Leonora (26 page)

Wine glasses are filled and refilled; those who once were married become accomplices again, and clink glasses to sharing their compromising information. The new arrivals have the shine of novelty about them.

‘Your Mexican is gorgeous, get me one like him,' says Peggy.

Renato flirts, raises his glass, drinks, smiles, and Leonora feels supported. But of course Max detests him because, even though he and Leonora might spend the whole day together, she spends every night with ‘the Mexican'.

‘The war brings us all the more together,' says the slender Kay Boyle, who takes Leonora under her wing and always tries to ensure that they are seated next to one another.

Kay comes from a rich family back in the United States. She has a nose almost as impressively large as the rest of her, and talks without pause of the concentration camps and the reign of terror that seem to be the Nazis' main source of inspiration. She wants to bring her imprisoned friend to the United States and her husband, Laurence Vail, informs her that the captive could well weigh anchor in the
Winnipeg
, departing from Marseilles, rather than with them.

‘I don't understand why your lover has to travel on an airline ticket paid for by my ex-wife.'

Marcel Duchamp and Herbert Read advised Peggy on which works to acquire for her collection, which has set sail for New York.

‘I've heard some terrible news, Peggy,' Kay Boyle announces. ‘The boat loaded with all your paintings was sunk.'

‘Don't over-dramatise, Kay,' Laurence scolds her. ‘You delight in saying things that have no existence outside your over-heated imagination. Better to employ it in writing.'

Laurence throws his glass at the wall, then picks up a plate and smashes it. Marcel Duchamp and Peggy, well accustomed to Laurence's scenes, stare at him unmoved, until Max decides to follow suit. Laurence was the King of Bohemia. Herbert Read removes another plate from his grasp, and Kay, usually so much mistress of herself, sobs loudly. They cry, laugh, insult one another and then are reconciled with, desire and then betray each other. Max Ernst is worried about the friends he left behind: Hans Bellmer and Victor Brauner.

‘I want to help them,' he says, addressing Peggy.

‘To me, your friends have no more existence than ghosts,' the patron replies.

Max becomes enraged.

‘It's just that you mention the name of their concentration camps as if it were St. Moritz, Megève, Deauville, Eden Roc, Kitzbuhl, or any one of your other holiday destinations.'

In the course of lunches and then dinners, Leonora learns what happened to Max in the time since the gendarme took him away.

‘Leonor Fini went to Marseilles to see Max, she is his spoilt brat. You know they were lovers, don't you? So, just as Jean Arp has two Sofias, so Max has two Leonoras, Fini and Carrington, and that's how he gets ahead in his career. Madame Fini has taken refuge in Monte Carlo, and is now painting pictures. She wanted to sell me a painting the size of a postcard for ten thousand dollars.'

‘I find her vulgar and her conduct is that of a whore,' Laurence Vail intervenes.

‘I don't appreciate her too much either, despite the fact that I like whores,' seconds Marcel Duchamp.

‘Max adores her and wants me to adore her, too. He introduced her to me as a patron of the arts, not as his beloved.'

‘Peggy, please.' Max seeks to defend himself.

‘Max considers her a prodigy for no better reason than that she painted his portrait. He supports any young woman, who is sufficiently pretty and flattering. He is far less indulgent towards male artists!'

‘Yet you have more than enough indulgence, don't you Peggy?' interrupts Kay.

Max advised her to deny her Jewish origins.

‘I told the police my grandfather was Swiss and that I am an American. Since the United States had only just delivered a shipload of food to France, the inspectors treated me well.'

Peggy relates how Max needed fifty dollars in bank notes and went to borrow them from Chagall.

‘I don't know a thing about money, go and talk to my daughter,' was how the Russian chose to excuse his way out of it.

Varian Fry, whom Max met in the street, at once took out sixty dollars, which he gave him. That was how he escaped from Marseilles with all his canvases under his arm, and got to Lisbon.

