Leonora (44 page)

It is pursuing me.

And it enters my house.

Take it, chase it away from me. Get away from here!

Throw three stones at it.

Spit three plugs of tobacco at it.

This Mother of Evil/is eating my heart out.

It wants to send me away.

It wants to start a fight with me.'

‘It rains so hard here in Chiapas, the region must truly belong to the rain god, Tlaloc,' Leonora jokes.

‘In Chiapas, all who meet their death by drowning are his chosen ones, destined to inhabit Tlaloc's own paradise.'

The great boulders in the river remind Leonora of the ones at St. Martin d'Ardèche.

An animal's howl interrupts the sound of the water.

‘It is the
saraguato,
the howler monkey. You can hear it from as far as eight kilometres away.'

Leonora is not interested in reproducing images of markets, or landscapes, volcanoes, huts, churches or pyramids; not even of street scenes. She paints, as always, her inner world. ‘Reason needs to know the heart's reason, and all the other reasons as well.'

‘You do well to choose the rainbow as a subject for your mural,' Trudi approves. ‘In Chiapas the rainbow is a subject of veneration.'

‘To tell you the truth, the most important god to me is Quetzalcoatl. Is there a zoo here?'

At the zoo, Leonora sketches tortoises and pheasants, and transforms the wild boars into hedgehogs, reminiscent of the images Max made in St. Martin d'Ardèche. The gazelles become centaurs and the lions have snakes' tongues. Fish have teeth and vipers mutate into a mattress and dance in front of Adam, before winding themselves around the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

However much she is drawn by Mexican customs, they do not run in her blood, and her sketches for the mural illustrate her personal history. The churches with their belfries, the Cathedral of San Cristóbal with its cloister; so it is
The Magical World of the Maya
becomes fused with the magical world of the Celts.

‘It's the first time I have ever painted something as large as this,' she tells Trudi as she shows her the sketchbook.

‘Don't be afraid, you won't be left on the margins; remember the spell conjured up by Jwana Krus Posol who offered a cleansing for Ambar Past:

‘I shall strike your face with a mattock, O sacred Earth.

I shall enter your body.

I shall bury your holy body.

I shall enter your flesh.

I shall seed my garden plot there.

I shall sow my labour.'

Back in Mexico City, Leonora decides to go to the hairdresser. At the same time she decides to divide her mural into three. On the far left, in the ‘world below', she paints a huge jaguar head, and on the right, a silk cotton tree. In the central ‘earthly world', the most salient feature is a white horse, larger than life. The
chamulas
, the peasants of Chiapas, she paints very small indeed. A sun and a moon illumine the sky, across which a winged snake is flying. On the earth tapirs, vultures, leopards and spider monkeys multiply. As she paints, Leonora recites the prophecy in the Maya creation myth, the
Popol Vuh
: ‘From the breast of darkness will be born the light that shall allow us to see what surrounds us.'

These are days filled with fervour. It is as if Leonora is working to the beat of an inner marimba, whose music hurries her on. ‘I want to be able to paint the sound of thudding wood.' As in San Cristóbal she smoked one cigarette after the next to keep the mosquitoes at bay, now she deposits a volcano of butts beside her easel.

51

THE MAGICAL WORLD OF DEATH

O
NCE SHE HAS COMPLETED THE MURAL
, Leonora goes on to paint
Dolphin Conference
;
Rarvarok
;
Alchimia Avium
and
Song of Gomorrah.

‘They asked me to paint a mural by the entrance to a hospital,' Remedios tells her. ‘I got scared and gave up on the idea.'

She shows Leonora the recently finished
Still Life Resuscitating
and
Music of the Forest
, still awaiting completion on her easel: ‘In this one, I feel that I am on the point of representing the union between man, nature and the Cosmos, Leonora.'

It is now the afternoon of 8th October 1963, and Leonora is drinking tea in the kitchen, when a furious ringing at the door summons her attention.

‘Why are you ringing like that? You frighten me.'

She wants to laugh, but the expression on Kati's face pulls her up short:

‘I have some bad news for you,' Kati says, her voice shaking.

‘What's up with you? You look as if you've just seen the devil. Come in and have a cup of tea.'

‘Leonora, it's terrible news. Better for you to sit down.'

