Redeemers (18 page)

 

III

When the height of the Revolution was over, in those dinner-table discussions in the Mixcoac residence Octavio Paz Solórzano would complain that his father, Ireneo, “did not understand the Revolution.” For him, revolution was not a mere political matter or an innocent request for the restoration of political liberty. It was a festive and violent expression risen from deep in the earth of Mexico, an armed demand for justice and equality for Mexico's vast poor majority. And the real revolution was the one to which Octavio Paz Solórzano had devoted the six most important years of his life, the revolution led by Emiliano Zapata.

He had joined the ranks of Zapatismo since September 1914, working as an intermediary between the forces of Zapata and the Villistas. He briefly saw action in the area south of Mexico City, including his own town of Mixcoac. When the forces of the Convention (favored by Zapata and Villa) occupied the capital, he directed a newspaper (which was then taken over by the Villistas). At the beginning of 1915, he left the capital to accompany the wandering government of Eulalio Gutiérrez, which would later, under the leadership of Francisco Lagos Cházaro, establish itself in the cities of Cuernavaca and Jojutla. In the local newspapers Octavio Paz Solórzano floated the idea of a committee to represent Zapatismo in the United States and counteract the negative coverage that the movement was receiving in the international press. The Convention accepted the project. In April 1917, Paz visited “the chieftain Zapata” at his headquarters in Tlaltizapán to finalize his foreign responsibility. Zapata received him while eating a watermelon (which he would cut open with one slice of his machete) and shared anecdotes with Paz, which the young lawyer would remember and include in a later biography of his hero.

Paz had faith in his duties but the truth is that it was already too late for the Zapatista cause. His first, quite long report, written to Zapata from Chautzinca, in the state of Puebla, where he was on the run, shows a mixture of stoicism, enthusiasm, and honesty: “I have gone hungry on various occasions and I have pursued my journey on foot . . . I have not lost heart for a single moment . . . almost alone, in rags, since the clothes I was wearing are in tatters, and hungry . . .” And he continued:

 

As I travelled through the towns, I kept on spreading propaganda in different forms and composed manifestos for many military leaders, so that they could inform their people of the betrayal by the Carrancistas and the reasons why they should help us, also—with every peasant to whom I spoke—I tried to inculcate [a conviction of] their right to the land, and I am deeply pleased to tell you that in Guerrero and Puebla, the land has been redistributed, well even if certainly not in a perfect manner but still many villages have taken possession of the lands that belong to them, in accordance with the sixth article of the Program of Ayala . . .

 

And as if to convince himself, he adds ingenuously: “the military situation is very favorable to us, since the Carrancistas only hold the railroads, the harbors and the state capitals . . . the word circulates everywhere that Carranza, Obregón and Luis Carrera will flee . . . Wilson doesn't know what he's doing and he is blindly striking out around him . . . the victory we long for is near.”

The son would relive the sudden changes, the dangers and the sufferings of his father, Don Ireneo, but he never had his father's good luck. In San Antonio, Texas, he spent a year in useless plotting. His letters reeked of frustration, bewilderment, bitterness, almost of abandonment. Zapatista headquarters was informed of his descent into alcoholism, a weakness that would gravely afflict him right up to his death. All his plans to support the Revolution of the South from Los Angeles failed completely. He formed a conspiracy to attack Baja California but it was discovered and a cargo of weapons was confiscated. Shortly after the assassination of Emiliano Zapata on April 10, 1919, Paz and his friend Ramón Puente (the biographer of Pancho Villa) formed the publishing house of “O. Paz and Company” and started the newspaper
La Semana
, where they published articles by the most noted Mexican exiles, including the philosopher José Vasconcelos. He received, in Los Angeles, a brief visit from his wife and the child Octavio, whom he had abandoned at the age of three months. His work as a publisher excited him but his tone remained somber. “I have been in this country entirely alone and without resources of any kind and sometimes tied hand and foot,” he wrote to his former military comrade Jenaro Amezcua. But he nevertheless continued his efforts to unite the various exiles and he tried to secure the freedom of Ricardo Flores Magón, the Mexican anarchist revolutionary who was locked up in an American prison. In May 1920 the money ran out and
La Semana
died. Paz lived immersed in uncertainty. When the rebellion of Agua Prieta, launched by Sonoran generals under the command of Obregón, disowned Carranza, Paz was unable, from his perspective, to sound the bells of victory. Why was there no mention at all of agrarian reform? Why was there no “presence of the south”? How could the Revolution ally itself with generals who had fought against Zapata? “The triumph of the Revolution, the true Revolution,” he wrote, “is a long way off.” Finally, in June 1920, after six years of “making the Revolution,” Octavio Paz Solórzano returned to the family home in Mixcoac.

