Leonora (43 page)

Even when she already has her mackintosh on and her umbrella in her hand, she goes back into the house to check with the I Ching as to whether she should go out or not. Fanatical, she casts the coins and interprets its sixty-four hexagrams in order to be all the more certain of her decision.

‘You complicate your life,' Chiki tells Leonora, and she grows irritated. Chiki shakes his head. ‘First it was the Kabbalah, then Yoga, and now the I Ching. What will it be tomorrow?'

‘You have nothing to say on the subject of the Kabbalah. It is a science purely intended for initiated and superior spirits.'

‘It has something to do with the fact that I am the Jew around here.'

‘Being a Jew is not enough in itself. I do not take an interest in the Kabbalah for its religiosity, Chiki, but for the way it turns me into God, able to create with a breath.'

‘You have no faith in anything at all.'

‘I said
to breathe
not
to believe.
I am a painter and I put my faith in creation.'

Leonora began to read the books of the Kabbalah and ended up in love with its mythology, particularly the legend of the Golem. The four letters which together compose the secret name of Yahweh are occult and the rabbi who succeeds in discerning it will be like God.

‘I am going to paint a rabbi, even if he tells me that the only truth is death. I shall paint him sitting in his bath tub. Rabbis prefer to bathe rather than to shower, and take their baths with their
kipas
still on their heads. The one in my painting I shall give a
sombrero.
'

Salvador Elizondo founds
S.nob
and asks Leonora to do its cover design.

‘The magazine will be a “menstrual”.'

Elizondo has a certain genius, but dislikes the idea of a ‘menstrual'.

Both Gaby and Pablo have had to get used to the idea that the first thing any celebrity requests on arrival in Mexico is to pay a visit to their mother. It seems quite normal for Vivien Leigh, many years after making
Gone with the Wind
, to knock on the door, wait for it to be opened, and to take tea at the kitchen table covered with its oilcloth. Leonora asks Isaac Stern if he is a urologist and he answers: ‘No I am a violinist.' A moment later, Leonora is picking a fight with him: ‘You are not an artist, you are merely an interpreter.' Instead of taking offence, the next day Stern presents her with a bouquet of thirty-six roses.

‘We shall put these roses everywhere in the house, including the toilet. I won't have enough vases for them all.'

Pegeen, Peggy Guggenheim's daughter, discovers Acapulco on her travels and falls in love with a boatman. She decides she is going to spend the rest of her life in a swimming costume, a shot of tequila in her hand. Peggy turns up at the house on Calle Chihuahua with the same nose as ever and her eyes popping out of her head. Leonora offers her a cup of tea in the kitchen.

‘Will you come to Acapulco with me to seek out and denounce the boatman?'

‘What will you denounce him for?'

‘For kidnap, abuse, and for …'

‘Peggy, we're in Mexico and your daughter has reached the age of majority. Thousands of young
gringa
women fetch up on the beaches of Acapulco to have their hormonal cycles set spinning by local boatmen. Pegeen is far from being the only one, and there is not a jail in the state of Guerrero with enough cells to accommodate randy boatmen.'

‘In the Chinese horoscope, Leonora, you are a snake.'

‘Snake or goat or dog or donkey, I am not going to go to Acapulco with you. I can recommend you a lawyer, Miguel Escobedo, the younger son of my administrator and who is an ace where money is concerned.'

Gaby and Pablo go off to an Israeli kibbutz and return slim and sunburnt.

‘We learnt how to sow, to harvest and to carry loads. The countryside no longer holds any secrets for me,' Pablo boasts to his mother. ‘Our working days were even longer than yours when you were cultivating your vineyards.'

The two are taking Hebrew classes and demonstrate to their mother how they can write from right to left just like her.

‘But no-one else can do it with both hands, nor using both hemispheres of their brain except me.' Leonora fiercely defends her treasured personal attribute.

Leonora finds her adolescent sons' libertarian passions infuriating, and for the first time she thinks about what Harold Carrington must have had to put up with because of her. The two boys have inherited their mother's temperament, and are striving for the impossible. Living under the shadow of a giantess is a danger to them. Aged only fifteen, the older boy is already the owner of his first car. Larry Bornstein, a Jew and a passionate art fan, invites the Weisz-Carrington brothers to come over and get to know New Orleans. Larry owns a restaurant there where five Blacks play jazz.

