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XX

In 1987, Paz returned to Valencia, in eastern Spain, to a conference attended by many writers as well as some survivors of the Spanish Civil War. It was a conference to commemorate that Second International Conference of Writers, held half a century before in the midst of the Spanish War. Paz delivered the inaugural address. He titled it “Place for Testing” (
Lugar de prueba
): “History is not only the dominion of contingency; it is the place for testing.” In his poem
Nocturno de San Ildefonso
, he had written “History is error.” Here in Valencia he says, “We are condemned to make mistakes.” Like the most severe of judges, he recounts what he considers his own mistakes. He saw a serious collapse of the revolutionary ideas he had once shared, the mortal blows received not so much from its adversaries but from the revolutionaries themselves: “where they have conquered power, they have muzzled the people.” But very quickly his theme and tone take on a religious quality:

 

We wanted to be the brothers of the victims and we discovered that we were accomplices of the executioners; our victories became defeats and our great defeat is perhaps the seed of a great victory we will not see with our own eyes. Our condemnation is the mark of modernity. And more: the stigma of the modern intellectual. Stigma in the double sense of the word: the mark of sainthood and the mark of infamy.

 

Condemnation, stigma, sainthood, and infamy. The confession—which the speech really was—recorded the moral grandeur of that distant conference: the love, the loyalty, the valor, and the sacrifice that had been its living environment. But he also remembered his own weakness: “the perversion of the revolutionary spirit.” And speaking of the proposal for the condemnation of André Gide, who had written of his disillusion with Stalin's Russia, he felt a need to expiate his own personal sin of silence: “Although many of us were convinced of the injustice of those attacks and we admired Gide, we kept silent. We justified our silence with . . . specious arguments . . . And so we contributed to the petrification of the revolution.” (Of course, not everyone had kept their silence, and the chairman of the conference, André Malraux, had refused to let the condemnation be approved. But it was his own personal sense of sin—not the upshot of the specific event—that preoccupied Paz.)

But the value that remained was “criticism”: to “examine our actions and cleanse them of the fatal propension of conversion into absolutes . . . to insert others into our perspective.” And he devoted the final paragraphs of his address to those
others
he had come to know in the Civil War. They were the faces of the Spanish people: soldiers, workers, peasants, journalists he had met. “With them I learned that the word ‘fraternity' is no less precious than the word ‘freedom': it is the bread of men, bread that is shared.” He was referring to an actual episode: the peasant who, during a bombardment, “cut a melon from his orchard and, with a piece of bread and a jug of wine, shared it with us.” Way back in Spain, in 1937, Paz had encountered, in human fraternity, in the common people of Spain, the bread and wine of his Communion.

 

BUT OCTAVIO
Paz had to confront, in the present and not in the sins of the past, a “place for testing” the strength of his democratic convictions after the “results” of the 1988 presidential election were announced. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the candidate of an improvised coalition of the left (before the postelection formation of the PRD), was gaining an overwhelming quantity of votes when the government (at that time still in total control of the vote count) announced an unexpected “crash of the computers,” reportedly (by some who were present) when the crushing Cárdenas majorities in Mexico City had begun rolling across the screens. A sizable sector of public opinion immediately suspected that a fraud was under way, a fear they felt was completely confirmed when the computers miraculously revived in the morning to give the PRI candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, a highly unlikely 50.48 percent of the vote (an unprecedentedly low claim, by the way, compared to the usual confections of a PRI-managed electoral count). The candidate of the PAN, Manuel Clouthier, launched a hunger strike to protest the fraud, even though it was clear to him that he himself had not won the election. There were many other demonstrations and protests in the street. Cárdenas was trapped for some months within a real dilemma. Should he call for an insurrection against what he considered a usurpation or should he accept it and turn to the formation of a new unified party of the left? After various months of tension, he chose the second alternative.

Paz, in contrast to most informed Mexican opinion (including some of
Vuelta
's own writers), refused to recognize the election as fraudulent. There had only been “irregularities” and after all, this was the first election “of this sort,” one with strong opposition candidates on the left and center right. One might partially review the process but under no circumstances should the election be annulled, as the Mexican left was demanding. Paz favored a “transition,” not a brusque change. The allegations were unjustified and the “agitation” was not only “noxious but suicidal.”

A sector of the Mexican public believed that Paz's arguments were in direct conflict with his stated defense of democracy. Paz never agreed. He did not believe that there had been a fraud. Perhaps he had convinced himself, as Don Ireneo had done at the beginning of the Porfiriato, that the project of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (who had once been his student at Harvard and had written for
Plural
) to open up and modernize the economy was what the country needed in terms of change.

 

IN
1989, on the occasion of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, the government of France awarded Paz the Tocqueville Prize. In his acceptance speech Paz declared the mythical cycle of the Revolution to be over and done with: “We are present at the twilight of the idea of Revolution in its final and unfortunate incarnation, the Bolshevik version.”

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and—no less a miracle—after Latin America began a generalized move toward democracy, Paz felt that history had justified his convictions. A number of his former adversaries had already abandoned their commitment to Soviet-style socialism. And some of the publications that had attacked
Vuelta
with the greatest virulence now paid a silent homage to the journal by accepting many of its positions.