During the two four-year terms of the “Sonoran dynasty” (Álvaro Obregón from 1920 to 1924 and Plutarco Elías Calles from 1924 to 1928), Paz tried to orchestrate a political career. In April 1922, on the third anniversary of Zapata's assassination, he had written a long biographical essay on his lost leader. As a gesture of loyalty to him, he became a founder of the National Agrarian Party (
Partido Nacional Agrarista
). Elected a member of Congress on that party ticket, he proposed legislation to protect peasants and workers and he put together a list of the abuses that hacienda owners were inflicting on peasants throughout the country. But all his political wagers wound up as losses. In July 1928, Álvaro Obregón, reelected and about to begin another four-year term, was assassinated. His downfall was also the end of the National Agrarian Party, which had been his principal political arm. And with the party, one of its directors, Octavio Paz Solórzano, also lost any chance for a political future.

Between 1929 and 1934, Mexico had three presidents but only one “Foremost Chief” (
Jefe Máximo
), Plutarco Elías Calles, the power behind the scenes. Without any possibility (or any desire) to be reelected, Calles (who had created the Bank of Mexico and the Bank for Agrarian Credit) would institute a party called the PNR in 1929, a hegemonic political organization that morphed into the PRM (in 1938) and finally the
Partido Revolucionario Institucional
(the PRI), which would govern the country until the end of the twentieth century. Paz Solórzano found no place for himself in this new order. Disappointed in politics, he threw himself into the vocation of journalist and publisher that he had learned from Don Ireneo. In 1929 he published (in daily newspapers, Sunday supplements, and magazines) anecdotes and stories from
his
revolution, the deeds of the Zapatistas. These literary and historic sketches would be a firsthand source for the understanding of Zapatismo, especially in its initial phase before 1915. People, attitudes, significant episodes, and brief narrative insights file vividly through the pages. One listens to dialogues, proverbs, bursts of language, ballads, descriptions of battle. And here and there Zapata himself appears, miraculously close to us:

 

Zapata greatly enjoyed inviting highly affected individuals to engage the bulls . . . normally they were sent flying, which Zapata found hilarious. He did it to ridicule them . . . he understood that they did not feel the Revolution.

 

But Octavio the elder had surely felt the Revolution. And because of it his main preoccupation was not, as with Ireneo, political freedom but social justice. And as the basis of social justice, he envisioned doing historical justice to Indian Mexico: “the basic postulates of the Revolution, especially with the land, date from the first inhabitants of Mexico.”

Between 1930 and 1931, Paz Solórzano, with much labor and very little commercial success, compiled an
Álbum de Juárez
(inspired by the work Ireneo had published on Father Hidalgo, leader of the first revolution against the Spaniards) and continued in the tradition of his father by writing a history of journalism in Mexico. He had a passion for being “the lawyer of the people.” In his office, recently opened again after two decades of other activities, he committed himself to defending peasants from the villages of Santa Martha Acatitla and Los Reyes, southeast of Mexico City, and he often did the work free of charge. With his clients, he wanted to continue the fiesta, the endless drunken spree of the Revolution, “to face death like a man” and perhaps die among these poor, as if he had died in the Revolution.

