Leonora by Elena Poniatowska Page B

class. Leonora had faced down her parents, the nuns, the Queen’s own Court; she had absolutely no reason to consider herself inferior. If she allowed herself to feel humiliated, her work would be affected. Nobody recognised the existence of women Surrealists. What in men is regarded as creativity, in women is regarded as madness. The more Leonora contradicts Breton, the more she attracts him.
    â€˜I adore your English girl. You may have brought her here, but she has won her own position among us.’
    Leonora is a delicately wrapped force of animal nature. When Joan Miró, another of Max’s friends, asks her to go and buy some cigarettes for him, and holds the money out to her, she is enraged: ‘You are perfectly capable of going down for your own cigarettes,’ and she walks off and leaves him standing with the note in his hand.
    She refuses to pose for Man Ray, who is keen to photograph her. Instead, she is more interested in his girlfriend, Ady Fidelin, and cannot understand what she sees in the North American Surrealist. Picasso is a typical Spaniard who believes that any woman will faint at his feet with desire. She meets Salvador Dalí at Breton’s house in the Rue Fontaine, and is unmoved by being presented as ‘the most important woman artist’.
    The Surrealists all have a secret passage leading to happiness inside them. Mockery is their most potent weapon. Their criticisms are implacable and they forgive nobody, not even themselves. Laughter is therapeutic, as every doctor affirms.
    Breton is above all attracted by rebelliousness. In others, he looks for the red-and-black flag of anarchism and is elated whenever he finds it flying. Rebelliousness is a moral virtue. Despite her youth, Leonora recognises no limits, all she needs is to shout out her rage in a public square like they do. Max Ernst told her that at heart Breton is a solitary man because one afternoon, when they were playing the Game of Truth, Eluard asked him: ‘Do you have friends?’ and he responded: ‘No, my dear friend.’ Breton seeks out live interlocutors in order to confront them. A rain of insults and every kind of projectile, including shoes, end all his public appearances. Jacques Vaché, who died from an opium overdose, remains forever in his memory, and André conceals himself behind him: ‘He is my only great friend.’ For Vaché, other people’s enthusiasms, apart from being noisy, are detestable. When Leonora tells him ‘sentimentality is a form of weariness,’ she unites him with his memory of Vaché and surrenders to his intelligence.
    Leonora meets the illusionist Magritte on two separate occasions, finding him well dressed and withdrawn. There is gossip within the group that his mother’s suicide, when he was only thirteen, formed his personality. He saw her when they brought her back out of the Sambre River. ‘It’s not so much that he paints well,’ comments Leonora, ‘as that he thinks very well. He told me his only enemies are his bad paintings.’
    They say that he covered the faces in The Lovers with the white dress of his drowned mother.
    Péret and Breton are inseparable. Smaller than Breton and bald, while André’s head of hair radiates splendidly, Benjamin follows him into parties and meetings, never acknowledging that he is the more audacious of the two. Twenty years earlier, he was the first to attack the academics, the traditionalists, the famous. He referred to Maurice Barrès in such slanderous terms that he offended not only the bien pensants but even the Dadaists. At Anatole France’s funeral, Péret and his friends handed out a leaflet written by Louis Aragon, inviting the mourners to kick the corpse. The press called them ‘jackals’. It then occurred to him to turn up at a demonstration wearing a gas mask and Nazi uniform, shouting: ‘Long live France and long live French fries!’ He