Leonora (37 page)

Leonora embraces challenges beyond the norm, her painting comes only from inside of herself, and she makes fun of the intricate system of social privilege and delights her listeners with a high sense of irony. The painter is a free woman, and James confuses delirium with creativity, witty remarks with ideas. He also shares in Leonora's Irish myths and so can enjoy her company even more than anyone else. In return, he introduces her to the wisdom of
The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
His one regret is that she wastes so much time looking after the baby. When he tries to have a conversation with her, Leonora continually warns him that she has to attend to Gaby, or take out the dog, or prepare dinner, or go into the city centre to purchase a canvas measuring precisely 75 by 40 centimetres.

Her house is bare of occasional tables, footstools and trinkets. She was very young when she broke her links with her past, and is determined that nothing at all will cross her. It would never occur to her to decorate the bathroom at Wimpole Street as James did when he commissioned Paul Nash to design it. Her creative impulses erased the past with a single brush stroke, and she excavated her own way forward like a miner in his coal shaft.

Leonora can discuss any topic with James, secure in the knowledge he understands what she is talking about. What's more, James is a seducer. Leonora is astonished at how much he knows about art. And as for James, his breath is taken away by the manner in which she pays attention to him, observing him with those intelligent eyes, fixed on whatever words fall from his lips. He wants to buy up her entire stock, including work she didn't paint herself. He spends hours in front of the easel and more often than not has a point when he makes an observation such as: ‘In my opinion, that figure would look better standing up.' Chiki would never dream of daring to give her any such advice. Leonora is superior to him and Chiki, overly modest, recognises her genius.

Edward James becomes a part of the family. He appears without warning, comes into the studio, examines the painting on the easel, opines that really the blue needs to be a stronger shade, and a few additional coats of red would work wonders for the people in the right-hand corner – or that, on the other hand, the addition of an animal would greatly enhance the bottom left-hand corner. The most important thing of all is to start giving each painting a title, writing it on to each canvas. Leonora consults him. No-one has ever done as much for her before.

‘Admirable, admirable! You are making my whole trip to Mexico worthwhile.'

‘What kind of a title do you think we ought to give this one?' Leonora asks. His influence is so obvious that she consults him even when she has her paintbrush in her hand. Even while she is painting, James stands at her side, almost without breathing.

What Leonora loves about him is his passion for her, he watches her with an immense curiosity, waiting for what she'll do or say next. He hangs on every word she says, storing them away one by one. Being able to hold a man within such a web of fascination is one more reason for her to consider that she's on the right track. For the first time since she came to Mexico, Leonora finds someone who gives her encouragement. Max always did things differently. Edward confirms that her art is for real, that Leonor Fini does not even come up to her ankles. He buys a few paintings from Remedios, and keeps Kati and José happily on board with projects for the future; but it is Leonora whom he considers the true artist.

James understands her, he is just as much of an eccentric as she is, he values her more than anyone else in Mexico, it's all down to her and her immense talent, a talent that also includes writing, for her short stories touch him to the core.

‘I too know what it is to descend into the hell of depression, Leonora,' he says, referring to her
Memories of Down Below.

Despite all that has happened to them, neither of them has ever flirted with death. Back in France, in 1937, Leonora heard that some Englishman named Edward James had bought a painting by Max Ernst –
Antipodes of the Landscape
– in the Mayor Gallery in London's Cork Street. This was the first time she had heard of him, when she still had no notion of what a patron might signify. Her only reference point was her image of Peggy Guggenheim, surrounded by dogs, buying the work of another dog, albeit one on two legs, with his tongue hanging out, and with much more of the look of a lapdog about him.

Her protector tells her that her painting is spontaneous and unconscious.

‘It's as if your soul conserved the scenes of previous incarnations within it. They are not in the least literary paintings, you have distilled them deep within the cellars of your libido.'

Leonora is apprehensive, and keeps having recourse to him and his refined judgements. Time after time he enlightens her: New York is the market, and James holds the key to it. Which gallery should she first go to? Leonora defends her work like a lioness, as if it were her newborn. Chiki photographs each canvas, their whole life revolves around the painting on the easel before her, the whole household knows that she is the breadwinner. Chiki does not raise his voice, he is prevented by natural humility and an old-fashioned courtesy, which derive from the moment when his mother abandoned him in the orphanage.

Her shoes are too large for Chiki to fill.

James' fascination with Leonora is such that in 1948 he writes an 8-page essay on her work, promotes her heavily, and in less than two months is organising her first show in New York.

