Leonora (23 page)

26

NANNY

D
ON LUIS ANNOUNCES NANNY'S ARRIVAL
from England. After a fortnight's journey in a cramped cabin aboard a warship, Nanny reaches the asylum disorientated and in a state of exaltation difficult to control. ‘Who on earth had the idea to send an elderly employee who speaks not a word of Spanish to Santander?' the Morales ask each other. Nanny scurries from one side of the room to the next like a scared rabbit, with no-one so much as offering her a cup of tea.

Leonora, who knows how to be hurtful, receives her mistrustfully.

‘My parents sent you here in a yellow submarine so that you would take me back to Hazelwood, is that it? If they're so worried, why didn't they come for me themselves?'

‘Prim, I came here because I love you and I haven't seen you in four years. Where do you think I might find a cup of tea?'

‘Go off back to England. They might give you one there.'

Leonora's hostility only grows more acute. Nanny hears her cough, and tries to bring her a glass of water but, not knowing where to find the kitchen, she gets lost. Every time she plumps up the pillows, Leonora curls up and turns her back on her. Nanny wants to supplant the nurse, and Leonora delights in the inability of this diminutive, wrinkled old woman, her grey hair knotted in a bun on her neck, to do so. She does not ask how she got to be there, whether she may be hungry or tired, where she'll sleep. The only thing bothering Leonora is to find out why she has come. ‘What are you here for? My father sent you.' Let the Carringtons all drop dead! Nanny drags her back to her childhood and her presence intensifies the confusion inside her head. ‘Behave, Prim, behave,' she tells her every time she pushes her food away. If she cries or throws a tantrum, Nanny sits down on the edge of her bed:

‘Prim, when you used to want something, you always knew full well how to fight to get it.'

Occasionally she mentions the name of Black Bess, her pony, or Winkie, her mare, or of Tim Braff, the chauffeur's son, whom she had held in affection. ‘He's married now, and his wife is expecting a child.' Or of Lassie, the dog whom Harold especially favoured, and who now lies beneath the ground, or of the new bishop, who wishes to modernise Church services and has Republican sentiments, for he knew Julian Bell, Virginia Woolf's nephew. How intense she is, how fresh is her memory, how irresistible the attachment to childhood! Gerard, Pat and Arthur's faces dance in her mind, cloud her vision.

‘Hush now, Nanny.'

Acutely wounded by her mistress' behaviour, Nanny retreats with her tail between her legs.

‘Nanny is a woman lacking either significance or authority,' opines Frau Asegurado. Mortified at finding her place at Leonora's side taken, the nanny becomes jealous and makes one mistake after another. ‘Let me do it, I can take care of her, I know her better, her parents sent me here to do this,' and the only outcome is that Leonora refuses even to let her come into the bathroom with her.

Nanny irritates Leonora with her overflowing tenderness and her furrowed brow. Her eyes fill with tears at every rejection, which further exasperates her mistress. What is this slow emissary from the past doing here, turning up to impose restrictions, taking her by the hand as she used to do when Leonora was a child, in order to drag her back to Lancashire? She feels a sense of revulsion whenever Nanny so much as takes her arm:

‘Don't you dare touch me. You are the Carringtons' accomplice.'

Leonora treats Nanny in exactly the same manner as she was treated when she entered the asylum: she humiliates her. The only thing missing are the Cardiazol injections.

‘I came here to help you. Why is this German woman always interfering, Prim?' Nanny asks.

‘Because she is a professional nurse and you're not.'

‘But I've known you since you were a child.'

‘Nanny, stop it, you're making me nervous.'

For Leonora, Nanny's jealousy is translated into a cosmic problem, as insoluble as all the rest. The first one concerns her transfer to the Down Below pavilion, where the residents are always happy, since they know they will soon be set free.

In St. Martin d'Ardèche she used to dare to appear nude, sure of her beauty, but now she is a skeleton. You could count her ribs; her skin is taut across her collarbones; her hip bones resemble coat hangers; and her sunken stomach disgusts her, while her hollowed cheeks make her face look like a dried apricot.

