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The thousand lives of Alcira Soust Scaffo, the poet who survived 1968 hidden in a sink

2022-07-01T03:27:53.830Z


She was a poet, muse of Roberto Bolaño and friend of the great exiled Spanish writers. Twenty-five years after her death, EL PAÍS reconstructs the story of one of the most important figures of the Mexican counterculture


Alcira Soust Scaffo was a poet and a wanderer, she was a witch, a gardener, a translator.

She is teacher.

She was recognized for having been Rufino Tamayo's assistant, Roberto Bolaño's muse, a friend of León Felipe.

It was all that but it was more.

A toothless wanderer who defended the beauty of writing against the military in 1968, who distributed verses at the funeral of Rosario Castellanos and grew flowers and students in an enclosed garden between the buildings of Ciudad Universitaria which she called Emiliano Zapata .

Become one of the most important figures of the Mexican counterculture, Alcira Soust Scaffo died on June 30, 25 years ago in Uruguay.

EL PAÍS reconstructs part of her history with the books, operas and exhibitions dedicated to her, with her family and the scattered friends she left behind in the Mexico she never left.

“I am the friend of all Mexicans.

I could say: I am the mother of Mexican poetry, but I better not say it.

I know all the poets and all the poets know me.

So I could say it.

I could say: I am the mother and a zephyr has been running from hell for centuries, but I better not say it.

Roberto Bolaño thus introduces Auxilio Lacouture, the nickname he gave to Alcira in

Los Detectives Salvajes

and in the novel that made her the protagonist,

Amuleto

.

The Uruguayan speaks and thinks about fiction as her friends say it sounded like in the 70s, when Bolaño met her.

“It's her doorbell.

It's her voice.

It is as if she heard her, she gives me

goosebumps

, ”the scholar Antonio Santos, a friend of the poet, tells EL PAÍS.

Bolaño's work elevated the myth of an extraordinary writer who lived for decades in the corridors of the UNAM Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, who met the key figures of the 20th century —from Picasso and Remedios Varo to Subcomandante Marcos—, and the one that surrounds, still decades after his death, the gaps and the questions.

"For everyone he had a hundred words or a thousand"

Antonio Santos recounts that Alcira Soust (Durazno, 1924) was named after the Valencian people and that her obsession with oranges was born there, which she amplified with reading and recovered in her poems.

The third of four siblings, she was always different.

"Alcira was like a family mystery, like a ghost that appears and disappears," Agustín Fernández, her great-nephew, recalls to EL PAÍS by phone from Montevideo.

She was trained as a teacher, she burned down a school in an oversight while preparing dulce de leche, she attended congresses of the great Uruguayan pedagogues who strengthened her ideology and learned the game as a way of life.

In Bolaño's version, Auxilio Lacouture does not remember when he arrived in Mexico or why or what for.

But he is wrong.

Alcira arrived in the country in 1952 with a UNESCO scholarship to do a specialization at the Regional Cooperation Center for Adult Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (CREFAL).

She lived 18 months in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán.

In December 1953, his plane ticket back to Montevideo was ready.

He did not arrive at the airport.

He didn't do it in 36 years.

Alcira Soust in front of Lake Pátzcuaro, in Michoacán, Mexico, in 1953. COURTESY

In her first time in Mexico, Alcira has a traditional life: boyfriend, house and job.

He worked in a children's hospital, in the Latin American Institute of Educational Cinematography (ILCE) and in the Ministry of Health.

She bilingual in French, highly educated, cinephile and voracious reader, she began to attend the galleries of Mexico City, to spend her days in the neighborhoods of the center.

In his walks and gatherings he made friends with María Zambrano, the musician Igor Stravinski, León Felipe, Emilio Prados and Pedro Garfias, Buñuel, Carlos Landeros, Manuel Barbachano.

The list goes on and on.

So much so that Alcira herself had to write them down on a piece of paper.

"For everyone she had a hundred words or a thousand," Bolaño wrote.

“I met Alcira at the Sonora cafe.

I loved her — I love her — outside of all sex or desire,” José Revueltas wrote.

“Years later, one of the reasons she was taken for crazy is because she talked about famous people as if she knew them.

But she knew them!” Santos says.

—What did Alcira have to connect with so many people?

'Easy: she was lovely.

The Alzira of the bathroom

The legend of Alcira grew larger in a single day: September 18, 1968. The Mexican Army violently took Ciudad Universitaria.

Alcira welcomes the soldiers with a poem by León Felipe, which he broadcasts over the campus loudspeaker.

His friend had died that very morning.

He also plays other verses by Nicolás Guillén: "Soldier, learn to shoot."

Terrified of being deported to Uruguay — she didn't have, she never had, papers — she decides to hide in the men's bathroom on the eighth floor of the Humanities Tower.

"Do not allow, baby, that they take you prisoner," says Bolaño.

From his refuge he sees the tanks enter, the grenadiers, he sees the arrests of the students and also the birds and the moon, he writes poems that he writes on toilet paper, he paints on the wall: "Long live love, live life".

She resists drinking only tap water for 12 days.

The historians Miguel León Portilla and Alfredo López Austin, one of her best friends, are the ones who find her and help her out when the soldiers leave.

“Elevator not working!

We go down the stairs!

I went to bed... I kept sleeping!

My legs hurt and nothing else, ”Alcira writes in pencil about her rescue.

The poet never recovers from that episode, which she described as having been abducted.

In a letter to the artist Leopoldo Méndez, she tells many years later: "Never reach madness... I want to tell you that after riding in my flying saucer I could not return to this world we live in."

