Leonora (25 page)

28

LIBERATION

T
HE MORALES DOCTORS
, father and son, put her on the train to Madrid together with Frau Asegurada, her nurse. The date is the last day of 1940, and the temperature is so abysmal that it turns their skin blue and the train gets stuck for hours in Ávila. Another train is held on the adjacent track, its wagons laden with sheep bleating with cold.

‘I'll remember the suffering of those sheep until the day I die.' Leonora buries her head in her hands.

Frau Asegurado stares out of the window.

‘I was one of those sheep when I was in the Villa Covadonga,' and Leonora covers her ears.

In Madrid, they stay in a large and luxurious hotel, courtesy of Imperial Chemical. Impressed, Frau Asegurado permits her to attend a
thé dansant
held on the first floor of the hotel. The orchestra is playing Strauss waltzes. A man approaches, invites Leonora to dance and, when she is about to accept, Frau Asegurado intercepts her:

‘You are allowed to watch the dancers, not to go dancing.'

‘Or to drink?'

‘That you may, and I shall bring the two glasses of Rioja I have just spotted on a tray.'

Much to her surprise, Leonora runs into Renato Leduc on the arm of a stunning blonde, to whom she at once recounts her Odyssey.

‘I am accompanied here by a nurse, Frau Asegurado, you can see her sitting over there, a glass of wine in her hand. They locked me up in an asylum in Santander and cured me with three doses of Cardiazol, the equivalent of three electro-convulsive treatments. My father ordains my fate, and he still wants me at his side in England. I would prefer to die than let him continue to control me.'

‘We have to do something!' The blonde is on the point of tears.

‘Where are you going after Madrid, for the love of God, Renato?'

Frau Asegurado approaches, glass in hand.

They converse in French, so that she can't understand them.

‘Come and find me at the Mexican Embassy in Lisbon,' Leduc replies.

Leonora sleeps much more soundly, despite her nurse's snoring.

Next morning the British consul and the director of the Madrid branch office of Imperial Chemical reappear, wreathed in smiles, and invite her to dinner.

They bid one another farewell with a hug. Without doubt, wine works miracles and the nurse forgets her role as torturer.

The Madrid director of Imperial Chemical can't do too much for Leonora.

‘Please, eat.'

They are apprehensive at her recent release from the asylum, and Leonora notices how the manager's wife jumps at seeing her pick up her cutlery. Harold Carrington's daughter does everything not to fall apart. ‘I've got them terrified.'

‘It would appear that I am something of a cause for alarm to Madrid's high society,' Leonora says, knife in hand. The director of Imperial Chemical invites her to dinner again, this time without the company of his wife.

‘This is the best restaurant in Madrid.'

He smiles at her. Leonora orders turbot in champagne sauce.

‘Your family has decided to send you to South Africa, to a sanatorium where you will be very happy.'

‘I am not so sure about that.'

‘I myself have a different suggestion: I could buy you a flat here and visit you frequently.' He places his hand on her thigh.

The alternatives are horrible: either she is embarked for South Africa, or else she has to bed this horrific man. In order to buy time, Leonora flees to the bathroom.

When they leave the restaurant at the end of the evening, the director tries to embrace her.

‘Come close, let me cover you up from the cold.'

Once outside, a terrific blast of wind unhinges the metal advert hanging over the restaurant and it falls right at her feet.

‘It could have killed you!' His hug becomes even tighter.

‘No, my answer is still no,' and Leonora pulls away.

‘Then go to hell! You'll be sent to Portugal and from there on to South Africa.'

‘Portugal?'

The British consul and the director of Imperial Chemical put her on the train together with her documents, which seem to have magically reappeared. Leonora repeats to them both:

‘I am going neither to South Africa, nor to another sanatorium!'

At the station she is received by a delegation from Imperial Chemical: two men who look like policemen, and a woman with a vinegary expression.

‘You're in luck, you'll be living in the prettiest house in Estoril until your boat sets off to South Africa.'

‘It will be wonderful.'

Leonora has learnt how to use cunning to overcome the enemy.

The house in Estoril, a few kilometres outside Lisbon, has a bath tub you cannot fill with more than a centimetre of water, and two parrots jabbering in their cage. She spends the night devising her means of escape, and at breakfast she tells the vinegary woman:

‘It has turned very cold, and I need to keep warm. So I need to buy a hat and a new pair of gloves.'

