As an Argentine, it pains me to say this: when it comes to literature, we are living in the Mexican century. There was a time, I am told, when Argentine literature was all the rage, and from the stronghold of Buenos Aires, writers waged a constant battle to dominate the discourse, claiming allegiance to (or tearing down) saints and sinners like Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Arlt, Julio Cortázar, Juan L. Ortiz, or former president Domingo Sarmiento. Now, our cultural primacy has faded, or rather, it has been ceded to our North American cousins. Not a day passes, it would seem, without a literary maelstrom surging in Mexican mentions and magazines. New authors emerge from obscurity to stake their own claim in the Federal Republic of Letters, reviving or spitting on the legacy of Octavio Paz, rereading and reorienting the national canon, from La Roma’s Anglo-colony to the martyrs of Tenochtitlan. There is a feminist avant-garde (Brenda Navarro, Brenda Lozano, Christina Rivera Garza), Sebaldian parodies of history (Álvaro Enrigue, Daniel Saldaña París), what Nicolás Medina Mora called the new NAFTA literature (Valeria Luiselli, Yuri Herrera), and some deliciously contradictory cosmopolitans (Guadalupe Nettel, Fernanda Melchor). Mexican literature is far from homogenous in its forms, styles, and influences, and debate over its future is intense and alive and often shapes the discourse of Latin American literature more broadly.

Swirling somewhere near the center of these arguments is the famous yet elusive figure of Elena Garro. Across her career and even after her death, she has been hailed as a feminist icon, a fascist abuela, a madwoman, a free spirit of the forties, a libertine who counted the Spanish language’s most prominent writers as her lovers, and a victim and victimizer of her Nobel-winning ex-husband, Octavio Paz. In 2023, a statue in her native city of Puebla was erected in her honor, only to be found the next day graffitied with the word “PUTA.” The Garro culture wars are disputed mainly between the misogynistic, grouchy, Paz die-hards on one side, and feminist readers who attempt to twist her into a caricature of protest against male oppression on the other. Two new works, Jazmina Barrera’s biography of Garro, The Queen of Swords, and Garro’s book of short stories, The Week of Colors, bring these debates into English, translated by Christina MacSweeney and Megan McDowell respectively for Two Lines Press.

Jazmina Barrera is a novelist and femme de lettres in her own right, and The Queen of Swords leans heavily on her identification with Garro. It is an autobiographical biography, if such a thing exists, in which we get just as much as the author as we do of the subject—we learn about Garro’s life in fragments while also experiencing Barrera’s own archive fever at Princeton University. Barrera documents a troubled, premature birth in 1916 that happened while Garro’s mother was escaping a cheating husband (they eventually got back together), followed by a wild childhood, first in the city of Iguala, in Guerrero state, and then in Mexico City, where Garro went to high school and, according to Barrera, “developed a penchant for arson and set fire to the house of a certain Carolina Cortina.” It was in the capital, in 1935, that she met Octavio Paz, at a friend’s party, and began to be seen not solely in terms of herself but, often, in relation to her husband.

Indeed, most of the debate around Elena Garro is centered on her relationship to Paz, about whether or not she could legally marry him (she was a minor when they wed, but he was only two years her senior), whether she was abusive or he was, whether she was crazy, if he withheld money from her, if he forbade her from writing poetry to avoid intra-marriage competition. The Queen of Swords, eschewing the current penchant for clear heroes and villains, deftly portrays a relationship in all its complexities. With the help of Garro’s archive, Barrera showcases an intense, long-lasting marriage that spans decades and continents. Throughout the years, Garro and Paz came together and separated, visited the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in Spain during the Civil War, lived in Paris and New York City, had a girl whom they cheekily named Helena Paz Garro, and cheated on each other prolifically. While Paz cycled through multiple mistresses, she became involved with Argentine literary titan Adolfo Bioy Casares. In the biography’s darkest moments, Barrera recounts Garro’s attempt at murder-suicide, and her daughter Helena survives more than one encounter with pedophilia by a relative. In a chilling passage, Barrera tells the story of Helena Paz contracting gonorrhea at age four, having her genitals cauterized with hot irons, and being moved by Garro to her grandmother’s house, only to be “raped again.”

There is a corrosive genre of criticism, particularly of women, which takes the complicated life of a writer and forces it into a mystical mold, deeming every action and creation a mystery, an enigma, or a riddle. Clarice Lispector was, not long ago, described by a critic as a “Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster,” while a reader of Muriel Spark claims she was “something of a witch.” These readings are centered on the writer’s torrid affairs and glamorous clothing rather than the work itself. Although Barrera touches on Elena Garro’s influences and creative production, she at times falls into the trap of depicting her as something holier than a mere mortal (“I’m writing by a shelf that looks like an altar to Saint Elena Garro,” she says, “to which I daily add such offerings as photos, post-it notes, to-do lists, and questions”). In one passage, Barrera catches sight of a doe on her way back from the archives, in the Princeton Forest, and muses, “I like to imagine that doe was Elena Garro. ‘The heavens that await me are in the eyes of animals…’”

The question of Garro’s politics is conspicuous by its absence in The Queen of Swords—for the most part. She notes that Garro was against abortion, and never called herself a feminist, yet insists that her work “is filled with denunciations of violence against women, protests, and criticism of male abuse.” Instead of looking into the overall picture of Garro’s ideological development, Barrera focuses on a Trotskyite youth, followed by a seemingly apolitical life, and avoids the question of Garro’s casual collaboration with the CIA and the ruling PRI party, her pronouncements blaming left-wing intellectuals for the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, and her fierce anti-communism, as well as the antisemitism and casual racism of some of her stories.

