Leonora

ELENA PONI ATOWSK A is Mexico's greatest living novelist. She lives in Coyoacán, a quiet suburb of Mexico City close to the Casa Azul, where Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and – until his assassination – Leon Trotsky resided. Fluent in English, French and Spanish, Poniatowska has published novels, non-fiction books and essays and been translated into over twenty languages. She is one of the founders of
La Jornada
, the feminist magazine
Fern
, publishing house Siglo XXI and Mexican national film institute Cineteca Nacional. For over fifty years she was a close friend of Leonora Carrington's, until the latter's death in 2011.

AMANDA HOPKINSON has translated books from French, Portuguese and Spanish, mostly from Latin America. She also writes books on Latin American culture, particularly photography. A former director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, she is currently visiting professor in literary translation at City University, London.

Praise for
Leonora

‘One of the most powerful voices in modern Hispanic writing' Cervantes Prize citation

‘Masterful … Poniatowska paints a picture of a troubled woman who personifies the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century' Biblioteca Breve Prize citation

‘A simple act of love, a tribute to an exceptional human being'
Vanguardia

Leonora

ELENA PONIATOWSKA

Translated by Amanda Hopkinson

A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request

The right of Elena Poniatowska to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Copyright © 2011 Elena Poniatowska 
c/o Guillermo Schavelzon & Asoc. Agencia Literaria
www.schavelzon.com

Translation copyright © 2015 Amanda Hopkinson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published as
Leonora
in 2011 by Editorial Seix Barral, S.A. in Spain and Editorial Planeta Mexicana, S.A. de C.V. in Mexico

First published in this translation in 2015 by Serpent's Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

3 Holford Yard

Bevin Way

London

WC1X
9
HD

www.serpentstail.com

eISBN 978 1 84765 827 2

To my grandson Thomas

1

CROOKHEY HALL

T
HE DINING-ROOM TABLECLOTH
is laid with dishes and around it are gathered the four children: Patrick, the eldest, is breakfasting on porridge, as are Gerard and Arthur; Leonora dislikes the stuff but the nanny, Mary Kavanaugh, says that when she reaches the middle of her bowl of oats she'll find Lake Windermere, the biggest and most beautiful lake in all England. So the girl, spoon in hand, eats the porridge from the outside edge inwards, beginning to hear the sound of water and see how tiny waves ruffle its surface as she nears Windermere.

Of the boys' three pairs of watching eyes, Gerard's are her favourite because they smile.

The dining room is dark and gloomy, just like the rest of Crookhey Hall. Leonora has known soot since she was a child. Perhaps Planet Earth is one immense chimney. The smoke surging from the Lancashire textile mills accompanies her night and day. Leonora's father is the king of all this blackness, and he, the brilliant businessman, is the blackest of all of them. Even the men she sees out on the street are dark with soot. Her grandfather invented the machine that manufactures a blend of wool and cotton trademarked Viyella, and Carrington Cottons stands out proudly in a county where the air is always tinged with the factory ash. When her father, Harold Wilde Carrington, sells the company to Courtaulds, he becomes the main shareholder in Imperial Chemical Industries.

Crossing Crookhey Hall from one wing to the other requires a great many steps. The Gothic mansion accommodates the Carringtons – father, Harold; mother, Maurie; the brother who follows Leonora around and is her playmate, Gerard; unlike Patrick, who is too grown up, or Arthur, who's too young. Two Scottish Terrier puppies, Rab and Toby, keep her company. Leonora kneels in front of Rab to look him in the eye and rub noses.

‘Are you walking on all fours?' her mother asks her.

Leonora blows on Rab's face and he nips her.

‘What did you do that for?' her mother asks in fear. ‘He could give you a nasty scar.'

If adults ask children why they do this or that it is because they lack the ability to enter that mysterious space shared by children and animals.

‘Are you telling me I'm not an animal?' an astonished Leonora demands to know.

‘Yes, you are a human animal.'

‘But I know I am a horse, Mummy, inside I am a horse.'

‘If that were true, your drive and strength would make you a filly, always launching yourself over every obstacle. Yet what I see before me is a girl all dressed in white with a medallion around her neck.'

‘You're wrong, Mummy, I am a horse dressed as a girl.'

