Redeemers (25 page)

In San Francisco, almost without willing it, Paz began a diplomatic career that would be his principal support until 1968, becoming part of an old Mexican cultural tradition (similar to France) of artists and intellectuals in diplomacy. At first, his duties, as a “reporter” for the Mexican consulate, were rather imprecise, mostly writing reports as well as articles for the newspapers.

In the streets he once again confronted the strange quality of being Mexican. Seeing the pachucos (young Mexican-Americans whom the age classified as “juvenile delinquents” in their flashy low-slung “zoot suits”) and “seeing himself in them,” he had the first glimmers of the self-liberating book he would write. “I am them. What has happened to my country, to Mexico in the modern world. Because what is happening to them is happening to us.” The essay that he wrote based on these impressions would later become the first chapter of
El laberinto
. The activity of revolution (in the form he had supported and practiced in his youth) seemed to him steadily more and more distant and nebulous. It was obviously incompatible with a government position. But the energy could be redirected toward the writing of that book about Mexico that would become an essential part of its culture—a prophetic work, visionary and in some sense revolutionary.

In a letter sent to his friend Victor Serge, the Belgian-born Russian writer and former Bolshevik who had fled both Stalin and the Nazis and arrived in Mexico as an exile in 1941, Paz commiserates with Serge about the attacks launched against his reputation by the Mexican cultural clique closest to the Soviet Union, then comments on the ideological and religious zigzagging of various European artists, which may have reminded him of a similar pattern in the 1930s in Mexico:

 

W. H. Auden, the most commanding of the new English poets, has just published a book that rejects all his former work. Caught between the betrayed revolution and the “guided” world they are preparing for us, he has grasped hold of the burning key of the Anglican Church. His case is not the only one but the most noteworthy because of his talent and his prestige . . .

 

He declares himself unwilling to “surrender his spirit” to religion, or to become a militant communist or an ingenuous liberal. There had to be other options. His residence in San Francisco has given him his first real access to Anglo-Saxon culture. For the first time, he is reading the democratic socialists who write for the
Partisan Review
and admires some of the modern American poets, like Karl Shapiro and Muriel Rukeyser:

 

The young poets . . . are attempting a more direct, a freer poetry . . . they dare to use a living, popular language, that does not recoil before slang, and that seems to me more effective than the language used by our contemporary French and Spanish poets.

 

It was “stimulating” to live in this country “because the crisis of the American intelligentsia does not subside into the rhetorical domesticity of Mexico.” He adds that “the Church or the void are preferable to the Ministry of Public Education.” But he continues to feel himself responsible to Mexican literature:

 

. . . The Catholic ideals, which formed a common faith, are dead and the liberal revolution has failed or been corrupted. The people in Latin American countries live a blind and mineral life; their intellectuals, on the other hand, whirl around in the void. Here the distance between them is not as great, though it exists. It seems to me that cultural forms have never been so isolated as they are now (and especially the political) from the need and dreams of the people. How many things there are to express! And the terrible thing is that we can hardly express our own anguish, our own impotence, our solitude.

 

Five years later, in Paris, he would finally find a way to express them.

His ascent through the world of diplomacy was aided by one of his father's friends. Francisco Castillo Nájera, who had known Paz Solórzano since 1911, secured Octavio's transfer to New York. Another guardian angel who would protect him in the future from the spiderwebs of bureaucracy was the admirable poet (and diplomat) José Gorostiza. Paz taught summer courses at Middlebury College in Vermont and interviewed the New England poet Robert Frost for the magazine
Sur
. Elena worked resentfully for the American Jewish Committee. Paz did some dubbing in a film and even considered joining the merchant marine. But in October 1945, Castillo Nájera, who had providentially become secretary of foreign relations, secured Paz's transfer to an official position at the Mexican embassy in Paris.

