Mariana Elizondo announced at FILPM that she wants to go to Paris

With musical and literary training, Mariana Elizondo debuted in the literary field with She wants to go to Paris, testimonial novel in which the protagonist – a young woman who has just overcome adolescence – moves to the French capital to discover, between harpsichord notes and broken silences, that fleeing is not getting lost: it is finding oneself.

Published by Editorial Jus, this work was presented last Saturday at the 47th Palacio de Minería International Book Fair (FILPM), in a pleasant conversation between Elizondo and the poet, narrator and translator María Baranda.

The author explained that this story arose from a personal need: to keep alive her early years of youth, when she decided to settle in Paris between 1978 and 1984 to study harpsichord.

“It was a fundamental stage for me, and I narrated it to myself all the time so as not to forget, to recreate it, because I had a very great nostalgia for what those years were like, with their cold, their famine and what I experienced, but I was happy. It is the only stage of my life where I felt myself as I was, free, with my objectives very clear, my desires put on stage.”

He explained that the transition from oral storytelling to writing occurred when he began to study literature: “my world began to fill with words. Everything that I told myself began to move towards a literary zone. I was interested in images that I had in my head, sensations, and I wanted to leave a record of that.”

A central aspect in this need to record memory, he said, was his interest in the harpsichord, an instrument that he considers “bizarre” within the Mexican context. “It’s kind of dark, dark music. I wanted to leave a record of that universe that only contains the harpsichord.”

Regarding Paris, Elizondo asserted that it is just another character: “it is an entity with a lot of life.” He said that at that time he lacked many things, including clothes, money and support.

“The cold was very strong, I was also very hungry. But those lacks led me to find virtuous paths. Lack helps a lot. I think that now giving everything to our children impoverishes them, because they don’t need anything, they are full,” he added.

By assuming the influences that nourish his story, Elizondo spoke about the theater and his participation in the play Too bad she’s a whore, by John Ford, directed by Juan José Gurrola in the late 1970s.

“That play opened me to another world. It was a red world of violence, blood, incest, sin. I was the only pure one, I was 16 years old, my costume was white. I was a different being in the middle of a perverse world. I played almost 100 performances, because I went to Paris.”

Asked by Baranda, the author maintained that this novel “does not have foster parents. I did read a lot of French authors. Cinema is also very close, because in principle I wrote this story thinking that it would be taken to the cinema. The narrative is conceived in cinematographic terms: there are moments where the scene stops, or a hidden camera moves away or gets closer.”

When asked by the audience about the influence of her father, the renowned writer Salvador Elizondo (1932-2006), and her intellectual environment, the writer clarified that there was no such influence and that people close to her, people of her generation, had more influence.

“I lived very uncomfortable with the world of my intellectual parents. My father was very critical, very judgmental. That intellectual world was the one I fled from, because I didn’t like it. I read some of them, but they didn’t excite me; I much preferred the voices of my generation.”

After highlighting the precision of Mariana Elizondo’s language, María Baranda highlighted the deeply human, experiential and at times crude sense of She wants to go to Paris, since it speaks of the singularity of love and madness, of loneliness and friendship, of the abandonment suffered in childhood.