Loca

I.

On the morning of September 21, 1968, Salvador Novo awoke in the elegant Mexico City neighborhood of Coyoacán to find his chauffeur scrubbing graffiti off the gray stone wall separating his home from the bougainvillea-draped street that had been renamed in his honor a few months prior. The poet and essayist had gone to bed the night before after a tiring day—a luncheon with a pair of illustrious architects, an impromptu tea with the Indian ambassador—taking off his formal suit, removing his oversize turquoise and onyx rings, and laying his auburn wig to rest like a sleeping animal. By the time he came downstairs in the morning, the driver had erased several epithets scrawled in red oil paint, but one phrase remained, a brilliantly vicious joke: POPULAR ENTRE LA TROPA—popular with the troops.

Three days earlier, in an attempt to stifle escalating student protests, Mexico’s president, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, had ordered a military occupation of the prestigious National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). The following day, at a funeral at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Novo—who was an intimate of the president’s—was cornered by a reporter and asked his opinion of the occupation. As a cronista de la ciudad, or chronicler of the city, a government position of considerable public standing, Novo was an equally reliable source for comment and for provocation. He did not disappoint. “Well, well, that’s the first news, and very good, I’ve heard today,” he answered the reporter, blithe as ever. “Tell me, how did it go?” 

Over the following weeks, Novo became a figure of public scorn. Fellow journalists, writers, and academics were incensed; some stopped speaking to him entirely. Young people at a movie screening interrupted a preambular reel of one of Novo’s poems with hisses, whistling, and projectiles. After the October 2 massacre of peaceful student protesters in Tlatelolco—an event whose death toll remains a matter of speculation half a century later, but that may have claimed more than 300 lives—Novo remained conspicuously silent, continuing to write his gossipy weekly columns with hardly a mention of the horror that had taken place. And though he made several uncharacteristically clumsy attempts to walk back his comments on the UNAM invasion—his new book had come out the same day, he said, and that had been the good news—it was no use. With one remark, Mexico’s first queer provocateur had calcified his image as a stooge for the establishment.

Though only sixty-four in 1968, Novo had been, by his own estimation, an old man for thirty years. Bulky and florid with sad eyes and an aquiline nose, he was no longer the beautiful boy with carefully plucked eyebrows and porcelain skin whose...