There is a time when the abolished time that Elena Garro kneads and molds in Ixtepec, that inner city that the Mexican turned into a particular Macondo long before García Márquez did it, becomes simple and frees himself from the weight he has been adding to The reader's shoulders: "The spell was broken and for the first time we had something to do, something to think about that was not misery."
Thus he introduces, on page 130 of The reasons for the future , the first respite from the misfortunes brought to the city by the military commanded by General Rosas, who lock up their prostitutes-lovers under lock and key while sowing hanged every morning the awakening of the place. Several of the neighbors have been excited to prepare a play that will break their routine of monitoring misfortune and for the first time they relax. It is only a parenthesis in an atmosphere of vital oppression without great resistance to resistance and where, despite everything, self-thinking opens its way.
Ixtepec is a stage and is the protagonist, speaking in the first person from the place, and is the collective voice of a town where even memory appears to us as a thick mass: “Here I am, sitting on this apparent stone. I am only memory and the memory of me ”, the city speaks at the beginning of the novel. Garro draws, thus, the blurry photo of the coexistence and collisions between the locals who remain (young people or those who can leave), the military, the darlings who must welcome them with the best face and without causing discomfort and outsiders. The principal, Julia, lover of the commanding general, is her obsession, her passion not subdued, representative of a rebellion that takes shape in her resistance to love. He may have his body, not his heart. "It escaped bright and liquid like a drop of mercury and was lost in unknown places, accompanied by hostile shadows," Garro writes.
Characters magnified in the smallness of their lives, from a widow who still speaks in the shadow of her dead husband to the old woman who already "only knows the ways of her house", from the man who thinks he is president to the daring son because he still ignores The fears of the place. The streets speak, the people speak in a first person who takes the life of revolutionary and violent times (the cristero war) that have led to miss the Zapatistas. The roots of servility, the abyss of inequality, the oppression of women and the quiet but throbbing resistance are key.
Much has been written in recent years about Elena Garro (Puebla, 1916, Cuernavaca, 1998), a huge Mexican writer excluded from the spotlights that lit her husband, Octavio Paz, and other male writers in the country. The effort to recover it and give it its rightful place in the Latin American canon as a key voice of magical realism and the boom is great, and the last contribution is the recent edition of Alfaguara, which accompanies Guadalupe Nettel (Mexico), Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (Argentina), Isabel Mellado (Chile), Lara Moreno (Spain) and Carolina Sanín (Colombia) with their reflections.
We highlight five good reasons to read it, reread it and try to resize its figure. And we will provide one more:
1. “The memories of the future, together with Pedro Páramo, is probably the best Mexican novel written in the 20th century,” writes Guadalupe Nettel. The author - also Mexican - remembers that Garro was on the edge and forced to keep part of her unpublished work. His daughter rescued from the flames the manuscript of this novel, the author's first, which he wrote in 1952, fifteen years before García Márquez published One Hundred Years of Solitude. “It would be necessary to see if they ever invited her to be part of the Latin American Boom, constituted exclusively by men, whites and heterosexuals,” writes Nettel. “The circular story told by the people is also ours. We are the future generation mentioned here, and the future that Ixtepec remembers is nothing other than our present. ”
2. “What Garro does is exceptional, it is to represent what was not yet represented, the experience of time in this subcontinent in which the Conquest never ends”, defends Gabriela Cabezón Cámara. “It has been considered a precursor of magical realism in the same way as Juan Rulfo although she was ignored for decades. Why precursor? Rather, Garro should be thought of as one of the peaks of magical realism. ”
3. And it is that experience of time that Carolina Sanín stands out . “Express the human discovery that time behaves in varied ways; that infinite times coexist and that, as Elena Garro says in this book, "memory contains all times and its order is unpredictable" is the most emphatic aspiration of Latin American literature. ” Sanín questions the name of "magical realism" as "unfortunate, colonialist and of sterilizing consequences" and argues that García Márquez or Garro del Baroque, de Góngora, Cervantes and Borges is no different. The future as a repetition of the past is Garro's challenge. Sanín also looks at the figure of women, here canceled from public space and captive in the hotel (brothel) or in their homes.
4. Like the other epiloguistas, Isabel Mellado also underlines the rupture of the chronological time, “immobile, agoraphobic time, which overwhelms in several places of the novel”, but also looks at the space: “Also choreographer, Garro cabrioleates time in the space. The choreography is enveloping, obsessive. Again, as if it were a character, dance winding, time goes back, advances, wobbles, elongates and paralyzes, claustrophobic jumps and slips into subtle toes. A plasticity that, in Garro, owes much to the conflict between Western time and the ancient Mexican world. ”
5. Hypnotized by the book declares Lara Moreno before a narrator (that town of Ixtepec) that unleashes questions: “Who speaks to us? And this narrator, where does it come from? Where does this catacomb voice sometimes come from, this whispered relieved, this broken vocal cord worn out over the years and yet luminous? It is a throat full of dust and years that speaks to us and yet does not tremble even once. ”
Great works grow with great readings. The memories of the future were worth by itself, but the five texts that accompany it in this edition bring different lights, nuances and discoveries to a treasure that did not have in its history the brightness it deserved. And this is the sixth reason to read this book.
Memories of the future, Elena Garro. With texts by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Isabel Mellado, Lara Moreno, Guadalupe Nettel and Carolina Sanín. (Alfaguara)