Leonora (49 page)

‘I don't understand. Is that rubbish really a work of art nowadays?' The artist grows indignant. ‘Even Dalí's crazes and Duchamp's nudes resonate with me; this says absolutely nothing at all to me.'

‘It does to me.'

‘Why don't you take off, silly Pepita? I am yesterday and today, but what I am not is rubbish. What you are showing me is the work of the Earl of Shitshire and his daughter the Whole of Arse.'

‘Who are they?'

‘Look, just take me home,' Leonora is getting annoyed. ‘I need a good cup of tea.'

‘Ay, Leonora, don't punish yourself! These artists are as undesirable as the Surrealists were! They are intellectual agitators!'

‘What? I've never heard anything so idiotic. There is a vast gap between intelligence and execution. These are throw-away objects.'

Despite the fact she exasperates her, the following morning Leonora recounts to Pepita how, in her dreams, Max Ernst appears, in the midst of birds extending their wings to him. He is busy painting their bellies, chests and sexual organs red. He is carving them on a surface until he turns them into bones.

‘You know he was fascinated by madness.'

Pepita sees that Leonora had taken the mortal leap, and had landed unconscious right at the bottom of the well. Religion did not enslave her, nor did she submit herself to any form of ideology, any schema of abstract thought, or any artistic trend: nothing had ever prevented Leonora from living her love outside time, outside society, a love born of passion, a love like an alchemical egg, a love that could be the wind, the wind of the North they call Boreas, who owns a dozen thoroughbred horses, the wind that could impregnate mares simply by their turning rump-first towards him.

‘In St. Martin d'Ardèche, Pepita, I discovered what the concierges of Paris call a
folie a deux.
Do you know what that is?'

‘Yes, I do know. I have also lived on the wild side, with my heart's blood pounding through my body, I have loved with André Breton's
amour fou
, even without André Breton.'

‘Oh yes, my girl? And you discovered that emotions are worth precisely sweet nothing?'

Pepita turns white. Her hands tremble as she raises the cup of tea to her lips.

‘Look, young lady, do you know how to bake bread? Do you know how to spend hours on end under the burning sun, cutting bunches of grapes? Do you know how to make your own wine? Do you know how to wash your lover's sheets and make up a bed almost in the middle of a river? Just when I was on the point of metamorphosing into the womanly support for Max's old age, preparing myself to be beside him his whole life through, a gendarme came into my kitchen and, over the cooking pot where our two loving hearts were simmering, asked for Max. Then, his rifle slung over his shoulder, he escorted him off to St. Cyprien. The war put an end to everything. In the end, my salvation has only and always been painting.'

In return, Pepita tells her that God holds her in his carelessness. Just like the Archbishop of Mexico and the President of the Republic, the Chief of Police and all prospective Members of the National Assembly.

‘So who do you believe in?' asks Leonora.

‘In you.'

‘I don't believe in politicians either, any more than I understand someone who runs after power. At heart, I am an anarchist, like Kati. Lord Acton, the first anarchist, declared that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.'

‘Do you know what else I believe in, Leonora? In myself, and in the loyalty of my two cats and my dog.'

‘What is your dog called?'

‘Drusille.'

‘How strange, that's the name of a woman in one of my stories!'

‘That's why I called her that. Would you have been the same, had you remained at home in England?'

‘No, I would have become more of a Celt, more Irish. Perhaps I would have lived in Westmeath. But, if I've got this right, Mexico made me who I am because had I remained in either England or Ireland, I would not have experienced the yearning for the world of my childhood as I did here … What I paint is my nostalgia.'

‘The weight of your forebears.'

‘I never read Mary Edgeworth, but I think that instead of having hair on my head, the green pastures of Ireland grew there.'

Pepita takes her to La Lechuza – the Barn Owl – on the Avenida Miguel de Quevedo.

‘Now we're going to eat real
tacos.
'

Leonora sits herself down on a low stool near a blazing open wood stove.

‘Do you see, sitting at that table is Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, who translated Homer and Ovid. One of his greatest books is
De otro modo lo mismo,
or
Whichever Way is the Same
. Doesn't that seem a good title to you? Do you prefer
tacos
filled with chicken livers or mushrooms?'

