The days like all of Elena Poniatowska

The days these days are the same as everyone.

Elena Poniatowska has breakfast reading

, the newspaper where she publishes on Sundays.

She walks less than she should and doesn't go to mass.

Nothing has changed too much.

"Only that there are many flowers to take care of," says the journalist and writer in the living room of her house, where she has put the bouquets that were sent to her because this Thursday she turns 90.

And she's seeing more reporters than usual;

Some enter, others leave.

She awaits them with a t-shirt that has a green bird painted on the front of it, a gift from an environmentalist friend.

“I put on the parakeet for the journalism thing, but they didn't ask me.

We talk a lot.

The parakeet speaks, of the animals he is the only one that says several things”.

Poniatowska began working as a reporter for the

newspaper in 1953 when she was 21 years old.

Over time, she would become a witness and protagonist of the cultural, political and intellectual life of Mexico.

She was lucky, she has said, because the people she wanted to interview answered the phone and then she went to the appointment with a Scribe notebook.

Almost half a century ago, the poet Alfonso Reyes called

;

Octavio Paz, who had already published

, asked him if he had read André Breton;

the actress Dolores del Río gave him a Guerlain perfume.

"I threw myself a little like young people throw themselves," he told EL PAÍS on a Saturday in May.

"It wasn't difficult," he continues, "because everyone liked it when a more or less pretty girl would come and ask them anything."

Muralist Diego Rivera, for example, was asked about his teeth.

He arrived, smiled and she could see "his little teeth".

She couldn't think of anything else, so she launched herself: "Hey, and are her teeth made of milk?"

He said yes, that with them he ate "Polish girls."

"And the interview was followed with that," recalls the journalist.

She is sitting in one of the yellow armchairs in the living room, in front of a window;

her cat appears and she leaves.

The artist's work was banned from her house because Rivera had painted the poet Pita Amor, Poniatowska's mother's first cousin, nude.

The young journalist had never seen her murals: "I had no preparation, the information I had about Mexico was extremely scarce."

Portrait of the writer Elena Poniatowska in her adolescence.RR.SS.

Hélène Elizabeth Louise Amélie Paula Dolores Poniatowska Amor was born in Paris in 1932 into a family descended from the Polish aristocracy.

At the age of 10, she arrived with her mother and her sister, Sofía, in Mexico.

Her father had stayed in Europe to fight in World War II and would arrive four years later.

In 1947 her brother, Jan, would be born, who died at the age of 21 in a car accident.

Poniatowska, who spoke only French and English, learned the “very popular Spanish” that she heard on the street or from the people who worked in her house.

And she immediately adapted.

"In Mexico, being a güerito [blond or white] is a great advantage, they treated me very well, they shouted at me in the street 'mamacita, mamacita!'

Her sister didn't like it when that happened, but she did and she smiled with the childish grin that she still has.

–How long have you lived in this house?

-Thousand years ago.

Many, almost every year I have.

That's Vais, it's the cat–, she points out when the animal passes, meows and continues towards the back of the house.

–How old is the cat?

-I dont know.

She has all of them because she was born here.

I don't keep track of the money or the cats.

Nor of the years.

His house is behind a white door in the Chimalistac neighborhood, south of Mexico City.

Walking through the flowery garden and through the front door, books cover all the walls.

The house is a library.

The publications are identified on the spine and the shelves are arranged alphabetically.

Although now, Poniatowska points out, they are out of place and she no longer knows if she will order them.

In addition to flowers and books, in the living room there are embroidered cushions, above all, with organic motifs –plants, birds–.

One has printed the caricature of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whom the writer supported in the 2018 elections. On her birthday, this Thursday, May 19, the writer will not celebrate it here.

The house is small, she says.

The celebration, on the other hand, will be at the National Palace of Fine Arts,

The writer Elena Poniatowska at her home in Mexico City in May.CLAUDIA ARÉCHIGA

Scattered throughout various parts of the house are also giant Christmas balls, shiny spheres that he bought from a nearby factory.

