Redeemers (23 page)

This institutionalization of culture corresponded to a broader transformation of Mexican politics and the Mexican economy. The 1930s had been ideological, polarized, revolutionary, beginning with the collapse of Wall Street and ending with the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the outbreak of World War II. Mexico in the early 1940s, still officially neutral, had become a peaceful and attractive shelter for refugees from Europe (though it would declare war on the Axis powers in 1942 and send a small contingent of airmen to fight in the Pacific Theater). Manuel Ávila Camacho, the new president (1940–46), had been one of Cárdenas's closest subordinates but his attitude was more conciliatory, his politics more centrist. The “Gentleman President” softened the emphasis on class struggle, declared himself a believing Catholic, halted the program of land redistribution, and concentrated on building and strengthening public institutions like social security (Seguro Social) and the nationalized oil industry (Petróleos Mexicanos). Untouched directly by the fighting and able to supply goods (and workers) to the United States, the country benefited economically from World War II, which gave a powerful boost to Mexico's burgeoning process of industrialization. And then came the heyday of tourism.

Talk of “the end of the Revolution” was in the air, and there were some who had already qualified the era as “Neoporfirismo.” Films began to be made showing a highly idealized version of peasant life on the haciendas before the Revolution and nostalgic memories of “the time of Don Porfirio.” The Mexican cinema entered its golden age with its movies and songs and actors famous throughout Latin America and even across the ocean in Franco's Spain. Constrained by money pressures, Paz entered the cinematic current in 1943, writing some dialogues and song lyrics for the movie
El Rebelde
, the second film of the superstar Jorge Negrete. The script was a respectful adaptation of a Pushkin novel done by Jean Malaquais, a Trotskyist friend of Paz (and of André Gide). In one scene, Negrete sings a furtive song directed to his beloved, who is listening to him in secret. Neither is able to see the other:

 

I do not see you with my eyes,

when I close them I see you

and I imprison you in my breast

with locks made of sighs.

My lips never name you,

heartbeats are your name

its syllables are the blood

from my heart broken open.

 

The style and the almost masochistic lover's anguish bear the mark of Paz's hand.

But Octavio Paz was not the man to accept a new version of Porfirian “peace, order, and progress.” The bourgeoisification of Mexico disgusted him. He experienced it as an historic betrayal. He was still sentimentally rooted in the peasant, Zapatista revolution, and ideologically in the world Revolution foretold by Marx, which was due to come to Europe at the end of the war. For Paz, Marxism not only formed part of “our blood and our destiny” but was also an open process of thought for further development. In his personal life, the future remained uncertain and professionally he was now somewhat uprooted. As with his father and grandfather, his life had been inseparable from the printing press and a public life embodied in writing and readers. Editing journals was a mode of expression for him, not in any academic sense but as political and poetic combat. The possibilities for creating a new journal, however, were steadily diminishing.

He continued publishing his poems in Mexican journals and in the most important literary review of the time,
Sur
, under the direction in Buenos Aires of Victoria Ocampo. In 1942 he came out with a new collection
A la orilla del mundo
(On the Shore of the World), which was hailed by José Luis Martínez (then emerging as the most important critic and historian of Mexican literature): “ . . . an out-of-the-ordinary poetic richness and a lyrical abundance that can only be compared to some of the great names in Mexican poetry . . . a firm step on a poetic career that will certainly go very far.”

But the lack of a journal of his own oppressed Paz. Along with the composition of poetry, it was his way of making the Revolution, of his being in the world. In November 1942 he poured out his resentment in a reminiscence of the “goatherd poet” Miguel Hernández, who had recently died of tuberculosis in one of Franco's prisons, where he had been held in bestial conditions. Paz recalled hearing Hernández sing folk songs in Valencia in 1937 and listening he had shared “true passion.” Now he would prefer, as a poetic and impassioned conceit, to leave all that behind: “Let me forget you because to forget that which was pure and true, to forget the best, gives us strength to go on living in this world of compromises and bows, respectful greetings and ceremonies, evil-smelling and rotten.”

