Leonora (35 page)

‘I was told to look for lodgings in the Latin Quarter,' Chiki went on. ‘Do you know the Hôtel Lhomond, between the Panthéon and the Rue Mouffetard? I didn't have a sou and Bandi paid for our first couple of nights there. “If we find ourselves dying of hunger, we can always steal a baguette.” “I suggest we go fishing in the Seine.” “No, Csiki, there's nothing to fish in the Seine. Not to mention that neither of us know how to catch fish.” “It's just a matter of patience.”

‘We managed to pull out two tiny fishes that tasted of mud. On the third night, we moved into one of those studios of the Rue Froidevaux, already crammed with Hungarians. With a baguette and several boxes of cigarettes, we managed to survive starvation. Bandi was sure that bread was most filling, but I continued eating the
pommes frites.
'

Leonora drinks in his words. Chiki seduces her, transporting her back to Paris, offering her recipes for survival.

‘Esdras Biro, a Hungarian, recommended eating potato peelings. They taste better than tobacco and are good for calming one's nerves, he told us.'

‘I adore eating potato skins,' Leonora smiles broadly.

‘We were not only young, but also idealists. Bandi dreamt of buying himself a 35mm Leica. In Hungary, Lasjos Kassak had taught us how to take photos and told us: “Through your lens you can observe social injustice on a grand scale.” Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine found all the pain in the world within range of their camera.

‘Bandi always had plenty of self-confidence while I am introverted and insecure. Women always clustered around him, whereas I was always paralysed with shyness in their company. At night, Bandi snored as loud as a rasping sawmill while it always took me hours to get off to sleep. He would reproach me with: “Csiki, don't always walk so close behind me, it makes you seem like my pet dog.” I think he believed I lacked character; the truth was that I lacked the self-assurance he enjoyed in such abundance. He often went out alone. One day he came back fired with enthusiasm from meeting up with a Polish photographer, Dawid Szymin, later to become known as “Chim” Seymour, and told me: “I had a conversation with the most intelligent and amusing man I've met in a long time. He has an unusually piercing look in his eyes, half-hidden by some thick glasses. He has invited me out to eat and I asked him if you might come along too.” To the horror of both of the others, instead of ordering a proper meal, I ordered bog-standard French fries, lifting them to my lips one at a time with my fingers, while the two of them became increasingly impassioned in their conversation with one another. From that moment on, I felt replaced. “Now I have found a truly stimulating companion!” Bandi announced.'

Leonora found it flattering to become Chiki's confidante. ‘How well he can express his emotions!'

‘Bandi and Chim joined forces with a slim young man with a tall forehead. His name was Henri Cartier-Bresson. The trio would meet up at the Dôme in Montparnasse. “You want to come along?” Bandi used to ask. And I always refused. Eating alone is hateful. “Why isn't your friend here too, that one who goes everywhere with you?” the café owner used to ask me, a woman so friendly that I could so easily have fallen in love with her.'

Before Leonora had time to ask him whether he had become involved with this café owner, Chiki continued:

‘The worst possible thing that could happen did so when his German girlfriend, Gerta Pohorylle, first appeared. Bandi dedicated every night to being with her. “What became of your friend, the one with the velvet eyes?” the café owner asked me and I felt even more lonely. Esdras Biro, who was a wise Hungarian, advised me that: “Csiki, you need to find yourself a woman who can help you put on the calories. Your friend and his lover only leave their bed when they need either to eat or to urinate.”'

Leonora found the words ‘to urinate' as objectionable in French as in Spanish.

‘One afternoon, Bandi announced: “From today onwards, I am Robert Capa and Gerta is Gerda Taro. We are an American photographer with two heads, one male and one female, a triumphant man of the world. This formula is guaranteed to open a great many doors for us. The first thing I need to do is to get rid of this leather jacket. The second is to go to the hairdresser. Do what I'm doing, change your name and shake the moths from your clothes.”'

‘Did you change your name?' asked Leonora.

‘No, I kept mine. My mother's words still echoed in my ears: “You too are a Jew, and don't you ever forget it.” For a Jew, to change your name is to alter your essence, and something in you dies. Sarai becomes Sara; Saul turns into Paul; and I want to go on being Imre Emerico Weisz until I draw my last breath. The irony,' and he smiled, ‘is that throughout my childhood I was a number in Hungary and in Mexico they call me Chiki, a nickname that belittles me.'

Leonora feels how much she admires him, without the least shred of doubt.

