Leonora (38 page)

‘To transform a little mound of stones into a homage to the dead is a good thing to do. I love those Irish dolmens that look out to sea,' observes Kati.

The 1950s are a decade of great productivity, when the two painters launch their careers, and Kati publishes an increasing number of photos. On top of which, Leonora looks after her sons, and is amused by their witty remarks.

Remedios tells them that the banker Eduardo Villaseñor has commissioned a mural relating the history of his bank:

‘I told him that I could paint a man at the entrance to a cave, there to protect a mound of bones with a club. I thought he wouldn't be back after that, but two months later he turned up again: “Could you please paint portraits of my sons, Andrea and Lorenzo?” And so I agreed to do it.'

The same year, Leonora paints
The Chair: Daghda Tuatha Dé Danann
, a homage to the egg and to fertility. In the face of the woman-chair, you can see the desire of the female to be fertilised by the tiny egg which she is about to weigh up in her hands. Sparks of white light flash from the chair, which represents the female sex.

She reprises the theme in
Ab eo quod
and includes an enormous egg, a bunch of grapes and two glasses of wine, along with a text taken from a book on alchemy inscribed with the date 1351, the
Asensus Nigrum
: ‘
Ab eo, quod nigram caudum habet abstine terrestrium enim decorum est
' (‘Keep your distance from any creature with a black tail! That is the beauty of the earth').

A dark face composed of black roots and weeds leers out from underneath the table and it is surrounded by circling moths in the process of turning into butterflies. Remedios comments that:

‘You are saving the rest of us from behaving like complete jerks.'

‘The yellow butterfly that flaps its wings across the dark face is me; it's me burning,' Leonora admits.

Remedios has her first show in the Galería Diana: ‘I'm scared. I've got no idea how they're going to react. Walter calms me down but even so …' The exhibition sells out within three days, and collectors are queuing up to join a waiting list.

‘We should celebrate!' Leonora proposes. They eat out in a restaurant, and Leonora orders a bottle of Petrus.

‘Where did you learn to taste wine in such a professional manner?' asks Remedios.

‘I first learnt when I was young, and I graduated with honours thanks to St. Martin d'Ardèche and to Max.'

All of a sudden, from one day to the next, a trunk appears in the middle of the room.

‘What's this?' asks Gaby.

‘It used to be our tea table. Let's use it to travel to a place far away from civilisation,' Leonora's eyes are shining brightly. ‘To England!'

While she packs, their mother regales the boys:

‘I bought it in New York.'

‘It's the size of a wardrobe,' Pablo says.

Lined with a patterned wallpaper that would have delighted Max Ernst, it is so vast that it can hold canvases more than a metre in length, paintings and even a small easel, two umbrellas, since over there they are bound to be more expensive, a walking stick, a screwdriver, hammer and nails, numerous cords, some scraps that will doubtless come in useful to patch torn trousers, and an alarm clock that only the English will be able to repair. Leonora packs warm clothes, as the weather in her native country is so unpredictable that, at the least provocation, the skies fall in.

They take the train. Chiki brings them to Buenavista Station with his Basque beret on his head, and stays on the platform to watch them depart, his eyes even redder than usual.

‘Adios, Pa, adios, Pa. When are you going to come and join us?'

‘Hush, I've already got enough to do with carrying this trunk,' Leonora gets increasingly annoyed.

‘I just don't like seeing him all by himself,' Pablo says.

‘He's not all
that
alone, he'll go round to Kati's every day.'

In St. Louis, Missouri, they take another train to New York. Nobody seems bothered by the length of the journey. Leonora is a fabulous storyteller, and they learn how Alice dealt her pack of cards; all about the isle of the Lilliputians and the land of Brobdingnag, where everything is outsized, and of Gulliver's terror of rats and mosquitoes, the greengrocer's wife who turns into a creeper, the queen who goes crazy in the heat; and of Tartar, the magical horse of Lucrecia–Leonora, and all about Uncle Sam Carrington, who can't stop laughing whenever the moon is full. Cabin Class is the best and sleeping in its bunks is sheer luxury. ‘Look, I can hardly even fit inside the toilet,' says Pablo in amazement.

The top deck on the
Queen Elizabeth
is so broad and gazing out to sea such a pleasure. When she is not beside them, Leonora forbids her sons from leaning over the handrail to watch the water slapping the ship's sides.