 

AT THAT
time Paz became friends with the very young painter from Jalisco Juan Soriano. Because of his excesses and eccentricities, his bouts of drunkenness and torment, Soriano was known as “the little Rim-baud” (
el Rimbaudcito
). He was gaining fame as an incisive portraitist and Paz, speculating on the roots of his friend's talent, saw a mirror of his own childhood in Soriano's lonely infancy: “balustrades and corridors where solitary children go running, always on the verge of falling down in the courtyard.”

Paz and Soriano spent much time together at the Café Paris in Mexico City and at fiestas and memorable evenings fueled by alcohol. And besides conviviality and a similar childhood, one thing more united them: the parallel lives of their fathers, both of them alcoholics and rakes. Paz had collected the remains of his father at a railroad station but had not even been able to hold a wake for him. The necessary mourning lay there within him, long delayed, oppressive, till the death of his friend's father freed it for expression. “When Octavio saw my father in his sickness,” Soriano would remember, “he felt it personally because it revived sad memories and he behaved perfectly.” While his friend's father was dying, “he went to see him every day, without fail . . . When my father died, the poet accompanied me and he was a coffin-bearer at the cemetery, because for him, his father and grandfather had been essential.”

Soriano experienced the relationship between Paz and Elena from up close. “Few women of that era were more dazzling!” he once noted. Soriano was above all a painter of women, and his idea was to capture the unique soul of each subject on his canvas. Around that time he painted a disturbing portrait of Elena. “The portrait of Elena Garro,” he wrote, “seduces whoever comes to know it.” And there she is, as she must have been, a beautiful and formidable golden-haired woman, with sensitive yet imperious features, and a bodily stance of elegance and aggressive strength. Behind her is a door, perhaps the same—as Juan Soriano recounts—that she often closed at night, rejecting Octavio Paz. His poem addressing this portrait (
A un retrato
) flows between images of tenderness and desire and touches of menace, almost of horror:

 

. . . The pallid highlights of her hair

are autumn over a river

Sun turned desolate by a deserted corridor

from whom does she flee? who is she waiting for

undecided, between terror and desire?

Did she see the foul sprouting of her mirror?

Did the serpent coil up between her thighs? . . .

 

Juan Soriano remembers that she tortured Paz: “By her nature she was very competitive but with him she shot to kill. What a tremendous impression!” Paz, on the other hand, “recognized her intelligence,” nourished it and sought ways to help her put it to use.

 

EARLY IN
1943, Paz convinced Octavio Barreda, editor of the magazine
Letras de México
, to join him in a new publishing venture: a journal “of high quality.” It would be called
El hijo pródigo
(The Prodigal Son). Much more than
Taller
, it would be a meeting ground of generations, traditions, and genres. It would publish important essays, translations of contemporary and classical authors, and many theatrical pieces, and from the very beginning it would have a strong emphasis on the visual arts. Paz would later remember
El hijo pródigo
with affection but not with the passion he felt for
Taller
, which had been for him a genuine battlefront. He had tried to stamp “a clearly defined intellectual politics” on the journal, but when he left
El hijo pródigo
in October 1943, his influence would fade away. He later liked to quote an editorial he had written in August 1943: “The writer, the poet, the artist are not instruments nor is their work the blind projectile that many suppose it to be. The only way to defeat Hitler and the universal evil he represents is to save, within the field of culture, a freedom to criticize and denounce . . . Totalitarianism is not the fruit of the inherent wickedness of this or that nation: there where man is simply a
means
, an
instrument
or an object of speculation, there totalitarianism will germinate . . .” The quote is significant because here, at least tacitly, Paz was beginning to see that totalitarianism was not only the province of European fascism.

