Leonora (41 page)

‘If you succeed in giving up cigarettes, your victory will be your salvation.'

‘And who told you that I wish to be saved?'

Within a few days, Leonora is growing annoyed. It has become intolerable to her that her companions in their fifties are now behaving like five-year-olds. They cry whenever they open their mouths, lamenting their lot in life.

‘Sentimentalism is a form of boredom,' Leonora repeats impatiently.

It also reminds her of what Renato Leduc used to say: ‘In life one has to do as one wishes, or else end up opening every other sentence with “I wish I had … I would have preferred to have …”, expressions not worth a damn.'

In order to unburden herself, she tears her friends to pieces in a daily diary addressed to Remedios, in which she also makes fun of Rodney and his wife, Janet.

‘If only, rather than sarcastically mock everyone else, you would follow your meditation exercises, this retreat could be of great benefit to you,' Rodney sweetly tells her, as if he could divine the content of her writing.

‘I have the feeling that, wherever it is I am going, I'm still carrying a sack of rocks on my back,' answers Leonora.

‘These are the rocks made by your own curse, they belong to your false personality, one that you have yet to renounce.'

‘What do you mean? There's nothing in the least false about my personality!'

‘That's what you think. You need to look more deeply inside yourself, recall your past history, tear off the mask to reveal your true self. Gurdjieff said: “You must make every effort to ensure that your past does not become your future.”'

‘There are always times, though, when no matter how hard I try the past takes possession of the present.'

‘The past dies if the present cuts its throat,' Lillian Firestone announces, with her spectacles perched on the end of her nose.

At meal times, Janet serves up frugal portions. When Natasha attempts to obtain a second helping, Janet explains: ‘If you eat too much you won't be able to experience the full force of cosmic energy.'

Janet insists on a policy of lights out at ten o'clock at night. ‘It seems almost as if I've been sent back to the convent,' Leonora grumbles. She cannot abide Lillian Firestone and writes as much to Remedios: ‘What on earth was the position of the stars at the hour of her birth? I can only believe such an imbecile must have been born back in the Stone Age.' Nor can she bear the look on Natasha's face and the banality of her smile. At every opportunity she interjects: ‘I want to integrate myself with the Cosmos.' To which Leonora replies, by way of a joke, that what she wants is a catapult to get her there. The other woman showers her with thanks: ‘Deep within me I know I carry my astral body. How good it is that you understand that!'

‘Our life is like a series of shipwrecks, we have fled one catastrophe only to fall into another. This retreat is a life-belt. Remember what Gurdjieff tells us: “He who advances slowly goes far.”'

‘Then it would appear that Gurdjieff cannot be described as exactly original, since this comes straight out of one of La Fontaine's
Fables
,' Leonora answers back, in her most acid tones.

In addition to teaching them how to assume the lotus position, Rodney Collin Smith instructs them in how to breathe and to meditate. He requests that they purchase copies of his book,
The Theory of Eternal Life
, based on Ouspensky's theories. He tells them that he is currently working on
The Theory of Celestial Influence
and will give them each a copy when it is published. He also has faith in Zen Buddhism; it is the reason he requests that they remain still, their eyes lowered, paying attention to their breathing, for immobility obliges them to live in the present moment.

Later on, he initiates them into sacred dance movements and to communal ways of working, in order to unite the spirit with the body and teach the love of one's neighbour. They make their beds, sweep their cabins, and take turns to prepare their meagre meals. Rodney himself regularly appears with a broom or a dishcloth, and is often to be found crouching on the floor tiles in the kitchen, scrubbing away with a benign smile on his face, even while the sweat runs down into his eyes.

Another communicant named Georgina snaps at Natasha as she is knitting a scarf: ‘Are you knitting a sweater for a cobra? And where on earth did you find such a nauseous green shade of wool?' Leonora approves of Georgina's frankness, most of all when Bible study hour comes around again:

‘Everyone knows that the Bible can't be trusted. According to Noah: “It doesn't matter in the least to me how high the water rises as long as it doesn't reach the wine.” So he filled the Ark with animals, got drunk, fell in the water, and his wife left him there to drown.'

