Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

Leonora is comforted by the fact that some of her friends stand up for the students, and go along to the patch of wasteland near the Registry on Sundays to read poems and play music. Gabriel Zaid reads aloud from his latest book, Seguimiento , and lovers sit listening on the grass.

‘It looks as if they lifted Pino, Salvador Martínez della Rocca, and seized a whole load of people from the Poly, giving them a really rough time.’

Times are changing. In Berkeley, Joan Baez sings her song to Sacco and Vanzetti and holds blossoming chrysanthemums in her hands. Peace and love. No-one is going to go to war again. Gaby’s long hair provokes a passing cyclist to call out ‘Hippy!’ and an old man allows the words ‘Bloody queer, bloody fag!’ to escape from between his false teeth.

When he leaves the UNAM campus, Gaby goes straight on to deliver classes at the José María Espinosa hall in the Institute of Philosophy:

‘I am going to pull the rug from underneath you,’ he challenges his students. ‘For the next class you need to read A Doll’s House .’

Among the students, Rosa Nissan is scandalised by Henrik Ibsen. Accustomed to obeying, Gabriel Weisz’s class shakes them to the core. It has the same effect on Miriam, Esther, Guita and Sara, who announces that she has decided to leave her husband because Professor Weisz has shown her that she is really nothing more than an object.

‘Change your lives, read Virginia Woolf’s book, A Room of One’s Own. What, don’t you know how to work?’ he enquires with irony.

‘It’s just that bringing up kids takes time,’ Esther protests.

‘You don’t have to only think about your children. You should have your own room, your own body and your own money.’

Leonora educated her sons within a feminist tradition; her influence is so strong that Gaby starts teaching sexual politics and gender studies from the standpoint of anthropological and magical rituals.

Every class is a source of provocation. Newly wed female students discuss what’s happening over dinner with their husbands, who exclaim: ‘Who on earth put such ideas into your head? Where on earth did this little maestro of yours come from?’

Finally, Gabriel is expelled, for spreading the ideas he’d derived from his mother.

Leonora scarcely sees her lover Álvaro any more. She is irritated by his indifference to the events around them.

‘Why aren’t you afraid?’

‘Don’t worry about it, nothing much is going to happen. The government will win and that’s all there is to it.’

On the night of 2nd October, a young man arrives wide-eyed and out of breath at their door.

‘Where are Gaby and Pablo?’ he manages to gasp out to Leonora.

‘At the meeting in Tlatelolco Square, in the Cuauhtémoc district.’

‘The army has been slaughtering people there. Soldiers are everywhere and arresting anyone they see with long hair.’

Leonora’s hands fly to her head and Chiki holds her tight.

‘May I stay here until they get back?’

‘Yes. Would you like a cup of tea?’ asks Leonora, cigarette in hand.

‘I’d prefer a joint.’

‘There isn’t any,’ Chiki interrupts.

‘Please may I ring home?’

‘Of course you may. But if there’s a ring on the door, you have to run and hide in the darkroom at the end of the corridor.’

‘How did you escape?’

‘Everything was going well until a helicopter flew over the square. It fired two green flares, let loose a hail of bullets, and I ran, heading straight up the avenue. I could hear the tramping of army boots. The soldiers were shouting: “We’ll show you, sons of bitches!” Then the tanks rolled in, as if they meant to turn the place into a battlefield.’

Gaby and Pablo finally arrived back at two in the morning, carrying only the clothes they stood up in.

‘How great to see you here, Leonardo!’ and they embrace their friend hiding there. ‘The government turned the tanks on us and began firing. We ran up to the top floor of the Nuevo León building and a girl let us hide in the maid’s room. She herself came back to let us out at midnight. They took away thousands of our friends. I’m going to ring Leduc: he knows everyone and is the one person who can help us now,’ says Gaby.

‘An old woman who must have been at least forty,’ recounts Pablo, ‘went directly up to a tank and said to the soldier: “You should be ashamed of yourself to be out here, killing young people your own age,” and the guy was so astonished he let her go.’

‘Come over to the table and have some tea,’ interrupts Leonora. ‘No, Ma, we have something more urgent to do first.’ Gaby is looking at Pablo.

‘What are you going to do?’ asks Chiki.

‘We are going to get rid of the cyclostyling machine.’

They dig a hole in the patio, heave the machine into it, and cover it over with earth.

‘They are capable of doing anything, Ma. One day, some future occupant of the house will excavate this weird archaeological artefact.’

The Weisz family spend one of the worst nights in their lives. Next day, the newspapers proclaim that the government have won the war on the guerrillas, Communists and trouble-makers.

‘Please don’t go out on to the street,’ Leonora beseeches her sons.

Five days after the massacre, on 7th October, the writer Elena Garro denounces any writers, painters and film directors who attended the mass meetings in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. According to her, the young people were egged on by Luis Villoro, José Luis Cuevas, Leopoldo Zea, Rosario Castellanos, Eduardo Lizalde, Carlos Monsiváis, Victor Flores Olea, José Revueltas, Leonora Carrington and even Octavio Paz, Mexico’s ambassador to India and Garro’s former husband. An anonymous phone call to Leonora terrifies her: ‘We’ve got them under surveil-lance.’ Then the telephone rings again.

‘Take great care of your sons, Leonora,’ Renato tells her.

On 12th October Siempre! magazine publishes an article by José Alvarado, in which he writes: ‘There was beauty and light in the souls of the dead youths. They wanted to make Mexico an abode of justice and truth with bread, liberty and literacy for the oppressed and forgotten. We want a land free of poverty and corruption. And now these youths have been cut down in the prime of their lives. One day there will be a votive lamp lit to them all.’

This news takes Leonora back to her flight from France in 1940. Other parents are out searching for their children. Manuela Garín and Rogelio Álvarez publish a notice in El Día asking the whereabouts of their disappeared son, Raúl. ‘They are holding them all in solitary confinement, in military camp Number One.’ ‘They have tortured them.’ ‘The army won’t let anyone else inside.’ ‘They stripped them naked in Tlatelolco and kept them that way in the pelting rain.’ ‘They treated them as if they were murderers.’ ‘By some miracle, Heberto Castillo escaped among the rocks in the Pedregal.’ The word ‘prison’ is on everyone’s lips. It is no longer the Germans invading France who threaten Leonora. This time the Mexicans are persecuting her, coming to murder her children.

‘Chiki, we have to get out of here as soon as possible.’

‘You know full well I don’t have a passport.’

AT THE END OF 1968, Leonora and her two sons fly out to New Orleans to stay with Larry Bornstein. A few weeks later, Chiki sends a letter to say that it is safe for them to return to Mexico, that the danger is now past, and that UNAM has returned to normality.

They find the University City empty. Their return to the Faculty feels like yet another defeat. Their comrades are devastated, their leaders in jail, and family members form a queue outside the doors of the former Palace of Lecumberri, now converted into a dark prison. Leonora jumps each time the phone rings, and she is unable to focus on her painting. Inés Amor is putting pressure on her, as she needs more paintings for Leonora’s first solo exhibition, due to open in the Gallery of Mexican Art in 1969.