‘Mushrooms have a soul,' Leonora replies, as she attempts to use the cutlery.

‘Wait here for me, Leonora, I am going to greet the poet.'

‘Do you know him?'

‘No.'

Pepita gets to Rubén at the same moment he is putting a steak
taco
dripping red sauce into his mouth. A moment later, he is bowing to Leonora:

‘At your feet, Señora.'

Pepita distracts Leonora by saying: ‘Not all of us can be geniuses like you and Rubén, that much I know.'

She leads her along the Paseo de la Reforma, and Leonora discovers that the little figures she used to model in the dark of her cave have grown into giants. A doctor, Isaac Masri, has put them along the length of the track that she used to ride down long ago, at least until she grew bored of doing so. Now she sees how the public seats itself at the Cannibal Table, and how children are trying to clamber inside her House of the Spirits. She enjoys seeing her crocodile taking the sun out of doors, and The Stove of Simon Magus the Sorcerer now measuring over three metres high. Her sculptures are enjoying the sun, the Montezuma cypresses and the motorists, who wind down their car windows to admire them from afar.

‘Today I am going to take you to a giant aquarium that has just opened in the south of the capital.'

‘And what kind of a thing is that? Is it very far?'

‘Yes, but if it gets late, then we can stay and eat down there.'

‘Like where?'

‘In any of the cheap restaurants there. Guess what, people are saying that I look like you. I know I'm not really that pretty, but what do you think?'

‘Well, to start with, you're a fair bit taller,' says Leonora with a smile. ‘I've grown smaller, for old age makes you shrink, to fit all the better into your coffin. I lived several lives: that of my childhood, my rebellions, as a mother, then as an artist.'

‘I have lived more than you,' says Pepita presumptuously. ‘No-one has ever spared hurting or humiliating me. Whatever happened to make you suffer?'

Was there ever a more painful source of pain than the loss of Max, or the experience of her imprisonment? For his part Chiki, the father of her children, lives as if the world were an enormous orphanage filled with numbers. Leonora abandoned him along the way, just as he, too, gave up on himself. In contrast, she is alive, nothing of her has vanished: not her painting, nor her rebelliousness, nor the arrogance of her independence, nor her English good manners, nor her opinions of others, nor her visions. The one thing she still knows nothing about is her own death.

‘At my age, what begins to worry me is how to comprehend what comes after death.'

‘Do you really think that there's anything to come? Just as we need to reconcile ourselves to life, so we need to reconcile ourselves to the idea of death.'

‘How can anyone reconcile themselves to the unknown? We don't know anything at all about death, despite the fact that we all have to die, whether we are animal, vegetable, or mineral. EVERYTHING DIES,' Leonora shouts. ‘How can you possibly make your peace with something of which you know nothing? To stare death in the face? I would not like to die in any case, but if I should may it be when I attain five hundred years, and via a slow process of evaporation.'

‘Don't get worked up, lighten up, it was just a question! It's entirely likely that I'll die before you.'

What is it like?
questions Leonora.
What is death? Death! Life! I came to Earth to find out what it is all about and I still don't know.

One thing she is sure of, her freedom is a victory, and because of it, she lives alone. Throughout her life, divesting herself of God, of convention, of Max, Renato, Chiki, Edward and Álvaro has been hard on her. She is still obsessed with certain ideas, even as her body fails with the years. Some nights, Max appears at her bedside either at her head or her feet, at her breast or before her eyes. Above all, she feels him in her hands when she washes her hair. She recalls the enormity of her harshness when she told him: ‘I can't come out with you today, I have to stay in and wash my hair.'

‘Is Max the person you have most loved in your whole life?'

‘I don't know. Every love is distinct in its own way.'

‘Here we are, we've arrived! I've just got to park the car.'

Suddenly, Leonora finds herself in front of some dolphins who emerge from the water and cross the sky in front of a crowd of magnetised spectators. They zigzag across the tank like arrows. They are coming towards her. They leap up against the blue skies and, for a few seconds, the sun is reflected on their backs, magnifying its rays, and splashing over her like the dolphins when they land back in the water, only to surface once more, smiling with their ducks' bills. Leonora returns their smile. They render her homage: how brave you have been, Leonora, how great were your battles. The dolphins take one leap after another and another at the speed of sunlight. Their diminutive fins are like wings.

