As the summer rains ravage the Federal District, a seized Octavio Paz threatens to commit suicide. It is July 29, 1935. Three months have passed since the 21-year-old law student met Elena Garro, who was 18 and was about to finish high school, and his love is already beginning to show shadows. The parents of what would become one of Mexico's most brutal novelists do not approve of the intensity of the relationship and threaten to send their daughter to boarding school. Garro cries silently. Paz denies that her world has been taken away.
"I do not want you to rebel against your people, but to explain the true situation with exactness and coldness," the poet wrote to his girlfriend that morning before leaving for his house to confront his in-laws.
The farewell is cold, the air is tense, and the poet leaves.
Paz would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990 and die at 84, but that night his life loses meaning.
When he got home he wrote again 13 pages that ended in a threat: “If you want to marry me, don't forget me.
If you don't love me tell me too: you have that duty.
The only one that I demand of you.
That you answer everything I ask you here.
You must answer all this;
otherwise I will do crazy ”.
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The letter is only the tenth of 84 epistles that Guillermo Sheridan (Mexico City, 71 years old), scholar and researcher at the Center for Literary Studies of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, saved and studied for almost two decades. This month he publishes them edited and commented on in a book by Editorial XXI under the title of
Odi et amo: letters to Helena
, in which he signs his fifth work on the life and work of the most successful poet in his country.
Written between the rise of a youthful love in 1935 and the first ruins of the separation that already lurks a decade later, the letters circulated in the 1990s, by a nephew of Garro who wanted to sell them, and their copies reached Sheridan as a gift from Helena Paz Garro, daughter of the writers. A window towards one of the most convulsive and commented marriages in Mexico, the absolute biographer of Octavio Paz protects them as an exploration into the origins of the writer. "The letters provide a very privileged intrusion into his creative intimacy," says Sheridan in an interview with this newspaper. “They are an accompaniment to this young man who is training as a poet; to a boy excited about the socialism that is experienced in Mérida during the years of President Lázaro Cárdenas; and a man who, after several years of marriage,he experiences what he describes in a poem as 'the custom that kills love'.
The cover of 'Odi et amo: the letters to Helena'.Editorial Siglo XXI
During that summer in which everything seemed to end, Octavio Paz probably read Wolfgang von Goethe, as Sheridan notes at the bottom of the book. The threat of suicide is diluted in rhetoric when the Garros decide not to separate the couple in exchange for the young Elena imposing a distance. The Peace that tempted death in the style of young Werther will also emulate the character of the German writer fantasizing about a son, will follow his girlfriend from afar, at dances and afternoons with friends, and will baptize her as Helena, with the 'H' as secret code. But he will also share verses, give a lecture on Nietzsche, read Stendhal with Garro or assimilate their relationship into Dostoevsky's characters. Runaway love is consolidated as epistolary. "Young Paz is not a good poet," says the editor. But in his readings, and in his way of organizing his intellect,all the elements in which he will develop his poetry already appear ”.
The correspondence will accompany them again in 1937 while Paz travels to the Yucatan peninsula at the age of 24, far from a judicial career and with a position in the delegation of teachers that seeks to "educate the children of the proletariat" amid the nationalist fervor of the President Cárdenas. Garro will venture into the theater, and Paz will shield his new companies from jealousy, blaming them for frivolity and a lack of revolutionary fervor. They will marry that same year and the letters will return in 1944, when Garro returns to Mexico due to financial problems after they went to live in California with the Guggenheim de Paz scholarship. She is 27 years old and he is about to turn 30.
Sheridan regrets the idea that Elena Garro's answers have been lost forever. "I do not know, but I perceived signs that Mrs. Marie José Paz [the third wife of the writer, who died in 2018] decided to get rid of them," ditch. "Having had the answers would have made this book doubly important," says the academic, who in his footnotes indicates reactions, desires and pains of an Octavio Paz who by 1945 depended on a minimum salary from the Mexican consulate in San Francisco after to fail in the deadlines of the book that prepared by the Guggenheim.
Back in Mexico, Garro cultivated his career in journalism. It had begun in 1941 with reports where she entered a female prison with the same astuteness of undercover as the house of Frida Kahlo, as her biographer Patricia Rosas Lopétegui narrates in an article. "She has a job, an interesting life, and is surrounded by friends," Sheridan describes. Meanwhile, Paz wanders through San Francisco, writes verses about faces and streets that, as the biographer recalls, would come to pass in the poem
Piedra de sol
(1957). He also celebrates his wife. "That is what I wanted, what I have always wanted: that you use in something - and not in destroying or destroying yourself - your talent, your charm and your ability," he wrote in one of the last letters, on March 16, 1945.
That summer they will meet briefly in Vermont, and then Paz will go to New York, where he will live for a few months until the Mexican Foreign Service will formally recruit him to Paris.
Then the collapse begins.
Garro will begin to write
Memories of the Future
in 1948, and Paz published
El laberinto de la soledad
in 1950. She falls in love with the Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares and maintains a relationship with the Mexican Archibaldo Burns.
He meets the painter Bona de Pisis.
Between distances and around the corner after a decade outside of Mexico, the divorce will come in 1959.
Sheridan describes them as "mutual captives." "Like any good love story, it has its ecstasies and it has its disasters," he says. “Paz fell in love with another woman and started another wild story. Elena Garro preferred to turn her hatred into a religion, ”she writes in her epilogue. The 1960s antagonized them in politics, with a Paz who resigned as ambassador to India in protest of the 1968 student massacre while Garro accused him, along with other intellectuals, of "confusing" and "betraying" the students. The literature, however, found them. Paz celebrated the publication of
Memories of the Future
.
“How much life, how much poetry, how everything seems like a pirouette, a rocket, a magic flower!
Helena is an illusionist, ”he wrote to the essayist José Bianco.
“Everything, everything, everything I am is against him.
In life you have only one enemy, and that is enough.
And my enemy is Peace, ”Garro wrote in a widely quoted letter to the literary critic Gabriela Mora, although she celebrated the 1990 Nobel Prize with her ex-husband. Both would die in 1998, he in April and she in August.
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