She remembers her outward journey to America. Every dawn she would unglue her body from Renato's and go up on deck to ponder and conjecture her future, and to meditate on whether she might be mistaken in taking such a path into the unknown. One morning she meets Gaby, leaning on his elbows at the handrail, his eyes fixed on the horizon. ‘How like me this son of mine is!' she thinks. His hair flowing in the wind, Gabriel Weisz resembles a figurehead on the prow.

‘I have never watched the dawn break before,' Gaby informs her, when he notices her leaning on the rail at his side. ‘What do you prefer, Ma, dawn or dusk?'

‘Dawn: it's the start of the world.'

Pablo is asleep while Leonora and her elder son stay up on deck. Leonora remembers that Renato warned her ten years ago: ‘You are coming to see the New World.' And she followed his drift with: ‘Any moment now, the mermaids will put in an appearance.'

Calais is their port of arrival. From Calais they board another ferry to Southampton, and grandmother Maurie sends a car to pick them up and transport them to Hazelwood.

The symmetrical gardens of Hazelwood Hall were created by Thomas Mawson, the man who went on to design the Peace Palace gardens in The Hague. The children inspect both the house and its garden. They can also hear the sea, and at the first opportunity they race to the beach and hurl themselves into the water, regardless of how icy it is.

In Mexico, the climate is a miracle. In England, every time they go out they have first to cover up completely, and when they come in, to unpeel themselves in the hall, shedding outer skins as if they were onions. They miss the bare heat of the skies of Mexico.

Their grandmother's spirit has become almost as free as her only daughter's. She expresses her feelings openly and accepts or rejects whatever occurs with spontaneity. Leonora's Irish side descends from Maurie, who says what she thinks and, if contradicted, exclaims: ‘Oh what a bloody nuisance!'

Hazelwood Hall, with its balcony overlooking the garden, bewitches her grandchildren: inside are its vast staircase, marble floors, and the medieval suit of armour which they believe to be inhabited by Harold Carrington, and the incredibly intricate barometer that transports them to Alice's Wonderland. Even when Maurie calls them in to tea, they remain in the company of the Cheshire Cat. Three great arches in the lower half of the house intrigue them, because they are so dark they could well prove the entrance to hell. ‘Ma, are those the arches you paint in your pictures?'

Gaby and Pablo soon take note of the fact that, for their grandmother, each person has their own assigned space and that children are prohibited from interrupting the conversations of adults. Old Nanny, who raised Leonora, and who – despite the mistreatment she endured in Santander – is incapable of feeling resentful, continues repeating the same stories:

‘Cerrid Gwenn went to the woods and chose the healthiest walnut tree according to the great quantity of birds in its crown. He installed the most magic cauldron of all in its shade. Patiently, he blended eight drops of understanding, four rose petals, two drops of advice and a butterfly wing, a pinch of compassion, three trickles of knowledge, five stars from a comet's tail, two teaspoonfuls of strength, then set all of them on to boil and stirred and stirred and stirred …'

‘Hey, Nanny! So what happened?' Pablo is getting worried.

‘For the course of one year and a day and without pausing, he kept the flame alive beneath the cauldron. He refined the recipe and added four jasmine flowers. Finally, from the cauldron he withdrew a few magic drops, which he stored in a phial. When he tested out the formula, the effect was immediate: he discovered the secret of Wisdom and was happy from that moment onwards.'

‘I want to have that tiny flask, Nanny – then I wouldn't have to go to school,' Pablo says.

‘So then you have to go and look for it, because Gwenn hid it here at Hazelwood, but we'll keep that for tomorrow, because it's already tea-time,' Nanny replies.

Pat and Gerard visit their nephews who have arrived from across the Atlantic Ocean. Pat bores them and Gerard reads his poems and laughs without stopping. Gaby concludes that he must be a good poet, and that living with him must be highly agreeable.

Leonora writes to James, who answers from Paris: ‘I am on the point of boarding the ship for New York, so we'll see each other next in Mexico.'

They go out for a walk after tea. ‘Hazelwood is full of fairies.' Leonora assures them her beloved fairies have nothing at all to do with Hans Christian Andersen's fairy stories.

‘The ancient fairies here are even wilder than the Aztec
chaneque
sprites in Chapultepec. Gaby, you too have Celtic blood in your veins.'