‘I can't possibly attend the opening. My life is taken up with nappies and feeding bottles.'

The English heir leads a sensational lifestyle and when he travels to take care of his investments, his letters resemble his way of life and invoke creativity. He has money because he knows how to make money; he is successful because he is born to triumph.

‘Which gallery do you prefer, Leonora? I advise you to go to Pierre Matisse, you know he is Henri Matisse's son, but there's also a gallery owned by Alexander Iolas. I know them both, I can talk to them and organise a one-man show for you there. I am also in with the dealers – Kirk Askew, Karl Nierendorf, Julien Levy; but I think that the Matisse is the best gallery for you, and if you're happy with that I'll call Pierre.'

Maurie arrives in Mexico and is amazed at how well Leonora attends to her baby.

‘You look as if you've done nothing else your whole life long. Aren't you going to have him baptised?' she asks.

‘No. He's a Jew.'

‘But you're not.'

‘No I'm not, but I have always known that I, as a Celt and a Saxon Aryan, have undergone all my privations in the desire to avenge the Jews for the persecutions to which they have been subjected. Even if I
were
one, I would still not impose my religion on any child of mine.'

Leonora had never felt as healthy as she does now. Her painting is a celebration of the birth of Harold Gabriel, whom everyone calls Gaby. She paints in the midst of sleepless nights, nappies and visits to the paediatrician. She paints with fervour, for at any second she may need to stop and attend to her baby. It's a natural instinct to scoop him up in her arms, just as natural as painting. Scarcely has the newborn closed his eyes than his mother runs to the easel to paint
Night Nursery Everything
and
Kitchen Garden of the Eyot.

For the first time ever, Maurie asks her about the images in her paintings.

‘They just arrive and I don't know where they come from,' she replies.

‘Maybe they come from your grandmother Monica Mary, do you think?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Or might they surface from your unconscious, perhaps?'

‘I've no idea what part of me they emerge from, nor why I do what I do.'

‘It's something you have in your blood. You inherited it from me. I myself used to paint.'

Leonora tries to explain: ‘See, Mummy, the figures appear on the canvas all by themselves.'

Leonora would prefer Edward James to return sooner from England, for she misses his ongoing admiration; she writes to him as
Darling
or
Dearest
, and hopes to introduce him to her mother, so she can observe a different member of the English upper class who thinks as she does. From London, Paris and Rome, his letters make good all her weariness. And he can be even more affectionate by letter than he is in person. She sees her connection to this man as a gift: she may freely ask him: ‘What colour next?'; ‘What's still missing?'; ‘What is there that's too much in all this?' If he suggests a different background would work better, she is always inclined to set about changing it. Now she is agonising over what price to ask for her paintings. Edward James assures her that whenever she paints, every inaccessible region of her brain finds its way to the surface and that's why he too would love to paint. She catches him one afternoon, paintbrush in hand, in front of her
Portrait of the Late Mrs. Partridge
and she erupts in a rage:

‘How dare you?'

‘I only wanted to help you.'

And he puts down the paintbrush, humiliated.

A young deer-like Oaxacan girl with tightly bound plaits rocks the cradle while Leonora paints.

‘In Mexico the nanny is better than the child's own mother,' Maurie now recognises, as she plonks an avocado plant down in the corridor. ‘The Mexican sun is too hot for an Irishwoman.'

She wears a wide-brimmed sunhat and is badly affected by the altitude. She regards Chiki with open curiosity.

‘This silent man who never speaks a word to me has been good for you. I thought you wouldn't have children; now I can see you've settled down.'

Sometimes Maurie gets up in the middle of the night to rock her grandson in his cradle.

‘You look like Nanny Carrington when she rocked Arthur in his crib.'

‘She is still alive and wants to see you. When are you coming to England?'

‘When Gaby is a little older.'

Maurie never touches on any theme from the past: she doesn't ask after the house in St. Martin d'Ardèche, nor about the flat on the Rue Jacob. Nor, above all, does she ever mention the asylum in Santander. It would be in the worst taste to raise such topics. What would be the point? What is still more unusual is that she has only thought about Harold very occasionally since his death in January 1946. All was gone with the wind on its coal-black wings. Nor can she bring herself to utter Ernst's name, although on one occasion Leonora comments, taking her eyes briefly off the painting on her easel:

‘Max would like this one. What do my brothers do with the money my father left them?'

‘They drink.'

