The love affair between the Mexican poet Octavio Paz and Marie-Jose Tramini is the stuff of legend here: the story of how they met at a reception in Delhi, where she was living as the wife of the French ambassador, how they fell madly in love and eventually married under a huge neem tree – how his poetry began to burn with an erotic fervour once they were together, how they eventually returned to Mexico, where Paz won the Nobel Prize and the couple was a pillar of cultural life.
“It’s very easy if you have the will to protect – but they have no will and there are incompetent people making wrong decisions and the result is this mess,” said Arturo Salcedo Gonzalez, a lawyer and cultural-affairs consultant – and collector of Paz works – who was close to Tramini. “It’s not like someone who died with no will and the discussion is about a chair or a car.
“She felt betrayed, she told me that, and she had the feeling she would be betrayed again – at the end everything was lost—the house, the money, the foundation,” Salcedo explained. “And then she was very careful.” But she was also on course for a situation that Paz never imagined – that there would be no foundation and no one to administer his work.
Salcedo said that days before her death, she outlined a plan to him to purchase Paz’s grandfather’s home – where the writer first discovered books – and use it to house the archive and serve as a retreat for writers and scholars. She had not lived in the apartment where Paz’s library and papers are for years ; she died in an apartment in the upscale neighbourhood of Polanco. It is not clear who might have been in the apartment at the time – several domestic workers, apparently, perhaps others.
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