‘That not right, Leonora,' protests Natasha.

‘Of course it is, his wife was left his entire inheritance and in those days a yoke of oxen was worth more than a bank account.'

What a relief to leave such air-heads to the ministrations of their spiritual guide!

Christopher Fremantle, who also hails from Great Britain, is another guru. Remedios Varo is enthusiastic:

‘He's a painter, just like we are. Get a move on, let's find out what he's made of! He was really close to Gurdjieff. He applies the master's ideas to his painting: to him concentration is a supreme undertaking.'

Through him, the initiates discover lines they never knew existed in a flower, or a fruit, or a wooden table. When the master asks: ‘What is more important, form or colour?' Leonora hesitates, remembering Max's
frottages
, his
grattages
, and finally considers form to come before all else.

‘Fremantle is an exceptional being, in addition to which he is really rather handsome. Thanks to him all our palettes will be reduced to a single colour,' sighs Leonora.

Anne Fremantle's generosity captivates Kati, Eva and Leonora, who share their spiritual conclusions with Remedios:

‘Free yourself of every stereotypical expression, free yourself from commonplace beliefs, free yourself from clichés, free yourself from visits, free yourself of those who call themselves visionaries, or at least that's what the two hemispheres of my brain are telling me.'

‘Lately I've been dreaming of a picture of a nun who winks one eye at me from the top of her tower,' Remedios tells Leonora. ‘I think it relates to a figure in a painting from the studio of the Spanish painter Zurbarán, or maybe from one in the eighteenth century, and it is sinister and bewitching.'

‘Then paint it.'

‘I've already painted
Towards the Tower.
Don't you remember?'

In addition to the bedevilled nuns of Loudun, the two artists are intrigued by the spectacle of nuns possessed by the devils of Louviers, who put the exorcist to rout. Each of the nuns is tormented by a different demon. Sister Mary of the Holy Sacrament is possessed by Putifar, Sister Anne of the Nativity by Leviathan, Sister Mary of the Child Jesus by Phaeton, Sister Elizabeth of Saint Saviour by Asmodeo. During her holidays in Manzanillo, Leonora paints them on the point of drowning:
Nunscape at Manzanillo
. Remedios, also convent-educated, applauds it:

‘Recently,' Leonora confides in her, ‘I had a terrifying nightmare: I am dead and obliged to bury my own corpse. As it starts to decompose, I decide to embalm it, so I order it to be paid for on arrival at my house on the Calle Chihuahua. When the coffin is delivered, I am so shocked by the sight of myself that I refuse to pay the charge and I send it back.'

‘It's as if one would refuse to pay the price for a life; in the end, what a relief not to have to occupy ourselves with our own funeral preparations!' Remedios concludes.

Influenced by her readings on Gurdjieff, Remedios paints
Rupture.
The main personage is fleeing a house with six windows, and out of each there leans a face identical to her own: ‘They are my multiple selves and I shed each one as I came to know myself,' she explains.

During the course of the week, Leonora encounters Fremantle again and finds him seductive.

‘How do you feel about the retreat you made with my friend Rodney Collin Smith?'

‘Fine, apart from the fact that my head is dancing with Tlalpan, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and the Ten Commandments; not to mention the scanty rations awarded us at mealtimes throughout the week I've spent in the shadow of his lectures.'

‘I am sure you have learnt something.'

‘As of now I want to learn from you, as I am interested in your theories regarding colour. I have been told you know all about red, blue and yellow.'

On returning to the Calle Chihuahua, she calls out to her husband:

‘Chiki, come out of your cave, I've prepared a delicious dinner!' Chiki obeys. ‘In spite of everything, that retreat at Peña Pobre gave me a sense of peace I have never known before,' she tells Chiki.