Gaby says that New Orleans is fabulously beautiful. The food – a combination of French and African – is sheer delight. Bornstein offers to put them up whenever they want to come over.

Gaby is intrigued by the circus, that human parody where everything is possible: sad clowns, pregnant trapeze artistes, elephants with their portable showers, women cut in half who are joined up again at the end, to raise high their top hats. The circus people are subjects of the Red Queen, who could never demand ‘Off with their heads!' because they already have their throats slit.

The world of elephant men, women covered in black hair and talking tortoises is more real and attractive to Gaby than university. He is both director and actor, appearing disguised as a dog. María Félix, whose portrait Leonora is currently painting, attends as a spectator. She enjoys coming round to eat with Juan Soriano and is always laughing. On one particular night Leonora explains that the plight of circus animals causes her great suffering:

‘Most of all the little ponies with the Amazons on their backs.'

‘But Amazons are strong women, aren't you worried that they might fall off?' enquires María Félix in her sergeant major's voice.

Like Leonora, María Félix is drawn to the arts of prophecy and she assumes the lotus position in her Chanel trousers. Leonora tells her of Zoroaster, and reads her horoscope for her. Leonora's house is the home of premonitions. María wants to learn what her future has in store, and holds out her hand for Leonora to tell whether her lines of destiny are favourable or not. They are Apollo, Saturn and Mercury. ‘Haven't you ever seen a Celtic tarot? In the major Arcana, the Beloved is the most beautiful of all. These two women, one blonde and the other with blue hair, are you and I. The man in the middle is Cupid.' María Félix applauds when the card of the Sun is drawn, but Leonora informs her that the Sun can also lead to loneliness, a lack of friends, divorce or lost love.

When her chauffeur comes to collect her, Leonora begs María Félix:

‘Please stay a little longer, for the better I know you, the better I shall paint you.'

The film actress sits herself back down on the floor again.

Both women are born under the sign of Aries; their elements are fire and wood.

‘When were you born, María?'

‘That's not something to be revealed to anybody!'

‘I was born on the 6th of April 1917 and I am a snake. I would guess that you are a tiger.'

‘I adore snakes, but if you ever reveal the date of my birth, I'll go for you. It was the 8th of April fifty-four years ago.'

‘Then our planet is Mars and our colour is red; we are also passionate, intelligent and restless.'

‘Alex gave me a tiger of 277 carat diamonds which he had made to order at Hermes.'

‘Neither of us are faithful women,' responds Leonora with intentional irony.

The telephone never stops ringing: ‘Ma, I'm coming over now.' ‘Ma, I'll see you tonight.' ‘I've no idea what time I'll be home.' ‘It's a really important meeting.' ‘I've got something else I must do, I can't go there with you, Ma.' The boys have set themselves free, they are extremely sought-after, young women in love with them turn up at all hours.

‘Ma, aren't you pleased that young female students find me so attractive?' asks Pablo.

‘But you're both still children yourselves!' protests Leonora in surprise.

‘Enough of that children stuff. We're young men now.'

‘Chiki, I want to run time backwards so our children can be caterpillars again.'

‘That's one thing which shall never happen. Every day from now on they'll fly further afield.'

‘How horrible!'

‘It doesn't seem horrible to me at all, it seems normal. They have their own lives to lead, as you have led your own.'

‘Chiki, there are still so many things I need to do.'

Leonora is agonised by the suspicion that her life is not right for her; it might be better if she were living in England; all her paintings indicate as much; but her sons have been born and raised in Mexico. How could they all move at this point in time? Most likely over there, in that great British Empire, nobody will remember her, not even her maternal family, since according to the Moorheads she is nothing more than the Carrington cousin who lost her mind.

Here in Mexico she has Remedios, among her other loves. It could well be that her version of Hazelwood is already a world of the imagination, a dream that in reality already crumbled to dust years ago.

‘Would either of you like to go and live in Europe?'

‘Ma, going to live in England is not going to resolve the problem of your depressions. In any case, your agonies are your allies, they are what keep you painting,' Pablo advises her. He is intending to train as a doctor.

