Redeemers (16 page)

 

But, tell me, do you believe that in the opposition between the coast and the sierra, the indigenous community is . . . the solution? Don't you see there a trace of the colonialism that you so condemn? Is the
cholo
[the Andean term for mestizo] not also involved? Couldn't you accept a movement of total and not exclusivist vindication?

 

Sánchez was rejecting the racism (including indigenist racism) that had divided the ethnic groups of Peru since the Conquest. He spoke for the mestizo and proclaimed himself to be a cholo. But Mariátegui, entranced with his own mythological conceptions, was not prepared to accept the more inclusive, open premise of
mestizaje
. He had called Vasconcelos's mixed-race utopia a “vehement prophecy” that “suppresses and ignores the present,” foreign to “the criticism of contemporary reality, in which he exclusively seeks elements favorable to his prophecy.”

But Mariátegui perhaps died too young to realize that his thesis was also a “vehement prophecy” as speculative and utopian as that of Vasconcelos. On this point at least, the mestizo affirmation of Vasconcelos—setting aside its absurd detours—has come to seem, in the end, more accurate, not only culturally but also economically and in demographic terms. Mexico, with all its own problems, had attenuated the original ethnic confrontation through a slow, complex process of
mestizaje
that lessened exclusion and ethnic hatred. And the agrarian reform of its president Lázaro Cárdenas in the late 1930s (well after Mariátegui's death) might have seemed a more reasonable solution, even to him, than indigenous communism. And finally, beyond ideas and ideologies, the races would begin to mix more freely in Peru and a process of
mestizaje—
though far less extensive than in Mexico—began to change the ethnic composition of the country. An agrarian reform (though again less intense than the Mexican) did finally come to Peru. This twofold process, not indigenous communism, seemed to point toward a future direction for Peru.

Beyond the problem of the Indian and the land, the second term of the equation, Marxist socialism, would have a melancholy denouement. And yet, thanks in large part to Mariátegui, Latin American intellectuals would offer some of the most intelligent, generous, and elaborated contributions to socialist thought. But long before the collapse of European communism, the closed, self-absorbed minds of the Comintern decided to dispense with the two options offered by Mariátegui and Haya de la Torre. The more middle-class socialism of APRA, committed to the electoral process, had already chosen to sail other waters and would have to confront the problem of corruption, common to the political parties of Latin America. But the silence of orthodox Marxists before the insights of Mariátegui did much more harm to the development of socialism in Latin America. They discarded the most brilliant socialist thinker ever to arise in “Our America” and there is no way to repair the effects of that loss. Even in the 1980s, Latin American writers close to the Soviet Communist Party continued to insult Mariátegui.

Perhaps the worst violence done to his thought and memory was the attempt to make use of his figure and the distortion of his ideas that was perpetrated by the narrowly dogmatic and supremely brutal movement of the
Sendero Luminoso
(the Shining Path) in the Peruvian 1980s and '90s. Myth, for Mariátegui, was a power of the spirit, not a tool for propaganda, which he despised. One of the loftiest intelligences of Latin America meant something far different from rabid cruelty when he wrote that “Marxist-Leninism will open the Shining Path to Revolution.”

In 1930, the fate he had evaded since childhood finally completed its vicious circle for Mariátegui. Due to a malignant tumor in his left thigh, he had to enter the Clínica Villarán. He was not spared his final weeks of pain and died on April 16. It is deeply moving to think that this man partially crippled since childhood, who spent his final, intensely creative years in a wheelchair, who had educated himself, who had created enterprises and institutions, produced exceptionally brilliant books and articles, master of a clear and splendid style, generator of theoretical insights of great breadth and an example to us all in his capacity for action despite his lifelong pain, is still waiting for the readers and followers he deserves. But history was preparing a surprise. More than sixty years after his death, his Indo-Marxist myths would take genuine root, not in Peru but in the mestizo country par excellence of Latin America, in faraway Mexico.

PART II

A Man in His Century

 

 

5

Octavio Paz

THE POET AND THE REVOLUTION

CANCIÓN MEXICANA

My grandfather, while drinking down his coffee cup

spoke to me about Juarez and Porfirio

the Zouaves and the Silver Gang.

And the tablecloth smelled of gunpowder

 

My father, while drinking down his shot glass,

spoke to me about Zapata and Villa

Soto y Gama and the Flores Magón.