‘Let's just see how long it lasts.'

48

UNTIED IN TIME

W
OLFGANG PAALEN, FINDING HIMSELF
without means and on to his third marriage (this time to Isabel Marín, sister to Lupe), determines to sell off some of his prehispanic artefacts. As he can no longer cope with the dangers associated with this contraband, he turns to drugs and alcohol to reduce his anxieties. A follower of Schopenhauer, for whom the most intelligent solution is to give up on life altogether, he takes the lesson literally to heart.

Paalen commits suicide in Taxco on 24th September 1959. He selects his hotel, pays in advance, and even adds a generous tip. His final
Self-portrait
shows his face with its features faded to vanishing point, immersed in candle smoke in a technique he calls
fumage.

‘Suicides throw me completely, for to me nothing is superior to the spectacle of life,' says his patron and companion Eva Sulzer, and bursts into tears.

‘How ironic. Years ago he made a pistol out of bones,' Remedios recalls. ‘Breton's homage to him in his magazine,
Medium
, was a timely one.'

‘I would never consider killing myself,' is Leonora's contribution. ‘I am always too curious to know what might happen tomorrow.'

‘Well I do at least understand those who commit suicide,' Remedios adds compassionately.

‘And I don't. In the end, we spend more time dead than alive,' Leonora concludes.

‘Ah well,' Alice attempts to comfort herself, ‘at least he enjoyed life.'

‘Was he bisexual?' Remedios asks.

‘He was trisexual,' answers Eva, who knows most about it.

Eva and Alice console one another. Alice has recourse to her painting, Eva to her photography and her Swiss fortune. Both of them analyse Paalen, and take time to consider the ways of the unconscious. Their relationship with him was above all psychological. After all, both were his wives, Eva more so than Alice, since she was the strongest member of the triad.

Eva Sulzer burns with a passion for Jung and talks about him at parties. ‘He is one of the greatest doctors of all time.' Remedios and Leonora recognise themselves through his interpretations of dreams.

‘Jung says our dreams are a fount of self-knowledge. The lies we live by can be revealed to us in our dreams. It seems as if the unconscious is a sort of Cerberus guarding the entrance, whom we can never get past. In addition to all this, it's in no way possible to understand Surrealism without psychoanalysis.'

‘I can't dream any more,' Kati alleges. ‘I'm working too hard.'

At the age of twenty, Eva decided to travel to New York to undertake analysis with Jung but it was essential to book the appointment a year in advance. Thus the Swiss psychoanalyst lost the chance to know a beautiful and intelligent woman who turned every head in a room when she entered, with her own head held high. Eva, Leonora, Remedios and Alice Rahon are all obsessed, like Jung, by occult phenomena. They recount their dreams to one another. Very soon Kati, Remedios and Leonora leave the group because Alice wants to discuss the psychic origins of schizophrenia and Eva Sulzer prefers to go on about how badly Paalen behaved and how his conscience must have tormented him. A great admirer of Remedios, she longs to know what the subject of her next painting will be. Leonora keeps a hermetic silence on the subject of all her work in progress. She insists on striving for a truth that will bring her happiness. ‘I want to become a “person”, the highest form of a human being.' Remedios, too, takes to psychoanalysis, along with her husband Walter Gruen, who in all things does as she wishes. In contrast, Chiki has no idea how to protect his wife.

‘Whatever induced the serpent to grow feathers?' Leonora asks.

‘Ay Leonora, do leave Quetzalcoatl in peace just this once!'

‘The truth is I'm talking about a nameless force that operates on the psyche and can work miracles.'

‘Work is the best psychologist,' Kati insists.

‘Have you never undertaken psychoanalysis?'

‘War psychoanalysed me, and now the one thing I know is that if I don't get out of bed in the morning, no-one will do so for me.'

