Cultural Amnesia (84 page)

But the drawback of bringing the two main ideologies closer together has been to encourage the assumption
that a system of belief can explain the killing. Such an assumption springs from the familiar tendency—and in some ways it is a commendable one—to invoke a complex mental preparation
for an elementary human act. The absurdity becomes manifest in the political sphere when its proponent, as he must, finds himself trying to establish similarities between the mental processes of
a sophisticated intellectual like G. Y. Zinoviev and a lumbering maniac like Saddam Hussein. Zinoviev said—and therefore, presumably, thought—that the Revolution should wipe out
innocent people as a matter of course. Saddam Hussein seems to have believed something similar. But really it doesn’t matter what such different men believe, or think they believe. What
matters is that they behave the same way, hence allowing us to deduce that what really interests them is unchallenged power, for which the necessity to commit murder is seen as a small price.

Here one ought to put the best possible construction on things and assume that most of the desk-bound mass murderers
arrive at such a solution only in answer to problems clogging the in tray. In harsh actuality, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that some of the great killers became political figures in
the first place for no other purpose except to wipe out their fellow human beings when they got the chance. Like Stalin, if with a touch more charm, Lenin was always vicious: a fact which, for
more than seventy years, was the very last to be admitted by the international left intelligentsia even though men who had known him personally, and believed in his cause, had said so from the
earliest days of the regime—even though Lenin himself had said that the regime must rule by terror. But as always, the psychotic cases are morally less edifying than the apparently normal
ones. Ho Chi Minh is
a more instructive exponent of state terror than Pol Pot because Ho could rein himself in: leaving aside the routine massacres through which he
established himself in unchallenged power, he didn’t start the class war against his bourgeoisie while the military battle remained unwon. But after his death, with the battle decided, his
successors resumed the business of class war in accordance with his known wishes. Pol Pot dismantled his own victory straight away by killing everyone whose help he needed: probably because he
needed their help, and found the dependency an unbearable challenge to his endlessly spiteful ego. From that angle, perhaps the most instructive example of all was Mao Zedong. The great leader
began as some sort of anarchist who eschewed violence in the belief that reform could be achieved by example and persuasion. When he decided otherwise, he began killing people in large numbers.
Eventually the numbers grew so large that they outran imagination. It wasn’t even enough for them to be innocent: they had to believe what he believed, and thus be guilty of no other crime
except the crime of not being him. It wasn’t even enough for them to die: they had to die in agony, and the climate of fear worked best if they could be induced to inflict the agony on each
other. In my ideal university, Jung Chang’s
Wild Swans
and Philip Short’s
Mao
would both be on the
course, but there would be a danger of making the young student despair of life. Even at my age, the story of modern China can make me wonder if my life was worth living.

But there was good news. After Mao’s death, somebody put the brakes on. Those blandly smiling Chinese authorities
who wonder aloud why Western liberals are so concerned with the Tienanmen Square incident of June 1989 are not quite so cynical as they seem. By Mao’s grandiose standards, an atrocity on so
diffident a scale—the dead scarcely added up to a village, and Mao was accustomed to obliterating people by whole cities at a time—was truly less than nothing. No doubt any of us
exposed to even half an hour of life in a present-day Chinese re-education camp would emerge gibbering if we emerged at all, but the truly orgiastic frenzy of torture and killing that went on
under Mao seems by now to be a thing of the past. The juggernaut looked unstoppable, but it was stopped. The only possible conclusion is that someone knew which levers to pull, and wanted to pull
them. The great
mystery of the socialist totalitarian regimes has been not how they grew into killing machines—in retrospect, nothing seems more logical—but how
the machines were put into reverse. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, it was remarkable enough. More remarkable still was that Khrushchev came to think
that way, having started out as a standover man of impeccably murderous credentials. He still didn’t think that way entirely, as the Hungarians found out later the same year, but he was a
different man from the Khrushchev who had carried out Stalin’s bidding in the Ukraine: a “task” which necessarily included extermination on an epic scale.

