Redeemers (24 page)

 

They made the Mexican people hermetic and insensitive, after they had awakened for the first time in their history. Now all of us have turned to solitude and the dialogue is broken, as men are smashed and broken . . . And yet the dialogue will have to be resumed. Because there must be some way, some form that opens the ears and unties the tongues.

 

It was the poet who had to take on the responsibility of opening the ears and untying the tongues. In that text Paz began to see the possibility of an “ethic of the poet” quite as “mystical and combative” as that which he had laid out in
Barandal,
but now centered not on world revolution but on Mexico, the mysteries of Mexico: “Just as a people nourishes it, poetry nourishes the people. It is an issue of painful interchange. If the people give substance to poetry, poetry gives voice to the people. What to do about a silent people, that neither wishes to hear or wishes to speak? And what to do with a poetry that feeds on air and solitude?” To escape from this labyrinth, the poet could count on the rich instrument of the Spanish language: “a mature idiom . . . which has undergone every contact, all the experiences of the West.” Through it one had to express “the most nebulous of things . . . the dawn of a people.”

To express a people was to “build” that people: “because our country is in pieces or at least not fully born.” The poet literally had to construct Mexico. Because of that responsibility, Mexican literature, always avidly curious about what might be universal, had to look instead “toward ourselves, not so as to find novelty or originality but something more profound: authenticity.” This essential quality of being Mexican (
mexicanidad
), sought after by everyone, did not have a nationalist nature “treacherous and preconceived.” What was it then. Only the poet, of the same substance as his people, could encounter it. And how? Letting “mystery” do its work, and dreams: “when we dream that we are dreaming, we are close to waking up.”
Mexicanidad
was an “invisible substance,” located somewhere:

 

We do not know what it consists of, nor by what route we can reach it; we know, dimly, that it has not yet been revealed and that up to now its presence, among the best of us has only been as a kind of aroma, a light and bitter taste. Let us be careful that an excess of vigilance does not drive it away; it will sprout up spontaneously and naturally, from the depths of our intimacy when we encounter true authenticity, key to our being. Love is made of dreams and jealousy, of abandonment and requirement. Let us dream while awake.

 

T
O BEGIN
his search for that “invisible substance,” Paz was equipped with superlative tools. His own
mexicanidad
had a number of roots: a well earned and tested connection to the tree of Mexican culture; an impeccable revolutionary genealogy of the Paz family in Mexican wars; a record of lucid, exhaustive, and accurate critical readings of Mexican writers, past and present; and even an indelible and meaningful topography engraved within his memory.

At thirty years of age he had begun to understand the miracle coded in his own biography. His deep Mexican roots extended not only across time but into various sacred spaces. Everything began to seem like a text written in ciphers. The village of Mixcoac (now part of Mexico City) was Mexico in miniature, both the place and the Nahuatl name, a metaphor for the centuries preserved within the present moment; and the small Plaza de San Juan opposite Don Ireneo's sprawling country home was the spiritual center of this miniature. Right beside it was the house of the great nineteenth-century Liberal Valentín Gómez Farías, who was buried in his own garden because the Church had denied him the right to burial in a Christian cemetery. Not far off were six schools for children and the Plaza Jáuregui, seat of the civil government, where each year Mexican independence was commemorated and, directly opposite, a small seventeenth-century church in whose atrium the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe was celebrated.

And amazingly, in the Mixcoac of the young Paz, not only the colonial but also the indigenous past lingered alive and intact. Paz would remember Ifigenia, the family's Indian cook: “witch and medicine woman, she would tell me stories, she would give me presents of amulets and scapularies, she would have me chant spells against devils and ghosts.” Through her he was initiated into the mysteries of the
temascal
, the indigenous steam bath: “it wasn't a bath, but a rebirth.” And as if this were not enough, the boy not only shared his existence with living indigenous culture but also had literally unearthed part of the dead or, more precisely, the subterranean Indian culture. On one of his wanderings around the village with his older cousins—among them the future astronomer Guillermo Haro Paz—Octavio had a truly marvelous experience. The boys discovered a pre-Hispanic mound (which now can be seen along the Anillo Periférico, the highway that circles Mexico City). Notified of the discovery, Manuel Gamio—founder of modern Mexican anthropology in the 1920s and a family friend—verified its authenticity. A real discovery! A temple dedicated to Mixcóatl, the Aztec god of hunters, the founding deity of Mixcoac!

