Leonora by Elena Poniatowska Read Free Book Online Page A

mother. I’ll be back in a minute.’
    Back at the hotel, Maurie warns her daughter not to talk to strangers. ‘It is badly looked upon for a young woman to sit down alone in a café.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜Because you attract far too much attention, and it appears you are looking for clients.’
    â€˜I don’t understand what you mean, Mama. The nuns never told me about any of this.’
    In her turn, Maurie weaves a web of restrictions and abstinence around her daughter, which causes Leonora to look daggers at her. Maurie intends to drown her in an ocean of rules. It is unthinkable to infringe them because her Carrington parents have educated her to exalt their name, their ancestry, their good reputation and the family glory.
    â€˜Mama, living according to the rules of others is an illness.’
    â€˜You are a part of Society, your heritage …’
    â€˜Everything you’re saying is nonsense. All these taboos … to me the only taboo I recognise is using face powder.’
    â€˜No, Leonora. They are nothing more than counsels for you to live in harmony with your own nature, with your own family history, and with the grandeur of your home nation. You are your nation. You are Great Britain.’
    â€˜I am Leonora, not the British Empire.’
    â€˜Don’t dismiss your forebears: you are your ancestors, too.
    Oscar Wilde is in your neurons, he is the reason you are as you are – rebellious, unattainable, and – just like him – you don’t measure the consequences of your actions.’
    Leonora alleges, as she did before in Crookhey, that none of this heraldry has the least effect on her; on the contrary, instead of inflating the importance of her past, she minimises it with her impish smile. ‘My mother is a snob,’ she mutters under her breath. In many families, the zeal for a glorious past is irresistible, rooted in human nature as it is, to such an extent that hotel owners, car salesmen, perfume and tobacco sellers all seek to acquire a heraldic shield or a family coat of arms for their business, their brandy or their wine.
    â€˜Receiving the benefits of merchandise you have not made yourself does not appear to me aristocratic. That reduces it to the level of a trade.’ They also discuss the question of good taste, because Maurie is forever striving to divide things into matters of good or poor taste.
    â€˜All that is entirely relative,’ avers Leonora. ‘What you like might repel me and vice versa.’
    â€˜No, Leonora, you have been educated in good taste, and if you overlook this first principle, you cut yourself off from your class.’
    The maitre d’hôtel murmurs the year and vintage of every wine into the ear of each guest as he pours from the bottle. When he utters ‘ Grand vin de Château Latour 1905 ’ Leonora is in no doubt that she is tasting something extraordinary, something old and wise while at the same time so fresh and cheerful that it could have been made yesterday. She sips it as if it were Communion wine.
    â€˜It is their wine that renders the French a race apart,’ she informs Maurie, ‘they owe their genius to this wine.’
    Within a month, she has learnt to recognise and return a corked wine, one whose colour looks deadened and whose taste is wooden, as against another bouchonné , whose cork has rotted to powder.
    â€˜I would like to be as rich and sparkling and free as a Veuve Cliquot or Pol Roger.’
    â€˜You have your own lineage in Lancashire.’
    â€˜I am not going to shackle myself to that place, or shrivel to a corpse like Mary Edgeworth. I don’t want to become asphyxiated by skeletons; I am my own mother and my own father. I am a one-off phenomenon.’
    Maurie turns her head aside so that Leonora can’t see her tears welling up. Leonora is her mortification: a strange creature who has emerged from the fold where her brothers still