‘On 18th July 1936 the Spanish Civil War erupted. The whole land seemed transformed, a secular State was about to take over, there would be work for all and the orphanages where children became numbers would be shut down. “We're off to Spain with Chim,” Capa told me. Walking up the Gran Vía in Madrid something incredible happened to Capa: he bumped into Kati, his childhood friend, the love of his whole life, and he threw himself at her: “Kati, Katherine Deutsch!” He lifted her up in his arms, and squeezed her so tightly that she nearly succeeded in fighting him off. “Why do you always think that just because you're handsome, everything is permitted you?” “What are you doing here?” “I'm working for the magazines
Umbral
and
Tierra y Libertad
. I was at the Aragon Front and have been sent on here.” “Csiki, let me introduce you to Kati Deutsch, whom I have fancied madly ever since I was fifteen years old. She escaped me following the burning of the Reichstag, since it was she who lit the match. So, as you can see, this woman is a menace,”' Chiki explains to Leonora.

‘Capa, Taro and Chim all went to the Front. Kati stayed behind and caught images of suffering that the rest of the photo-journalists missed. While they rushed about, she took an image of a woman standing up as she breastfed her child in the midst of the rubble of ruined buildings, and made a series on newborn babies lined up on a kitchen table. It was three days before Capa registered that there was nobody there he could trust to develop his films, and he asked me to go back to Paris. “There you are indispensable, whereas here there's a whole crowd of us.”'

‘So Chiki, the truth is you hardly know Spain at all,' Leonora comments.

‘No, I don't. What I asked Bandi – now Capa – was to be able to say goodbye to Kati, and have the chance to tell her that her photos were excellent. “Take care of yourself, and we'll meet up again. Do you know what, Kati? Thanks to your pictures, I feel myself drawing closer to your fellow anarchists.” And she asked me: “What about Gerda Taro? Bandi is a seducer and women always fall at his feet. His mother told me that even when he was a baby he was always grinning at young women.”

‘So in the end, Capa, Taro and Chim Seymour, as well as Maurice Oshron, all sent their copy back from Spain to Paris, and I would print it up in a darkroom, and archive all the negatives. Capa's photos got mixed up with Gerda's; Chim's with Maurice Oshron's. Yet the bye-line was always Capa's and, in those days, the bye-line was the last thing anyone ever thought about. Anyone could die in the blink of an eye, or a click of the shutter.

‘There were two more photo magazines as well as
Vu
and they were called
Regardes
and
Voilà.
This multiplied our outlets – and the amount of work involved. I had never sought to stand out. On the contrary, I had learnt that the best way of surviving was to keep well away from the winners. I kept all 127 rolls of negatives in small compartments inside three cardboard boxes with little niches inside, like a honeycomb. Each one was marked with a sticky label giving the place, date and subject. There must have been well over three thousand negs that I guarded like the apple of my eye.'

Leonora considers how Csiki's capacity for devotion has no limits.

‘Ripped apart by a Republican tank, Gerda Taro died at Brunete, her sole weapon the camera over her shoulder. Robert Capa never stopped blaming himself: “It should have been me who died.” I just carried on developing, printing, archiving, hoarding, and I thought about Kati, so small, there all alone – or perhaps not so very alone – for a twenty-year-old woman can make men turn and stare, and all the more so when they feel surrounded by death. Inside his rolls of negatives, Capa hid the message: “Things are going really badly.”'

‘It's unbelievable that you have lived through so much!' Leonora cries out in distress.

‘You know the rest, Leonora. The Republicans lost the war, and the chaos at the end of it all was terrifying. Chim Seymour caught a ship out to Mexico, he came out aboard the
Sinaia
. And Esdras Biro, despite his advanced years, was thrown into prison. The day that Capa left for New York, I took a train down to Marseilles, with all the negatives in my suitcase. “If I can't save myself, at least I can preserve the evidence that we put up a fight.” Once at Marseilles, I handed over the case to Francisco Aguilar González, a Mexican diplomat. “Your country is the only one to support us Republicans,” I insisted. Soon afterwards, still in Marseilles, the French Vichy regime deported me to a concentration camp.

‘At Casablanca I set sail for Mexico on board the Portuguese ship
Serpa Pinto
, the same one that Remedios and Benjamin went out on. I had no passport, no money, and from Veracruz I travelled on to Mexico City by train only because a Spaniard bought me a ticket.'

Chiki sits there in silence.

‘Good. Well, I think that's all.'

Leonora looks at him in admiration: Chiki is a Stoic. To place her trust in him seems the most natural thing in the world. How utterly different to her, fleeing Lisbon on the arm of a handsome diplomat! Her situation was vastly privileged compared to his. His simplicity overwhelms her. She looks at him as if he were a mythic character. A man of that degree of integrity is what she needs, a man with the same European roots as her, someone who has suffered as she has.

