Leonora (36 page)

42

THE LOVE THAT MOVES THE SUN

‘Y
OU LOOK VERY PRETTY
now you're pregnant …'
Remedios is smiling at her.

Leonora has no idea about any of this. Any more than Chiki, and the two of them are looking at each other in perplexity.

‘I hadn't thought of having a child.'

‘Well, now you're going to have one. What do you prefer, a boy or a girl?' Kati asks.

‘I would prefer to paint one. What kind of a thing is a child? How does it happen?'

‘You were once a child, weren't you?'

‘No, I was a filly, then a yearling, and now I am a mare.'

‘You look more like a cow at present!' says Remedios, laughing out loud.

‘The postman brought me a letter from my mother. I really hope she'll come to Mexico as I haven't a
centavo
left. Do you think she'll come, Kati?'

‘You told me yourself that she's keen to see you.'

They set up home in a flat at number 174 on the Avenida Obregón. Leonora loves this avenue; the street lamps along it have been imported from Paris and light up her memories.

With so little understanding of their situation, Leonora and Chiki look enquiringly at one another.

‘I think I heard its heart beating.'

Chiki feels something move beneath his fingertips.

‘It's kicking.'

What was about to happen? Both of them are afraid. Leonora doesn't stop smoking. Chiki begins to worry.

‘How does one live in Mexico without papers and without relatives? How are we going to support ourselves?'

Bringing a child into the world when it is impossible to foresee the future is something that utterly terrifies him. Leonora has hardly put on any weight and walks down the street unaware that she's carrying her foal like a mare. Their problem is money. Harold has disinherited her and shared his fortune between Pat, Gerard and Arthur. Chiki has no sense of how to get his work noticed; he earns almost nothing through his photography and Leonora herself remains unknown as an artist. They live on whatever money Maurie has sent them.

Back at her easel, Leonora paints
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
, as viewed by Bosch and by Peter Brueghel the Elder. She situates the hermit at the waterside with a pink and black piglet. She draws the saint with three heads. A bald young woman, wrapped in a red gown, combines sensuality with the delicacies of the dinner table and is busy preparing a hotpot filled with lobsters, turtles, chickens, tomatoes, mushrooms, Gorgonzola cheese, chocolate, onions and peaches bottled in syrup. The Queen of Sheba, wife of Solomon, and her train of maidens are approaching the hermit, whose sole daily fare is dry pasta and tepid water.

A carrier pigeon flies between Kati's and Leonora's house. Kati has trained it.

Leonora paints feverishly, but has no idea what to do with her finished canvases. The first task is to pay for the doctor and midwife.

‘I am strong,' is her assumption. ‘The day after the birth of my child, I'll sit down in front of the easel again.'

‘You have no inkling of the amount of time a newborn can take up,' Elsie Escobedo scolds her.

‘Do you like children?' asks Remedios.

‘No.'

‘And does Chiki like them?'

‘Not as far as I know.'

Two days before the birth, Leonora completes
L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle
, its title from the final line of Dante's
Paradiso.
A golden carriage – taken from one of the tarot cards – announces their new life. The couple, clothed in red, their arms raised, perform a dance to love and light. On the eve of the arrival of their first child, the painter – who had never previously had recourse to religion – is clearly evoking Ezekiel's vision of God enthroned in the temple among the heavenly host.

When a red bundle is placed in her arms, a diminutive scrap who breathes and opens his mouth, Leonora is stunned. Her heart has never beat so hard.

‘Here is your son,' the woman in white tells her. ‘Take him.'

‘How?'

‘Put him to the breast.'

The infant is the most beautiful charge there is.

‘He looks just like you,' the nurse confirms.

On 14th July 1946, Bastille Day, Leonora goes through the looking-glass, entering a space she had never previously envisaged: that of motherhood. ‘I never thought I would feel like this.' But in the clinic she was already worrying. ‘Will he feel cold or hungry? Will he sleep through the night?' Remedios is worried, too, and goes out to smoke in the corridor. Not to mention Chiki, who is anxiously conferring with Kati in Hungarian.