But luckily, what is usually simple in biography is made more complicated in fiction. The Queen of Swords is, in this sense, immensely useful as a companion to Garro’s masterful book of short stories. The Week of Colors, highly influenced by Juan Rulfo and the emergence of literary genres like magical realism the fantástico (of which Garro’s lover Bioy Casares was a pioneer) features mostly bourgeoise female protagonists who seem to be tormented by their desire, surrounded by their kindly servants as well as ghostly presences and apparitions. They are intensely magnetic tales which—not unlike in Garro’s own relationship to Paz—slouch towards violence and fear.

Take “What Time Is It?” for example, the “Before the Law” of situationships. In it, a woman named Lucía Mitre hides in a Parisian hotel while waiting for her lover Gabriel. She is convinced that he is flying out to see her but, like The Law in Kafka’s parable, he never arrives. In a circular telling, every day she promises the staff that Gabriel is coming, “at nine forty-seven,” then spends day after day in her room, paying her bill bit by bit with jewelry. She is silent and reserved, almost the archetype of a subdued woman, and she passes her time calculating how many hours remain until their promised encounter. The baffled staff assume that she is insane, that her lover doesn’t exist. Then, after a long period of despondency, Madame Mitre dies one day, at exactly nine forty-seven, which of course is when Gabriel Cortina finally shows up. As in Kafka’s story, it is not until he is no longer needed that he appears. (Reading Barrera’s biography, one could ask if the mysterious Gabriel Cortina is not a veiled fictionalization of Adolfo Bioy Casares, who courted Garro while in Paris.)

“Love and desire, in Garro’s short stories, are anything but uncomplicated, and are often engendered by charged, violent situations. Sometimes, this feels not so much a denunciation as an exploration of eros in brutality.”

“What Time Is It?” is a story about yearning, and about the desire that is not produced by the encounter with the loved object, but rather, by its absence. Love and desire, in Garro’s short stories, are anything but uncomplicated, and are often engendered by charged, violent situations. Sometimes, this feels not so much a denunciation as an exploration of eros in brutality—for Garro, he hit me and it felt like a kiss is a constructive principle of the relationships between men and women. Another incredible example arises in “It’s Tlaxcaltecas’ Fault,” a politically suffused short story about Laura, a wealthy housewife who seems to be simultaneously living in 20^th-century Mexico and the time of the Conquest. In the story’s present, she leads a tiresome life, with a jealous and possessive husband named Pablo, and talks mostly with her indigenous servant, Nachita. In the past, however, Laura is tormented by a love affair with a violent man, who, we can venture, is an Atzec, belonging to the ruling tribe of Mexico which was defeated by Hernán Cortez during the Conquest. In the end, she opts for her white husband Pablo instead of her indigenous kin, betraying her lover in the same way the Tlaxcaltecas betrayed Mocteczuma.

“It’s the Tlaxcaltecas’ Fault” is one of the central fables of Mexican literature, often read as a parable of the search for identity during the period of nation building. Laura is a headless woman, unable to think, to recall what is happening. Her memory is lost, she is merely a captive of her desire; the personal and the political become intermeshed in a nightmarish scenario. In this way, Laura’s psychodrama replicates the racially charged sexual fantasies that are foundational to 20^th-century Mexican nationalism, an ideological fairy tale of the neoliberal ruling classes to which Garro (and Barrera) belong. In an early passage, as Laura is recounting her first encounter with the indigenous man to Nachita, she says:

Someday you will find yourself facing your own actions turned into immutable stones just like that stone there, I was told as a child when I was shown the image of a god—I don’t remember now which one. We forget everything, don’t we, Nachita? But it’s only forgotten for a while. Back then, words also seemed to be made of stone, but a fluid and crystalline kind. The stone solidified each word ended, to be written forever in time. Weren’t the words of your elders like that?

The women in The Week of Colors are consumed by their love, which is always bloody and intense. Men in their world are violent and terrifying, but therefore arousing. In “The Ring,” a mother sees her daughter succumb to a curse when a young man, a love interest, steals a golden ring from her. The young man is murdered, and the daughter, linked to him through violence, dies too. In “The Tiztla Theft,” a criminal investigation takes place after a group of vicious men enters a private house, and only the servants and children, like in the Odyssey, can distinguish the truth. In “Era Mercurio,” a man cheats on his fiancé with an enigmatic foreigner and becomes convinced that her lover was Mercury, the trickster God of commerce. Men are a menacing presence for Elena Garro, a fearful and intense irruption into a dull, everyday life lead by women and their attendants. Violence, in this case, makes their characters not so much victims of the men themselves but rather of their desire for them, of the intention and willingness to submit while knowing perfectly well that the consequences will be painful. Garro’s relationship with Paz might, from what Barrera relates in her biography, have been animated by a similar dynamic.

Without recognizing this exploration of eros and violence in her stories, all we are left with is a holy Garro, a victim and a saint, a martyr of Octavio Paz. This is useful for the culture wars but less interesting for readers whose lives are flesh and blood, not just paper and ink. If, instead, we treat Garro as a serious writer and not a feminist or misogynistic fantasy, we are faced with a body of work that is much more nuanced, and interesting, than the culture wars would have us believe.