Crossed Words between the Lines: The Confusion of Voices in the Love Soliloquy of Elena Poniatowska's Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela

In a recent interview upon the publication of her novel La piel del cielo [The Sky's Skin] (2001), the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska reflects on the importance of posing questions for her career as a journalist. Poniatowska believes that journalism "le da la oportunidad de preguntar, más que de contestar [offers her a chance to ask, more so than to answer]." According to her interviewer, her answers are correspondingly enigmatic: her affirmations, negations, clarifications and pauses, "rompen cualquier esquema previamente diseñado [break away from any previously designed pattern]." The writer explains: "Nunca me siento segura de nada, yo soy una mujer llena de preguntas que nunca tengo una sola respuesta, por eso pregunto, pero en realidad nunca he tenido ninguna seguridad [I never feel sure about anything, I am a woman full of questions who never has a single answer, for that reason I ask, but I never have had any real certainties]." ¹ That same combination of form-breaking pattern and of uncertainty as both a motivation for and an outcome of dialogue shapes Poniatowska's creative narrative and is particularly evident in her epistolary novel Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela (1978). ²

From its very title, Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela seems to skimp on information, to send the readers elsewhere (the text, its problematic sources), searching not just for the missing words between the phrases separated by the comma, but for the hints that only confound them, their sole certainty in the interrogations constantly arising in the gap between the narrator's voice and silence. ³ Quiela consists of twelve letters supposedly written by the Russian painter Angelina Beloff (Quiela) to the Mexican painter Diego Rivera between 19 October 1921 and 22 July 1922. ⁴ Beloff writes from Paris, alone and abandoned after Rivera's departure and return to Mexico after living with her for ten years. Questions immediately arise: what relationship to assume between Poniatowska's characters and their historical referents; which sources the writer uses in her documentation; what kind of relationship actually existed between Rivera and Beloff; ⁵ the time when he returned to Mexico; ⁶ why he never responded to Beloff's letters except to send her money; and, lastly, how to classify the text. The twelve letters are followed by a coda in the author's voice in which she acknowledges her debt to Bertram Wolfe's The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera and narrates an anecdote about a later chance encounter between Rivera and Beloff in Mexico when he does not even recognize her. ⁷ This coda becomes problematic for several reasons. First, its detached tone contrasts with that of the rest of the novel. Furthermore, it reinstates uncertainty regarding Quiela's fate: does Beloff ever recover from Rivera's effect on her life and work? And finally, its apocryphal nature invites further analysis. ⁸

Written in an almost disconcertingly lyrical tone, the letters convey the emotional fluctuations of the protagonist in her solitude, her agonizing poverty, her demoralization, and her creative block. It is the first winter since Rivera's departure, evocative of another harsh winter that had precipitated the death of their little child four years earlier: "En París, en 1917, había una epidemia de meningitis. Después todo fue muy rápido [In Paris, in 1917, there was an outbreak of meningitis. Thereafter, everything went very fast]" (Quiela, p. 17). ⁹ Quiela desperately wishes to join Diego in Mexico; she suffers for not having had another child with him, and her abandonment and solitude reconfirm the couple's distancing already implicit during the little child's funeral: "Ese día hizo un frío atroz o a lo mejor yo lo traía...