Leonora (42 page)

Chiki, Gaby, Pablo and Leonora wonder why the people cling to bleeding figures of Christ in the festival processions, and why they genuflect quite so often. They make signs of the cross like insects marking their forehead, chest, shoulders and belly. The body is their individual codex. In Europe the saints wear smiles; in Mexico the suffering of martyrs and souls in purgatory is bloodcurdling.

There are times when Leonora feels as if she is always walking on an island: England? Ireland? Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital city? Perhaps a combination of all three; a place of her own invention, where the creatures who keep her chained to her easel emerge from. Why did they drain the Lake of Texcoco? We could be happy if we only had water. How many deeds does this country commit against itself! Today all is dust. Leonora is slowly discovering Mexico; the country itself has already discovered her, and holds her fast.

The city assails her on its street corners that evoke other countries, rivers and European capitals, mountains and lakes, with their stallholders whose hands recall those of Van Gogh's
Potato Eaters.
The Federal District of Mexico City insinuates itself through each of her five senses and she sips it down as she does her daily cups of tea.

49

POETRY OUT LOUD

A
LICE RAHON WEARS WRAP-AROUND SKIRTS
like a Tahitian and her hair sweeps her shoulders. When she walks she leans at an angle, leaning forwards, which gives her an air of vulnerability, but also makes it all the easier to embrace her. She smiles and recites poems that on her lips sound like a bell in the night. She is never apart from Eva Sulzer and she spends many long nights with Remedios, whom Eva has taken under her wing. Alice invites Leonora and Octavio Paz to dine at her house in the literary district of San Ángel. Around the table they reach the decision that poetry should take to the streets:

‘It should be declaimed in the squares, in church aisles, in the market place!' Alice Rahon is wildly gesticulating by way of emphasis. ‘Mexico is pure poetry that has to break out into the streets!'

‘It is essential to create a theatre of really high quality,' Octavio observes. ‘Here the only interesting playwright is Usigli; we have to open ourselves up, extend bridges across the ocean. Many short pieces are totally poetic and easy to stage. I could also contribute one.'

Two days later, the poet knocks at the door on Calle Chihuahua. His eyes are as light as those of Max and the two Morales doctors. He is brilliant and warm, and loves the Surrealists, who have adopted him as one of their own.

‘The University supports us in staging plays by García Lorca, the
Eclogue IV
by Juan del Encina and Shakespeare's
The Tempest.
Together with García Torres we are going to create
Poetry Out Loud
, I am considering translating some short works: Ionesco's
The Motor Show
; Georges Neveux's
The Canary
, and Jean Tardieu's
Oswald and Zenaida
, and I'd also like to do an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Would you be able to do the sets?'

Those seductive blue eyes succeed in persuading Leonora to accede to his request. The poet turns up in the afternoons to talk about Djuna Barnes, Breton and Picasso, who hover over the Earth, and above all about Duchamp, whom he admires as much as he does John Cage and his music.
Readymades
are just coming into fashion in Mexico.

‘It is by no more than the mere fact of selection that an artist turns a urinal into a work of art that he then baptises
The Fountain
,' protests Leonora.

‘I like his way of giving art critics who reduce everything to adjectives a kick in the eye,' replies Paz.

‘I've given plenty of good kickings in my time but I do know what art is. To me this seems like an attack on my faith in painting.'

‘By painting a beard and moustache on to the Mona Lisa, Duchamp opened up the possibility of her being a man,' Paz alleges.

‘Marcel should have persisted in his career as an artist. Instead he preferred to close it down when he was only twenty-five years old.'

‘Why insist on the issue of whether he realised he was a great painter or not? To me it seems far braver to exhibit a piss-pot and sign it with the pseudonym R. Mutt! To paint moustaches and a beard on to the Mona Lisa is to desanctify painting,' Paz insists. ‘And worse still, he wrote on the bottom of the picture:
LHOOQ, elle a chaud au cul.
In the 1920s, it was a feat for Man Ray to take Marcel's photo dressed as a woman in a fur coat and a cloche hat, and so shine a light on his alter ego, Rrose Sélavy.'

‘Marcel is a misogynist, like the majority of Surrealists.'

