The Promised Party / Elena Poniatowska

Jennifer Clement is a comet blonde apparition at Chimalistac every leap year. She comes and goes, her resounding and demanding voice fills the square and echoes in the trees and in the small fountain, but in the blink of an eye she disappears, although months and years later, when I open my eyes, there she is, covering the sun with its rays. of his head almost white because it was so luminous. For me, Jennifer Clement is a festive shooting star who managed to get a Pen Club out of the quagmire that was more prone to sadness than one of those drunks that the waiters usually sweep out of the cantina, complete with sawdust.

Now, Jennifer also directs or directed the Pen Club México, which only served anything internationally when Julieta Campos became responsible and effective president, and was concerned about the persecuted intellectuals in the world and that Mexican writers gave at least an image that would have repercussions on the International Pen Club, as is well known to the only outstanding intellectual, who responds to the name of Gabriel Zaid.

The philosopher Ramón Xirau enveloped the Pen Club México in the smoke of his cigarette and no one, none of us, gave color. We only presented Octavio Paz for the Nobel Prize, which was superfluous, because Paz didn’t need us at all.

Now I interview Jennifer, who gives color by putting her book in my hands The promised party, with a pink cover, just as Edith Piaf sang it on the streets of Paris. The promised party He does not remember Hemingway, but he does remember a Mexico full of Americans totally against anything that resembles war.

–My parents moved to Mexico and lived on Palmas Street, in San Ángel, where the Diego Rivera Studio House stands out, which became my second home, although both Diego and Frida had died, but Ruth and the others stayed behind. Ruth’s children, Pedro Diego and Ruth María, who were my great friends, since we played on that lonely cobblestone street. In fact, Pedro Diego remains a great friend.

–Ruth Rivera left very quickly…

–When Ruth died, very young, at 42 years old, Rafael Coronel stayed with that house and also the children (Pedro Diego was about 10 years old and Ruth María was about 13). Gunther Gerzso and Juan O’Gorman also lived in the colony. I realized that I could write a book, because it had many stories that make you who you are. Your own life is not only what you have lived, but also the stories of others, as well as the songs you listened to, the movies you saw, everything that affects you. For this reason, I decided to write my book in this fragmented way, because the market demands that memory be read like a novel and I do not believe that memory or life are. I was reading TS Elliot, who said that life is a whole made of fragments. Borges clarified that memory is a pile of broken mirrors and that is what I tried to do in The promised party.

“The first part takes place in Mexico City, before the Free Trade Agreement, and I quote the Mexican government census in 1970 that asked taxpayers: ‘do you have shoes, do you eat meat?’ The other question was more or less surprising when asking you if you were over 12 how many of your babies were alive.

“The rest of my novel is about New York. I arrive in New York and immediately become friends with Keith Herring, the graffiti artist, and Jean Michel Basquiat. I wrote a book, The Widow Basquiat about him and his wife whom I knew very well; “It was a chance encounter.”

–How random, if your painter mother is American and you belonged to the world that she inherited from you?

-Exact. Yes, you are right in a way.

–Jennifer, it is a privilege.

–A great privilege, but then I had to think a lot. The book is also about love for Mexico, because I returned and told what was happening inside me. It also deals with the friendship with Aline Davidoff and Ruth Rivera Marín. Of course, I tell stories about other people like you, or stories about Elena Garro that Ana María Xirau told me. Your story is that of your visit to Siqueiros in prison.

“The promised party It is a book about how I became a writer, because what I experienced had a great influence on me; for example, my dad’s relationship with Alma Reed. In this book I paint the New York that I lived, and I tell about my return to Mexico at age 27. I tell how I became a writer, because my nanny Chona didn’t know how to read or write, and she began to understand the magic of the alphabet because I could tell her: ‘That truck says Center; that truck says Plinth‘, and we arrived at our destination, which seemed wonderful to her.”

–That’s the good thing. And the bad?

–I have written a lot about painful things, because I got into the world of my nanny Chona, who was an orphan, because her parents died of typhoid. Chona was like my mother, she took me to the public baths to breathe steam and see the Virgin. I was always with her, and helped her, since she did not know how to read or write. I felt that Chona had to be the first to share my elementary school skills. I read to her Dr. Heart and other lampoons. I also told about his visit to Pachita and the 1968 movement. My dad traveled to the Soviet Union because he got involved with all the American communists who came to Mexico. My parents received Kennedy, because my father worked a lot in the civil rights movement in the United States. My parents went to Kennedy’s inauguration, personally invited by him, because my father worked to defend civil guarantees. He belonged to the group of Americans in Mexico, which included Elizabeth Catlett, from the Taller de Gráfica Popular, married to Arturo García Bustos. My dad appears in the FBI files, because he and my mother sent money to the United States for the anti-government marches.

–The Taller de Gráfica Popular of Leopoldo Méndez and Pablo O’Higgins was very political.

–My father was also; He was with a group of Americans expelled from their country during the McCarthy era.

“A very nice thing happened to me with The promised party, which I presented in September. A very excited man arrived with the very marked book and sat in the front row and told me: ‘It took me three hours to get here; I was the milkman’s son, in San Ángel, in the 60s; I met Mrs. Ruth and her mother, and your father.’

“He was the milkman’s son. So, I feel like I had the best of readers in him. Who would have thought? He told me that he had read in the newspaper that a book about Saint Angel in the 60s and 70s was going to be presented, and he came. Apolinar rolled up his pants to show us his terrible pearly gorings because, in addition to being a gardener, he was a bullfighter. We remember that Ruth María had a kind of passion for me and was always carrying me as if I were a doll. She was a big girl, like her grandmother, Lupe Marín. At that time, on the street they would touch my hair to see if it was real.

“One interesting thing about this book is that at that time, as you know very well, it was very expensive to travel to the United States; So, my mother wrote letters to my grandmother and the postman came by twice a day; My mother gave him the letters and he took them to the Post Office, in the Center.

–The postman set the bells.

–Yes, you could buy stamps from him. In general, you have to go to the Post Office to post your letters. My grandmother never threw away those cards; I spent almost eight months reading them, and the timbres were wonderful. Much of what I tell are quotes from my mother’s letters; That is also a fantastic collection. She arrived in Mexico and what she found dazzled her, she fell in love with everything. My dad died very young, in Mexico, they never left here, they never wanted to leave. There are wonderful coincidences between life and between roses. I met many of the people in this book through the eyes of a girl, a teenager.