Redeemers (19 page)

Buried deep in the poet's memory lay the most horrifying recollection—the events of March 8, 1935. It was of course “a day of fiesta in Los Reyes La Paz,” recalled Leopoldo Castañeda, “and the
licenciado
arrived directly there. They say someone was with him when he arrived.” He was killed by a train of the Interoceanic Railway. “The body was so frightfully dismembered that the remains . . . carefully collected . . . were carried in a bag to his house” at Licenciado Ireneo Paz Street No. 79 in Mixcoac. The newspaper
El Universal
went on to describe the lawyer Paz's rich historical archive, as well as that of his father, and noted the existence of a valuable historical diary that he kept. His son came to believe that his father had been murdered. The authorities tried to interrogate the man who had arrived with him but he never presented himself. There were people who believed it was an accident but others thought it had been a suicide. It was said that some Indians had found the head fifteen hundred meters from the body. Not long after his father's death, Octavio Paz discovered that he had a sister whose mother lived near the site of the accident.

And so, having “faced up to death,” the drunken spree, the Mexican fiesta of Octavio Paz Solórzano was swept into silence, a man “so likable that he even made people laugh who didn't like him,” but so somber in his final photos. Paz admitted, half a century later, “I relegated him to oblivion,” though he immediately corrected himself and said, “although oblivion is not the right word. In reality he was always present for me but set apart, like a painful recollection.” In 1936, a history of the Mexican Revolution was published. The chapters on Zapatismo were by Paz Solórzano, fruit of the great passion of his life. Ten years later, in the poem “Interrupted Elegy,” Octavio portrays his father as a lost, wandering soul:

 

And someone among us gets up

and carefully closes the door.

But he, there on the other side, keeps

insisting, he lurks in every hollow,

in the folds, he wanders among the yawns,

the surroundings, though we may close

the doors, he keeps on insisting.

His silence is a mirror of my life.

His death prolongs itself within my life.

I am the final error among his errors.

 

IV

The legacy was there, implicit. If the Liberal patriarch and the Zapatista leader had been revolutionaries, their descendant should be more of a revolutionary than either of them. The adventure began in 1929, when Paz was fifteen years old, as he joined a famous student strike for the autonomy of the National University. The students were also very active in backing the presidential candidacy of José Vasconcelos, who would become one of Octavio's idols. Vasconcelos's term as Secretary of Public Education had been a true educational and cultural crusade. In 1929 Vasconcelos had returned from exile and based his program on a very simple platform: the moral purification of the Mexican Revolution, corroded by militarism and the corruption of the “chiefs and little chieftains” Don Ireneo had observed. Vasconcelos was defeated through the first great electoral fraud perpetrated by the official party near the very beginning of its long history of power. José Alvarado, a friend of Octavio Paz, described the state of mind among the young:

 

Mexico was then living through a dramatic time. The Revolution had been halted and betrayed. There was an air of confusion in all areas and the country's youth, defeated through evil maneuvers in the electoral contest of 1929, felt desperate and oppressed. All the best voices had dissipated and the best proposals dissolved. The world seemed gray with the echoes of the American financial crisis, the triumph of fascism in Italy, the winds foreshadowing Hitler, and the disputes among the great powers.

 

The students moved radically to the left.

In 1930, Octavio Paz Lozano entered the most prestigious public school in Mexico, the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, where his father had studied. In that noble and highly symbolic building, which had once been the old Jesuit college of San Ildefonso, José Clemente Orozco had painted his celebrated murals on the Mexican Revolution. Friends remember Octavio in heated discussion with his history and philosophy teachers about rural injustice and peasant misfortunes (not long ago he had been typing “clean, correct copies” of his father's pro-Zapatista articles). He became friends with a Catalan student named José Bosch, an anarchist, and the two engineered academic protests, attended anti-imperialist demonstrations, and sometimes were arrested, always to be rescued by Octavio's father, the lawyer Paz Solórzano. Bakunin, Fourier, and the Spanish anarchists were Octavio's first political mentors, but soon he was “saved,” in the jargon of the time, by Marxism. The young Octavio joined the Union of Students for Workers and Peasants, whose objective was to establish educational outreach projects in the city and countryside. (Frida Kahlo also participated in the activities of the
Unión de Estudiantes Pro Obreros y Campesinos
, while Diego Rivera was painting murals adorned with the hammer and sickle in the Ministry of Public Education.) Octavio also became a member of an ephemeral Radical Preparatory (“high school”) Party.

