Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

The morning cheese buns offered them by a man with white hair taste of heaven in all its glory, and the water in the stream looks like liquid diamonds. Having seen her once before, the locals recognise Leonora at once: ‘Ah the little foreigner, little German, little Italian, little gringa, little French one!’ It is true that she belongs to every one of these lands.

At midday, with the sun shining directly overhead in the midst of the skies, Álvaro places his hand on his forehead like a visor and asks her:

‘Why don’t we just stay and live here forever?’

‘No,’ replies Leonora in a tone of authority. ‘Now it is time for us to leave.’

‘Who did you come here with the last time? Everyone seems to recognise you.’

‘I came with my husband.’

‘Let’s go,’ and he takes her by the arm and falls silent.

GABRIEL AND PABLO CHOOSE DEGREE courses in Medicine, a clear reflection of and resemblance to their mother, the alchemist who deals in the mysteries of life and death. Gaby soon abandons Medicine, tempted first by Anthropology, then by English Literature, and finally going for Comparative Literature and Philosophy.

‘I want to write, Ma, because writing is an escape from everyday life.’

‘So is painting. To Leonardo da Vinci, painting was dumb poetry and poetry was blind painting.’

‘One always writes for someone else, doesn’t one, Ma? Who do you paint for?’

‘For my father. I never believed his death could cause me pain, and it’s taken me until today to realise that I’ve started every picture with him in mind. But you know I paint for you and Pablo too, as well as Kati and Chiki, and for Remedios. Most of all I painted for Edward, and I miss him more than anyone else.’

‘Invent him for yourself, like you invent your whole world.’

‘I think it’s much more likely that this world invented me.’

Gaby gets up at any early hour of the dawning morning, whenever a poem comes to mind. Chiki wakes up when he sees light emerging from his son’s bedroom.

‘Tomorrow you won’t be awake for any of your university courses.’

‘Poetry is a tyrant and if you don’t write when the moment is right, it all evaporates.’

‘Now go back to sleep.’

‘I don’t want to.’

At university, youth and rebellion weave themselves together; the students have no blueprints for the future, because they have no idea of what it will be. The country denies them this. What most exasperates them are their rulers, who attempt to tell them the way Mexico should be and how they should behave themselves. ‘I’ll dress however I want to.’ ‘I don’t want to take a degree in that, I want to change to Philosophy.’ ‘I’m not going to get married, or have any children.’ ‘I am in favour of free abortion on demand.’ ‘The President of the Republic is a son of a bitch.’ Nowadays, women are more daring. When a young man takes their fancy, they say so. It happens to Gaby, and he is left speechless by the familiarity of the redhead who makes a pass at him.

The ‘trots’, ‘mamelukes’, ‘anarchists’ and ‘CP-ers’ all attack one another. Roberto Escudero proposes that the President comes to meet the crowds massing in the main square, the Zócalo. He proposes that members of the National Assembly disclose their income; that they enter into dialogue with the people on the necessary measures to be taken; that transparency is introduced into public finances and, above all, in elections, so that every child is provided with a school place and all university graduates have access to a job. The student leader who attracts the most followers is Luis Tomás Cervantes Cabeza de Vaca. Strong and thoughtful and kind-natured, he wants the country to belong to the young, not to the politicians. ‘We are all one, and everything belongs to everyone’; ‘The oppressors are in the government’; ‘The truth belongs to us’; ‘Mexico, freedom’; ‘Yes to books, no to bayonets!’; ‘The real agitators are ignorance, hunger and poverty’; ‘We don’t want the Olympics, we demand the Revolution’; ‘Zócalo, Zócalo, Zócalo’.

‘I don’t ask for a gun, I want a word,’ says José Revueltas, brandishing his pen. ‘This is my gun.’

Students follow him across the area of flat ground in front of the Registry. José — who they call Pepe — jokes and recommends they read Rilke, César Vallejo, Baudelaire. He returns to his sources in Dostoyevsky and Thomas Mann. ‘Do you have enough cash for books, mate? If not, you can use mine.’ He looks like a Greek philosopher followed by his retinue. The police are always looking for him, and he lives from one day to the next, sleeping wherever he fetches up. It could be stretched out on the floor of the offices of the Society of Writers at Filomeno Mata Street, number 8. The lecture theatre called ‘Justo Sierra’ is renamed ‘Che Guevara’. When it is occupied by students, they sleep on the stage and in the aisles, then cover the walls with paintings of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. They dress and wash in the theatre toilets. When they leave their toothpaste and brush in the sink, nobody steals them.

Helicopters circle over the city centre.

Hijacking a bus is the perfect form of student activism. The driver is afraid, pleading, on the verge of tears, with them not to do anything to him, trying to locate the ringleader: there’s always some guy, the strongest one among them, the rebel boss.

‘Please don’t do anything to the vehicle, it’s not mine, but if you break anything at all, the boss will make me pay for it, and you tell me, what have I got to pay him with? How will I manage to do that?’

Some of them say to leave him in peace, that he’s just a poor sod, whereas others urge them on. Just like in a stadium when the Pumas are playing.

‘Come on! Don’t be a wimp, we’re not going to do anything to you, just take us straight to the Zócalo — right now!’

Three blocks later a police patrol intercepts them and the activists whistle and stamp their feet on the floor.

‘Drive right at them!’ orders their leader.

They drag the driver from his seat and accelerate at the patrol.

In the streets of the city centre, traders are afraid of the university students. If two young people pause in front of a shop window, the store owner threatens them: ‘Get a move on, get going now you pieces of shit!’ Others just pull the metal shutters down over their shop fronts. Carrying a student card can prove dangerous.

‘We’re going to end up having to swallow them up,’ Cabeza de Vaca tells his gang of supporters in the Chapingo National School of Agriculture.

Nobody now attends church on Sundays, and nobody bothers to ask Gaby or Pablo whether they are Jews or Catholics any more. Just the opposite: the younger generation loathe religion. The most radical students are in the School of Political Science, and it is the future sociologists and political scientists who are behind the occupation of the Pedregal de Santo Domingo, the patch of stony lava taken over by poor people. Rather than forcing them out, the students from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México help them to build homes there. Real life is unfolding in the Polytechnic and the University City. ‘UNAM, the free territory of America,’ a youth proclaims at the top of his voice.

Pablo brings friends home where, seated around the kitchen table, they plan to abolish the official political party, that of the Institutionalised Revolution; to depose all corrupt judges; and to go out and puncture tyres and take part in marches and sit-down protests. ‘I really despise all the men in our government,’ declares Martín Dozal. He seems an intelligent man to Gaby, as he talks about machismo in the Mexican home, and relates how the person he most admires is his mother, a seamstress. Pablo takes the mickey out of the formality of the speeches from the Mexican Revolution that keep getting repeated, Dozal explains how he entered the School of Sociology because he thought it the most radical university department, but that from then on he had experienced little but an enormous disappointment. Even the crowd in Anthropology were a load of wet fish. Little Mexican princesses are chauffeured to the School of Education by their family drivers and deny even a glimpse of a smile to their fellow students.