In 1990,
Vuelta
organized a conference, listed as an “Encounter” and titled “The Experience of Freedom,” during which, without any emphasis on triumphalism, an international and varied group of intellectuals analyzed the light and the shadows of that watershed of history, the collapse of Eastern European communism. Among the most outstanding participants were Czesław Miłosz, Norman Manea, Leszek Kołakowski, Adam Michnik, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Mario Vargas Llosa, and many other prominent writers and thinkers.
Vuelta
made a special effort to invite representative writers of the left, and about ten of them attended, including the old Marxist Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez and Carlos Monsiváis. The sessions were transmitted on television and financed by contributions from the Mexican private sector. Books were published that included the many subjects of discussion.

The Encounter drew considerable public attention though voices from the die-hard left castigated the participants as “fascists,” an accusation that especially angered some older participants who had been survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. Paz once again delivered his criticisms of Eastern European socialism, on the verge of its total demise, and referred in detail to what he termed the complicity of Mexican intellectuals across six decades. But he also castigated “private monopolies,” the “blind mechanism of the market,” and “the domination of money and commerce in the world of art and literature.” At one juncture, when the Peruvian Vargas Llosa described the Mexican political system as “the perfect dictatorship,” Paz charged to its defense: “what we have endured is the hegemonic domination of a party. This is a fundamental and essential distinction [from a dictatorship].” He was speaking, yet one more time, as a son of the Mexican Revolution.

During the same year, Paz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. After that, in the Spanish-speaking world, he held a place that had only been matched earlier by Ortega y Gasset. Paz had emerged from his personal labyrinth and had, to a considerable degree, brought Mexico out of its tangential position and into the full light of Western culture.

Once, at a dinner, Paz was talking about the Revolution. Without the least intention of offending him, his old friend José Luis Martínez dared to say to him quietly, as a friendly jibe, “But Octavio, you were never really a revolutionary.” Paz rose to his feet and responded in a loud, almost angry tone: “What are you saying? That
I
was not a revolutionary!” Martínez of course was referring to revolutionary action, whether the violent action of a revolutionary soldier or guerrilla, or the considerable dangers accepted by a militant, like José Revueltas. Paz had practiced the Revolution essentially with his poetry and thought, but considered himself nonetheless a revolutionary. And he had paid his own dues, in sorrow and guilt, for having been one.

Clearly there was a living flame of Revolution still present in the aging Paz. And on January 1, 1994, Octavio Paz—and all of Mexico—would awaken to the incredible news of an indigenous insurrection in the southeast of Mexico. Its leader was a certain Subcomandante Marcos and the group called itself “Zapatista.”

For Paz this turn (and return) of history was deeply confusing. At first he deplored the “relapse of the intellectuals” who immediately showed their enthusiasm for the movement and he criticized the turn toward violence. But as time passed, his articles began to show a subtle sympathy for what was happening in Chiapas. How, after all, could he condemn a movement that brandished the image of Zapata? And he was genuinely impressed with the literary skills of Marcos: “The invention of the beetle Durito, as a knight errant, is memorable; on the other hand his tirades only win me over half way.” But to win Paz over, even “only half way” was a great victory. Christopher Domínguez, one of the young literary critics who wrote for
Vuelta
, once reproved him: “Why have you written more about Marcos than about any one of us?” to which Paz answered, “Because you haven't risen in arms.”

These were distant echoes of his youth. Nevertheless, he had no doubt that “Liberal Democracy is a civilized way of living together. For me it is the best among those [systems] that political philosophy has conceived.” And then he formulated what was, for him, the simple and final synthesis of his long passion for history and politics:

 

We must rethink our tradition, renew it, and seek the reconciliation of the two great political traditions of modernity: liberalism and socialism. I dare to say that this is “the theme of our time.”

 

TOWARD THE
end, even his face began to look more and more like that of his grandfather. He said he wanted a quick and serene death, like Don Ireneo, but that final blessing was not granted to him. He had been born during the historic conflagration of 1914, and the final stage of his life would be marked by a tragic fire, which in 1996 destroyed much of his apartment and library. Shortly afterward, he was diagnosed as having spinal cancer (a metastasis of the cancer that had been suppressed by the operation of 1977). And toward the end, just like his grandfather, he became concerned about the shadow of anarchy that seemed to be spreading over Mexico. He finally appeared to have lost faith in the autogenerative capacities of the system. “What will occur in Chiapas? What will happen with Mexico?” he would ask. He died on April 19, 1998. Two years later, Mexico would make a definitive transition to democracy.

During a public ceremony of farewell, in the open air, he had turned once again to the image of Don Ireneo, the protective, wise patriarch. He repeated his favorite metaphor of Mexico as “a country of the sun” but then immediately reminded the audience about the darkness of our history, our “luminous and cruel” duality that already reigned within the cosmogony of the Aztec gods and had been an obsession for him since childhood. He wished that some Socrates might appear who could free his people of the darker side, of all the destructive passions. Unusual for him, he was actually preaching “like my grandfather,” he said, “who loved to preach after a meal.” And suddenly he looked up toward the cloudy sky, as if he wanted to touch it with his hand. “Up there,” he said, “there are clouds and sun. Clouds and sun are related words. Let us be worthy of the clouds of the Valley of Mexico. Let us be worthy of the sun of the Valley of Mexico.” For an instant the sky cleared, leaving only the sun, and then Octavio Paz said, “ ‘The Valley of Mexico,' that phrase lit up my childhood, my maturity, and my old age.”

In the following weeks, both his Revolutionary father and Liberal grandfather dropped out of his consciousness. He was left with only the memory of his mother and the presence of his wife. And one day, unexpectedly, she heard him whisper to her, “You are my Valley of Mexico.”

PART III

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