Socorro Venegas / Elena Poniatowska

Socorro Venegas is strong and forceful and dedicates herself to letters body and soul. She is head of the Directorate of Publications and Editorial Development of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Winner of the 2004 Carlos Fuentes National Novel Award, she received honorable mention at the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in 2010, at the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL). A scholarship recipient from the State Fund for Culture and the Arts of Morelos, the National Fund for Culture and the Arts and the Mexican Writers Center, she was also selected in an artistic exchange for a residency at the Writer’s Room in New York. Today, in this talk, sitting on the old sofa in my house, Socorro responds with the clear and strong voice that comes from her multiple triumphs. For some mysterious reason, her presence reminds me of my great friend Margarita García Flores, who died before her time, but she left her mark on the University Gazette and in the devotion that Carlos Monsiváis and I and many other writers have for him. Now only I am left, about to turn 92 years old.

–The novel that is now being published in Spain is titled The night will be black and white, that I published for the first time in ERA in 2009. It is a story that I worked on at the Mexican Writers Center with Alí Chumacero and Carlos Montemayor for a year, but since I did not have confidence in what was written, I kept it. One day, Daniel Sada offered to read it and warned me that it would take time, because he had many pending readings. Two days later he called me. He had read it in one sitting; He liked it a lot and he believed it was time to publish it.

-How cool!

–It was a great joy, and he suggested I take it to the ERA publishing house, which looked for a co-editor, and UNAM was interested. My work had very favorable repercussions on my spirit. It had very nice reviews and reviews. I remember that of Sergio González Rodríguez, who stated: It is a book called to endure. I miss Sergio a lot, because he was very generous: something I wrote about, something he praised.

–I am very aware, Socorro, of the dramatic kidnapping of Sergio González Rodríguez, and I remember that he spoke about it frequently; He never recovered…

–Sergio had many after-effects from the beating he received. His was a hard life.

(We both remain silent, perhaps united by a silent prayer.)

–And your book? Will the night be black and white?

–The publisher sent my first novel to the Sor Juana Prize at the FIL Guadalajara and it didn’t win, but they told me that it was the first time that the jury had awarded an honorable mention.

“It had a nice path and I managed to get the ERA publisher to release the rights to publish it in other countries. In Mexico there are no longer copies. Now that the contract expires, it would be interesting to redo it. There was a lot of interest in Spain, and in Argentina they bet on it.

“In that book, I was looking for my father; He has a very strong autobiographical component based on the death of my little brother. Finding him and explaining my life was my search at that time; I explored my father’s alcoholism, I tried to understand the world in which he had needed to take refuge, the collapse of a family due to the death of a child and what death means for those of us left to experience that loss. I was 11 years old when my brother died, at nine; I do not tell the story as it happened, but rather I delve into the painful experience of that loss and give it a new meaning. I was very clear that I was writing a novel, not a chronicle or a story; The work I did with Carlos Montemayor at the Mexican Writers Center was very important…”

–Did he personally take care of your work?

–Yes, we worked very rigorously, the sessions were every week; I lived in Cuernavaca and I came like a pilgrim to see what was happening with my book, to see how it was read; I was very lucky because sometimes my colleagues did very badly, the criticism was very strong, very rigorous, very tough, and I worked very well with Montemayor, I never had to redo anything fundamental; My writing was flowing very well. I have always felt very grateful for everything I learned from him.

–In addition to Montemayor, wasn’t Alí Chumacero a critical and very attentive reader?

–I learned a lot from Chumacero about the use of language, because I have always been a great reader of poetry, I like it a lot, and I feel that it has formed me, perhaps more than prose, and Alí was a master of language. It was very rich to learn from him. I could never imagine, at that time, that one day I would edit books at UNAM, that has been a happy and totally unexpected arc of time.

I was born in San Luis Potosí. Amparo Dávila lived a good period of her life there. She told me that there she met Alfonso Reyes and he called her to make her his secretary.

–It’s good that you talk about Amparo Dávila, because for me he was a very special character. She explained to me that she could no longer drive because her car had a life of its own and took her wherever he wanted. But, Amparo, you’re the one with your hands on the wheel! No, Elena, the car takes me wherever it wants.. Amparo Dávila married the painter Pedro Coronel, tall and strong, and she was very small, she looked like a little fish attached to the back of a huge and angry whale that any harpoon would slip off. Run and leave itI advised her, and she replied: I can’t, because I love him and we have two daughters..

–I know Jaina – Socorro explains to me – well because I worked as an editor at the FCE and there we made a book of stories about Amparo Dávila, her mother; It was an illustrated edition. Amparo still managed to select her stories. She was already very old, but very lucid. She died at almost 90 years old.

–Socorro, Culture in Mexico dedicated one of its issues to four Mexican writers: Guadalupe Dueñas, Emma Godoy, Carmen Rosenzweig (whom I interviewed with great affection) and Amparo, who appeared with a hairstyle like María Félix, unlike Emma Godoy, who gave me a little oval all wrinkled of his beautiful face. Let’s go back to your work, Socorro, because you make me think that, unlike you, I have never written anything about the serious things that have happened to me…

–My second novel is called Wedding dress, and it has to do with my experience with widowhood, because I was widowed at 26 years old. Tusquets published it. In it I explore other themes that cannot be called autobiographical or autofiction, but in my Wedding dress There is everything I learned by force with the sudden death of a husband from an aneurysm, unlike what I experienced as a child with my brother, who was very sick for five of the nine years he lived. My husband died suddenly. I worked on these two life experiences both in my novels and in short stories published in Spain, in the publishing house Páginas de Espuma. The memory where it burned, the first book of short stories, had such a good response that it made the editor of Password publish my The night will be black and white y Wedding dress, which Tusquets had already launched, as well as The cursed part, title by Georges Bataille. In Argentina, Dolores Reyes did a very fine reading of my novel: she talks about the father as a being that women in Latin America constantly look for, while our mother is our own writing. In The night will be black and white There is a character, a young woman who tries to understand her father and at the same time decides her vocation as a writer. There is another character who is a writer inspired a little by Ricardo Garibay, my friend and my teacher.

–He had a very powerful voice.

–I met Ricardo Garibay when he was very old in Cuernavaca and was sick with cancer. That great character read aloud every day and spoke very well; He gave me very important advice and I took what I wanted from his recommendations. He knew that many members of the literary community criticized him and he had a phrase that I recovered in my novel: They don’t despise me, I despise them.