Leonora (39 page)

45

EDWARD JAMES

W
HEN EDWARD JAMES ARRIVES
at Leonora's dark house he sees
The Giantess
standing on the easel, and immediately knows he is standing in front of a masterpiece. Leonora explains that the painting is the fruit of her reading of Jonathan Swift:

‘She is an inhabitant of the Island of Brobdingnag.'

‘She looks as if she might arise from the beginnings of creation, from chaos. Look at the despair of those men struggling to save themselves,' James comments.

‘The ones out there at sea rowing?'

James continues, utterly absorbed: ‘Your giantess shelters a tiny egg in her hands. In comparison to her body, her hands are diminutive. Beneath her feet are horses and humans bearing bows, arrows and lances, fleeing in terror. They have never seen a sight remotely like this before. Leonora, you are the giantess in your painting,' declares James. ‘I'll buy it from you!'

Gaby and Pablo return from school and, on seeing
The Giantess
on the easel, ask their mother if it is her self-portrait from when she was a little girl, because her head is circled with stardust; and pelicans, gulls and ships sally forth from her white cape. Nothing could be more natural than for the children to come in and interrupt her, bumping into her easel, borrowing her paints – most especially Pablo, who without more ado helps himself to her paintbrushes.

‘Who is that man, Mama?'

‘He is an Englishman who flew in and landed on the flat roof of our house.'

‘Is he an Englishman or a swan?'

‘If I tell you he flew all the way here, he could as well be a migrating bird or a purple heron.'

Edward James is enchanted by the tale of the purple heron, which the Mexicans call an imperial bird. ‘Children always tell the truth, and it's clear that I look very good painted as the heron. But Leonora, the light is atrocious,' he commiserates.

‘It doesn't matter. In any case, as soon as my children get in from school, I stop painting.'

‘Everyone talks about the light in Mexico, but it's as if it doesn't exist for you.'

‘It's that I wanted so much for Europe to be my children's homeland.'

‘But you still stayed here, didn't you?'

‘I never actually decided to, it just happened that way.'

The general interest US magazine
Town & Country
publishes a photograph of
The Giantess
(also known as
The Guardian of the Egg
) alongside a story called
Un Jour
by Jean Malaquais, whom Leonora recalls having seen walking around Paris looking like a vagrant. Max had mentioned how: ‘The idealism of this Pole enchants me.' Vladimir Lalacki, who wrote about the concentration camp where he was imprisoned, is also now living in Mexico.

‘Look at this!
Time
and
Art News
magazines are reviewing your work. Where do you keep the articles that get written about you?'

‘I don't keep them. Maybe Chiki does, I don't know.'

‘The magazine
Horizon
has a litany of eulogies to you. Did you see that Victor Serge wrote of how your painting stirs his emotions because it reflects “an adolescent but luminous interior life”? Gustav Regler also reproduces two of your paintings.'

Leonora is flattered by the article because the novelist Regler fought in the Twelfth International Brigade in Spain, and, now he is in Mexico, has grown passionate about its pre-Hispanic cultures.

Leonora appears in the catalogue of the Bel Ami International Art Competition, next to Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst, and Ernst's new wife, Dorothea Tanning.

In February 1950, the Clardecor Gallery, which specialises in interior design, offers her its wall space.

‘A furniture shop?'

‘Leonora,
this is Mexico
,' responds Edward.

‘It's not exactly what you deserve, but at least it can be an opportunity for the Mexicans to sit up and take notice of you,' adds Esteban Francés.

Inés Amor, a tiny woman with ankles so slender they could belong to a canary and who smokes at least as much as – if not more than – Leonora, scrutinises every picture she brings into Clardecor minutely. She is the director of the Gallery of Mexican Art. ‘This woman certainly knows how to sell,' Jesús Bal y Gay whispers in Leonora's ear. The majority of her clients are from the United States. In spite of her fragile physical appearance, she has a will of iron. ‘You will see how the Mexicans are going to treat you once you have me at your side,' Inés comforts Leonora as she complains of the xenophobia that surrounds her.

‘Unless I turn into a
chichimeca
native, one of those the Aztecs fought for centuries, I don't think they'll ever pay the least attention to me. I have never painted a single, solitary slice of a water melon.'

‘Things are going to change once I am involved.'

