Leonora (15 page)

18

THE GREAT INDIAN COCKROACH

L
IFE IN ST. MARTIN
is not without its mysteries. A young man beats a drum to announce that tonight the great Kaffir, famous the whole world over, and his medium, Olga, will disclose the secrets of the universe in the courtyard of the Hôtel du Centre, where their circus will be performing.

Leonora and Max watch the show through a rip in the canvas of the Big Top. ‘We could do better than this' is their conclusion, and they suggest to Alphonsine that they provide a show in which a third member of the cast will participate: their friend Drusille, the spinster daughter of the owner of the castle at the top of the mountain.

‘If someone in the village lends us a gramophone, we could do far better than this insipid session of mass hypnosis. I am going to paint my face and hair blue which will make me the great Indian cockroach, and Leonora shall dance on the tables while I perform a number of miracles with her.'

‘What kind of miracles?'

‘Firstly, the miracle of resuscitating her. Then I shall hypnotise the audience. Leonora, do you know the spell to hypnotise a wild panther? And Drusille's secret turn will leave everyone open-mouthed.'

‘You know they say that this Drusille has a screw loose,' Fonfon protests. ‘Don't let her go and break all my crockery. It's because her mother abandoned her, and her father – the Lord Viscount – sleeps all day and reads all night, locked inside the castle library.'

‘Max has mastered Drusille,' responds Leonora. ‘You don't need to worry about a thing.'

‘And me, what I am meant to do?' asks Fonfon.

‘You'll probably be asked to play the little dwarf. But put on your best dress, because today you are first of all going to be selling a large quantity of wine.' The order comes from Max.

He is proved right. Not much goes on in the little villages around here, and Max and Leonora are daily news from the minute they get out of bed: whether they walk hand in hand down the street to the river; decide to take a bicycle ride; or he takes her in his arms and kisses her in the middle of the bridge; even if they then buy cheese and a couple of bottles of wine … Of course the public will come in droves to bear witness to their miracles.

More and more people crowd into the café. Max is a terrific mime artist. Leonora's role is to play the patient, with Max as the surgeon. Leonora complains loudly, both her hands clutching her belly. Wrapped in a sheet, she lies down on the table, and Max transforms the café into an operating theatre in which he slits her stomach open with a knife. Leonora screams with pain and from her intestines Dr. Ernst removes tomatoes, nails, a hammer, ears of corn, apples, chains, shoes, an alarm clock, aubergines and sausages, which he lifts to his lips and starts chomping, while displaying his findings to the festive audience. Finally, he pulls out a handful of little snakes, also from inside his patient's abdomen. Leonora, miraculously restored to health, leaps up from the operating table, landing lightly on her bare feet with one bound, and takes a bow to popular applause.

‘Leonora, stand over here without moving,' Max instructs her, and the Englishwoman stops stock still, and lets fall the sheet that has been covering her, as the audience falls silent. No-one moves. Leonora is ethereal. Sometimes, nudity can take people's breath away.

This couple are original: no doubt about it. He, tall and aquiline, with a halo of sanctity encircling his white hair; she, tall and slim, with burning eyes, a woman ripe to the point of bursting. Her mass of black hair is filled with nesting birds. The rumour has gone round that Drusille, the mad daughter of the local viscount, is also going to perform, and the announcement stirs the morbid fascination of the local peasantry, who are sure they've seen her whipping her animals while naked.

The grand finale heightens the public's tension and inclination for another bottle of wine, while Drusille displays her charms and Ernst – his face running with blue paint – entertains the public, until a whistle from the kitchen prompts him to put a record on the gramophone, and Drusille makes her entrance dragging a terrified black goat. The Amazon is wearing a leather corset and thigh-high black boots. She opens with a Satanic dance, in which it is impossible to distinguish woman from goat. The petrified audience watches as the goat stands up on its hind legs. Then, in a desperate bid to escape, the billy goat frantically leaps onto the record player, which zooms over the heads of the spectators, before dragging the Viscountess of Guindre offstage on her tummy.