‘On top of all that, he's good-looking,' Kati tells her with a smile.

Leonora exaggerates everything she says about him, inventing her own version of Chiki.

When Renato tells her it is now time to leave the party, Leonora returns as if from another world, and Remedios notices the gleam in her eye. It's possible that Renato too might have noticed it. From that first conversation onwards, every night before she falls asleep, Leonora sees the Hungarian's face before her eyes, and his voice echoes deep inside her head.

41

OF NEEDLES AND THREAD

I
N MEXICO, LEONORA GOES ABOUT UNNOTICED
, even more so now she is at Chiki's side. Nobody had turned a hair on the busy streets of New York either; here, when they see her, they lower their gaze. They might even timorously step aside.

Her new suitor collects her from the Calle Artes and, since neither of them have any money, they go out walking together with the dogs, something that Renato would never do. Tall, slender and with a large nose, Chiki's wide smile never fails to comfort her. He must be the most attentive man on earth.

There is something inherently defenceless and modest about the way he looks. Just like the Mexicans they pass in the street, it seems as if he's apologising for his very existence. Leonora forgets all about the straw hat she bought on the market to protect her face from the glare and confronts the sun, extending her arms as she does so. ‘It won't matter. When I was a girl in the convent school, I stopped the sun in its tracks, and today I'll do it again.' They talk in French, or walk on in silence down the Avenida Álvaro Obregón, which seems to them the most Parisian of all the avenues in Mexico City. Leonora issues orders: ‘Stop'; ‘Go'; ‘Good boy'; ‘Good girl' and the dogs look back over their shoulders at her in gratitude. The photographer Semo had given Chiki a camera, which he now wears slung around his neck.

He learns Spanish faster than Leonora, because students and young lovers ambling along the avenues keep stopping and asking him: ‘Please can you take our photo?' or ‘Where do you come from?' before pausing to chat with him.

Since almost no-one can speak Czech, Polish, Hungarian or Russian, Slavs are bound to have to learn new languages, and within three months Chiki can make himself understood considerably better than Leonora.

Meeting up with him in the afternoons makes life more bearable. Plus there is the fact that Chiki regards her with something approaching veneration.

Leonora is no longer affected by the whirlpool of appointments and excursions revolving around Renato. The less she sees of him, the better off she is.

‘I would love to fly through the window mounted on a white horse.'

‘So now you have found yourself a Hungarian mount, haven't you?'

‘Yes. I have more in common with him than I do with you.'

‘And is that lowlife going to help you to paint?'

‘I don't know.'

‘The only things that struck me about him are his bloodshot eyes and his equally red nose.'

‘He knows André Breton.'

‘Well fancy that! Some recommendation!'

‘He has suffered enormously.'

‘That's no kind of reason to get married.'

‘I have suffered a lot myself.'

‘Oh no, now you're becoming a pain in the balls, it's high time you stopped repeating that same tired old story.'

‘I don't want to live with you any more.'

‘As far as I know, this is the only floor you have to sleep on.'

‘I've already spoken to Elsie Escobedo and she has invited me to stay at her house.'

‘You're crazy! Where on earth are you going to leave your animals?'

‘I shall take them with me.'

‘Leonora, I can't leave my job or we'd both die of hunger, you need to pull your weight.'

‘Yes, I shall pull my weight by getting myself out of here!'

Renato goes out, slamming the door as he does so, and Leonora packs up her case, her dogs and her cat, and Don Mazarino's cage, closing the door behind her. It is over now, for certain. The only creature she leaves behind is Pete, for she intuits that Renato loves him, so as she leaves, she bids him farewell saying: ‘You belong here in this house.'

‘If only there were enough space here in the Gabino Barreda, I'd invite you to stay. But there's scarcely enough room even for me and Benjamin,' Remedios Varo tells her. ‘You can leave Kitty here with the rest of my cats, if you like'.

‘I'll still come to visit Gabino Barreda.'

Elsie shows her to her room in the house on the Calle Durango. ‘Here in this house we all love you.'

That afternoon, Leonora sews a wardrobe of clothes for José Horna's puppets. One night she slip-stitches a white hospital overall, and can be heard talking aloud in Dr. Luis Morales' voice.

She runs into the master bedroom, and arrives screaming at the bed of the sleeping Elsie and Manuel Escobedo.

‘Please stop shaking and crying, Manuel has to get up early for work tomorrow morning.'

‘May I light up a cigarette?'