‘Poetry Out Loud
is producing my version of Hawthorne's
Rappaccini's Daughter
. In a tropical garden filled with poisonous plants grown by the doctor Rappaccini his daughter, Beatrice, is “a living flask of venom”.'

‘Max Ernst was fascinated by carnivorous insect-eating plants,' Leonora informs him.

‘The garden is home to revelations.'

Leonora is intrigued by the concept that plants can bestow both life and death and that Paz seeks to defy logic by maintaining that to live and to die are one and the same. The venom can be transformed into an elixir. ‘My whole being began to clothe itself in green leaves. My head, instead of being a sorry machine churning out thoughts, was converted into a lake. From then on I gave up thought in favour of reflection,' announced Beatrice's lover. ‘Just as he puts it in his love poems, Octavio Paz yearns to lose himself in the woman – to lose himself in poetry in order to find himself, and so to be born and to die in it.'

Diego de Mesa is the most cultured among them; León Felipe turns up at rehearsals wearing his Basque beret, with his medieval cape and cane. María Luísa Mendoza yields to talent: ‘This is sublime. The Comédie-Française is nothing by comparison.' Sometimes Carlos Fuentes accompanies Octavio Paz and hangs on his every word with devotion.

‘Why don't we stage Ionesco's
Exit the King
?' suggests the young author Juan José Gurrola.

Leonora assumes responsibility for the sets and the wardrobe, and soon creating scene sets swallows up her painting; worse yet, her costumes get in the way of the actors' movements. For Beatrice, she invents a wide white hat that the actress rejects out of hand.

‘It's so heavy it keeps falling off. I spend my time onstage worrying more about this unwieldy contraption than over what I ought to be saying.'

‘We could trim it a little.'

Juan Soriano knows just how to phrase requests, and Leonora reduces the hat's size. He makes her laugh with his laughter and levity, and his last-minute happenings.

‘I think you must be a
sidhe
, Juan.'

‘Next you'll next be calling me a
chaneque
.'

‘Now we are going to repeat the scene with the kiss.'

León Felipe and Diego de Mesa propose that the number of trees also be reduced.

‘There's no space left on the set,' complains Hector Mendoza. ‘Each time The Messenger comes on, he knocks over painted flowers and animals.'

Soriano's costumes are also a hindrance. Paz comes to his defence: ‘It doesn't matter. Employing over seventeen metres of royal blue nylon is a great novelty.'

For the next spectacle,
King Balthazar's Dinner
, Leonora suggests that the audience be required to wear masks. There is not enough money to supply three hundred of them, or even enough to make all the scenery. Yet enthusiasm does not wane. The
miseen-scène
for the
Book of Good Love
by the Archpriest of Hita, with musical instruments provided by Juan Soriano, proves a triumph.

The Alatorre-Frenk family sings
Chaste Susanna
wearing sumptuous clothes made of velvet and feathers that rapidly go well over budget.

Leonora attends all the rehearsals. She meditates on her own projects and composes
Penelope
and
The Invention of Mole
in her head. She sets the Archbishop of Canterbury on to boil in a vast cauldron, under inquisition by Moctezuma. The priest bubbles away until nothing more than his head in its mitre shows over the top. His crozier awaits like a ladle attached to the cooking pot. This image galvanises her. Would the real Archbishop of Mexico, Luis María Martínez, agree to play the role? It is said that he goes about in a
strapless
cassock, blessing the capital's nightclubs.

‘In any case, if I decide to cook the Pope along with a decent quantity of potatoes, someone has to help out with peeling them all,' comments Leonora, with heavy irony.

‘You really are provocative, there's no doubt about it,' Juan Soriano says, amid laughter. ‘In Mexico we are tacky and sentimental.'

Another young artist turns up at the doorway on Calle Chihuahua: Alejandro Jodorowsky.

‘I am the Professor of Invisibility.'

Whatever operates against established orthodoxies soon finds an ally in Leonora. The young man proposes that a thousand women dressed as female popes storm the Vatican to prevail against the Church to leave off being misogynist.

‘You're quite right. The treatment we are given is preposterous.'

They share two favourite obsessions: the unconscious and the abolition of prejudice. Jodorowsky, the Chilean who like Leonora loves cats, tells her that he knows the whole pack of Marseilles tarot cards by heart because he is endowed with a golden third eye. She brings out her deck of cards and spreads it on the kitchen table.

