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Compared with the impending Porfiriato, the “dictatorships” of Juárez and Lerdo de Tejada had been child's play. As justification for his loyalty to the regime, Paz would point to the material progress presided over by his good friend Porfirio. Mexico was to leave behind the era of revolutions, civil wars, and foreign interventions, and enter a long and energetically sustained period of “Peace, order, and progress”: thousands of miles of railroads, new harbors, increasing exploitation of mineral mines and oil fields, agricultural and industrial development, growth in foreign trade, all within the framework of a kind of absolute monarchy outfitted in republican clothing. Like Mexico itself, Ireneo Paz settled down and filled his life with “order” and “progress.” In 1877 he initiated a new periodical,
La Patria
, with its illustrated supplements and famous annual almanac. It would appear, issue after issue, until August 1914. But one element of Porfirio's official ideals would fail to take firm hold within the life of this highly combative man, the condition expressed by his own family name: peace. Close to the date of the presidential elections of 1880, Ireneo, as if he still had to pay a debt of violence to his revolutionary past, challenged the young poet Santiago Sierra to a duel. The colonel would kill the poet and this episode of bloodshed would weigh upon him from then on. “You do not know what it's like to carry a corpse on your back through an entire life,” he once told some young men who were contemplating a duel.

The killing seemed to weaken every vestige of his physical aggressiveness and he turned definitively to his work in editing and literary creation. Instead of making war, Ireneo Paz devoted himself to
hacer patria,
“creating the fatherland” through writing. His ambition, which he never completely realized, was to become the Benito Pérez Galdós of Mexico, chronicling the story of his country in works of history and fiction as the great Spanish novelist was doing for Spain. After publishing (in 1884)
Algunas campañas
(Some Campaigns), his attractively written revolutionary memoirs, he began a series of Historical Legends (
Leyendas históricas
), which began with the Conquest, then treated important political figures of the nineteenth century (Santa Anna, Juárez, Maximilian, Manuel Losada, Porfirio Díaz) and finally a few twentieth-century revolutionaries. His work ran parallel to that of the authors of the great collection (published in 1884)
México a través de los siglos
(Mexico Across the Centuries). The intention in both cases was to firmly establish a historical consciousness for Mexico by creating a civic pantheon. At one point he was given the federal concession to publish the Diary of Debates held in Porfirio's more than obsequious Congress. The success of his own works and publishing projects was reflected in the life of his family and his material prosperity. Although he had lost his wife and was deeply saddened by the early death of his firstborn son, Carlos, two daughters remained to him (Rosita and the very sensitive Amalia, a lover of literature, who would remain unmarried and be his lifelong companion) and two sons, Arturo and then the youngest born in 1883, Octavio. And Ireneo showed no hesitation in his support for Porfirio, whom he saw as a “ruler who has known how to rescue, almost from the rubble, a nationality to be respected.”

But around 1910, the patriarch sensed a return of the deep past, both the country's and his own. His initial reaction was to criticize the “stupid revolution” proclaimed by the anti-reelectionist leader Francisco I. Madero, but then the recollection of his own campaigns with Porfirio Díaz against Juárez and Lerdo and the memory of the years when he had abandoned work and family to launch himself on a political adventure all combined to again awaken the rebel that he had once been. Hadn't he himself coined the phrase: “Valid voting, no reelection” (
Sufragio efectivo
,
no reelección
), first brandished by Porfirio at the time of the La Noria uprising in 1871 and that had now become Madero's slogan?
La Patria
began to put some distance between itself and the dictator and Ireneo sharpened its attacks on the arrogant political elite that surrounded Díaz, the so-called Científicos. Díaz responded by sending his old comrade, now seventy-five years old, to the Belén prison of Mexico City.

On June 7, 1911, Francisco I. Madero entered a Mexico City from which Díaz had fled to France.
La Patria
, under the interim direction of Ireneo's son, Octavio Paz Solórzano, announced in huge front-page headlines, with a photo of the triumphant leader of the Revolution, “ECCE HOMO, he had to win and he won.”