In 1931, the best bookstore in Mexico City, Pedro Robredo—one street away from the National Preparatory School—put some twenty new books on sale, almost all of them translations from the Russian:
Anarchism and Socialism
by Plekhanov, Marx and Engels's
Communist Manifesto
, an anthology of writers of revolutionary Russia,
Russia in 1931
by César Vallejo,
The State and the Revolution
by Lenin, and more. Paz and his friends read some of these books and, like almost an entire generation of Latin American students, identified with Sashka Yegulev, the heroic student who gives his life for the revolution in the novel by the Russian novelist Leonidas Andreiev.

They called each other
tovarich
(“comrade”) and some of them even dressed like Bolsheviks, in Russian tunics, but very few actually joined the Communist Party. The government of Plutarco Elías Calles, soon to be dubbed the “Foremost Chief,” had banned the communists (after his brief romance with the Soviet Union) and membership in the party would put you on the wrong side of the law. Among these boys, one student, the most radical among them, seemed predestined to “make the Revolution”: he had been born on November 20, 1914, the official anniversary of the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. Even his last name, José Revueltas, implied rebellion. Between 1930, when he joined the Mexican Communist Party, and 1935, when he visited Soviet Russia as a delegate to the Seventh Party Congress, Revueltas would willingly suffer two periods of incarceration in the Pacific island prison of the Islas Marías. Much more prison time followed in the course of his life. Revueltas embraced his militancy with religious fervor. His spirit of sacrifice, his willingness to contemplate suffering and accept his own, would later be poured into deeply moving novels. Many times in the future his life would intersect that of his schoolboy friend Paz.

Another friend of Octavio Paz, the poet Efraín Huerta, has evoked the atmosphere of those febrile years: “A light united us, something like a communion.”

 

We were like angry stars

full of books, manifestos, heartbreaking loves

 

Afterwards

we gave our veins and arteries

what are called desires

to redeem the world on every warm morning,

We lived through

a cold rain of goodness:

everything winged, musical, everything guitars,

and declarations, whispers at daybreak,

sighs and statues, threadbare clothes, misfortunes

they were all there . . .

 

Paz shared the fervor of those times but his road toward Revolution did not, as with Revueltas and Huerta, lead to formal communist militancy. Born among books and printing presses, he very quickly embarked on a life of publishing and of combat in the world of letters. In August 1931 he started the literary journal
Barandal
(Balustrade), which would last for seven issues, till March 1932. There he published his first poems, with a tone that veered from playfulness to desolation. “We all had the dream of having our own magazine,” recalls Rafael Solana. “We were thunderstruck with admiration, stupefied, when a friend, Octavio Paz, brought out his [magazine] . . . small, only a few pages, but cleanly produced, young, new.”

In December 1931, Paz was only seventeen but in his magazine he published an “Ethics of the Artist,” in which he formulated a totally serious prophecy about the future of his vocation. Between the options of “pure art” and “committed art” (an intensely debated topic of the time) he opts for the second, but not in a simple way nor with the arguments of a schoolboy. He had read Nietzsche, ancient Greek theater, the Spanish novel, Russian Marxists and German Romantics, and he believed that literature had to be “mystical and aggressive,” elevated and eternal, “possessed by truth.” Much more important, he declared himself committed to a cultural mission that would include all of Latin America: “It is indispensable to realize that we form part of a continent whose history we have to construct ourselves. That there is a manifest destiny running through all eras, obliging men to fulfill the will of life and of God.” The literary and publishing work of his father and grandfather had made their mark, in various forms and degrees, on the history of Mexico. His own work would unfold on a much larger stage.