 

VIII

Paris was as much a feast for Octavio Paz as it had once been for Hemingway. There he lived a life composed of various fragmented and difficult lives. An intense diplomatic responsibility, which he fulfilled with substantial and reliable reports to the embassy on French and European politics. A tangled personal life, involving a harsh and tormented relationship with his wife and a close connection with his daughter, to whom he sent (while she was living for a time in Switzerland) installments of a novel he was writing about a group of boys who had gained entrance to the Mayan past through a sacred pool (
cenote
) in Yucatán. A life of Mexican and cosmopolitan friendships including a circle of artists, philosophers, and intellectuals, some of them famous (Camus, Sartre, Breton), others less well-known but important to him personally and intellectually, like the Greek philosopher Kostas Papaioannou, with whom he discussed the Russian and Mexican revolutions. Meanwhile his literary career continued, with the publication of a new volume of poetry,
Libertad bajo palabra
(Freedom on Parole) in 1949. In May 1948 he had written to his friend, the writer and deputy editor of
Sur
, José Bianco: “The moments I have spent writing them, correcting them, typing up clear copies and putting them in order, have been the fullest in my life.” His activity as an editor of journals was necessarily on hold but Bianco continued to welcome his suggestions so that Paz, though at a distance, functioned as one more advisory editor of
Sur
. His political life was also temporarily suspended, domesticated perhaps by his diplomatic commitments.

His love life was a battlefield. Ever since his time in San Francisco, Paz had had affairs, which he did not hide from his wife; he even suggested that she take lovers, too. In Paris, the two still enjoyed their rich social life and moments of happiness with their daughter, Chatita. But the couple could find no peace or harmony, and even love seemed to be fading. Elena had as yet found no way to direct her talent. She blamed Octavio and was constantly competing with him. Octavio, according to Elena's unpublished diary, could be impatient and irascible. She considered him “controlling” and says she had come to find him “physically repugnant.” They often talked about divorce. In mid-1949, while the poet was working on a collection of essays, she would write in her diary: “On that 17th of June [of 1935] Octavio kissed me for the first time . . . This 17th of June of 1949 is a decisive day in my life; Octavio is over with.” A “mad love” had possessed her, for the Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares.

But the revolutionary poet, in the middle of 1949, was working on a collection of essays. They dealt with “a theme that is somewhat fashionable,” he wrote (apparently giving it little importance) to Alfonso Reyes, another one of his guardian angels looking over him from Mexico: “A small book . . . a minor book on some Mexican subjects.” This little book, this minor book (to be published in 1950 by the publishing house of the journal
Cuadernos Americanos
), would become
El laberinto de la soledad.

Much has been discussed and written about the influences on this book. Paz mentioned his reading of Caillois's
Man and Myth
, Freud's
Moses and Monotheism;
and the effect upon him of D. H. Lawrence, who “ . . . was seeking, with greater desperation than anyone else, the secret sources of spontaneity and unity in the darkest, most ancient and ineffable part of man, in what does not admit explication but rather communion and not communication: the blood, the mystery of nature.” But the true primordial sources of this primordial book were not external but intimate.

A search for himself in Mexico and for Mexico in himself. An entrance—and simultaneously an exit—from the labyrinth of his own solitude,
El laberinto de la soledad
can be read as the Rosetta stone of Paz's own biography. Who is the man that in the chapter “Mexican Masks” “shuts himself in and preserves himself,” who “settled into his surly solitude, prickly and courteous at the same time, jealous of his intimacy, not only does not open himself up, but does not flow outward”? His character involves “distrust . . . the courteous reserve that closes off access for the stranger.” This is the Mexican of the high central plateau, or the mestizo tied to duplicity, disguised as a Spaniard but with the brown skin that reveals his suspect origins. But this man is also Octavio Paz.

The fiesta he describes—that which levels all men, the permissive and liberating fiesta, the evanescent burst of joy—is at first sight a universal phenomenon (Antonio Machado, for instance, evokes a similar feeling when he writes about the villages of Andalucía). But if we look more closely, Paz's fiesta shows a key difference: it is a deadly fiesta. The people “whistle, shout, drink and break through boundaries. A communion followed by an explosion, an outburst.” What fiestas resound behind his words? The multicolored fiestas of Mixcoac, his own childhood celebrations. But also other fiestas, ferocious fiestas, of pulque and gunfire, those of Santa Martha Acatitla, those of that “total macho,” Octavio Paz Solórzano. The fiestas where the sun never rises, the fiestas of death.

Mexico is not the only culture fascinated by death (Spain and Japan, for instance, in their very different ways, share the same obsession). Nor has the Mexican attitude always been one and the same in the face of death. But yet, in
El laberinto
, Paz dwells on an aspect of death that is shared and common to Mexicans. The Mexican, he affirms, “makes fun of death, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it. It is one of his favorite toys and his permanent love.” His own death and the death of others. Only a few years earlier, Malcolm Lowry, with his novel
Under the Volcano,
had reconstituted—like Paz in his own flesh and in a memorable book—that infernal paradise of the fiesta, the drunken spree and death in Mexico, and more surprising still, Lowry had written his book in the former territory of Zapata.

“Our indifference toward death,” Paz writes, “is the other face of our indifference toward life.”
Someone
takes on flesh in this sentence. For
someone
, death is not other than life but really the same.
Someone
“sought it out,” someone close to him “sought out for himself the bad death that kills us.” And so the poet modifies an old proverb and concludes: “Tell me how you die and I will tell you who you are.” Was he thinking of his father as he wrote such passages? Was he masking his own memory? Or was it so glued to his skin that he did not see it, until suddenly, many years later, in an elegy:

 

What was my father

fits into this canvas sack

that a laborer hands to me

as my mother crosses herself . . .

 

In
El laberinto
, Paz has pages on the Mexican idiom
chingar
(“to fuck”) and
la chingada
(literally the “fucked” or “violated” woman). How many meanings of the verb
chingar
fit into Octavio Paz's life? Is it too much to think that Paz's mother is an incarnation of the woman who has suffered, been violated, “
chingada
.” The section “The Sons of Malinche,” which includes his thoughts on
chingar
, is—even among the more “anthropological” chapters—perhaps the least autobiographical, the most autonomous, possibly because its subject is language. And yet in no other domain is Paz more skillful, precise, and alert than in that of words.

 

IN THE
second part of
El laberinto
, dedicated to history, the subject is not “the Mexican” or
mexicanidad
but Mexico and its history. In the beginning there were the Aztec people after the Conquest, in an “orphaned” state of radical solitude. Not only had their “idolatries foundered” but also the divine protection earned through the sacrifices. The gods had abandoned them. Fortunately, says Paz, a new order replaces the break in cosmic truth precipitated by the Conquest. It is an order sustained by a new religion and “built to last.” And it is not a mere “superimposition” of new historical forms, nor does Paz even qualify it as a form of syncretism. It is a “living organism,” a place where “all men and all races were encountering a location, a justification, and a meaning.” It was the cultural matrix of Mexico, the Catholic order of the Colony, and it would last for three centuries. “Through the Catholic faith,” Paz goes on, “in their state of orphanhood, the connections with their ancient cultures broken, their gods as dead as their cities, the Indians find a place in the world . . . Catholicism restores meaning once again to their presence on the earth, nourishes their hopes and justifies life and death.” The poem of Mexican history passes from solitude to communion. In Paz's view, the persistent importance of religion in Mexico is also explained by its pre-Cortesian background: “nothing has disrupted the filial relation of the Mexican to the sacred. Constant force that gives permanence to our nation and depth to the emotive life of those who have been dispossessed.” And the man who writes these phrases is not a man narrowly bred in the Hispanicist tradition that automatically foregrounds the inheritance of Spain but is the grandson of Don Ireneo Paz, the Jacobin creator of
El Padre Cobos
, last of the great nineteenth-century Liberals. It has the value of a vision that dares to touch upon the
other
orthodoxy (the Catholic) in order to criticize an official (liberal) orthodoxy in Mexican government and thought.