Maurie buries the past beneath the green lawns of Hazelwood to help it germinate. This may well be the reason for her peaches-and-cream complexion, her shining eyes, the appetite with which she attacks the cheese buns, and the tenderness with which she cuddles her grandson. She only ever sees Chiki at meal times. In addition, Maurie never indulges herself by imagining what might become of her daughter in this tropical country where the people go around barefoot. The ferocity with which Leonora looks after her son surprises her. Maurie was never nearly as close to hers. Others took on that responsibility. Leonora checks the temperature of the bathwater with her elbow, before bathing the child, and gets him dressed with an equally surprising dexterity.

‘Wherever did you learn to do that?'

‘From my maternal instinct.'

There is water on the boil to make tea at any and every hour of the day. Leonora introduces papaya to the breakfast table, and Maurie accepts it. ‘It helps with your digestion, you know.' Mexican oranges prove just about as good as Valencian ones. Leonora takes the time to fry up the potatoes, and – above all – to make scrambled eggs with chile, Mexican-style.

‘I have never tasted anything so delicious. Starting the day with a Mexican breakfast is like manna from Heaven.'

‘From the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, Mama.'

‘How can you pronounce such names?'

Leonora has a whole quiver filled with unpronounceable names, all noted down in an exercise book.

A year later, her second son, Pablo, is born. Leonora paints
Chiki, ton pays.
She revisualises the journey her husband has taken from Hungary to France, through Spain and on to Mexico. She again paints a carriage – red this time – red being the colour chosen by the two lovers, advancing down a tunnel, preceded by a jaguar skin, a creature of Mexican mythology. Leonora gives feet to Chiki and claws to herself.

Leonora is flourishing, the perfect model of maternity, and has never been as happy as now. The children appear out of corners, take over the whole house, clambering up the stairs, leaving the doors ajar, and in every window there's a smiling face smeared with chocolate, in every smile milk teeth beginning to protrude.

43

THE ATLANTIC IN SIGHT

C
ELTIC MYTHOLOGY IS LEONORA'S
one religion. Mexico enters her system through her pores, despite the fact that its indigenous peoples live inside a closed world, whose secret even they forgot centuries ago.

Chiki also inhabits a secret place. Mexico is cruel and full of fury. To be a foreigner there carries a stigma.

Within the home, Leonora's English past holds sway. Chiki's Hungarian homeland is relegated to the darkroom. At lunch and again at supper time, the family discuss problems that have arisen at school and try to resolve them between the four of them. They speak French because Chiki detests English; Leonora insists the boys learn it anyway. ‘Their grandmother is waiting for them in Hazelwood, how on earth will they converse with her otherwise?'

Chiki confronts Gaby.

‘You have to learn to adapt to circumstances.'

‘That's impossible. I didn't choose this world and I can't make head or tail of it!'

Leonora takes his side. Gaby finds maths difficult, and Chiki sits with him until the homework is done.

Chiki fears for his children and is more worried than any paterfamilias back in Leonora's native Lancashire. Some don't even bother to check their sons' homework. But Chiki infects his sons with his nervousness.

‘You no longer have my permission to go to the cinema today.'

‘In any case, it is Mama who is going to take us,' Gaby boasts.

In the Cine de las Américas they always show films of cops and robbers. Every bullet makes her jump.

‘Don't be afraid, Ma, I'll protect you your whole life long,' Gaby assures her. Leonora stoically puts up with Westerns with their cowboys and smoking guns, their wagons under attack from Indians who gallop down from the high Sierra between volleys of gunfire. The sound of their horses' hooves stimulates her memories.

‘I used to gallop better than that,' she tells Gaby.

‘And did you save the young woman?'

‘If I couldn't even save myself, how could I possibly save any other young woman?'

Afterwards they drink malted chocolate or strawberry milk-shakes or order banana splits while Leonora complains of the poor quality of her cup of tea.

When they get home, Chiki reads aloud to them from thick volumes published by an imprint called
Labor.
If they are not asleep by the end, he selects a religious text from the bookshelf, guaranteed to knock them out.

Pablo paints a watercolour that Leonora praises to the skies, and pins it to the wall with a thumb tack.

‘Ma, last night the girl I painted leapt out of the picture frame.'

‘No need to worry, the ones I paint often escape, too. Yesterday I dressed an old woman in my skirt and jumper, and she turned up at dawn to give me back my clothes: “I have now divested myself of you,” she told me.'