The audience overturn bottles, glasses, hats, chairs and start screaming in the midst of the chaos of broken bottles and upended chairs:

‘I am the Harlequin of the fete,' shouts one, swaggering with his hips thrust forward.

‘I am Blue Beard and I'm looking for a new wife,' announces a fat little fellow.

A woman swathed in a shawl proclaims: ‘I am the Queen of England, and the proprietress of St. Martin d'Ardèche.'

Leonora disabuses her: ‘You can't be the Queen, because I've seen her as plain as I am looking at you now.'

The woman at once stops laughing, and curtseys politely.

Pierre, the grape-picker, is dressed as a frock-coated dandy and raises his glass too high and too often to toast what's happening. He seizes Fonfon by the hands: ‘You are no peasant, you have the fingers of a princess, and I shall present you with a diamond.'

He kneels and declares himself the Prime Minister of France.

‘Where has the Viscountess gone?' asks old Mathieu.

The goat has also disappeared. The whole of St. Martin d'Ardèche is playing at role reversal, safe in the knowledge that tomorrow everything will be back to normal.

‘They liberate their unconscious, performing Quasimodo in a fete of lunatics,' Max seeks to calm Leonora, who can't see the Satanic Amazon, still less her goat, anywhere at all. ‘Don't worry,' Max whispers to her, ‘tomorrow the locals will all return to the vineyards, the river, the white rocks or their aubergines, or to shooting the rabbits you see fleeing with their ears down. As for Drusille, only a moment ago, I heard the gallop of her horse on the bridge, and she must by now have reached the final slope leading up to her castle.'

On the wood-fired stove, Leonora is putting plums, peaches and quinces on to boil.

‘We shall gorge on fruit each evening in honour of Aphrodite,' Max tells her.

Leonora rushes between the vineyards and the kitchen, from her easel to the store cupboard.

‘I am an ant among the cicadas.'

The kitchen becomes central to the expression of their love. Eating restores their energy, only for them to resume their love-making with renewed vigour. Leonora knows that the house is her body; its walls are her bones; its roof, her head; its kitchen, her liver, her blood and her heart. Its walls embrace her, and she caresses them in return as she climbs the stairs, places a sack of potatoes in its proper corner, or opens the windows to admit the morning.

Leonor Fini arrives from Paris with André Pieyre de Mandriargues and a heavy suitcase. They install themselves in the bedroom on the second floor, which they take over with their extravagant clothes. If it weren't for her baby face, Leonora would get rid of the Argentine and her interminable monologues on the Marquis de Sade. She can speak French only by purring in a strong Spanish or Buenos Aires accent, and irrationally pursues her every whim: ‘I can't take a bath, the soap just escaped through the window.'

According to Leonor, her mere presence is a guarantee that objects will start rebelling against their natural function. Just as the soap vanished, so Max's bicycle was found one morning without wheels, and a full saucepan of water evaporated before the stove was lit, while not a single cushion was left with its feather stuffing intact.

‘Why didn't you put any sheets on their bed?' Max complains to Leonora.

‘Of course I made up the bed with fresh sheets,' Leonora answers indignantly, and Fini chuckles with pleasure at what she has done.

‘They are the sails for my boat, and I took them up on the roof to see if they would billow in the wind.'

Just like Leonora and Max, Leonor also climbs up on to the flat part of the roof to sunbathe naked.

‘These Parisians always enjoy playing at Adam and Eve,' the locals comment.

André Pieyre de Mandriargues writes seated in the lotus position, and fetes Fini's extravagances, which cause him such intense emotion that he begins to stammer. Leonora asks him what he's doing, and he answers that he's reading erotic literature written by birds in the sky. Meanwhile he constantly repeats the mantra: ‘What time are we going to eat?' Leonor Fini becomes the cats' guardian as there are now eight of them consuming numerous litres of milk a day, despite Leonora warning her that they should only be served it mixed with water.

