Halfway through Mexican author Elena Garro’s debut novel, Los recuerdos del porvenir, time stops dead. I don’t mean in some metaphorical sense, though it may feel that way due to the sudden boldness of the plot twist. No, I mean that Felipe Hurtado, the stranger who showed up in the little town of Ixtepec some weeks earlier, actually halts the passage of time so he can ride off into the proverbial sunset with Julia, the mistress of the local garrison chief. The reader senses that Hurtado may be different—it’s rumored that he passed through a storm with his lamp still lit—but nothing prepares you for such Neo-like control of The Matrix, a film that wouldn’t come out for another thirty-six years after the novel was published, in 1963. Back then, authors didn’t do things like stop time unless they were explicitly writing science fiction or fantasy, and Garro’s novel is a historical epic, about power, love, and betrayal set during the Cristero rebellion, the popular uprising against the Mexican government’s efforts to weaken the authority of the Catholic church in the late 1920s.
Bolstered by its audacity (along with that bravura stoppage of time, Garro makes the innovative decision to have the town itself narrate the novel), Los recuerdos del porvenir won the prestigious Premio Xavier Villaurrutia. She would publish a half-dozen other novels and two story collections during her lifetime, in addition to writing plays, articles, and movie scripts; and by the time she died, in 1998, Elena Garro was regarded as one of the most influential Mexican authors of the twentieth century. Yet for more than fifty years, the only way English speakers could witness Garro’s greatness was via the 1969 translation by Ruth L. C. Simms of Los recuerdos del porvenir, titled Recollections of Things to Come, which is still available from the University of Texas Press. That lacuna is finally being filled, however, by Two Lines Press, which in 2025 published two new titles that will allow Anglophones to experience the thrills and beauty of this pioneering author’s work. The first is The Week of Colors, Megan McDowell’s English-language translation of Garro’s revelatory 1964 story collection, La semana de colores; and the second is The Queen of Swords, Christina MacSweeney’s translation of Jazmina Barrera’s deeply personal 2024 biography of Garro, La reina de espadas.
Garro’s twenty-first-century obscurity is somewhat surprisingly not limited to the United States, Barrera writes, noting that the late author’s work was not covered during her literature studies in Mexico. It wasn’t until she was working toward her graduate degree in New York City in 2016 that a teacher introduced Barrera to Garro’s writing. The Queen of Swords began some years later as a “modest biographical essay” but soon became a more intimate fixation, a journey documented by Barrera in chapters that detail her visits to Garro’s archives at Princeton, her discoveries of her ancestral links to the late author, and her general soul-searching about the legacy of this literary titan. Like many biographers, Barrera cops to having “fallen in love with” her subject and clearly hopes the reader will as well. This personal investment leads Barrera to disavow any claims to objectivity; and yet, if anything, I found her to be almost overly considerate and self-effacing at times, interpreting as much as reporting her thorough research: “The recollections we have of Elena Garro today are blurred and contradictory. This is something that perhaps happens with everyone after their death, but the process is a little more noticeable in her case because it’s much harder to separate the facts from the lies, the lies from the literature, and the literature from the facts.”
Born in 1916, Garro grew up in the Southern Mexico town of Iguala—years that became a touchstone for her fiction. “Childhood is my constant point of reference,” Barrera quotes Garro as saying. “I experienced everything during that time, what followed has been just an added extra.” Garro’s Mexican mother and Spanish father resulted in her having blond hair that she would pass on to not only her own daughter but many of her fictional children. The local Nahua women, who helped raise Garro and her siblings, shared stories about the Cristero wars that would inform Los recuerdos del porvenir and instill in Garro an enduring interest in Indigenous issues. When Garro was fifteen, she went to live with her aunt in Mexico City, enrolling in a school “made up of three thousand men and seven women.” She developed an interest in dance and theater, both lifelong passions that would be stifled variously by self-doubt and the demands of marriage. Garro maintained her attachment to the stage by writing sixteen critically acclaimed plays, but her pursuit of dance was dealt a fatal blow in 1935 when she met Octavio Paz. Though she snubbed him at first, their encounter initiated “a story of love and complicity, hatred and rivalry, a turbulent and volatile relationship that defies comprehension.”
