Leonora (28 page)

32

NEW YORK

L
EONORA AND RENATO LIVE
on 306 West 73rd Street, in downtown Manhattan. Every morning, Leduc goes to work at the Mexican Embassy and Leonora, lingering with a degree of trepidation, only emerges on to the street with her mac around her shoulders and a cigarette between her lips after having downed several cups of tea. She walks and walks, nothing pleases her more than walking. What a way to defy the skies over New York! Not only does the city grow upwards, but it has its roots in the seabed, and the skyscrapers cling to the ground so they won't take flight. Crowds levitate in the streets, their arms becoming wings which raise them ever higher. To walk through Central Park is to cross the garden of Eden. People hurry about, their skin looks taut, their hair and eyes shine brightly. Men, women and children cheerfully greet one another: ‘Hi!'; ‘Hi there!'; ‘Hello!'. New Yorkers are a breath of fresh air, for all their toothpaste smiles! Leonora tries out the city as if it were a new frock, and the ground creaks beneath her clicking heels. ‘No Spain, no, no more Spain, I shall never return to Spain; I am here to inaugurate a new Leonora.'

Renato's way of seeing the world puts her in a good mood. He always has a joke on the tip of his tongue: ‘Ay, Leonora, don't complicate things, each day offers us something new, here and now, don't be a misery guts!'

Standing on the subway platform waiting for the train, between a black guy as tall as the Statue of Liberty and a Puerto Rican woman with enormous earrings, Leonora spies her old friend from the days of the Ozenfant Academy, Stella Snead: ‘Incredible! So it's true the world is no bigger than a thimble!' Stella informs her that Amédée Ozenfant, also now in New York, is still teaching. ‘Let's stop by and say hello.' When he receives them, he no longer treats them like pupils. ‘We have to celebrate!' They are now his equals. He invites them to tea at Tiffany's. That evening, when Leonora tells Renato all about her day, she tells him that she also saw Max.

‘What a coincidence, another meeting with the neurotic ape!'

‘I saw him in the Pierre Matisse Gallery. He and Peggy are inviting us to dinner on Saturday. I shall take the opportunity to return his canvases to him. He told me how, when he came down the steps from the aeroplane, at the very moment when Jimmy approached to give him a hug, two officers seized him and he was locked up on Ellis Island. His photo appeared in the press with his face the picture of panic. They held him in solitary confinement, incommunicado in his cell. Jimmy moved heaven and earth and, thanks mainly to him, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, and Peggy's money, Max was set free.

‘Well this young lad must be a mess, having a pimp for a Pa.'

‘What do you mean by a pimp?'

‘A man who lives off women, like your Max.'

Peggy owns a house on Sutton Place, close by the Hudson, in the district where all the embassies are. Whenever she sees Leonora, she greets her with a face as long as a lobster's. Renato, though, she welcomes with open arms. That evening they are to join Peggy, Kurt Seligmann, Jimmy Ernst – who appeals to Renato considerably more than his father – Berenice Abbott, Amédée Ozenfant, André Breton, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp and Piet Mondrian.

‘Man Ray takes himself too seriously; Marcel Duchamp is much easier to deal with,' Leonora says to Renato.

‘Marcel Duchamp is a leech who passes the time playing chess, and Max is the most neurotic man I've ever met. Maybe one day you'll distance yourself a little from these Surrealists?' Renato says accusingly.

‘They are my people,' Leonora says.

The one appealing character is definitely Luis Buñuel, whom Renato always tries to sit next to. He is direct and always questions him about Mexico, his prominent eyes looking at him with a genuinely interested air of enquiry.

‘Are there dwarves in your country?'

‘We certainly have plenty of vertically challenged politicians.'

That night Leonora dreams that she and Peggy are lobsters attacking each other while everyone else stands by just looking.

From that moment on Leonora, Max, Peggy Guggenheim, André Breton and Jacqueline Lamba, Marcel Duchamp, Luis Buñuel and the elderly Amédée Ozenfant meet up regularly. They follow Peggy from one party to the next, gathering prospective clients as they go. One of Peggy's favourite expressions is ‘Let's throw a party.' Her energy is as inexhaustible as her appetite for shopping. She promotes, divulges, weighs up, pronounces on the originality of the avant-garde; she glides from one group to the next, glass in hand, with the slender haughtiness of a fashion model. She always seems to have some excitable pet on her lap. She invites newcomers to dinner, makes flirtatious remarks, all her energy is consumed in doing business and, thanks to her, the Surrealists sell their pictures.

