Leonora (40 page)

They all nod solemnly together.

That year, eighteen thousand orchids are killed by frost.

47

THE WEIGHT OF EXILE

W
ALKING DOWN AVENIDA ÁLVARO OBREGÓN
and sipping tea deep within the warm grotto of her dark kitchen evokes for Leonora the flavour of London. When she emerges for her afternoon walk in the rainy season, the scent of freshly mown grass transports her back to Hazelwood.

If living one's life is hard work, maybe that is a reason why so many exiles regard having recourse to a spiritual guide – whether a guru, a psychiatrist, or a father figure – as a basic necessity. Nostalgia for a land left behind can poison one's whole system.

‘Do you identify with that line of maguey cacti advancing across the Mexican plains like a green army, Leonora?' Remedios asks her.

‘What I mostly identify with is tequila.'

Even now, she is not acclimatised to the noisy shouting that greets Independence Day every 15th September, nor the quantities of street children, dogs that never sleep, or fireworks let loose on saints' days, the continuous abuse of authority, pilgrimages on 12th December, still less the laconic tolerance of extreme unpunctuality, the expression ‘What may I do to assist you?' cravenly summarised in the single word ‘
Mande
?' She lives with one foot on the land where she was conceived, from where an ocean now separates her.

The day that a Mexican state functionary gives up his uniform and walks among the people like one of them, or the day when a woman stands up to her abusive husband, Leonora will feel more at home in Mexico. This is a country crawling with paper-qualified bureaucrats: they spread like fungi in the court rooms, the registry offices, and in the Church. The queues to renew every kind of document or registration paper run the length of the Calle de Bucareli and are a source of absolute torture: ‘I cannot possibly extend your visa. You are obliged to first leave and then re-enter the country.' ‘We shall have to impose a fine on you for failing to inform us of your change of address.' ‘But that's not my fault! The street's name was changed by order of the government.' ‘Then that's the government's business, and you need to take care of your own.' ‘What's this? Don't you have a mother? Why do you give me your documents with only your father's surname on them?'

‘There's a monologue running around my brain that I can't silence and it's killing me,' she tells Remedios. ‘It never gives up, but just repeats and repeats and repeats, and no matter what I try it keeps spinning round in my head. It accompanies me everywhere from the moment I wake in the morning.'

‘Then jump out of bed and go for a walk,' Remedios recommends.

‘I can't stand Chiki any longer, and I can't even stand myself any more. I'm in bits, my body feels fragmented, and I don't know how to piece it back together again.'

‘You did the right thing in marrying Weisz. He is a good, sound and intelligent man. It was thanks to him that I got Lizárraga released, once I recognised him as an inmate in the concentration camp that Chiki filmed in France.'

‘Well, Chiki never saved
me
from anything at all.'

‘Don't be unfair, Chiki breaks his back for all four of you. Why not come along with us to Onslow Ford's house at Erongarícuaro: Eva Sulzer and I came back feeling quite renewed after a visit there. It's an oasis of peace. We were studying Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, who can both lead us to a higher life.'

‘I feel that my anxiety will never leave me, for I
am
that anxiety. Each morning I wake up on the edge of that precipice in the conviction that my fall is imminent and terrifying.'

Leonora and Remedios share their inner lives.

‘I am fascinated by your
Anguish
, Remedios. But why did you sign it Uranga?'

‘Because it was for the Bayer Chemical Company,' Remedios answers.

‘It feels as if you painted my portrait.'

‘Not at all, Leonora, so please don't say that. You're not tied down. In any case, you are lucky enough to have a superior intelligence.'

Chiki waits for the cashier who, from behind her little window, is going to push through a yellow envelope with his payment and the receipt for the seven copies of
Novedades
that have accumulated in his mailbox. As time goes by, he chooses different newspapers at random. These ones are over six months old. Inside one he reads: ‘Robert Capa's death is a major loss to photo-journalism.' His heart leaps in his throat. Robert Capa died in Indochina on 25th May 1954. He stepped on a land mine that blew off his left leg and tore open his chest. At the moment of death, he still held his Contax camera in his hand; the blast caused his Nikon to land some metres further on.

Chiki half-turns. He boards the Roma–Mérida bus that goes down the Calle Tabasco: he has to go and find Kati. The urgent need to hurry accelerates his breathing and constricts his chest. He is transported back to Madrid 1938; to the Pix agency and to the French magazine
Clartés
, to Simon Guttmann and to Chim. What will become of Chim? Above all, he thinks of Kati, who had loved Capa ever since she was a teenager. Capa's death doesn't seem possible, he is better than anyone else at estimating risks. Capa was all that Chiki couldn't or didn't want to be. He made the most beautiful women around lose their heads over him; seduced even the most powerful men; drank Martinis and harangued waiters; made instant friends with whomever he met in a bar; and above all played out his life on a battlefield in order to obtain action pictures of wars that were syndicated across the world.

‘Kati, Bandi is dead!' he tells her in Hungarian.

Kati barely opens her weary eyes before lighting up a cigarette.

‘I already knew.'

‘You knew and you didn't tell me?'

‘I knew deep inside myself.'

Chiki collapses. His whole life through, there had been someone who got in ahead of him.

‘Let's go and sit outside to see whether it's true that, as Octavio Paz says, happiness is a chair in the sun.'

Cigarette in hand, the sun at its noonday height, they again recall their Jewish origins, and Hungary, the Pecsi school, and how – although still adolescent – Bandi longed to devour the world, and how Kati was always his port in a storm; Kati, his anchor; Kati, the voice of his conscience, for she never needed to change her mind, renounce her anarchist faith, nor betray the peasant woman in her head-scarf whose portrait she took for one of the many posters she made for the Federation of Iberian Anarchists. Bandi sought out fame, while his companions never allowed themselves to submit to that kind of pressure.

