Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

The city assails her on its street corners that evoke other countries, rivers and European capitals, mountains and lakes, with their stallholders whose hands recall those of Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters. The Federal District of Mexico City insinuates itself through each of her five senses and she sips it down as she does her daily cups of tea.

ALICE RAHON WEARS WRAP-AROUND SKIRTS like a Tahitian and her hair sweeps her shoulders. When she walks she leans at an angle, leaning forwards, which gives her an air of vulnerability, but also makes it all the easier to embrace her. She smiles and recites poems that on her lips sound like a bell in the night. She is never apart from Eva Sulzer and she spends many long nights with Remedios, whom Eva has taken under her wing. Alice invites Leonora and Octavio Paz to dine at her house in the literary district of San Ángel. Around the table they reach the decision that poetry should take to the streets:

‘It should be declaimed in the squares, in church aisles, in the market place!’ Alice Rahon is wildly gesticulating by way of emphasis. ‘Mexico is pure poetry that has to break out into the streets!’

‘It is essential to create a theatre of really high quality,’ Octavio observes. ‘Here the only interesting playwright is Usigli; we have to open ourselves up, extend bridges across the ocean. Many short pieces are totally poetic and easy to stage. I could also contribute one.’

Two days later, the poet knocks at the door on Calle Chihuahua. His eyes are as light as those of Max and the two Morales doctors. He is brilliant and warm, and loves the Surrealists, who have adopted him as one of their own.

‘The University supports us in staging plays by García Lorca, the Eclogue IV by Juan del Encina and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Together with García Torres we are going to create Poetry Out Loud , I am considering translating some short works: Ionesco’s The Motor Show ; Georges Neveux’s The Canary , and Jean Tardieu’s Oswald and Zenaida , and I’d also like to do an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Would you be able to do the sets?’

Those seductive blue eyes succeed in persuading Leonora to accede to his request. The poet turns up in the afternoons to talk about Djuna Barnes, Breton and Picasso, who hover over the Earth, and above all about Duchamp, whom he admires as much as he does John Cage and his music. Readymades are just coming into fashion in Mexico.

‘It is by no more than the mere fact of selection that an artist turns a urinal into a work of art that he then baptises The Fountain ,’ protests Leonora.

‘I like his way of giving art critics who reduce everything to adjectives a kick in the eye,’ replies Paz.

‘I’ve given plenty of good kickings in my time but I do know what art is. To me this seems like an attack on my faith in painting.’

‘By painting a beard and moustache on to the Mona Lisa, Duchamp opened up the possibility of her being a man,’ Paz alleges.

‘Marcel should have persisted in his career as an artist. Instead he preferred to close it down when he was only twenty-five years old.’

‘Why insist on the issue of whether he realised he was a great painter or not? To me it seems far braver to exhibit a piss-pot and sign it with the pseudonym R. Mutt! To paint moustaches and a beard on to the Mona Lisa is to desanctify painting,’ Paz insists. ‘And worse still, he wrote on the bottom of the picture: LHOOQ, elle a chaud au cul. In the 1920s, it was a feat for Man Ray to take Marcel’s photo dressed as a woman in a fur coat and a cloche hat, and so shine a light on his alter ego, Rrose Sélavy.’

‘Marcel is a misogynist, like the majority of Surrealists.’

‘Poetry Out Loud is producing my version of Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter . In a tropical garden filled with poisonous plants grown by the doctor Rappaccini his daughter, Beatrice, is “a living flask of venom”.’

‘Max Ernst was fascinated by carnivorous insect-eating plants,’ Leonora informs him.

‘The garden is home to revelations.’

Leonora is intrigued by the concept that plants can bestow both life and death and that Paz seeks to defy logic by maintaining that to live and to die are one and the same. The venom can be transformed into an elixir. ‘My whole being began to clothe itself in green leaves. My head, instead of being a sorry machine churning out thoughts, was converted into a lake. From then on I gave up thought in favour of reflection,’ announced Beatrice’s lover. ‘Just as he puts it in his love poems, Octavio Paz yearns to lose himself in the woman — to lose himself in poetry in order to find himself, and so to be born and to die in it.’

Diego de Mesa is the most cultured among them; León Felipe turns up at rehearsals wearing his Basque beret, with his medieval cape and cane. María Luísa Mendoza yields to talent: ‘This is sublime. The Comédie-Française is nothing by comparison.’ Sometimes Carlos Fuentes accompanies Octavio Paz and hangs on his every word with devotion.

‘Why don’t we stage Ionesco’s Exit the King ?’ suggests the young author Juan José Gurrola.

Leonora assumes responsibility for the sets and the wardrobe, and soon creating scene sets swallows up her painting; worse yet, her costumes get in the way of the actors’ movements. For Beatrice, she invents a wide white hat that the actress rejects out of hand.

‘It’s so heavy it keeps falling off. I spend my time onstage worrying more about this unwieldy contraption than over what I ought to be saying.’

‘We could trim it a little.’

Juan Soriano knows just how to phrase requests, and Leonora reduces the hat’s size. He makes her laugh with his laughter and levity, and his last-minute happenings.

‘I think you must be a sidhe , Juan.’

‘Next you’ll next be calling me a chaneque .’

‘Now we are going to repeat the scene with the kiss.’

León Felipe and Diego de Mesa propose that the number of trees also be reduced.

‘There’s no space left on the set,’ complains Hector Mendoza. ‘Each time The Messenger comes on, he knocks over painted flowers and animals.’

Soriano’s costumes are also a hindrance. Paz comes to his defence: ‘It doesn’t matter. Employing over seventeen metres of royal blue nylon is a great novelty.’

For the next spectacle, King Balthazar’s Dinner , Leonora suggests that the audience be required to wear masks. There is not enough money to supply three hundred of them, or even enough to make all the scenery. Yet enthusiasm does not wane. The miseen-scène for the Book of Good Love by the Archpriest of Hita, with musical instruments provided by Juan Soriano, proves a triumph.

The Alatorre-Frenk family sings Chaste Susanna wearing sumptuous clothes made of velvet and feathers that rapidly go well over budget.

Leonora attends all the rehearsals. She meditates on her own projects and composes Penelope and The Invention of Mole in her head. She sets the Archbishop of Canterbury on to boil in a vast cauldron, under inquisition by Moctezuma. The priest bubbles away until nothing more than his head in its mitre shows over the top. His crozier awaits like a ladle attached to the cooking pot. This image galvanises her. Would the real Archbishop of Mexico, Luis María Martínez, agree to play the role? It is said that he goes about in a strapless cassock, blessing the capital’s nightclubs.

‘In any case, if I decide to cook the Pope along with a decent quantity of potatoes, someone has to help out with peeling them all,’ comments Leonora, with heavy irony.