The intrepid journalist Irene Polo I had only 32 years old when he committed suicide in Buenos Aires on April 3, 1942. He did not jump out of a window, nor did he, as urban legends propagate, for the unrequited love of the famous actress Margarida Xirgu, whose theater company she had joined as personal secretary and press assistant in 1936, before the start of the Civil War, to start a tour of South America. Other woman, a diplomat named Judith, would have contributed, along with other factors, to the brilliant Barcelona reporter of the Second Republic will take his life with a pill overdose for depression that he was taking and that caused him a long agony. to solve some riddles of that last and very unknown time they deal Gloria Santa-Maria and Pilar Tur in ‘The Any Americans of Irene Polo’ (Cal Carré), where they play 17 cards to his good friend the painter Miquel Villa sent between 1940 and 1942 (the last one dated only 14 days before killing herself), in addition to three of her articles, three texts about her and a revealing postface.
Santa-Maria and Tur have pulled the thread to reconstruct those last years of exile (neither the journalist nor Xirgu would ever return to Spain) also with oral interviews with people who knew her and a large newspaper library since the 1990s, when they began to investigate to Irene Polo. The fascination of journalism. Chronicles (1930-1936)’ (Quaderns Crema, 2003), a book whose edition they took care of. She was a niece of Polo, Mònica Merli, who provided them with the letters, which had come into his hands thanks to the Villà family after his death in 1988.
When Polo was killed, he had not been in contact with the Xirgu for more than two years. tisner explained to the authors that the cause was said to have been unrequited love for a mexican diplomatsomething that the journalist also wrote in his memoirs Vicenç Riera Llorca. “But Tísner didn’t like it because she was more attracted to women,” says Santa-Maria. They looked for which diplomats coincided in Buenos Aires with the journalist. “And we identified a woman, a diplomat from Mexico: Judith Martinez Ortega. In all the letters to Villà he cites “Judith”, who is “destined” there, until he suddenly stops doing so. It is an amazing silence. It is not clear what relationship they had, it distilled a lot of friendship, although there is nothing explicit. It is understood that they lived in the same house with Irene’s mother and a sister who had a chronic illness, “he adds. The sister and the mother, who was mistreated by their father, an alcoholic, womanizer and player, went into exile in the Argentine capital in 1939, at the end of the Civil War.
platonic crush
Polo, who had collaborated in the most relevant press of his time, “She lived her lesbianism naturally. Everyone knew it and respected it, although some did not accept it. Sempronio used to say that he fell terribly in love with women but in a platonic way,” the authors point out. In the letters, a disappointment in love can be sensed when Judith, fed up with the weather in Buenos Aires, leaves for Brazil in December 1940 – “I will be very lonely and disgusted with the heat”, he notifies Villà- and later informs him in a postscript that Judith will return to Mexico on June 26, 1941.
“I have a terrible nervous breakdown, and an anguish that I don’t know if I will be able to resist if it lasts much longer,” Polo writes in a letter
Polo writes to his painter friend in September of that year: “I’m having some very bad days. I have a terrible nervous breakdown, and an anguish that I don’t know if I can resist if it lasts much longer”. “There is no training for pain“, continued on February 23, 1942, before commenting on the suicide of Stefan Zweig. “This America, to live in it, is a killer (…). You have already seen that poor Zweig has killed himself with the woman in Brazil, also fed up with America, surely”.
Threatened by the FAI
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To this state of mind it was necessary to add that Polo had no longer practiced as a journalist and, with his mother and sister in charge, to earn money he worked in a perfumery as a secretary and doing translations. “There are different reasons that make us understand his feelings. His economic situation was unsustainable and he barely had a social and cultural life. With Franco’s victory he could not return to Spain, he could not work as a journalist and he did something he did not like, the world was in the midst of World War II… everything pushed her into depression,” says Tur, who recalls that before leaving Spain with the Xirgu he had received serious threats from the IAF for having written articles on labor issues where he criticized the anarchists for taking advantage of the workers. Shortly before the start of the Civil War, the FAI had assassinated his companion Josep Maria Planes. And another, Francesc Madrid, fled Spain after a gun was put to his forehead.
“Polo was a fascinating character, who left his mark,” they highlight. Of the enigmatic Judith, they point out, “she was already a very free woman in a masculine world, who from a very young age traveled from one diplomatic destination to another.” She ended up marrying a man.