Her sons rush on ahead of her. When they reach the end of the dyke, they run into a red ball that returns their gaze and they ask her what it is. It is the slowly setting sun. To Leonora, seeing the sun on the point of disappearing has confirmed her conviction that she has made a mistake. ‘What am I doing in Mexico? This place is where I belong,' and she is invaded by the most tremendous sadness.

‘Tomorrow we are leaving for Paris, Ma.'

44

DISAPPOINTMENT

I
N PARIS, ANDRÉ BRETON
watches the family apprehensively as they enter the Rue Fontaine. Gaby and Pablo play his African drums and wear their masks. ‘Aube was never like this, your children are a couple of savages.' His new wife, the Chilean Elisa Claro, makes herself scarce. ‘I can't attend to your needs, I am in the middle of a poem.'

Everything has changed. Jacqueline Lamba and her daughter have remained in New York. Breton has remarried and so has she. Both their lives are moving on: it's called old age. Duchamp has also stayed there, keeping company with his bishop, his queen and his castles on the other side of the Atlantic. Man Ray and Max Ernst got married in a double wedding on the same day, the former to Juliet Browner and the latter to Dorothea Tanning. Lee Miller, now separated from Roland Penrose, lives in Sussex with their son.

Breton is surprised that Leonora does not keep company with Diego and Frida, and only occasionally sees Victor Serge and Laurette Séjourné. Leonora tells him that Serge's words on painting were just like Gustav Regler's: ‘That worked very well for me.' Lázaro Cárdenas is now no longer the President of the Republic and, ever since Trotsky's assassination, foreigners are looked on askance. The Ministry of the Interior has become much stricter, and Mexico has become unworthy of the republic she once was. Residency visas are less and less frequently renewed, there are no longer trees in the streets, and the forests that once flanked the volcanoes of Popocatapetl and Iztaccihuatl have been felled. The city is becoming covered by a hideous cloak of Toltec cement and machines imported from the United States are tearing down the old mansions built out of
tezontle,
the native volcanic rock. Manuel Ávila Camacho, the new President, has a face like a pudding basin.

‘So Mexico is no longer surrealist?'

‘Not even the Surrealists are surrealist any more.'

‘What of Buñuel?'

‘Yes, I see him from time to time, but he never brings his wife with him. What do you think of men who never take their wives out with them?'

‘Don't you start … You sound just like Jacqueline!'

Breton invites them to the Café de Flore, but there's not too much to amuse children there. Or grown-ups, as Leonora can confirm. France has still not yet recovered from the war, and the French are already talking about getting the atom bomb.

‘Leonora, I have just made known my support for the recognition of an autonomous Celtic culture.'

Regardless of the fact that Sartre and Camus are the ones who hit the headlines, Breton is still copiously read by the French, and is in the process of preparing a collection of his poems. Interviewed on the radio, he is asked for his opinion on existentialism.

‘As you live in Mexico, Leonora, you can stay on the fringes of the latest fashions, and that's a huge asset.'

Breton's political disappointment is obvious and Leonora has no way of responding to his questions on the extent of Trotsky's influence.

‘Do you know any of Trotsky's followers?'

‘The only one of whom I know anything is Victor Serge, and he only lives to write.'

‘I still maintain that no man has the right to impose his authority on another.'

Leonora doesn't answer. What for?

‘You have been the muse of superior men,' remarks Breton, with a smile.

Leonora flies into a rage.

‘I never had time to be anyone's muse. I have been fully occupied with rebelling against my family, and with learning how to be an artist.'

‘Your parents persecuted Max as though he were a psychopath who had to be expelled from society.'

‘Yes, they made his life impossible. But then that's exactly what they did to mine, too.'

Conversation languishes, something unthinkable in previous times, and Leonora notes Leonor Fini's arrival with relief.

‘Antonin Artaud is dead. I miss his devilish smile. I hardly see Péret any more. Nothing now is as it was before.' And with these words Breton bids his farewell.

Leonor Fini invites them to Les Halles to buy snails, which she intends to serve at a dinner for them and Benjamin Péret.

‘No way am I going to eat those poor little creatures,' protests Pablo.

‘They are
escargots.
You will be intrigued by them.'

Benjamin Péret takes Pablo by the hand to cross the Boulevard des Capucines. The boy, terrified by the traffic, gives him a kick on the shin, then bites him. On reaching the other side of the street, Leonora reprimands her son:

‘What's the matter with you? Do you think you're an Aztec?'

