Leonora (17 page)

‘Wipe that painter out of your life; you're still looking for a father figure in him, and you're punishing yourself.'

‘I am absolutely fine and in love with Max.'

‘No you are not fine. You have never been in such a bad state in all the time I have known you. Do your parents know what state you are in?'

‘I don't have any parents.'

‘Of course you do, and they're worried about you. They loathe Max, and they've fallen out with you, and despite all that they still continue to maintain you. Your mother has even gone so far as to buy you this house.'

The day they venture into the village, Leonora sits herself down at a table with two lean and athletic Belgians.

‘I am going to seduce them,' she informs Catherine. ‘Your little chat has revived all my sexual desires. I haven't made love since they came to take Max away.'

But the young men are more concerned with war than with love, and with what the Nazis have done to their country. This young woman with the unkempt hair and fiery eyes is not in her right mind. They rise and leave her alone at the table.

‘I shall have to remain painfully chaste,' concludes Leonora, with resignation.

She drinks too much wine and Alphonsine has no choice but to send her to bed, to sleep it off there at the café.

On another occasion, as if out of nowhere, Leonora tells Fonfon:

‘I dreamt of two wolves and a fox.'

‘Speak with wolves and they turn into lambs.'

‘Even if they are German wolves?'

‘Leonora, you are teetering on the edge of a precipice. Why don't you go and find Drusille de Guindre? They say you can see her standing alone at the window because her father no longer lets her out. The viscount has his own extensive sphere of influence; Drusille has been asking after you; and there's no doubt that they would help you.'

Leonora returns to her vineyards. She catches sunburn and sweats to such a point that Catherine comes to find her, and tries out yet another of her psychoanalytic approaches.

‘Love is a transitory psychosis. In addition, St. Martin is a dangerous place. You can't stay here on your own. We are going to get you out of here with us.'

‘I am waiting here for Max, and it's impossible for me to leave without him. I will not move from this house.'

‘Who knows when they might let him go? And you need to leave now, with us. I've heard tell that the Germans are raping the women they find alone.'

‘That doesn't frighten me, Catherine. Who knows, I might even enjoy it. What makes me panic is the thought of robots, beings without brains. The Germans don't have blood in their veins, they have lead, the lead of bullets. Tomorrow I'll go back to the village, and see what I can find out. Surely someone will listen to me.'

‘Nobody here would as much as throw you a rope to save you from drowning. Look at yourself, you look a fright: you haven't bathed or brushed your hair and you scare people away. Hurry up, and I'll help you pack your case.'

‘Ever since my lover left, I've lost track of the date or the day of the week, and the only thing I know is that I have to stay here and wait for him.'

‘You use Max as an instrument of self-castigation. He is nothing more than a father substitute for Harold Carrington. In any case, you're drinking like a fish.'

‘Baudelaire said that one has to drink without stopping and to live life drunk, so I am following his advice. When I drink I don't notice the days go by.'

Catherine takes pity on her.

‘If you don't want to leave, I'll stay with you; but if we stay here in this house, the same gendarme who took your lover away will come for us. Michel is Hungarian, and if the Germans find him here, they'll lock him up too. But I am not going to abandon you. You're in danger and so are we all. Once in Madrid, you can get hold of a visa for Max. Here, you're no use to him at all.'

Catherine, the therapist, needs to save her friend, and so makes herself answerable for her future.

‘You need to understand what I'm saying to you: free yourself from Max just as you did from your father.'

Michel interrupts: ‘Spain is our salvation.'

20

FLIGHT

E
VERY TIME SHE THINKS
of Max, Leonora doubles up as if thumped in the solar plexus. She keeps her passport next to his; she will obtain a visa for him. Why didn't she think of this before? Spain is the chance of a new life for her and Max together.

In Bourg-Saint-Andéol the gendarmes deny them permission to travel on.

‘Come back tomorrow, or go to the Town Hall and see what the officials there have to say to you.'

Their indifference has become insulting.

‘Whatever happens, we are going to leave now,' Leonora shouts, sitting in her Fiat. ‘Now, this very minute! I am going to tell Fonfon and all the villagers that we are about to leave.'

‘What shall we do with the house?' Caroline is worried. ‘We need to close it up.'

‘The people here are honest; you can put it in the care of any one of them. I think I'll leave the key with the man who owns the
Motel des Touristes
in St. Martin.'

In the
Motel des Touristes
, the only person they can find is Rose Vigne, wife of the hotelier.

‘Don't worry about it. All we need to do is to go and see the notary. It'll only take about ten minutes,' she tells them.

At the notary's, Leonora grows increasingly uneasy.

‘Sign,' the hotelier's wife orders her, categorically. ‘I shall take full responsibility for the house.'

Leonora signs the transfer of ownership for her house and all her possessions to the motel owner.

Pierre, the grape-picker, arrives while Leonora is still living at the farm.