And so it comes to pass that Leonora is recognised as an artist who belongs to Mexico and is included in the exhibition ‘A Portrait of Contemporary Mexico', sponsored by the National Museum of Modern Art and National Fine Arts Institute. When Inés Amor inaugurates her first solo show on the Calle Milan, the critics talk of her technique and of the mysterious nature of her subjects: Margarita Nelken, a refugee from the Spanish Civil War, writes in
Excelsior
that it is the best exhibition on show in Mexico. Antonio Ruiz, known by the nickname of
El Corcito
(the Buck) because of his resemblance to an eponymous bullfighter, declares that at long last he has found an identical twin soul.

‘How well you are doing in Inés Amor's hands!' Gunther Gerzso congratulates her. ‘She is the only one who can persuade a buyer to do as she wishes.'

Leonora and her children attend
Dante's Inferno: The Ballet
choreographed by George Balanchine, who a few days later turns up on the doorstep with a suitcase stuffed with plans and programmes so that Leonora can design the sets and the wardrobe. Opting for a change of surroundings, she invites Balanchine into the kitchen and offers him tea.

‘How can I spread out my floor plans if the cat is sitting on the table?'

‘Pablo,
get
Kitty.'

Pablo, in a night shirt since it's already bed-time, chases after the cat who, in its turn, is intent on catching a mouse; but since Kitty can hardly see any more, the little mouse gets into the sleeve of his night shirt and, when he realises it, the boy races up and downstairs, creating the maximum rumpus.

‘Ma, the mouse is biting me, the mouse is eating my arm.' His screams grow more and more shrill. Although they are now very old, Dicky and Daisy bark ceaselessly. Balanchine, who has been unable to take so much as a sip of tea, gets to his feet and joins in the shouting:

‘This is no place to work, it's impossible! We don't have a single moment of peace, this house is like a mental asylum!'

He packs up his things and departs.

‘Why did you do that?' Chiki asks Pablo.

‘The mouse crept into my sleeve, and I only noticed when it began to race up my arm.'

‘Now it's high time you went and said sorry to your mother.'

Chiki punishes him with his silence. In contrast, Leonora consoles him:

‘Don't be afraid, you didn't do anything wrong, it's Balanchine who has made an idiot of himself. If he'd been seriously interested, he would have put up with it and stuck around.'

Leonora paints without a pause. It is 1957, and her second show at the Antonio Souza Gallery brings in fresh admirers.

The entire attention of the vanguard is focused on the Galeria Souza, where the most unexpected artists are always on show. The public is just as unusual. María Félix, Juan Rulfo, Maka Tchernichew, Patsy O'Gorman, Mathias Goeritz, Gunther Gerzso and Juan Soriano chat to Rufino Tamayo, who serves himself a tequila. Bridget Tichenor leaves with Pedro Friedeberg, her kindred spirit. ‘You have to see the de Chirico that Bridget has hanging in her living room,' Antonio Souza tells Eugenia Orendain. Souza, who wears a little blue flower in his lapel that he – oddly – calls his paint-brush, provides a running commentary that would have caused the Marquis de Sade or the Bloody Countess to blush. Cynical and witty, he alters the names of his painters and ascribes a Benjamin López to Francisco Toledo. Paul Antragne, a young debutant, locks himself in the bathroom to consume his drugs. The smile worn by Pedro Friedeberg, de Souza's close friend, is a cause for pleasantries, since ambassadors, cultural attachés, Bona de Pisis and André Pieyre de Mandiargues are all seated on his wooden chairs in the shape of a hand. In 1938, Kurt Seligmann convulsed the whole of Parisian society with a chair he called
ultra-furniture
supported by three sensual women's legs. Finally, ‘Mexiquito' – little Mexico – is pulling aside its nopal curtain, just as José Luis Cuevas predicted when he gave the muralist David Siqueiros a trashing, before bestowing another on Diego Rivera. ‘Out of my way, juvenile mouse-face!' riposted Rivera. One of Leonora's paintings is included in an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston called
The Disquietening Muse: Surrealism.
‘Now you see how I succeed in internationalising my painters!' cries the poet Souza, owner of the most snobbish gallery in the country.

Each time Edward James returns from a journey, he invades their house with a cohort of serpents and macaws, which the Hotel Francis won't allow him to bring indoors. The iguanas hang out on the flat roof, the parrots and kites flit about indoors, and the tortoises get lost in the corridors; five parakeets imported from Manaus chatter without pausing for breath, and seven badgers – so fierce that not even Kitty will go near them – shit all over the house.

He puts them in the care of Leonora; in the end, even she complains.

‘Could you not take them up on the flat roof so that they can get some sun, Leonora?' Edward continues persistently.