‘Do you know there's a Hieronymus Bosch here in Lisbon?' Max asks Leonora. ‘Would you like to go to the National Museum of Classical Art while Peggy is busy being the centre of attention?'

‘Yes.'

The Temptation of St. Anthony
draws them closer again and they promise themselves they will paint one of their own one of these days. Every single detail of the work of art painted nearly five hundred years ago leaves them speechless: the kingdom of devils, the adoration of the Magi, the miniature dogs and pigs, the ruined tower that could have been the Tower of Babel, the couple flying on a fish to escape forever.

‘Would you consider escaping with me on the back of a fish?'

30

THE RETINUE

P
EGGY, LEONORA AND MAX
arrange to go riding together.
   ‘When I was a child,' Peggy relates, ‘I had a terrible fall, but I jumped up and got back on to the horse, just as the rule book says, even with a broken jaw and several teeth missing.'

‘Does that mean those teeth aren't yours?' Leonora pokes fun at her, since she finds Peggy ugly, despite her fine figure.

Peggy doesn't ride out with them again, but still sees Leonora quite frequently, since Max won't let go of her.

‘Do you have to include her in all our breakfasts, lunches, walks and visits?' Peggy demands to know of him.

Peggy, the protector to whom he owes his life, presides over the table where everyone sits elbow to elbow with ex-husbands, ex-wives, lovers, and the offspring of prior relationships; a world of people gathered together for the purpose of drinking. Peggy is the person who offers them the most, while the rest laugh, psychoanalyse one another, discover magical and secret places, spend large fortunes, and regress to childhood. At noon on the dot they order their first cocktails – the women opting for port with ice, which rapidly renders them drunk – and when at long last day dawns, they take their drinks to bed for a nightcap. Presumably that's where they continue their
ménages à trois.
At noon they rise to start drinking all over again, before returning to bed for a siesta that can last all afternoon.

‘Did you know that Niarchos – the Greek shipping magnate – had an el Greco hanging in his yacht?'

‘How imprudent!' Peggy shrieks.

Kay insists that European works of art are at risk and that now, at this very minute, paintings from the Guggenheim collection could be in the jaws of a shark.

‘Worse still, Franco couldn't care less if his lunch were served on a Picasso with a delicious salad of sunflowers.'

A different obsession was added to their terror of the Nazis: Leonora's incarceration in the asylum at Santander.

‘I can understand that you might have lost your head,' Kay says. ‘At the age of twenty-three it must be difficult to be living with a German genius, so far from your family, and in a strange country. In your situation I would have felt depressed, too. And what can be done in the face of war? One either dies or goes mad. I've spoken with Leonora and want to offer her protection.'

‘She is all skin and bones and there is fear in her eyes when she looks at the rest of us,' says Laurence Vail.

‘If only that were all, but I see her getting up to all sorts of weird stuff,' Kay Boyle goes on.

‘What kind of stuff?'

‘She is always hunting desperately in her bag for something or other. She smokes like a chimney and never stops looking behind her, as if she were constantly being pursued. I've also noticed how she rubs her hands in a kind of nervous tic, but at the same time she often loses her temper.'

‘She talks so nervously and seems to be very insecure,' Marcel Duchamp adds.

‘Not all that insecure. Max doesn't leave her alone for so much as a minute,' Herbert Read defends her.

‘That's also the effect of the asylum. Max feels responsible,' insists Marcel.

‘Max loves her, you can see it from miles away,' Kay exclaims.

‘Max owes his life to Peggy. I don't think he's that much of an idiot he would consider a woman straight out of an asylum could be of more use to him than Peggy,' interrupts Laurence Vail.

‘It's just that madness evacuates someone's inner being and they become someone else,' is Herbert Read's opinion.

‘Leonora speaks in a different voice, it has a different rhythm, even the way she structures her sentences is different. It's as if her way of speaking has become very dense. Herbert and I were talking about it only last night,' concludes Laurence.

‘In any case, what's absolutely obvious is that she has put all her trust in the Mexican,' adds Kay Boyle.

