Luis Graciano Velazquez. March/5th/2012. Teoria del arte y la Literatura.

Waiting Faithfully: Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela

Elena Poniatowska wrote in 1978 her short story title Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela. This story tells us about a woman, but more than a woman it tells us about the way a woman feels, how she defines herself and how she struggles with that self definition that she has come to accept completely. Quiela, whose actual name was Angelina Beloff, was the lover of Diego Rivera during his professional training in Paris. This story could easily be read as a series of letters that an obsesses and heartbroken woman sends to man on another country who simply sends her money but never actually answers, it can be read as Quielas ramblings on how much she misses Diego, or it can be read as a mere work of fiction. It is most definitely not my place to unravel such things, but it is so to tell how this Quiela is in fact a modern Penelope, who keeps knitting an endless tapestry. Quiela is our modern Penelope, the forsaken wife of Ulisses from The Odyssey. She is a woman who has all the faith and patience in the world to wait for her beloved, she maintains everything in order for him to return, and she in way prays to the gods so he returns home soon. She also knits a memento that when she is done will bring Diego back to her, the pen she glides across the paper on her letters are her threads, and so she keeps knitting, waiting for her Odysseus to return from across the sea. But this Penelope has no suitors, she herself has managed to keep them at bay, this

Penelope has no stately home, she duels on poverty and hunger, this Penelope has no Telemachus, he never made it past his infancy. But the suitors are there in the form of artistic work; work for which she is never feels good enough without him, Telemachus lingers still, as the memory of Little Diego, her and Diegos deceased child, who haunts this modern Penelope. But without the actual suitors, Quiela never undoes her knitting, the string she keeps knitting is eternal and so is her grief. Quiela does not live on a world of certainty like Penelope did, who valiantly undid her work every night so her beloved might return to her. Quiela is instead a poet whose daydreams have completely over taken her; she deludes herself and loses her identity by defining herself in the works and the existence of another one. Quiela is lost, or rather, she loses herself, like a drop of water on and endless sea, she would have keep on writing, she would have keep seeing Diego on the same old coat hanged from a wall, she would have still compared her work with his, deeming her own as not enough. But in the end Quiela can just wish, and wait, and keep knitting, she would do this until she passes away or she breaks from the spell of this mirage she holds on to. The story itself makes us believe she is already breaking the walls of her glass prison, such a fragile illusion, and even if we believe the last lines we cannot really claim a happy ending for Quiela, This Penelope left Ithaca, traveled overseas and found her Ulysses, but Ulysses did not remember her, did not even seen her, he had chose Calypso, he had followed the sirens, this Ulysses was not going back home. As for Quiela who knows? We never had a character there; we only had a pale reflection of a man on a mirror of a woman.