Khrushchev began his career as an apparatchik capable of any crime the state ordered. But when the time came and he saw
the glimmer of a chance, he didn’t want to live that way any longer. Nor did Brezhnev. In contrast to Khrushchev, who was bright for a thug, Brezhnev was a dim bulb, but once safe in his
appointment he could have done something to steer the Politburo back towards the cult of personality if he had really wanted to. Instead, he resolutely submitted to the restrictions of
“collective leadership”—the only term or phrase in his pitiably mendacious official biography that means exactly what it says. Khrushchev and Brezhnev, with their sordid
background in the classic massacres, are even more instructive exemplars than Andropov, the man who changed everything. Andropov could never have changed everything had not his immediate
predecessors first changed something. For him it was comparatively easy: no doubt he had signed the orders for a few hundred young hotheads to be given the treatment in the psychiatric hospitals,
and he had certainly been active in the re-education of the Czechs in 1968; but in his deeper past there were no stretches of permafrost or pine forest with thousands of bodies under them. It was
easy for him to print off a special edition of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
and make his bright young officers read it. He wasn’t going to get into trouble
with the KGB. He
was
the KGB. The real breakthrough was further back, when the first mass killers got tired of killing. Against all the odds, it happened.
When you think of the blood on their gloves, it doesn’t seem much of a comfort: but if you want to live in hope, you have to deal with some very raw material. And if you want to see an end
to the kind of “State the like of which the world has never seen,” you have to accept that for some people there is nothing
more habitual than to do their worst,
and that the sole function your fine opinions might perform, and always at a tangent, is to affect those people at the moment when they begin to wonder whether being ordered to torment their
fellow human beings might not indeed be a blow, and scarcely to be borne any longer.

Octavio Paz

Alfred Polgar

Beatrix Potter

Jean Prévost

Marcel Proust

OCTAVIO PAZ

Octavio Paz (b. 1914) is not only the great poet of modern Mexico, but the great essayist. Nobody
in any of the main Western languages does more to demonstrate the closeness of those two forms. His every poem opens up a topic, and his every essay glows with treasurable turns of phrase. In
his capacity as essayist he can be approached with confidence by the beginner in Spanish, because Paz’s prose style might have been put on earth specifically as a teaching aid to that
language. Attractively wrapped in coated white paper by the Spanish publishing house Seix-Barral, his collections of essays are almost beyond counting and cover every artistic subject. They
leave the reader amazed that their author ever found time to be a poet. That he found time to be a man of action as well beggars belief. In the Spanish Civil War he fought on the Republican
side. In the 1960s, in his role of diplomat, he was Mexico’s ambassador to India. His engagement with the politics of his own country was unceasing and often tempestuous. All his
artistic enthusiasm, and all his political experiences, yielded material for poetry: he was the embodiment of Goethe’s principle that there could be no event in life without the golden
shadow of a poem. In the light shed by this active
volcano of high-quality creative activity, the award of the Nobel Prize in 1990 made his admirers wonder why some
previous recipients were not shamed into handing their prizes back. Of the old imperial European countries, Spain has been the most conspicuous example of a homeland having its energy
restored by the creativity of its colonies. From Rubén Darío onwards, the writers of Latin America were conscious of their mission to restore the intellectual force of the
Spanish world. We can pick favourites among the twentieth-century exemplars—Sábato and Vargas Llosa are among mine—but Paz is up there with Borges no matter what we think
of either. As it happens, I think Paz’s homage to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is one of the most romantic books in the world, and would still have made him a master if it had been
the whole of his work, instead of only a hundredth part.

Faced with the disappearance of the correspondence of Sor Juana,
the melancholy provoked inevitably by the study of our past is transformed into desperation.

—OCTAVIO PAZ,
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
, P. 181

I
N OTHER WORDS,
he was
in love with her. Any man who reads the book will feel the same way about its heroine, and wish for himself Paz’s Camusian good looks, the dark charm with which he has always carried his
immense learning. He had all the qualifications to think of himself as her saviour from the solitude of the cloisters. Luckily he remembered, as we must remember, that the lyrically gifted
beauty’s life as a nun was a life she chose. Our own salvation is to reflect that it was not necessarily the love of Christ that drew her to the convent in the first instance. In Mexico, in
the age of the Baroque, learning was a man’s business. Colonial Mexico had been founded by the conquistadores, and their suits of armour were still standing in the hallways of the
haciendas. Mexico is still a macho culture today. Imagine what it was like then. In her childhood, Juana de Asbaje y Ramirez de Santillana was so gifted that she taught herself Latin in a breath.
She
dreamed of going to university and at one stage planned to pass herself off as a boy so that she could enrol. Finally the would-be Yentl had to face facts. Her grand name
had no money to back it up. Much courted for her beauty and lively personality, she could have picked a rich husband and so gained the leisure to read and write. But she didn’t want to sell
herself. The convent was the only recourse. Though her faith was real, it undoubtedly came in handy. If we can’t look on her lifelong piety as lip service, we can see it as a part
expedient, and so dream of joining the long line of suitors who came to her at the convent. One of them might have succeeded, although, as was bound to happen, there has always been much
speculation about her sexuality. Some believed that she was a man all along.