‘Why don't we buy a cow, and keep her in the garden?' suggests Leonor Fini.

‘Listen, we're not living in the Pampas here,' Max protests.

‘This place is ideal for painting watercolours,' announces the Argentine, and takes possession of the kitchen table. ‘Look, Leonora, the watercolour does exactly what it wants. You only need to follow the course of painting through water, and you reach its source all on its own, and it takes you where it will, until the most unexpected thing occurs, far more beautiful than anything you'd hoped for.'

Fini takes up all the space, sets up an easel in one room, then abandons working on canvas in favour of returning to making her watercolours on paper.

‘We're going to eat now, you need to move your things,' Leonora pleads with her.

‘I want to paint you, Leonora, inside the house, so as not to compete with Max, who has painted your portrait in the jungle outside.'

Leonora finds Leonor's unpredictability endearing. Despite the fact she has exhibited with the Surrealists, she is not one of them. ‘I am me.' She is almost repeating the words of Jehovah to Moses when He tells him: ‘I am that I am.' She declares Leonora a true revolutionary, and paints her portrait as half woman, half man, like a mysterious Joan of Arc from antiquity, her breast covered by a bronze breast-plate. Here, in
The Alcove
,
an interior with three women
, Leonora is foregrounded, while two more women, naked and holding hands, barely stand out from the sombre background.

‘I look like a medieval statue.'

André Pieyre de Mandriargues also becomes attached to going about in the nude and plans on going down to the river stark naked.

‘You can strip off when you get there,' says Max.

‘Nobody will notice, I'll go on Leonora's bicycle.'

‘André, these French provincials are extremely conservative …'

In the kitchen, the two Leonoras lean over their bubbling saucepans, into which they throw garden herbs, hairs of the eight cats, locks of their own hair, mushrooms and flowers, all of which Leonora then serves up, dressed in her embroidered white blouse and a fringed shawl with little bells around the edges borrowed from Fini's wardrobe. In their corner of the room, the potatoes wait in their sack on the floor. From the garden the Englishwoman brings in lettuces she calls ‘my lettuces', and carrots that she also considers to be her own, but what most delight her are the heavy dark purple globes slowly expanding in the midst of their spiky leaves: aubergines.

‘You don't know what it's like to grow tomatoes on your own land, cut them through the middle, and bite into them.'

‘Is it like an orgasm?' Fini asks her.

With her fingers, Leonora skins horse mackerels, shucks beans and shells lentils. Her hands are more than adroit: they are also wise. They race back and forth without once erring, not when they cut the tops off the corn cobs, nor when they slice carrots into neat rings.

‘No-one peels potatoes like you do. How come you're so dextrous?' André asks her.

‘Because I use both hemispheres of my brain.'

This dexterity has never been as much cause of wonder and rumination as now. Harold and Maurie complied with the nuns. André and Leonor Fini rejoice in Leonora's exceptional faculties.

André Pieyre de Mandriargues cracks open a walnut: ‘This is what your brain looks like, Leonora.'

‘No, mine extends and extends until it pierces the celestial dome. Owning a telescope without its complement, the microscope, is a symbol of the most wilful incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to look through the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.'

‘Cartier-Bresson awaits us in Paris,' trumpets Fini, ‘but before we leave, I need to satisfy my curiosity. Max, what is it you like to do best in life?'

‘To look.'

As they are on the point of leaving, Max paints his ‘lover of the wind', and gives the finishing brushstrokes to
La Toilette de la Mariée,
which shows Leonora in the nude. Moss again invades the canvas, a dense vegetation that presses upon leaves and mist and interweaves them into minuscule organisms.
Leonora in the Morning Light
palpitates, its green that of primitive cells at the origin of all life. A goddess arises among branches and vine leaves, flanked by a unicorn and a minotaur, a celestial creature and a lover of the wind who might have been happy, had a heavy teardrop not left a damp blot on the sleeve of her dress, or a tiny skeleton weren't dancing right before her eyes.