Elena Poniatowska: Carlos Monsiváis

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see you , I'll look for you , I'll talk to you during the week , I'll stop by your house , Call me tomorrow , I'll have it for you on Thursday are 17-syllable haikus that began to proliferate starting in 1957. “At Kiko's, at 10 for breakfast, I'll wait for you tomorrow without fail.”

Your ghost would come to the meeting. I'd dial your number, you'd fake your voice, you'd sound like Sara García. Enough, Monsi , don't act like this, we all know it's you! Years have passed, and today, overwhelmed by your absence, we'd like to hear your laughter. After some time, and after consulting Rafael Barajas , "El Fisgón," I concluded that it was easier for a bomb to blow up the Monument to the Revolution than for you to keep your promises.

Even though Monsiváis was plunging us into the abyss, at the exact moment we were saying, "Now it's over," in that bitter hour, rescue was coming. A providential call from Saint Simon brought us back to the beginning. The warm, almost sing-song " How are you?" (because Monsi had a very good voice and we even sang in English) reopened the floodgates, and everything was back to square one.

What instinct guided him? What guardian angel made him dial the expected number? What was his catechism for reluctant friends? Carlos Monsiváis, you suffered it firsthand. He was a source of sleeplessness for those of us who loved him and hated him in the same breath. We tried to get him out of our lives before he got us out of his.

There are such unique and indispensable men. Carlos Monsiváis was one of them for our daily anxiety. We seek his approval and judgment. Octavio Paz wrote that Monsiváis was a head-hunter: “The case of Carlos Monsiváis fascinates me: he is neither a novelist nor an essayist, but rather a chronicler, but his extraordinary prose texts are more than the dissolution of these genres, they are their conjunction. A new language appears in Monsiváis—the language of a street kid from Mexico City—an extremely intelligent young man who has read all the books, all the comics, seen all the movies. Monsiváis: a new literary genre...”

When the poet Alí Chumacero presented Monsi with the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in February 1996 for The Rituals of Chaos, Octavio Paz was delighted to attend and declared that the life of Mexicans from the 1960s to the present would be infinitely sadder and poorer if we did not read and were guided by this intensely playful and moral pen .

When giving thanks for the Villaurrutia, Monsiváis made people laugh by imitating the dedications that innocent people write in their professional theses: To my godfather of generation, Mr. Guillermo Ortíz, encouragement, norm and light of my career or To Mr. Arsenio Farell, whose generosity is not of this time .

If I were to repeat what Monsiváis said about each of us, he would remain like Saint Simon, the man with the pillar in the desert, petrified with horror for centuries to come. The only thing that consoles me is that Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Norman Mailer, André Gide, and Joyce himself used misogyny, I believe, to counteract the power of its poison.

You're so mean! You're so mean! I met Monsiváis in 1957 on the corner of Bucareli and Reforma, the heart of journalism, next to José Emilio Pacheco. I always saw them as extremely thin, agile, implacable with themselves ( "my text is rubbish ," Monsi used to say; " my poems are going to be pulverized with good reason by Alí Chumacero ," José Emilio predicted). Both with dark hair, mordant, mischievous, and bespectacled, they drank coffee and read aloud to each other what they called monstrosities or rubbish . They were both poets and wrote for Medio Siglo and for the magazine of the gynecologist Elías Nandino, who heroically gave birth to it and named it Estaciones. From then on, the three of us loved each other very much because we were united by laughter and we never confided in each other. Monsiváis felt obliged to half-love me on the orders of his mother, Doña Ester, but without his intervention I would be several meters underground in the pit of Monsivaisian slander.

As we all knew, he was sharp and sly, he transformed into a kind of cordial virtuosity, which he performed, smacking himself like the Cheshire Cat, smiling at the unsuspecting Alice, baring his teeth in Wonderland. Those of us who loved him confirmed that Monsiváis's face became increasingly feline, his telephone laughter closer to a meow, and we saw how his hair prematurely whitened and his claws sharpened. As time passed, Monsiváis increasingly resembled his now-deceased cats: Rosa Luz Emburgo, Ansia de Militancia, Eva Sión, Fetiche de Peluche, and Fray Gatoslomé de las Bardas.