Pepita, smiling from ear to ear, assures her that the dolphins are speaking to her, and to anyone who knows how to understand them:

‘Yes, I know how to listen to animals, it's a gift I've had since I was a little girl,' she replies.

The dolphins nod their agreement, as if replying to an examiner. Then they play hide-and-seek. Enchanted, Leonora extends her hand towards one of their silvery backs.

‘Loneliness is what kills them,' Pepita tells her.

‘So they are like me,' Leonora repeats, as if to convince herself. ‘Solitude kills them.'

She remembers Black Bess, her pony, and Winkie, her mare, and sees Tanguito, the bull she could do nothing for, before her eyes, and the bleating of the sheep at Ávila station. Winkie neighs. She is the mare of the night, the lover of the wind. The dolphins dance for her and whistle a sound that goes through her guts, that of the giantess condemned to paint for the rest of her life, the giantess who accepts that loneliness kills and is ready to die at her easel, for creation can only take place in solitude, for one has to be as submerged as a dolphin in order to create. A wild horse with a long mane appears on the crest of the water, then another appears, reflected in the dolphins' eyes. Are the dolphins really horses? Leonora talks to them in a low voice, telling them all about Crookhey Hall and the
sidhes
; of Max and his flight from St. Martin d'Ardèche; the horrors of the electro-convulsive treatments in Santander; Maurie's death, Nanny's, Remedios', José Horna's; and they console her with their little glassy half-closed eyes, which are not those of Gerard, nor Ernst, nor Luis Morales, but are urging her to come out and play.

Leonora caresses its slippery back one last time. The dolphin lifts his head to tell her how she resembles Alice and the White Goddess; the Minotaur's daughter and the Great Bear; then Penelope, Dulcinea, Beatrice, and the love which moves the heavens and the stars.

‘I am hungry, Leonora, let's go and eat what Yolanda has prepared in your kitchen. Call her when we get home and, when she comes in, we'll throw ourselves upon her, tear her face off and I'll wear it to the party tonight.'

‘Only if you promise me that you'll kill her before you tear off her face, otherwise you will cause her too much pain.'

‘I want us to leave here right now,' Pepita orders.

‘You are as pale as a marble statue.' Leonora sounds worried.

All of a sudden feathers sprout from the body of the young woman. They grow over her shoulders, her neck, her eyebrows, eyelashes, on her arms and hands. Instead of hair, Leonora watches as a crown of white plumes arises from her forehead, shining like snow beneath the Mexican sun. Her ears move as a horse's do. Pepita gets up from her chair, and a splendiferous tail sweeps the floor.

‘Get up, Leonora, hurry!' her hooves are pounding.

‘Are we in the Bois de Boulogne, Pepita?'

‘Of course we're not! We are on the lower slopes of the Ajusco, it is cold, cold with ice sliding down from the mountain, the horses are made of ice, and look at the trees covered in snow. At your side stand two great black horses, yoked together.'

‘I can't see any of this.'

‘That's because you yourself are a small white horse that has just tumbled over and is dying.'

‘Am I about to die?'

‘You live the death of the animals, for you are like them.'

‘So I am not about to die?'

‘Of course not! Remember the phrase you kept repeating to yourself when they took Max away: “I am not fated to die.” You are about to enter a dark country from where you will emerge transfigured.'

‘Tell me what to do in order to emerge!' says Leonora suspiciously.

‘Be keen to get to the other side, like Caer, daughter of the lord of Connacht, who metamorphosed into a swan. So hurry up now, give me your arm, I'm in a hurry, Leonora, I'm in a very great hurry.'

‘If this is a holiday, what do you have to do?'

‘Paint a giantess.'

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I
N AMONG LEONORA CARRINGTON'S STORIES
,
Little Francis
and
The Stone Door
, together with
Memories from Below
, one encounters three of the most important events in the artist's life. Once more in
House of Fear
,
A Flannel Night Shirt
,
The Oval Woman
,
The Hearing Trumpet
and
The Seventh Horse
, Leonora appears entirely recognisable. In them it is possible to recognise the resemblances to
Max and Leonora
by Julotte Roche, herself a resident of St. Martin d'Ardèche and who interviewed the Ardechois villagers who had once lived alongside the two artists.