Tartar is the wooden rocking horse on which, since earliest childhood, she has gone riding several times a day. ‘Gee-up, Tartar, gallop!' Her dark eyes flash, her face points forward, her hair becomes a mane, and the reins swing wildly about the animal's extended neck.

‘Get down at once, Prim,' Nanny demands. ‘You've been on him for ages. If you don't dismount now, your father will come and put the bit between
your
teeth.'

Harold Carrington's children are afraid of him. They live their lives apart, their domain being the nursery, and they are presented to their parents once a day. Occasionally, their parents require their presence for tea in either the living room or the library. They are only permitted to speak when spoken to. ‘Milk or lemon?' enquires their mother, her right hand holding the silver Sheffield teapot in the air. She has the odd habit of exclaiming: ‘Someone has just spilt something on their clothes … Someone is slurping their tea … I can see black ink lodged under the fingernails of someone here … Someone is pointing with their finger … Someone else is tinkling their spoon in their teacup … Someone here is not sitting up straight in their chair …' and the four children straighten up as one. Leonora watches the servants pass like draughts of air, barely if at all addressing her. The only ones who speak directly to her are her French governess, Mlle. Varenne, the nanny, and her brothers' tutor, also responsible for giving her catechism lessons.

Adults keep asking Leonora: ‘How are your studies coming along? Could you read aloud to me?' Good manners belong on the walls with the heavy mirrors, with the footstools, the cups of boiling tea to be raised just so to avoid burning one's lips, the paintings of ancestors unable to share even a wink of complicity. Everything here is breakable, and it is essential to remain alert as to where you plant your feet.

‘Leonora, would you kindly inform me as to your progress in class?' Harold Carrington regards her with sympathy. He relishes her intelligence. Leonora questions everything adults tell her, and this surprises him. His eyes follow her down the corridors of Crookhey Hall and find her charming. He will expend every effort and any amount of money on her.

Lessons unravel as interminably as the decades of a rosary. Twice weekly, fat little Mr. Richardson puts Leonora tortuously through her piano lesson. The girl's long fingers span over an octave, and give the piano master every reason to assure Maurie that her daughter could make a good pianist. Each time Richardson inclines his head over the keyboard, his minuscule spectacles slide off, and Leonora conceals them so he has to beg her to give them back. Next comes fencing, then ballet, each bearing a strange similarity to the other: in both, you have to jump back and forth and land on target. She would prefer to be running wild in the garden with her brothers than taking classes in sewing and embroidery, and she pricks her fingertips in annoyance at being forbidden to go out.

The entire right wing of the house belongs to the children, along with the nanny and tutor that Harold and Maurie have assigned them. Mlle. Varenne eats at table with the parents, while the Irish nanny spends all day and night with the children, which is why they love her. One day, Mlle. Varenne was to be packed off back to France,
Marseillaise
and all. They had known for sure one day she'd be off, but Mary Kavanaugh, never. Despite being small and skinny, her lap and her shoulder were always comforting to lean on. She magnetised them with her tales of the miniature people she called the
sidhes.

‘Why can't I see them, Nanny?'

‘Because they live underground.'

‘Are they dwarves?'

‘They're spirits which take on the form of bodies to emerge above ground.'

‘So why do they live buried like that?'

‘Because the Gaels arrived from Spain under the leadership of Mil Espaine and conquered the land. That was why the
sidhes
descended down into the centre of the Earth to devote themselves to magic.'

‘Even if the
sidhes
were minutely small I could still see them. I see everything, Nanny.'

‘No one has ever succeeded in seeing the smallest beings, Leonora, not even the scientists with their microsopes:

Big fleas have little fleas

upon their backs, to bite them.

Little fleas have lesser fleas

and so on ad infinitum.'

Sidhes
jump on to the table when Leonora does her homework, they share her bath when she gets into the tin tub, her bed when she goes to sleep. Leonora speaks to them in a low voice: ‘We're going to go down into the garden, come with me.' ‘Mlle. Varenne is a pest, help me to make her vanish.' ‘She's worn us out with her past participles and her subjunctives.' The French are like that.

‘Elle nous casse les pieds,' says Leonora. ‘She's breaking our feet,' she translates for her mother. ‘Que tu voulusses, que nous fîmes, que vous fîtes' are verb tenses that not even the French use any more. Not even Louis XIV himself knew how to conjugate them.

