Resistance

Alcira Soust watches storm clouds and pink skies through the small window of a restroom in the eighth floor of the Tower of Humanities where she has found herself trapped. It is 1968. The army has taken UNAM, in a flagrant violation of the university’s autonomy. Alcira takes a deep breath and, to remain calm, she tries to picture her natal Durazno in Uruguay, the noise of cicadas in the summer, the rich flavor of well-prepared mate, the rusty autumn leaves. She brings to memory precise details of loved faces. How beautiful Sulma is—one of her sisters—with that elegant and somewhat feline way of walking. Gloria is the other, they write letters frequently, what a mischievous face her kids have—she’d like to have one of the pictures she sent, but she has to rely in her memory alone. She remembers the texture of that stamped poplin dress, which she wore sometime, when everyone called her Mima, when she was still beautiful, when she taught in a modest rural school. The bell rings in her ears and the hum of children’s games in the yard seems music for her. What did she wear that time at the Jockey Club party? Who knows. What nonsense comes to mind. 

Memories keep coming to fill the hours. Poems make her feel calm, she knows so many by heart… She knows all Mexican poets, those who were born here and those who arrived from the Republican Spain, so hurt. Pedro Garfias’ clear eyes and words come to her over and over again: 
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer makes her smile: 
Is he talking to me? She wonders. She closes her eyes and see with total precision León Felipe’s beard, his humble eyes hidden behind a thick pair of glasses in a black frame, and she listens to his rough voice recite: 
She likes that poem. That is exactly how she wants her poetry to be. She summons these verses as a mantra over and over again to survive fear, cold, hunger, madness. Oh, madness! A ghost that always stalks her. What if she had gone out with everyone else, after having played León Felipe’s poems on the loudspeaker to confront the army? Such an irony, while soldiers are received with his poetry, that very same day the poet dies. 

What if, instead of hiding, she had joined the others? Would she have ended up being deported, disappeared, or tortured like many others in that unfortunate year of 1968? Would she have been one more, humiliated, with her arms raised facing a wall? Alcira did not want to find out. Maybe out of fear, maybe out of courage she preferred the protection of that white-tailed jail, the humidity of that cold restroom, the unceasing throbbing drop. “Resist”, she told herself, and she resisted in the border of delirium, with her imagination galloping to hold her up. How many poems did she write in the air because she didn’t have paper and pencil? How many colorful drawings like the ones she made with her children? 

She must have thought thoroughly about her friends. About José Revueltas with whom she shared a mimeograph and long nights typing stencils to publish their Poetry in Arms journal, where they always included verses by Éluard, Verlaine, Rimbaud. But also her own, not ashamed of sharing space with the great poets, because poetry is a weapon: it changes history, it is Revolution, active participation, no matter if she is old and has lost her teeth. Where did she lose them? Who knows. People say she lost them in that dirty sink in the Tower of Humanities, where her reason became also entangled. Or was that before? 

Maybe she is ashamed of her lack of teeth, since she always covers her mouth, like in that picture where a bucket of flowers is hiding the toothless hole. But deep inside, being ugly is something she does not give a fuck about. Who cares about the years? She is young with the students of 1968 when she brings them her hand to change the world. It is forbidden to forbid. And sure she is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to defending her own. This way, Alcira slowly becomes a myth. 

Over time, I came to feel her so close to me, as if we were old friends from the Southern Cone, but I regret to admit that I never met Alcira, I didn’t even know of her existence. When I studied Hispanic Literature, she was no longer around the faculty. She had moved to Montevideo where, once again, she got lost in the streets. Like so many stories, it seemed that this one was also going to become silent. I first learnt of her in 2004, while participating in a radio program recording for Radio UNAM in which I had the fortune to read a wonderful text by Roberto Bolaño, chapter IV of The Savage Detectives. The author names her Auxilio Lacouture, but she is unmistakably recognizable. The only lines which did not belong to that book were the final ones: 
I felt lucky to have been invited to that program at Radio UNAM. Undoubtedly, my bond with Alcira could have ended there. But the days went by and the character would not abandon me. I found communicating vessels within my own story in this passionate Latin American woman who had fallen in love with Mexico and decided to settle here forever, adopting the country as her own, and UNAM as her home. I realized this was the ideal text that I had been looking for to make a one-person show—the ultimate test for any actress or actor—and that same year we staged it under the direction of Antonio Algarra. 

However, I still wondered if such a character had really existed. At that time there was almost about her to be known. There was some reference on the internet about the thesis she had written in 1952, during her stay in Michoacán, when she had come to study a graduate course on education at the Center for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CIALC). She was a brilliant student and not much more. But, little by little, her outlines became clearer to me. Friends or colleagues who had been in the faculty before me, knew her. I discovered José Revueltas’ words about her: “Alcira, my god! Wonderful, beautiful, so fair and pure, so noble, earthly, beloved, endearing, nothing of this world! I don’t know what to tell you. I love you.” Reading those lines made my heart skip a beat. 

I started collecting bits of anecdotes. During my presentations there were always people waiting for me at the exit to bring me a drawing, a picture, one of her poems, or simply to tell me an anecdote. “Alcira lived in my house”, many told me proudly. Others were afraid of the vociferous Alcira who shouted at those who approached her in the hallways of the faculty. When Alfredo Zitarrosa—an Uruguayan singer-songwriter with a deep voice—came, she always went to greet him with flowers and applauded him wildly from the front row. A friend gave me a colorful poster that she painted, dedicated to UNAM’s Pumas, because her love for this institution also extended to the soccer team of which she was the most loyal supporter. The stories around her have no end. 

Now that she has become a myth, she would laugh and think they are all crazy. She might even grow angry about it. Why do they talk about her, who was so austere, who gave everything away, who didn’t even want to own a house, always living on the borrowed? She, the most outsider of outsiders, would never have imagined that an entire hall at the MUAC would have been dedicated to her with the title To write poetry. To live, where? [see box] or that her grandnephew Agustín Fernández Gabard would have made that loving documentary titled Alcira, and the field of ears of wheat. She surely would have loved the performances that were once made in her beloved faculty dedicated to remembering her. 

Alcira has achieved a place of recognition, not only in the history of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters but also in the history of UNAM, as a symbol of resistance and courage, as well as of art and transgression. Hold the fame, Alcira, because you earned it, you planted a seed in the hearts of many and we need your rebelliousness as we need air. 

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