‘Of course, no-one goes out without gloves and a hat at this time of year,' agrees the vinegary woman.

On descending from the train in Lisbon, she sees a café. ‘It's now or never,' she thinks to herself. ‘I have only moments in which to act.'

‘I need to go to the toilet.'

She prays to the entire heavenly host that the café has a back door.

The vigilant minder awaits her at their table.

Leonora has got it right and the café has another exit, towards which she immediately heads. She is even more in luck, for a member of the heavenly host delivers up a taxi at precisely the right moment.

‘To the Mexican Embassy.'

She pays the driver with the money for her gloves.

At the Embassy she uses her asylum-learnt Spanish to enquire:

‘Might Renato Leduc happen to be in today?'

‘He doesn't have a strict time of arrival.'

‘Then I shall sit down and wait for him.'

‘But, young lady …'

‘The police are after me!'

Several people are staring at her. At that moment, Emmanuel Fernández, the Mexican consul, opens his office door.

‘You are on Mexican territory and you enjoy diplomatic immunity for as long as you are here. Your compatriots cannot lay a finger on you,' the consul assures her.

Is what follows true or is it a fairy story? Nobody maltreats her and the best of all is when Renato appears, and makes obvious his compassion for her.

‘Your troubles are over, Leonora, you need to unwind, and in order for this to happen you need a good meal and a good night's sleep.'

He takes her to her hotel. Next morning, breakfast with Renato is sheer delight. Light-hearted and witty, his mere presence is enlivening and the horizon opens before her like the parting of the Red Sea before Moses. Leonora launches herself into a full gallop.

29

RENATO LEDUC

L
EONORA HAD FOUND RENATO
attractive ever since they first met in Paris, and he seems all the more so now, when her empathy for him becomes absorbed by his capacity to save her.

She finds his Mexican-inflected French accent particularly pleasing.

‘I was taught to speak French by my father, and I would always talk in it with him. In addition, I have always enjoyed travel – on foot, on horseback, by train, by bicycle, by any means of transport whatsoever. It's something I carry in my blood. In another life, I think I must have been a cloud.'

Over the next few days, he surprises her with his sparkle, and the way he murmurs a poem into her ear, something that already feels like a ring upon her finger:

‘Negra su cabellera, negra, negra,

negros sus ojos, negros como la fama de una suegra.'

Leonora laughs aloud.

‘Have you ever had a mother-in-law?'

‘No, Max had no mother.'

‘Then you are quite right.'

Every day more men, women and entire families arrive at the Mexican Embassy, seeking safe conducts to leave the country. While Renato looks after them, Leonora goes on long walks, inhaling the salt air, smiling at the seagulls in flight and smoking cigarettes. The hotel where they are staying is clean, just like Renato. Clean in spirit. He asks nothing from her but offers to take her out to purchase canvas and tubes of paint, so that she can paint while they await their departure.

‘Who knows how long we'll be stuck here? There are so many people waiting here and their situation is nothing if not depressing.'

‘War destroys everything, doesn't it, Renato?'

‘Yes indeed,' he responds gravely, as if she were a little girl.

Lisbon is a port of exit and not one solitary refugee more can squeeze in. The streets are crammed with people awaiting the journey as they smoke cigarettes and play blind man's buff, a perfect game for wartime. Leonora ventures into the market and is suddenly turned to stone: it cannot be, or else it has to be one of her hallucinations, so many people look alike. But this tall man with his white hair resembles Max so much, and his straight back is surely identical to Max's. That the gentleman is weighing a hammer in his hand just as Max would draws her magnetically towards him and he, on looking round, causes Leonora to tumble into the depths of his fishy eyes. Max Ernst gazes at her with identical astonishment. Neither makes the least movement towards the other: not he, hammer in hand, nor she, cigarette in hand; they measure up to each other, as if stricken with terror.

At long last, Max sets down the hammer and takes her by the hand. The knots in his throat are loosened and he tells her that on emerging from the camp at Les Milles he set out in search of her. Yes, yes, he did find her note on the kitchen table at their house in St. Martin d'Ardèche: ‘Dear Max, I've left with C. and I'll wait for you in Extremadura.'

‘You went without taking a single thing with you, and you left the house in the charge of a wholly unscrupulous innkeeper. You abandoned the lot and the lot has been lost.'