‘And better for you to tell me what it's all about. What news can be so bad to cause you to lean on the bell like this?'

Leonora remains upright, standing on the threshold. Kati sits down and wrings her hands as if she were rinsing an invisible and slippery cloth.

‘The maid ran all the way to the Sala Margolín to tell Walter, but he arrived home too late.'

‘Too late for what?'

‘Too late to be able to do anything, Leonora.'

‘I don't understand what you're telling me, Kati.'

‘Remedios died this afternoon. She went upstairs for a rest after lunch, because she was feeling a little strange. It seems as if she suffered a heart attack.'

Kati's words appear so absurd to Leonora that she cannot assimilate them. So she sips her tea, and picks up another cigarette and acts as if nothing has happened. She goes to her room without a word, takes one of the dolls she keeps there and starts sewing a brightly coloured skirt on to her, then puts the doll in a blanket and wraps her up tightly. She wants to clear the bed in order to lie her down on it, and throws sheets, pillows and the bedspread on to the floor. From downstairs she can hear Kati's voice floating up: ‘Leonora, I have to go and let Alice know,' and the front door slams.

To cap it all, she is on her own, it's a school day: Chiki has gone out to take photos, and there is no-one there to keep her under control. When her husband returns, he finds her so devastated that in the end he decides that the only thing to do is for them to go and find Walter Gruen.

In the corner of the room where the wake is being held, Kati, Eva Sulzer and the maid are all in tears. Leonora cannot cry. Everyone else present looks on uncomprehendingly. Walter receives them without seeing them, hugs them as if in a blur. Nothing worse could possibly have happened to him, none of the employees in the Sala Margolín dare to look him in the eye. This strong man who survived a concentration camp through his powers of resistance is now falling apart. He blocks his ears and goes outdoors for a breath of fresh air.

‘The Mexicans are right: October moons are the best,' Leonora tells Chiki, who is also gazing at the astral vault.

‘Calm down, you're chain-smoking again.'

Leonora pays no attention, since she no longer hears even what she is saying to herself. She closes herself off inside her inner cell, and remembers the day when Remedios told her that they were like the fox and the Little Prince: ‘And when the hour came to depart: “Ah!” said the fox. “Now I shall cry.”' Leonora chews over every word in a rage. Chiki regards her with a weary look: all at once, he feels an infinite compassion for this woman who smokes so desperately. She is doubled over like an old crone, curled up in a ball, and hides her face on her knees, from where emanates a near-inaudible voice imploring: ‘Can someone tell all these people to stop crying?'

In the morning they take Remedios' body to be buried in the cemetery garden, barely thirty metres away from the tomb of her close friend José Horna.

‘They will keep one another company,' murmurs Kati, more tired than ever.

Leonora takes refuge in her studio. She paints
The Burial of the Patriarchs
: one figure holds up a crozier bearing the image of Hermes, who transports the souls of the patriarchs to eternal life in a canoe. She reads
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
by Frances Yates, and paints
The Burning of Bruno
. She admires the philosopher's challenge: ‘There is no need to seek for divinity outside of ourselves.' For this the Inquisition brought him to judgement, declared him a heretic and consigned him to the flames.

Leonora completes her paintings and continues to write
The Hearing Trumpet
. Her main character, the ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby, is confined to an old people's home. She exclaims: ‘At times I feel like Joan of Arc, so frighteningly misunderstood. And I often feel as if I'm being burned on a pyre merely for being so different to all the others.'

‘I am her,' thinks Leonora. Who could have understood her? ‘Only Remedios, Remedios would have understood me.'

Chiki no longer knows what to do. Leonora cries out aloud at night. The death of her friend causes her to revert all the more strongly to her old acquaintance: anguish.

In the course of the following days, as if she were sent by the
sidhes
, Laurette Séjourné, Victor Serge's widow, calls her to ask if she wouldn't agree to publish the sketches for her mural in a book of the same name:
The Magical World of the Maya.
Leonora agrees. She feels comfortable with this woman who speaks to her in French and in such tones of persuasion. Laurette is also interested in the occult, the pre-Colombian stones speak to her: at the pyramids of Teotihuacan, she enters into a dialogue with the gods. She relates that what is above is also below; the stars continue in their path across the wide Earth. She deciphers signs, and comprehends even the silences of the stones. Leonora listens to her reverentially; she tells her there is no trace whatsoever of love in any of these Mexican gods, they harbour their vengefulness, and take retribution on every supposed offence. They are there to tear out human hearts with an obsidian knife.

