Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘Such solemnities!’ says Álvaro with a smile.

Leonora flies into a rage.

Álvaro is surprised by how fragile Leonora’s artist friends are. Even Bridget Tichenor, who has such a constant circle of friends around her, is in need of the approval of others; not to mention Pedro Friedeberg, whose vocation seems to be one of continually pleasing others with his ingenuity and disguises. Like frightened birds, they follow newspaper columns that tremble as they hold them. ‘Here they’re saying something nasty about me.’ They are offended if there is a party they are not invited to; if they come out badly in a photograph, or do not appear at all; if Margarita Nelken or Jorge Juan Crespo de la Serna do not return their phone calls. ‘Nobody told me about this.’ They attribute their failures to the way in which the Fine Arts Institute is run. And they hide if a crowd fails to show up for their talks, when Carlos Fuentes gives a lecture, even Tongolele and Padre Partinas, albeit now without his cassock, always appear. The drama can be colossal. ‘They boycott me, they loathe me, I want to go and live in another country, poor Mexico, art is denied here.’

In the final analysis, the person who holds the strongest views is Leonora when she defends, in the name of her art, her right to demand that the world be transformed. ‘I have proved that Mexicans lack any kind of a voice in public affairs; here strength is always on the side of the ruler, not with the ruled. Why do we submit ourselves to such rulers?’ Álvaro is always delighted by the face she pulls whenever she angrily announces: ‘I loathe all political parties.’

The day when Álvaro acquires a small flat on the corner of Roma and Liverpool streets, he reveals his love to her. Leonora has known the vitality of passion and enchantment before, but never this everyday feeling that every morning is reborn anew. She has known obsession, her great dependence on Max, Renato and then Chiki. Yet the love of couples on a level with the poet López Velarde, of whom Octavio Paz spoke, is something wholly new to her. Love disrupts established values, hurls one into the unknown. André Breton, he of l’amour fou , would be well satisfied by her discovery, and by her beauty, on which so many around her are now commenting. ‘Never have you looked so lovely,’ she is told, in recognition of the energy that gives the truth to love. Only now does she remember something that Breton once said to Jacqueline Lamba: ‘You are scandalously beautiful.’ Thanks to Álvaro, Leonora now feels like ‘the omnipotent ruler of the world’.

She moves an easel, canvas and a box of paints in to the flat.

To remake a life is to unmake the past. The more Leonora talks of what she has lived, the more certain Álvaro becomes that only extreme pain could have led to her madness. As she recounts her story, Leonora also lifts both hands first to her breast, then touches her stomach, as if her heart and then her guts were about to fall out:

‘I gave him all that I was, I submerged myself in him and then had to tear myself away so brutally that a life I had scarcely started broke up and me with it: every synapse in my brain short-circuited and they gave me electro-convulsive therapy in order to try and connect them up again. Do you know what Cardiazol is? It is a form of shock therapy when they inject you with such a high dose of insulin that you end up in a comatose state. The truth is, they kill you. They call it a cure for schizophrenia, but Cardiazol really kills off all there is inside of you. The agony of what they did to me I still carry here, and here …’ and she places her hand on her heart and then on her head.

Álvaro looks at her with a degree of respect he has not felt for anyone in a long time. Someone capable of suffering for love to such a degree of intensity has to be exceptional. ‘It would be easy to fall on one’s knees before a woman like this.’

Leonora possesses powers that render her capable of leading you even over the precipice; she is the light, the true flower of dawn. She comes from a limitless infinity; she was lost and redis-covered herself; abandoned her body and now radiates a light, an energy, a halo he recognises. ‘Walter Benjamin committed suicide, even after all he succeeded in achieving by crossing the whole of the Pyrenees on foot carrying his manuscript with him; if he had waited only a little while he would have been saved; one always has to keep hope alive,’ is what Álvaro thinks. This is why the sensation of something ancient and unknown that Leonora is capable of provoking always wins the day. When she says: ‘Phenomena exist which escape reason — they are those I am most familiar with,’ he believes her.

‘I know that stars are men, women and children who died long ago. They compose interstellar material.’

‘We are a part of that too,’ rejoins Álvaro, yielding.

Leaving town at weekends becomes routine for the two of them. Leonora’s sons are grown and Chiki has nothing to say on the matter. Perhaps Leonora’s true and terrible journey through madness shakes Álvaro. One evening in Sanborn’s a waiter overturns a trolley full of dishes and the painter leaps to her feet and shouts: ‘We’re leaving now, this minute!’

When once Álvaro refused invitations to conferences in the provinces, he now accepts and selects one in Necaxa. The humid winds of the Gulf state hurtle across the zone, and ferny woods grow among the waterfalls. At the bottom of the valley, in a village surrounded by trees, they are welcomed at a modest hotel called Villa Juárez. They walk for hours without growing tired, and everything becomes one with the woodland — conversation and laughter, tortillas and rice, caresses and love. At times, they have arguments. Álvaro is pragmatic and Leonora follows her instincts which lead her towards nature; seeds can arrive here from as far as the Andes, brought by a current in the atmosphere and bearing toxic substances of which only she is aware.

‘Toxic?’

‘Yes, Álvaro. At the foot of these trees grow the most sacred plants, meaning the mushrooms we are now going to seek out.’

That evening, at the end of a long walk, they find themselves in the deepest part of the wood. Birds flit like spangled lights among the topmost branches and others sing from within their hidden nests. The smell of rotting leaves mingles with the scent of invisible flowers.

‘Here they are, here they are, come here my loves, come to me my little sons,’ and Leonora falls to her knees at the foot of a tree. ‘These are the right ones. Try this,’ and she holds out a mushroom to him.

‘You’re crazy.’

‘Don’t call me that word! I know what I am doing, take one and watch,’ with which she starts slowly masticating.

‘It might be poisonous.’

‘Of course it isn’t, I know what I’m about. Put it in your mouth, it’s the food of the gods. In any case, you’re a doctor so you can save the gods.’

It goes through Álvaro like a purgative. Leonora laughs and places her shawl on the ground wrapped up to form a pillow, and invites him to lie beneath the spread branches of the tree.

‘We are going to sleep here.’

‘No, let’s go down to the village: this is too dangerous. You could be making an attempt on your life without so much as knowing it.’

‘The only danger, Álvaro, is not doing what one wishes. Lie down, the earth is really soft here.’

Stretched out beside her, his emotions heightened by the effort, exhausted, and suffering vertigo after the long walk, the crickets and the frogs conspire to have him shut his eyes.

‘There would be nothing unpleasant about dying like this. If I die now then I accept it utterly.’

When he opens his eyes again, he sees that Leonora’s are also wide open and that she is crying. How long has he slept? In the profoundly dark night the stars are still shining. He wants to ask her why she is crying, but no sound comes from his mouth. He sees her black hair on the ground, her fine profile and the tears running down her cheeks, and for the first time he has the feeling that up until now his whole life has been meaningless. There can be no doubt about it, he has more than met his match in this woman. When will he be able to express his feelings like she can? Never. When had he ever met a woman more delicate and more mistress of herself at one and the same time? Her instincts, that to start with infuriated him impossibly, now open up parts of him he never thought he possessed. Finally, after who knows how long, the dawn succeeds in restoring his sense of movement and he embraces her. He feels more tenderly towards her than ever: ‘Leonora, my child, Leonora.’ She hides her head against his neck, and he plucks bits out of her hair, smoothes down her skirt and leads her to the hotel. ‘Come with me and let’s go and have a bath.’