Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘All San Cristóbal is an observatory.’

‘To have a telescope without its essential complement, a microscope, is a sign of the most obtuse incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to stare through the telescope, while the left eye peers down the microscope.’

‘Frans gave our microscope away to the school.’

‘This biting cold reminds me of my childhood.’

Leonora locks herself away for several days to decipher copies of Maya codices in the manner of Brother Bartolomé de las Casas, the sixteenth-century monk who respected and defended the indigenous peoples of Mexico. She tries to read, but the forest distracts her. She could spend an eternity watching the trees extend their branches to embrace the rain’s assault, cascading down on them for hours on end.

‘Are you afraid of thunder?’

‘Did you see that flash of lightning?’ interrupts Trudi. ‘The Maya used to believe that its zigzag was a silver snake slithering across the sky in the course of the storm. The snake sent its light down to Earth in bolts of lightning and so it was that men and animals were created.’

‘What is a nahual ?’

‘It’s the small creature that protects each of us, your double in the shape of an animal. What do you think your nahual would be, Leonora?’

‘A horse. And yours?’

‘A squirrel. Although the shaman, wizard and healer, Pasakwala Komes, calls me a goat.’

Trudi walks back and forth, on and on, without the least sign of tiredness. Her energy intrigues Leonora. Where does she dredge it up from?

‘I think that with all this walking I must have circled the Earth three times over. What about you, Leonora?’

‘Me? At least five circuits around the planet. I’ve walked further than the Wandering Jew.’

Leonora is inexhaustible, but Trudi beats her hands down. She interrupts her quiet time in the library by bursting in and infuriating her with her litanies of bad news concerning the Lacandon jungle.

‘I want this shameless government to turn the forest into a National Park with the assistance of Chan K’in Viejo, and I really believe I am going to win this one.’

Chan K’in is like a mysterious phantom, with his long hair and eyes that always look askance. Barefoot and clothed only in a tunic that once upon a time was white, Chan K’in comes to Na Bolom and noses around the house. If anyone approaches him, he gives them the shivers. The Lacandons remind Leonora of the sidhes , they hide behind trees and live deep in the forest.

‘Do the Lacandons accept you, Trudi?’

‘Yes, because on every one of our expeditions Frans and I brought them medicines, axes, machetes. Even now, three Lacandons are waiting for me to cure their illnesses back at Na Bolom. I am taken aback by their intelligence. They learnt good table manners in the space of a couple of weeks. They now bathe in my bath tub, and when they smoke they use the ashtrays.’

In San Cristóbal, the young are kind to the elderly. Sensitive to the fact that as they age they lose their sight, they lick their eyelids clean, masticate their food before inserting it into their mouths, and always invite them to share their pozol , a maize and vegetable stew. In so doing, they repay some of the care they themselves received during their childhoods.

The small, slender Lacandons, with their dark curtain of hair, emerge from the rain forest and head for the Blom house, where they suddenly appear in the garden, calling for Trudi.

‘My wife woke up feeling ill today. Come quickly.’

Trudi cures flu and colds, binds wounds, provides food, and imposes her authority. Leonora hires a bicycle and potters about like everyone else in San Cristóbal. She comes and goes through the streets and wins the sympathy of the local people. The women, some of them scarcely more than children themselves, already often carry babies on their backs, and offer her their embroideries. Every step provides a fresh encounter with their extreme poverty, but also with their magic: their clothes and their hats strung with a thousand ribbons are a fiesta in themselves.

The blonde woman Ambar Past relates how

‘There once was a man who fell in love with a woman in the forest.

He had to go away and decided to leave her pregnant, so she would remember that he loved her.

When he returned, there were so many women and all of them pregnant.

He no longer knew which one was his.’

Leonora’s notes fill up her exercise book.

‘Would you like to meet Tonik Nibak, the healer? We’ll take you to see her,’ Pasakwala tells Leonora.

In a wooden house with a tiled roof, Pasakwala tells her that ‘as long as words exist, nothing shall be forgotten, for only thanks to words do we retain memory and if memory exists, I exist.’

‘Do you think that I exist, Pasakwala?’

‘I don’t know. All I know is that there is a great need for you.’

Leonora reaches the hut where Tonik lives — a stooped old woman with rheumy eyes — and she is received with suspicion. Tonik performs a cleansing on Leonora, using herbs and copal, and tells her that at night the forces of death emerge from the underworld and one needs to be forewarned against them. Leonora tells her that almost every night she dreams of a ferment of ants:

‘Do you cross yourself before you go to sleep? Your dream signifies that a horde of envious people are persecuting you.’

‘So what do I do to make the dream disappear?’

‘You die.’

‘Am I about to die?’

‘On the contrary, you will live to be very old indeed, probably at least to a hundred or more years.’

The shaman offers her pozol in a calabash mug: ‘What is this?’

‘Don’t turn your nose up at it, drink it,’ Trudi commands her. ‘It’s a drink made with maize, water and cacao.’

‘I adore cacao. It’s delicious.’

Leonora and her bicycle become a familiar sight in San Cristóbal.

‘Why don’t you draw us a silk cotton tree?’ Pasakwala Komes asks, when Leonora requests that she recount the story of Xolotl. ‘Xolotl was a god capable of transforming himself into numerous doubles, with the intention of not dying until he had accomplished his final stage of transformation. The sun needed the blood of the gods, and when Xolotl fled away, he was turned into a monstrous fish.’

Chatting with Pasakwala, Josefa and Chica reveals a world similar that of the sidhes to Leonora. María Tzu celebrates a rainbow with a poem:

‘The rainbow is biting me, Kajval.

Now it is staring at me.

It is pursuing me.

And it enters my house.

Take it, chase it away from me. Get away from here!

Throw three stones at it.

Spit three plugs of tobacco at it.

This Mother of Evil/is eating my heart out.

It wants to send me away.

It wants to start a fight with me.’

‘It rains so hard here in Chiapas, the region must truly belong to the rain god, Tlaloc,’ Leonora jokes.

‘In Chiapas, all who meet their death by drowning are his chosen ones, destined to inhabit Tlaloc’s own paradise.’

The great boulders in the river remind Leonora of the ones at St. Martin d’Ardèche.

An animal’s howl interrupts the sound of the water.

‘It is the saraguato, the howler monkey. You can hear it from as far as eight kilometres away.’

Leonora is not interested in reproducing images of markets, or landscapes, volcanoes, huts, churches or pyramids; not even of street scenes. She paints, as always, her inner world. ‘Reason needs to know the heart’s reason, and all the other reasons as well.’

‘You do well to choose the rainbow as a subject for your mural,’ Trudi approves. ‘In Chiapas the rainbow is a subject of veneration.’