And the tablecloth smelled of gunpowder.

 

I kept my silence.

About whom could I speak?

 

In Paris, midway through the twentieth century, the poet Octavio Paz writes a book about Mexico. He is thirty-five years old and has a long history behind him of poetic achievements and political experience. He has dedicated his Friday nights and his weekends to composing this book, after finishing his workweek as a diplomat. For six years he has lived far from his homeland. Although he misses “the flavor, the smell of Mexican religious festivals, the Indians, the fruit, the sun-soaked patios of the churches, the candles, the street vendors,” his motive is not mere nostalgia. He has always known that his own family was a tree with deep roots in the past history of Mexico. And he also knows that in Mexico there is “a past that is underground but alive, a universe of buried images, desires and impulses.” He wants to uncover both of these intimately connected past histories, to see them with clarity, to give them expression and to free them for use. Since the early 1940s, like other Mexican writers and philosophers he had intended “to encounter the essential nature of Mexico [
la mexicanidad
], that invisible substance that can be found somewhere. We do not know what it consists of nor through what path we may reach it; we know, obscurely, that it has not yet been revealed . . . it will spring up, spontaneously and naturally, from the depths of our intimacy, when we encounter it in its true authenticity, the key to our existence . . . the truth of ourselves.” In Paris he is in the process of encountering this “truth.” And for him, this essential key has a name: solitude.

No one in Mexico, except for Octavio Paz, would have fastened on the word “solitude” as anything like a formative, essential characteristic of the country and its people, of its culture and its history. Ever since the Mexican Revolution, the idea of “Mexico” (its history, identity, place in the world, its destiny) has been a national obsession. Mexico as the site of a complex, tragic, yet in its way creative encounter between two radically different civilizations: the Spanish and the indigenous. Mexico as the site of an unfulfilled promise of social justice, progress, and freedom; Mexico as a land condemned by the gods or chosen by the Virgin of Guadalupe; and, finally, Mexico as a country shackled by its various complexes of inferiority. All of this and more but not a people enclosed in a state of “solitude.” The very title of Paz's book is truly strange. At first sight, and especially compared with the typical American, the Mexican is a very gregarious being—in every latitude and epoch, including the immigrant living in the United States, the heir to the “pachuco” whom Paz will consider in his book. He or she is a “we” not an “I,” not an atom but a constellation: the small village, the community, the neighborhood, the church brotherhood, the structure of obligations between children and their godfathers and godmothers known as
compadrazgo,
and, above all, the Mexican family, partly eroded in modern Mexico but still as solid as the mountainous masses of the Sierra Madre. Nothing is more alien to ordinary Mexicans than the isolated figures in a painting by Edward Hopper. The image of the Mexican, today as for centuries past, is more that of a Sunday family outing in the crowded Chapultepec Park of Mexico City.

But not for Octavio Paz, who had been weighed down since early youth by a piercing and constant feeling of solitude and by doubts about his own identity: “the anguish of not knowing exactly who one is.” All of a sudden the thought came to him that his own biography could mesh with the collective history of his country, could serve to present it and be presented within it. And so he had wanted “to tear the veil and to see”: “I felt that I was alone and that Mexico too, as a country, was alone, isolated, far from the central flow of history . . . While reflecting on the strange condition of being Mexican, I uncovered an old truth: every man hides an unknown man within him . . . I wanted to penetrate into myself and unearth that unknown person, to speak with him.”

As time passed, that book, that revelation of national myths would become a myth in itself, approaching the status of a historical and poetical mirror or a kind of philosopher's stone of Mexican culture. So brilliant were the book's insights on Mexico, on its identity and its history, and so liberating, that they concealed its quality of confession, of a “personal confidence,” and for the reader they seemed to bury away Paz's own “unknown person.” But this person is the secret presence within
El laberinto de la soledad
, a tacit autobiography, the labyrinth of Octavio Paz's solitude.