Leonora still suffers grave crises. ‘I can no longer draw,' she complains and José Horna takes her to Cuernavaca to get some fresh air and be among trees.

Leonora, Chiki, Gaby and Pablo have no other family than their fellow refugees. Kati Horna is the daughter of a Hungarian banker and lost a sister when she was killed back home. Chiki has no reason at all to return to Budapest.

Increasingly desperate, Benjamin Péret rails at Remedios:

‘How can you live without even thinking of returning to Europe? Here I feel as if I am dead.'

‘Then leave. There is nothing and no-one to keep you here,' replies Remedios impatiently.

‘Nothing at all, obviously, apart from the lack of money,' replies Péret ironically.

Péret's Surrealist friends in Paris stump up the cost of his fare. His departure comes as a relief to Remedios. A letter from the south helps her decide to move on to Venezuela where her brother, Rodrigo, lives together with his latest lover, Jean Nicolle, who is a pilot. ‘…I have a post at the Ministry of Health in Caracas … It will be a pleasure to share my free time with you both.'

Remedios bids Leonora farewell and promises to write: ‘I don't know how you even get up the steps on to a plane, Remedios. It always gives me a panic attack.'

In Caracas, Bayer – the same pharmaceutical company as before – employ Remedios to create illustrations of their analgesics. They suggest she should take inspiration from methods of medieval torture. Remedios paints women stabbed and chained to a rack covered in nails, their faces grimacing with pain.

‘All I need to do is to look at your illustration for
Rheumatism, Lumbago and Sciatica
. My whole body starts aching and I'm dying for one of those pills,' jokes her brother, Rodrigo.

Leonora realises that as the time goes by, her anguish is starting to return with ever greater force. She struggles to maintain her balance, but there are mornings when she has no desire even to rise from her bed. The sound of Gaby and Pablo's voices is the one string that leads her out of the labyrinth. Then the painting on her easel summons her.

‘It could well be that your anguish is what makes you paint. Have respect for that anguish,' Chiki suggests, in between fetching and carrying their sons.

‘And if I were to send it all to the devil and go back to England?' muses Leonora. ‘What would that mean? Worse still, does this “all” matter so much alongside that of being in exile?'

‘We do nothing for ourselves, it all happens to us,' Chiki says to her.

‘You're the one who does nothing, and I'm sick of it,' she answers.

They don't speak to one another for several days.

‘There are these times when I feel like an uprooted plant. Max was right, I am “the lover of the wind”,' she writes to Remedios.

‘I know all about malaria, I'm doing loads of drawings for the Bayer laboratories, I feel calm and have work, and no insect holds any more secrets for me, and that means that I am dedicating my time to entomology …' replies Remedios. ‘I think I'll soon be back in Mexico.'

‘How long two years can be!' Leonora laments.

In the midst of all this, she paints
Crookhey Hall, Seraputina's Rehearsal
,
Kandy Murasaki
,
Plain Chant
and
Nine, Nine, Nine.

‘I've already had my first exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, and Edward James is enchanted by whatever I paint,' she writes back proudly.

The births of her two boys and the interventions of Edward James both have a great deal to do with her productivity. When Remedios returns to Mexico in 1949, Leonora's paintings astonish her.

‘So all the time I was busy doing illustrations for medical catalogues, you created this miracle? You have progressed so incredibly far!'

The women resume their friendship; they complement each other perfectly. The two heads of tousled hair, one red and the other jet black, promenade up and down Avenida Álvaro Obregón, and into the Sala Margolín, the only shop in town that specialises in classical music. Walter Gruen, now widowed, surprises Remedios with his knowledge.

‘I like Stravinsky a lot too,' Walter comments.

‘I know Stravinsky, he has been to my house; he never wants to talk about music, only about his sinusitis,' answers Leonora.

‘Ravel is my favourite,' interrupts Remedios.

‘I'm not sure why, but I've always had the impression that Ravel was going deaf while he was composing his
Bolero
, and that's the reason why it starts out so muted and ends up in the loudest of fanfares,' Leonora interrupts back.

Her comments irritate Walter, while Remedios' seduce him. The old Austrian and his wife Clara were members of the circle that surrounds Remedios, and he still remembers the occasion when one night Leonora served her guests caviar on a silver-plated platter and as Benjamin Péret was helping himself to a full ladle, the Englishwoman confessed:

‘It's tapioca we dyed with squid ink; it tastes just the same, though, doesn't it?'

Gruen relished the occasion, but Péret was less pleased about it.

