Leonora (33 page)

‘And if you do it, I promise I'll write you a collection of poems.'

‘Breton dedicated a poem to la Nozière where he says that before her winged sex, like a flower in the catacombs, students and the elderly, priests and judges and lawyers all bend their knee, for every hierarchy ends in copulation.'

Xavier Villarrutia and the artist Agustín Lazo come to visit them at the invitation of César Moro, the co-founder with Emilio Westphalen of the magazine
El Uso de la Palabra.
Octavio Barreda is also interested in a magazine called
Dyn.
Paalen is an enthusiast of totemic art and wants to know all about art in Mexico before the Spanish Conquest. He argues heatedly about Freud's
Totem and Taboo
, where he discusses animism, magic and the omnipotence of the thought processes of primitive people. Taboo is far more ancient than the gods of any religion. On the other hand, the Peruvian has no idea what Machu Picchu is, and has never bothered to go and take a look. He complains that no-one will publish him in France, still less in Lima, because his book would need to be translated.

‘Why ever do you write in French? What a curious way to complicate your life!' Alice Rahon, his closest friend, comments.

Moro calls his continent ‘
Cretinoamérica
'. Paalen invites him to contribute to his magazine,
Dyn,
due to his admiration for his law suits with the Chilean poet, Vicente Huidobro.

‘Vicente is an imitator,' Moro insists.

‘What is this all about
Dyn
?' asks Leonora.

‘
Dynaton
, whatever is possible … Or have you already forgotten your Greek?
Dyn
is going to promote the art of Alaska, of the Maya, the Aztecs, and will re-evaluate the work of those painters for whom the Mexican muralists are an abomination.'

‘Who are they? There aren't any, because the whole lot of them are immersed in that shit,' Péret exclaims.

‘I came to know a very different young artist, along with his wife. The two of them paint in a very similar style. Their names are Rufino Tamayo and María Izquierdo,' Paalen recalls.

Benjamin Péret is ill at ease in Mexico, he spends his whole life looking behind him. He is passionate about
El Libro de Chilam Balam
; reading the
Popol Vuh
excites him; he consults codices and manuscripts, but his mind is more on the capitulation of France to the Nazis than on the folk tales of the Quich'e Maya.

‘I write on them, even though my French never leaves me,' he laments.

‘The hallucination I experienced in the caves of Altamira changed me forever, it is the most primitive people who have the most genius,' avers Paalen.

Each time a new road is opened, pre-Colombian artefacts come to light: all you need to do is follow the bulldozers in order to pick them up. Even in cemeteries, vases and pots turn up, they catch your eye like popcorn. Paalen enthuses over broken objects and the obsidian arrows buried around the pyramids of Teotihuacan.

‘I cannot manage to understand how you can be so enthused. Mexico is such a horribly sad city,' alleges Péret. ‘It is dead, without either cafés or bars.'

‘And what about the famous tiled Sanborn's on Calle Madero?'

‘What I mean are the pavement cafés that can bring everything to life, with tables out in the open air, where unexpected encounters happen, Nadja suddenly turns up and asks you for a light …'

Remedios is the only one of them who has work and she keeps prodding the rest to ‘get moving'. Eva Sulzer, mistress of a vast fortune, financially maintains both Wolfgang Paalen and Alice Rahon.

‘I make whatever it's necessary for me to turn my hand to: making posters and tickets, or designing clothes, decorating furniture and restoring the pre-Cortésian antiques that Paalen brings me,' boasts Remedios.

‘And I shall give you some work on
Dyn
,' announces Paalen.

‘Who will pay for that?'

‘Eva.'

Eva Sulzer also buys their paintings from them.

A cemetery filled with prehispanic artefacts has been uncovered in Tlatilco, and Péret, so gloomy as a rule, grows enthused. What sophistication! What mystery! Some of the masks they find are astounding. It takes scant work to reconstruct the broken figurines and Remedios gets emotional when she manages to recapture the smile on a clay face.

The smallest jade bead is a gift from heaven in the hands of Benjamin Péret and Wolfgang Paalen.

‘Well before the Christian era, the Maya were able to predict eclipses,' Miguel Covarrubias explains, who has also agreed to contribute to
Dyn
.