‘This tarot is a
gringo
variant invented by Rider Waite. It's no use at all to anyone other than the hippies who used to consult it in Berkeley.'

‘Well, Waite's symbols have me spellbound,' says Leonora, deeply offended. ‘My favourite is the moon-woman with a hyena and a dog howling at her, separated by a scorpion.'

‘Just by looking at this one card I can see you are blocked by fear, erroneous thoughts and a tendency to talk nonsense.'

From his first visit onwards, Jodorowsky appears with increasing frequency. Gaby and Pablo grow used to seeing such a variety of unusual men and women come through the front door that nothing surprises them any more. Of them all, the most eccentric remains Edward James, and they have learnt to tolerate him. Alejandro introduces Leonora to Álvaro Custodio, who commissions her to design the sets for José Zorrilla's
Don Juan Tenorio.
The actress Ofelia Guilmáin is obsessed with the Spanish Civil War and brings it up at each interval. Leonora listens to her in horror. The rehearsals provide entertainment for Gaby and Pablo, who help their mother out painting masks and decorations.

‘Listen Leonora, what do you think of us writing something together?' Jodorowsky suggests.

‘I'd never considered co-writing. What type of thing do you have in mind?' Leonora responds.

‘A Surrealist children's operetta. Can you think of a title for one?'

‘What do you think of calling it “Princess Spider”, in homage to the resident in my studio?'

‘Princess Spider' never materialises, but instead Jodorowsky produces both
Penelope
and
The Oval Lady.

‘You need to alter the last part. The father can't end up burning Tartar, that's too cruel. You can't do that to Lucrecia.'

‘That's what was done to me, Alejandro.'

‘You are a lioness; your name even suggests as much in Spanish.
Leon(or)a
, the Lioness.'

‘That's precisely the reason why the story has the ending it does!'

Jodorowsky pontificates on his outstanding spirituality. All the same, he devotes himself to scandal. He loves to seek out the centre of any storm, whereas Leonora flees every camera, including Chiki's. Alejandro wants to convert her into a public figure and have everyone recognise her on the street. ‘Go out in the nude, take your cue from Pita Amor,' but Leonora refuses. Christopher Fremantle taught her to concentrate, to live at one and alone with herself.

‘I am now in a period of tranquillity,' she informs Chiki, who looks back at her incredulously. Jodorowsky is a bull in a china shop and, however fond Leonora may be of cattle, he plays havoc with her inner peace. Jodorowsky is sure always to be pursued by a trail of photographers.

‘You have very bad habits, Alejandro. In addition to which you are over-emphatic; I detest people who over-emphasise.'

‘Oh dear. Now you are going to play the aristocrat with me.'

On the other hand, Leonora feels at home during the filming of
Un alma pura
, based on a short story by Carlos Fuentes, which entertains her with its caricatures of the famous. Leonora plays Claudia-Arabella Arbenz's mother, and is directed by a fan of Klossowski, Juan José Gurrola, who displays his talent in every scene. During the hours spent sitting around, Aldo Morante, the banker and brother of the novelist Elsa Morante, talks to her about Mexican painting and his recent acquisitions of work by Francisco Corzas and two brothers, Pedro and Rafael Coronel.

‘I don't know who they are,' says Leonora.

‘Are you not interested in Mexican paintings?'

‘I am interested in Remedios Varo and Alice Mahon.'

‘And Orozco?'

‘He's terrible!'

When Luis Buñuel phones to see if she would like to have a part in Alberto Isaac's film
There are no Thieves in this Town
, taken from the short story by Gabriel García Márquez – Isaac is a friend of his and a swimming champion – Leonora thinks it could be pleasant to spend the day in company with Gabriel García Márquez – with his Afro hairstyle – along with Juan Rulfo, Carlos Monsiváis, the caricaturist Abel Quezada and María Luísa Mendoza, who both praises her and makes her laugh. Buñuel explains in detail: ‘You don't need to say a single word. I only need you to be seated at a café table, chatting to the rest of them.' At the last moment, the I Ching counsels her not to go.

Leonora consults the Chinese Book of Changes even to decide whether or not to accept a dinner invitation. ‘Six in the third position signifies chewing on rancid dry meat and consuming something poisonous. It brings humiliation. No comeback.'