You’ll have a sense of how 194 Chihuahua feels if you’ve seen Roma, Alfonso Cuarón’s Oscar-winning film from 2018. Indeed, in The Hearing Trumpet, her alter ego-protagonist Marian Leatherby, 92, dreams of escaping to Europe from the Spanish-speaking country she was transported to many years before. Perhaps so, but part of Leonora missed her homeland. People used to ask if they were they ironic. Taped to the cupboard doors, just as they always were, are a selection of postcards including some of the royal family, one of them doctored so Prince Charles – who gave Leonora her OBE on a visit to Mexico in 2000 – is sporting a balaclava. On the kitchen shelves, her jars of spices, with her handwritten labels, still stand.
Every day with her was an adventure: she lived absolutely in the moment, always on the lookout for glimpses of ridiculousness or oddness or fun. She was far more interested in talking about politics – or world events, or the newspaper vendor down the street, or her dog Yeti’s latest escapades – than she was about Ernst or Picasso or Dalí or Duchamp, all of whom she had known in Paris. Leonora was 94 when she died, but her curiosity never wavered. Photograph: Claudio Cruz/AFP/Getty Images The most exotic of the 1940s artist-émigrés … Carrington’s courtyard, featuring her sculpture Woman with Pigeon.
I’m half expecting her to come in, sit down, relight her cigarette and say: “So, what’s the news today?” In the kitchen – the engine room of her world, where we spent so many hours sitting chatting – her teacup, glasses and some letters are on the table in front of her empty chair. (Virtual visits are already possible.) It feels very strange, being back here without Leonora. The £3m restoration, by the Metropolitan Autonomous University of Mexico (UAM), is now almost complete and I’ve been invited here to work on various connected projects before its opening later this year. Leonora held court at this address, the most exotic of the 1940s artist-émigrés who Frida Kahlo, the incumbent queen of Mexican art, dismissed as “those European bitches”. The house is still filled with her sculpture: weird and wacky pieces, including a maquette of How Doth the Little Crocodile, named after the Lewis Carroll poem. ‘Her worlds were beautiful, scary, profound’ … the house is full of Carrington’s sculpture.
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