‘So now it turns out that you who were my pupils have become my teachers!' says Leonora, and laughs out loud.

Leonora designs a rug that is to be woven by an artisan in Chiconcuac in the State of Mexico.

‘How good it is to have you here among us, little miss. Every line you draw is like a vein leading to the heart.'

‘What does Chiconcuac mean?' asks Leonora.

‘“Inside the serpent with the seven heads”, little miss.'

Leonora smiles at the artisan with affection.

In a series of three rugs she calls
The Snakes,
a snake is shown coiled around a shrub that could well be a marijuana plant. It has a golden bough and in it Leonora conjures up her Celtic origins and references Frazer's
Golden Bough
as well as Graves'
The White Goddess,
books that revert to their roots in the tales told by Grandmother Moorhead. She always assured her that the family was descended from the fairies of Tuatha Dé Danann, who live below the green hills.

On the 4th of August 1963, the group is hit by some terrible news. José Horna, the life and soul of every party, who never returned to his native Andalucia, dies of a heart attack in the Spanish Sanatorium, at the age of forty-nine. They hold a wake for him right there, and the wreaths of flowers are laid out in the garden where sheep graze, and who come over and start nibbling them.

‘José would have enjoyed that,' Kati says with resignation.

Leonora spends the entire night with Kati and Norah, all of them inconsolable. José had helped them to love life.

‘José always promised me that we would “be a couple of happily married old people”, and he let me down.'

Kati ages ten years in a single night and withers. Norah, the sceptic, blossoms.

50

NA BOLOM

F
OR LEONORA, IT IS THRILLING
to keep company with Ignacio Bernal in his discovery of a still largely buried Mexico. The director of the National Museum of Anthropology, Bernal, teaches her that, in order to reconstruct a culture, the most important objects are those that belong to daily life, and he assembles them with care.

‘No-one seems to appreciate the true value of it all. This material could reveal everything about who we once were to us.'

They clean the pots with the finest of brushes, in order to remove the earth and to conserve the knowledge they may hold. When Bernal's assistant, Santiago Luna, bangs a box down on the floor and levers it open to see what's inside, Bernal is clearly annoyed:

‘We are on the point of examining an object which runs the risk of breaking under pressure: only ever use a flat brush or a paintbrush.'

He holds out a small vase to Leonora: ‘Take it in both hands. It's a unique piece.'

Whenever the archaeologist notices raised patches on the grass, he pauses.

‘Hold on a moment, there could be a tomb underneath here.'

‘I am walking over a drum,' Leonora affirms.

‘Why don't we insert a rod and see what we find?' Santiago Luna proposes. ‘Pound the ground and if it sounds hollow, it means there must be a cavity underneath it. That makes it more likely we'll uncover a tomb there.'

On seeing how moved Leonora is, Ignacio Bernal proposes that she paints a picture of the world of the Maya for the National Museum of Anthropology.

‘Your mural will be opposite Rufino Tamayo's.'

The only thing Leonora knows about the Maya is that they were astronomers, and the most cultured and resourceful of all the meso-americans:

‘First of all, I need to get to know the Maya.'

‘Itzamna could be syncretised with the Jewish Yahweh.'

‘I have never painted anything nearly as big as a mural before.'

‘Gertrude Duby has a house called Na Bolom down in San Cristóbal. She will receive you there.'

The journey to Chiapas turns out to be utterly exhausting. The road twists and turns, the asphalt over-heats as much as the car does, but the grandeur of the countryside affords compensations. Water springs forth on all sides. Suddenly, when it is time to make the climb from Tuxtla to San Cristóbal, a red shape appears near the roots of a tree in the midst of the leafy forest. It is a woman, her shoulders covered by a blanket which ignites the woodland with its brilliant colour. Yet who is this apparition? The red moves and dances beneath the crown of foliage. The forest sings. The woman is walking with a plank of wood across her shoulders; her
quexquemetl
shawl lights up the green horizon. An extraordinary tree extends its branches like wings.

‘What type of tree is this?'

‘It's a silk cotton tree,' says the driver.

