Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

Chiki half-turns. He boards the Roma — Mérida bus that goes down the Calle Tabasco: he has to go and find Kati. The urgent need to hurry accelerates his breathing and constricts his chest. He is transported back to Madrid 1938; to the Pix agency and to the French magazine Clartés , to Simon Guttmann and to Chim. What will become of Chim? Above all, he thinks of Kati, who had loved Capa ever since she was a teenager. Capa’s death doesn’t seem possible, he is better than anyone else at estimating risks. Capa was all that Chiki couldn’t or didn’t want to be. He made the most beautiful women around lose their heads over him; seduced even the most powerful men; drank Martinis and harangued waiters; made instant friends with whomever he met in a bar; and above all played out his life on a battlefield in order to obtain action pictures of wars that were syndicated across the world.

‘Kati, Bandi is dead!’ he tells her in Hungarian.

Kati barely opens her weary eyes before lighting up a cigarette.

‘I already knew.’

‘You knew and you didn’t tell me?’

‘I knew deep inside myself.’

Chiki collapses. His whole life through, there had been someone who got in ahead of him.

‘Let’s go and sit outside to see whether it’s true that, as Octavio Paz says, happiness is a chair in the sun.’

Cigarette in hand, the sun at its noonday height, they again recall their Jewish origins, and Hungary, the Pecsi school, and how — although still adolescent — Bandi longed to devour the world, and how Kati was always his port in a storm; Kati, his anchor; Kati, the voice of his conscience, for she never needed to change her mind, renounce her anarchist faith, nor betray the peasant woman in her head-scarf whose portrait she took for one of the many posters she made for the Federation of Iberian Anarchists. Bandi sought out fame, while his companions never allowed themselves to submit to that kind of pressure.

The Katherine Deutsch of his childhood in Budapest was the only one he knew. Had war not broken out, the intrepid Bandi would have been a theatre director in Buda, the home city of the two of them; with her, Kati, as his leading lady.

‘Women all over the world must be in tears, Ingrid Bergman more so than any of them.’

‘What about you, Kati?’

‘I have been feeling desolate about losing him for a long while already.’

‘I’ll ring Leonora and Remedios.’

The three women share a common European past, along with the war, their art, and feeling orphaned. The three of them keep one another company, motivate one another, console each other, share the same reasons for living.

Wolfgang Paalen surrounds himself with the trouvailles he has found on his travels: they include a petrified whale penis over three metres long that he hangs from a beam in his studio.

‘Why don’t you sell your penis?’ asks Kati. ‘I have a millionaire friend who would be sure to buy it from you.’

Just as Leonora paints horses, Remedios accumulates cats and owls on her canvases.

‘Why do you paint owls when it’s said that they augur death?’ Gaby asks Remedios.

‘Because I am death’s bride.’

‘Mama paints Boadicea and says this warrior queen always led her cavalry into battle herself and was just as much of a redhead as you are.’

‘Do you like what I paint?’

‘Pablo likes Magritte better.’

‘And you?’

‘I like the The Fern Cat .’

Leonora has been consulting the psychoanalyst Ramón Parres for some time, since between painting each of her pictures she always falls into a deep depression. Painting is her balsam, as opium was for Joë Bousquet, but there are also mornings when anxiety asphyxiates her, even when she’s standing before her easel. She can’t identify the features of the beast, something that causes her to lash out blindly. She calls up Pedro Friedeberg in a state of high anxiety.

‘Can you please take me to the madhouse in your car?’

Chiki begs her to calm down.

‘Chiki each one of us is the master or mistress of our destiny, and I am not going to let you push me under.’

He keeps his silence. His wife’s temperamental outbursts go well beyond his capacity to deal with them.

Pedro waits outside in his car to bring her back home:

‘Do you know, Leonora, the day will come when psychology, psychiatry and hypnotism will be swept from the face of the Earth for being a danger to Public Health.’

Remedios, just like Leonora, wants to achieve self-perfection. Peaceful interludes are brief, and Erongarícuaro is a source of consolation, the more so since Gordon Onslow Ford is a close friend:

‘Remedios, you paint a universe where everything is relative. Don’t worry so much, your art transports you to the cosmos,’ Gordon tells her.

‘Sometimes my visions are terrifyingly earthly ones.’

‘Paint your dreams, Remedios, and tell Leonora to do the same; she seems more anguished than you.’

‘She has a capacity for rage that I lack. What I would like is to be able to stop waving my arms about as if I were drowning. That is why I am seeking a guide.’

‘Living among exiles forces you to feel excluded, you really ought to see other people.’

‘We are a family of our own. The Mexicans are not in the least interested in us. When I go to their gatherings, they never ask me what I do, nor how I earn my living.’

‘And as for you, do you ask them ?’

‘No, I suppose I don’t.’

Via the British Embassy, Leonora discovers the Englishman Rodney Collin Smith, who came to Mexico a year after the death of his master, Ouspensky.

‘He is one of the illuminati, and just the person you were looking for,’ Elsie Escobedo tells her. ‘He was Ouspensky’s constant companion when he was a broken man, buried in a mire of self-pity. Seeing him die in a drunken stupor brought him to the decision that he should himself become a spiritual guide.’

‘In any case I’d like to hear him, since in addition to the ways of the fakir, the monk and the yogi, there is a fourth way: the sublimation of sexual energy that, and I think here you will concur with me, is a source of enormous power.’

‘It seems to me that you have no need of any of these secondrate Rasputins. Just take a cold bath, both you and Remedios. It’s healthier and more effective than your fourth way!’

Rodney Collin Smith is innocent and credulous and everyone takes advantage of him. He puts himself at the service of every next person, lurching to meet the most lavish desires of the person nearest at hand.

‘Do you require anything more?’ he always asks, before exhausting himself in supplying whatever it is. He builds a planetarium because he believes that cells and galaxies are one and the same thing, and that each person has their own guiding star. Ouspensky’s New Model of the Universe is his Bible. His wife, Janet, establishes a clinic for the poor.

They buy a leafy plot of land near to the paper factory at Peña Pobre, to use for spiritual retreats, and Leonora falls in love with its vast garden filled with geraniums and dog roses. Peña Pobre is an oasis of green hemmed in by cement. Every acolyte is given their own cabin, while Rodney, together with his wife and three employees, occupy the main house. The spiritual guide runs up and down the garden paths as if he were levitating.

When he comes to welcome them, he explains:

‘Here we are separated from the outside world, in the midst of a desert we may only traverse alone and in silence. Do not be afraid if you come up against your inner fears, for I shall always be there for you.’

Punctuality is strict, and Leonora is bothered by the fact that she is not permitted to smoke. Since she continues to do so in secret, another follower named Natasha exposes her. At lunch and dinner, the guide sits at the head of their table and reads the Tales of Beelzebub and his Grandson by Gurdjieff, then picks out a chapter called The Sheep and the Wolf .