Leonor Fini, Benjamin Péret and Leonora eat every last one of the snails with garlic and white wine, but Gaby protests:

‘I am utterly disgusted with you, Ma, I thought you really loved animals.'

Just like Breton, Péret – now feeling listless – asks a number of times after Remedios and swears he misses Mexico terribly.

‘That will be because you always called it the saddest place on earth.'

‘I now think that I was the saddest thing about it.'

To the Surrealists, children were
objets trouvés
who had to be kept entertained by someone else, so they could be free to talk to their mother.

‘Look out, Pablo's clambering up that Giacometti sculpture.'

‘Look at him, he wants to add his improvements to that Picasso.'

‘Leonora, if you let your sons loose, they will bring down the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame and the Arc de Triomphe.'

Leonora no longer calls them the Anti-Christs as she did when they were little, and takes them off to Hauterives and the Rhône Valley to sleep in a barn. Postman Cheval attracts her more than ever when she sees the interest Gaby expresses in him. Pablo takes out a notebook and sketches details of the sculptures. ‘They are better than Max's,' he thinks.

The vineyards and the wine harvest also work their spell. Leonora catches flu and the boys go out only when muffled in their newly purchased capes, and bring her herb teas and stewed fruit on her sick-bed. She anxiously pens a letter to Edward James: ‘Edward, Is there any way in which we might live in England or in France? Do you think Chiki could find work there? I can paint anywhere, but what do I do with Chiki?'

Edward replies that he will be returning to Mexico at the same time as she is, and shall give her his answer then.

Hardly has he entered the house belonging to Nancy Oaks and Patrick Tritton, on the Calle Marsella in the Colonia Juárez, than Edward fills the space with his guests. They revolve around him as their central figure, and his eagle eyes are ever-ready to pin down their prey. James goes from one side to another with a natural elegance that has them murmuring as he passes. ‘He's a multi-millionaire'; ‘he's an eccentric'; ‘he's a man of the world'; ‘if he takes to you, he will give you whatever you want'; ‘his house in Sussex, West Dean, contains three hundred rooms and covers two hundred and forty hectares'; ‘his divorce from Tilly Losch has cost him an arm and a leg'; ‘all his money comes from Marshall Field's'. The vast timber empire he inherited from his father has turned him into a Golden Calf and, as though it mattered, the gossips are certain he is the illegitimate son of King Edward VII, a matter he never took the trouble to contradict.

If he could hear all the conversations buzzing around, no doubt they would not seem in the least eccentric to him, just as it doesn't appear odd that a person might be born with green hair: ‘I have just returned from Ravello, where I rented a villa for the summer'; ‘I went, as I do every year, to the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, famous for exerting such a major influence over the Symbolists'; ‘I bought myself a flat on the East River with a view over the Hudson'; ‘I would like to bring my horses over to Mexico, but there's no point because here the stable hands are so poor that they'd probably eat them'; ‘That's a vile lie, they treated their horses so well throughout the years of the Revolution'; ‘They're hungrier now'; ‘Do you know where that phone with a receiver like a lobster that Edward James has came from? From a dinner when he and his friends amused themselves by throwing lobster shells at the ceiling and one fell back and landed on the telephone. James then told Dalí to make him a handset in the shape of a lobster'; ‘There's nothing more Surreal than James' house in Monkton. In fact it is the most notable example of three-dimensional Surrealism'; ‘Edward James paid to have all eleven volumes of his poetry bound and published. And the only thing anyone ever remembers about them is the manufacturer's typography and the luxury of their binding'; ‘I knew that in 1938, Oxford University Press published his book
The Bones of my Hand
'; ‘What you may not know is that Stephen Spender wrote that it was nothing but the whim of a millionaire. After that, James never published again, other than a few articles in Lord Beaver-book's paper,
The Evening Standard.
'

James goes further than the multi-millionaires who compensate for their lack of creativity by their purchases, for he does indeed have a certain talent. He hires architects and decorators to make over his houses in England. Fabulously rich, he motivates artists such as Stravinsky, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley and George Balanchine, who after making ruthless use of him cast him aside like a worn sock. Perhaps that is why James always leaves socks behind him wherever he goes.

At the tender age of twenty-one, the young heir exchanged Oxford for a permanent ongoing party. New York, London, Paris, Rome and Berlin are the main points of his compass. Now he happens to be in Mexico, and the one person he notices, the first he makes a beeline towards, parting a way through all the other guests, is Leonora.

‘I came because of you.'