Even Paz thought she had a male mind. Women dream of her as men do, and might even be closer to the
truth. There was a direct connection from the convent to the viceregal palace, where her poems were valued as evidence of the colony’s growing place in the world. One of the vicereines was
as attentive as any male suitor. She was the splendidly named and titled Maria Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga, Condesa de Paradis y de la Laguna. This time the big name had all the
accoutrements, but with the wealth and the position went blue stockings. The accomplished and superior Condesa de Paradis was drawn to Juana Inés as one intellectual aristocrat to another.
Since the nun could not go to the palace drawing-room, the Countess of Paradise and the Lagoon went to the book-lined convent cell. The nun wrote poems in praise of the noblewoman’s beauty.
The vocabulary of adoration was standard for the day, but there is no mistaking the passion, even after the lush lilt of her Spanish is cut and dried into English.

You are the queen of the flowers

Hence even the Summer begs

The pinks of your lips

The roses of your cheeks.

When the movie is made, undoubtedly they will grapple, albeit discreetly. In real life, they almost
certainly didn’t, but Sor Juana wrote some of the loveliest poems of her career, which means that she enshrined her passionate appreciation at the apex of Spanish poetry
from all eras. When talking of her talent, the first thing to do is throw caution to the winds. In a single sonnet by her, there is a single moment that suffices to put Mexico in
the centre of the Spanish literary world. The sonnet is the one which seeks to dismiss the praises (“
desmentir los elogios
”) lavished on her
portrait, and the moment is the last line, an inspired, legitimate and dazzling variation on Góngora: “
es cadaver, es polvo, es sombre, es
nada
.” (It is a corpse, it is dust, it is shadow, it is nothing.) The moment would carry less weight without the argumentative solidity of the thirteen lines leading up to it. Her
sense of form was monumental even when playful. As in her life, in her poetry she brought the Renaissance to the Baroque: in the first fully self-conscious artistic age, she rediscovered the
sense of discovery.

How could so free a spirit have shut itself away from the world? Perhaps to get a better perspective, and anyway her
solitude was strictly a metaphor. For year after year, her cell teemed with visitors, most of them bearing new books for her library. It was like a coffee house in there. Her
tertulia
was the hub of literary life in the colony. But the Church was a long way yet from tolerating the idea of a secular civilization. At forty, but already near
the end of her life, she was called to order by her confessor and by her archbishop: she had to renew her vows. The Condesa de Paradis, her best mentor and protectress, had already left for
Spain, never to return. In Madrid, the countess financed the publication of the first volume of Juana Inés’s poems. Juana Inés was launched on her journey to the future, but
in the present she was finished. In the same year that she renounced the world all over again, she dispersed her beloved library. Her papers and letters were scattered with the books. Paz’s
grief about the correspondence is hardly excessive: if we had the letters, we would have the whole story of a Creole culture becoming aware of its strength. Surely the letters would have been
populated with all the voices of her
tertulia
. Books will be written endlessly in speculation about what her informal writings would have contained.
Paz’s was far from being the first book on Sor Juana, and there will be many more. But there will never be a book quite as exciting as his, because he is a poet at her level of intensity,
and a prose writer who can get his poetic intensity into a paragraph. Her correspondence, he goes on to say, would have been a document to place her with those of her seventeenth-century
contemporaries—not
in Madrid or Lima or Mexico but in Europe proper—who were inaugurating the modern era. The correspondence was lost through sheer carelessness:
the Spanish carelessness that Paz defines in scathing terms. “It is said that the passion that corrodes the Spanish peoples is envy; but worse and more weighty is carelessness: the creator
of our deserts.” When he brings in a phrase like
creadora de nuestros desertos
, Paz shows us the transatlantic cable that runs from Unamuno and Ortega
to himself and Vargas Llosa: the charge of energy that brought Spanish civilization to life again, offshore in the Americas. Spanish expository prose in the twentieth century was a miracle that
these men created, but they didn’t dream it up out of the air. There was already a long heritage of rhetorical strength in the poetry, where the telling phrases lie separate that would
later be strung together in a coruscating style.

One of the many virtues of Paz’s continuously thrilling magnum opus about the brilliant creature
Juana Inés is his success at bringing out the prose qualities in her poetry: the concentration of intelligence, the toughly argued sentence. For any beginner in Spanish, his book about her
is one of the texts to put beside a big dictionary and construe line for line and word for word, in full confidence that none of the effort will be wasted. You will hear two people who never met
each other talking across time, and realize once and for all that the reason most critical biographies fail is that the biographer falls out of love with his subject. Paz falls further and
further in, and we go with him.