Remedios finds an ocean of peace in the company of the old widower. The idea of becoming a ‘serious' artist, as he is proposing, is a temptation. ‘You paint and I'll provide.' The couple set up home together in a flat on Avenida Álvaro Obregón.

Now that Remedios is no longer obliged to illustrate laboratory catalogues she can paint
Woman or the Spirit of the Night
,
Portrait of Baron Angelo Milfastos as a Child
and
The Sorceress.
The year she goes to live with Walter, she completes
Premonition
: three women dressed in white, the Three Fates, running away from a giant spindle whose white threads are attached to their tunics.

Leonora and Remedios confer with each other. Remedios is in love with Piranesi, Goya, Antonello da Messina and Bosch. Where Leonora has her Celtic universe, Remedios constructs her own, beginning with the Garden of Delights, and so with eggs and with minotaurs. Like Leonora, she seeks out the alchemist Nicolas Flamel, along with Basilio Flamentin, Fulcanelli and other occult scholars. Her canvases on the easel are linked to Leonora's:

‘I am almost finished with
And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur
, and it's the first time I've used gold leaf for the faces. If I make the smallest mistake, I lose a whole sheet of gold leaf,' she explains to Leonora.

If Leonora is working late in the afternoon, the children arrive and press their faces to the window panes of her studio. Then Leonora calls out to Chiki:

‘What I am doing now requires extreme care, thought and dexterity. The process is a very delicate one, so much so it makes me nervous. Take them out for a walk.'

The first thing she does on finishing her painting is to go round to Remedios' house:

‘How wonderful it is that you've come round, Leonora, since I wanted to tell you that last night I dreamt I was bathing a light-coloured cat in the sink; you were the cat, Leonora, and were wearing a yellow coat that needed a jolly good wipe down!'

‘And then?'

‘Then nothing. I woke up.'

‘Your dream suggests to me that I need to make changes in my life. The truth is I can't put up with Chiki any more.'

‘It's more as if it's Chiki who is the pet cat,' Remedios counters.

Walter comes in, casts an inquisitive glance around the room, and vanishes again. No sooner has he shut the door than Leonora asks:

‘Doesn't he irritate you? For me he really is a bore.'

Remedios celebrates her forty-fifth birthday in the flat on Avenida Álvaro Obregón, now rapidly getting too small, and never more so than when employees at the Sala Margolín import six
mariachi
musicians from the Plaza Garibaldi. Their sombreros hem the guests in, the singers have to prop their guitars on their paunches, and Leonora asks them to repeat
Las Mañanitas
– the birthday song – because she's so fond of the line
cantaron los ruiseñores,
‘the nightingales sang'.

One of the singers leaves his wide sombrero on a chair, and Pablo empties half a bottle of tequila into the crown.

‘So, why does he leave it lying around any old where? A sombrero that big holds a lot of tequila,' Leonora invariably defends her son.

To Leonora, whatever her sons do is right.

Kati and José Horna sing along with the
mariachis
; their daughter Norah doesn't let go of Pablo for an instant and unties her plaits.

‘Kati come over here, take some photos,' Chiki asks her.

‘I swear, I can't stand the sound of
La Cansancia
.'

‘You are quite correct to make weariness – which should be
el cansancio
– a feminine noun,' José announces with a smile.

Certain Spanish words are unique to the Hungarian Kati. She calls her room, which in Spanish is
camara
, her ‘camera'.

The next year, Remedios paints the
Portrait of Walter Gruen.
She hardly ever leaves her easel and hardly ever sleeps. She carries on with
Dressing Table Mirror
and
Space-time Weaving.

‘Listen, Remedios, why do you work at such a pace? What's the rush?'

Leonora goes on to paint
Sacrifice to Minos
; she makes scarcely any progress because every time she goes to paint the immolation of the bull, she recalls the
corrida
she went to with Leduc and Gaona.

‘I didn't want to ruin my Bull of Minos with the body of a man.'

Yet Leonora not only completes her
Sacrifice to Minos
but also paints
Sidhes, the White People of Dana Tuatha Dé Danann.
Gathered around a table, the lunar
sidhes
are celebrating the wedding of Daghda and the Great Goddess. They dance in a ring around the horse venerated for his speed and bravura. They are all beings of light.

Leonora recounts some of her earliest memories. ‘When we used to go out to walk in the park with my grandmother, Mary Monica Moorhead, she would pause and build stone circles to the memory of the
sidhes
.'