The small but very quarrelsome literary world of Mexico had recently been rocked by a feud (that would become legendary) between Paz and the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who had been consul general of Chile in Mexico since 1940. He and Paz were friendly and spent time together. The division between them was sparked by the publication of one of Paz's anthologies of Spanish poetry,
Laurel
, in which Paz did not meet the standards of choice favored by Neruda. The Chilean detested “celestial poets, followers of Gide, intellectualizers, miserable Rilkeans, surrealist queers.” A discussion between Paz and Neruda in a restaurant ended with a physical confrontation. Neruda issued declarations on “the absolute disorientation” and “the lack of civic morality” that, in his view, dominated Mexican poetry. Paz and some of his young friends responded with harsh words. In his “Response to the Consul,” Paz wrote:

 

Señor Pablo Neruda, Chilean consul and poet, is also a distinguished political figure, a literary critic and a generous patron of certain lackeys who call themselves his friends. So many different activities cloud his vision and twist his judgments: his literature is contaminated by politics, his politics by literature, and his criticism is often a matter of mere complicity with friends. And so, very often, one does not know if the functionary or the poet is speaking, the friend or the politician.

 

This definitive rupture with Neruda on the plane of aesthetics would distance Paz, by one more step, from the ideological current that identified with the Soviet Union. He continued to embrace Marxism and to admire Lenin but, within the new perspectives opening in the world and in his country, it was unclear what this adherence meant concretely.

 

MEXICAN CULTURE
in the 1940s had not only changed its institutional and material structure. It had changed its focus. The shared, general interest no longer dwelt on the word “Revolution” but rather on “Mexico.” As had been the case in 1915, when World War I isolated Mexico and promoted a time of introspection, Mexican culture during World War II tilted once again toward itself. The term “autognosis” became fashionable. It had first been used in 1934 by the philosopher Samuel Ramos, who, in his seminal book
El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México
(The Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico), had made the diagnosis (from a social therapeutic standpoint influenced by the thought of Alfred Adler) that Mexican culture was suffering from an “inferiority complex.” This intellectual current of introspection was strengthened by the arrival of the Spanish exiles. The philosophers, historians, and creative writers of the Spanish Generation of '98—Unamuno, Ortega, Machado, Azorín—had published famous meditations on the nature of “being Spanish.” Now their successors imported and transferred this type of reflection to their new home. Perhaps the first of the exiles to do so was the poet and painter José Moreno Villa, who in 1940 published a small and delightful book called
Cornucopia de México
, detailing the gestures, manner, customs, and idiosyncratic words he had collected while traveling through his new world of Mexico. And José Gaos, former rector of the University of Madrid and a friend of Ortega y Gasset, inspired the first reexaminations of “the history of ideas” in Mexico.

But when Mexican culture was setting out on a search for itself, the young Octavio Paz—despite his feeling of being uprooted or perhaps because of it—had already forged ahead in at least two areas, poetic meditation and art criticism. In his first contribution to the Argentine journal
Sur
(August 1938), Paz interpreted the book
Nostalgia de la muerte
(Nostalgia for Death) by Xavier Villaurrutia as a mirror of “the Mexican spirit,” of what is “specifically ours”:

 

illuminating—or darkening, poetically—all these conquests, I meet with, I touch and explore that which is Mexican [
lo mexicano
]. What is Mexican in him, as in all of us, circulates invisibly and invincibly, like the breath, warm and impalpable, from our lips or the color, lightly sad and dancing, timid, of our words. Of our sweet Mexican words, the same that take rounded form in a Castilian mouth and in ours lose all their body, all their illuminated contours . . .

 

Another text on the same theme appeared in
El Popular
, on October 28, 1941, titled “On Mexican Literature.” The questions Paz raises are not in the least academic. When did the Mexican people encounter and when did they lose their expressiveness (that is to say their feeling, their
being
)? How to regain it? Who will regain it? And then Paz formulates, perhaps for the first time, his vision of the Mexican Revolution as the moment when the Mexican
encounters
himself. The obligation of writers and political leaders had been to keep this encounter alive but all of them had abandoned their people: