Through tears, the writer Elena Poniatowska is sitting next to the burning chapel where this Thursday relatives and representatives of Mexican culture fired the plastic artist Vicente Rojo, who died on Wednesday in Mexico City due to heart complications.
Dressed in black, fragile, the author has come to say goodbye to her great friend, with whom she shared her passion for art, travel, political development, journalism and even jokes.
The burial takes place only a few days after the artist's birthday, when both should be celebrating lives full of triumphs, battles won and also ups and downs.
"We were always like brothers," Poniatowska told EL PAÍS while wiping a tear.
"We shared the same thoughts, the same reactions to events."
The writer remembers details, conversations, and trips like that one to Havana in 1959, when accompanied by the writers Carlos Fuentes and Fernando Benítez, they enthusiastically toured the Cuban capital, intoxicated by the triumph of the Revolution that aroused so many passions. among the intellectuals of the time.
Poniatowska saves the memories as photographs in her head, including knowing laughter and moments of "winking at each other when we heard something funny."
The body of Vicente Rojo (Barcelona, 1932) is veiled this Thursday at a funeral home in the San Rafael neighborhood, once a bohemian area of Mexico City - once inhabited by personalities such as the painters Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, who, like Rojo, he had gone into exile in Mexico in 1941.
Today the palaces of the colony suffer the ravages of gentrification.
The wake was intimate with family, friends and colleagues, joining one of the great masters of Mexican art.
Several flower arrangements from cultural institutions in the country arrived at the venue throughout the morning, whose managers have expressed their sorrow on social media for the departure of the exponent of Mexican abstractionism.
Before his death, Rojo was preparing a large exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art on Paseo de la Reforma, one of the centers that the artist himself managed to catapult with his work into the generation, known as La Ruptura.
His family and friends have agreed that the show, which will open its doors in the coming months, becomes the artist's first great posthumous tribute.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador also dedicated a few words to Rojo in his morning conference this Thursday.
The president said that the painter, sculptor and editor - exiled in Mexico at the age of 17 - was "very Mexican" and recalled when he met him, when López Obrador was head of the Government of Mexico City and the artist created a fountain in the Alameda Central, in the heart of the capital.
"He came to Mexico as a child to receive protection from our Government at that time," said the president in relation to the reception of Spanish exiles mainly during the governments of Lázaro Cárdenas and Manuel Ávila Camacho.
Poniatowska recalled this morning what his arrival meant for the artist: “The Spanish civil war suffered a lot, so Mexico was for him a light that was lit in his life.
Vicente felt very good here ”.
Rojo was the nephew of General Vicente Rojo, the last chief of the Republican Army's General Staff and who organized the defense of Madrid against Franco's troops.
In Mexico a world of freedom was opened for the future artist.
"Here I found a beautiful, bright, clear light and a free environment," he said in an interview with El PAÍS.
"I knew this was going to be my country since I set foot."
Since the news of the artist's death was known, Mexican intellectuals have expressed their regret.
Historian and journalist Enrique Krauze has lamented the death of Rojo, whom he has classified as "a great visual artist, an innovator of graphic design, a companion of good times, a faithful and loving friend."
For the writer Jorge Volpi it is "a great loss", that of an "inescapable artist of modern Mexico, generous designer, eternal lover of books, accomplice of painters, sculptors, writers and poets, serene and thorough man".
Writer Margo Glantz, who in a pandemic has become a daily voice on Twitter, sent "a lot of love and sadness" for Barbara Jacobs, the artist's partner.
Poniatowska, who has spent the whole morning at her friend's wake, recalled the walks she took with Rojo, in which they had long conversations about the events that capture their attention.
He has commented on the discussions between the group they formed, together with the poet José Emilio Pacheco and Carlos Monsiváis, both deceased.
"He was a severe man, but we loved him very much," said the writer.
“We were always together.
I was the one in the group that did the chronicles and the interviews;
they made a lot of jokes ”.
He says that Rojo "never drank", but in his house there was always a cabinet with bottles for friends.
"There was a lot of complicity in everything, even in the authors that we liked or disliked."
With his departure, explains Poniatowska, Mexico “loses a cleaning tree, which gave many leaves, green, full of writing and painting”.
A memory of Vicente Rojo?
“He didn't like me saying the sidewalk, he fell off the sidewalk.
He would correct me and say to myself: 'Elena, don't say a sidewalk, it's a sidewalk, A CE RA ”.
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