Leonora (16 page)

The Surrealists call Ernst ‘the superior bird', and in tribute Leonora paints him with a large feathered cape rising to a collar of fishes. Behind the bird–fish emerges a frozen horse's head – or could it be that of a mare? Again, in her short story, ‘Pigeon Fly', Leonora describes an older man who wears striped socks and an overcoat of feathers.

When Leonora cannot express what she wants in her paintings, she writes it down instead. Her lover encourages her.

‘If Remington rhymes with Carrington, your father must have been a typewriter.'

‘He was a machine that produced Nos: no, no, no, no don't, no you can't, no you mustn't.'

Leonora is typing insistently on the same dining table from which she had obliged Leonor Fini to remove her watercolours.

Agatha, her protagonist, is experiencing a profound repugnance towards her husband, Celestin, who is gradually changing into a bird. In the meantime, she is becoming so obliterated that she can hardly see herself in the mirror any more. Her husband, mired in his egotism, pays her no attention. She writes: ‘Celestin came and saw nothing at all. He touched my face with his soft hands, hands that really are too soft.' Yes, Max's hands are too soft and there are times when Leonora would like to bite them.

In the village café, all the talk is of war, and Alphonsine is continually irritable.

‘Pétain, the hero of Verdun, will know how to defend us. He is a supreme strategist.'

In spite of their faith in the Maginot Line, the terrified peasants confer among themselves. Only Max and Leonora persist in dedicating themselves exclusively to their love.

‘Those two can't see beyond the ends of their noses,' Pierre says, as he passes the front of their house to take another look at the sculptures. ‘They make their puppets or doodle their pictures and are oblivious to everything else.'

Max remembers: ‘Before the defeat of the Republicans in Spain, I painted
L'Ange du Foyer.
Of course the title is ironic, a gob of spit in the face of a twisted idiot, a monster flying over the earth, annihilating all in its path: the monster of Nazism.'

‘And the terrifying lizard in the monster's tail?'

‘That's its creator. You bear your own lizard within yourself, and if you fail to identify with all your creations – or your creatures – you'll never become a great artist, Leonora.'

‘The second monster I have known is you, and the first was my father. Your picture anticipated what would occur in Spain, and it is now happening across the whole world.'

Leonora renews her sisterhood with nature, as she used to when she was a child. The birds whose singing drowns out all else scarcely fly over the village any more. The peasants tend their vineyards like a favourite child, and Leonora is moved by their actions. For them, wine is the antidote to illness and infection: it cleanses the veins and helps the blood to circulate. They talk about Château Latour.

‘If the Germans come, I'll bury my best bottles.'

‘In my case, wine is what penetrates my very soul.'

‘And in mine, my very heart.'

Leonora shares their devotion to the vines, and always carries a pair of heavy grape scissors in her apron pocket. Pruning is a splendid task, as splendid as the vineyard workers' conversation. ‘Wine ages slowly, and the more slowly it ages, the more noble it becomes.' ‘I grow older like a fine wine, because I improve with the years.' ‘The wine reveals that our land has been here for ages before us, and will still be here long after we are gone.' ‘Thanks to our wine, we have survived wars. Wine is what makes French people French. Their spirit derives from their wine.'

‘If it goes on raining, we are going to lose the harvest.' Pierre the grape-picker raises his eyes to the heavens. ‘We shall have to get the harvest in before the Germans arrive and the vineyards become battlegrounds.'

The message goes round from one community to the next: ‘The fine wines have to be hidden. No Boche is going to get his hands on my vintage 1932.'

19

WAR

N
OTHING TROUBLES LEONORA
. Max and she are not man and woman, but bird and mare.

‘How oblivious you are, Max!' Roland tells Max when he pays them a visit with Lee Miller. ‘The whole of France is talking about how imminent war is, and all you do is paint.'

It is extraordinary that Max, who suffered the devastations of the Great War, does not recognise what a risk he runs, being a German in France at this point in time.

‘You have to leave now, immediately.'

‘No, there's no danger here,' replies Max, irritated by all the letters written in alarm, including some from his son, Jimmy. ‘The French regard me as one of them. I am more French than German.'

In fact he is in so much danger that two gendarmes march him off to the concentration camp of L'Argentière, just outside St. Martin d'Ardèche, with a hundred other Germans. The foreigners are to be kept there under surveillance until further notice, all the more strictly if they happen to be Germans. To be held in custody means interminable waiting behind barbed wire. Leonora, being English, is not at risk. France and England are allies.

Leonora rents a room in L'Argentière and every noon brings Max food to eat, and puts fresh clothes and tubes of paint in his hands. She even obtains permission to accompany him on his walks inside the camp. She comes every day without fail, although the bread, milk and vegetables she brings grow steadily worse, both their quality and quantity severely reduced by rationing. Hans Bellmer, a fellow prisoner, comments on her assiduousness to Max, who seems to find it entirely natural that the Englishwoman should be there at his service.