‘Trust in the Mexican? That man has nothing whatsoever in common with her,' Duchamp alleges.

‘He has to have something in common with her, since she sleeps with him,' retorts Kay.

One morning, after bidding farewell to Renato, Leonora goes out alone. All of a sudden she sees a tall figure approaching, greeting her effusively:

‘Would you allow me to accompany you?'

The man is Herbert Read.

‘We met in London and you only had eyes for Ernst. Tell me, Leonora, what's the first thing you look for when you meet someone new?'

‘I suppose it has to be talent, and a voice that strikes me as out of the ordinary.'

‘Regardless of any scandal?'

‘Yes. To me Peggy Guggenheim and her crowd, for all their love of scandal, is preferable to the conventionalism of the whole British Empire!'

Read is persuaded that society will never succeed in understanding the artist, this ‘supreme egotist' condemned to love those who reject him. Art has nothing to do with either left or right wing, with the Communists or capitalists and, although they might seek to use an artist for their own ends, politicians will never succeed in adopting, overcoming or destroying it.

As they walk along, Read tells her that many Surrealists find their inspiration in nature, and look to it for fresh designs, as does Ernst with his forests. That is why they study the structures of minerals and vegetables, of biology and geometry. Max is a sage, passionate about astronomy, who investigates below and beyond the visible surface, to give his work a living and universal order.

‘So … Surrealism is inspired by nature?' she asks.

‘Of course. Tanguy once told me that while walking on the beach, he came across tiny marine organisms, and they gave his imagination a starting point for his next creative moment. Where do you derive your inspiration from?'

‘I don't quite know how to explain, it's something as physical as eating, sleeping and making love.'

‘And as for nature?'

‘Nature exists outside of me. My art is deep inside,' and she holds her hands over her belly.

‘Are you going to stay with Max?' he asks as solicitously as an elder brother.

Leonora assures him that she has finished with Max, yet she feels confused.

‘It seems to me this is like
The Comedy of Errors
,' Read replies.

‘Yes, you're right; Peggy is jealous of me and Max, even of Renato. We are living inside an absurd comedy, an operetta.'

‘Life is a surrealist adventure.'

Herbert Read makes a mockery of the bourgeois values of British society. From his youth, he made fun of the elite's pastimes, society's codes of behaviour, and the importance accorded to titles and honours.

Leonora listens to him devoutly. To her, he seems a wholly unique individual. She would love to say to him: ‘My mother gave me your book on Surrealism with the dust jacket designed by Max, and nothing would please me more than to be your friend.'

Among the crowd buzzing like flies around Peggy, Leonora feels most comfortable with the friendly, sensitive and thoughtful writer Kay Boyle, who interrogates her about her Mexican – as the group refer to him – and reassures her that he seems much more sensible than Max.

‘The court around Peggy is wholly destructive.'

‘There's nothing about her more destructive than her nose,' Leonora tells her.

To the Englishwoman, Peggy's nose is the ugliest in the world. Peggy herself had told her that hers was one of the very first cosmetic surgery operations undertaken in St. Louis, Missouri.

‘But, since nobody knows what her original nose looked like, there can be no means of comparison,' adds Laurence sarcastically.

When Peggy confesses her blunders and embarrassments she suddenly looks more attractive, but to have eternally to play the centre of attention at the party would make even
il Poverello –
St. Francis of Assisi – loathsome. Peggy's retinue is as phenomenal and repugnant as the courtesans who dress up buffoons between one caper and the next.

Max and Leonora separate from the group, so provoking the American woman's jealousy, and she confides in Kay:

‘I am certain that Max is still in love with her.'

‘Don't worry about it, you're the one he really needs.'

Leonora walks for hours at Max's side. They wander into churches, walk back and forth over the Plaza del Municipio and the Rua Augusta; with each step he returns to his old methods of seduction: no-one sees as he sees; no-one else understands how to look between the sun's rays; no-one else gives the moon a sunhat; no-one else makes crystal wine glasses sing; no-one else offers such a range of possibilities.

