Redeemers (20 page)

Paz always reserved space for his own creative work. In 1933 he published his first collection of poems, the chapbook
Luna Silvestre
(Wild Moon). But the winds steadily grew more ideological. In September of the same year, the review
Cuadernos del Valle de México
appeared but would only last for two issues. It was directed by a collective that included Paz, and though it published a translation of a section of Joyce's
Ulysses
, it was heavily inclined toward politics. The review printed, for example, Rafael Alberti's poem “Un fantasma recorre Europa,” the title obviously drawn from
The
Communist Manifesto
: “A specter is haunting Europe.” Enrique Ramírez y Ramírez describes the Soviet Union as a “transitory state leading to higher levels.” José Alvarado contributes a piece criticizing intellectuals who practice the “invention of novel games and logical enticements” and instead proposes “a higher mission . . . The politics of rebellion is the sole creative activity of men, the only work we can do in joy and trembling.” Alvarado himself would later describe the torturous Dostoyevskian atmosphere of his generation:

 

. . . one of these boys, from a Calvinist family, had adopted and abandoned communism to then convert to Catholicism after a long spiritual crisis. Another, a sensitive and intelligent man, was released from prison after an unfortunate homicide which would later lead him to further violence and a mysterious and miserable death. Students and Marxists, a good many of them anarchists . . . furious at deception and perversity, had been touched by the lustration of Vasconcelos and his preachings on social justice. Lyricism was political and love, poetry, metaphysics were all political . . .

 

Paz as well would always remember the wasted lives, the suicides, and the abrupt conversions of his generation, infused with its political fervor. His friend Enrique Ramírez y Ramírez had worked in 1930 for
El hombre libre
, a newspaper of the Hispanic right, xenophobic and anti-Semitic. Overnight he had turned to “collectivist rhetoric” and become a communist. And Rubén Salazar Mallén—a somewhat more important writer, who would become one of Paz's permanent adversaries—had veered in the opposite direction. Paz himself was no convert; his path toward radical politics had been naturally rooted in his family saga.

Near the end of 1933, General Lázaro Cárdenas became the next official presidential “candidate,” a designation equivalent to election. From the very beginning, he showed his clear intention of actualizing social reforms spelled out in the program of the Mexican Revolution but still unrealized. Like almost all his friends, Paz would welcome the official shift toward the left during Cárdenas's presidency (1934–40) but he never became a party militant. He was a radical in politics but an avant-gardist in culture. As a result, he would form friendships with some of the mostly nonpolitical Contemporáneos and later (in 1935) with Jorge Cuesta, perhaps the clearest thinker of his time. In a polarized world, almost no space had been left for traditional liberal thought. But Cuesta was the most important exception. An essayist whose broad intellectual spectrum and critical passion anticipate the future Paz, Cuesta was a pioneering Mexican critic of Marxism. And from 1933 on, he called attention to what he saw as a central element of Mexican political culture: the persistence of the old dogmatism of the Catholic clergy in the new political and ideological structures of the Mexican state. At the same time he analyzed the contradiction he saw in the controversial government attempt to introduce “Socialist Education” within a capitalist society.

 

SOMETIME BEFORE
the tragedy of his father's death, Octavio Paz had met an eighteen-year-old preparatory student, dancer, and choreographer in the University Theater. She was the beautiful, blond, restless, difficult, and enigmatic Elena Garro. Her life was a mirror image of Octavio's life. She was brave and independent, her father was Spanish, the mother Mexican, her grandfather—in tribute to her character—called her “La Generala,” and in her family two uncles had fought and died among the legendary troops of Pancho Villa. An earlier brief liaison with a woman had left Octavio with a residue of intense jealousy. To heal himself he found no better recourse than a complete reading of Marcel Proust. But in the middle of 1935, Paz began to live his love life like a character in a D. H. Lawrence novel (always his sacred scriptures in matters of love). At times his stance was that of Goethe's young Werther. (“I love you desperately, in anguish. If I didn't love you, I would die.”) His almost daily letters to Elena (whom he rebaptized as Helena) read like the diary of an inspired and tortured young man, devastated by an elusive love. But perhaps it is not so hard to understand the roots of this level of desperation. It was likely, in part, a direct product of the grief he felt over his father's terrible death. One of his letters offers a rare glimpse of his life at the age of twenty-one:

 

I am here, in my library, in the midst of my dead, of my beloved and bitter tears and solitude, and I feel somewhat separate from them, as if their wishes were not mine, as if I were not the blood of my father and my grandfather, who bind me to a solitary destiny. Because I tell you, Helena, in this house I have felt myself bound to a series of dark and decadent things, to a design of death and bitterness, as if I were only a depository for rasping words.

 

So as not to feel himself bound to the fate of his family, and following the violent death of his father, Paz had leaped into a professional void, abandoning law school with only one course remaining for his degree. He took a job in the Archivo General de la Nación. He was then reading
The ABC of Communism
by Bukharin and
The Origin of Family
,
Private Property, and the State
by Engels. Late at night he would compose thoroughly Marxist texts on the meaninglessness of work and the abstraction of money within the decadent capitalist world. And he sketched in his hopes for a new world, interpreting (in his own way) the aphorism of Engels: “From the reign of necessity to the reign of liberty.” He wrote that “tomorrow no one will write poems, nor play music, because our actions, our being, in freedom, will be like poems.” Then, all of a sudden, tomorrow would knock on his door; History would fall into line with him and invite him to participate in its unfolding.

It was July 1936. The Spanish Civil War had begun. Alvarado recalls that Paz had defended the agrarian revolution with the same passion he later devoted to exalting the Spanish Republic. Now the republic was in danger. This was clearly his opportunity to participate in history, as Ireneo had done with Porfirio and his father with Zapata. In September 1936, Paz published a long poem titled
No pasarán
(“They will not pass”) after the famous cry of the communist firebrand and orator Dolores Ibárruri Gómez (
La Pasionaria
) during the Fascist siege of Madrid in 1936. Suddenly his words are not “rasping” but angry, exalted, and full of hope:

 

Like the dry wait for a revolver

or the silence that precedes childbirths

we hear the cry.

It lives in the guts,

it lingers in the pulse,

ascends from the veins to the lips:

they will not pass.

 

I see the hands that are fruits

and the fertile wombs,

opposing the bullets

their delicate warmth and their blindness.

I see the necks that are ships

and the breasts that are oceans

being born from the plazas and the fields

in the ebbings of breathed out blood

in powerful exhalations

crashing before the crosses and destiny

in slow and terrible swells:

They will not pass . . .

 

Cárdenas's government printed 3,500 copies to be distributed among the Spanish people and Paz gained instant celebrity.

In 1937, as a countercurrent to the rhetoric of commitment, Paz attended to his more personal side and published his first real book of poems,
Raíz de hombre
(Root of Man). The theme is not revolutionary passion but its complement: the passion of human love. It is a passion he had carefully elaborated in his letters to Elena Garro and in the thoughts and late night writings that he would publish some years later. He feels like young Werther but he acts like Goethe: he is omnivorously curious, a philosopher by day and night, in lecture halls and cafés, in the streetcar that he mounts and that takes him from Mixcoac to Mexico City, and above all in his family library. There is not a shadow of frivolity to him—nor apparently of humor—but rather gravity and rigor and intellectual and poetic passion. His friends call him “the Lord Byron of Mixcoac,” in joking reference to his vocation, his romanticism, and his physical elegance. But Paz's central dialogue is with himself. And he moves along patiently and firmly: “solitude, you who go on revealing to me the form of my spirit, the slow maturation of my being.” Cuesta, in a review of
Raíz de hombre
, recognizes his character: “an intelligence and passion as rare as they are sensitive . . . the most characteristic note of his poetry is desperation, which will soon take on a more precise metaphysical form . . . not the pure psychological idleness of the artist.” With this work, Cuesta continues, Paz “in his poetry confirms the domination of destiny over him. Now I am certain that Paz has a future.”