Even before they were married, that turbulence can be felt in the letters Paz wrote to Garro, letters that include “an abundance of orders and reprimands” instructing her to stop seeing certain people, including her teachers, and doing certain things, like wearing pants when she went out. Paz doesn’t want Garro to dance, go to college, or leave the house at times. He even threatens, rhetorically at least, to kill her on eight occasions. Citing other writers who have encountered pushback when they were seen as being overly critical of Paz, Barrera is extremely sensitive in her characterization of these letters, despite Paz being hoist by his own petard. (Garro’s archives at Princeton contain only Paz’s letters, and the contents of Paz’s archives remain sealed until 2043.)
As with many aspects of Garro’s life, conflicting stories exist about her 1937 marriage to Paz. However, all agree it was hasty and reliant on some sort of deception because Garro, age twenty, was too young to legally wed. During their two-plus decades together (they divorced in 1959), Garro and Paz moved between Mexico, the United States, Spain, France, and other locations generally dictated by his career. Their marriage can charitably be characterized as open and unhealthy, though modern readers will see it as emotionally and occasionally physically abusive. Both had numerous affairs, including for Garro a yearslong relationship with “the craziest love” of her life, Adolfo Bioy Casares, husband of revered Argentine author Silvina Ocampo. Paz and Garro had one child together, Laura Elena Paz Garro, who was born the day after her mother’s twenty-third birthday. Helena, as the girl was most often called, would be Garro’s “companion for the rest of her mother’s life and would share her grave afterward.”
Garro and Paz spent the last years of their marriage in Mexico, where their relationship had cooled to “a (more or less) strategic alliance.” Garro increased her political activism and renewed her friendship with Carlos Madrazo, then president of Partido Revolucionario Institucional, leading to accusations that she stoked the student uprising that resulted in the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre. In the aftermath of that tragedy, Garro’s life grew increasingly chaotic, as Barrera candidly admits: “I still didn’t understand what the hell happened.” To wit: After Madrazo’s death in a 1969 plane crash that may or may not have been due to a bomb, Garro and Helena spent the night “in the corpse freezer” at a funeral parlor. In 1972, mother and daughter fled the country amid rumors of Garro’s own imminent assassination, and remained exiles in the United States, Spain, and France for more than twenty years. Garro died in Mexico in 1998, four months after Paz, who remained supportive of her writing after their divorce, though Barrera found no evidence that they ever met again in person after 1963.
Elena Garro never set out to revolutionize fiction, yet the thirteen stories in The Week of Colors are nothing short of revolutionary. Six of them draw on Garro’s Iguala childhood, featuring sisters Leli and Eva, who are based on Elena and her sister Devaki, who was two years older. Sometimes Leli narrates, sometimes Eva does, and sometimes we just observe them rambling through the boundless spaces of childhood imagination. Lots of authors tell stories from the perspective of a child, either by making them hyper-precocious or beholden to some omniscient narrator’s intentions. Garro’s writing reveals an uncanny perception of the things kids actually do, and each of these stories derives from those genuine motivations. In “The Day We Were Dogs,” Leli and Eva stay home with the servants while their family goes to Mexico City. The girls imagine parallel timelines—“a day with two days inside it”—so they can escape into their own vacation where they are dogs named Christ and Buddha, crawling around on all fours with the family pet, Toni. They even instruct the cook to feed them together, with McDowell nailing the diction of a child: “I told them to make food for three dogs and no people.” It’s all a lark until the conclusion, when it becomes clear that the girls have retreated into this fantasyland as a coping mechanism after a traumatic experience. The perils of childhood just as often arise from actions we unthinkingly take ourselves, however, as in “The Gnome,” where Leli believes she has eaten a poisonous plant and tricks her sister into eating it too, so they will die together; or “The Tiztla Case,” where Eva’s white lie leads to a seemingly pointless crime, a “theft with no theft.”