Laurette recounts a legend to her in her silky voice:

‘The birds were fighting to establish who was the most important. The Great Spirit gathered together an assembly to select the one most worthy to govern them all.

‘“Surely they will choose the bird with the sweetest song,” said the nightingale.

‘“You're wrong about that,” responded the eagle, “whoever governs needs to be strong.”

‘“I should be elected, my career is impeccable, my plumage is scarlet and all who see marvel at it,” added the cardinal bird.

‘Dzul Cutz, whose feathers were ugly, asked the Puhuy bird to lend him his plumage in return for sharing the riches and honours of winning with him.

‘Puhuy gave him his feathers and the Great Spirit named the Peacock king of the birds. Once crowned, Dzul Cutz soon forgot about returning the plumage. The Great Spirit decided that whenever Dzul Cutz fanned his magnificent tail feathers, he would emit a tiny squeak from his beak that would make anyone who witnessed it burst out laughing.'

‘What you're telling me here sounds like the history of power politics. Am I right?'

‘Yes, that's it.'

52

OF LOVE

L
EONORA'S ATTENTION IS CAUGHT
by the way Álvaro looks at her, as he holds a whisky in his left hand and observes her where she stands in the drawing room of the British Embassy.

‘You are the most beautiful woman at the party.'

‘So I have been told thousands of times.'

From then on, Álvaro's face shines with a metallic purity and he looks in such a way that Leonora opens up to him without a second thought:

‘I believe that yes, you are the person who can love me as I want to be loved.'

Without further ado, he responds with: ‘Yes, I am that man.'

In an instant, Leonora's life is transformed. The laws of physics are altered when he leans his face close to hers: so daring, so handsome. Leonora is invaded by a sense of anticipation that makes her giddy.

‘I have a premonition.'

‘What is it?' he asks, anxiously.

‘It's one of loss.'

The British ambassador announces that it is time to proceed to table. Seats have been assigned with place cards: Leonora has been seated to the right of the host. At the other end of the table she sees other women's heads turn in her direction: women wearing make-up, with lustrous hair and painted nails, all fabricated by beauty salons. Women who know how to love themselves according to the advice of fashion magazines.

‘He is a great surgeon,' the ambassador tells her. ‘Álvaro Lupi has saved many lives in his time.'

By the time the coffee comes round, she has learnt that Álvaro has conducted experiments with peyote, with hallucinogenic drugs, and she asks him about psilocybin.

‘I received a revelation: I stretched out my neck, lifted my arms, and launched myself to dance just like Fred Astaire. I dominated all sense of space, distance and air. It went so far that when I sat down, my hands went on moving to the sound of the music, and the play of light between my fingers caused me to fall into an ecstatic trance.'

Leonora listens, holding her breath all the while.

‘You have a pre-Raphaelite profile,' he tells her.

‘I am pleased you think so.'

Leonora agrees to a date in Chapultepec Park.

‘One can think better beneath the trees. We'll meet there at four o'clock on the Calzada de los Poetas, the Poets' Carriageway.'

Álvaro cancels appointments. It is years since he has been to the woods of Chapultepec. Finding the right road is easy. He watches her advance towards him, dressed all in black, a mackintosh floating around her as if lifting off in time with her long rhythmical steps. She walks towards him without the least hint of coquetry, as if she were a boy, with ungainly steps. Her movements resemble the decisions that Álvaro is soon to learn all about.

‘That's the reason she's a painter,' he thinks. In her, every move has its own light. Suddenly they move into darkness, and the next moment they light up. To him, she is absorbing and reflecting them back at one and the same time. When she's displeased, his mood turns black; if she smiles, he shines.

Leonora traces circles on the ground as they walk along. Álvaro wants to know why, and she replies that otherwise malign spirits might carry them off through the air.

‘Don't you take any exercise, Álvaro? I find that all sorts of problems resolve themselves if I meditate on them during a good long walk.'