His patron deities are Lawrence and Marx. Communism, like physical love, seems to him a kind of “religion” that “seeks the active communion of the desperate as well as the disinherited.” Many of his friends became members of LEAR (“The League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists”), formed in Mexico in imitation of its homologous French organization, presided over by Gide, Barbusse, and Malraux. Paz attended the founding convention in January 1937 and listened to all the anathemas against a culture of “purist” “bourgeois” “foreignizing” art, as well as the defense offered by the Guatemalan poet Luis Cardoza y Aragón, of poetry not as “the servant of the Revolution” but as an expression of “perpetual human subversion.” He also heard the more radical speakers reject a lukewarm “revolutionary nationalism” and instead embrace proletarian internationalism, repudiating the Mexican government's offer of asylum to Leon Trotsky, who had just arrived in Mexico. Paz, who by then was friendly with Cuesta and had begun to read him, was aware of all these tensions as well as the polemics in Europe over the repression of dissidents in the Soviet Union and the diatribes of the Third International against anarchists and Trotskyists. Nor was he ignorant of what André Gide had written in his
Retour de l'URSS
(Return from the USSR), which had appeared in translation in Mexico toward the end of 1936: “The dictatorship of the proletariat is the dictatorship of one man over the proletariat.” The book unveiled the Stalinist cult of personality, the shortages of food and other necessities, the propaganda manipulations, the terror, the vassalage, the prevalence of informers, and the suffocation of intellectual liberty. The account opened the eyes of many communist true believers. But not for Paz. Cuesta, since 1932, had criticized Gide's conversion to communism and predicted his disenchantment. But he had not been able to convince his young friend, who remained firmly persuaded of the justice of his cause. “I stood with the Communists,” Paz would remember. “It was a time when I affirmed with enthusiasm that the revolts throughout the world, including Mexico, would find their fulfillment in communism.”

 

OUTSTRIPPING THE
left from the left, the new president Lázaro Cárdenas launched his Agrarian Reform, which would include the whole country and divide 17 million
hectáreas
(about 42 million acres) among three million peasants. On the fourth of August 1937,
El Nacional
would announce, in an eight-column spread, “The Revolution will divide the henequen plantations.” It was not so easy nor was it terribly necessary to be a Communist in the Mexico of Cárdenas. It was better to support the president. The natural corollary to this gigantic transfer of property (beginning in 1937) was the expansion of education. And Octavio Paz, full of missionary spirit, left for Yucatán in March 1937 to become director of a federal secondary school.

Paz was now a
narodnik
, an intellectual working with peasants, just like his father in Zapatista territory. Always an enclave for the “Divine Caste” of Yucatecan plantation owners in the midst of an ocean of Maya Indians, the “white city” of Mérida awakened Paz's sensitivity to the hidden depths of Mexican history and his angry, poetic Marxism. He reasoned that “to see things ‘as they are' is, in a way, not to see them.” And so in Mérida he began to
see
reality, to look underneath it poetically:

 

The social subsoil is profoundly suffused with Mayan influence; it crops up at once in all the actions of life; in the delicacy of a costume, in a gesture whose origin you do not recognize, in the predilection for a color or a form . . . the gentleness of behavior, the sensibility, the amiability, the lovely and easy courtesy, it is Mayan.

 

Everything seems peaceful in the beautiful provincial city but “in an instant the city strips off its mask and, naked, lets you see its living entrails, valiant and silenced . . . the great days of strikes and meetings.” The indigenous and mestizo subsoil, and the Revolution—the old emphases of his Zapatista father. But as yet Paz is not an excavator of the Mexican soul. He is a poet with a cause: “Here, as in every capitalist regime, what functions is a process by which man lives through the death of man. At times, at night, you awaken amid rubble and blood. The henequen, invisible but present every day, presides over your awakening.”