Bellmer encourages Max to resume making decalcomanias. Neither the camp officials nor the soldiers used as prison guards are bothered by the two men painting pictures out in the prison yard. Max is nervous and depressed, and begs Leonora to go to Paris and speak to Eluard, to stir up their friends and the authorities, to request an appointment with the President of the Republic, or to run to the Archbishop and persuade him to knock at the heavenly gates to tug at the angels' wings.

‘I shall obtain your freedom,' she assures him, with blazing eyes.

‘Then it had better be soon, since I doubt whether I shall last long in here.'

Leonora goes to Paris and seeks out Eluard: ‘You alone can approach the President of the Republic.'

Eluard puts pen to paper and writes to Albert Lebrun: ‘Max Ernst is one of the most outstanding and respected painters of the School of Paris. He is considered a Frenchman and was the first German artist to be exhibited at a salon in this country. He has lived twenty of his fifty years in France. Sincere, candid, correct, proud and loyal, he is my dearest friend. If you knew him you would understand at once that his imprisonment is unjust. He has restored a house in a village near Montpellier, the peasants there care for him, he cultivates his vineyards, and you need to grant him leave to return to St. Martin d'Ardèche. I would put my hand in the fire for him.'

Marie-Berthe Aurenche is also busily calling on Senator Albert Sarraut. For whatever reason, Max is transferred to a camp at Les Milles, near to Aix-en-Provence, at a former brick factory where red dust infiltrates even the food rations, now still further reduced. The latrines are disgusting and their pestilence extends through the camp, where many prisoners contract dysentery. Once at midday and once in the evening, the captives queue up while a soldier dumps a ladle of food on their plates. Some of the German students interned by the French are treated as criminals. France, which once so loved them, now persecutes them.

‘I can demonstrate that I am anti-Nazi,' Max insists. ‘That is precisely the reason I am here in France.'

Once again, the two painters are allowed out to paint in the yard, following another petition from Bellmer, the Polish Jew. He paints Max's portrait in profile, composed of Les Milles' red bricks, against a black background. Bellmer is in better spirits than Max and challenges him to paint. It seems as if creating so many of his mutilated dolls may have hardened him.

‘Anyone may paint anywhere, provided their family can bring them the materials to work with.'

They stay out in the yard all day. Max paints
Alice in 39,
a little picture in the style of a Russian Orthodox icon. In it, he revisits Leonora among the trees.

They are deporting Jews back to Germany from the camp at Les Milles, and the French authorities now inform Bellmer and Ernst that they are to be removed to North Africa, to work at laying railway lines.

In November 1939, and in desperation, Max sends a card to Jimmy, his son in New York. He reminds him that his father is interned in a concentration camp at Les Milles. Surely he can use his contacts to assist in liberating him from his imminent fate? ‘Do something. Approach important people who can be of help.'

He emerges free at Christmas-time, and spends the winter snowed in at St. Martin d'Ardèche with Leonora. It is a novel experience for them both, not only because of the snow, but because the peasants who had once believed he was French now know him to be German, and when the couple go into the village, only Alphonsine opens her arms to him.

‘Whatever happens, I still need to explore the limits of my mind,' Max says.

‘While you still have the time … ever since I've been with you, I've developed a sense of danger I never had before.'

‘I feel just as you do. I go from one extreme mental state to another, and each time I become more conscious of what awaits me.'

Leonora conceals from Max that when she went to Paris she ambushed Marie-Berthe and gave her a pummelling she still thinks of fondly.

‘What about Hans Bellmer, Max?'

‘He must have got out a few days after me.'

‘Are you sure about that?'

‘No.'

Someone in the village denounces Max, and the gendarme presents himself at the door again.

‘You are a German and as of now are under arrest.'

‘Leonora, calm down! Speak to our friends. They have already let me out once.'

‘Sit down and control yourself, Madame,' the policeman orders Leonora, who is trembling so much her teeth are chattering.

The terror in her eyes fills the entire room.

‘Your husband is not the only one,' the gendarme explains. ‘The concentration camp is now full to bursting. The order has been given to hold all foreigners under control. They are all to be deported.'

It doesn't even occur to Max to embrace her. He stares straight ahead until the policeman handcuffs him, takes him by the arm, and leads him away.

No sooner have they gone than Leonora throws herself on top of the heap of potatoes. It disintegrates under her weight, scattering potatoes across the kitchen's tiled floor. She doesn't pick them up because her tears prevent her from seeing clearly. Instead, she goes down to the village and drinks several glasses of
marc
. When Alphonsine finally lets her know it is closing time, she returns home. She downs a bottle of Eau de Cologne, and spends the whole night vomiting, in the hope that the spasms wracking her body will lessen the pain of her suffering. When dawn breaks, she reaches a decision: ‘I need to start moving. The only way of surviving this is to get to work.'

