NewsLatin AmericaPrincess Poniatowska has her heart divided between Poland and Mexico in this World Cup

Princess Poniatowska has her heart divided between Poland and Mexico in this World Cup

The referee has just awarded a penalty against Mexico and Elena Ponitaowska, very attentive to the screen, asks:

—And that one who is dressed in black, who is he?

The 90-year-old Mexican writer is sitting in front of the television in the living room of her house, in one of those armchairs that stretches to comfortably rest her legs. With the enigma of the man in black solved and the penalty saved by Memo Ochoa, the Mexican goalkeeper, she is clear about which of the two she gets. “It must be horrible to be the referee, with the pressure to make a mistake and ruin the life of another. I like the goalkeepers better because they are there all by themselves, very nervous, waiting for the final judgment of the goal to fall on them. They are heroes.”

The Cervantes Prize winner is also clear that she goes with Mexico, despite the blue and Polish blood that runs through her veins. Although in addition to Poland he has sympathy for more World Cup teams. Through France, where he was born and lived until he was 10 years old. And through the United States, the country to which her family sent her as a teenager to study in a boarding school for nuns where the only man she had was the priest in the confessional.

Elena Poniatowska and Conrrado Martinez watch the Mexican and Polish teams meet at the World Cup in Qatar.Nayeli Cruz

Helène Elizabeth Louise Amelie Paula Dolores Poniatowska Love, her full name, has a family forest more than a tree. Her father’s family, the Torellis, were rivals to the Borgias in 17th-century Parma. Persecuted by the powerful dynasty of patrons, they went into exile in Poland and changed their last name to camouflage themselves: from Torelli (Italian bull) to Ciołek (Polish bull). The first Ciolek married the last Poniatowska and they changed their last name and lineage again. The couple’s son was already born as a nephew to the last King of Poland and 2nd Prince Poniatowski.

She tells all of this herself. the polish lover (Seix Barral, 2019), the historical novel where he reviews the history of his distant great-great-grandfather, King Stanisław August Poniatowski. After the monarch fell at the end of the 18th century, the European powers divided up Poland and the family fled again. This time to France. Back in Paris, his grandfather, Andre Poniatowski, had the patience to look as far back as possible and found a possible origin in 843, with Ludolf of Saxony.

Without taking her eyes off the television, Ponitowska remembers that all that aristocratic skein made Carlos Monsivais, one of the great Mexican chroniclers and perhaps her best friend, laugh. Like her, Monsivais did not know much about soccer either. “The one who knows everything is Juan.” She refers to Juan Villoro, another of the great Mexican writers, a disciple of Monsivais himself. “I was a good friend of her mother, who was a psychoanalyst, she would put the coconut things in your place.”

Between memory and memory, a Polish player writhes on the ground after a Mexican mess. The rest of his teammates surround the referee, shouting with their hands up. “Look, these Poles are very passionate”, he blurts out before explaining the details of his first and only trip to the country of his ancestors. She went with her mother in 1966, shortly before publishing her chronicle of the Tlatelolco massacre that would place her as the godmother of the new journalism, but since she was already a well-known reporter for her interviews, above all, with important men.

Poniatowska in the studio where she writes.
Poniatowska in the studio where she writes.Nayeli Cruz

Of that Poland he remembers a country with many deficiencies, subjected at that time to the Soviet yoke. “They had little to eat but what they always had was a bottle of vodka.” His companion during the trip was his friend Sergio Pitol, another Mexican Cervantes Prize winner, expert and translator of Slavic literature. “She had fallen in love with a Pole and was going crazy. One day he had a car crash and spent 40 days in the hospital”. Poniatowska also considers Poland a cultured country, very intellectual, “everyone knew how to read, write, many played music”. And above all, “they are a very Catholic, very religious people.”

That cultural baggage was one of the springs that promoted the resistance against the Soviet occupation. “They hated the Russians,” recalls the writer, giving more familiar examples. A distant uncle, another Poniatowski, was one of Napoleon’s marshals in the failed campaign to conquer Stalingrad. Rather than surrender to the Russians, the soldier decided to throw himself into the Niemen River followed by his entire battalion. “His name is engraved on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.”

That mythical anecdote was also reminded by her maternal grandmother, another aristocrat -this time Russian- to her mother, the Mexican Paula Amor, as a warning when she told her that she had gotten a descendant of that French soldier of Polish origin as a boyfriend. . Poniatowska’s maternal family were wealthy landowners close to dictator Porfirio Diaz and had fled Mexico after the Revolution. The writer’s parents met at a ball organized by the Rothschilds, the millionaire German bankers.

The plains football illustrations from the book "it all started on sunday" that Poniatowska wrote and a portrait of her mother, Maria de los Dolores Amor de Yturbe.
The llanero soccer illustrations from the book “Todo empecio el domingo” that Poniatowska wrote and a portrait of her mother, Maria de los Dolores Amor de Yturbe.Nayeli Cruz

“My dad was a very thin and handsome young man. Mom was struck by the fact that she jumped on top of a piano. They fell madly in love, but she suffered a lot because my grandparents were very stiff.” Poniatowska smiles whenever she recalls some controversial detail from her past. She is a kind of protective shield against melodrama. Her nose twitches up and her thin upper lip almost disappears into an elastic smile of teeth and gums.

He has inherited the delicate features of his father, Jean Joseph Evremond Sperry Poniatowski, successor to the Polish throne, a French soldier with a Californian mother who fought with General De Gaulle in Algeria and later against the Nazis in World War II. On the first floor of her house, lined with books from floor to ceiling, she has a photo of him. He appears in profile, hair gelled and dressed in uniform. Relaxed, he smokes a cigarette while talking to the bartender at the Ritz hotel in Paris with a half smile.

There is something of that smile in the childish grimace with which his daughter dismounted her interviewees since the fifties. The young reporter made her way into that world of men playing a naive, corny and apparently harmless character. With that strategy, she achieved memorable interviews with Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros or the writer Jose Revueltas, both in jail. The interview that she did to Diego Rivera at that time is famous. “Are those teeth of yours milk?” asked the young princess. To which the totem and great macho of Mexican muralism replied: “Yes, and with these I eat the inquisitive Polish girls.”

The writer smiles as she watches the game.
The writer smiles as she watches the game.Nayeli Cruz

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