The Katherine Deutsch of his childhood in Budapest was the only one he knew. Had war not broken out, the intrepid Bandi would have been a theatre director in Buda, the home city of the two of them; with her, Kati, as his leading lady.

‘Women all over the world must be in tears, Ingrid Bergman more so than any of them.'

‘What about you, Kati?'

‘I have been feeling desolate about losing him for a long while already.'

‘I'll ring Leonora and Remedios.'

The three women share a common European past, along with the war, their art, and feeling orphaned. The three of them keep one another company, motivate one another, console each other, share the same reasons for living.

Wolfgang Paalen surrounds himself with the
trouvailles
he has found on his travels: they include a petrified whale penis over three metres long that he hangs from a beam in his studio.

‘Why don't you sell your penis?' asks Kati. ‘I have a millionaire friend who would be sure to buy it from you.'

Just as Leonora paints horses, Remedios accumulates cats and owls on her canvases.

‘Why do you paint owls when it's said that they augur death?' Gaby asks Remedios.

‘Because I am death's bride.'

‘Mama paints Boadicea and says this warrior queen always led her cavalry into battle herself and was just as much of a redhead as you are.'

‘Do you like what I paint?'

‘Pablo likes Magritte better.'

‘And you?'

‘I like the
The Fern Cat
.'

Leonora has been consulting the psychoanalyst Ramón Parres for some time, since between painting each of her pictures she always falls into a deep depression. Painting is her balsam, as opium was for Joë Bousquet, but there are also mornings when anxiety asphyxiates her, even when she's standing before her easel. She can't identify the features of the beast, something that causes her to lash out blindly. She calls up Pedro Friedeberg in a state of high anxiety.

‘Can you please take me to the madhouse in your car?'

Chiki begs her to calm down.

‘Chiki each one of us is the master or mistress of our destiny, and I am not going to let you push me under.'

He keeps his silence. His wife's temperamental outbursts go well beyond his capacity to deal with them.

Pedro waits outside in his car to bring her back home:

‘Do you know, Leonora, the day will come when psychology, psychiatry and hypnotism will be swept from the face of the Earth for being a danger to Public Health.'

Remedios, just like Leonora, wants to achieve self-perfection. Peaceful interludes are brief, and Erongarícuaro is a source of consolation, the more so since Gordon Onslow Ford is a close friend:

‘Remedios, you paint a universe where everything is relative. Don't worry so much, your art transports you to the cosmos,' Gordon tells her.

‘Sometimes my visions are terrifyingly earthly ones.'

‘Paint your dreams, Remedios, and tell Leonora to do the same; she seems more anguished than you.'

‘She has a capacity for rage that I lack. What I would like is to be able to stop waving my arms about as if I were drowning. That is why I am seeking a guide.'

‘Living among exiles forces you to feel excluded, you really ought to see other people.'

‘We are a family of our own. The Mexicans are not in the least interested in us. When I go to their gatherings, they never ask me what I do, nor how I earn my living.'

‘And as for you, do you ask
them
?'

‘No, I suppose I don't.'

Via the British Embassy, Leonora discovers the Englishman Rodney Collin Smith, who came to Mexico a year after the death of his master, Ouspensky.

‘He is one of the illuminati, and just the person you were looking for,' Elsie Escobedo tells her. ‘He was Ouspensky's constant companion when he was a broken man, buried in a mire of self-pity. Seeing him die in a drunken stupor brought him to the decision that he should himself become a spiritual guide.'

‘In any case I'd like to hear him, since in addition to the ways of the fakir, the monk and the yogi, there is a fourth way: the sublimation of sexual energy that, and I think here you will concur with me, is a source of enormous power.'

‘It seems to me that you have no need of any of these secondrate Rasputins. Just take a cold bath, both you and Remedios. It's healthier and more effective than your fourth way!'

Rodney Collin Smith is innocent and credulous and everyone takes advantage of him. He puts himself at the service of every next person, lurching to meet the most lavish desires of the person nearest at hand.

‘Do you require anything more?' he always asks, before exhausting himself in supplying whatever it is. He builds a planetarium because he believes that cells and galaxies are one and the same thing, and that each person has their own guiding star. Ouspensky's
New Model of the Universe
is his Bible. His wife, Janet, establishes a clinic for the poor.

They buy a leafy plot of land near to the paper factory at Peña Pobre, to use for spiritual retreats, and Leonora falls in love with its vast garden filled with geraniums and dog roses. Peña Pobre is an oasis of green hemmed in by cement. Every acolyte is given their own cabin, while Rodney, together with his wife and three employees, occupy the main house. The spiritual guide runs up and down the garden paths as if he were levitating.

When he comes to welcome them, he explains:

‘Here we are separated from the outside world, in the midst of a desert we may only traverse alone and in silence. Do not be afraid if you come up against your inner fears, for I shall always be there for you.'

Punctuality is strict, and Leonora is bothered by the fact that she is not permitted to smoke. Since she continues to do so in secret, another follower named Natasha exposes her. At lunch and dinner, the guide sits at the head of their table and reads the
Tales of Beelzebub and his Grandson
by Gurdjieff, then picks out a chapter called
The Sheep and the Wolf
.

‘What do you understand by a sheep and by a wolf?' he amiably enquires of Leonora.

‘According to Gurdjieff, the wolf and the sheep must live together in harmony. The wolf represents the body and the sheep the emotions. Have I understood this correctly? The truth is that I find it quite impossible to believe that the wolf and the lamb will lie down together, and even more impossible that you refuse to permit me to smoke here.'