In return, they render shameless homage to the millionaires, tout for trade like street vendors, or else declare themselves to be on the verge of suicide. It all serves to aggrandise their sense of self-importance, and Peggy is crowned the queen of public relations. The press promotes her scandals and she sells them to the highest bidder.

‘We are on top of the world,' Man Ray exclaims.

Peggy is busy filling up her diary. ‘Lunch with Herbert Read,' she notes; ‘tea with Elsa Maxwell', ‘interview with the editors of the
New York Times
,
Vogue, Harper's Bazaar
'.

Behind every lifeless picture, there is an artist fighting to position their own work in the best place on the wall, while money simmers and bubbles away. Each and every step Guggenheim takes around her gigantic drawing room means dollars: when she extends her hand to be kissed, dollars drip from her fingers; each phone call clinches a deal. Of course, she herself will be left with the vast canvas that Leonora painted of Max in St. Martin d'Ardèche (
Loplop, the Superior Bird
) which he both saved and then surrendered to her.

‘Send the lot of them to the devil, and I'll support you in Mexico,' Renato offers.

‘No, I still can't. They are my friends and my family.'

‘I think I'm worth more than all of them put together.'

Leonora stays silent.

Without intending to, Dalí had opened a pathway for them in New York. In 1939, the company Bonwit & Teller invited him to decorate the front window of their main department store and the Catalan chose the theme of night and day.
Day
was a mannequin on the point of stepping into a fur-lined bath tub, similar to the hairy cup devised by Meret Oppenheim;
Night
was a brazier glowing with embers, with a black backdrop and curtains. Without consultation, the store owners altered a part of the scenario they decided looked obscene; Dalí waited for the busiest moment of the day, and then launched himself, furry bath and all, on to the spectators in the street outside. The court ordered him to pay the costs of the shattered window, plus a fine to stay out of prison. His patron Edward James made haste to defray the expenses: ‘It couldn't matter less. The whole of New York is dying for a Dalí,' asserted James. But by now the curious were avid for a new spectacle.

Max Ernst pursues Leonora relentlessly: ‘You are my woman, the one that I love; the lover of the wind. Loplop and she cannot be separated.'

He turns up at the house every morning, an hour after Renato leaves for the Embassy and tells her: ‘Let's go!'

Leonora throws her mac over her shoulders and follows him out. The difference between Renato and Max is that Max is her world and her mentor, he shows her the buildings she has to see, the books she must read, he extends the vision of a brilliant future shining before her, of winning the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale and at Rome.

If he doesn't turn up Leonora grows anxious, calls him on the phone, begs him to take her to lunch. Complicity is like handcuffs and only Max holds the key. They walk the banks of the Hudson, where heavy barges navigate their way beneath the watchful eyes of Bell Chevigny, looking down from her window on Riverside Drive.

‘Walking is good for us and we can pretend the Hudson is the Seine.'

They walk enthusiastically from ten in the morning until eight at night, pausing a while in Washington Square, visiting Manhattan, discovering the Lower East Side. They walk as far as Brooklyn, a place that Max never gets to visit with Peggy. Guggenheim is the provider and Leonora the inspiration. Peggy organises one show after another so she can forget that Max only turns up at home when he feels like it, and even then only has eyes for Leonora. Leonora is the one he introduces to his friends; Leonora the one to whom he gives his arm; Leonora the one he never lets out of his sight. He has but one obsession: Leonora, Leonora, Leonora; and Peggy is left to suffer. Waiting for Max has become an agony.

Peggy begins to protest: ‘Everyone says you spend all your time with her. If you are here in New York, it's thanks to me, not to her.'

Jimmy Ernst is increasingly worried by the strange mixture of desolation and euphoria visible in the drawn features of his father. It is there in his fixed look and in the lines of his thin, bitter lips.

‘The only thing that matters to you is meeting up with that Englishwoman again.'

Jimmy himself does not exist for Max.

Max sits beside the telephone awaiting a call from Leonora. If it doesn't come, he falls into the deepest depression.