Eva Sulzer, the know-all, gets irritated:

‘Leonora, you go to your sessions in order not to discover yourself; most people go along just to be like everyone else, even if their conformity brings them to a type of slavery and ultimately they reach the point of destruction.'

‘I want to know myself; to find my inner truth!' Leonora refutes her.

‘The day when that happens you'll stop painting.'

‘The Red Queen told Alice that in order to go faster she had to run backwards.'

‘Is that what your psychoanalysis is all about?'

‘Yes, and I live it out in Clayton Green, Lancashire, on my father's arm.'

‘What's going on, Leonora, is that you are attemping to assume your father's role.' Eva Sulzer intercepts, convinced that she should be the psychoanalyst here.

‘How can I do that if I am his total antithesis?' asks Leonora, offended.

‘You are actually quite like him: authoritarian and busily trying to ensure that everyone depends on you! Maybe that's the reason why you have always felt persecuted by him.'

‘That's a lie!' yells Leonora.

Alice Rahon comes to her defence:

‘Leonora's great virtue is the curiosity which crucifies her and, if we all had it too, the mysteries of the spirit would be revealed to us all.'

‘I'd rather the mysteries of the digestive system were revealed to me,' responds Leonora.

‘When the artist encounters himself, he is lost. Artists' sole ambition is to never confront themselves,' Alice persists.

‘If you meditate for forty minutes every day, you'll be stimulating your hormones,' Leonora is quick to point out.

‘What?' asks Eva, open-mouthed.

‘Forgive me, I meant to say neurons,' Leonora adds, by way of an apology.

‘What a Freudian slip and what a catalogue of contradictions! We are all subject to inexplicable phenomena,' Eva pronounces. ‘Jung dedicated himself to alchemical philosophy and believed in divine miracles born of men and nature; thus he compared Buddha and Christ, and then finally chose to stay with the Buddha because the Christ offered himself in sacrifice and Jungian psychoanalysis finds no place for victims.'

‘What I liked about Jung was that a group of Masai percussionists and dancers leapt up and down around him in Africa and he accepted that he felt afraid,' Remedios enthuses.

Every day more visitors are drawn to Leonora's door by her growing reputation. Chiki receives them and retires. At first, Leonora attempts to dissuade him from withdrawing, but no longer; he is an adult and must take responsibility for his decision to remove himself, it's not for her to intervene.

‘Chiki, it looks as if your refuge is the most inhospitable room in the house.'

‘I spend most of my time with all of you.'

‘No, you are always off on your own in there.'

‘And you isolate yourself from everyone behind your curtain of smoke. You'll end up not even able to see your sons.'

‘To be frank, the one person I've no desire to see is you. It goes without saying, since what you are doing is erasing yourself from the face of the Earth.'

Chiki retreats, weighing the force of her words. Even with the passage of time he cannot forget that in a single concentration camp the Nazis murdered over a million Jews.

‘And don't read any more about those crematorium ovens. It'll make you even sicker than you are already.'

Yet Chiki cannot stop thinking about those underground chambers with their tiled walls. Nowadays, some of the concentration camps have been turned into museums in which everything is conserved, right down to the straw on the bunkbeds where the skeletons that once were humans used to lie. To him, the most moving story is that of Ilse Rosenberg, a girl who began to recite poems in the cattle truck used to transport her to the camp. A Nazi overheard her and ordered her to recite a passage from Goethe's
Faust.
In the midst of a deathly silence, Ilse recited from Goethe and the man was moved; yet not even this saved her from death in Auschwitz.

‘You cannot remain locked inside this hell. Break out of it for the sake of Leonora and your sons,' Kati protests. ‘Even your silence is offensive. Leonora says that days, weeks, perhaps months go by without your addressing a word to her.'

‘She doesn't deserve it.'

‘What you both deserve is a house filled with light. Yours resembles one of the infamous grottos of Cacahuamilpa, in Guerrero.'

‘All I long for is that it should always be filled with friends,' Leonora insists.

