Leonora by Elena Poniatowska Page A

idea what to do with him. He hauled him around his friends’ houses to see Dalí, Masson and Tanguy. It was with relief that Max took him back to the Gare St. Lazare and put him on a train back home.
    Now Jimmy was living in Paris with his mother, looking for work with the help of Marie-Berthe Aurenche, the woman abandoned. Since the painter had left his second wife, Louise and she had become accomplices in grief.
    â€˜Leonora, paint what you used to think about as a child. Express all your inhibitions and your childhood fears.’
    â€˜Then I would have to paint like a child and I’ve no interest in doing that.’
    â€˜It’s the first step to liberating yourself; whatever you paint, whatever you draw, whatever you sculpt will be childish in content but will lead you into freedom. In addition, children arrive in the world with an impressive power of reason but then, through lack of experience, allow themselves to be repressed by adults.’
    One morning Leonora snaps at him: ‘Marie-Berthe told me – or rather yelled at me – that you have a son. If you are so very interested in children’s fantasies, introduce me to Jimmy.’
    â€˜What will you say to him?’
    Jimmy is now seventeen and no longer a child. He has nothing in common with the collage his father dedicated to him fifteen years earlier, when he was about to turn two: Dadafax, minimus. He is a young man with straight fair locks that fall into his eyes, and which he keeps pushing aside with his hand. Leonora kisses him on both cheeks and Jimmy smiles.
    â€˜The thing I like best in the world is chocolate cake, and I’ve just baked one. Would you like to taste it, Jimmy?’
    Leonora sings and dances, laughs and makes him laugh. Jimmy feels more comfortable with her than with his own father.
    â€˜Would you like a glass of beer?’
    â€˜I would prefer a glass of wine.’
    â€˜ That’s my boy, ’ replies Leonora, laughing.
    â€˜Your son is more open than you are,’ Leonora tells Max when he returns.
    â€˜To me he is a total stranger,’ Max replies.

10

    THE SURREALIST WHIRLWIND
    L EONORA ASTONISHES HER LOVER with her culinary talents. She brings dishes out of the oven made to her own original recipes, and operates confidently in the kitchen. Their guests likewise get to savour her black eyes, wild dark hair, white arms, slim thighs. Her pronouncements express an innocence and authenticity that make her stand out from the ordinary.
    â€˜It’s not feasible for her to be as ingenuous as she seems; in her case, ingenuousness can only be a perversion,’ claims the Surrealist doctor and great scholar of ancient civilisations, Pierre Mabille.
    â€˜She is most certainly a genuine femme enfant, ’ exalts André Breton.
    Leonora teases, provokes desire without meaning to, yet is too intelligent to be unaware of what she is doing. Independent-minded and combative, as her expulsion from several schools bore witness, the Surrealists melt before her. Breton, the father of Surrealism, finds her adorable.
    â€˜Your beauty and talent have us all mesmerised. You are the very image of the femme enfant. ’
    Leonora is annoyed. ‘I am not a femme enfant . I happened upon your group through Max, but I don’t consider myself a Surrealist. I have had fantastical visions and I paint and write them. I paint and write what I feel, and that’s all I am doing now.’
    â€˜Say what you will, to me you represent the “child-woman” who, thanks to her own ingenuity, is in direct contact with the unconscious.’
    â€˜All this deification of woman is a load of nonsense! I’ve seen how the Surrealists use women the same as any wife is used. The Surrealists may call their women muses, but it’s the women who still end up making the beds and cleaning the toilet.’
    Her absolute self-confidence and natural impertinence are the consequence of her social