Elena Poniatowski (Paris, 1932), the French girl who stopped being French when her parents arrived in Mexico fleeing World War II, the descendant of Polish aristocrats in love with illiterate peasants, the journalist who captured the 1968 revolt better than anyone else in ‘The night of Tlatelolco’ in the style of Svetlana Aleksievich, the Cervantes Prize winner, the tenacious writer. She hardly brags about anything but she admits that her best virtue as an interviewer is to listen. “I listen so much that I can’t even hear my own voice anymore,” she has written.
It’s never too late. Just turned 90, the Mexican author has decided to pay attention to that too and recover the memory of her ancestor, Stanislaw Poniatowski, the last king of Poland, who was one of the many lovers of Catherine the Great -“He was ‘knifled’ by her”, explains the author very graphically – although later he was forced to fight against Russia to prevent his country from being wiped off the map. He didn’t get it.
That biography is a counterpoint in ‘The Polish lover’ (Seix Barral) of the other plot that explains the sentimental education of the author herself, and in it she dared to reveal an episode that raised a great cloud of dust in her country: the abuse she suffered by Juan Jose Arreola glory of Mexican letters, when he was a father of a family and she was just an inexperienced twentysomething. From that story was born the first son of the writer, Mane, to whom the novel is dedicated and from whom her biological father disregarded.
From his home in Mexico City, Poniatowska seduces her audience again with her simple and carefree style, via videoconference. “I work like an ant every day -he says- and I have always felt that my goals were very small. In my family they used to remember that we were important but I have considered a book in which I investigate what the hell we are”.
Tell the truth
The author does not have the slightest inconvenience of entering the rag in the controversy that at the end of 2019 aroused in Mexico not a few interviews, open letters from Arreola’s family in which they excused the father and various opinion articles for or against the author. Why reveal it now, more than 60 years later? “Perhaps because my training was very rigorous, I was part of the ‘scouts’ that made you swear in front of the flag that you would always tell the truth. Yes, that was very childish but it stayed with me. I felt that I could not leave without filling this gap So I told my son, he read the book and told me it was fine, I had no obligation except to him.”
He does not hide that it was difficult for him to approach the subject: “I had my son in Rome, in a nunnery, and for three months no one spoke to me there, I was like a plague-stricken person. My aunt accompanied me, who at some point wanted to adopt to my son, although later that didn’t happen. She told me that they were going to let me write novels but not live them”.
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In Mexico, the country of drug trafficking, poverty and femicidesthe voice of the author, who militates in a feminist group led by the anthropologist Marta Lamas, don’t shut up. “I am especially interested in the mistreatment of housemaidsr, women who work for a salary that often depends on the generosity of the housewife”. Poniatowska fights so that these women who come from the countryside to the city can be insured and receive an education if they wish. As a journalist she has delved into that field. “I knew a girl who slept on the bedroom floor accompanying the lady who had hired her and who in the morning turned into a doormat when she got up and stepped on her without any hesitation”.
Although the author hardly notices her ailments, she is aware that, despite living in a third world country where not everyone has had the opportunities she enjoyed, she needs someone to work at home. Her name, Martina Garcia. “She can’t read or write but she’s very smart. She’s the one who decides who gets into this house and who doesn’t. The other day she didn’t like a fat guy who knocked on my door and kicked him out. She has a great character, a strength that leaves me overwhelmed, with which she has managed to get her son forward. Every day I learn something from her”.