But for Ireneo Paz, electoral freedom was one thing and another, very different matter, was the threat of a revolution led by Emiliano Zapata, whose struggle had not ended with the political triumph of Madero. Perhaps Don Ireneo lumped Zapata in with his memories of the “Indian hordes” of Manuel Losada, the “Tiger of Álica,” who had fought an ethnic war in western Mexico. Again under the patriarch's direction,
La Patria
lashed out at Zapata, dubbing him “the sadly celebrated Attila of the South” and his soldiers “rabble in revolt,” “coarse gangs of fiends” from whom “the soil of the fatherland” had to “purge itself.” When Madero was assassinated (February 23, 1913),
La Patria
's editorial pages drew a skeptical conclusion: “The Mexican people did not understand freedom, nor has it managed to discipline its character.” Only liberal education would resolve the political problems of the country and it would take some time. Meanwhile, Ireneo found no problem in supporting the military regime of General Victoriano Huerta, who had led the coup d'état against Madero.

 

AT THE
beginning of the twentieth century, Ireneo Paz's large country home in Mixcoac was a faithful reflection of the “Porfirian peace.” It had a jai alai fronton, a bowling alley, a swimming pool, a billiard parlor, pavilions, and even a Japanese garden. His work life was in Mexico City. The Paz publishing house was on Relox Street, very near the Palacio Nacional, and there the young student Octavio Paz Solórzano learned the business while earning his high school diploma and moving on to a degree in law. Díaz, in a famous newspaper interview of 1908, had broached the possibility of not reelecting himself to an eighth term of office and permitting the formation of political parties as well as genuinely free elections. The sympathies of young Octavio (and perhaps also of Ireneo himself) were drawn to the presidential candidacy—then being floated—of the prestigious general Bernardo Reyes, governor of the dynamic northern state of Nuevo León, who in the end disappointed his loyalists by accepting a diplomatic posting to Europe. Octavio praised the political revolution of Madero but there was another revolution that attracted him more, one that would allow him to be more revolutionary than his father.

In the spring of 1911, while the star of Emiliano Zapata was still on the rise, Octavio Paz Solórzano,
El Güero
(“the blond guy,” as the Zapatistas later came to call him), had traveled through the Zumpango region of the state of Guerrero to see what exactly was going on. The first stage of Zapata's “Revolution of the South” was over but Paz carefully noted down the events and surroundings and would write down their story many years later. It was the first foreshadowing of his later commitment to the Zapatista cause. After Díaz resigned (on May 25, 1911), Octavio organized a student reception for Madero in Mexico City and an ephemeral Liberal Center for Students, which tried to revive the candidacy of Bernardo Reyes. In August of the same year, in elections far more honest than any that had previously been held in Mexico, Madero became president. And Paz Solórzano finished his law degree with a thesis on “Liberty of the Press,” a subject intimately connected with the life experience of his father.

The triumph of democracy seemed to promise a tranquil life for the young lawyer. In 1911 he published an “Updated Manual for the Voter,” established his law office, and married Josefina Lozano (“Pepita,” the young and beautiful daughter of an Andalusian wine grower whom he had known in Mixcoac). He moved with his wife to Ensenada, in Baja California, where he filled various posts in the Ministry of Justice, directed by Jesús Flores Magón, the brother of the great anarchist rebel Ricardo Flores Magón. But neither the times nor the character of the young lawyer portended a peaceful life. He had quarreled to the point of combat with the Porfirista prefect in Mixcoac and had the same kind of confrontations with a local
cacique
in Ensenada. Like his father, he was a man always ready for battle.