Paalen goes from the highest mood peaks to the deepest depressive abysses. Some days his wife, Alice Rahon, cannot get him to rise from his bed, even for meals. When he is asked what on earth he does all day long with the curtains and the door tightly closed, he answers: ‘I stare at the ceiling.' So she asks Covarrubias to help her. ‘El Chamaco' (the Kid) invites Paalen to Tabasco and drives him crazy with delight showing him five Olmec heads he found in the archaeological terrain at La Venta.

‘I have never seen anything possessed of such weight, expressiveness and essence!'

He returns to the capital in a state of exaltation, and writes – without stopping, in one fell swoop – an essay that gets published in the
Cahiers d'Art.

The regular suppliers of both Paalen and Péret arrive with brown paper sacks which they open to reveal precious artefacts from Iztapalapa, Tenayuca, Teotihuacan and as far away as Xochicalco and Tula. Diego Rivera completes his private collection and Jean Charlot sketches and catalogues each and every figurine. Miguel Covarrubias is the most enthusiastic and generous of all. Kurt Stavenhagen's collection of popular culture is to be envied and Álvar Carrillo Gil, from the Yucatán, monopolises finds from the Maya peninsula. Péret has never dreamt that pre-Colombian art could be so much in demand. He writes to New York and Paris advertising the wares for sale, and receives one order after another by return of post.

‘Mexicans are ignorant of the treasures they possess. This country has a head that needs examining.' Péret laughs each time a peasant comes to the door from Cholula or Cuicuilco and asks $2.50 for a treasure of incalculable value.

‘One day they will come to their senses,' Paalen predicts, ‘but for now we're well off, whereas later on we'll be dead.'

The market in such idols is centred on New York, Paris and Berlin. Remedios employs her seamstress' hands to restore them, and finds it incomprehensible that despite her best efforts Péret never has a
centavo
to his name.

‘Go and ask Eva to pay you.'

‘How lucky you are to have a Swiss woman, as well as all the Petits Suisses.'

‘You can't get Petits Suisses in Mexico.'

‘The white cheese from Chihuahua is similar, and it tastes just as good.'

‘The hot chocolate is also good here.'

‘Corn-on-the-cob soup is good too.'

‘Popular art is also very good.'

‘And
churros
– doughnuts – dipped in hot chocolate are delicious.'

The
aficionados
visit local churches and make off with armloads of crucifixes and colonial paintings, without anyone raising a murmur of protest. As to all the ex-votos covering so many sacristy walls, what more can one say about them?

Eva Sulzer has been captivated, even subjugated, by Mexico. The Swiss millionaire quotes Dürer, who comes across pre-Colombian ceramics and jewellery for the first time when in Brussels and exclaims ‘All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things.'

In Texcoco, José Feher makes copies of the originals and they sell like hot cakes. His wife, Itza, keeps to European customs and force-feeds geese in order to turn their bloated livers into paté de foie-gras.

Leonora loves to climb to the top of the pyramid at Cuicuilco in the south of the city, because Gunther Gerzso – born to a Hungarian father and a German mother – knows about everything and informs her that at the centre of Cuicuilco there is a circular temple twenty metres high, from the top of which one can obtain an imposing view of the volcanoes.

‘Here is where thousands of people used to live until the Xitle volcano erupted and covered their farms in lava.'

He knows the whole history of Mexico and makes fun of the Big Three – the muralists Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco – for painting hideous big monkeys.

‘I'll get my hat and come along with you, Gunther,' Leonora answers enthusiastically.

Looking down on the land from the summit, Gerzso records it on his canvas and then cuts it into slices: here the yellow corn, there the green alfalfa, and then suddenly he scratches the smooth surface with his pen-knife; he tells Leonora that Mexico is an unexpected revenge.

‘A betrayal.'

‘Yes, the Mexicans are also traitors.'

‘Sometimes, when we go on these walks, I have a sense of vertigo.'

‘We are all fragile.'

‘But not the spaces you paint. You used to resemble Tanguy but now you are more like yourself,' affirms Leonora.

Gerzso carries on walking, notebook in hand.

‘At the end of the day, the landscape is your personality,' Leonora repeats to him.

‘And what is yours?'

‘It belongs to the world of my childhood, the
sidhes
, the horses, the Celts.'

Benjamin Péret tells how the first sun was a jaguar who devoured everything; the second a great wind that likewise did away with the planet; the third drowned all the animals, so that not even reptiles survived; and so on up until the fifth sun, which transformed all Mexicans into the people of the sun, a chosen people. The old world has still not noticed what it means to be the people of the sun.