‘How about he puts those socks of his, the ones he always leaves around for us to find hidden behind bedroom doors, out there for a bit of a bleach in the sun?' protests Pablo.

Edward is by now the patron of the Weisz family. This clearly allows him to feel at liberty to leave his disgusting yellow socks in any corner of any room, which deeply offends Pablo. James' eccentricities irritate Leonora too, at times, and she returns to the house, her eyes black with anger. Even so, Leonora always enjoys going out with him. That was how James came to invite her to dine at the University Club on the Paseo de la Reforma, and when the time came to pay, pulled out an envelope stuffed with only one
peso
notes and asked if she had any cash on her. Leonora grew enraged: ‘Now we'll have to stay and do the washing up, since I don't have a solitary
centavo
on me.'

The Weisz household looks after the reliquaries he steals from rural churches and dusty rectories: saints missing hands or whole arms, and a beautifully ornate
churrigueresco
– a Mexican baroque crucifix – that James was to reclaim two or three years later.

Leonora has less patience than Kati with armadillos and iguanas. Pablo is shocked that James uses shampoo for washing his hands, and leaves the towels flung down on the floor; that a whole toilet roll gets used in one go; and that he leaves the bathroom floor soaking wet, whereas he and Gaby are always obliged by their parents to clean up after themselves.

‘Mama, we really can't stand James any more,' Pablo tells her.

‘You may not be able to stand him, but without him we'd have nothing to eat.'

Gaby shakes his head in resignation, while Pablo shows his indignation: ‘I would prefer to die of hunger than put up with his smelly yellow socks any longer.'

‘And you haven't even read his poetry. It's even worse than his socks!' Gaby offers by way of consolation.

46

A PALACE IN THE JUNGLE

E
DWARD JAMES ARRIVES BY CAR
from the United States, using the newly inaugurated Mexico City–Laredo freeway and crossing the ancient lands of the Huasteca people, who inhabit the south-eastern region of San Luis Potosí. The hotel built in the jungle at Taninul is a Surrealist phantasm, and its vast hot thermal baths reflect the skies overhead. ‘We are immersed in a Rousseau painting. There can be no doubt he painted
The Dream
right here.' James goes crazy over the orchids hanging from the trees. In Tamazunchale he asks for more and more orchids:

‘Then you need to go to Xilitla,
jefe
!'

The English heir stubbornly insists on going on foot to Xilitla. This involves walking fourteen kilometres along dirt tracks; when night begins to fall, a cold wind causes him to shiver like a leaf. All at once he asks his companion, a retired sergeant from the US army named Ronald McKenzie, to pass him the suitcase:

‘In there, underneath the bananas and oranges, I packed a toilet roll. Please pass it to me as quickly as possible.'

He unravels it round and round himself: ‘This is my method of conserving body heat.' An hour later, the local residents are surprised to see a mummy shrouded in toilet paper enter their village.

Xilitla village lies on a coffee-growing hillside in the San Luis Potosí, part of the Huasteca region which straddles four Mexican states. Protected by the Eastern Sierra Madre, its houses are built of wood and have pitched roofs. James enters the rain forest and discovers the miniature paradise they call Las Pozas, ‘The Pools', because deep springs of clear water well up at intervals in the River Tancuilin. There, in the midst of luxuriant vegetation, orchids reign supreme, and from among them emerges Plutarco Gastélum, a young man of twenty-nine years old, slim and tall, with a high forehead and a fine Aquiline nose.

To Plutarco, this new arrival provides a novel spectacle. Tall and distinguished, wearing a yellow and gold Indian tunic, his wild gesticulations are those of astonishment and jubilation and his smile swings from one tree to the next.

Exclamations of ‘Incredible!' and ‘Marvellous!' are accompanied by further extravagant gestures. ‘I have reached the promised land! This is the ground upon which I shall raise my house!'

‘That's what they're all like, everyone who arrives here from across the ocean. No doubt Hernán Cortés uttered all the same expressions of astonishment,' is Plutarco's thinking. ‘This white man, despite his obvious enthusiasm, is yet another
conquistador
, one can only follow in his slipstream, and comply with his every whim, however bizarre they may seem.'

‘Here in my private paradise I can defy even death,' shouts James, waving his arms in the air. In the evening he calms down and writes: ‘My house has wings and sometimes, in the depths of night, it sings.'