‘Not today, Max.' When Leonora refuses him, she is unaware that she is pushing him further towards the abyss.

The weekends are spent with Renato who takes her off to Coney Island. ‘Let's climb onto the first roller coaster in all the United States,' and Leonora allows herself to be taken. As she becomes more used to being with Renato, his frequent absences cause her all the more anguish.

On days like these the desperation in Max's eyes is such that they cannot settle on anything, and he bursts into irrational laughter with an offensive ring to it. Max could not give a fig for what anyone else does; only for what Leonora is up to.

‘Last night, six geese marched across Fifth Avenue,' Leonora informs Max, ‘they were heading for Sutton Place, to be stuffed for dinner at your house, but all of a sudden a hyena appeared and ate them up … and snaffled up the rest of dinner, too.'

Once in a while Leonora protests and Max does not know how to reply. Her sense of irony renders her impenetrable. Max longs only to sweep her up in his arms, but she won't let him. Ever since she left St. Martin d'Ardèche she has not been the same, and the hostility between the two of them is intensified.

‘What about Peggy?' Leonora enquires.

‘She's the boss,' comes the answer.

33

WHITE RABBITS

L
EONORA REVOLVES BENEATH THE SKYSCRAPERS
, in ecstasy over this new life which makes her seasick with its speed and the force of its energy. How is it possible to be so happy after being so utterly miserable? Leonora wakes up every morning feeling light as a feather, and the Surrealists comment on her sense of humour and acts of libertarianism. After an experience like hers in Villa Covadonga, such a change is unprecedented. The Englishwoman is grateful for it. ‘The Morales doctors could never have imagined my becoming the comet on whose tail everyone seeks to hitch a ride.' Sometimes, in the midst of the whirlwind, she has the distinct sensation of a dagger being planted between her shoulder blades. ‘It's really my wings on the point of breaking out,' she thinks, ‘the wings I need in order to fly away from Max.'

Darling, glad to meet you, have a good day, enjoy:
such formulas spur her on to flight.

‘Tomorrow I wish to be alone, Max.'

‘Tomorrow I can't see you, Max.'

‘Tomorrow, I need to write, Max.'

‘Tomorrow, I have an appointment I can't miss, Max.'

Max soon doesn't get to see her the days she needs to wash her hair, either. Leonora warns him well ahead of the ceremony: ‘On Thursday I have to wash my hair, Max.' After rinsing it out, she sits beside the window to dry her hair in the sun, pulling back the jet black curtain which falls across her face, so she can see the buildings dark and dusty with soot, as dark as her black hair.

She knows Max loves her, but often finds being apart from him restful.

Through her window she can see a crow swooping down to perch on the balcony rail of the building opposite. The crow scratches himself, searches out something beneath his wing, while a woman comes out on to the balcony and lays a dish on the floor, which the bird acknowledges with a squawk. The woman watches Leonora from her balcony, smiles at her, and then asks if she doesn't have a morsel of leftover meat to give to the crow.

Leonora buys some meat and waits until it starts to rot before she crosses the street. The woman, her white face spangled with a thousand tiny stars, opens the door to her.

‘Come on up.'

Inside, a hundred white rabbits with pink eyes are awaiting the scraps of putrid meat. They share it among themselves. Then her hostess points out a man whose skin shines like her own, sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room.

‘Let me introduce Lázaro to you.'

On his lap Lázaro has a large white rabbit, busily engaged in tearing a piece of meat to shreds. The woman puts her cheek close to Leonora's and the stench of putrefaction in her breath shocks her.

‘If you are coming here to live with us, young lady, your skin will become covered with the stars of the holy disease as recorded in the Bible: its name is leprosy.'

As she flees, Leonora looks back to see the lady of the balcony raising her hand in salutation, as two fingers fall to the floor.

Leonora writes
White Rabbits
and relives her dream as a premonition. If she remains in New York, she will catch leprosy. Peggy Guggenheim infects all the little rabbits who circle in her orbit.