"In Bolaño's work, everything is focused on that Alcira in the bathroom, the Alcira of '68. But there were many Alciras, he had many lives," says his great-nephew Agustín, who has just finished, after 14 years of work, a documentary about her:

Alcira and the field of spikes

.

The name comes from a poem that the writer dedicated to her sister Sulma, Agustín's grandmother: "If you want to hear my voice / Let's go to the field of spikes / there the flowers are suns / And the thorns are suns".

The filmmaker acknowledges: “I did think: 'How much more can I contribute with Bolaño's work being there?'

But I think there was something to make the character more complex, to humanize the myth”.

"Write poems.

And live?

Where?"

Since the end of 1965, Alcira Soust no longer had a steady job or her own home.

She spent the nights in the apartments of her friends, her belongings —few— scattered, her days as a cicada in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UNAM, her nights at the mercy of the wind and the cafes of the then Federal District.

“If I didn't go crazy it was because I always kept my humor.

I laughed at my skirts, at my cylindrical pants, at my striped stockings, at my white socks, at my Prince Valiant haircut, less blond and whiter every day, at my eyes that scrutinized the night in Mexico City, at my pink ears that listened to the stories of the University”, recovers Bolaño.

This wandering made the poet suffer, who wrote down a phrase that would pursue her like a destiny until the end: “Write poems!

And live?

Where?".

Her friend, Antonio Santos, tries to explain it: “There is a pedagogical, philosophical reason in the decision to break with everything.

He first burns his ships with the family, then with his love, and then with the social status, even with the salaried job, that throws him out.

She breaks with the traditional, with the role that she had been assigned in life”.

The curator Antonio Santos with the book 'Write poetry, live where?'

edited by MUAC. Nayeli Cruz

The writer tried to make up for everything with writing.

The director of the MUAC, Amanda de la Garza, explains Alcira's radical decision to “dwell in poetry, to be-in-poetry”: “In the constant appearance of a “despite everything” at different times nests the power of poetry as a way of life and the question about living, as freedom and as tragedy”.

In the 70s he began his great project, called Poesía en Armas, which lasted for two decades in which he distributed verses, his and others', in flyers created with the mimeograph, in every corner of the UNAM.

"For her, there were two ways of bringing light to people: producing it in her poems or reflecting it, in being the mirror of what others wrote," Santos reasons.

“Why / for what / from where / here: / HE CAME / Just for that he CAME / To know who he was / If it was the sun or the moon”, says one of those who wrote Alcira.

In October 1971, in commemoration of the death of Che Guevara, he plants a cedar between the campus buildings.

He continues to expand the place with trees and plants that he dedicates to friends, characters or historical events.

He calls it Jardín Cerrado and turns it into a space of memory and resistance.

"It's the only place in Mexico that was his for many years," says Antonio Santos.

Thus the thousands of poems that he disseminated had the same address: Emiliano Zapata Garden, Secretary of Defense of Light, Poetry in Arms, Philosophy and Letters, UNAM.

Alcira's poetic production was broad, vast, chaotic, dated.

She was not published by any label, nor named, not even in Bolaño's novel where she is the protagonist.

“Her history is covered by that patriarchy that made her invisible in editorial, commercial or academic circles.

Obviously she was not invisible because she was her own publishing house, "replies Santos, who is trying to get UNAM to organize a tribute to her on her centenary in 2024. "Mexico and UNAM owe a lot to Alcira."

Poem by Alcira Soust Scaffo, distributed in Ciudad Universitaria, in Mexico City, in 1986. MUAC Archive

“He suffered: because Mexico lost”

The artist's portraits reflect her way of speaking and laughing by placing a hand over her mouth, or a flower, or a notebook, after losing her teeth.

They recover her fighting spirit that led her to confront everything that she considered unfair;

in 1971 she even sent a letter to Francisco Franco to protest the execution of eight Basque prisoners.

They remember how she put on wet clothes after washing them because she didn't have any more.

They name The

Little Prince

and

One Thousand and One Nights

like his bedside books and his obsession with constellations and nature as part of the surrealist current.

He saw the coincidences and coincidences on each date: "Che, did you notice?".

He disliked strawberries and pretentious ones.

She was explosive and exaggerated most of the time.

She loved opera, which she considered the synthesis of all the arts.

She was tall as Don Quixote, says Bolaño, who assures on her behalf: "I lived with my time, with the time that I had chosen and with the time that surrounded me, trembling, changing, full and happy."

In 1988, after years of harassment by the authorities, several episodes in which she was interned against her will in psychiatric institutions, Alcira was sent back to Uruguay by her friends.

Her return was uneventful because her mother did not recognize her at first due to her physical deterioration, malnutrition and difficult emotional situation.

From those years, Agustín Fernández, who was only six, remembers that her arrival at her house was like that of Santa Claus: “He often went by to leave a little birthday present, a phrase from a poem.

She chased us

running around

, singing the mornings”.

She was missing during the last months of her life, cutting off contact with family and friends.

She died at 9:20 in the morning, at the age of 73, at the Clinical Hospital of Montevideo due to bilateral bronchopneumonia.

She was unable to contact her family.

Her body was confined to a common grave.

Santos describes her difficult return in this way: "She suffered because she lost Mexico and in Mexico she had already lost everything."

The poet Alcira Soust Scaffo in her youth and in her old age, in images provided by the Gabard Soust family. Courtesy (Family Archive)

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Source: elparis

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