That was the order that had been lost, “the unity of the beginning from the beginning,” the “Great Whole” to which Paz in the future would have to return poetically. In permanent vigil, in the solitude of his labyrinth, Paz was dreaming while awake, dreaming his own future poem of Mexican history.

 

BETWEEN APRIL
and November 1943, he would publish a series of articles on
lo mexicano
, the quality of being Mexican. They do not contain the sort of revelations to be found in
The Labyrinth of Solitude
but they do anticipate what Paz would write years later in Paris. They are cruel, perspicacious, moving freely through the country and its people. The poet attempts a broad and sweeping psychological examination of his fellow Mexicans. His gaze is above all moral: he tries to probe below the typical attitudes of the Mexican in order to liberate him from them. He investigates the meaning in depth of various popular words like
vacilón
(“fun time”) or
ninguneo
(“ostracism” or “total dismissal”). He offers a crude phenomenology of typical personages who pullulate throughout Mexican politics:
el agachado
(“bent over,” “a servile man”)
el mordelón
(“big-biter,” “a bribable policeman or other official”),
el coyote
(“middleman,” “fixer”):
el lambiscón
(“bootlicker”), and other social and political slang words. And as if he were warning against too facile “Mexicanist” analyses, he writes that “Montaigne knew more about the soul of Mexicans than most of the novelists of the Revolution.” He would try to find the correct balance that could reveal this soul from a universalist perspective, influenced in style and emotional values by French culture. He would try to become a Mexican Montaigne.

 

DURING THOSE
years of personal crisis and poetic incubation, Octavio Paz developed his exhaustive attention to historical and contemporary Mexican traits and sources. It would become a constant in his work. Fully aware that he had already earned a solid niche within the history of Mexican culture, Paz felt obliged to assemble the components of this history. Collect them in order to properly evaluate the tradition and to establish his own place within it. And in an obituary for his friend Silvestre Revueltas, or a tender and anguished profile on Juan Soriano, or pieces on the poet Carlos Pellicer and the Porfirian landscape painter of the Valley of Mexico, José María Velasco, Paz would leave clues about the kind of art to which he himself aspired. He also, as he wrote about Revueltas, “did not love disorder, nor Bohemia; he was instead an ordered intelligence, precise and exact.” With Soriano he shared rebellion and orphanhood. From Pellicer he had learned to hear and see the poetry of nature, a constant presence in his work. And even in the coldness of Velasco, who, like a disdainful eagle gazing down from his Porfirian eyrie, had painted desolate landscapes, empty of humanity, Paz salvaged the importance of “rigor, reflection, architecture . . . [his work] alerts us to the dangers of pure sensibility and a reliance on imagination alone.” And he saw his own predilections not only in the mirror of Mexican writers but also in Spaniards whom he admired. On the work of Luis Cernuda, for instance, he commented: “In his pages, we do not encounter displays of cleverness, pseudo-philosophic complications, opulent and empty baroquism . . . Transparency, equilibrium, objectivity, clarity of thought and of words are the external virtues of his prose.”

But among all these critical examinations, the most significant is the one he dedicated (in the final issue of
Taller
, January–February 1941) to a recent edition of the Selected Pages (
Páginas escogidas
) of José Vasconcelos. Paz was neither ignorant of nor did he condone Vasconcelos's atrocious ideological turn toward Nazism, directing, since February 1940, the magazine
Timón
, funded by the German embassy in still neutral Mexico. But Paz was deeply attracted by the romantic energy of Vasconcelos and even more by the fierce polemic his work and personality had provoked. It seemed to Paz that Vasconcelos had been “faithful to his era and to his land, even though his passions had torn at his en-trails.” And above all, Vasconcelos seemed to him a great artist: “a great poet of America, I mean the great creator or recreator of the nature and the men of America.” His work, Paz went on, was “the only [project] among his contemporaries, that had ambitions toward greatness and monumentality”; Vasconcelos had wanted “to form, from his life and his work, a great classical monument”:

 

. . . his best pages on aesthetics are those in which he discusses rhythm and dance: he understands order, proportion . . . there is in his work something like a nostalgia for musical architecture . . . His authenticity, like his greatness, testify to his virile, tender, impassioned nature, and this nature is what we love in him, beyond everything else.