“I made friends with the lady.

I was going to put like 10,000 balls in here.”

Martina, the woman who works in the journalist's house, has placed next to one of those pieces, on a high shelf, another ornament that shouldn't be there.

“Oh, remove it because you don't know what it is.

I even thought a mouse,” says Poniatowska as she looks up.

The writer has risen, agile, from the yellow armchair because the photographer asks her for a portrait next to the round table full of photos: of her ten grandchildren, of her friend Carlos Monsivais, of the painter Leonora Carrington.

"Thanks to journalism," he says, "I began to meet great Mexicans, who perhaps I would not have met otherwise."

Except for the writer Carlos Fuentes, who, as he was the son of diplomats, attended the same dances as her.

This is how the writer tells it in her latest book,

, two volumes of a personal novel in which she investigates the history of her ancestor Stanislaw Poniatowski, the last king of Poland, and reconstructs her own biography: “At parties, Carlos and I danced waltzes and polkas, but also

and

which, rather, makes us jump like kangaroos until exhaustion.

'Let's dance a conga', asks Carlos, because that's how he grabs the girl in front of him by the waist;

we make a long queue and advance like a viper through corridors and stairs through the whole house”.

If she remembers, she smiles again with the gesture of a girl: she wrinkles her nose and shows her teeth.

When he writes about her, that naive air is mentioned.

Leftist intellectual, author of more than 30 novels, essays and short stories, acute and ironic, it is difficult to believe that she is deluded.

"I smile because I have a very short upper lip and my mouth opens on its own, but I also smile because I have a great disposition for happiness."

She also tells about it in

, where she also reveals, without saying her name, that the writer Juan José Arreola, 20 years older than her, raped her and left her pregnant with her first child in 1955.

-When you look back, everything you have written, the place you occupy in the world of Mexican culture, how do you see yourself?

-Well, I don't spend much time thinking about how I see myself, because I'm always thinking about causes other than mine.

What saves me is getting out of myself and talking to others, listening to others and worrying about others.

For example, I have worked with peasant women, with seamstresses, in the [1985] earthquake I stayed on the street for months and made a relationship with many victims.

Poniatowska at a demonstration to stop violence against journalists in Mexico City. Miguel Tovar (GETTY IMAGES)

And before that,

(1971).

His most recognized work is a choral account that collects testimonies of what happened on the afternoon of October 2, 1968, when the Government of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), brutally repressed a student rally in the Plaza de las Three Cultures of the Mexican capital.

The narration is one of the records that has transpired from that afternoon.

30 years after the publication, the writer Luis González de Alba, a student leader in the sixties, denounced the writer for "altering the content" and the text had to be partially corrected.

“He began to tell me that I had been wrong about many things, but I put what the people with whom I spoke told me.

He put it as religiously as possible ”, defends the journalist.

What worries him these days are the murders of journalists in Mexico, the femicides and a clown who they want to displace from a Coyoacán mayor's office where he has worked for years.

She knows Moisés Miranda from her walks around the neighborhood, which begin across the street, at the Church of San Sebastián.

“He has grown old and it would be infamy for them to remove him,” he says.

On Twitter he has denounced the case and has even offered to complain to the municipal president: "If the delegate does not understand, we will turn to God the Father."

These days, just like all the others, he has not stopped working.

"I'm writing," she says, "I'm always writing."

And when he's not doing that, he doesn't know what he likes: "I have very good friends, although two that mattered to me a lot, Carlos Monsiváis and José Emilio Pacheco, and also Octavio Paz... I miss Octavio Paz very much."

"Now what I am certain of is that I have little time left," he points out, "that is an absolute truth."

Already in 2013, when she received the Cervantes Prize in Madrid, she said that: “I am about to be ephemeral.

I am already 81 years old.

Next year I am 82. Eight years for 90″.

He has said it many times.

But what if she is still 10 years older?

-So good so good.

It shrinks the nose, shows the teeth, and adds nothing else.

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