‘He will be called Harold,' announces Leonora.

‘Why Harold? Aren't you are at war with your father?' exclaims her husband.

‘I want him to be called Harold.'

‘He cut you off penniless.'

‘I want him to be called Harold.'

‘Fine then, Harold Gabriel,' Chiki intervenes.

‘Everyone in France is celebrating his birth,' Kati responds, smiling.

In the morning, Chiki would go out to take photographs for the Rotary Club, whose meetings are social events staged in order to fund-raise and endow schools with drinking-water fountains and teaching materials, along with meals delivered to old people's homes. Chiki looks on in surprise as over-made-up women, straight out of the beauty salon, throw themselves on the trays of canapés and glasses of wine, and recalls the bread distributed to the refugees in Madrid. On every image, another is superimposed in his mind: ‘Why am I doing this to myself?'

When the journalists are unleashed upon a personality, the sound of bombs dropping over Madrid thrums in his ears. A gossip columnist notes down their names, repeating: ‘Yes, a graduate, as you say, with a BA,' because there's nothing better than to be graduate Gómez, Sánchez, López, González or Rodríguez, this or that … Their embraces are always loud, their glasses clink ‘cheers', and Chiki hears the sound of window panes breaking in the Calle de Bravo Murillo, in Madrid. Incredulous, camera in hand, he lives the results of the Mexican Revolution.

‘Did you learn anything worth remembering?' Leonora enquires on his return.

‘I heard a lady say that she owns nine cars, one for each of her sons, and I saw a member of the National Assembly showing a Rolex to his secretary, saying: ‘Look at this watch! It never fails me.'

‘What was he talking about?'

Chiki changes the subject and insists that his wife ought to give up smoking.

‘That's one thing I can't do. What I most need right now is a nice cup of tea.'

The birth of Gaby returns her to her years in the nursery at Crookhey Hall. Leonora stitches him a mermaid out of red velvet, fitted with little pockets to store
centavos
, buttons, marbles. In motherhood she finds herself inclined to make things for the home. She sews, sitting beside the cradle.

‘Just think, I bumped into Renato, and he gave me this poem to recite to you,' Kati tells her.

‘When you came

when she went

we looked – or did we look? –

with a look that gives nothing away

delicate tea cups

and a lump of sugar

and the tea's amber bubbles.

Forefinger and thumb

so slender, so fine

that seeing them raise the cup of tea

I tell myself:

these fingers will snap …

Where were you? …

Forefinger and thumb raise the cup of tea.

You answer me with those eyes of yours

deep, astonishing,

according to confirmation by the child-god.

Forefinger and thumb

slowly lower the cup of tea.

Where were you? …

And your voice: do you know? …

I burnt myself …'

‘I shall invite him to dinner!' Leonora says with a laugh.

Esteban Francés tells her that the great collector Edward James admires both her work and that of Remedios too.

‘He saw you with the Escobedos on the beach at Acapulco and you took not the least notice of him; all you did was read.'

‘And what is that Englishman doing in Mexico City?' asks Leonora.

‘You already know. He's a rare beast, travelling wherever the mood takes him. In New York, Peggy Guggenheim and Man Ray talked to him about you. To painters like us, Mexico is a tomb; you have already put down roots in this well of anguish and I can't tell what is going to become of you or your son. You, who sell nothing that you paint, need to find yourself a patron like him. René Magritte, one of his protégés, painted him from behind as he looked into a mirror, and drew every single hair on the back of his neck, calling the painting
Not to be Reproduced.

Little by little, Leonora begins to see what they have in common: he is as British as she; as aristocratic as she; as dissatisfied as she; and the owner of a castle in England. Again, just like her, the society photographer Cecil Beaton had taken his photograph; the only difference is that Max Ernst had never painted him in the morning light. West Dean House bears some resemblance to Crookhey Hall and in Monkton House, decorated in style by Dalí, Edward James has installed two Dalí sofas of pink satin, representing the lips of Mae West, and Dalí has converted a telephone into a lobster.

