Leonora (22 page)

This woman, with her prodigious inner life and her beauty, is a gift from God. Her desire for independence and her self-confidence dazzle him. Accustomed to treating patients who are the victims of circumstances, Leonora causes him to marvel: she is certainly a unique case. Don Luis smiles on her. She is unsure whether or not to return the smile.

Leonora tries to say one thing and something else comes out. Her mouth is suddenly filled with saliva. ‘If only this superior man, god, doctor and analyst, would just leave me in peace!'

‘No more interrogations,' and she rises restlessly. ‘I need to reflect and to find a solution. Yesterday I was on the point of reaching one.'

What does this man want of her? Why does he destroy her routine? All of a sudden the certainty that Morales wishes to do her harm imposes itself:

‘Leave me alone, leave me! Can't you tell that I am stretched out in the sun, on the white stones of St. Martin d'Ardèche?'

The doctor smiles: ‘It's normal for you to feel dislocated. You need to take your time.'

She begins to turn away and the nurse takes her by the arm.

As the days go by, other inmates observe her through the glass door. They come into her room. Sometimes the Prince of Monaco, as noble as his lineage, greets her reverentially, waving his cadaverous hand around in the air. Others, including the Marquess Da Silva, the intimate friend of King Alfonso Xlll and of Franco, parades around as if wearing a crown on his head, and when he extends his hand, Leonora notices his nails are bitten.

‘He chews them because he is a heroin addict,' says José. ‘They injected him with Cardiazol, but he thought it was the sting of a spider.'

‘You are a friend of Franco's,' Leonora tells the Marquess Da Silva, possessed of an innate elegance, ‘and I urgently need to speak to him. Kindly obtain an appointment for me! If you do this, the war will be over.'

Leonora ties her personal life to what else goes on in the world: she is the earth, her arms are olive branches raised against Nazism. It is not she who is imprisoned but rather England, France, Spain who are inside the asylum. Governments are the sum total of every form of egotism that has brought Europe to its demise. He wants to treat their populations precisely as Harold Carrington did her. Her fight is against repression. If they would only untie her, she would once again become the lover of the wind, and gather up all those countries in her arms to carry them off to a safe place high above the clouds.

The Prince of Monaco with his aquiline nose and his wayward gaze has installed a typewriter and a radio in his quarters in the Villa Pilar. From morning till night, he types away with two fingers, writing letters to diplomats. And he invites Leonora to come and listen to broadcasts on Radio Andorra.

‘Why do you have so many maps pinned to your wall? Are you going to stay here forever?'

Leonora seeks out the route from St. Martin d'Ardèche and the prince tells her that, if she wishes, she can mark it out in red crayon.

‘So you will know your way back, Lady Carrington,' he tells her.

‘I am not a Lady, my family has no aristocratic titles. What it does have are airs and graces, which is why they have presumed to incarcerate me here.'

‘Why would you want to leave? Outside these walls there's carnage. Inside here, they treat us like royalty.'

‘But without the courtiers. I've got such a tune going round inside my head that all I want to do is dance.'

‘Then go out into the garden and dance, follow your instincts. I would accompany you, had I not to write to the Duke of Sessa, and to Cayetana de Alba's parents to let them know they need to find her another hairdresser.'

She doesn't need to be told twice, and Leonora leaves with her arms held high above her head, swaying as she walks. Now yes, the freedom in her body is hers alone; the new-found lightness in her thighs carry her way beyond the asylum. ‘I shall never grow tired, all of me is a fortress!' When dusk falls, Leonora twirls on her toes and attempts to sing a ballad without need for words. Its melody accompanies the beating of her heart. Are the
sidhes
sending her this music? The Prince of Monaco leaves the typewriter, throws his letters in the air, advances on her clicking invisible castanets and stamps frenetically until he hears Frau Asegurado shouting:

‘Into the cold water with these lunatics!'

25

THE GREAT BEAR

L
EONORA LISTENS TO THE CRIES
of her fellow detainees, the scraping of chairs on the floor, the rain against the window. Frau Asegurado's tone of voice grates on her ears, unlike Piadosa's and José's. She responds to them by nodding her head, as she acknowledges they treat her with something close to affection.

‘You had better not leave off eating, as it won't be long before you're out of here,' José tells her.

She wants to question him about the alarm that wakes her up every morning. Is it a factory hooter? A siren heralding a bomber? Is it war? Does it mean her mission to unleash the day has started? Or does she have to run to the Down Below pavilion and open the doors to let everyone out?

She climbs on a chair, steps out on to the wardrobe, and remains there vigilantly, almost holding her breath. It is always a great pleasure to her, being so high up. She is a high-flying hawk, her eyes glued to the door. A magnetic current holds her up there. If anyone came in she would plummet down on them.

‘Look at the sense of balance of the madwoman up there!' Santos exclaims, coming through the door with a pail of water.

‘Don't mess with me, I am a painter.'

‘Yeah, really? If you sleep in a puddle of shit, your pretensions will turn out shitty too.'

Leonora tenses. It could be that Santos wants to bring her down with a bucketful of cold water. What luck, he goes on with his rounds and it almost seems to her as if he's smiling.

Piadosa comes in with a trolley on which Leonora makes out a glass of milk, some fruit and biscuits, a pot of honey and a mild cigarette.

‘Here's your breakfast, little English Miss,' murmurs Piadosa, without so much as raising her eyes.

Leonora descends and, on seeing the arrangement of food on the tray, she is convinced that the doctors are about to transfer her to the best pavilion, Down Below, as luxurious as the Ritz, with windows you can open with pleasure as there's a tree growing in front of each.