 

Two years later Paz gave a lecture in Oaxaca, where Vasconcelos was born, and further refined his own perceived vocation for “greatness,” implicitly comparing himself to Vasconcelos, as if Paz had been prefigured in an immense mirror—the first pages of Vasconcelos's autobiography
Ulises Criollo
(The Creole Ulysses):

 

The destiny of the Mexican poet, between heaven and earth, between the sirens of foreign culture and a soil that he loves without understanding it, meets and defines itself—and this is more than a symbol—in that child Vasconcelos describes in the first pages of his book, lost in a frontier town and pursuing his first studies in a foreign preparatory school. The whole Vasconcelian odyssey is a spiritual odyssey, about the traveler who returns, not to take charge of his home, like the Greek, but to rediscover it . . . It is not important that Vasconcelos . . . stopped halfway through his journey, amid Hispanic forms of nationality; his work is a dawn. What he praises is less important than his direction. And so it is also a lesson. He shows us that it is not necessary to hope for Mexico to arrive at full maturity before daring to speak for the nation.

 

Now it is Paz's turn to continue on the path, to go beyond the dawn and arrive at high noon, to speak for the nation: “and perhaps it is the poet who will manage to condense and concentrate all the conflicts of our nation into a mythical hero who will not only speak for Mexico, but more important, help to create her.”

Vasconcelos had been “a dawn” but then he had lost his way. Now he, Paz, would become Mexico's midday sun. He would further synthesize what he now felt was his mission in a piece called “Poetry of Solitude and Poetry of Communion”:

 

All poetry moves between these two poles of innocence and awareness, solitude and communion. We modern men, incapable of innocence, born into a society that naturally renders us artificial and that has stripped us of our human substance to convert us into merchandise, we modern men look in vain for the lost man, the innocent man. All the valiant efforts of our culture, since the end of the 18th century, are directed to recover him, to dream him. Rousseau sought him in the past, like the romantics; some modern poets in primitive man; Karl Marx, the most profound, dedicated his life to constructing him, to remaking him . . . Poetry, by giving voice to these dreams, invites us to rebellion, to live our dreams while awake. It points the way to the future golden age and summons us to freedom.

 

Very few Mexican writers, perhaps only Paz, Vasconcelos, and José Revueltas—despite their great ideological differences—have thought or would think in just this way.

 

A VISION
of this kind would necessarily clash with the neo-Porfirian ambience of the time. Despite his insights, his poetic and personal experience, and his heroic ambition, the years between 1938 and 1943 had been a period of crisis for Octavio Paz. He was beginning to feel he could no longer live in Mexico. He was troubled not only by the ostentatious and rhetorical official culture, the economic orientation of the country, and the considerable weakening of revolutionary politics. He also was drifting professionally. He did not want to become part of the cultural apparatus dependent on the state or on the academy, but unless you were independently wealthy, which Paz was not, there were no other real possibilities for earning a living. Another alternative always open to Mexican writers was the diplomatic corps, but it was perhaps an alternative Paz did not consider at the time.

He saw Mexico as a country becoming blatantly capitalistic. In an “excess of money, cabarets, industry and business deals” Mexico had lost its revolutionary nerve, poetic inspiration, and critical passion. The ambience, he thought, was contaminating culture and literature with a miasma of self-complacency, pretension, mediocrity, and lies. Paz needed to leave the country and he found a means to do so. In November 1943 he received a Guggenheim fellowship to the University of California at Berkeley and he set out for San Francisco. It was a journey that was supposed to be temporary but—except for a couple of years in the 1950s—Paz would then live abroad for more than thirty years, until 1976. He left for San Francisco alone. His wife and daughter were to join him in a few months. In Mexico two of his friends had committed suicide. One, Rafael Vega Albela, had been a friend since childhood. The other was the essayist (and his sometime mentor) Jorge Cuesta. He would later say to David Huerta, the son of his old friend Efraín, “I left because I didn't want to be trapped either by journalism or by alcoholism.”