Álvaro stumbles.

Then Leonora launches in: ‘Beneath where we now are lies another Chapultepec with its lake and its pine trees growing inside it, its grass and its stones still more beautiful than those we can see here, even its castle with a fine covered balcony from where you can see the flying Angel on Independence Avenue.'

Leonora pauses under a sunbeam which immediately illuminates her.

‘Move your hands around as you did on the night of our first dinner, Álvaro. That will return you to the same state of ecstasy you experienced on psilocybin.'

‘I have no need to return, for I have never left that state behind.'

Leonora creates a state of disquiet around herself. Leaves shiver and assume forms he has never seen before, approaching closer to them, scratching them. Even the slimmest sapling can fall on them.

‘There's no such thing as a tree without a personality,' she assures him. ‘Anything that breathes is a thing of beauty. Once dead, it is fit only to be thrown in the bin. So many things I have loved have ended up in the rubbish.'

‘What kind of things?'

‘Men!' and she kicks a stone in her path.

Álvaro takes her hand and is surprised by how tiny it is.

‘Come, I would like to take you for a drink, a coffee, whatever you feel like.'

‘At Sanborn's? That's the place I like best.' She beams with reassurance and continues smiling when they reach the bar. As she drinks, her cheeks start glowing. ‘I want you to come and meet two of my friends; one is called Pedro Friedeberg, the other Bridget Tichenor. They own a marvellous de Chirico.'

While Álvaro parks his car at the corner of Monterrey and Chihuahua streets, she bounds out with a single leap and declares, as she shuts the car door:

‘I amaze people. I have entered into your body without you even noticing.'

They resume their walks among the Montezuma cypresses. One afternoon, Leonora shows him a particular tree with dark branches raised high up to the skies, then shuts her eyes and keeps them tightly sealed while she tells him:

‘To me you have all the solidity of this tree.'

Álvaro holds a pearl necklace out to her and she looks at it for a long time.

‘Do you know something? Your present moves me because pearls are seekers after truth. That is why they are born, live and grow inside a shell; they yearn to be essential. With this necklace you have placed in my hands the instrument through which I can attain the truth.'

‘Such solemnities!' says Álvaro with a smile.

Leonora flies into a rage.

Álvaro is surprised by how fragile Leonora's artist friends are. Even Bridget Tichenor, who has such a constant circle of friends around her, is in need of the approval of others; not to mention Pedro Friedeberg, whose vocation seems to be one of continually pleasing others with his ingenuity and disguises. Like frightened birds, they follow newspaper columns that tremble as they hold them. ‘Here they're saying something nasty about me.' They are offended if there is a party they are not invited to; if they come out badly in a photograph, or do not appear at all; if Margarita Nelken or Jorge Juan Crespo de la Serna do not return their phone calls. ‘Nobody told me about this.' They attribute their failures to the way in which the Fine Arts Institute is run. And they hide if a crowd fails to show up for their talks, when Carlos Fuentes gives a lecture, even Tongolele and Padre Partinas, albeit now without his cassock, always appear. The drama can be colossal. ‘They boycott me, they loathe me, I want to go and live in another country, poor Mexico, art is denied here.'

In the final analysis, the person who holds the strongest views is Leonora when she defends, in the name of her art, her right to demand that the world be transformed. ‘I have proved that Mexicans lack any kind of a voice in public affairs; here strength is always on the side of the ruler, not with the ruled. Why do we submit ourselves to such rulers?' Álvaro is always delighted by the face she pulls whenever she angrily announces: ‘I loathe all political parties.'

The day when Álvaro acquires a small flat on the corner of Roma and Liverpool streets, he reveals his love to her. Leonora has known the vitality of passion and enchantment before, but never this everyday feeling that every morning is reborn anew. She has known obsession, her great dependence on Max, Renato and then Chiki. Yet the love of couples on a level with the poet López Velarde, of whom Octavio Paz spoke, is something wholly new to her. Love disrupts established values, hurls one into the unknown. André Breton, he of
l'amour fou
, would be well satisfied by her discovery, and by her beauty, on which so many around her are now commenting. ‘Never have you looked so lovely,' she is told, in recognition of the energy that gives the truth to love. Only now does she remember something that Breton once said to Jacqueline Lamba: ‘You are scandalously beautiful.' Thanks to Álvaro, Leonora now feels like ‘the omnipotent ruler of the world'.