She contemplates all possible means of moving to Down Below as quickly as possible, since it all depends on how the pips are distributed inside her apple; the rosiness of the stone inside her peach; and the grape skins on the plate Piadosa has prepared for her. She has to reproduce the constellations: here is the Great Bear, there the Pleiades, over here, the Little Bear, keeping the peach stone to the right and the green grape skins on the other side. Who was it that once upon a time told her she had the skin of a peach?

Her nurse draws a bath for her.

‘You can wash yourself on your own, the soap and sponge are over there.'

Leonora squeezes out the sponge, it's a living creature that once used to float in the sea.

‘Have you finally finished? What took you so long? I am going to take you to the solarium.'

Naked, she dances with the towel and, when she lifts it up, Leonora observes that the entire firmament obeys her. That makes it essential for her to resolve the problem of her self in relation to the sun.

The solarium diffuses a blinding light; beneath such a light, Leonora leaves behind the sordid substances of matter and enters into a new space. She remains stretched out there for several hours and the rays reach her through the glass.

‘Come out of there now, or you will get sunstroke.'

‘Give me a pen and paper.'

The nurse tells her she can write once she comes out, but Leonora wins the match, and obtains her sheet of white paper. On it she laboriously inscribes: ‘I am the sun and the moon, I am man and woman, I am night and day, from now on there will be no more war, for from today everyone knows what war is.'

‘Take this message to Don Luis.'

‘First I am going to give you something to eat, and then I'll take it to him.'

The Cardiazol forces her to obey and eases her resignation.

The Down Below pavilion is the promised land. It heralds arrival at the gates of Eden, and of Jerusalem, and it holds the door to freedom. The two Doctors Morales are God the Father and God the Son. When she recovers some lucidity, her nurses will take her to the Down Below pavilion, as the Third Person of the Trinity, for without a woman, the Trinity makes no sense whatsoever.

‘And the woman? I have to be the woman. The Holy Spirit is a female dove.'

From her perch on top of the wardrobe, Leonora tackles flight as the dove she is.

Frau Asegurado returns Leonora's possessions to her, confiscated when she first entered the pavilion.

‘I have to get to work with them to combine the various solar systems and regulate the conduct of the world.'

A collection of French coins represents the fall of men due to their covetousness. Her quill, empty of ink, is her intelligence; her two bottles of Eau de Cologne are Jews and Nazis. Her little box with its black-and-white lid containing
Tabu
face powder is the eclipse. Two bottles of creamy lotion are man and woman. Her nail file is her talisman. As for the tube of lipstick called
Tangee
, no doubt that had to do with the conjuncture of word and colour.

Her various body parts lie on the floor and she neither knows how to piece them back together, nor what the key is to secure them from slipping away: an arm lies there, in the corner; her right leg, out in the corridor; her head rests on the bed. She yells out her ideas of how to end the war with all the strength in her lungs, and emphasises them with her facial grimaces and hand gestures while everyone else ignores her. After a while, Frau Asegurado tells her:

‘You're pouring with sweat, you need to calm down straight away.'

Leonora feels uncontrollable longings to flee and gallop like the mare she is, until an annoyed Frau Asegurado calls Santos over, and the two of them get a grip on her:

‘Sit down and recover your breath.'

Even Dr. Morales emerges from his office in irritation.

‘Leave us alone for a moment, we already know how agile she can be. It is impossible to watch over her sixty seconds of every minute.'

‘Don Luis, last night I dreamt that I was on top of a little hill in the Bois de Boulogne, watching a gymkhana. I waited until two large hitched horses leapt over the stockade, and headed towards me. As they did so, they turned from two into three horses, as a white colt joined them and then fell over to die at my feet. I am that colt.'

‘The only equines we have here belong to the horsemen who turn up on Sundays. Now it's better for you to return to your bedroom,' answers the doctor.

Leonora decides on her own form of defence. She closes her eyes to avoid penetration by the most intolerable suffering: other people staring at her.

She keeps them shut for hours on end. Thus she expiates her exile from the rest of the world, it is the expression of her flight out of Egypt, as she calls the Covadonga pavilion, into China, the solarium. Shutting her eyes even allows her to put up with the pain of a second injection of Cardiazol, and she recovers so quickly that three days later she tells Frau Asegurado:

‘Get me dressed. I have to go to Jerusalem to tell them what I've learnt.'

The nurse takes her out into the garden. She leaves her outside the Villa Pilar, the pavilion where the Prince of Monaco is tapping on his typewriter. As the landscape becomes more beautiful, she knows she is approaching the pavilion Down Below.

‘I have triumphed,' she tells the German woman.

If she stands on the toilet, Leonora can peep out of the bathroom window and look out on the seaside cemetery where Don Mariano's daughter, Covadonga, is buried.

Piadosa and Frau Asegurada continue to take care of her. Don Luis informs her that for the time being it is no longer deemed necessary to administer further Cardiazol. Then he adds:

‘This is going to be your home. Be sure to make yourself responsible for it.'

‘At one point in my life, I knew how to speak Chinese, but now I don't even know where China is. Are the patients here Chinese or Jewish?'

Leonora answers her own question, deciding that the occupants are Jews and that she is here in the asylum to take revenge on behalf of Max and everyone else she saw behind the wire fence at Les Milles.

José, the nurse, arranges to meet Leonora at their rendezvous as far away as possible from the main garden.

‘Leonora, where on earth are you?' calls her nurse.

Hurriedly, hurriedly, kisses fall from the corners of their mouths. There is never enough time.

‘Kiss me again before they discover us.'

How awkward it is to be kissing with the enemy lying in wait!

José gives her cigarettes.

‘If you weren't so dotty, I'd marry you.'