Max makes her a present of a notebook he's bought with Peggy's money. They sketch elbow to elbow, they show one another the results, and Max reverts to being a tender, blond Infant Jesus, his eyes wide with innocence.

Ernst doesn't let go of Carrington, night or day, rain or shine; he couldn't care less how much suffering it causes Peggy. He longs to be able to hypnotise Leonora to regard him as she used to. Never in his life has he felt so in love. Having once lost her means he is now insistent, neurotic, on the verge of hysteria.

Peggy drinks.

‘To me, Lisbon is Hell,' she confides in Kay Boyle. ‘Max doesn't even speak to me.'

Lisbon is one vast crowd they could disappear into it if they wished; but Max wants them to see him. Leonora, with her pale face and black hair, is his trophy: he won her like the blind swimmer, and is now about to recover her, before they set out across the Atlantic.

At noon, they eat together with the rest of the group, in an orgy of sardines and port, and Leonora is scared by what she hears. If she was supposed to have once been insane, her new friends appear to be revolving at a hundred and eighty kilometres an hour around a planet whose core is Max. Peggy recounts how Max grows jealous if she buys herself a dress, because he immediately wants to wear it. In Marseilles she had bought herself a suede jacket, upon which Max at once bought himself an identical one.

‘The shop owner was surprised and insisted it was designed for a woman, but then he agreed to cut a new piece of suede to Max's measurements.'

It was impossible for her to take her eyes off Max, for his look was that of an eagle, and his nose like that of a silver beak.

‘Do you know, Leonora,' Peggy says, ‘Max gave me his books, and among them was one with a dedication to you that reads like this: “For Leonora, royal, beautiful and nude.” I read
The Oval Lady
and
Pigeon Fly.
Utterly enchanting! I finished reading them in the train.'

If Leonora registers her words, she mentally erases them at once.

Peggy relates how she spent a whole night in the train with Max: ‘How old he looks when he's asleep, don't you think so, darling?'

On seeing Leonora's expression, Peggy changes her tune and tells her how she still wants to rescue Victor Brauner, the artist who lost an eye. Brauner was refused a visa because the quota of Romanians admitted into the United States was already filled. Leonora looks at Max, who keeps quiet.

Max's visa to the United States has expired, and getting it renewed entails spending days waiting outside the US Embassy. ‘Help! Help! Help!' Peggy waves her passport about her head and the officials clear a way for her. All powerful, she even manages to make fun of the police; not only is she an heiress, she is also the saviour of her present and future husbands. Djuna Barnes is still awaiting her passage in Paris.

Obtaining a visa is sheer hell, involving as it does assembling together a birth certificate, exit orders,
permis de séjour
, and some friends have nothing more to their names than an expired passport. Oh, the bureaucracy of it all! The friends eat seafood at the Leão d'Ouro to forget about it, where they run into Max and the English-woman, who hardly bothers even to greet Peggy.

A small fat blockage in her chest cavity obliges Leonora to be admitted to hospital for an operation.

Reclining on a white pillow, her black hair covers her shoulders and her alabaster arms give her a translucent aspect. The other patients, aware of her beauty, lean across to look at her. ‘She is a painting.' ‘Her mouth is so very red.' ‘Her eyes are blazing.' Even Peggy is impressed. Those enormous dark eyes below Leonora's thick eyebrows observe her with suspicion. The perfection of her nose, fine and slender, is arresting. She is so beautiful that Peggy turns on her heels and returns to her place at the hotel bar.

‘Bring me a double whisky,' she orders the barman. ‘On second thoughts, better to leave me the bottle.'

Max spends the whole day at Leonora's side and only bids her farewell when the Mexican arrives. Marcel Duchamp, Herbert Read and Laurence Vail visit her in the clinic. They all agree that Leonora is an apparition. ‘Max won't let go of her for a moment. He is crazy about her, only now do I realise how much he loves her. I never thought he was capable of loving with such intensity,' Herbert Read observes.