‘Leonora, I have one Huitzilopochtli too many. Don't you want to take it home?'

‘He frightens me. These figures that so excite you appear malevolent to me. Just one of these devils could destroy me.'

‘I have never seen anything more beautiful than Coatlicue,' Paalen enthuses again. ‘She contains the whole primitive artistic genius.'

Leonora covers her eyes. ‘What a nightmare!'

The Aztec goddess rises before her with her eagle's claws, a skull in place of a head and her skirt composed of snakes.

As far as Péret is concerned, Mexico should never have been conquered. Its past is far superior to whatever the pigs who vanquished it could possibly have devised.

On the Calle Gabino Barreda, they live as a family and play the Surrealist game they call ‘exquisite corpses', involving both images and word-play. One person folds down the part of a sheet of paper on which they have written a word or drawn a picture, and others keep adding their contribution until all have done so and the finished text or image can be revealed. Remedios and Leonora also practise that other favourite of the Surrealists, ‘automatic writing'.

‘You have to start by first creating the sense of a vacuum within yourself, and then waiting. The drawing is born in your unconscious and its transferred expression on to the page is simply a physical movement, rhythm, incantation. It may resemble a scribble. You have already reached the preliminary stage, so now release and liberate your inhibitions on to your sheet of paper.'

Leonora returns home filled with enthusiasm. She has found her spiritual ambience, her true family; all that has landed in her lap she owes to Remedios.

Whether one likes it or not, the whole group goes back to Max. Péret remembers how insecure Max used to be, and how he felt himself drawn to people whom he regarded as living on the edge of what is called madness.

Mexico is the land of the future. André Breton wrote, two years earlier, that ‘in him all hopes are burning …'

The group of friends quote Max at every opportunity and Leonora thinks of all she has lost.

39

MEMORIES OF THE INFERNO

I
N THE HOUSE ON CALLE GABINO BARREDA
, the topic of the day is France, above all because Péret still resides there, in spirit if not in body.

‘Doesn't anything of what goes on here interest you?' Leonora asks him.

‘To tell you the truth, Mexico is Pompeii to me and I am simply one more corpse.'

‘Why Pompeii?'

‘Because if Vesuvius did for Pompeii, Mexico is also buried in lava and …'

Péret does not finish his sentence and diverts into discussing his obsession: Nazism.

‘How easy would it have been to assassinate Hitler before National Socialism spread as it has? Are Mexicans aware that they also admire Nazi-style discipline and applaud it during news bulletins?'

He keeps his distance from the muralists who, according to his point of view, celebrate violence. Péret knows enough about death to know that to die changes nothing.

‘The Revolution? All it left behind was corpses, orphans and widows. Then the Big Three annihilated what was left. Nothing can exist apart from them. Their catch phrase “No other way but ours” – the title of Siqueiros' book on modern art in Mexico – is an ignominy,' Péret alleges.

‘Herbert Read is right. Diego Rivera is a second-rate painter,' Esteban Francés concludes.

Yet the country of Mexico is hospitable, for it opens its doors to refugees.

José Horna can put anyone in a good mood. He made numerous maps for the Spanish Republicans and has now stuck a number of them up on the walls of his house. He seems handsome to Leonora, and he amuses her when he says:

‘I always help anyone with anything, as long as they don't make me get up before eleven in the morning.'

Leonora is charmed by the way he speaks and calls him ‘child'. Remedios translates Mexico for Leonora and teaches her how to pronounce Quetzalcoatl, Tecayehuatzin, Xicotencatl, Axayacatzin, cuetlaxochitl, and Leonora writes short stories populated by characters drawn from the covered markets on Jamaica and La Merced streets. The Sonora market is evil, for as well as plants and flowers, it sells herbs to bring about death or abortion, and women approach fearfully and ask for them in low voices. Bats hang on the stalls, their skulls knocking against one another. To the swearwords Renato has already taught her, Leonora adds the riddles she collects on the street: ‘A large ugly negress/who keeps her shape without recourse to food/she has everything but flesh/for the flesh am I/something I share with her./What am I?' Both Leonora and Remedios are obsessed with the shadows of their characters.

‘So, let's see if you can guess this other one: “I am a poor little negro/without arms or legs/I navigate over land and sea/and can hook even God himself.” What am I?'

‘The answer is the nail I have inside me called Max.'