We talked almost until the day of his death and our meeting took place when he was 28:

–Why do you never talk about women?

-That?

–Why do you never talk about women?

-What's that?

–Carlos, stop making fun of yourself. Why don't you talk about women?

–Well, because I'm a misogynist and because I don't see...

"What's misogynistic, Carlos?" I interrupted.

–The one who hates women, right?

–Do you hate them, Carlos?

"No, what I told you is that there are no important women working in Mexico right now. There's Rosario Castellanos, who is an excellent poet and a poor novelist..."

At that time, we never dreamed that Claudia Sheinbaum would be our President, something Monsi would have loved.

At a very young age, upon meeting Marta Lamas, his avowed misogyny didn't prevent him from decisively supporting the women's cause. From then on, he became an absolute and indispensable defender of the girl Paulina, in Mexicali—who at age 13 was denied a legal abortion throughout Baja California. Parodying a Church leader who believed women should avoid miniskirts and low-cut tops to avoid being raped, Monsiváis advised our sexual sisters to go out into the street without bodies. He collaborated with Marta Lamas on the magazine Debate Feminista, attended every event or conference to which his beloved feminist invited him, and no one at Bellas Artes mourned him more than those of us who made up the magazine fem., to which he also contributed.

An essential thorn in the side of Mexican life from the 1950s to the present, Monsiváis distinguished himself not only as the author of celebrated chronicles but also as a political analyst of our daily lives. Nothing that happened in the country escaped his notice. The first half of the 20th century belongs to José Vasconcelos, Alfonso Reyes, and Salvador Novo, just as the second half belongs to Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes, and the third, more popular and relatable, to Carlos Monsiváis (the latter among others, as he would say). Irreverent, caustic, sharp, critical, his mind maintained a natural and perfect relationship with his prose. Whether it was art criticism or political criticism, everything that came out of Monsiváis's mind was tinged with two virtues that don't always go together as well as in his case: intelligence and humor. Therefore, any commentary on his life's work would be incomplete without his sagacity and sense of humor, which linked him to the Swift school, always ironic and never condescending. All public figures faced the test of his wit, and every politician religiously read "Por mi madre, bohemios" (Because of my mother, Bohemians). Humor in Monsiváis was social criticism, exposing falsehood and ridicule. Monsiváis's humor had an unsurpassed critical sense. "Every humorist is first a moralist ," Monsi once wrote.

After 32 years of appearing every Monday, first in Mexico City in the Cultura magazine and starting in 1985 in La Jornada, many fans of Por mi madre, bohemios (For my mother, bohemians) agreed with the anonymous R., a voice of lucidity and reason. As essential as the glasses that hid her malevolence were her commentaries on cultural, social, and political events, which went down in history as the daily log of Monsiváis's wit.

In 1996, La Jornada published Por mi madre, bohemios (For my mother, bohemians), a book illustrated by El Fisgón, a friend and fellow bibliophile and antiquarian of the now legendary Monsiváis for years. The late PAN member José Ángel Conchello declared at the time: "He's evil, but one applauds everything he says because the wit with which he destroys both friends and strangers, Tyrians and Trojans, left and right, is admirable ." Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas explained that his presidential candidate would be Carlos Monsiváis, and even today we celebrate the fact that Subcomandante Marcos entrusted his spirit to him.

In Por mi madre bohemios (Bohemians for My Mother), PRI members were constant subjects of his satire, and state governors were careful not to make overly folkloric statements. Monsiváis, ferocious with ecclesiastical authorities, deputies, senators, and columnists, always sided with minorities. Those who contributed most to his harvest of stupidity were the holders of public space, whom he pinned with a pin, just as the Monsiváis figure delighted cartoonists, starting with his dear friend Naranjo. Monsiváis collected caricatures, paintings, miniatures, and precious books in La Lagunilla and at flea markets, and went further: he donated his entire collection to El Estanquillo, which we visited with a cheerful: "Today, Sunday, we're going to see Monsi."