‘The situation has changed. The Boches are now on the streets of Sedan, and you can cut the fear in the atmosphere with a knife.'

Leonora abandons the cats, dogs, vines, sculpted figurines; the shawl with its fringe of little bells, Max's paintings and hers too; she forgets about the books, and the album into which she has begun to stick photographs. All her willpower is focused on Spain and on obtaining Max's visa.

While Catherine Yarrow packs up the kitchen and hangs the saucepans back on the walls, Leonora spends the night packing and repacking her suitcase from Brooks Leather, and which bears her name next to a plate with the one-word logo: ‘Revelation'.

‘I am sure this word is a message from the Cosmos.'

At five in the morning, when she shuts the case and prepares to sleep, she hears Catherine's voice:

‘Leonora are you ready?'

The sculptures ranged along the walls watch their departure impassively. Nor could Leonora succeed in moving an equally uninterested Rose Vigne, the hotelier's wife, when she went to bid her farewell and entrust the house to her:

‘Look after it well, it is our home, and we'll be coming back. I am this house, it means my life to me.'

Catherine seats herself behind the steering wheel, with Michel next to the window. Scarcely has she started up the engine, than the Englishwoman transforms herself into the Fiat. Tense to the ultimate limit of every muscle, she never takes her eyes off the road, and she is possessed of the strength of an engine. When her friend accelerates, Leonora's right foot also presses down on the floor. Twenty kilometres outside St. Martin d'Ardèche, the clutch locks and Leonora announces: ‘I did that.'

‘What do you mean you did it? How could you have?' Catherine is growing increasingly irritated.

‘Because I can move the energy of the Earth, I radiate a magnetic force I never imagined possible. It was I who gave the car the order.'

Astonished by her own power, she blames herself for the stuck clutch: she is the car, the battery,
the clutch
, the steering wheel and the radiator.

‘Well, if you're so all-powerful, you'd better fix it quickly, because here come the Nazis.'

‘My solar system will give the order to the Fiat, and the clutch will come unstuck again.'

The car at once resumes functioning, without anyone having the least idea how.

The journey is sheer hell, because Catherine and Michel's patience has reached its limit. Catherine beseeches Leonora to keep quiet, and not to make their life impossible.

The woman riding in the back seat of their car is transparent and dishevelled, with wild hair and special powers: she orchestrates the inner workings of the world, arranges the patterns of traffic, has the capacity to stop the car in its tracks; she is a woman responsible for the rising of the sun and with the authority to end the war. She hates the Germans, and winds down her window and yells, with all the force of her lungs: ‘Hitler must die!' Catherine winds the window back up. The pitch black night does nothing to impede Leonora's vision and, every time they encounter another car, she shouts: ‘Hitler is a murderer!' Then she sits back down on her seat, shuts her eyes, and reopens them to stare at rows of coffins lining the road. Obviously they belong to French citizens massacred by the Nazis. The violence of the war seeps into her every pore. She sees piles of corpses stacked in military lorries, their arms and legs dangling. Catherine and Michel either can't or don't want to see them. Leonora winds the window down once more and yells: ‘The Germans are murdering France, the whole place stinks of death!' In this case, she happens to be right, since Perpignan is the site of a vast military cemetery.

‘We are going to stop here and sleep for a few hours,' says Michel. But not one hotel has a single free room.

Leonora gets out of the car, and asks where the Nazis are. She stops the waiters, the shoe-shine boy and the postman, intimidating them by her tone of authority and the madness lurking in her black eyes.

One of them eventually answers her: ‘The Germans have gone through France like a knife through butter.'

Another then confirms: ‘I saw them come in. Riding their motorbikes with the sun reflected in their sunglasses. There's no room for even one more person in Bordeaux.'

Leonora always gets herself noticed and in occupied territory it is risky to stand out.

‘Get back into the car and we'll be off, Leonora,' orders Catherine.

Leonora's anxiety grows in relation to their southward progress. She is trembling like a leaf except when she is yelling, or talking loudly to herself. It is quite impossible to control her. The main roads, overflowing with people in flight, have become impassable. The sound of car engines revving is constant and drills into their eardrums.

‘What about all these people? Do they know where they are heading?' Leonora asks.

‘Of course they don't!' Catherine yells back at her. ‘We are all fleeing. The Germans have bombed France, or perhaps you haven't noticed?'

Leonora proclaims she has reached the only possible decision under the circumstances: to kill Hitler. Catherine shuts the window, and Leonora immediately opens it again:

‘There's nothing worse than to invade another country and all soldiers are pieces of shit!'

Catherine winds up the window again. With hitherto unknown strength, Leonora winds it down again:

‘Down with the invaders! Long live Free France!'

‘Shut up!' Catherine tells her.

‘If I tell all these people that I can hold back the war with the power of my mind, then the war will be over, and if I tell them I have psychic powers, they will stop being afraid; lots of people tell me that my eyes have a power in them, so if I confront the Nazis, they are bound to understand that they have to get out of the country.'