The inhabitants look on in surprise while the euphoric tourist takes his daily bathe in the nude down at one of the nine river pools, then spends hours on end seated beneath the trees, drawing in his sketchbook the monuments he has in mind to build in the midst of this paradisical garden.

James erects thirty-eight cement sculptures in Xilitla; immense flowers with stone petals, giant four-leaf clovers, rings and vipers. When Leonora tells him she would adore to be a bat, he has the bright idea of creating an Arcade of Bats in homage to her, as he also does to Max Ernst. He constructs the house on three floors with the potential to have another couple of storeys added, making five. He names them the House of Peristyles; the House of Plants; the Gates of Saint Peter and Saint Paul; the Terrace of the Tigers and the Summer Palace.

Nothing leads anywhere else, for James inverts arches, balances columns, has doors opening onto chasms, uses rods to reinforce the cement in a manner that defies logic, and leaves parts exposed to the most inclement variations in the weather system. Nothing lies on the far side of the bridge; balconies extend out over suicidally steep abysses; here all sense of the future is abolished, and nothing is guaranteed. His cement cobwebs spun out across a void have meaning only for him. At last he has achieved what he was never quite able to reach in his poetry: to reveal himself by announcing: ‘This is who I am.' In the Huasteca jungle his cry is that of the avenged. Here his dreams and his creatures can roam free, and he can sleep soundly in the vast tropical hammock he has constructed beneath the stars.

‘Here is all that I love! This is my sky and my abyss, my heaven and hell. Piranesi and Gaudí, Escher and Chichen Itza are my masters.'

The astonished people of Potosí humour him obediently, as Don Carmelo Muñoz calculates the composition and dimensions of his rods, weights and levers. Under his guidance, they tip the cement mix into prodigious moulds made of wood, doubling the number of rods, transporting the cement in wheelbarrows, smoothing the bricks with a trowel, and going so far as to ask whether ‘the madman' is going to build houses for them too. ‘Of course he will,' responds Plutarco. He points James out to them, with a macaw on his shoulder he calls Eulalia, to whom he sings lullabies or recites his poetry.

The vast cloud of Monarch butterflies that seek sanctuary there is the icing on the cake. ‘If you stay silent, you can hear them flutter; they are more than likely your guardian angels.' The cloud of butterflies is there just for him. The marvel is that they have had to cross more than four thousand kilometres simply in order to reproduce here, in Xilitla, just as he covered the whole of the Earth in order to embrace Plutarco. James, who comes from so far away, is feeling for the first time an insatiable love for this young man of the
yaqui
people, who gazes at him like a roe deer. What do infinite distances matter if at long last he has discovered his reason for living! Everything he has seen and loved is now incarnate in Plutarco. If copulation lasts an hour or more for the Monarch butterflies, James would make it last until the hour he dies. James grows crazy:

‘It takes between four and twelve days for the tiny egg to turn into a caterpillar. I shall turn you into the most dazzling, luxuriant and fresh butterfly ever, the only one to have access to the calyx of all the flowers. Within you shall all three kingdoms reside. Plutarco, you arrive at my domain in a mantle of butterflies, you are as noble and powerful as they, you reign sovereign over far distances, the king of kings, my emperor, the sultan of the desires I have harboured since childhood, an aristocrat with wings, the prince of fluttering wings. You are all I have ever dreamt of, you were the caterpillar in a body no more than five grams in weight and ten centimetres long, and now look what you have become! Until I found you, the world to me was absurd and senseless; now at last you demonstrate a world that is coherent and harmonious to me. Do you realise all this, Plutarco?'

He recites him the legendary poem,
The Conference of the Fowls
by the twelfth-century Persian poet Farid al-Din Attar, who describes the flight of the birds in search of their king.

‘You are my vale of dangers and marvels.'

There is no-one on Earth more desirable than Plutarco. To the
yaqui
, born in Sonora, all the rulers of the Earth will offer praise. ‘Plutarco in swimming trunks is the most perfect specimen of Yuku, the
yaqui
god of rain.' James photographs him constantly; back in New York, he commissions Tchelitchew to paint his wonderful body in order to add the best model there is to his already extensive collection. ‘You will see what a man he is!' He goes so far as to order Leonora:

‘You have to see him, Leonora. He is Adonis incarnate, the finest man ever created; you will never see anything more beautiful on Earth.' He invites her to accompany him to Xilitla.

‘With Gaby and Pablo as well?'

‘Of course!'

By now, James has bought himself a trailer and they set out for Xilitla in the middle of a storm, which causes the water to rise as high as the mudguards. Leonora sits in the front, beside Plutarco, and the children go behind with James.

