Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘What a Freudian slip and what a catalogue of contradictions! We are all subject to inexplicable phenomena,’ Eva pronounces. ‘Jung dedicated himself to alchemical philosophy and believed in divine miracles born of men and nature; thus he compared Buddha and Christ, and then finally chose to stay with the Buddha because the Christ offered himself in sacrifice and Jungian psychoanalysis finds no place for victims.’

‘What I liked about Jung was that a group of Masai percussionists and dancers leapt up and down around him in Africa and he accepted that he felt afraid,’ Remedios enthuses.

Every day more visitors are drawn to Leonora’s door by her growing reputation. Chiki receives them and retires. At first, Leonora attempts to dissuade him from withdrawing, but no longer; he is an adult and must take responsibility for his decision to remove himself, it’s not for her to intervene.

‘Chiki, it looks as if your refuge is the most inhospitable room in the house.’

‘I spend most of my time with all of you.’

‘No, you are always off on your own in there.’

‘And you isolate yourself from everyone behind your curtain of smoke. You’ll end up not even able to see your sons.’

‘To be frank, the one person I’ve no desire to see is you. It goes without saying, since what you are doing is erasing yourself from the face of the Earth.’

Chiki retreats, weighing the force of her words. Even with the passage of time he cannot forget that in a single concentration camp the Nazis murdered over a million Jews.

‘And don’t read any more about those crematorium ovens. It’ll make you even sicker than you are already.’

Yet Chiki cannot stop thinking about those underground chambers with their tiled walls. Nowadays, some of the concentration camps have been turned into museums in which everything is conserved, right down to the straw on the bunkbeds where the skeletons that once were humans used to lie. To him, the most moving story is that of Ilse Rosenberg, a girl who began to recite poems in the cattle truck used to transport her to the camp. A Nazi overheard her and ordered her to recite a passage from Goethe’s Faust. In the midst of a deathly silence, Ilse recited from Goethe and the man was moved; yet not even this saved her from death in Auschwitz.

‘You cannot remain locked inside this hell. Break out of it for the sake of Leonora and your sons,’ Kati protests. ‘Even your silence is offensive. Leonora says that days, weeks, perhaps months go by without your addressing a word to her.’

‘She doesn’t deserve it.’

‘What you both deserve is a house filled with light. Yours resembles one of the infamous grottos of Cacahuamilpa, in Guerrero.’

‘All I long for is that it should always be filled with friends,’ Leonora insists.

On her return from the cinema with the boys, Chiki informs Leonora: ‘Leduc called you on the phone.’ The same evening Leduc appears on the doorstep with a book in his hand. It is called Tales of Animals, Children and Ghosts for her to illustrate. He is the same Renato as ever, only still more charming, if that were possible.

‘You too look exactly the same. I also have a child, a daughter called Patricia. I’ll bring her round.’

Leonora’s pleasure is obvious and she invites him to dinner. Chiki takes care that no-one is in need of anything and the boys are charmed by the guest, Gaby most of all. They all discuss literature, especially Swift, Lewis Carroll and mention is even made of Mary Edgeworth, Leonora’s aunt. Renato may be the only guest to have heard tell of The Crock of Gold, a book that Leonora has guarded like treasure ever since she was a child.

‘Lewis Carroll has a lot in common with you, Leonora. For a start he was left-handed like you.’

‘I’m not left-handed. I write and paint with both my hands and can also do so from right to left. And I don’t stammer like him, either.’

Gaby sticks around until night is well advanced, keen to pick Leduc’s brains on Mexican politics. In a fortnight Renato returns for the drawings. ‘They are a total mess!’ Then Gaby confesses to him that he writes poetry.

‘Me too,’ and Renato smiles.

‘My mama never told me you were a poet.’

‘Yes, indeed I am. And she even went so far as to illustrate one of my books.’

Gaby opens the book at random and starts reading.

‘To love, desiring, as I loved before

— before I knew that time is golden –

How much time I wasted, how much time.

And now I have no time to love

as once I loved, how I pine

to waste time once more.’

‘That’s not at all bad, Renato,’ Gaby tells him, from the heights of his youthful insolence.

‘Does it seem such a piece of crap to you, Gaby? And no, I don’t write poems any more.’

‘No, it’s a good sonnet, and now I’ll read you one of mine.’

Leduc is an excellent conversationalist. Gaby shows him what he is writing and follows Leduc’s suggestions.

‘Why don’t you write more poetry?’ he asks Renato.

‘Because, having spent four or five hours a day sat on my arse in front of a machine typing nonsense to earn a daily crust, there’s no longer even a passing moment during which one feels like writing love notes to the beloved. Look Gaby, to write novels, essays, plays or any form of high literature, I would need to detoxify myself from journalism and it’s what has been putting food on my table for the past thirty years. I’ve got too used to living by and through journalism.’

Gaby figures out that the editing suite, noisy with the tapping of typewriters, also constitutes a story or perhaps a novel with its own well-defined stereotypes: the liar, the opportunist, the flatterer, the careerist, the arriviste. ‘We make nothing at all that lasts. We don’t possess even the smallest particle of tenacity,’ Renato concludes.

From Renato’s Mexico emerge street vendors of herbal cures, porters, whores and pimps. Gaby asks which Mexico is his own. Gaby and Pablo speak French with their father and English with their mother. Gaby’s birthplace is an enigma to him — for at times he feels it to be alien, incomprehensible, even cruel, and maybe it’s Renato who holds the key to it.

Mexicans, so humble and so humiliated, are unpredictable:

‘You already took the Child Jesus of Atocha home to dress him? May I sing him a godfather’s lullaby?’ ‘I went to offer my condolences to the Virgin of Guadalupe.’ ‘Don’t forget the rum for the libations at the altar of the dead.’ ‘We’re going to celebrate my fifteen-year-old daughter’s confirmation, and I don’t care if I have to steal to pay for it.’ ‘Today the Novena of Prayers is ended, and it’s the feast of the Raising of the Cross.’ ‘There’s no-one here because they’ve all left for the cemetery to visit their dead.’ ‘I want to cut off and offer up my plaits to Saint Anthony in order for him to give me a husband, even an old one.’ ‘Neither left nor right, but always the opposite way.’ ‘The local priest won my sister over with all his papal benedictions. There they are in the living room, framed in gold.’ ‘You need to sing Las Mañanitas — a birthday hymn — to the Little Virgin.’

Chiki, Gaby, Pablo and Leonora wonder why the people cling to bleeding figures of Christ in the festival processions, and why they genuflect quite so often. They make signs of the cross like insects marking their forehead, chest, shoulders and belly. The body is their individual codex. In Europe the saints wear smiles; in Mexico the suffering of martyrs and souls in purgatory is bloodcurdling.

There are times when Leonora feels as if she is always walking on an island: England? Ireland? Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital city? Perhaps a combination of all three; a place of her own invention, where the creatures who keep her chained to her easel emerge from. Why did they drain the Lake of Texcoco? We could be happy if we only had water. How many deeds does this country commit against itself! Today all is dust. Leonora is slowly discovering Mexico; the country itself has already discovered her, and holds her fast.