Leonora's behaviour in New York continues to be eccentric. The retinue gathers at the French restaurant Larre, on 56th Street, or goes round to Breton's apartment in Greenwich Village. There they all talk enthusiastically of the new magazine
VVV.
Breton continues to issue orders and Jacqueline is clearly fed up. As she explains ‘he is so domineering', and Leonora agrees with her. Sometimes the group congratulates Leonora on her eccentricities, and sometimes it condemns them. Luis Buñuel is surprised when, in the midst of a dinner at Barbara Reiss' house, Leonora leaves the dinner table, goes into the bathroom and returns soaking wet, with her dress clinging to her body. She comes back to the dining room streaming with water, sits down opposite Buñuel and stares at him fixedly:

‘I just took a shower.'

‘With your clothes on?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then I shall take you back home.'

‘You are a very attractive man,' she tells Buñuel, clutching his arm. ‘You remind me of my prison warder, Luis Morales.'

There's no doubt about it, Buñuel is a good man. Leonora was not there for the screening of
L'Age d'Or
in Paris, the night on which the League of Patriots and the Anti-Jewish League threw paint at the screen, and slashed four Surrealist canvases hanging in the cinema lobby. This time, Buñuel takes her arm instead, and his prominent eyes sweep over her. When she looks back at him with anguish, he tells her: ‘I am the one of us here who has been excommunicated,' and his smile pacifies her. ‘Being a man condemned sets you above the multitude. They expelled Charles de Noailles from the Jockey Club, and it was all the fault of my film, which he directed. That day we opened a bottle of champagne. Would you like us to go and have a glass somewhere now?'

Her gastronomic experiments also cause a sensation. She invites André Breton and Marcel Duchamp round to eat and serves them a rabbit stuffed with oysters.

Nobody wants anything more to do with Dalí. ‘He's a whore.' ‘He's gone too far now.' Not even Max continues to meet up with Gala, his ex-lover, except that now he refers to her by her given name: Elena Ivanovna Diakonova. Being extravagant is a means to acquire celebrity and Surrealists are not interested in glory.

There are days on which Leonora reverts to Villa Covadonga, back to her former state of depression. On others, her rage makes her laugh. In one restaurant she smears her feet in mustard:

‘That'll make that pompous waiter put us out on to the street.'

Buñuel tells her of an experiment conducted by some North American scientists, about a couple shut up in a cage, who would not be fed for the duration of the test. In love, they agreed to being guinea pigs. As their hunger increased, the lover forgot about his love, and they had to remove the love birds before they killed one another.

‘Did he leave any bones?'

‘Ay, Leonora!'

‘I understood that he had devoured her.'

‘No, it didn't happen quite like that.'

‘Do you think that Max would have sacrificed himself for me?'

Buñuel chose to tell her the story of the book he liked best. Two good friends who had lost touch with each other decided to meet up again. One, crazy with joy, took the train to the country house of the other, who was awaiting him anxiously. Gradually, they became aware that they actually had nothing at all to say to each other.

‘Are you telling me this because of Max?'

‘No, Leonora, and please stop bringing everything back to your own situation.'

‘Do you really think that Max and I have nothing to say to each other?'

‘Leonora, please don't start.'

To Renato, his wife's behaviour does not provide cause for concern. The fact is he spends so little time with her that he isn't really keeping up. Leonora feels safe when she's with him and, in order to please her, Renato sometimes accompanies her to her various dinners; but when he refuses to go out, Leonora doesn't put in an appearance either, much to Max's annoyance.

Breton and Tanguy are assiduous regulars at the gatherings and they worry about her. ‘Leonora please don't leave off writing.' ‘Don't stop painting now, Leonora.' Deep inside her, the asylum is alive and flourishing, and surfaces in the subjects she paints. In
Green Tea,
a Leonora swathed like a mummy in the wake of a session of electro-convulsive therapy pauses in the middle of the garden at Santander, at the centre of a circle from which there is no exit. To one side, a female hyena with a tail like a tree has a horse tethered to the trunk, with another tree for its tail, tied in its turn to the female hyena.

In Stanley William Hayter's studio, Leonora creates her first black-and-white print on a glass plate, which allows her to relive the madness; she draws with such realistic precision that it looks as if she is copying the scene imprinted on her brain by her life itself: chained dogs facing inwards to the centre of a circle likewise endowed with a hound's paws and face. Leonora is the same chained dog that appears in
Green Tea
.

‘Look here, Leonora,' David Hare, Breton and Duchamp all tell her, ‘your sketch will be included in an original portfolio of works from
VVV
that we are about to launch.'

