Leonora by Elena Poniatowska

dimension that stands out. He does what he likes and they admire him. Leonora is now his queen, his woman, his chosen one, and Marie-Berthe has been cast aside along the way: she is now nothing more than a victim. Surrealists do not practise fidelity.
    Loplop, the superior bird, dazzles André Breton: ‘We are witnesses to the birth of a new art form.’ Insults justify Ernst’s way of life and his disdain for whoever fails to understand it. La Fessée , his painting of the Virgin slapping the infant Jesus’ bottom, offended his father. He paints with fury, liberating the burdens of childhood, buffeting traditions, taking it out on his family. When he was an adolescent visiting an art gallery in Cologne, he heard a young man offering an explanation of each painting in turn to an old man. Finally, the old man exclaimed indignantly: ‘What is all this about? I am now seventy-nine years old, and in my whole life dedicated to art I have never been so insulted.’ The youth became equally infuriated: ‘If you are really seventy-nine years old, you should have passed on to a better life by now.’
    â€˜He would like to be your friend,’ Max intervened, speaking to the young man.
    â€˜My name is Jean Arp,’ the young man introduced himself, holding out his hand. ‘Art has to be done away with as civilisation was by the War.’
    â€˜How?’
    â€˜With terror, with rage.’
    â€˜Does Dadaism not have any room for compassion?’
    â€˜Yes, but never for the past.’
    Arp was the first to affirm that chance is the great creative stimulus. After struggling for months with a picture which he ended up tearing to bits and scattering to the four winds, he observed that the scraps of paper had fallen to the ground in just the shape that he had been seeking. So he stuck them together, recalling Mallarmé: ‘ Un coup de dés n’abolira jamais le hasard .’
    He tells Max: ‘I created a woman’s buttocks from an ink blot.’
    Ernst despises the morality of the confessional and maintains, with Lautréamont, that his one and only task is to attack the Creator who engendered such scum on earth as man. Max discovered him thanks to Breton, who in turn knew him because Soupault obtained a copy of Les Chants de Maldoror (‘Songs of Maldoror’) which he took to the Front with him during the First World War.
    According to Ernst, the Church’s confessionals were responsible for diminishing sexuality and repressing pleasure.
    Max brandishes the cutting edge of his smile.
    All this rebelliousness stimulates Leonora because it evokes something more within her; her energy is more ferocious than ever, and her ideas swim against the current like salmon. The more eccentric Max’s propositions become, the more attractive they seem to her.
    â€˜Do you know that once upon a time I wanted to be a doctor? My intention was to cure minds. I felt myself to be capable of teaching men not to give in to whatever a scarecrow in a cassock told me about being an emissary of Divine Will. When you’re young, you’re like a billiard ball, always liable to bounce one end of the table to the other. I experienced mystical crises, times of exaltation and depression, even attacks of hysteria. I dangerously blurred the distinction between birds and humans because my pink cockatoo died the same day my sister was born. I buried her in the garden – the cockatoo not my sister – and then descended into a nervous breakdown; the same experience repeated itself when I was almost hit by a car in Brühl. I laughed and the driver cursed at me. I put my family into check-mate and I think I did them a favour when I left Germany.’
    What Max fails to mention is that in Brühl he also left behind his first wife, the art critic Louise Straus, and his son, Hans Ulrich Ernst, known as ‘Jimmy’, aged only two. The boy came to visit in Paris and Max had no