‘I really can't cope with you any more,' Catherine is imploring her with tears in her eyes. ‘Please stop yelling, you will end up giving us all away, and Michel doesn't have any papers.'

‘But you are my responsibility, and I am in the process of saving you,' Leonora protests.

She goes back to repeating to anyone with ears to listen that she is Joan of Arc.

‘If you want us to get to Andorra, don't say another word. If you do, everything will fall apart, things are getting too serious, Leonora, and our lives are at stake.'

‘Would you like me to slip into a voluntary coma?' Leonora sits rigidly and bites her lip until it runs with blood.

Catherine and Michel cannot begin to relax until they have reached Andorra, a country the size of a bread crumb that has fallen by chance between France and Spain.

On getting out of the Fiat, Leonora can no longer straighten her back.

She has lost control of her movements, and advances sideways like a crab. She attempts to climb the hotel staircase, and her legs trip her up. Catherine becomes annoyed again.

‘It's just that my body won't obey the orders given by my brain. I need to erase all I've learnt in order to eliminate the old formulas causing this paralysis of anxiety.'

‘What's really happening is that you are going to stuff us all.'

Once inside the Hôtel de France, the only employee is a young girl who hands them the key to a room at the end of one corridor, then another to one on the second floor.

‘You are the only guests,' she explains in Catalan.

In the hall to the empty hotel, Leonora takes a few hesitant steps and attempts to straighten up. Michel and Catherine, utterly fed up with her, shut themselves away in their room. Every man for himself, they decide. If the Englishwoman wants to be shot of life, that's her business, but for the time being she still needs them to save her. Leonora eventually gets into her room on the second floor, opens her window and, two by two, a line of unusually tall pine trees advances on her.

After the first night Michel, in a somewhat improved mood, tells her he is going to the post office to send a telegram. The English-woman is unaware that it is to her father, who has sent some money out from England. Within a few days, his emissary is due to arrive in Andorra: he is a Jesuit who will obtain their visas to cross into Spain. The power of Imperial Chemical is immeasurable.

Leonora manages to stand up and to walk but, when she tries to walk up the slope behind the hotel, she seizes up like Catherine's Fiat, and is unable to straighten herself up.

‘I can't believe you're doing this to us. Stand up straight,' and Catherine attempts to lift her up.

‘I can't.'

‘Stand up properly, I tell you!'

‘I swear to you I can't!'

‘Why on earth not?'

‘Because of my impotence in the face of the suffering I saw on the main road as we came here.'

Anguish prevents her from coordinating her mind and body. Not one intended action can reach its logical completion, she is asphyxiated by anxiety and can't move a single finger on her right hand, nor on her left: all this affliction is borne by a woman who can write and paint using both cerebral hemispheres. Her mouth has become twisted, and it makes her embarrassed to speak. She attempts to understand why her body won't take orders, and decides it is because it is in rebellion. As her will is rendered powerless, her first recourse is to seek an accord with nature, starting with this wooded hill she is trying in vain to scale.

‘Mountain, help me, please don't send me away, make me walk again! If I could only walk, I should be saved!'

She takes a couple of steps and falls to the floor.

‘They have emptied my mind, and the only thing left imprinted on my memory is the image of the Germans mounted on their motorcycles, with the sun shining on their black goggles!'

A barking dog returns her to reality, and she drags herself back to the hotel.

But she can't sleep at all, and can hardly manage to eat.

Leonora takes refuge in the discipline she has inherited from her parents, and each morning strives to walk, whatever the cost.

‘Dear Mountain, I want us to reach an agreement: please grant that my mind and body are united with you.'

She lies face downwards, her head buried in the grass.

‘The earth absorbs me, the earth desires to communicate its strength to me.'

She raises herself up onto all fours, leaning heavily on her elbows, lengthening first her left leg, and then the right, scraping her elbows. At long last she straightens herself up and stands erect. Little by little, with huge effort, she takes a little step, then another, and finally trusts that she will be able to walk once more.

‘Tomorrow I shall try again.'

Catherine and Michel want nothing more to do with her.

‘This woman is wrecking all our lives,' Michel says.

‘She has become a burden on me, too. Once I have been able to hand her over, I shall never see her again.'

On bumping into her one morning at the hotel entrance, Catherine enquires:

‘Is the crab going out today, then?'

After ten days of submitting herself to training, Leonora succeeds in climbing the hill. She slips and falls, but no matter: she has recovered the use of her legs.

‘I have never before had such power and control over my own body,' she tells Catherine and Michel, who make fun of her.

Leonora is not conscious of the effect her behaviour has on others, nor of how strange she must appear. Catherine and Michel pretend not to know her and go out for walks alone. Sometimes, by way of compromise, she follows in their wake. After all, she is their guarantee of safe conduct into Spain. The heiress is utterly unconscious of the fact that those who have strings to pull are those who always ultimately win the day.