Breathe
People with disabilities in Mexico lack many things, but if they have one thing, it is a superpower: they are invisible.
If today, in the 21st century, we still do not 'see' them in schools, in companies, in the street, in hotels, on airplanes, in parks, it was much worse in 1976.
Elena Poniatowska was 46 years old when she accepted an invitation to interview Gabriela Brimmer, a 29-year-old with cerebral palsy who wrote letters and more letters to her with the big toe of her left foot tapping the keys of a typewriter christened Che Guevara.
"The first time I saw Gaby, I didn't even dare to look at her. I was puzzled by her spasms, the fact that she would arch back in the chair or throw her head back completely."
"We are so accustomed to human communication being done according to the established canons, by the only paths traveled, that we do not try any other."
"Gaby's need to feel looked at in other eyes is great."
These are sentences from the book Gaby Brimmer. A book she never intended to write.
The first interview together was published in the newspaper in which he collaborated.
"Well, that's it, she's out, I also have my sack to carry, Gaby's doesn't concern me".
But Che's owner wanted a book, she wanted her struggle to defend the rights of people with disabilities to access standard education, to push for inclusion in classrooms and not in special institutions, to be known.
He had a hard time writing. On good days he could barely make seven pages. Her hands, her motor, her confidant, her mast to tie herself to in the storms was Florencia, a maid from Oaxaca who she had just met as a child in her house in the Condesa, and she could never separate from her again. This relationship was more powerful than the one she had with her mother. And Elena had said yes to the book, but it was an uncomfortable situation, which required a lot of effort, which distanced her from the literary world where she was flourishing.
Gaby's situation reminded her painfully of her nephew Alejandro, who in an accident in those years had also been left with a profound disability that only allowed him to communicate by touching a paper alphabet with his finger.
Many of her friends advised her not to take this adventure. But -in the prologue she recalls- Gaby's green eyes pursued her. And two years after the first meeting she published a book that is actually a dialogue between two highly sensitive, intelligent women, two hearts in need of leaving a legacy in letters, a game that would give Gaby the possibility of removing that superpower of invisibility.
"Maybe Gaby Brimmer will open the eyes of the able-bodied to the thousands of invalids we push aside because we think they have no conscience. Beyond the wheelchair, there is a strong and intelligent girl, a very cool, relieved, really cute, beautiful in body and soul, do you see her?"
Gaby opened up with Elena, a woman who, with a tender ear, a lot of patience and finally genuine affection, was able to capture in the air the ideas she wanted to say with difficulty and turn them into a book.
And as a good journalist, she knew that there was a big story behind the woman who typeaba with her left foot, in this poetess enclosed in a rigid body and rocked by the love of a lifelong nanny.
That 'sack' that fortunately did not let go, became a successful play that made Gaby, people with cerebral palsy, the deficiencies of the educational system and the lack of empathy of a society that does not accept anything out of the 'normal'.
After the Elena play, Gaby became a speaker in many forums, gave conferences and began to gather a group of people that would help her create her own civil organization (Association for the Rights of People with Motor Disabilities -ADEPAM-) in 1989.
In 1987 this story became a film, the first international breakthrough for Luis Mandoki in Hollywood who cast international actors in an English-language film to take it out of the 'small circuit' and give it now international visibility. Argentina's Norma Aleandro, who shared the leading role with Liv Ullmann and Rachel Chagall, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
On May 3, 2019 when with Katia D'Artigues and Agustín de Pavia -a lawyer with cerebral palsy- we launched the portal www.yotambien.mx we invited Elena as godmother. She had 'visibilized' disability exactly 40 years earlier.
I got a '79 edition of the book on Mercado Libre and took it to the event to get it signed.
I admire her for being so brave in telling this story that might not interest anyone.
As she wrote a dedication in her beautiful, scrawled handwriting, she asked me: "Has the world of people with disabilities changed much since I told Gaby's story? Now they can go to school or college as she dreamed?
It made me sad to return her still innocent look at over eighty years of age with a resounding NO.
I was angry that I could not tell her that the goal had been achieved and that now everyone in people with disabilities was what she saw in Gaby.
I preferred to make a grimace that hid an ojalá.
She, as intelligent as she was sensitive, took me by the hand and said. "Well, then I am the one who admires you".
@ba_anderson
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