With no food in her stomach and without a hat on her head, she goes down to the vines and cuts off one bunch of grapes at a time, until the sun scorches and puts a crick in her neck. Despite her best efforts, Max's absence consumes her. When she returns home, she bends over the lavatory and puts her fingers down her throat. She tries to vomit, but nothing comes up, her throat is a raw red ember, her chest burns, her whole body shakes. She goes up and down stairs from bedroom to kitchen and finally lies down on the mound of potatoes.

For the whole of the next week she eats boiled potatoes, one or often only half at a time. She has never been possessed of such strength in her life. She rises with the sun, and goes to bed when it sets. In the morning, she leaps out of bed before bad thoughts assail her, and, as she sleeps in her clothes, she runs straight out to attend to her vines. Sweat pours off her, the nape of her neck is permanently dripping. ‘I am set on total purification!' she tells herself, and doesn't budge until she sees the sun set over the horizon. Every time a memory of Max drifts across her thoughts, she makes an effort of will to exclude it from her mind. Better to think only of a potato, all of life a potato. ‘Maybe I could go to the village and buy some butter, then bake myself a potato in the oven this evening.' Sometimes she feels reflective: ‘I never knew that wine, as well as a stimulant, was such good nourishment, it keeps my strength up.' On Sundays she takes her clothes off and sunbathes on the flat roof, stretched out like a lizard, before downing a full bottle of wine. Every night she downs another. Wine is extraordinary, and provides the best of therapies.

The feast day of Saint John is drawing near. Leonora goes to the village to buy butter.

‘What a strange war!' the villagers in the dairy are saying.

In Paris they call it
la drôle de guerre
, and relate how in Holland the children wave at the Luftwaffe planes and laugh out loud. How can they understand that the Germans are now their enemies? In the Polish countryside, farm labourers and women with colourful scarves on their heads carry on working as if nothing had happened. A whole group of Belgians have arrived in the village. During the Great War, the Germans raped their country: Belgium has become the symbol of German treachery. They sank the
Lusitania
. In Paris, all the cafés are full. The French are having a good time, disregarding Poland's tragedy. An invasion? Fonfon is not to be seen. Ever since the gendarme took Max away, she hasn't been seen anywhere other than in her café, when she comes over to serve Leonora another glass of
marc
. In the dairy, the owner can barely manage to be civil; and he used always to pay her court for being so beautiful. He asks her if the butter is for snails.

‘It seems as though someone came to your house in the night and robbed you of your snails.'

‘My what?'

‘Be careful, they say that you're a spy. You could be denounced.'

‘Are you going to bring a lantern and hunt me down like the snails?' Leonora asks.

The Englishwoman isn't afraid of the war. She just wants Max back.

At night she closes her eyes against her filthy pillow of potatoes, and repeats the phrase that she introduced several days ago and now utters with absolute certainty: ‘I am not fated to die here.'

That was how, on 24th June 1940, Catherine Yarrow, an old friend of Leonora's, finds her. Catherine, who is tall, slim and British, arrives with Michel Lukacs, her ungainly lover.

‘Leonora, these are bad times. I don't think you can stay here.'

Leonora scarcely hears her:

‘I'll go to the kitchen garden and pick a lettuce, I want to make a big salad for you both, and I have olives, tomatoes, olive oil. It'll be a kind of Salade Niçoise, or almost a Niçoise, and I have some aubergines too.'

She returns from the vegetable plot covered in mud. She has fallen over. And her arms are empty.

‘What on earth did I go down to the kitchen garden to bring? You two are going to be staying here, aren't you? I'll sleep in the kitchen so I can hear if anyone knocks at the door, and the potatoes can be my pillow.'

Catherine looks at her fiancé in alarm. Then she looks back at Leonora, busy lighting a new cigarette from the last, chain-smoking so hurriedly that at one moment it seems she might in fact burn her face.

‘Max will be here at any moment,' she announces. A sudden flash of terror streaks across her black eyes.

To be mad is to pace up and down without knowing why or what for, and getting lost along the way. ‘It is to wander into the unknown with the abandon and the values of the ignorant.'

‘Leonora, you have to get out of France; the Germans are everywhere. Max isn't coming back, we've no idea when war will be over, nor when they might release him. You have to leave now with us!'

‘Max won't be long, he went to the Pont Saint Esprit but, as the Rhône has flooded, he's been delayed on the way back. Let's open a bottle of the red. Although I do also have some white wine, if you prefer.' She covers her face with her hands. ‘Max will be coming back. I am waiting here for him.'

‘You need to eat something more substantial. You are all skin and bones.'

Thanks to the arrival of Catherine and Michel, Leonora is obliged to exchange the potatoes for some nourishing soup, and now spends less time under the burning sun.

The creative and original Catherine has spent her life in the hands of psychiatrists, and analyses whatever comes before her eyes. Among her words of advice, those that most catch Leonora's attention are: ‘You need to find yourself a new lover.'

Who might that be? Pierre the grape-picker? Old Mathieu who never does anything except noisily clear his throat?