On her return from the cinema with the boys, Chiki informs Leonora: ‘Leduc called you on the phone.' The same evening Leduc appears on the doorstep with a book in his hand. It is called
Tales of Animals, Children and Ghosts
for her to illustrate. He is the same Renato as ever, only still more charming, if that were possible.

‘You too look exactly the same. I also have a child, a daughter called Patricia. I'll bring her round.'

Leonora's pleasure is obvious and she invites him to dinner. Chiki takes care that no-one is in need of anything and the boys are charmed by the guest, Gaby most of all. They all discuss literature, especially Swift, Lewis Carroll and mention is even made of Mary Edgeworth, Leonora's aunt. Renato may be the only guest to have heard tell of
The Crock of Gold,
a book that Leonora has guarded like treasure ever since she was a child.

‘Lewis Carroll has a lot in common with you, Leonora. For a start he was left-handed like you.'

‘I'm not left-handed. I write and paint with both my hands and can also do so from right to left. And I don't stammer like him, either.'

Gaby sticks around until night is well advanced, keen to pick Leduc's brains on Mexican politics. In a fortnight Renato returns for the drawings. ‘They are a total mess!' Then Gaby confesses to him that he writes poetry.

‘Me too,' and Renato smiles.

‘My mama never told me you were a poet.'

‘Yes, indeed I am. And she even went so far as to illustrate one of my books.'

Gaby opens the book at random and starts reading.

‘To love, desiring, as I loved before

– before I knew that time is golden –

How much time I wasted, how much time.

And now I have no time to love

as once I loved, how I pine

to waste time once more.'

‘That's not at all bad, Renato,' Gaby tells him, from the heights of his youthful insolence.

‘Does it seem such a piece of crap to you, Gaby? And no, I don't write poems any more.'

‘No, it's a good sonnet, and now I'll read you one of mine.'

Leduc is an excellent conversationalist. Gaby shows him what he is writing and follows Leduc's suggestions.

‘Why don't you write more poetry?' he asks Renato.

‘Because, having spent four or five hours a day sat on my arse in front of a machine typing nonsense to earn a daily crust, there's no longer even a passing moment during which one feels like writing love notes to the beloved. Look Gaby, to write novels, essays, plays or any form of high literature, I would need to detoxify myself from journalism and it's what has been putting food on my table for the past thirty years. I've got too used to living by and through journalism.'

Gaby figures out that the editing suite, noisy with the tapping of typewriters, also constitutes a story or perhaps a novel with its own well-defined stereotypes: the liar, the opportunist, the flatterer, the careerist, the
arriviste.
‘We make nothing at all that lasts. We don't possess even the smallest particle of tenacity,' Renato concludes.

From Renato's Mexico emerge street vendors of herbal cures, porters, whores and pimps. Gaby asks which Mexico is his own. Gaby and Pablo speak French with their father and English with their mother. Gaby's birthplace is an enigma to him – for at times he feels it to be alien, incomprehensible, even cruel, and maybe it's Renato who holds the key to it.

Mexicans, so humble and so humiliated, are unpredictable:

‘You already took the Child Jesus of Atocha home to dress him? May I sing him a godfather's lullaby?' ‘I went to offer my condolences to the Virgin of Guadalupe.' ‘Don't forget the rum for the libations at the altar of the dead.' ‘We're going to celebrate my fifteen-year-old daughter's confirmation, and I don't care if I have to steal to pay for it.' ‘Today the Novena of Prayers is ended, and it's the feast of the Raising of the Cross.' ‘There's no-one here because they've all left for the cemetery to visit their dead.' ‘I want to cut off and offer up my plaits to Saint Anthony in order for him to give me a husband, even an old one.' ‘Neither left nor right, but always the opposite way.' ‘The local priest won my sister over with all his papal benedictions. There they are in the living room, framed in gold.' ‘You need to sing
Las Mañanitas
– a birthday hymn – to the Little Virgin.'