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| Pita Amor |
One imprecise day in 1945, the capital's Guadalupe Teresa Amor Schmidtlein, better known in the artistic field of dance, theater and cinema as Pita Amor, during the break of a rehearsal, wrote with her eyebrow pencil on a paper napkin : “The round house had a round solitude, the air that invaded it was a round harmony of unbreathable anxiety”; She read it thoughtfully and smiling, she put it in her handbag and once again, like so many others, smiling to herself she felt unique.
Her scarce and difficult primary education in religious schools – including that of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart in Monterrey – was being surpassed by her insatiable avidity for reading, at all hours, day and night, in the abundant and comfortable family library. . Then, the poem of five lines in one stanza was expanded to three stanzas and left complete as follows:
Months later, on September 16, 1946, she burst into the capital's literary scene as a writer with a collection of poems composed of 25 texts, without titles, only numbered from I to XXV, with verses grouped from one to three stanzas, formatted in tenths - ten. rhymed octosyllabic verses–, dedicated to C.S. of A., his mother, who had recently died, and to whom he gave the title: I am my house.
The edition of 150 handcrafted, numbered copies appeared under the seal of Alcancía, the non-commercial publishing house run by Edmundo O'Gorman and Justino Fernández. Copy number 3 is dedicated in manuscript to Alfonso –Reyes–, one of his literary mentors and defenders.
Guadalupe Amor in this her first collection of poems – and then in subsequent ones – explores and shares her existential anguish of loneliness, selfishness, vanity, death, religion; in its most intimate and personal setting: the archetypal children's and family home.
Guadalupe or Pitusa or Pita, the youngest daughter of the Amor Schmidtlein couple, was born on May 30, 1918, under the dual sign of Gemini - when Mexico City was still experiencing the euphoria of the Revolution and the recently proclaimed Political Constitution of 1917 -, in a large and stately house on Abraham González Street, number 66 – between Lucerna and General Prim – in the central Juárez neighborhood. It was formed within one like many other families of powerful aristocrats, generated in the Second Mexican Empire, very close to General Porfirio Díaz, stripped of their rural estates and urban properties by the new revolutionary order and in mortifying expectation of political changes. in their favor that they never happened.
Already elevated and recognized in the literary world for her sustained poetic production, Pita Amor returns to the theme of the house, now as a metaphor, in terms of the similarities between the physical decay of the object and the restlessness of the subject that inhabits it. The Fondo de Cultura Económica, his new publishing house, published in 1957 his first work in a narrative genre that mediates between novel, memory and autobiography, repeating the original title of Yo soy mi casa, and connecting both works by the use of stanzas of the first as epigraphs of the second. The first epigraph chains and determines the confessional atmosphere: Round House had / of round solitude: / the air that invaded it / was round harmony / of unbreathable anxiety / and the last, the symbolic dimension of the language used: By saying house I intend to express / What house I usually call / the refuge that I understand / that the soul must inhabit.
Divide the text into 42 sections titled with the functional parts that make up the house: “My mother's bedroom,” “My father's bedroom,” “The great hall,” “The dining room,” “The library,” “My room", "The magic room", "The doormen's room", "The maids' room", "Another servants' room", "The work room", "The cellars", etc., separated by 13 epigraphs of which the first and the last come from the first collection of poems as already said before.
Each thematic unit – “The sewing box”, “The kitchen”, “The magic room”, etc. – is described with abundant or little information about its architectural characteristics such as its location in the complex, its functional use, its general dimensions. , the furniture and objects it contains, and generally emphasizes the apparent physical decay: cracks, rust, humidity or leaks and all as a favorable setting to conduct his childhood memories, from the ages of seven to fourteen, filled with primitive fears such as the black butterflies that precede the rains, the indeterminate kidnapping of the sack, the darkness of the night, death, etc., and coupled with the desperate economic decline on the lips of all the adult inhabitants.