In 1914, the young couple returned to Mexico City. On March 31, 1914, the office of
La Patria
received a notice for next-day publication. While the federal forces of Victoriano Huerta were locked in fierce combat with Villistas at the city of Torreón and rumors were running through the city about “the almost certain death of the ferocious Emiliano Zapata,” Octavio Paz Lozano was born in Mexico City and given the name of his father: “the first delivery by the wife of Licenciado Octavio Paz, the son of our director, who gave birth to a healthy child” welcomed “with great joy.” The new Octavio would spend his childhood with his eighty-year-old grandfather because in a few months the elder Octavio, duplicating the destiny of Don Ireneo, would leave his wife and son and “go off to the Revolution.” And the child was born among flames: the Great War had begun in Europe and Mexico was undergoing the preliminary stages of a savage civil war between the revolutionaries who had supported Venustiano Carranza and the armies of Villa and Zapata. Three weeks later, soldiers loyal to General Pablo González burst into the Paz publishing house and confiscated everything. The final issue of
La Patria
, number 11767, appeared on August 26, 1914. Since May, Don Ireneo had informed his readers that he was in economic difficulties; and now he suffered the physical blow of a stroke. Cared for by his daughter Amalia, he convalesced in his Mixcoac home. Very soon afterward, he was joined by his daughter-in-law Pepita and his little grandson Octavio.

 

FROM
1915 on, the Revolution set the country aflame but the violence did not enter Mexico City. Don Ireneo (whom his children called Papa Neo) would live ten more years, organized, athletic, sarcastic, and resigned to the very end. With the sonorous call of a bugle, he would unite his family at the dinner table—his daughter Amalia, his son Arturo with his own wife and children, his daughter-in-law Josefa and the child Octavio. Ireneo spent time in his orchards but, still a restless man, he would also go off elsewhere. His grandson would accompany him on some of these trips: a weekly visit to the mother of the well-known actress Mimí Derba, where he was treated by mother and daughter with great affection, or a trip to collect rents. The grandfather and child would also meet in his library, which held the precious jewels of literature and French history, especially dealing with the French Revolution, and albums with pictures of Ireneo's political and literary heroes: Mirabeau, Danton, Lamartine, Hugo, and Balzac. It was perhaps there in the library—for Ireneo a kind of civic altar, among portraits of Napoléon and Spanish liberals like General Juan Prim and Emilio Castelar—that the grandson first heard him speak of his campaigns in the wars of the Reform and the Intervention and his rebellions against Juárez and Lerdo de Tejada. He was a magnificent conversationalist.

He died peacefully on the night of November 4, 1924. His son Octavio, who by then had a position in the government of Zapata's home state of Morelos, could not return for the funeral. According to the accounts, Ireneo's grandson, Octavio Paz Lozano, a “young man” ten years old, had to preside over the ceremonies of mourning. He would be left with many memories of his grandfather: the walks hand in hand through Mixcoac, his grandfather's “dark silk jackets sumptuously embroidered,” his recounting of anecdotes and legends. All of it would remain firmly fixed in his recollections, like the engravings by Gustave Doré that Ireneo had shown him:

 

the first death we never forget

though he may die by lightning, that suddenly!

never to reach the bed or the last rites.

 

The house in Mixcoac turned ghostly. Living there were the father, almost always absent; the child's mother, Josefina (a paragon of Catholic piety during a revolutionary era); and his aunt Amalia, who guided the first literary steps of that child, reserved and timid though also playful, and already extremely sensitive to the sonic resonances of words. (Why is the word
calcetín,
“stocking,” not the name of a small bell—
campanita
? he once asked as a small child.) To this solitude of an only child, abandoned in early infancy by a revolutionary father and now abandoned forever by the patriarch “who was gone in a few hours / and nobody knows what silence he entered,” the young Octavio would add the intangible presence of those who had vanished: “the twilight brotherhoods of the absent”: “In my house the dead outnumber the living.” As the years passed, Papa Neo's library became his refuge. Surrounded by portraits, he read Ireneo's collection of novels, poems, and historical legends, and he preserved his albums, books, manuscripts, and unpublished works.

Political liberty had been the central concern of Don Ireneo, the driving force behind his revolutionary campaigns. But his work as a writer and editor—periodicals, sonnets, and books—had been in the end his strongest weapon, his way of “constructing the fatherland.” He ended his days believing that “for the dictatorship of one man, the caudillo Díaz, the Revolution had substituted the anarchic dictatorship of many chiefs and little chieftains.” In the obituaries, the press remembered Ireneo Paz as he had really been: “the dean of journalism.” He had lived the nineteenth century over nearly its entire range, from war to peace, from peace to war. Symbolically, he was the last survivor of his epoch, the last Liberal.