‘Whatever have they done to me?'

The yellow skin stretched over her cheekbones looks as if it is on the point of cracking open.

‘I look like Frankenstein's monster.'

Nanny weeps.

‘Your snivelling puts me on edge! Either shut up or clear off and cry somewhere else. I don't want to listen to you, go back to Lancashire.'

Leonora's narcissism means that her world revolves entirely around herself.

‘You have changed so much,' Nanny laments, ‘you are no longer the Prim I knew since the day you were born.'

‘If I am no longer the same, what on earth are you still doing here? Clear off!'

‘Quite aside from coming on your parents' behalf, I am here because I love you, Prim.'

Leonora's rage is so immense she cannot manage to conceal it. She longs to pulverise Nanny and trample her ashes into the ground, to obliterate her very existence.

‘You are not allowed to come into the garden with me.'

‘Why not, Prim?'

‘Because my companion has to be Frau Asegurado.'

Each morning at eleven, when Leonora goes out with her German nurse, she ensures that Nanny is occupied with another task, so that she cannot follow her out.

Clearly, her nanny gets in her way.

‘I don't want to have to think about you. If I can hardly cope with myself, how am I going to put up with your jealousies?'

Berating her has its compensations, since through Nanny she can get at her father, and be sure to offend him. If Nanny thinks she still has any kind of a hold over her, she has another think coming. There was a reason for her to be around during Leonora's childhood, but no more.

Nanny has lost her powers, she has dwindled to nothing and is no more than a loose thread from the past. Humiliating her makes Leonora an accomplice of the Doctors Morales. If she submits to the doctors, they will transform from being her executioners to becoming her allies, and set her free.

Never in her worst nightmares did Nanny ever imagine that Prim would betray her.

‘There is no way I am going to return home with you, do you understand? Hazelwood is over. Now my goal is Down Below.'

Next to the Down Below pavilion, the garden opens out and, most importantly, a door leads into the garage, which Leonora spies on to see when Don Luis comes home and parks his car there. A few steps on and a cave serves as a storage space for the gardeners' tools and a heap of the dried leaves they have swept up. In her mind, the pile of dead leaves is Covadonga's grave, where the director's daughter – who is also Luis Morales' sister – lies.

‘They believe that I am Covadonga,' Leonora says to herself. ‘I have come to replace his daughter. That is why they want to make this place my sepulchre.'

As well as an automobile, the Morales have a private dining room. At midday a nauseating smell permeates Leonora's bedroom. The gardeners are spreading manure on the lawn. Leonora cannot comprehend how Mariano Morales, God the Father, gives his consent to her food being thus contaminated. She rises indignantly and, followed by her nurse, enters the private refectory. The two doctors ignore Leonora's impertinence and Don Luis addresses Frau Asegurado in German. Leonora is irritated by the fact that he only speaks to the nurse and only in German. She seats herself between the two of them, and is crossed by an electric current flowing from one to the other. When she gets up the current switches off. ‘This current is the flow of their fear of me.'

The doctors look at her with apprehension; in the asylum, fear travels from one person to another: the insane are capable of anything, so the doctors tranquillise them with injections. Cardiazol is also good at covering up the doctors' own shortcomings.

As Don Luis continues eating, Leonora asks José for pen and paper and draws the Cosmos (the father), the Sun (the son), and the Moon (herself). She holds the sheet of paper out to her doctor, who returns it to her without saying a word. Disappointed, Leonora goes to the library in the Villa Covadonga, chooses a book by Miguel de Unamuno, and opens it at random: ‘Thank God we have pen and ink.' She is convinced that this is a message from the Cosmos.

A dragonfly lands on her hand, settling in place as if it never wishes to move on. Leonora looks at it without moving until it falls on to the floor tiles, dead.

