Spain: Lumen, 2024. 266 pages.
As I have always been fond of letters and the arts, when I travel,
different places bring to my mind the existence of those friends
retained in memory—painters, writers—and often this recalled
virtual existence becomes more pressing in its reality, more
intense, than the actual gentlemen about on the street.
José Donoso, Diarios tempranos (1950 -1965)
There is a necessary and inescapable connection among all writers. This network and its liaison points might lead us down an endless path of inquiry. It represents a living correspondence, beyond studies and reading, beyond the work itself. An exchange that also flows through thought and dream. Writers share experiences, questions, and doubts. Time is no obstacle, nor is death. If we could equate it to a real-life feeling, that feeling would be friendship. Friendship subjected to the passage of time, born of and strengthened through interaction. It starts with admiration, but there is also space for disagreement and deceit, always driven by the impulse to understand the other. On this basis, we come to understand how writer and essayist Jazmina Barrera (Mexico City, 1988) addresses the life of Mexican writer Elena Garro. This is no comprehensive biography, as the author herself confesses:
We might even make the mistake of confusing the dead for books, but no life fits in a book. We would need countless filing cabinets, archives, libraries, and reference sections to address the vast, unaccountable life of Elena Garro, and what I am writing here has no such aspiration. You hold in your hands a personal portrait.
Barrera tells us how in 2016, when she was 27 and completing a master’s in New York, being made to slog through an agonizing novel, her professor recommended she read Garro’s book of stories, Andamos huyendo, Lola. That was the first encounter. The stories captivated her, but in parallel, a question arose: Why had a student of literature completing a master’s in New York taken so long to get to Elena Garro? Some time later, by then an established author, Barrera was pitched the idea of writing a book about her. Spurred on by how much she had enjoyed reading a couple of Garro’s books, and unaware of the details of her life, she accepted the offer, unaware of the mess she was about to get into.
In Cuaderno de faros, one of her previous books (translated into English by Christina MacSweeney as On Lighthouses), Jazmina Barrera goes out into the field with the aim of visiting, studying, and collecting these remarkable structures. Telling the stories they hold, delving into this lonesome and, sometimes, forgotten vocation. She reminds us that the English term, “lighthouse,” can be translated into Spanish as “casa de luz.” A light that guides us through the darkness and points out the dangers in our path. But she also realizes that she cannot cover them all. Some will remain unvisited, unknown; her research will inevitably have its blind spots.
There is a parallel here to how she approaches Elena Garro, but this time, her focus is not on an object; whatever symbolic possibilities Garro might hold, we are now facing a complex, contradictory human being. We are in the presence of a writer who could be, and sometimes was, a lighthouse in her own right. But she not only reflects light; she also absorbs it. She is shadow, too, and that shadow is in motion, fluctuating alongside her country’s history, the Latin American literature of the twentieth century, and a complex marriage to Octavio Paz.
Barrera immerses herself in the universe of Elena Garro. Once again, she goes all out; she plunges into her novels, short stories, stage plays, archives, diaries, letters, and interviews. “As I read, I get the sensation I like best from literature: the sensation of looking through a window and suddenly seeing, in the glass, like a ghost, my own reflection.” The result, and what she decides to offer the reader, is notes, fragments, voices, and images that interweave throughout the book. A portrait made up of various levels in which biography and research intersect. She recreates a convincing Elena Garro while painting her own reflection behind that of her biographee.
At the start of the book, Barrera reveals the causes that led Elena Garro’s mother to leave her husband behind and set out for Mexico, first to Veracruz and then to Puebla, where the author was born in 1916—a life begun in flight. José Garro, her father, reunites with them some time later, and they settle in Mexico City but soon move from there to Iguala, in the state of Guerrero. There, her years of learning and study—which she will constantly recall—begin. An education marked by reading and by atmosphere. Plato’s dialogues amid Nahua cosmovision; trees, animals, and the countryside. This life, this place, will remain as a reference point and source of inspiration for the rest of her days. In parallel, just over the page, Jazmina Barrera turns to the Elena Garro Papers at Princeton University’s Firestone Library. There, she accesses some of the information that she goes on to share with us: telegrams, letters, receipts, handwritten notebooks. But she also makes use of Garro’s works, from which she extracts, with surgical precision, the portrait that hides in her fiction.
“Through these notes, fragments, and snapshots, we are gradually exposed to an Elena Garro who is human and hateful, flawed and admirable.”