Sometimes the danger children face is simply the realization that childhood and its unmatched liberty won’t last forever. “I had the days at my fingertips, and I walked through them easily,” Leli narrates in “Before the Trojan War.” That ease is tested as the girls pick different sides reading the Iliad and discover their individuality clashing with their sororal love. The imagery from this story is some of the most haunting in the collection, playing off the girls’ fading innocence in lines like “Scorpions tumbled from the ceiling beams and the crystalline geckos broke their little pink feet when they hit the floor tiles of my room,” or the hopelessly bleak knell of McDowell’s six perfect syllables in “Night fell like a black bell.”
Barrera notes that Garro’s “whole body of work can be read as a treatise on time and memory,” and indeed, all the stories in The Week of Colors are tangled up with the passage of time, which Garro treats as both a tangible item capable of being manipulated and an ephemeral force that ultimately cannot be conquered. (Even Felipe Hurtado stops time only in a finite space—“a sea of blackness, with dawn all around it.”) The collection’s title story sees Eva and Leli visit Don Flor, clad in his bougainvillea tunic, at the home where he lords over anthropomorphized versions of the days of the week, women who have a corresponding color, sin, and virtue. Much like a Miyazaki film, Garro uses creativity, adventure, and whimsy to leaven disturbing truths, like the don’s merciless abuse of the Days; at one point he even tells the girls that he’s going to make Tuesday “vomit out her lungs.”
While “The Week of Colors” presents physically malleable manifestations of time, Garro toys with the fourth dimension more classically as well. In “It’s the Tlaxcaltecas’ Fault” (often cited as her most famous story), a woman named Laura simultaneously inhabits two lives, one during the fall of Tenochtitlán in 1521, the other in Mexico City in the mid-1900s. (I have to imagine that this story influenced the parallel lives at the center of Ave Barrera’s Restauración.) Laura’s timelines bleed together when her husband from 1521 follows her back from Lake Cuitzeo through the centuries and into Mexico City. Both realities draw from the same well of time, however, so when Laura clings to her first husband as arrows are being fired around them, her twentieth-century husband can no longer locate her despite her belief that she is standing outside a Mexico City café. Even more enigmatic is the way that eleven months perhaps collapse into a single day as a woman awaits the arrival of her lover in “What Time Is It . . . ?” When she was a child, “time flowed like music through a flute,” but “clinging to an unrecoverable minute” in her Paris hotel room, time simply ricochets off the walls that confine her.
Though written more than sixty years ago, The Week of Colors addresses vital contemporary issues, including violence against women, the plight of Indigenous people, and the abuses of government. In “The Ring,” a story about a mother trying to break a curse to save her daughter, Garro offers heartbreaking observations such as “If a poor person started to cry, their tears would drown the world, because every day is a new reason to sob.” Ultimately, the story upends everything you think you’ve been reading, which is another of Garro’s gifts—namely, her ability to raise the hairs on your arms with startling conclusions. Never is that sensation more intense than in “The Tree,” a harrowing story in which the wealthy, privileged Marta struggles to feel compassion for Luisa, an Indian woman from a village with no electricity whom she’s known and disdained for years. Marta’s racism is fed by the “old Creole loathing of the natives,” but her feelings of superiority gradually turn to terror as she hears Luisa talk about the contentment she found in prison and how dearly she wants to find her way back there. Garro steadily builds the tension to the point that you’re terrified to turn the final page once you realize what’s going to happen, especially because you sympathize with its bleak depravity.
The Queen of Swords doesn’t go into the nuts and bolts of Garro’s writing career, but it makes clear that the vocation was not her first choice: “Becoming a writer was never Elena’s Plan A, not even B or C.” As Garro told literary critic Emmanuel Carballo: “I wanted to be a ballerina or a general. The idea of sitting down to write instead of reading seemed ridiculous.” It’s a relatable sentiment when you can read a writer of such enormous talent, and thanks to Barrera, MacSweeney, and McDowell, English speakers can now discover more of what the literary world gained when Garro landed on her ridiculous-seeming path toward greatness.
Cory Oldweiler is an itinerant writer who focuses on literature in translation. In 2022, he served on the long-list committee for the National Book Critics Circle’s inaugural Barrios Book in Translation Prize. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Star Tribune, Los Angeles Review of Books, Washington Post, and other publications.