‘Not in bed, no,' Manuel Escobedo answers, increasingly annoyed.

The next night, Leonora again appears in the doorway, then jumps on top of the wardrobe.

‘Down the corridor, in my room, Dr. Luis Morales is there with a syringe filled with Cardiazol in his hand ready to inject me!'

Elsie calms her down, and Manuel Escobedo gets used to finding cigarette butts throughout the house, not to mention the nocturnal visits that interrupt his night's sleep.

‘Leonora, it would be a good move for you to visit a psychoanalyst,' Elsie advises.

‘Is that very expensive?'

‘It can be worth every
centavo
.'

‘I have my very own psychoanalyst inside me, and can hear their voice night and day.'

‘It doesn't seem like it's having that good an effect. We had better go and look for another. In the meantime, rather than listen to that maddening voice, start reading again. Or are you unable to read at the moment?'

‘Yes, I can from time to time. But I feel there's a crowd of people inside me, I'm not just a single person. My whole body is like a radio, it receives and emits messages. Certain frequencies just don't get through. No doubt the mad voice only hears one radio wave.'

‘What you most need is to get out of yourself and find a job to do. Let's think about it: we all have our own responsibilities in this house. The dogs are barking in the garden, and the bird is singing in its cage.'

Leonora is drawn to the old-fashioned English that Miguel speaks. He is the sixteen-year-old son of the Escobedo household, and he follows her from the living to the dining room to interrogate her.

Leonora assures him: ‘I am your psychiatrist.'

‘Since brevity is the soul of wit. And tediousness, the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief. You are mad, good madam,' Miguel answers, paraphrasing
Hamlet
.

The Ojo Caliente, country ranch of the Escobedo family, is an oasis. Catherine Yarrow also paints. She decides to do the portrait of a stable lad, whom she orders to strip naked in the yard. He takes offence. Manuel's mother starts wailing to the heavens on high.

‘The creative initiatives assumed by your compatriots know no limits, it would seem,' Manuel tells Elsie.

‘Indeed. We live in a Golden Age and we shall put on
The Madwoman of Chaillot
by Jean Giraudoux.'

‘And who will play the Madwoman?'

‘I shall. Leonora is creating a hat for me with a swan on top, and is designing a wardrobe of new costumes for Remedios to run up, because she's the only one of us with a sewing machine. She is the most phenomenal fashion designer!'

Elsie invites Leonora to Acapulco, to what at the time is the only hotel on the bay: it's called
El Papagayo
, meaning the Parrot. Leonora reads stretched out on the sand in front of the hotel. Her head of black curly hair is seen as a challenge, and the holiday-makers turn and stare. ‘Look, a real mermaid.' Among those who come up to her is an Englishman called Edward James, who finds her stiff and haughty. She is, however, distinguished by her ingenuity, wit, and her critical sensibility. Elsie is equally sharp and makes fun of the British stiff upper lip. Leonora responds with lofty superiority, and when conversation is resumed she takes herself off alone to read. Whenever anyone asks her something, she replies in monosyllables.

‘You should take a look at her paintings,' Elsie advises Edward.

‘This arrogant Englishwoman can paint?'

‘Yes, and very well too.'

At lunch time, Edward James sits down next to Leonora, and Miguel Escobedo asks Edward about his collection.

‘I don't have a collection. I've just bought up pictures painted by young unknown artists. Some of them have become famous, but what they needed at the time when I bought their work was financial and moral breathing space.'

Leonora takes note of the fact that, along with sharing a nationality, they have in common the habits of their privileged social class.

Elsie's personality gives Leonora back her adolescence. She is a woman of character, cast in the same mould as Ursula Goldfinger, Stella Snead and Catherine Yarrow. In other words, they form a group of women who know what to do with their lives. Sometimes Leonora irritates Elsie, and then Catherine takes her off, an echo of her indomitable behaviour when she rescued Leonora during the war.

‘I have the soul of a psychoanalyst, and I know how to manage any kind of a situation. I calmed her down in St. Martin d'Ardèche; and again in Madrid; so I can help to stabilise her in Mexico.'

At the end of her first therapy session, Catherine tells Elsie:

‘Leonora is leaving Renato. Chiki, who has been living in a shed at the bottom of the garden belonging to that anarchist Ricardo Mestre, has found a flat for them.'

Elsie is worried. ‘Do you think that Weisz can manage a woman with such a temperament and so much talent?'

‘There's no other option any more. Leonora is pregnant.'

That night, Leonora herself goes up to Elsie: ‘I am going to have a baby.'

‘Don't worry, it will do you good. I know: I've got two.'