‘It is the hand of Don Luis who wants me dead. I shall be sure to anticipate his desire for me,' she assures the German nurse.

She endows anything that happens with a transcendental significance. If a sudden gust of wind blows the door open, it is because the garden is calling to her, and she must go out at once.

In order to go out walking, Don Luis gives her a cane which she looks after carefully as it is now her sceptre. Leonora's mind is filled with scenes from Alice and the Irish fairy stories in
The Crock of Gold.
She labours over three numbers that have come to obsess her – six, eight and two – and arrives at a total that reminds her of the consort queen, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.

‘I am the Queen of England.'

‘Tell that to the doctor!' growls Frau Asegurado.

Leonora runs to the consulting room:

‘I am Elizabeth, Queen of England.'

‘No, Leonor, you are Leonor Carrington, and you have no need to be queen of anywhere.'

‘What I need is to get rid of all the characters I carry around in me, and the one I dislike most of all is Elizabeth of England.'

‘Then leave, and be sure to exclude her from your life.'

She constructs an effigy of the queen in her room. A three-legged table for her legs; a chair poised on top of the table for her body, and on top of the chair she places a decanter with three red roses in it: the crown and conscience of Queen Elizabeth. To top it off, she dresses it in her own clothes and places the table legs into some of Frau Asegurado's shoes.

Satisfied by the figure she has created, she runs into the garden and through a place she calls Africa, an enormous reed bed growing in the crater left by a hand grenade. She gathers their leafy plumed stems, which she uses to cover herself up completely, then wriggles on her stomach to the door, only to discover that it is firmly locked. She returns to the pavilion in a state of high sexual excitement. So it seems to her entirely natural to find Don Luis standing in front of the effigy of Queen Elizabeth of England.

‘Congratulations: to pull out inner characters that are inessential to one's core is a symptom only of sanity.'

Don Luis caresses her cheek, then introduces one of his fingers into her mouth, which clearly gives her pleasure. Leonora becomes excited. He picks up his prescription book and rips out a page:

‘A palace or a pigsty, anything but mediocrity.' From that moment on, Leonora starts to desire him, and writes to him every day. ‘Doctor, what does it mean to be reborn? Something is growing inside me. You are responsible for provoking what is happening within me.' ‘Doctor, do you think I've made good progress and can now move to the pavilion Down Below?' ‘Open the door to me. I'm alone.' ‘I am yearning for you.' ‘I am not a woman, I am a mare.' ‘There's no-one else in this garden apart from you and I, Doctor. Take me now or I'll go mad.' ‘My madness is my unconsummated desire.' ‘I can't stand myself, look at the state I am in, consumed with desire.' ‘I admit defeat, you and the rest of them are all stronger than I am.' ‘Who would believe that you could inflict such torture upon me?' ‘I am your slave. I am the weakest woman in the world, and I am here only to serve you, I can satisfy all your desires, whatever they are, I'll lick your shoes.' ‘I am prepared to die for you.'

Luis Morales stays quiet and avoids meeting her alone.

‘Are you going to take a holiday from yourself, or have you become as mad as your patients?' Leonora asks him five days later, from her perch on top of the wardrobe.

Dishevelled, agitated, having lost his self-control, the doctor goes hither and thither accompanied only by his dog, Moro. Leonora suspects that at this point in time Moro has all the powers of his master, and that were she to try and escape the dog could prevent her. She is happy at the thought Don Luis has gone mad.

‘How does it feel to be on the other side, Doctor?'

‘Give the Englishwoman a bath, that should calm her down.'

Frau Asegurado gives her a cold bath and puts her to bed. Leonora reflects on this: ‘They are preparing me for my wedding night. Although his face belongs to that of his dog Moro, the doctor has the body of a man.' She closes her eyes and now the doctor has Moro's body. ‘This is all for my triumphal entrance into Down Below.' The doorway is lit with an orange light, so marvellous that Leonora has a presentiment of the exit. Later, José brings her her cigarette and gives her a goodnight kiss.