Leonora inhales deeply, her emotions rising like a pair of doves fluttering in her throat. On raising her eyes, she observes tigers in the skies and, on lowering them again, the most astonishing colours assail her:

‘If I don't learn to give up smoking here, I'll never manage to do so for the rest of my life,' she admits to Trudi, her host, and wife to Frans ‘Pancho' Blom.

Gertrude Duby Blom, Swiss in origin, likewise came to Mexico in flight from the war. The Lacandons call her Trudi.

‘I knew nothing at all about Mexico before coming here, only that the Aztecs cut out human hearts. Here I learnt that shoot-outs soon superseded human sacrifice.'

They go on foot along unpaved streets, out to the red earth of Cuxtitali. The people of Chamula give way to them; the women wrapped in their shawls barely look up and only approach when they recognise Trudi. They carry with them a scent of burnt wood, smoke and copal resin. The odours of their cultivated plots of earth accompany them into their houses.

‘Watch out when you walk through the rows of produce. Be careful not to step on the pumpkin shoots, or trample the shoots of maize.'

Numerous beggars gather in the church porches, their half-shut eyes blinking through a filmy mist.

‘The hooch they sell them here is lethal,' Trudi tells her.

Leonora loves to hear the noise of hooves on the cobbles, and sees how the horses are tethered to a hoop buried in the wall. When Trudi tells her the tale of a spellbound steed, she longs to see him. At the far end of a pasture, a horse is protesting at the lashes of his owner:

‘The lash is made specifically for animals who have been bewitched.'

Then, to the surprise of all present, Leonora approaches the creature and holds out her arm. The horse lowers his head and she places the flat of her palm over his eyes, calming him instantly.

‘How did you manage to do that?'

‘I spoke to him in his own language. I speak in Horse. Now I would like to give him a lump of sugar.'

Trudi insists that she has swum across reservoirs and ponds infested with crocodiles and emerged without as much as a scratch on her skin. According to her, far worse things happen in the holiday resort of Acapulco than in the rain forests of the Lacandon. The greatest danger comes from the wild boar. When a herd of fifty or a hundred wild boar follow a bold, aggressive leader, the only remedy is to clamber up into the trees along with the howler monkeys and marmosets. Another real danger is that a tree falls on to the camp, in which case there's no means of avoiding being crushed.

‘I walked for seven months through the rain with Frans. Everything got mildew: fabric, film, clothing and food. The forests made us feel ill all the time.'

‘Trudi, I am so hungry,' Leonora tells her, in order to change the subject from that of the overwhelming hazards.

‘Ah, how good you mention that now. I hope you'll eat howler monkey, marmoset, pheasant, venison, corn
tamales
, grasshopper soup, maize and maize and lots more maize, because that's all there is. What you're doubtless going to take especial delight in are my tomatoes, which I sowed myself. I've got a university degree in horticulture, you know.'

‘Don't worry about that, I eat whatever I am given. Do you happen to have tea?'

‘Of course I have tea. How English you are!'

At night the cold rushes down from the mountains and the celestial dome fills up with stars.

‘Do you have a balcony from where I can observe the skies?'

‘All San Cristóbal is an observatory.'

‘To have a telescope without its essential complement, a microscope, is a sign of the most obtuse incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to stare through the telescope, while the left eye peers down the microscope.'

‘Frans gave our microscope away to the school.'

‘This biting cold reminds me of my childhood.'

Leonora locks herself away for several days to decipher copies of Maya codices in the manner of Brother Bartolomé de las Casas, the sixteenth-century monk who respected and defended the indigenous peoples of Mexico. She tries to read, but the forest distracts her. She could spend an eternity watching the trees extend their branches to embrace the rain's assault, cascading down on them for hours on end.

‘Are you afraid of thunder?'

‘Did you see that flash of lightning?' interrupts Trudi. ‘The Maya used to believe that its zigzag was a silver snake slithering across the sky in the course of the storm. The snake sent its light down to Earth in bolts of lightning and so it was that men and animals were created.'

‘What is a
nahual
?'

‘It's the small creature that protects each of us, your double in the shape of an animal. What do you think your
nahual
would be, Leonora?'

‘A horse. And yours?'

‘A squirrel. Although the shaman, wizard and healer, Pasakwala Komes, calls me a goat.'