The
sidhes
are even better friends than Gerard: both children have devoured Jonathan Swift, but now Gerard no longer wants to play at Lilliputians, nor solicit an audience with the Emperor Blefescu. These tiny people emerging from the ground are her advisers now, supplanting Gerard, who is no longer interested in Lewis Carroll's Alice, or in Beatrix Potter carrying her pet rabbit Peter under her arm. These are girly things. The
sidhes
are wiser than anyone else in the world, wiser even than the biggest fish in the pond, and that's saying a lot because that fish knows it all. The girl pauses on the embankment and the fish tells her all will be well and she feels lit up by the silver reflections along his back. Of course, this was with Nanny's assistance.

‘May I ask you a question that no one has ever been able to answer me?'

‘Go ahead and ask.'

‘When will my father die?'

‘You're right, I can't answer that one.'

‘Nanny, why do we have to sleep at night?'

‘Because it's too dark for us to do anything else.'

‘Owls can, and so can bats. I've always wanted to go to sleep hanging by my heels like a bat.'

Nanny agrees: ‘Yes, it's an excellent position, since it circulates the blood to the head.'

During the night Leonora wakes her up:

‘I can see a boy with no clothes on sitting on a branch of the ash tree, calling to me.'

Nanny gets up and leans out of the window:

‘There's nobody here.'

‘I have to go to him, he'll freeze under that white sun.'

‘The ash is the largest and most beautiful tree on the planet, its roots reach to the sea, its branches support the sky and, like the oak and the hawthorn, it is inhabited by fairies who wouldn't admit a boy without its permission,' says Nanny, sitting herself on the edge of the bed until the girl returns to sleep.

The same thing happens when they go for walks around Crookhey Hall:

‘I saw a boy who held his little hand out to me, a little tiny hand, and I went to give him mine when he cried out and faded away.'

‘I can't see anything, Prim.'

‘Don't call me Prim.'

‘It's just that you're all stiff and proper, look how you extend your neck.'

‘I detest it when you call me Prim. Look, here he comes again. He's just hidden himself behind that tree.'

Nanny searches and smiles: ‘It seems as if you attract the
sidhes
.'

‘Yes, I wish they could play with me my whole life long.'

‘If you keep reading, Prim, you'll never be alone. The
sidhes
will accompany you.'

The young girl draws them on the nursery wall and her mother doesn't punish her because she too is used to painting the boxes they sell at her charity fetes. Maurie draws flowers she then colours in, while Leonora paints horses and adds one pony after another on the surface of the whitewashed walls. Maurie admires her daughter's skill: ‘You did that really well.'

If Nanny asks her which is the toy she loves best, Leonora replies:

‘Tartar is my favourite. He loathes my father.'

Whenever she is reprimanded she mounts her horse. If Gerard doesn't want to come out into the garden with her, she rides Tartar until someone else comes into the nursery. If they refuse her dessert at mealtimes, Tartar's rocking is more than adequate recompense for even the best chocolate cake the world has to offer.

The odour of stew draws her in, quite possibly because it is forbidden to enter the kitchens. Deep within are bubbling the mysteries of steak and kidney pies, roast beef and haddock. The old yellowed cook, propped at the side of the stove, waits for the stew pot to come to the boil. Her daughter, who works there as a maid, tells her that if she feels ill, for God's sake she should go and lie down; she can do her job perfectly well.

‘You complain all day long, Mum.'

‘You dolt!' shouts the cook. ‘Here I am fainting with pain and you've no sympathy at all!'

‘Well go and hang yourself then! There are plenty of trees outside and rope's not dear.'

‘I should have drowned you at birth,' responds the old woman, quivering with rage.

How can people treat one another like this? Leonora enters a different world to that of the nursery, different again to that of the stables, a world only she knows how to reach, where no-one can stop her from riding bareback or cuddling the colt, who pricks up his ears and snorts in greeting. A smell of lamb pervades the kitchen. The soup is boiling up the odours of stable, hayloft, manure, adventure, of a mane blowing in the wind that has to be grasped so tightly not to fall off and of discovery: along with the knives, the kitchen drawers hold scents that must have come all the way from Mesopotamia.