I started out to write a novel inspired by Leonora Carrington, but rather than compose a story that merely alluded to her, I decided to write directly about her and extend the homage started by Lourdes Andrade, a major scholar of Mexican Surrealism, who died on Thursday 26th October 2002, when she was run over by a drunken motorist in Chipalcingo, Guerrero. That day, the scholar was on her way to the launch of her book
The Legends of the Wind's Lover
, on the subject of Carrington's literary output. Lourdes was in the habit of walking in the Colonia Roma with Leonora and I set out to retrace that route by way of a tribute to the two of them.

Ever since the 1950s, extended over a long period of time, I visited and interviewed Leonora. She invited me over to dine on
mole
as black as the Lancashire coal mines, and Chiki and their two sons, Gaby and Pablo – still young children – kept us company. I also conducted several interviews with Kati Horna, for whom I maintain an immense respect, and with her daughter Norah. There followed the beautiful Alice Rahon, Gilberto Bosques, Gunther Gerzso, Fernando Gamboa, Malú Cabrera and Harry Block; Mathias Goeritz, Jesús Reyes Ferreira, Juan Soriano, Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Juan O'Gorman, together with Raoul and Carito Fournier; Inés Amor, Antonio Souza and Alejandro Jodoroswky; and then Renato Leduc and his daughter Patricia, who entrusted me with a letter from Leonora to her father, along with two previously unpublished photographs.

During the visits I paid Leonora over the last few years, I would try not to bother her with direct questions. She always began our conversations by asking, ‘Tell me what's new in politics', or else with a ‘How do you like the President?' but I more often responded by telling her about my own childhood, the piano and the ballet lessons, or in good manners, relating anecdotes which prompted her recall of even the name of her French governess, Mlle. Varenne, or of her piano teacher, Mr. Richardson. Then she would say: ‘Tell me about your love life.' She had no desire to discuss her own, and when I asked her whether Max Ernst had been the love of her life, she answered: ‘Every love is different, let's not get too personal.' The personal matter of which she did speak, with horror, throughout one entire afternoon was of her confinement in Santander and of the treatment she received there: ‘They've made Cardiazol illegal and I had three doses of it.'

I assured her I had arrived at the Calle Chihuahua on horseback, or else on the back of a goose or a dragon, and the idea used to entertain her. On occasion, I would tell her how an owl man or a comet's tail had guided me to Insurgentes, the widest avenue in the city, to which she responded: ‘So, let's go and see your comet's tail,' and we used to go out on to the street where we could watch a river of car headlamps passing by. Her magic transformed them into alchemical symbols and, through the car windows, strange figures emerged riding on kites.

Seeing Leonora has always been a privilege and a pleasure, for it takes me back to my own childhood, my parents, my origins, to the countries we had in common. She is a bewitching woman. They call her white, black or red, but what's undoubtedly the case is that Leonora makes magic with every colour there is and that she is the most beautiful enchantress to have survived into our lifetimes. Three times over, she was sent to the inquisitors' pyres in England, France and Spain. Yet every time she emerged purified by fire, until she became a slender rod of precious metal. She is the painter who most resembles her brushes. There are even those who say she is an artist who paints with her eyelashes.

Visit her house and you will always find a fiesta. I deem myself lucky to be near a human being and an artist who makes me want to inhabit a world I had some inkling of in my childhood, well before I lost my way on the track of becoming a journalist.

Only recently, Leonora and I went out to eat at Sanborn's; Café Tacuba; Casa Lamm; and in Chimalistac. A while ago we ate at Isaac Masri's house, and Leonora made Joy Laville, Carlos Monsiváis and me laugh by telling us we all have a tiny President Salinas de Gortari inside each one of us.

Monsiváis and I accompany her to numerous events in her honour at UNAM, the Sala Manuel M. Ponce de Bellas Artes, the Palacio de Minería, the José Luis Cuevas Museum, the Convent of Sor Juana and even to Los Pinos, where she received the National Art Prize.