Elena enrolls in the UNAM’s School of Philosophy and Letters in 1936; she delights in ballet, acting, and choreography. Around this time, she meets Octavio Paz, and so begins a legendary, tempestuous relationship marked by love, hate, and rivalry; threats, jealousy, and control. A dynamic journey whose protagonists raise each other up just as they destroy each other. A marriage that starts violently, when a very young Elena Garro must lie about her age. The couple then travels to Spain to take part in the antifascist writers’ conference during the civil war; from this experience are born her Memorias de España (1937), where she describes, in critical and burlesque fashion, the attitude of some of the conference’s attendees. The Octavio Paz we come up against in these first few chapters is domineering, jealous, and, at times, brutal. But their relationship, which lasted almost two decades, and from which was born the only daughter of both, is full of paradoxes and sharp turns, love, doubts, violence, and regret. Not unsymptomatically, Los recuerdos del porvenir, Elena Garro’s first and most famous novel, written in 1952 during her convalescence in Bern and later translated by Ruth L.C. Simms as Recollections of Things to Come, was only published ten years later. It is possible that Paz’s shadow, which followed her throughout her life, was one reason for this delay. But, at the same time, when she received the Xavier Villaurrutia Award in 1963, Paz was on the prize jury.
The author pauses and slows the story down when she comes to the facts surrounding the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, under the government of Díaz Ordaz. Elena publicly criticized her country’s intellectuals for having incited students to participate in this protest, which cost approximately three hundred people their lives. This caused her expulsion from the Mexican intellectual sphere and the start of her exile, along with her daughter, for more than two decades.
Through these notes, fragments, and snapshots, we are gradually exposed to an Elena Garro who is human and hateful, flawed and admirable. We learn of journeys, cities, and lovers. We see how she tackles motherhood, politics, the mechanisms of anger, and her hatred of Paz. Little by little, a collaboration begins to take shape between this book’s two women writers, both born in the same country but living in different eras. Two periods with contrasting sensibilities. We observe the first’s passionate, erratic, fickle, and intuitive behavior through the lens of the present day: the sterile, compassionate perspective of a generation that looks back with mistrust on the errors of the past and, in this regard, finds yet more blind spots. Barrera sometimes doubts, gets lost, and despairs. She tells herself she wants to do justice to her fellow Mexican writer, but then, in the next fragment, she takes it back: “How pretentious, saying I want to do her justice. Elena doesn’t need me. Better to admit, once and for all, that I’m writing this book for me.” At this point, another level of the book opens up: a blind spot that, in this case, is neither the unknown nor the unvisited. Barrera finds herself in Elena Garro’s nature. She finds herself in those movements that, within any human being, ceaselessly wander. Barrera not only researches; she becomes obsessed with understanding the other—she speaks to her, she writes to her, she even dreams of her. And, in this dream, she sees Elena Garro sifting through her own documents in search of answers about herself.
Over the course of this exploration, the author stresses the concept of “nostalgia for catastrophe,” which appears in Garro’s work, and anchors it into the reader’s memory. She has it float like an energy, defining a person’s actions, while we continue examining Garro’s years of exile, precarity, delusion, and rage. Then comes her return to Mexico, her work’s resurgence and her transfiguration into a character, until the end of her days, alongside her daughter, her cats, and the cigarettes she interspersed with breaths from an oxygen tank she needed for her pulmonary emphysema. The details, voices, and images are varied and exquisite—sometimes sad, violent, or amusing; always interesting. The researcher starts to yield ground in her questions, in her pursuit of absolute knowledge. And so we come to understand that behind these anecdotes and symbols, these facts and happenings, the work itself is taking shape. We suspect that this sort of temperament, this expansive force that drags what is coming next along with it, is fertile ground for a truly great literature in which the many Mexicos that make up Mexico come into being, from within the country and also from a distance. A work that is a contradictory ceremony, made up of enthusiasm and anguish.
Jazmina Barrera achieves her goal. Through this personal exercise, she succeeds in breathing new life into Elena Garro; she does her justice. She shows us how her peculiar way of existing in the world is expressed in Los recuerdos del porvenir, in La semana de colores, in the surprising short story “La culpa es de los Tlaxcaltecas”; it is etched all over her work. She shows us that, despite her fallible and multifaceted humanity, Garro paused over a key question for literature, for art: How to make time? Nothing is more difficult than “making time.” “Her entire body of work can be read as a treatise on time and memory.” After that, it is impossible to close the book on La reina de espadas without setting out to read Elena Garro for oneself.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