 

II

The temporal progression that led to
El laberinto
begins in the 1920s in a large country mansion, located in an ancient (and at that time still suburban) pre-Hispanic and colonial village called Mixcoac, south of Mexico City. The Paz family had taken refuge there in 1914, when the revolutionary factions contending with each other (on one side the followers of Venustiano Carranza, on the other the partisans of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa) began intermittently to occupy the capital. Almost ten years had passed since those events. The Revolution had ended in 1920. Except for Álvaro Obregón, the undefeated
caudillo
who was president of Mexico between 1920 and 1924, all its great leaders had died by violence: Madero, Zapata, Carranza, Villa. The Revolution, which had cost the country nearly a million dead (by violent death, hunger, or disease), had entered its constructive phase. A generously funded program to expand and improve education had been launched, with the philosopher José Vasconcelos as its creator and director. And the government was taking its first timid steps toward implementing the social reforms outlined in the Constitution of 1917: redistribution of land, stronger laws against the exploitation of workers, greater control over the country's natural resources.

Around the family dining table in Mixcoac, these programs were the subject of intense debate between two Mexicans arguing about the past and future of the country, dramatically linked to the history and destiny of their own lives. A boy around ten years old, the poet-to-be Octavio Paz, was a silent witness to these contending positions. Paz would recall the arguments a half century later in his poem “Canción mexicana,” where he remembers these conversations and comments, “The tablecloth smelled of gunpowder.” And these were not two men who merely represented positions or served as teachers for the young boy. They were his grandfather Ireneo Paz and his father, Octavio Paz Solórzano. The old Liberal and the revolutionary Zapatista offered him two distinct and atavistic faces of power and authority: “a figure that splits into the duality of patriarch and
macho
. The patriarch protects; he is good, powerful, wise. The macho [the
caudillo
, the ‘military leader'] is the frightening man, the hard-ass, the father who has gone off, who has abandoned wife and children.”

Ireneo Paz, the patriarch, was born in 1836, in the state of Jalisco. From 1851 to 1876 his life had been an uninterrupted campaign for political liberty, fought with the pen and with the sword. His favorite means of combat was the periodical “in opposition,” where he would wield the genre of satire with unparalleled talent. He founded his first publication when he was only fifteen years old and, later, another journal dedicated to defending the liberal Constitution of 1857. In 1863, with a newly acquired law degree, he moved from his native Guadalajara to Colima, where he left his young wife, Rosa Solórzano, and his daughter Hilda, only three months old, to enlist in the Liberal armies opposing the coalition of French invaders and Mexican Conservatives. His daughter died during his absence. He took advantage of an amnesty in 1865 and started yet another publication in Guadalajara,
El payaso
(The Clown), a daily paper marked by his biting wit directed against the French-backed empire, whose Emperor Maximilian, during his brief reign, was himself actually entertained by its articles. Paz's period of comparative calm was short-lived. He was soon arrested, as he would be at various times in the future, and succeeded in the first of many adventurous escapes that could fill a novel. He would join the Liberal guerrillas and, within the border enclave controlled by the Juaristas, become the interior secretary of the republican government in the state of Sinaloa. And there the news arrived of the execution of Maximilian and the triumphal entry into Mexico City (on July 15, 1867) by the forces under President Benito Juárez. The date marked the restoration of the republican and liberal order opposed by Mexican Conservatives since 1858 (they had been supported by the French invaders since 1862). It seemed like the right moment to finally lower the guns, but for the restless Ireneo Paz, it was only another beginning.

Between 1867 and 1876, Mexico had an opportunity to experiment peacefully with a democratic system, but ten years of war had nurtured a turbulent and adventurous spirit among the young. Ireneo Paz embodied this restlessness. The political problem of the time was essentially a generational struggle. On one side were the men of letters and lawyers who had accompanied Juárez during the long wanderings of his peripatetic government through the years of the War of the Reform (1858–61) and the War of the French Intervention (1862–67); on the other were the young commanders who had defeated Conservative and French troops on the field of battle. The best-known leader of these young soldiers was Porfirio Díaz, who was thirty-seven years old in 1867 and had waged thirty-seven battles. With that kind of record, Díaz was not prepared to patiently await his turn at the presidency. In the rebellion he would then launch, his foremost intellectual lieutenant was Ireneo Paz, who in 1867 founded two periodicals (
La palanca de Occidente
and
El diablillo colorado
) to support Díaz and oppose a third presidential term for Benito Juárez. But Díaz and Paz lost in this first confrontation. Díaz retired to a hacienda in his native Oaxaca and Ireneo Paz started yet another newspaper, one that would make history:
El Padre Cobos
(“Father Cobos”). The government soon arrested him and he had to serve eleven months in the Tlatelolco Prison of Mexico City. From behind bars, he wrote ribald and venomous texts and “prepares his friends in the area of Revolution,” because this is the magic word in Mexico for every political movement that takes up arms against a government it considers authoritarian or illegitimate. Not revolt, not rebellion: Revolution.