 

THE SIGNATURE
of the poet Octavio Paz Lozano resembles that of his father, the same open
O
without a finishing flourish, the same rhythm, the same sloping inclination. How many times must he have seen this signature among his father's papers? But it is certain that the intermittent presence of his father did not lessen the boy's experience of solitude. The first real meeting between them had been in Los Angeles. A new face for solitude, with the sensation of alienness in a foreign country and surrounded by a foreign language. On his return to Mexico, enrolled in good Catholic and later secular schools in Mixcoac and Mexico City, he experienced another tightening of the screw of solitude. Because of his blue eyes, the other children mistook him for a foreigner. “I felt myself a Mexican but they wouldn't let me be one.” Even Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama, a leading protagonist of Zapatismo and a comrade of his father, exclaimed at the sight of the young Octavio: “
Caramba
, you didn't tell me you had a Visigoth for a son!” Everyone laughed at the joke. Except the boy himself.

His mother Josefina, who lived to be very old, would be with Octavio Paz until her death in 1980. A devout Catholic, she often sang him the songs of her native Andalucía. She softened the weight of the abandonment, the emptiness, the need. He had not only his mother but his aunt Amalia, who opened the doors of literature to him (she had been a friend of the greatest writer of the Mexican modernist movement, the poet and chronicler Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera). Years later, the women he came to love, often in a mode that was both intense and tormented, helped to clear the way toward the vocation he early chose for himself: the writing of poetry.

His father, on the other hand, offered no escape but only a wall of silence. The son would have liked to share his father's solitude, to speak with him intimately so as to clarify his own life. “It was almost impossible for me to speak with him,” he confessed half a century later, “but I loved him and always sought his company. When he was writing, I would approach him and try to give him my support. I typed up clean, corrected copies of some of his articles, before he took them to the publishing office. He never even took notice of my affection. I turned distant. The flaw in my father, if he had one, is that he didn't notice that affection I showed him. And it's very likely that he took no notice of what I was writing. But in no way do I reproach him.”

The articles for which the son typed “clean, correct copies” were specifically Paz Solórzano's articles on Zapatismo. Though he has not been recognized as such by scholars of Zapatismo, Paz Solórzano was the first historian of Zapatismo and the first guardian of its place in history. On that subject, in silence, a permanent bond was nurtured, and the son became a witness of and comrade to his father's life. Paz Solórzano introduced his son to “the real Mexico,” the country of the Zapatista peasants, and initiated him into an understanding of the
other
history of Mexico, buried but still living: “When I was a child, many old Zapatista leaders visited my home and also many peasants whom my father defended in their legal troubles and lawsuits over land. I remember some men from an
ejido
[collectively owned farming community] who were claiming some lagoons that are—or were—along the road to Puebla. On my father's saint's day, we ate an extraordinary pre-Columbian meal cooked by the
ejiditarios
. . . it was
pato enlodado
[‘mudded duck'] sprinkled with pulque cured with the fruit of prickly pear.”

But his father's life outside the house had its shadowy side: “my father had a frenetic social life, women, fiestas; all of it in some way wounded me but not as much as it did my mother.” A half century later, peasants whom the lawyer Paz had defended in the village of Santa Martha Acatitla remembered him as a “saintly man.” “Of course I remember . . . Octavio Paz! I can almost see him arriving over there! Smiling and with a woman hanging on each arm . . . I can tell you Don Octavio was a real rooster. He adored women and he had many friends.” For that “lawyer of the people,” a daily visit to Acatitla meant a return to origins, “making the Revolution,” touching the truth, the Indian truth of Mexico, eating indigenous foods that dated back many centuries—plovers, lake beetles, fish-egg foam, river shrimp, tadpoles, roasted insect eggs—hanging around with the locals, offering toasts to Emiliano Zapata, and listening to ballads “that everybody sang with enthusiasm and celebratory
gritos
.” It meant searching for “a good swallow of rum and very happily drinking down a jug,” and it meant hunting ducks on the lagoon and carrying those trophies to his lovers in the village, his “veterans,” as he called them. And above all, attending the village fiestas: “Don Octavio loved the village fiestas where the good pulque flowed freely,” recalled the son of Cornelio Nava, a friend of Paz Solórzano. “And what good pulque it was! Thick and delicious . . . With Octavio Paz Solórzano, people like Soto y Gama came there . . . and I almost forgot his son, the writer who carries his name. He was a child then but he would be there too.”