki never saved me from anything at all.’

‘Don’t be unfair, Chiki breaks his back for all four of you. Why not come along with us to Onslow Ford’s house at Erongarícuaro: Eva Sulzer and I came back feeling quite renewed after a visit there. It’s an oasis of peace. We were studying Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, who can both lead us to a higher life.’

‘I feel that my anxiety will never leave me, for I am that anxiety. Each morning I wake up on the edge of that precipice in the conviction that my fall is imminent and terrifying.’

Leonora and Remedios share their inner lives.

‘I am fascinated by your Anguish , Remedios. But why did you sign it Uranga?’

‘Because it was for the Bayer Chemical Company,’ Remedios answers.

‘It feels as if you painted my portrait.’

‘Not at all, Leonora, so please don’t say that. You’re not tied down. In any case, you are lucky enough to have a superior intelligence.’

Chiki waits for the cashier who, from behind her little window, is going to push through a yellow envelope with his payment and the receipt for the seven copies of Novedades that have accumulated in his mailbox. As time goes by, he chooses different newspapers at random. These ones are over six months old. Inside one he reads: ‘Robert Capa’s death is a major loss to photo-journalism.’ His heart leaps in his throat. Robert Capa died in Indochina on 25th May 1954. He stepped on a land mine that blew off his left leg and tore open his chest. At the moment of death, he still held his Contax camera in his hand; the blast caused his Nikon to land some metres further on.