Remedios introduces her to every type of edible insect starting with the caterpillars that live in the maguey and nopal cacti. She is familiar with them through recording them in such minute detail, and Leonora appreciates her gift as a miniaturist.

The pair of them are certain that nature heals, and that spells either offer cures for the soul or else precipitate it into the inferno, so it seems entirely normal to have recourse to herbalists and traditional healers.

‘Sometimes I wish that my brains could be taken out, just to stop me thinking on and on about Santander,' Leonora tells her, and Remedios gives her a tea made with lemon balm, a recipe for oblivion.

Remedios knows how to barter.

‘How much is it?'

‘Fifteen.'

‘Ten.'

The seller ends up giving it to her for whatever she offers. She is always called either ‘little miss' or ‘young girl', something which rejuvenates the two of them.

‘Wouldn't you like this
burrito
, so well-trained and obliging?'

Leonora would happily buy a donkey a thousand times over, but Remedios interjects before she can:

‘Not just yet. I need to check with my husband first.'

Leonora laughs aloud.

‘Don't laugh. Benjamin knows how to do twenty thousand different things, and he still misses
Le Petit Parisien
.'

Walking about among so many warm and shy stallholders at once stimulates them.

Remedios reads widely and talks about Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, Aldous Huxley and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

‘Do you know what? I am writing a novel called
Lady Miracle.
'

She reads it aloud to Leonora, who has already published two books of short stories. The two of them undertake a ‘cleansing' with the healer called Pachita, who brushes them from top to toe with
pirul
leaves, rue and lemon. Remedios brings her an egg and Leonora, certain of her friend's perfection, is horrified when the black caterpillar of death emerges from the shell.

‘Both you and Kati have changed my life in Mexico, Remedios. My anguish has vanished and I hardly suffer from those horrible recurrent memories any more.'

They put their friendship to simmer over a slow flame in a Celtic cauldron:

‘We are the fox and the Little Prince. “It's the time that you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important”,' Remedios, who knows
The Little Prince
by heart, assures her.

‘What I like best about the book is the boa constrictor who swallowed the elephant,' Leonora replies.

‘It is said that Saint-Exupéry was inspired to draw it by an island off Patagonia he saw from his plane.'

In the kitchen at her dilapidated flat on the Calle Gabino Barreda, they prepare delicious syrups and cordials. When they are together they have no need of anyone else. Remedios writes letters to imaginary psychiatrists, and Leonora laughs in surprise at her friend's ingenuity.

‘I have just finished writing another letter to my psychiatrist, Justo Locatelli.'

Leonora confides in Kati over her horror at Renato's world: a world of politicians, bullfighters, journalists, drunkenness, riotous behaviour and bullets in the
cantina…

‘Yet Renato himself is not altogether abominable, is he?' Kati asks.

‘No. He himself is a truly good man.'

The Englishwoman responds at once to the atmosphere in both Remedios' and Kati's houses. She is convinced that Remedios, their older sister, is in possession of an absolute truth, a secret that will change both their lives. When she bids them farewell she says: ‘I am now going to put on my cape of bats,' and Remedios holds it out to her, or occasionally has cause to remind her: ‘You have forgotten to put on your cape of bats!'

‘What is your lucky number?'

‘Number seven.'

‘Mine is number eight,' Remedios smiles. ‘Are you familiar with the law of octaves? Our vibrations coincide with one another.'

The two women artists read books on alchemy, a topic that has always fascinated Leonora, and read the tarot. They see in the arcana how their passions, desires and a common history are aligned.

‘Do you know the tarot painted by Brauner, Herold, Max, Masson and Lam? The arcana are Paracelsus, Hegel, Lamiel, Novalis, Freud, Baudelaire, Alicia, Ubu, Lautréamont, Helen Smith and Pancho Villa.'

Leonora paints to suit herself, and Remedios illustrates catalogues for the Bayer drugs company. If she and Remedios ever fall out, Kati is always on hand to be their conciliator.

On the street corner, the street-sellers set out their herbs, chameleons, sea shells and little packages labelled ‘sexual debility', ‘arthritis', ‘bile', ‘indigestion', ‘eye strain', all greatly in demand by healers, spiritualists, bone doctors, all of whom know so much more than doctors. Remedios prefers taking a fennel tea to taking a pill. In Mexico miracles, just like idols, appear from under every stone. Each time a site is excavated, urns and masks materialise which Hernán Cortés and his army attempted to destroy and which today are regarded as treasures.