‘Ma, what are we going to have for breakfast?'

‘Two rhinoceroses, one tapir, one yellow bird, three fingers from a nun. You are then forbidden to swim in the river pools for at least an hour, in case you get indigestion.'

Plutarco dives in and emerges from the waters shining and muscular. Everyone applauds and he acknowledges the compliment with supreme graciousness. James runs over to him, holds out a towel, and turns him round to face Leonora, Gaby and Pablo. ‘This is the son of Tlaloc and Coatlicue and he is God.' James bows to the ground, and affects to kiss his feet. Plutarco acts either timid or inhibited. ‘Foreigners never restrain their desires,' he thinks, and Leonora comments ‘Edward is making a fool of himself,' as she hints at a smile of complicity, or possibly of jealousy. James now wants everyone to dive into the pool as nude as he, and the villagers from Potosí shift quietly away to vanish from the scene. ‘Good grief, what kind of a mad goat is he?' Yet James insists that all his employees strip naked and bathe together with him. Plutarco protests: ‘But it embarrasses them!' Don Cipriano explains that the rich are like that, for they think that everything is permitted them. James has never been so happy, he talks like a parrot and goes around with a boa as a mascot wrapped around one arm, and a small crocodile on the other. Or perhaps it was an iguana?

Gaby is fascinated by the glow-worms, and Pablo by the grass-hoppers, which he stores in a metal box well away from the mad excesses of adults.

Edward James, filled with emotion, invites Gastélum inside: ‘Little Plutarco, I shall now show you the wonders of civilisation.'

He introduces him to the trailer with its bath and kitchenette, lighting the gas flame, and Plutarco leaps backwards to exclaim: ‘Ooooh!' Then he shows him the fridge and Plutarco again goes: ‘Ooooh!'

‘Come on, have you really never seen anything like this before?' Pablo asks him.

‘Of course I have, and I'm no stranger to gas, iceboxes and electricity. But if it gives him pleasure, then I'll play the fool.'

‘And everyone else here is also playing the fool?' Pablo enquires again, who won't let anything get by him.

‘No, they pass themselves off as smart, but I have them well under my control.'

Edward can no longer find further means to conquer Plutarco, and in addition to purchasing him forty hectares of land and building him a castle, he takes every opportunity to keep reciting the sayings of the Greek Plutarch to him, only to be greeted by his homonym with considerable scepticism. ‘To cling to every form of pleasure is utterly irrational, but to avoid every form of pleasure is utterly insensate' or ‘I have no need of a friend who changes when I change, and who nods when I nod. My shadow does that much better.'

‘Did you know that Plutarch had a major influence on Shakespeare, my little Plutarco?'

Pablo trails after the adults, and Gaby isolates himself. He reads
Tarzan
– his book of choice – over and over again, because it's so easy to picture his hero swinging from the lianas with Chita clinging to his neck, there at the heart of the rainforest.

What delights Gaby the most is not having to go to school in the middle of the exam period.

‘Do you like it here?' he asks his mother. ‘This is paradise: but the gates to heaven are so close to those of hell.'

Whether the children miss school or not is a problem for Chiki alone.

When Pablo spots Edward asleep in his hammock, he picks up a caterpillar and drops it into his open mouth.

‘Did you see what your son just did?' asks Edward as he wakes up, all the more annoyed because Plutarco is laughing at him.

Leonora, flushed with the heat, her hair electrified by the humidity, paints on a wall using a sepia palette, the picture of a tall and slender woman with the head of a ram, while her sons continue playing, and James falls asleep again, hidden beneath his straw hat.

James keeps paintings by Varo, Carrington and de Chirico in one of his houses. He stacks the pictures against the damp walls, among the moss and roots, at the risk of ruining them. The floor is made of compacted earth, and fungi sprout in its corners.

Of Leonora's two sons, James prefers Gaby and lets it be clearly known. He gives the elder son a puzzle with more than a hundred pieces and a picture of a trailer on it. ‘What a beauty!' In contrast, Pablo is given a badly wrapped package. When he opens it he asks: ‘Why has he given me a china doll when I'm not a girl?'

When James bids farewell in order to embark on one of his many trips to the United States, England or Italy, he assembles the sixty-eight builders and puts them in charge of the orchids.

The variety of flowers in the rain forest is phenomenal. Edward tells his men: ‘Look at these roots. Don't they look like testicles to you? Look after them carefully, and take note that they are extensions of myself.'