Trudi walks back and forth, on and on, without the least sign of tiredness. Her energy intrigues Leonora. Where does she dredge it up from?

‘I think that with all this walking I must have circled the Earth three times over. What about you, Leonora?'

‘Me? At least five circuits around the planet. I've walked further than the Wandering Jew.'

Leonora is inexhaustible, but Trudi beats her hands down. She interrupts her quiet time in the library by bursting in and infuriating her with her litanies of bad news concerning the Lacandon jungle.

‘I want this shameless government to turn the forest into a National Park with the assistance of Chan K'in Viejo, and I really believe I am going to win this one.'

Chan K'in is like a mysterious phantom, with his long hair and eyes that always look askance. Barefoot and clothed only in a tunic that once upon a time was white, Chan K'in comes to Na Bolom and noses around the house. If anyone approaches him, he gives them the shivers. The Lacandons remind Leonora of the
sidhes
, they hide behind trees and live deep in the forest.

‘Do the Lacandons accept you, Trudi?'

‘Yes, because on every one of our expeditions Frans and I brought them medicines, axes, machetes. Even now, three Lacandons are waiting for me to cure their illnesses back at Na Bolom. I am taken aback by their intelligence. They learnt good table manners in the space of a couple of weeks. They now bathe in my bath tub, and when they smoke they use the ashtrays.'

In San Cristóbal, the young are kind to the elderly. Sensitive to the fact that as they age they lose their sight, they lick their eyelids clean, masticate their food before inserting it into their mouths, and always invite them to share their
pozol
, a maize and vegetable stew. In so doing, they repay some of the care they themselves received during their childhoods.

The small, slender Lacandons, with their dark curtain of hair, emerge from the rain forest and head for the Blom house, where they suddenly appear in the garden, calling for Trudi.

‘My wife woke up feeling ill today. Come quickly.'

Trudi cures flu and colds, binds wounds, provides food, and imposes her authority. Leonora hires a bicycle and potters about like everyone else in San Cristóbal. She comes and goes through the streets and wins the sympathy of the local people. The women, some of them scarcely more than children themselves, already often carry babies on their backs, and offer her their embroideries. Every step provides a fresh encounter with their extreme poverty, but also with their magic: their clothes and their hats strung with a thousand ribbons are a fiesta in themselves.

‘Would you like to meet Tonik Nibak, the healer? We'll take you to see her,' Pasakwala tells Leonora.

In a wooden house with a tiled roof, Pasakwala tells her that ‘as long as words exist, nothing shall be forgotten, for only thanks to words do we retain memory and if memory exists, I exist.'

‘Do you think that I exist, Pasakwala?'

‘I don't know. All I know is that there is a great need for you.'

Leonora reaches the hut where Tonik lives – a stooped old woman with rheumy eyes – and she is received with suspicion. Tonik performs a cleansing on Leonora, using herbs and copal, and tells her that at night the forces of death emerge from the underworld and one needs to be forewarned against them. Leonora tells her that almost every night she dreams of a ferment of ants:

‘Do you cross yourself before you go to sleep? Your dream signifies that a horde of envious people are persecuting you.'

‘So what do I do to make the dream disappear?'

‘You die.'

‘Am I about to die?'

‘On the contrary, you will live to be very old indeed, probably at least to a hundred or more years.'

The shaman offers her
pozol
in a calabash mug: ‘What is this?'

‘Don't turn your nose up at it, drink it,' Trudi commands her. ‘It's a drink made with maize, water and cacao.'

‘I adore cacao. It's delicious.'

Leonora and her bicycle become a familiar sight in San Cristóbal.

‘Why don't you draw us a silk cotton tree?' Pasakwala Komes asks, when Leonora requests that she recount the story of Xolotl. ‘Xolotl was a god capable of transforming himself into numerous doubles, with the intention of not dying until he had accomplished his final stage of transformation. The sun needed the blood of the gods, and when Xolotl fled away, he was turned into a monstrous fish.'

Chatting with Pasakwala, Josefa and Chica reveals a world similar that of the
sidhes
to Leonora. María Tzu celebrates a rainbow with a poem:

‘The rainbow is biting me, Kajval.

Now it is staring at me.