In Elena Poniatowska’s latest book, The Polish Lover, the Mexican writer and journalist says she feels “wrapped in a shroud of letters” and wonders, “Did they make me happy? Did I make someone happy with this? This is how her friend, the anthropologist Martha Lamas, remembered this Thursday. During a ceremony at the Palace of Fine Arts, organized now that Poniatowska has turned 90, Lamas replied from the stage: “Yes Elena, you made thousands of us happy and we also suffered and cried with your little letters .” Cervantes Prize winner and author of more than 30 novels, essays and short stories as well as chronicles and interviews, Poniatowska has written about students, seamstresses, peasant women and railway workers. “Your writing,” Lamas summarized, “is a love cry to our beloved Mexico.”
Poniatowska is accompanied by her family, three children and ten grandchildren. All in white, with white hair, she watches the ceremony prepared by the Ministry of Culture from the front row. His friends are there too. The feminist María Teresa Priego, who calls her “a national star” – “You are an iconic figure in spite of yourself” -; the president of public service broadcaster Jenaro Villamil, who came on behalf of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador – “Elena, like that of Troy, is our torch” – or the actress Jesusa Rodríguez, who wrote a song for him says : “Elenita there is only one and she belongs to our time. Princess of the Tomato, Empress of the Maguey, Countess of the Tepalcate”.
When asked a few months ago what she wanted for her birthday, Poniatowska asked that the protagonists of her chronicles and her books be there this Thursday. And this is how it happened: the biologist Antonio Lezcano recites the testimonies of the seamstresses who star in Nothing, Nobody. The Voices of the Quake, about the earthquake that killed thousands in Mexico in 1985; the writer Bianche Petrich utters the words of the activist Rosario Ibarra in the diary of a hunger strike; Ignacia Rodríguez, an Express politician, reads her own statements from the book La noche de Tlatelolco, in which Poniatowska collects the testimonies of the 1968 repression and massacre of students.
During the hour and a half that the ceremony lasts, an actress portrays Poniatowska herself on stage, young, sitting behind a desk, typing on a typewriter. “I believe everything they tell me, they convinced me that God loves me and put me on earth to fulfill his purposes,” the interpreter recited. It is a text adaptation of The Polish Lover, the author’s most recent work, in which she examines the history of her ancestor Stanislaw Poniatowski, the last king of Poland, and reconstructs her own biography. “I’m young, I laugh easily, I smile all the time,” the actress continues.
Poniatowska was born in Paris in 1932 into a family descended from the Polish aristocracy and came to Mexico at the age of 10 with her mother and sister. After the end of World War II, his father came and shortly after, in 1947, his brother Jan was born, who died at the age of 21. The girl, as she has often told, learned Spanish on the street or listened to the people who worked in her house.
“Perhaps what is most impressive about Elena Poniatowska,” said Martha Lamas at the lectern, “is the way she stands up against what her destiny has in store for her.” “As the daughter of aristocrats, she shed the deceptive greatness associated with that social class, and people crowned her in a different way than the red princess,” he affirmed. “In today’s political jargon,” he added, “it’s a Fifi Chaira.” The anthropologist has also recognized that the author’s literature “exudes a sensitive and critical feminism” that “does not idealize women”: “She herself embodies a feminist ideal, that of work and autonomy.”
A typewriter sounds, and the actress on stage recites again. “Working on a newspaper puts everyone on high alert. My parents subscribed to Excelsior. Mom reads it in the afternoon. Dad, at breakfast. I am very happy. I call Alfonso Reyes and ask him for an appointment. Another to Dolores Reyes. And another to Diego Rivera. Nobody refuses,” says the interpreter, and continues: “My parents think that in a newspaper, a woman’s name only appears in a few lines when she is born, when she marries and when she dies. I earn less than Victorina, our cook, but my enthusiasm, my enthusiasm, exceeds hers. Now I know that writing is my thing.
He hasn’t stopped writing since he started working for a newspaper in the 1950s. He still publishes every Sunday in the newspaper La Jornada. His best-known chronicle is La noche de Tlatelolco, a 1971 book that city manager Claudia Sheinbaum recalled this Thursday. “The Night of Tlatelolco became a tool of struggle and light, a slap in the face in mid-1971. A book that showed a repressive regime at a crucial moment in history. With her release, Elena became an endearing symbol. She bravely and resolutely took the side of the students.”
A group of children enter from behind the stage and chant political slogans. They demonstrate like the students in 1968 in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City. Then a shot is heard and the children cover themselves with a cloth marked with red bullets like blood.
Poniatowska had also asked for children and there they were. When the youngsters return to the stage, they do so by dancing a conga. A small foot for one side and one for the other. Young Poniatowska, the actress she portrays on stage, also dances. The children leave the sunflowers they were carrying in their hands on a basket, and then it is the writer’s turn to go on stage. The real Poniatowska is small next to the lectern, taller than she is, and when they bring her a bench to set her up, she says no, she’s speaking from the side.
“It’s very nice to see you, your faces, your affection, the affection of the musicians and everyone involved,” he assures. He could only thank those who were there and those who weren’t, his friends who he misses: “[Carlos] Monsivais, Jose Emilio Pacheco. I’m older than them, they should have left later.” And he continues: “I remember all the friends who preceded me and maybe they’ll see us, I hope. Thanks. It’s a very beautiful word, I’ll tell you that from here, from the bottom of my heart.” Then Las mañanitas plays, the audience sings while standing and she waves with open arms. Smile like a girl who has turned 90.
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