Leonora (47 page)

Collectors arrive from the United States and Europe, and journalists chase interviews.

What a bloody nuisance!
Leonora grows impatient with the number of times there's a knock at her door.

She protects her private life. As the homage paid to her increases, it becomes more of a burden, since it is impossible to be allowed to keep smoking on a rostrum in front of everyone. ‘Sheer agony!' she repeats to herself. ‘If only the goddess Diana would descend and transform me into a salt codfish!'

Leonora recites aloud:

‘The codfish lays ten thousand eggs,

The little hen lays but one.

The codfish never cackles

To tell you what she's done.

And so we scorn the codfish,

While the humble hen we prize,

Which only goes to show you,

Friends: it pays to advertise.'

Although Leonora has never sought it out, she is now being pursued by publicity.

The Mexico City university, UNAM, pays her homage in the Aula Magna of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, filled to overflowing. Crowds of young people cram the corridors, dressed in denim jeans and carrying rucksacks on their backs. They talk loudly and scratch their ribs. Some also smoke. Others play chess, regardless of the surrounding racket. The walls are so thickly covered there's no room for even one more poster.

‘Looking for a student to flat-share, only five minutes from the UNAM'; ‘The Karl Marx Society holds debates every Wednesday'; ‘Learn German with a native speaker'; ‘Tai Chi every afternoon in the UNAM annex'; ‘Under pressure to complete your thesis? We can help you.' A skinny young man in traditional woven leather sandals collects signatures for a petition demanding that the canteen lower its food prices. All at once, Leonora finds herself surrounded by young people, barely one third her age, who treat her as if they have known her all their lives. A young woman with unkempt hair, dressed in a blue jumper and torn trousers, approaches her with a copy of
The House of Fear
, and hands the book to her.

‘Señora Carrington, could you please dedicate this copy of your book to me? I am one of your greatest admirers,' and she holds out a pen.

‘What is your name?'

‘My father called me Leonora after you.'

The Englishwoman's eyes light up as she writes: ‘From Leonora to Leonora, with affection.'

The girl bids her farewell, and a number of journalists approach the podium. Leonora thinks she recognises one in the front line, a diminutive woman busily writing in a red notebook with the concentration of a Buddha. Suddenly she looks up and asks Leonora point blank: ‘Did you enjoy your First Communion?'

Leonora smiles at her and everyone else laughs.

‘Yes, because afterwards my mother took me to the zoo. I took my First Communion in a small mining village where men would work hard in the dark in order for others to live in the light.'

‘And a hyena taught you to speak French?'

‘Indeed. She read me a chapter from Balzac's
Eugénie Grandet
and I promised to return for more the following week.'

The reporter keeps on writing while the others make use of the opportunity and hustle for autographs. Mention is made of Max Ernst and a tall woman, swathed in necklaces, with heels as high as stilts, giving her first lecture on the world of dreams.

Between 1973 and 1975, Leonora paints
A Warning to Mother
,
The Powers of Madame Phoenicia
and
Grandmother Moorhead's Aromatic Kitchen
. In this last painting she creates a kitchen in Puebla, with its Talavera mosaics, its pots and jars of fired earth hanging on the walls. The cooks hold fans in their hands to blow the hot coals of the stove; they resemble paper kites and the little handmills whirl like tin humming tops. Leonora sets five Mexican women to grind corn, chop vegetables, taste and flavour the soup, and lightly roast chillies on a giant metal rack where a cabbage, a red pepper, cloves of garlic and, of course, numerous ears of corn on the cob await. A huge white goose with the air of a Celtic god is joining the ritual.

‘I am paying tribute to Mary Monica Moorhead. The pestles and mortars, the flat metal trays for cooking the tortillas, have all been an integral part of my life now for many years. I know how to make a good guacamole, my sauces and especially my chocolate
mole
for chicken are delicious and my rice never sticks. It would give me great pleasure to eat the Archbishop of Canterbury in a
mole
made with green chile.'

When reference is made to her beauty, Leonora grows irritated: ‘Thank you. The one good thing about old age is that it makes one less sensitive to other people's personalities.'

In
Self-Portrait
, Leonora paints herself as a scarecrow, her face covered by a white sheet and a straw hat, intended to scare off the birds. From the barren earth, a crow looks on and waits for her to fall. ‘There is nothing human about me any more,' she alleges, and when asked why, she replies firmly: ‘Old people like us are not considered as human beings. On the contrary, we're seen as a bag of rancid, decomposing meat, or a sack of bones that gets dumped in an old people's home as soon as it begins to look unpleasant. The only thing we are left with is fear and shame at our failing memories, as we repeat the same things to the same people and it grows harder to remember what we have to do, perhaps because our minds turn more and more inwards, looking towards death.'

