Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

Gaby stays in contact with Renato Leduc. He comes round to dinner, and Gaby complains to him about the university bureaucracy; the secretaries that lose track of academic records; the endless long waits in front of one information desk after another: ‘You are missing a copy of your secondary school graduation certificate’; ‘The date of birth you gave us is not the same as the one we have here.’ Renato replies by telling him that there is no worse form of bureaucracy than matrimony, for it’s the one that kills love. Also that young people’s surrender to the cause of social justice is the worst of inventions, for everyone anyway eventually integrates into the system as they grow old. When he’s in his company Gaby laughs a lot, for Renato is the best-informed man in Mexico, he spices bad news with his sense of humour and Gaby roars with laughter when Renato vows that Leonora is a marvellous friend, and a Churchill in skirts as a wife.

‘Well I at any rate intend to get married,’ Pablo announces.

Leonora furiously protests: ‘Getting married is like getting involved with the police even when the police aren’t getting involved with you.’

‘Ma, we’re not going to be with you for the rest of our lives.’

Newsreaders repeat the jargon of ‘pinkos’, ‘ provocateurs ’, ‘infiltrators’, ‘subversives’, ‘Communists’, ‘de-stabilising elements’, and ‘marxists’ on a daily basis, and Leonora’s indignation mounts.

Edward James turns up at the door with two boa constrictors and asks Pablo: ‘Can you get me some rats to feed them with?’

‘The ones we have in our labs are for scientific experiments.’

With great difficulty, Pablo secretes two fat rats for him. He brings them to Edward at the Hotel Francis: he puts them in his bath tub, where he keeps his boas. Two days later, James goes into his bathroom and the rats have eaten up the boas.

Pablo only finishes his medical practicals late at night, returning home at one or two in the morning. Some nights he forgets his keys and Chiki gets up to let him in. After making him coffee, they take George out for a walk, he’s the collie dog Pablo adores. While George sniffs around the walls and the kerbs, Pablo confides his worries to his father. All at once, Chiki looks at his watch: ‘Already four in the morning? I can’t believe it — how fast time passes! We’d better get back as your mother is bound to be worried.’

Each time there’s a ring at the door, Leonora explodes. Gaby and Pablo have a mimeographer: they print flyers inveighing against the government and the armed forces. They announce the next march or demonstration. When they are not busy printing, they go out to take up collections with tin cans emblazoned with the initials CNH, for the Comisión Nacional de Huelgas — the National Council for Strikes. Motorists often verbally abuse them: ‘Why aren’t you in school?’, ‘You should go and get yourselves a job, you lazy gits!’ The young people are motivated by rage: it’s high time their voices are heard. Adults have nothing at all to offer them.

Pablo gets up onto a soap box, taking the word onto the streets, speaking on the corner of Sonora market. Gaby distributes propaganda flyers on buses and at the factory gates, and improvises short popular comic plays. The Olympic Games are headline news in both print and broadcast media, and the student movement is damaging the image the Mexican government wants to give the world. It is high time to put a stop to the saboteurs. Pablo rebels. ‘Why won’t the President show his face on the balcony of the National Palace?’ Meanwhile, Gaby makes fun of the authorities in his impromptu street theatre.

All along the Avenida Álvaro Obregón, trucks of soldiers in blue uniforms and helmets resembling chamber pots trundle up and down. Gaby and Pablo join the medical brigades and Pablo has attended to numerous wounded students. They live amidst real and imaginary terrors, since the army is ever more visible and tales of kidnappings are running through the Faculty of Medicine.

Chiki and Leonora feel as if they are back in the war years. All that’s missing are the bombers flying over the capital city. Gaby and Pablo are always rushing to answer the doorbell, and to let in Javier, Mateo, Tita, Naha, Carlos, Raul or Elisa, each looking over their shoulders in case they are being followed. ‘I’ve come for the flyers.’ ‘They’ve taken Edgardo Bermúdez from the Poly.’ ‘They are pursuing all the university lecturers.’ Leonora’s heart is in her mouth each time her sons leave the house. ‘They tortured Luis Tomás Cervantes Cabeza de Vaca, who was at Chapingo, and almost killed him in the process.’ Anguish reddens Chiki’s eyes even more than before.

In the classrooms and corridors of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, they lay out mattresses and sleeping bags. ‘Our house is now under surveillance. My parents are furious with me.’ The government regards UNAM as a hotbed of agitation. Why does the rector, Barros Sierra, allow them to stay overnight in the classrooms? ‘They aren’t students, they’re just parasites, illiterates and total cynics.’ Gaby and Pablo cross the road whenever they see a policeman. Gaby has grown his hair long. Wherever he goes, he takes a little puppy in his jacket pocket with him. Whenever he opens the front door, this seduces one visitor after another. With his right hand he takes out the little puppy to get some air and the response is always the same: ‘Oh, how adorable! Just look at him, he fits into the palm of your hand!’ from yet another enamoured adolescent.

The two brothers march and demonstrate with their Faculties, and Gaby follows up with his happenings and his circus turns. ‘Leonora, I saw your boys on the demonstration.’ ‘Leonora, I bumped into Pablo in front of the Registry.’ ‘Take good care of him, it seems to me as if he is really involved in the movement and Diaz Ordaz is raging against all those who are against the Olympic Games.’ The brothers leave the house with their knapsacks on their backs and Leonora never knows when they will be back.

‘I’m so scared that something will happen to them.’

Chiki remains silent. The soldiers are capable of who-knows-what. The flyers represent them as orang-utang.

All along the Paseo de la Reforma blue trucks called ‘julias’ are stationed at intervals.

‘That’s what they take you to jail in,’ Pablo informs everyone.

Army lorries crammed with soldiers pass by three times a day.

‘We are afraid that even more serious things will happen, there are vigils every evening in many parts of the city,’ Inés Amor confides to her friends over afternoon tea.

On 18th September, the army violates the autonomous territory of the University City, detaining the academic and administrative staff and students alike. The violence with which the University City is invaded terrifies Leonora and Chiki. ‘They threw all the books on the floor, then trampled and even urinated on them.’

‘Time to take to the hills,’ Sócrates Campos Lemus orders. ‘And time for me to get hold of some machine guns.’

Lorenzo Rios Ojeda, a student at the Polytechnic’s Faculty of Biology, is murdered by a policeman while he is painting graffiti on a street wall in the Lindavista district. He had told his parents he would be home late that evening, since he was going out to paint the words ‘Únete pueblo!’ — ‘People unite!’ — along the fences. Pablo used to know him, as they had sometimes attended lectures together. When he told him of his intention to specialise in pathology, Lencho replied: ‘And I in biology.’

‘Ma, we’re not big activists, but we can’t stand by as if we were indifferent. That at least is what you have taught us, and so it was proved by our time on the kibbutz.’