She moves an easel, canvas and a box of paints in to the flat.

To remake a life is to unmake the past. The more Leonora talks of what she has lived, the more certain Álvaro becomes that only extreme pain could have led to her madness. As she recounts her story, Leonora also lifts both hands first to her breast, then touches her stomach, as if her heart and then her guts were about to fall out:

‘I gave him all that I was, I submerged myself in him and then had to tear myself away so brutally that a life I had scarcely started broke up and me with it: every synapse in my brain short-circuited and they gave me electro-convulsive therapy in order to try and connect them up again. Do you know what Cardiazol is? It is a form of shock therapy when they inject you with such a high dose of insulin that you end up in a comatose state. The truth is, they kill you. They call it a cure for schizophrenia, but Cardiazol really kills off all there is inside of you. The agony of what they did to me I still carry here, and here …' and she places her hand on her heart and then on her head.

Álvaro looks at her with a degree of respect he has not felt for anyone in a long time. Someone capable of suffering for love to such a degree of intensity has to be exceptional. ‘It would be easy to fall on one's knees before a woman like this.'

Leonora possesses powers that render her capable of leading you even over the precipice; she is the light, the true flower of dawn. She comes from a limitless infinity; she was lost and redis-covered herself; abandoned her body and now radiates a light, an energy, a halo he recognises. ‘Walter Benjamin committed suicide, even after all he succeeded in achieving by crossing the whole of the Pyrenees on foot carrying his manuscript with him; if he had waited only a little while he would have been saved; one always has to keep hope alive,' is what Álvaro thinks. This is why the sensation of something ancient and unknown that Leonora is capable of provoking always wins the day. When she says: ‘Phenomena exist which escape reason – they are those I am most familiar with,' he believes her.

‘I know that stars are men, women and children who died long ago. They compose interstellar material.'

‘We are a part of that too,' rejoins Álvaro, yielding.

Leaving town at weekends becomes routine for the two of them. Leonora's sons are grown and Chiki has nothing to say on the matter. Perhaps Leonora's true and terrible journey through madness shakes Álvaro. One evening in Sanborn's a waiter overturns a trolley full of dishes and the painter leaps to her feet and shouts: ‘We're leaving now, this minute!'

When once Álvaro refused invitations to conferences in the provinces, he now accepts and selects one in Necaxa. The humid winds of the Gulf state hurtle across the zone, and ferny woods grow among the waterfalls. At the bottom of the valley, in a village surrounded by trees, they are welcomed at a modest hotel called Villa Juárez. They walk for hours without growing tired, and everything becomes one with the woodland – conversation and laughter, tortillas and rice, caresses and love. At times, they have arguments. Álvaro is pragmatic and Leonora follows her instincts which lead her towards nature; seeds can arrive here from as far as the Andes, brought by a current in the atmosphere and bearing toxic substances of which only she is aware.

‘Toxic?'

‘Yes, Álvaro. At the foot of these trees grow the most sacred plants, meaning the mushrooms we are now going to seek out.'

That evening, at the end of a long walk, they find themselves in the deepest part of the wood. Birds flit like spangled lights among the topmost branches and others sing from within their hidden nests. The smell of rotting leaves mingles with the scent of invisible flowers.

‘Here they are, here they are, come here my loves, come to me my little sons,' and Leonora falls to her knees at the foot of a tree. ‘These are the right ones. Try this,' and she holds out a mushroom to him.

‘You're crazy.'

‘Don't call me that word! I know what I am doing, take one and watch,' with which she starts slowly masticating.

‘It might be poisonous.'

‘Of course it isn't, I know what I'm about. Put it in your mouth, it's the food of the gods. In any case, you're a doctor so you can save the gods.'

It goes through Álvaro like a purgative. Leonora laughs and places her shawl on the ground wrapped up to form a pillow, and invites him to lie beneath the spread branches of the tree.

‘We are going to sleep here.'

‘No, let's go down to the village: this is too dangerous. You could be making an attempt on your life without so much as knowing it.'