But Leonora's flat on the Avenida Alvaro Obregón is the antithesis of all that is familiar to James. You enter down a dark corridor that leads directly into the kitchen. Leonora offers him a cup of tea, and sits him down on a hard wooden chair.

‘What are you doing in Mexico?' she asks, as she puts water on to boil.

‘Geoffrey Gilmore, an old friend from Oxford days, invited me to stay at his house in Cuernavaca and I took the opportunity to come and visit you. Is this your living room?'

‘Yes. Remedios Varo calls it my magic grotto. She has even produced a painting of it.'

Tea is construed as a slow, liquid ceremony, and Leonora's hands resting on the oilcloth covering the table are beautiful: small, with no rings on her large, strong fingers, the tools of a woman who suffers and has no control over her nightmares.

‘Listen, have you mastered your dreams?' she asks him, offering a second cup of tea.

‘Not yet. Do you know what, Leonora? I too had a nanny. My first journey abroad, to San Remo, took place when I was four years old. I remember a whole army of servants, nursemaids and secretaries, huddled together on the boat and, once on dry land, almost filling up an entire busload. Nursemaids are wholly indispensable in the lives of children belonging to our social class. My mother was accustomed to saying to my nanny: “I'd like one of the children to take to Mass with me.” “Which one, madam?” “The one whose dress best matches mine.”'

‘My nanny introduced me to the
sidhes
.'

‘I know very well who the
sidhes
are. I would love to see the inside of your studio, Leonora.'

‘I'll show you. Let's go.'

They go upstairs to a broom cupboard no bigger than a dovecote. Up until now, the artists James has visited painted in workshops worthy of their work and their fees.

‘Is this your
sancta sanctorum
?' asks James in surprise. ‘I can't believe it. Do the paintings that so seduce me emerge from here? Out of this keyhole of a place? This is really your
atelier
?' He asks over again, still incredulous.

No-one but Leonora would call it a studio. Ill-lit, narrow, rickety, where the visitor is forced to squeeze himself against the wall when a girl with a broom comes towards him.

‘Oh no, don't clean now, today we have a visitor,' Leonora tells her. James turns sideways to let her pass, filled with emotion: Leonora is even more fantastical than the creatures she paints. Abandoned, orphaned of light and air, this hovel-like box room exults James: on a table lie curled-up tubes of paints, squeezed nearly empty beside the palette; an ashtray overflowing with cigarette stubs; a spider weaving its web. Leonora is a reliquary for every kind of orphanhood, she could paint inside a dustbin. This attic lends itself to the most bizarre mental constructs, and both disturbs and fills him with new energy. People had said that Leonora was a one-off, but he never thought that she assumed such an admirable form. Nothing contaminates her, she does not imitate Ernst, her interior world is hers alone. The only footprints on the way to these gallows are hers alone. A prisoner of herself, she is condemned to be a painter.

Motherhood swallows her up. Nappies, feeding bottles, the ‘What's the matter with baby?' refrain, to the astonishment of Chiki, who always hangs back – it all conspires to keep her living on a knife-edge. There is her canvas, stretched on the easel. She has never felt herself to be more productive than here and now.

James is captivated, and offers to buy four paintings for a derisory price. Leonora angrily shows him the way out, without registering that such a gesture only enhances her magnitude in his eyes for, despite having his own full share of caprices and flouted conventions, Edward James knows full well that Leonora's rebelliousness goes well beyond his own. From the word go, Leonora has been confronting authority, defying whatever goes on around her, with a sense of liberty unknown to James. With what a noble bearing she had shown him the door! He returns the next day and offers Leonora his apologies, which she accepts with another: ‘Would you like a cup of tea?'