Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘To tell you the truth, the most important god to me is Quetzalcoatl. Is there a zoo here?’

At the zoo, Leonora sketches tortoises and pheasants, and transforms the wild boars into hedgehogs, reminiscent of the images Max made in St. Martin d’Ardèche. The gazelles become centaurs and the lions have snakes’ tongues. Fish have teeth and vipers mutate into a mattress and dance in front of Adam, before winding themselves around the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

However much she is drawn by Mexican customs, they do not run in her blood, and her sketches for the mural illustrate her personal history. The churches with their belfries, the Cathedral of San Cristóbal with its cloister; so it is The Magical World of the Maya becomes fused with the magical world of the Celts.

‘It’s the first time I have ever painted something as large as this,’ she tells Trudi as she shows her the sketchbook.

‘Don’t be afraid, you won’t be left on the margins; remember the spell conjured up by Jwana Krus Posol who offered a cleansing for Ambar Past:

‘I shall strike your face with a mattock, O sacred Earth.

I shall enter your body.

I shall bury your holy body.

I shall enter your flesh.

I shall seed my garden plot there.

I shall sow my labour.’

Back in Mexico City, Leonora decides to go to the hairdresser. At the same time she decides to divide her mural into three. On the far left, in the ‘world below’, she paints a huge jaguar head, and on the right, a silk cotton tree. In the central ‘earthly world’, the most salient feature is a white horse, larger than life. The chamulas , the peasants of Chiapas, she paints very small indeed. A sun and a moon illumine the sky, across which a winged snake is flying. On the earth tapirs, vultures, leopards and spider monkeys multiply. As she paints, Leonora recites the prophecy in the Maya creation myth, the Popol Vuh : ‘From the breast of darkness will be born the light that shall allow us to see what surrounds us.’

These are days filled with fervour. It is as if Leonora is working to the beat of an inner marimba, whose music hurries her on. ‘I want to be able to paint the sound of thudding wood.’ As in San Cristóbal she smoked one cigarette after the next to keep the mosquitoes at bay, now she deposits a volcano of butts beside her easel.

ONCE SHE HAS COMPLETED THE MURAL, Leonora goes on to paint Dolphin Conference; Rarvarok; Alchimia Avium and Song of Gomorrah.

‘They asked me to paint a mural by the entrance to a hospital,’ Remedios tells her. ‘I got scared and gave up on the idea.’

She shows Leonora the recently finished Still Life Resuscitating and Music of the Forest , still awaiting completion on her easel: ‘In this one, I feel that I am on the point of representing the union between man, nature and the Cosmos, Leonora.’

It is now the afternoon of 8th October 1963, and Leonora is drinking tea in the kitchen, when a furious ringing at the door summons her attention.

‘Why are you ringing like that? You frighten me.’

She wants to laugh, but the expression on Kati’s face pulls her up short:

‘I have some bad news for you,’ Kati says, her voice shaking.

‘What’s up with you? You look as if you’ve just seen the devil. Come in and have a cup of tea.’

‘Leonora, it’s terrible news. Better for you to sit down.’

‘And better for you to tell me what it’s all about. What news can be so bad to cause you to lean on the bell like this?’

Leonora remains upright, standing on the threshold. Kati sits down and wrings her hands as if she were rinsing an invisible and slippery cloth.

‘The maid ran all the way to the Sala Margolín to tell Walter, but he arrived home too late.’

‘Too late for what?’

‘Too late to be able to do anything, Leonora.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re telling me, Kati.’

‘Remedios died this afternoon. She went upstairs for a rest after lunch, because she was feeling a little strange. It seems as if she suffered a heart attack.’

Kati’s words appear so absurd to Leonora that she cannot assimilate them. So she sips her tea, and picks up another cigarette and acts as if nothing has happened. She goes to her room without a word, takes one of the dolls she keeps there and starts sewing a brightly coloured skirt on to her, then puts the doll in a blanket and wraps her up tightly. She wants to clear the bed in order to lie her down on it, and throws sheets, pillows and the bedspread on to the floor. From downstairs she can hear Kati’s voice floating up: ‘Leonora, I have to go and let Alice know,’ and the front door slams.

To cap it all, she is on her own, it’s a school day: Chiki has gone out to take photos, and there is no-one there to keep her under control. When her husband returns, he finds her so devastated that in the end he decides that the only thing to do is for them to go and find Walter Gruen.

In the corner of the room where the wake is being held, Kati, Eva Sulzer and the maid are all in tears. Leonora cannot cry. Everyone else present looks on uncomprehendingly. Walter receives them without seeing them, hugs them as if in a blur. Nothing worse could possibly have happened to him, none of the employees in the Sala Margolín dare to look him in the eye. This strong man who survived a concentration camp through his powers of resistance is now falling apart. He blocks his ears and goes outdoors for a breath of fresh air.

‘The Mexicans are right: October moons are the best,’ Leonora tells Chiki, who is also gazing at the astral vault.

‘Calm down, you’re chain-smoking again.’

Leonora pays no attention, since she no longer hears even what she is saying to herself. She closes herself off inside her inner cell, and remembers the day when Remedios told her that they were like the fox and the Little Prince: ‘And when the hour came to depart: “Ah!” said the fox. “Now I shall cry.”’ Leonora chews over every word in a rage. Chiki regards her with a weary look: all at once, he feels an infinite compassion for this woman who smokes so desperately. She is doubled over like an old crone, curled up in a ball, and hides her face on her knees, from where emanates a near-inaudible voice imploring: ‘Can someone tell all these people to stop crying?’

In the morning they take Remedios’ body to be buried in the cemetery garden, barely thirty metres away from the tomb of her close friend José Horna.

‘They will keep one another company,’ murmurs Kati, more tired than ever.

Leonora takes refuge in her studio. She paints The Burial of the Patriarchs : one figure holds up a crozier bearing the image of Hermes, who transports the souls of the patriarchs to eternal life in a canoe. She reads Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances Yates, and paints The Burning of Bruno . She admires the philosopher’s challenge: ‘There is no need to seek for divinity outside of ourselves.’ For this the Inquisition brought him to judgement, declared him a heretic and consigned him to the flames.

Leonora completes her paintings and continues to write The Hearing Trumpet . Her main character, the ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby, is confined to an old people’s home. She exclaims: ‘At times I feel like Joan of Arc, so frighteningly misunderstood. And I often feel as if I’m being burned on a pyre merely for being so different to all the others.’

‘I am her,’ thinks Leonora. Who could have understood her? ‘Only Remedios, Remedios would have understood me.’

Chiki no longer knows what to do. Leonora cries out aloud at night. The death of her friend causes her to revert all the more strongly to her old acquaintance: anguish.