La Jornada: “I write because everything moves me”; Furthermore, “originality is sacred”

Elena Poniatowska Amor goes out into the streets to look for stories. Observe, ask. He looks at a building and wants to know who imagined it; you hear fragments of conversations and feel the need to get closer; cross the Zócalo of Mexico City and discover a face, a sadness or a laugh that deserves to be told.

The writer and journalist turns 94 this Tuesday, May 19, and her curiosity remains intact. “I walk a lot, I go out and, of course, I continue doing the same thing as you: I talk to people, I write chronicles, so I lead a normal life, absolutely. Everything moves me, that’s why I write,” he says in an interview with The Day in his house, in the south of the capital.

The ground floor seems built around books. The walls are practically covered by shelves: poetry by Pablo Neruda, stories by Oscar Wilde, novels by Haruki Murakami, titles by Rosa Montero on the journalistic profession, Russian classics, Mexican authors, thousands of copies, recent novelties and editions worn by time and use.

There are no televisions or devices that compete for space with the written word. “I can’t conceive a wall without a bookcase,” he says as his gaze wanders among the shelves that surround it like a second architecture. It is also covered with lilac, white, yellow and fuchsia flowers; family photographs, saints, volcanoes and watercolors, as well as a doll made in his likeness, a gift from Fernando Rivera Calderón.

Poniatowska Amor paints still lifes and landscapes. Among the paintings there is a Virgin, a portrait of Claudia Sheinbaum and another of Popocatépetl next to Iztaccíhuatl. Literature, plants and memory coexist under the same roof.

While Elena Poniatowska speaks, a cat meows, circles the yellow armchair and settles down next to her with absolute familiarity. The writer smiles and defines her in a single phrase: “she is very gossipy.”

The feline is part of a duo named in honor of Carlos Monsiváis. One is called Vase; the other, Monsi, who “chose to leave in the first days of the pandemic.” He still has a portrait of the latter among flowers, books and family photographs.

The talk with the also collaborator of The Day follows the rhythm of his memories: one image leads to another. The cats lead her to old friendships that marked a good part of her life. Then Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Rosario Castellanos, Vicente Rojo and Tito Monterroso emerge. He speaks of the ingenuity of this Guatemalan author, of Rojo’s discipline in the face of the cultural supplement of News and his endearing closeness with Castellanos. But avoid getting trapped in the past. “No, I don’t think it’s nostalgia, I always speak from gratitude for my presence in the world.”

Then come their loved ones that are gone, the names that are no longer there and the memories that survive: “of course now great friends have left me and they invite me to talk about them. So, there may be melancholy in that, but in general I have never lived from there.”

She also doesn’t like having her mother’s last name, Paula Amor, cut, since it remains an intimate part of her story. “They taught me to eat everything, because I am a child of war.”

“I get up and ask questions.”

The phrase opens the way to her native country, France, to the Second World War and to her arrival in our country in 1942, where years later she would become a Mexican naturalized. He then lived in his grandmother Elena Iturbe’s house, on Berlin Street in the Juárez neighborhood, where the family had about 40 rescued dogs, all with opera names, like Rigoletto y Fausto.

The closeness with the animals continues to this day. Also a taste for plants, crochet, bicycles, horses and the sea. “I had the privilege of doing all those things,” he says before looking at some potted plants that surround the room. “Apparently they are happy with me.”

She writes, paints, knits, mends socks and still has the same need to understand how things are made. As a young man he wanted to know who Carlos Chávez was, how an orchestra conductor worked or who had imagined the Satélite towers.

If I heard that Tongolele was performing at the Blanquita theater, I was going to see it. He never distanced himself from a mural, a showgirl, a building or a street chatter; everything could become a door to get closer to others.

His white hair falls just above his shoulders and his hands, thin and still, intertwine as he remembers the great walls of Luis Barragán. “My reaction was: I want to go ask him how he does it.”

Journalism appears again and again in the talk with Poniatowska Amor, it is the eternal common thread of the author of The night of Tlatelolco, Cervantes Award 2013, who talks about sidewalks, trucks, squares and Metro stations with the naturalness of someone who has spent a good part of his life listening to others.

“I get up and ask questions. The trick in this job is to get the person walking next to you to speak. Communication is immediate or it is not.”

Many of those voices ended up entering his chronicles, interviews and novels. There are the girls who went up to the rooftops to hang sheets and told him about their loves and the “very loud kisses” they received on Paseo de la Reforma. Also plumbers, bricklayers and workers who came to repair a faucet or a toilet. “I really liked all those things.”

When Elena hears the question about whether she “still” reads, she barely raises her voice and responds with humor: “I haven’t died. My job is reading. I read, I read.” Then he mentions Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Miguel León-Portilla, his lifelong companions.

There are no rituals in writing either, he adds. “I don’t need coffee, eating a chorizo ​​or a fried egg; I don’t need anything.” Even so, she admits a debt to herself: “what I would like to do is a good novel.” He smiles when asked if he already works on it. “No, not right now, because I am sitting with you answering your questions.”

The journalist only recognizes one real difficulty: sadness. The one that the student massacre of 1968 and the earthquake of 1985 left him, and that continues to appear as an open wound: “I saw gunshots, collapsed buildings and families that lost their homes or their dead.”

He also returns to Lecumberri, a prison that he visited countless times because there he found stories impossible to find anywhere else. “People are totally willing to tell you their lies or their most prodigious truths.” But the darkness never lasts too long. “If you ask me to dance right now, I’ll dance with you.”

“Everything I have stays here”

The celebration for his 94 years will come without excessive ceremonies, a meal with his children Emmanuel, Felipe and Paula Haro.

Tributes seem to matter less to him than books, archives and the permanence of written memory.

One of his most recent prides, he says enthusiastically, is the non-profit organization that bears his name, conceived as a link between culture and the country’s historical memory. “I am very pleased that the Elena Poniatowska Amor Foundation is in Mexico.

“I regret that numerous literary collections have ended up in American universities. Everything I have stays here. It is a gift for the people. There are many Mexican researchers who have to go to Harvard, Princeton, Yale or Stanford to consult fundamental documents of our literature.”

Elena Poniatowska Amor concludes: “The Day It has been very important in my professional career, and I am very grateful to the readers who have accompanied me for so many years. Regarding the new generations and digital tools, I cannot advise them anything, because I do not feel like a Sara García of journalism.”

The silence lasts just a few seconds. Then comes an idea that seems to summarize a good part of his way of looking at the world: “originality is sacred.”