For the young Paz, it seemed clear that radical politics had to be fused with cultural modernity. The air was full of radical politics—in the press, political parties, meetings, books, cafés, periodicals, lecture halls—but modernity was not so easy to achieve. The previous generation (born between 1890 and 1905) had set the bar very high. Almost indifferent to politics but closely and actively attentive to the productions of the literary and artistic vanguard, this early generation had clustered—as was usual in Mexico since the middle of the nineteenth century—around a magazine, in this case
Contemporáneos
(which was published from 1928 to 1931). The group included truly outstanding poets and playwrights (Xavier Villaurrutia, Carlos Pellicer, José Gorostiza, Salvador Novo) and the impressive essayist Jorge Cuesta. They were of the same age as the Spanish intellectual Generation of '27 (which included Rafael Alberti, Manuel Altolaguirre, Gerardo Diego, and Federico García Lorca) and they greatly admired the poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado. Their magazine published authors from the
Nouvelle Revue Français
(Gide, Morand, Maurois, Larbaud) and translations of T. S. Eliot's
The Waste-Land
, D. H. Lawrence's
Mornings in Mexico,
and the
Anabasis
by St.-John Perse. And these Contemporáneos cast doubts on the continuing hegemony of the great Mexican muralist movement, which by that time (at least in the cases of Rivera and Siqueiros) had become repetitive and pedagogic. With
Barandal
, Paz wanted to follow in the steps of the now defunct journal,
Contemporáneos.
He published the modernist French poet Valéry, the Dutch historian and philosopher Johan Huizinga, the Italian futurist Filippo Marinetti. His little magazine was somewhat irreverent in relation to intellectual sacred cows of the academy and did valuable work of recovery and discovery in the visual arts.

But above all Paz was a poet. His teacher Andrés Iduarte remembers him as “timid, or more precisely restrained, capable of explosions that were promptly calmed by much reading of the best writing, a penetrating intelligence that could lead him to doubts and a painful sensibility that could end in despair, spontaneous and revelatory in opening his heart and then tortured and distant to the point of sullenness.” His friend José Alvarado has left us another sensitively observed sketch of the young editor of
Barandal
: “Leaning on the balustrade of the top floor” of San Ildefonso, looking at the light above the Valley of Mexico “beyond his bewildered eyes, one already recognized an unbreakable poetic will and a thirst for inventing the world; Octavio . . . did not want to be simply one among many poets, but a true master of poetry; and he did not entrust his identification with the world only to reason, but to every sensation, emotion, all possible judgments . . .”

In 1932, continuing another strand of the family tradition, he entered the law school of the National University. He traveled to Veracruz, one of the most radical states in Mexico, to support peasant groups encouraged by the state governor Adalberto Tejeda. As a member of a Federation of Revolutionary Students, he attended a demonstration in honor of the Cuban communist leader Julio Antonio Mella, assassinated in Mexico in January 1929. The police threw the young demonstrators in jail, from which they were freed one more time by Octavio's father. His anarchist friend Bosch was expelled from the country. Hitler took power in 1933, inspiring Mexican fascists; and the politics (in 1935) of the Popular Front opened political life anew to the Communist Party. Militias were formed, groups like the “Red Shirts” on the left or the “Golden Shirts” on the right, who would later fight to the death on the streets of the capital city. The philosopher Antonio Caso advised his student Paz to follow the example of Vicente Lombardo Toledano: “he's a socialist but also a Christian.” Caso failed to draw Paz to Christianity (he was a liberal Jacobin, like his grandfather) but Lombardo did not convert him to hard-line leftist orthodoxy.