Other collaborators include Marc Chagall, Alexander Calder (the inventor of the kinetic mobile), André Masson (for whom Nietzsche is God), the macabre Kurt Seligmann, Yves Tanguy, André Breton, Roberto Matta and Robert Motherwell.

Leonora cannot contain her surprise when Manka Rubinstein, sister to the cosmetics entrepreneur Helena, commissions a painting the size of a wall in her house.

‘I don't even have enough money to buy a canvas as big as that,' she admits to Max.

‘Don't worry about it, we'll go and see Chagall. He is the only artist now selling like hot cakes. Tell him you'll pay him back as soon as you get the money from Helena Rubinstein,' Duchamp proposes.

Chagall scrutinises the eight little sketches the Englishwoman presents him with and lets fall, in the strongest of Russian accents: ‘Carry on painting, little one, carry on painting,' but he doesn't loan her a single canvas, still less any money. Breton had the idea of taking the sheet off his bed and placing it in Leonora's arms.

‘Here you are, and now to work. Why waste time over someone so stingy?'

Duchamp, Matta and Ernst are her assistants. The Chilean Roberto Matta is enthusiastic and, as an architect, he knows all about proportions and perspectives. His technique is to use sexual perversion as a means to understanding his subjects. Duchamp, for whom Leonora has considerable sympathy, in not taking himself seriously, fills in the background. Max signs with his little blue bird in the upper left-hand corner of the canvas.

‘Why are you signing it if the painting is Leonora's?' Duchamp enquires.

‘I only put in my blue bird for good luck,' Max disingenuously pretends.

When they finish the mural, Manka Rubinstein is charmed, and hands over $200, far more than Leonora has ever previously earned for a painting.

‘Can you imagine what Helena Rubinstein must have paid for Dalí to decorate her apartment?'

One night, after a massive celebration of the success with Rubinstein together with Max, Duchamp and Matta, Leonora finally returns home to discover that Renato is not there. His absence gives rise to a severe panic attack. She seizes Leduc's portable Olivetti typewriter and begins to write furiously:

‘Did you go out again after returning home and not finding me here? Have I come back too late? I was so sure that you would be in and now that you're not I find an immense sadness deep inside me. When I came in the porter gave me a look as if you had told him something about me. Is that true?

‘I am slowly and painfully exploding with the desire to see you, please come back soon. I cannot stretch out on the bed alone, on that devourer of fornicators, only with you there beside me; I don't dare to lie down alone upon such an object. I am terrified to be here alone, of falling into the chasm. I love you abominably, it's horrific to be here alone without you, even though I am used to your being away all day long. I loathe New York. I love you and I want to make love to you, to kiss you and lick you. It is getting late and there's no sign of you. I'm not afraid of anything, for the love of God – or of Satan, better of Satan – come soon, come soon, Renato. I am going mad without you, I need you so much. I am in anguish, and I need you so much. If only you knew how much I need you! I am not going to stop writing until you get back, and that way your absence will feel less terrible. Have you ever felt such strength of emotion? It's horrible. Tomorrow I'll go to the Consulate with you, just in order not to be without you. This lost night, night of loss, is truly terrible. I realise I am now becoming hysterical. Do you blame me and is that why you don't come home? I don't believe you capable of behaving like this. Luckily, you are not like me. I would be willing to give up the cat, all my hair and my left hand to have you back. I am going to strip myself of every violent emotion in order not to be in a bad mood when you return. It is terrible of me to get annoyed with you. I love you. From time to time I stop writing to see if I can hear your steps on the stairs. If you don't come soon, I shall have to write a new page, and then another and another, throughout the night. Nothing can be worse than these feelings that suffocate me. The cat suffers along with me when we are alone, they should give him a dose of Cardiazol too, and put him in a seaside asylum.

‘(See I have had to start a fresh page). Now I really am afraid. What can you be doing? Where are you? Are you happy to be without me at this moment in time? RENATO, FOR THE LOVE OF THE DEVIL, COME SOON.

‘I don't know if I should go out and look for you. In any case, I've no idea where to go to look for you … That frightens me. I realise how close I am again to madness: I am sweating and trembling over something that would seem unimportant to most people.