‘What is this?' Leonora asks in surprise.

‘It is a jade mask. Jade was especially highly valued, a sacred stone
par excellence,
' Péret answers.

‘It is not the only stone of its kind,' Wolfgang Paalen adds, ‘there's also the
chalchihuitl
, a word that means “precious stone that illuminates”, and it is round and brilliant. The Olmecs placed it inside the mouths of the dead to light up their path into the underworld. The Chinese, too, used to carve jade cigars to place between the lips of their dead.'

That the earth can at any moment expel the remains of an extraordinary culture moves Leonora. In contrast, Mexican religiosity astounds her: they cross themselves with the first coin of the day they receive, drink moonshine at the foot of the altar and cut or lash themselves until they bleed on Good Friday. On even the smallest village square stands a church that swallows up any passers-by. On the second of November, All Souls Day, Remedios buys Leonora a sugar skull with her name iced on the forehead; except that she had to add the final ‘a' with a pen, because he could only find one reading
Leonor.

‘That's what Doctor Morales used to call me when I was in Santander.'

As soon as Renato departs to his newspaper office, Leonora rushes round to the Calle Gabino Barreda. She had already met Remedios in Paris with Esteban Francés, her husband at the time, and before then when she used to live with Gerardo Lizarraga. Now she is with Benjamin Péret.

‘In Paris, I found the group of Surrealists so intimidating; it was why I hardly ever went near the Café de Flore,' explains Remedios, who encourages Leonora to play all kinds of Surrealist games.

Ever since she left the clinic in Santander, Leonora has learnt to keep herself at a distance, but Remedios succeeds in piercing her armour. Scarcely does she set foot in the flat before her sense of security is restored. Remedios supports her, protects her, comprehends her. She has never had such a close friend.

‘I only really feel good when I am with you. It's a huge relief.'

‘How good that Doctor Mabille came to Mexico! He has been asking after you and hopes to see you,' Alice Rahon relays to her.

To his great friend André Breton, the French doctor is an exceptional Surrealist. He seems to wear his white coat even outside his consulting rooms. His essay on the importance of the mirror in human psychology was published in the magazine
Minotaur
and caused a big commotion inside the group. In it, he maintained that man recognises his ‘I' in his mirror image. Reading
The Oval Lady
while he was in Paris inspired him to write that Leonora was a marvellous personality and that ever since she had set foot inside the Rue Fontaine looking ‘slim, with her dark hair, heavy eyebrows, eyes burning with a unique fire', she dazzled him. ‘She reminds me of those legendary Scottish princesses, beings of immense lightness who escape across medieval castle roofs to gallop off on wild white horses, only in order to vanish around a bend in the track over the moor …'

Leonora had not been pleased to find Mabille confusing the Irish with the Scottish and the English, but the Surrealist doctor's poetic strength and good looks persuade her to confide in him.

‘Pierre, I am an addict,' and Leonora embraces him.

‘Don't you think that what you do is to let your emotions go up in smoke? If you're able to paint with a cigarette in your hand, you are bound to be able to write about whatever happened to you in Santander.'

‘No, Pierre, I can't. I wrote it all down once in New York, but I don't want to go back to talking about it any more.'

‘If you don't express it in words, your body is liable to explode. The whole world is possessed by madness. Where I've just come from, in Haiti, Voodoo is a liberation. It seems as if insanity is the norm there. In the north of Mexico, the
Rarámuri
have ceremonies that go back thousands of years, and their dances create catharsis. It makes no difference that if their interminably repeated dance steps appear meaningless to the casually curious passer-by, they have a function in ridding them of any torment.'

‘Would you like me to dance?'

‘I would like you to write down your experiences in Santander, and I'll help you. What has happened to you happens to many more than just you. You have no monopoly on insanity.'

‘That was all three years ago. It's impossible to live through it all again.'

‘In order to forget, it is necessary first to remember. What was published in the magazine
VVV
when you were in New York is barely more than a sketch. Don't be such a narcissist, or you'll turn into a new little Saint Thérèse. The virgin from whose mouth roses issue is such a commonplace in the magical thought patterns of the people, just like tears that fall as pearls and drops of blood as rubies. But the story of a woman who returns from hell – the inferno – and can tell us about it is a gift to both psychoanalysis and to philosophy.'