‘Nothing is lost, if we have found one another.' Leonora is trembling, but Max is not listening to her.

‘I went back to St. Martin d'Ardèche and you weren't there,' he insists.

‘How did the vineyards seem to you?'

‘They were in a lamentable state, they had been left to languish, that is just how the French wine-makers are. Not a single bottle of our wine was left, either. I stayed there, at St. Martin, for a few days, rolled up some of my canvases, and brought what I could with me. Alphonsine kept repeating: ‘
Elle a perdu la tête
.' You stopped by her café and called out that you were fleeing for Spain with another couple. Why didn't you wait for me, Leonora?'

‘I didn't know if you would come back, and the very thought of your not doing so made me ill. If Catherine and Michel had not come for me, you would have found me there, still waiting.'

‘So, instead of awaiting me, you vanished?'

‘Fine, and what did you do?' Leonora interrupted him, lighting up another cigarette.

‘I was in hiding, gathering up the canvases and, as soon as I could, leaving for Marseilles, to take refuge in the Villa Air-Bel. Kay Sage, Yves Tanguy's wife, asked Peggy Guggenheim to fund my journey to New York, along with bringing out Breton, Jacqueline and Aube. And I asked Peggy if she would recover the sculptures and bas-reliefs from St. Martin d'Ardèche. Since she had seen pictures of them in the
Cahiers d'Art
, she took an oath before a lawyer that they were worth at least 175,000 francs, and rescued what she could. I definitely have at least two of your paintings here with me,
The Inn of the Dawn Horse
and your large portrait of
Loplop, the Superior Bird.
'

‘Paintings?'

‘Yes. Or don't you remember that we are painters?'

Leonora cannot believe it, although perhaps she doesn't realise the implications. Max doesn't ask her about herself, about all she has suffered, or about the asylum in Santander. Max talks about himself compulsively, enumerating all the canvases he has retrieved, and the one which still remains incomplete:
Europe After the Rain.
He recalls each and every one of the figures sculpted on the walls of St. Martin d'Ardèche, one with the fish on its head, another with a hat, that of the minotaur.

‘They even removed the bench I had painted, trampled the bas-relief into the ground, broke down the painted door. Only the bas-relief can be restored.'

He is insistent on the point that it was she who abandoned their house. His blue eyes cloud over, his gestures become increasingly abrupt. He orders one coffee after another.

‘And the cats, Max, whatever happened to the cats?'

‘Who cares about the cats?' Max grows still more irritable.

Leonora tries to light her cigarette but cannot find the lighter inside her handbag, any more than she can her locate her true
raison d'être
. She rummages as Max continues to lecture, his one and only topic being art, and he communicates with such iciness that Leonora starts to tremble.

‘Max, let me go to my hotel, I think I am feeling ill.'

‘I'll accompany you there. I have to go to the station to pick up a friend, anyway.'

Back in her room, Leonora throws herself on to her bed, and hides her head under the pillow. She doesn't realise that Max has gone to meet Peggy Guggenheim and that at that very moment, his face a death mask and his voice strangulated, Max is taking his patron by the arm before manoeuvring her to one side as he says, almost before she has had time to set foot on the platform:

‘Something dreadful has occurred. I've found Leonora.'

‘How delightful for you.' Peggy rises to the challenge.

They go to their hotel and try to act naturally, opening several bottles of wine. At midnight Max asks Peggy to accompany him on a walk. ‘I've found her, I've found her,' he repeats at every step, as if he were driving hammer blows into the back of Peggy's neck.

‘It's as if you neither see nor hear a thing!' Max complains, since Peggy makes no reply.

‘What do you want me to understand by this, Max? You and I … I don't know what we are. Is there anything between us?'

Max stays silent. The person paying his passage to the United States is Peggy, the woman who shares his bed is Peggy.

‘Let's meet Leonora,' Peggy proposes to Max.

‘You have met her before.'

‘Well, then let's meet her again,' the patron corrects herself.

They drink tea and Leonora talks about the ‘Mexican' with whom she is to be married, or has already become married.

‘I would do anything in the world to escape from Imperial Chemical and Harold Carrington. What I most want is to live at the ends of the earth, so that my parents cannot find me,' says Leonora fiercely.

