They were ten women determined to change the course of culture in Mexico, in the midst of the convulsive decade of the eighties, when the cultural canon was marked and unquestionably macho.
They just wanted to write, eat and look good.
They decided to call themselves 'The elegant ones' because they all shared a taste for good dress and also for good taste, that is why to belong to the privileged group they had to be obese women and, on top of that, be proud and satisfied with it.
Didí Gutiérrez (Mexico City, 1983) has brought them together in a book of stories to finish what they could not specify, in part, due to the earthquake that shook the country in 1985, and because all of them had been kept in the drawer from Gutiérrez's bedside table, for more than a decade.
Wendy Tienda, Susana Miranda, Tania Hinojosa, Lola Herrera, Julia Méndez, Roberta Marentes, Fidelia Astorga, Aurora Montesinos, Alí Boites and Nora Centeno make up this peculiar group of exceptional women whose stories are revealed page by page in the book.
Before each story, Gutiérrez makes a brief description of how she was able to find each author and slips in some details about her personalities: “The first time I saw her was in a
boutique
of one of the residential neighborhoods of Mexico City.
She summoned me there under the pretext that I would help her choose her outfit for a funeral, ”reads the first story by Panamanian-Mexican Wendy Tienda.
"Julia's case is strange, everyone knows her, but no one wants to talk about her, probably due to her links with organized crime," she recounts before the scatological tale
Las tipas duras se lavan las mano
, by Julia Méndez, who was fan of Lucía Berlin and took advantage of the name to commit a crime.
All the stories take place in Las Bonitas, a kind of shared universe, a city with wild dogs from which only one of the compiled stories escapes, that of Montesinos (
The days, a cafeteria
), -and the only erotic one- who is described by Gutiérrez as “the rebel of the group”.
In Las Bonitas, this kind of female, Mexican and eighties Macondo, the stories of these rising stars are developed, extinguished by tragedy and the fate that almost any author or artist suffered in those years: anonymity and forced editorial abandonment.
Gutiérrez has summarized the origin of
The Elegant Women
in three acts: the first, when ten years ago I was a cultural journalist and wanted to write fiction.
The second, when he became entangled and fascinated by what he read by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, dazzled, in turn, by another of the great universal Latin Americans: Jorge Luis Borges.
“For him (Borges) the drive to narrate was everything.
He wanted to narrate the world.
That everything had a story form, ”says Gutiérrez.
Then it all started.
Didí Gutiérrez, anthologist of 'The elegant ones', in a business in the center of Mexico City.José Pablo Díaz
Cling to fiction to be able to with reality
In 1936, Jorge Luis Borges included in his book
Brief History of Eternity
a critical review of a book entitled
The approach to Al-Mu'tasim
, or
The approach to Almotásim
.
In his text, Gutiérrez says excitedly, Borges described that work by an Indian-British author with such care, detail and with a fine and marvelous narration, that whoever read it was probably fascinated and eager to get a copy.
This is how it happened to one of the great friends of the Argentine writer, also the author of great works: Adolfo Bioy Casares, who, stunned, commissioned the book from the publisher, which turned out to be a non-existent work.
A ghost book invented by Borges.
Like Bioy Casares, many of the readers of
Las elegantas
can search for the names of the writers anthologized by Gutiérrez, without much success.
It happened to Juan Becerra, a librarian and promoter of reading for more than two decades: “I was so hooked on reading the stories that I consulted the Encyclopedia of Mexico and found nothing.
I wondered why there was no data on them,” he recounts.
On July 15, after having finished reading the book and having reviewed it for different media outlets, Becerra invited Gutiérrez to present it at the Polytechnic University of the Valley of Mexico.
“It was a very important moment for me to be able to talk about
The elegant
before a university forum.
In addition, the documentary rescue in the fiction that Didí does... and that feminine gaze that is rarely talked about, for example, about the 1985 earthquake: it has always been said that the only one who died there was Rockdrigo González, but they also".
The 1985 earthquake and the pottery that fell on top of the women who wrote
In the prologue of
Las elegant
, one of the best that has been written in recent years, according to Becerra, Gutiérrez explains that these women began a literary workshop with the Uruguayan poet who had just arrived in Mexico in 1983, Leonor Enciso, with the purpose of "creating a mythical world by several hands".
A year later they published the
Elegant
e Manifesto, whose first postulate refers to the desire to produce the first team-made work.
On September 19, 1985, the book project headed by Enciso was interrupted by the tragedy of the earthquake.
The title would be, precisely,
Las Bonitas
, and it would group together those stories that they would have written during the time they met to write and eat.
Both Enciso and Nora Centeno died in their homes the morning of that day.
'The elegant ones' did not meet again and the project was forgotten.
This book is the reconstruction of what the earthquake buried.
And an attempt to name the desires of artists who could not see the light.
Copy of the 'Elegant Manifesto'. Didí Gutíerrez
Didí Gutiérrez wrote this story ten years ago, but it was not until 2021 that the publisher Paraíso Perdido published it.
Consulted by EL PAÍS, the writer has reported that she designed each of the characters: the life, the concerns, the families, the styles, the motivations and the passions of each one of them, individually, and separately.
“I think that all that work that I undertook more than a decade ago, I would not do it again.
I certainly put a lot of time into it and I think now I wouldn't have that energy anymore,” she says.
This bet has also been on the editorial side.
Sandra Liera, director of Lost Paradise, assures that the work still has a long way to go, and is grateful that it continues to be received with great surprise and expectation.
“In several presentations, Didí has appeared as an anthologist and researcher and disclaims authorship credits, which is something that seems to me, to begin with, risky as an editorial decision.
But I think that's also part of the genius of this book.
Didí separates herself a little from the authorship of her own stories to take the fiction a degree further”, she assures.
Gutiérrez even reports that more aspects of the works of the authors have emerged that are beginning to emerge from the different fictions created, now, by their readers.
In the story by Roberta Marentes, the sixth in the book, the protagonist's friend Gertrudis, who recounts her story, gives a speech in which she notes the following: "When they read the text, they celebrated my ability to recreate the moments Shared with Gertrude.
They say that writers are liars, and, at the insistence of these gentlemen, I confess to them, tonight, that I saw fit to invent a little.
I had no other choice."
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