Redeemers (27 page)

The camps, Paz explained, did not serve a penal or corrective function. They were an essential feature of the bureaucratic Soviet regime, putting into parenthesis its socialist character and its capacity to offer an alternative to capitalism. “The crimes of the bureaucratic regime are theirs, truly theirs,” he concluded, “very much theirs and not [the crimes] of socialism.” Months later, in a lecture he gave honoring the memory of Antonio Machado on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, he reaffirmed his hope for the “revolutionary and creative” capacity of nations, their capacity to save themselves if only they could “eliminate” the “saviors by profession.” His socialist convictions were still solidly held but they did not lead him to follow the opinion of Jean-Paul Sartre (whom his wife Elena Garro used to meet in the Pont Royal Bar). Sartre's recommendation was to ignore the facts presented by Rousset because a public acceptance would play into the hands of imperialism. Paz moved in the opposite direction and his decision brought him close to the Trotskyists. In fact, this first public gesture of criticism coincided with the resignation of Natalia Sedova, Trotsky's widow, from the Fourth International, when she rejected the idea that Soviet Russia was still a workers' state: “whoever loves and defends this oppressive and barbarous regime, no matter what his reasons, abandons the principles of socialism and internationalism.” Her statement was published in
Quatriéme Internationale
in May 1951 and Paz had certainly read it.

 

WITHIN THE
Mexican foreign service, Paz continued his career with diplomatic poise and efficiency. He held various postings in India, Japan, and Switzerland. For five years he served within Mexico as director general of international organizations, where he used his position to support the admission of refugees from Hungary after the Russian repression of the 1956 uprising. Following his period in France (between 1959 and 1962) he was named Mexican ambassador to India. On each posting, he sought to immerse himself intellectually in the host culture, whether it was Japanese literature or the versions of Indian thought and writing in translation that he chose to pursue.

In these years of formidable creative liberation and production, his penchant for founding and editing magazines (inherited in a direct line from his father and grandfather) would lie dormant, though much to his regret. José Bianco would receive and often act upon his suggestions and advice on authors, texts, focused points of view: to draw the writers of
Orígenes
, an excellent Cuban periodical, to the pages of
Sur
; to publish Rodolfo Usigli, the Mexican playwright who wrote corrosively about corruption in government; to devote an issue to the new Italian literature. At the beginning of his period of diplomatic service in Mexico, Paz wrote to Bianco:

 

I have the sensation that only if I do something concrete will I be able to escape the painful feeling that my presence here is useless. Naturally, nothing better has occurred to me than a magazine. (When writers want to save the world, it always occurs to them to found a magazine.) But I've had no success even in that.

 

Nevertheless, during his diplomatic tour at home in Mexico, Paz was the hub of literary activity in the capital city. Among other efforts, he was a driving force behind the project
Poesía en Voz Alta
(Poetry in Public Performance), which renovated Mexican theater, and also of the magazine
Revista Mexicana de Literatura
, initially directed by Carlos Fuentes, who as a young writer was very close to Paz and greatly influenced by his personality and his intellectual concerns. Feeling a sense of responsibility for the cultural development of his country, Paz also tried to discover and support new talent. (As part of this search, he made the acquaintance, for instance, of Gabriel Zaid, a young engineering student in Monterrey who wrote poetry and plays.)

With the passing of previous generations (that of Vasconcelos and Reyes and the later generation of the Contemporáneos), Paz's star began to shine more brightly. He was only forty years old but already had a measure of international prestige. Around him gathered a new generation of writers, philosophers, and artists, born in the 1920s and '30s, who shared his critical outlook, his creative freedom, and his receptiveness to experimentation. The poets and novelists, tired of nationalist rhetoric, were drawn to the open and cosmopolitan perspectives of his work. The philosophers, influenced by the phenomenological analyses of Husserl, began to explore the idea of a “Mexican philosophy,” following the lines of
El Laberinto de la soledad
, while the visual artists approved of his rupture with the by now rigidified traditions of the muralists. Although readers of serious works were a narrow segment of Mexican society (books were published in editions of three thousand copies or less and a second edition of
El laberinto
was not printed until 1959), the country's cultural activity was lively, intense, and in touch with currents of the international avant-garde. Paz had always been most influenced by France. The new novelists were more oriented toward American literature and perhaps the most surprising and impressive among them was Juan Rulfo (who was no less rooted than Paz in a biography heavy with history and violence, though Rulfo's origins were in the Catholic and conservative west of Mexico). Rulfo's book of short stories
El llano en llamas
(The Plain in Flames) and the novel
Pedro Paramo
(which dealt, in an original combination of surrealism and expressionism, with the recurrent Latin American theme of the tyrannical patriarch) showed a depth of feeling and perfection of style that, unfortunately, Paz never adequately recognized.

 

WHILE THE
grandson of Ireneo Paz was waiting for the moment to found a new magazine, the son of Octavio Paz Solórzano took advantage of his first opportunity to display, at least symbolically, his revolutionary impulses. The writer José de la Colina recalled the scene:

 

It was 1956. A demonstration in support of students protesting an increase in bus fares was marching past the intersection of Paseo de la Reforma and Bucareli . . . I was moving along with great enthusiasm, haranguing [my co-demonstrators] in the tone of a romantic anarchist. Paz came down from his office which was opposite the [monument of] El Caballito and joined that demonstration.