In 1869, barely out of jail, Ireneo Paz became a relapsed revolutionary. He formulated the plan for another revolt, this time in the state of Zacatecas, and again it was unsuccessful. In 1870 he was imprisoned in Monterrey, under sentence of death, but he escaped disguised as a priest, went into exile in Texas, and then accepted yet another amnesty and returned to Mexico. In 1871 he returned to his old ways and began to reissue
El Padre Cobos
. The country was already on the threshold of new presidential elections (with Juárez once again a candidate) and Ireneo Paz published sonnets like this one, opposing the reelection:

 

Why if, perhaps, you were so patriotic

are you buying up votes with pesetas.

Why do you permit this loathsome fraud,

doling out money to whoever votes for you?

 

Tell me, aren't you disturbed by our bankruptcy,

by the hunger that squeezes your people so tightly?

If you don't mend your ways, though I am no prophet

I am telling you that you will be set out in the stocks.

 

Yes, Saint Benito, now take some other path.

Don't show yourself, my friend, to be such a pirate.

Notice that the people are no longer so stupid.

Be merciful and set us free, beloved father.

 

It has already been fourteen years of hemlock.

Set us free, President Old Broken-Down Nag!

 

After the fourth reelection of Benito Juárez,
El Padre Cobos
became the standard-bearer of a new revolution. In November 1871, Paz articulated the Program of La Noria, on the basis of which Porfirio Díaz rose in arms for the first time against his former mentor Juárez. Yet again, Paz left his family and marched to the north with the intention of closing the pincers of the revolution as Díaz, advancing north from Oaxaca, tried to take control of the center of the country. But Díaz failed and, wearing the disguise of a humble citizen, reached the Sierra de Álica, in western Mexico, where he met with his friend Ireneo Paz. It was a zone controlled by one of the most mysterious personages in Mexican history, the
cacique
(“local strong man”) Manuel Losada, who, with his Indian forces, harassed the creole city of Guadalajara. There, as Díaz and Paz were involved in planning conspiracies with Losada, the surprising news arrived of Juárez's sudden death. Paz and Díaz accepted the general amnesty that followed.

In 1873,
El Padre Cobos
began a third epoch of opposition to the government of lawyers and men of letters. It would become the journal's golden epoch, a fiesta of criticism and slander. The political environment then was one of complete freedom of speech, but no freedom was freedom enough for Ireneo Paz. In addition to his merciless satirical pieces and his hilarious dialogues, each issue centered around a scathing sonnet by Ireneo and a cartoon of Father Cobos—Paz's alter ego—squeezing poor President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada by the scruff of the neck as he thrashes around desperately and even hangs out his tongue. By now Paz owned his own press and had published his first historical novel (on the Conquest), as well as a commercially successful
Álbum de Hidalgo
and plays, short theatrical pieces, and poems. The time for new elections was approaching and Paz, as was his custom, began to hatch a new conspiracy. Because of his cartoons, he was briefly jailed again, “in a dark prison with a glimmer of light entering through a tiny skylight at the door, our friend Paz lies, ill due to such harsh treatment.” But he kept firing off his darts. And the revolutionary cycle repeated itself again, in almost every respect. Once again at the side of his
caudillo
Porfirio Díaz, Paz composed the original version of the Program of Tuxtepec, announcing Porfirio's renewed revolt against the central government. Early reverses resulted in a fifty-seven-day jail term for Paz and then exile in Brownsville, Texas, and Havana, Cuba. But Díaz eventually triumphed, entered the capital near the end of 1876, and called for new elections, in which of course he won the presidency. With a brief parenthesis (one of his subordinates was entrusted with the presidential office from 1880 to 1884) Díaz would stay in power till 1911. His faithful friend Ireneo would finally lay down his arms (he was by then a colonel) after thirteen continuous years of combat, “in consonance with the times when everything had to be renewed.”