Leonora illustrated my book,
Lilus Kikus,
and when I tried to return the original pictures to her, she smiled and told me: ‘You may keep them.' They are now framed and hanging in Mérida, in the house of my daughter Paula. On another occasion, a couple of years ago, Leonora provided me with preliminary drawings both by herself and her son, Pablo, for
Rondas de la Niña Mala
. I think that the very last sketch she made was in fact for this same book, since she no longer paints, or even draws.

We always conversed in either English or French, which is why I decided not to translate her expressions literally in the original Spanish version of this book. I call it a novel, for it has no pretensions whatsoever to being a biography, but is instead a free approximation to the life of an exceptional artist.

As to the books I have most of all had recourse to,
Villa Air-Bel, World War II, Escape
and
A House in Marseille
, written with mastery and an open heart by Rosemary Sullivan, has shown itself indispensable for the manner in which it recounts the death of Walter Benjamin, or explains how Varian Fry of the American Rescue Committee saved the life of so many others, now that nobody any longer remembers his name.

On the other hand, books produced by North American writers Whitney Chadwick and Susan L. Aberth provide invaluable information, not to mention the analyses afforded by Marina Warner. I admired the interview with Paul de Angelis and, above all, the writing by Salomon Grimberg.

In like manner, the interviews graciously extended me by Leonora herself, Gaby and Pablo Weisz, Rosita and Max Shein, Ana Alexandra Gruen, brother and sister Miguel and Helen Escobedo, Pedro Friedeberg and Joanna Moorhead have all, in one way or another, proved indispensable.

I wish also to express my gratitude to my editor and close friend Braulio Peralta, and to Gabriel Sandoval for their encouragement and their faith in this book, which could not possibly have reached completion without Mayra Pérez Sandi Cuen, who never let up in pursuing her fervent and tireless reading of one chapter after another; and to Rubén Ángel Henríquez Serrano for his splendid suggestions and the care with which he checked the book line by line; and to Yolanda Gudino for her discretion, loyalty and love for Leonora, and to the Benjamin Franklin Library, who lent me material from their special collections.

Thanks are also due to Marta Lamas for always being at my side; María Consuelo Mejía for her solidarity; Philippe Ollé-La Prune who provided me with an out-of-print book; the film-maker Trisha Ziff, who rescued the case containing negatives belonging to Robert Capa and Emerico Weisz; to Mary McMasters for having pursued the pictorial images of Mexico with loving solicitude.

It opens one's eyes to read whatever the critic and scholar Tere Arcq has written. The outstanding interview with Elena Urrutia on the subject of Leonora's doll-making opened a new door on the full set of this painter's skills. Daniel Centeno, in El Paso, Texas, made himself responsible for calling in books impossible to find in Mexico.

In addition to all this, the names of the talented writer Alain Paul Maillard; the art critic Luís Carlos Emerich, also curator of the vast exhibition mounted at MARCO in 1994; Juan Antonio Ascensio, who loaned me a Dictionary of Surrealism and a disk on which I could hear the voices of André Breton and Angelica Abellyra, and his articles in
La Jornada
are all names that come easily to mind.

I am also grateful to Isabel Castillo González; to my indispensable Chabe, who fifteen years ago knitted me the red sweater which protects me from the cold when I am at work in my little study; to Martina García Ramírez, whose strength and intelligence work hard to protect both humans and animals; to Paula Haro, my daughter, who read the early chapters and sharply proposed a number of corrections; and to Mane and Felipe, for picking me up each time I was starting to go under.

Birds regularly arrived at my study window just as dusk fell, and their racket made me think that if Pisanello had already painted every single one of them, Leonora hatched them all over again, in order to bestow on them the face of a
zenzontle
bird, or of a canary, or a hen, and so create a new reality for them. Horus' own sparrowhawk flies through her paintings dressed as a Harlequin, while Ur Jar traverses the skies in a hot air balloon; in
Are You Really Syrious?
the hanging star interrogates us and plays with the meanings of language; the
sidhes
and the Tuatha Dé Danann, are spherical and intangible, the Celtic and druidic White Goddess, lunar and so before all time, revolves – as she does in
Samain
and
Pastoral –
in order to render visible the invisible past, and instruct us in the vast zoology we all contain within ourselves.