Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

Leonora smiles at the artisan with affection.

In a series of three rugs she calls The Snakes, a snake is shown coiled around a shrub that could well be a marijuana plant. It has a golden bough and in it Leonora conjures up her Celtic origins and references Frazer’s Golden Bough as well as Graves’ The White Goddess, books that revert to their roots in the tales told by Grandmother Moorhead. She always assured her that the family was descended from the fairies of Tuatha Dé Danann, who live below the green hills.

On the 4th of August 1963, the group is hit by some terrible news. José Horna, the life and soul of every party, who never returned to his native Andalucia, dies of a heart attack in the Spanish Sanatorium, at the age of forty-nine. They hold a wake for him right there, and the wreaths of flowers are laid out in the garden where sheep graze, and who come over and start nibbling them.

‘José would have enjoyed that,’ Kati says with resignation.

Leonora spends the entire night with Kati and Norah, all of them inconsolable. José had helped them to love life.

‘José always promised me that we would “be a couple of happily married old people”, and he let me down.’

Kati ages ten years in a single night and withers. Norah, the sceptic, blossoms.

FOR LEONORA, IT IS THRILLING to keep company with Ignacio Bernal in his discovery of a still largely buried Mexico. The director of the National Museum of Anthropology, Bernal, teaches her that, in order to reconstruct a culture, the most important objects are those that belong to daily life, and he assembles them with care.

‘No-one seems to appreciate the true value of it all. This material could reveal everything about who we once were to us.’

They clean the pots with the finest of brushes, in order to remove the earth and to conserve the knowledge they may hold. When Bernal’s assistant, Santiago Luna, bangs a box down on the floor and levers it open to see what’s inside, Bernal is clearly annoyed:

‘We are on the point of examining an object which runs the risk of breaking under pressure: only ever use a flat brush or a paintbrush.’

He holds out a small vase to Leonora: ‘Take it in both hands. It’s a unique piece.’

Whenever the archaeologist notices raised patches on the grass, he pauses.

‘Hold on a moment, there could be a tomb underneath here.’

‘I am walking over a drum,’ Leonora affirms.

‘Why don’t we insert a rod and see what we find?’ Santiago Luna proposes. ‘Pound the ground and if it sounds hollow, it means there must be a cavity underneath it. That makes it more likely we’ll uncover a tomb there.’

On seeing how moved Leonora is, Ignacio Bernal proposes that she paints a picture of the world of the Maya for the National Museum of Anthropology.

‘Your mural will be opposite Rufino Tamayo’s.’

The only thing Leonora knows about the Maya is that they were astronomers, and the most cultured and resourceful of all the meso-americans:

‘First of all, I need to get to know the Maya.’

‘Itzamna could be syncretised with the Jewish Yahweh.’

‘I have never painted anything nearly as big as a mural before.’

‘Gertrude Duby has a house called Na Bolom down in San Cristóbal. She will receive you there.’

The journey to Chiapas turns out to be utterly exhausting. The road twists and turns, the asphalt over-heats as much as the car does, but the grandeur of the countryside affords compensations. Water springs forth on all sides. Suddenly, when it is time to make the climb from Tuxtla to San Cristóbal, a red shape appears near the roots of a tree in the midst of the leafy forest. It is a woman, her shoulders covered by a blanket which ignites the woodland with its brilliant colour. Yet who is this apparition? The red moves and dances beneath the crown of foliage. The forest sings. The woman is walking with a plank of wood across her shoulders; her quexquemetl shawl lights up the green horizon. An extraordinary tree extends its branches like wings.

‘What type of tree is this?’

‘It’s a silk cotton tree,’ says the driver.

Leonora inhales deeply, her emotions rising like a pair of doves fluttering in her throat. On raising her eyes, she observes tigers in the skies and, on lowering them again, the most astonishing colours assail her:

‘If I don’t learn to give up smoking here, I’ll never manage to do so for the rest of my life,’ she admits to Trudi, her host, and wife to Frans ‘Pancho’ Blom.

Gertrude Duby Blom, Swiss in origin, likewise came to Mexico in flight from the war. The Lacandons call her Trudi.

‘I knew nothing at all about Mexico before coming here, only that the Aztecs cut out human hearts. Here I learnt that shoot-outs soon superseded human sacrifice.’

They go on foot along unpaved streets, out to the red earth of Cuxtitali. The people of Chamula give way to them; the women wrapped in their shawls barely look up and only approach when they recognise Trudi. They carry with them a scent of burnt wood, smoke and copal resin. The odours of their cultivated plots of earth accompany them into their houses.

‘Watch out when you walk through the rows of produce. Be careful not to step on the pumpkin shoots, or trample the shoots of maize.’

Numerous beggars gather in the church porches, their half-shut eyes blinking through a filmy mist.

‘The hooch they sell them here is lethal,’ Trudi tells her.

Leonora loves to hear the noise of hooves on the cobbles, and sees how the horses are tethered to a hoop buried in the wall. When Trudi tells her the tale of a spellbound steed, she longs to see him. At the far end of a pasture, a horse is protesting at the lashes of his owner:

‘The lash is made specifically for animals who have been bewitched.’

Then, to the surprise of all present, Leonora approaches the creature and holds out her arm. The horse lowers his head and she places the flat of her palm over his eyes, calming him instantly.

‘How did you manage to do that?’

‘I spoke to him in his own language. I speak in Horse. Now I would like to give him a lump of sugar.’

Trudi insists that she has swum across reservoirs and ponds infested with crocodiles and emerged without as much as a scratch on her skin. According to her, far worse things happen in the holiday resort of Acapulco than in the rain forests of the Lacandon. The greatest danger comes from the wild boar. When a herd of fifty or a hundred wild boar follow a bold, aggressive leader, the only remedy is to clamber up into the trees along with the howler monkeys and marmosets. Another real danger is that a tree falls on to the camp, in which case there’s no means of avoiding being crushed.

‘I walked for seven months through the rain with Frans. Everything got mildew: fabric, film, clothing and food. The forests made us feel ill all the time.’

‘Trudi, I am so hungry,’ Leonora tells her, in order to change the subject from that of the overwhelming hazards.

‘Ah, how good you mention that now. I hope you’ll eat howler monkey, marmoset, pheasant, venison, corn tamales , grasshopper soup, maize and maize and lots more maize, because that’s all there is. What you’re doubtless going to take especial delight in are my tomatoes, which I sowed myself. I’ve got a university degree in horticulture, you know.’

‘Don’t worry about that, I eat whatever I am given. Do you happen to have tea?’

‘Of course I have tea. How English you are!’

At night the cold rushes down from the mountains and the celestial dome fills up with stars.

‘Do you have a balcony from where I can observe the skies?’