She devours Lewis Carroll anew: ‘No book has made as great an impression on me as his.'

‘You and he have the same initials: LC,' and Chiki smiles at her.

‘Yes, even though that's not his real name. He was christened Charles Dodgson. “But I don't want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can't help that,” said the Cat: “we're all mad here.”'

‘And what do you think of your ancestor, Oscar Wilde?'

‘Well, we have our self-portraits in common. He took a fair amount of time to destroy himself, and I was more practical than Dorian Gray: I already painted myself as a phantom.'

55

BASKERVILLE

T
HE 1985 EARTHQUAKE EXILES LEONORA
once again. Right across the road from her home, the block of flats at number 193 Calle Chihuahua collapses. The flats land stacked one on top of the other, as tightly packed as a
mille-feuille
pastry. The terrified tenants depart the city altogether, as the Colonia Roma suffers as much if not more than districts in the town centre. Ambulance sirens howl all day long on the 19th September. Dust and smoke are suspended in the air, just like during the air raid on Madrid. There is no light, no water, no television or radio or telephone. Bad news gets transmitted by word of mouth, from one person to the next. ‘The Hotel Regis has fallen down.' ‘Nothing is left of the Chihuahua building in Tlatelolco but dust.' ‘Loads of hospitals and maternity clinics have hit the ground.' ‘More than ten thousand have died.'

Scarcely have communications been restored than Gaby and Pablo phone from the United States.

‘CBS is saying that it's been the worst tragedy in Mexican history for five hundred years.'

Chiki races to the Calle Tabasco and to Kati's house. Nothing at all has happened to her.

‘Look, Chiki, the people have organised themselves in an incredible way. It's those in government who are a complete disgrace.'

‘It's only when it comes to repression that they know how to act effectively.'

‘In the midst of tragedy popular organisations were forged in Spain.'

‘It would be difficult to envisage Mexico lighting the flame of Socialism, still less of Anarchism. Here the Catholic Church is a repulsive institution. The ecclesiastical hierarchy has never found itself to the left of anyone or anything for as long as I can remember.'

‘Anarchism is the ideology belonging to all the exploited classes and here …'

‘Don't dream on, Kati. All that's left to us now is to pass on our libertarian ideals to the next generation. What more can we do?'

‘I can feel my blood boil just thinking about the corruption in the powers that be.'

Chiki is deeply wounded by the sight of the city in ruins. It takes him back to the bombing of Madrid. He recalls Capa shouting in the middle of the street; Chim focusing and shooting off his camera; Gerda taking refuge behind a barricade. In no time at all, beggars have occupied the spaces among the tumbled walls of number 194 on the Calle Chihuahua, and are improvising a roof with plastic sheets and tarpaulin. The ruins fill up with cats and dogs. The ancient Colonia Roma has seen more damaged houses than any other district in Mexico City. Leonora asks herself how people can live there amidst the dust, broken stones and bent girders. Their neighbourhood is changing and Chiki greets the new arrivals. The beggars living across the road from their house enquire: ‘Would you like us to look after your car, boss?' ‘Señora, may we sweep the road in front of your house?'

Each time Leonora gets on a train or a bus, she takes her unfinished dolls with her and spends the length of the journey decorating, dressing and sewing buttons on to them. Back at the hotel she continues her work, and occasionally she manages to finish one.

‘Do your dolls always accompany you?' Natalia Zaharías asks her.

‘Yes, to me they are like carpets and I am like the Bedouins who leave with their rugs on their backs and erect their home in the midst of the sand. I bring my dolls with me to feel at home, however far away I may be.'

She returns to the flat overlooking Gramercy Park, and the first thing she does is to go and collect Baskerville from the dog kennels. She races up along Madison Avenue, Park Avenue, Lexington Avenue and Fifth Avenue. Then she walks from Ninth Avenue to Thirtieth without feeling in the least tired. She finds nothing more stimulating than to eat up the streets until suddenly she reaches a road sign and notices she's just polished off another ten blocks.

Walking takes her back to being a mare again. Sometimes Baskerville gazes up at her with imploring eyes, his tongue hanging out like a thick red ribbon.
Come on Baskerville, don't be so lazy.
‘It's only because I'm about to drop down dead on the spot with exhaustion,' the dog replies. Leonora tells him that they're going to continue until they reach the sea, that they'll cross the bridge over the Hudson River, and that they'll salute the Statue of Liberty along the way. Sometimes, without even noticing, she revisits the streets she used to walk with Max without so much as giving him a second thought, not bothering to look out for any of the little cafés where once they met. In any case, wherever she goes, she has to leave Baskerville tied up at the entrance. If she's invited to a get-together in the evening, she always asks: ‘May I bring my dog? He hates to be by himself and he smokes too many cigarettes waiting for me to call him.' Some say no, and so Leonora cuts short her visit.

She has letters to reply to and begs the Gallery to please do it for her. They see her so preoccupied that they agree. She takes part in
L'aventure surreáliste autour d'André Bréton
in Paris, and in 1986 publishes
Pigeon Vole
, short stories written in the course of the 1930s, collected into one volume for the first time. She paints
The Magdalens
under the influence of her readings in the apocryphal gospels of Mary Magdalen. Christ arises from his tomb, and Leonora's Magdalen extends her hand to him, a stigmata on her palm. At her side, water and a giant fish symbolise Christianity.

Leonora suffers from alternating mental highs and lows, when she descends into a cave that is no longer her kitchen, but rather a black hole and a well of solitude. She repeatedly questions herself as to whether she wants to die in Mexico, and by way of consolation, imagines that death is a slow process of vaporisation, and every atom a different colour. Was it worth it to exchange the mansion at Hazelwood for a student attic in London and defy the world by going off hand in hand with Max? To bury her face in the mud of the asylum and set off for Mexico with Renato? To live exiled in a country that continues to disconcert and imprison her? She knows full well she would do it all over again, for she has taken risks ever since she was a child. Once when Winkie fell on top of her, Leonora, crushed against the floor, ordered her to get up off her:
Winkie, stand up.
‘The higher the bar, the higher we'll jump! I am a mare riding through the night.
I am a nightmare!
'

Although she did not attend the opening at the Museo Nacional de Arte, Leonora exhibits together with ‘
Los Surrealistas en Mexico
'. She remains in New York to launch her exhibition at the Brewster Gallery. In 1988, she publishes
The Seventh Horse
and
The House of Fear
, a further collection of short stories.

In Richmond, she rises later than usual. She accompanies her son Pablo on whatever excursion he suggests. In the afternoon, she sits down in the park to read, smoke, and think about Baskerville, now back again in the kennels. When she and Pablo go to New York, they visit the Metropolitan and the Frick museums on 70th Street, for she is passionate to hear her son's opinions, and pauses before each and every work of art, turning her head to observe his reaction, and to ask him: ‘What do you think?' She neither informs or corrects, but simply listens to him.

‘And now it's time for me to go and collect Baskerville, since they've told me he's on the point of a nervous breakdown.'

She returns to the Kristine Mann bookshop, and greets Carl Hoffmann once more. At the sight of her, he almost falls off his ladder propped against a bookcase. What a pleasure!

They decide to go out to eat at the same restaurant. Leonora returns to the theme of her position as a woman.

‘I was born a female human animal and was told this makes me a woman. “Fall in love with a man and you'll learn what it is to be a woman.” I fell in love several times without learning this lesson. “Have a baby, and you'll see.” I gave birth to two babies to no better effect. Am I the observer, or am I observed by a multitude?
Je pense, donc je suis.
Ask Descartes.'

‘You shouldn't be asking who you were, but who you are right now.'

‘It's like Alice's answer to the caterpillar: “I know who I
WAS
when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”'

‘Exactly …'

‘Because it's true I am my thoughts, Carl, which means I could be anything: a bowl of chicken soup, a pair of scissors, a crocodile, a body or a leopard, even a mug of beer. If I am what I feel, then I am love and hatred, irritation, boredom and happiness, pride and humiliation, pain and madness.'

‘Pleasure.'

‘Before all else, I am my body and I yearn for an identity that demystifies me.'

Leonora has not talked so much in many years. Carl stares at her through his glasses, and considers she looks spectacular when she speaks with such passion.

‘That is why I try to keep myself to the facts. I am a female of the human species who is growing old. There is nothing particularly original or edifying in my saying this. My consolation is to imagine that I am a seed which may perhaps divide and germinate into something other than what it seems to be.'

‘Women like you are what restore my faith,' Carl says with a smile.

‘How can you say such a thing? If you observe me attentively, you will see nothing but question marks.'

Leonora looks closely at him, face to face. Carl does not attempt to flatter her, he believes in her, and this is his way of acknowledging the privilege she is granting by talking about herself to him.

‘I'm afraid of death because no-one has so far explained it to me. There are many spaces inside me, and in one of them, right beside my dreams, is my return to Earth.'

Carl walks her back to her flat overlooking Gramercy Park:

‘Leonora, I have the key to this garden and we can walk there whenever you feel like it.'