 

The episode was meaningful but exceptional. Paz's employment in public service prevented him from expressing criticism of Mexican internal politics. Paz would later (in 1978) coin the term the “Philanthropic Ogre” (
El ogro filantrópico
) for the Mexican state, but in 1956, like most Mexican intellectuals, he benefited from the philanthropy of the government. In addition to his salary from the Department of Foreign Relations, literary friends (Alfonso Reyes as president of the Colegio de México; José Luis Martínez, who was an official in the nationally owned Mexican Railways) helped the poet with scholarships that freed him for his creative work.

During this period, he would publish a philosophical volume,
El arco y la lira
(The Bow and the Lyre), that would be highly praised by the leading Mexican philosopher José Gaos;
Sendas de Oku
(Paths of Oku), the first translation of the Japanese poet Basho into a Western language; and
Las peras del olmo
(The Pears of the Elm—a Spanish metaphor for demanding the impossible), a collection of essays on artists, writers, and classical and contemporary literatures. But if he never expressed his criticism in prose, he did so in poetry.

In his memorable poem of 1955
El cántaro roto
(The Broken Pitcher), which would have fascinating repercussions more than a decade later, he expressed his feelings of distress and of hope.

During a time when Mexico seemed (at least to many) an island of peace, order, and prosperity under the paternal command of the President and the PRI,
El cántaro roto
disturbed the conscience of many Mexicans and was also attacked for its supposedly communist content. It was inspired by a journey of readings and lectures across the northern states of San Luis Potosí and Nuevo León. It is not a political or sociological interpretation of contemporary Mexico. Like
The Labyrinth of Solitude
, it is a mythical analysis and judgment. Paz (from the standpoint of a later, sparer style) would condemn what he termed the “verbal excesses” of the poem but never its substance.

El cántaro roto
begins with a reverie of the poet on the vanished Aztec past:

 

wind! The gallop of water between the interminable walls of a throat of jet, horse, comet, rocket that strikes true at the heart of the night, feathers, fountains feathers, sudden flowering of torches, candles, wings, invasion of the white man birds of the islands singing under the forehead of the man who is dreaming

 

But the poet opens his eyes to a different landscape, the
other
Mexico, a wasteland depicted in images from the northern desert:

 

Only the plain: cactus, desert acacia, enormous stones that crack open under the

/ sun

The cricket was not singing,

there was a vague smell of lime and burnt seeds,

the streets of the village were dry gulleys

and the air would have broken into a thousand pieces if someone had shouted

/ “Who goes there?”

 

The poet's bewilderment spills into a cascade of painful questions, some of it in the style of Nahuatl lamentations:

 

The maize-god, the flower-god, the water-god, the blood-god, the Virgin, have they all died? Have they all gone away? Broken pitchers at the rim of the

/ stopped-up fountain?

Is only the toad alive,

only the greenish toad glittering and glistening in the night of Mexico,

is only the fat chieftain of Cempoala immortal?

 

This wasteland is the creation of the present, or rather of the past weighing upon the present. It is the work of those who command and continue to command, of power personified in the historic figure of the “fat chieftain of Cempoala,” ally of Cortés but reincarnated across history as the Catholic bishop or inquisitor, the nineteenth-century military dictator, the revolutionary general or the banker:

 

Stretched out at the base of the divine tree of jade watered with blood, while two

/ young slaves fan him

before the people on the days of great processions, leaning on the cross: weapon

/ and walking stick,

in battle dress, the sculptured face of flint inhaling, like a precious incense, the

/ smoke of executions by gunfire,

weekends in his armored house near the sea, beside his beloved covered with

/ neon jewels,

is only the toad immortal?

 

But the poet still hopes that there will “finally surge the spark, the shout, the word.” He puts his faith in poetry:

 

we must disinter the lost word, dream inward and also out to the world

decipher the tattoos of the night and stare face to face at midday and tear

/ away its mask,

bathe in solar light and eat the nocturnal fruits, interpret the writing of the

/ star and that of the river,

remember what the blood says and the tide, the earth and the body, return

/ to the point of departure.

 

Two years later he would publish one of his most famous works,
Piedra de sol
(Sun Stone), which Paz saw as the end of a cycle begun in 1935. The wasteland now was not only Mexico. It was the world, a prisoner of history and of myth. And as in
El cántaro roto
, his hopes for the future rest on words, dreams, fraternity, and love.

 

X

Despite this somber vision, during the four presidential terms in which he served the government, from Miguel Alemán (who took office in 1946) until 1968, when he made his great renunciation during the presidency of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Paz believed that, in general, his country had kept moving in an ever more positive direction, despite great social inequalities, the subordination of labor organizations to the state, poverty in the countryside, and a growing dependence on American capital. In 1959 he added to the second edition of
El laberinto
his comment that “our evolution is one of the most rapid and continuous in [Latin] America,” due to the nationalist inheritance of the Revolution and state intervention in the economy. Paz was not the only accomplished intellectual to herald the progress of the country in those optimistic times. Even the historian, editor, and essayist Daniel Cosío Villegas—the most critically incisive heir to the nineteenth-century Liberal tradition—thought so and came to moderate the harsher judgments he had poured into his celebrated essay, written in 1947,
La crisis de México
. Trained as an economist in American universities, founder and director of the government-funded publishing house Fondo de Cultura Económica, a scholar of nineteenth-century liberalism, Cosío Villegas had always believed, like Octavio Paz, that the Mexican Revolution had been a valid and justified historical movement and that its modest and nationalist social agenda (achieved to a degree under President Lázaro Cárdenas) had been diverted during the 1940s toward a predominantly capitalist model, foreign to the original social commitment of the Revolution and its primary focus on the agricultural countryside. But also like Paz, Cosío could not ignore the obvious economic and institutional progress in the country.