‘The United States are at the end of the world,' Max says with weighty emphasis, as taut as a bow, desire writ large across his face. His gigantic blue eyes pursue Leonora and register her slightest move. She affects not to notice, orders more tea, and treads on Peggy's foot.

From that night on, the millionairess moves into her own room.

‘Like any good Latin, Renato is jealous,' Leonora divulges.

Peggy offers to invite him to dinner, revealing just the smallest sign of her desire for revenge on Max, and Leonora accepts.

‘He can only be free in the evening, he's at work all day long.'

‘Is he an ambassador?' Peggy enquires.

‘No, he's the Second Consul.'

Leonora shakes hands with Peggy, inserts a carnation into the buttonhole of Max's jacket, and kisses him.

‘Even if the war drives everyone mad, no-one will ever be as fragile as Leonora,' Max comments as they walk back to their hotel.

‘And because I have money that means I'm not fragile, right?' Peggy asks.

Their way back is miserable. Max doesn't even offer her his arm. He precedes her, swathed in his black cloak, wholly wrapped up in his own thoughts.

There are no vacancies in any hotel and people are gathering in the cafés to wait; after a pause they get up and resume walking around, perhaps to another café to continue waiting. After two or three hours they return to where they started from, as though playing musical chairs. Peggy stays with her children Sindbad and Pegeen, in the Hotel Frankfurt-Rossio, but her spite is so extreme that she takes refuge in the arms of her ex-husband and the father of her children, Laurence Vail; and he tells her that he intends to cancel his journey to the United States.

‘I shall stay in Britain and assist the Royal Air Force. My services are needed as a pilot.'

‘Don't be so irresponsible! Sindbad and Pegeen, all our friends – they rely on you! I rely on you!'

And Laurence Vail takes Peggy in his arms.

Leonora not only crosses Peggy's path, but also that of Laurence Vail and his second wife, the artist and writer Kay Boyle, the five children they have between them – two of Peggy's and three of Kay's – and, above all, of Peggy's latest official lover: Max Ernst.

Whereas once magnetic fields joined them together, now the war unhinges them, they fight and forgive, drink and embrace, love with passion and the next day no longer remember the reason for their fits of rage or ecstasy, nor even with whom they spent the night. Each holds intimate memories of the personal life of the other, and their mutual confidences are eschatological; let everyone look at them, let everyone know how and who they are, what they are worth. Their sole
raison d'être
is to shine like stars, the only secret they keep under lock and key is that of their income.

There is much talk of Varian Fry and the Villa Air-Bel in Marseilles, a vast house that Breton baptised with the name of the Villa Esper Visa.

‘Why did they give it that name?' asks Leonora in all innocence.

‘Because that's all we did there: wait for a visa. Haven't you noticed how difficult it is to obtain a visa for Spain or Portugal?'

‘Tell that to Peggy …'

‘Peggy can …'

‘Peggy is about to receive a deposit from the Bank of America.'

‘So if you make yourself amenable, Peggy will make it happen for you, too.'

‘Listen, you know that Peggy paid for André Breton and his wife Jacqueline, along with their daughter Aube, to set out for Martinique aboard the
Paul Lemerle
, and is now paying for ten passages on the clipper from Lisbon to New York.'

As Peggy's first husband, Laurence Vail qualifies as the group's leader, choosing where they are to eat, drink, converse, argue and yell at one another. They are continuously out partying, and the more he comes to loathe their raves, the less he wishes to leave them.

His retinue floats on the crest of a wave, and the leitmotif of their existence is how to make money as they do in the United States. Kay Boyle, on the point of separating from Laurence, talks of nothing but a prisoner whom she intends to spring from a concentration camp.

Naturally, the topic currently at the top of their list concerns the pale Englishwoman whom Max has only just met up with again: Leonora, who lived with him in St. Martin d'Ardèche.

‘Her family want to get her out of the way, and send her to another psychiatric clinic, this time in Cape Town,' Max confides in a low voice.

‘To where?' Peggy pursues with vengeance.

‘To an a-sy-lum in South Africa. Which makes her fear her father even more than the Nazis.'

Renato works in the Mexican Embassy and one night he turns up at the Leão d'Ouro, where Guggenheim is installed with her retinue. Peggy is greatly impressed by this man with his long legs, tanned complexion and grey-streaked hair, who addresses everyone in impeccable French. He has much political news to impart on Portugal, France, Spain, and even the United States. They all besiege him with questions.