Redeemers (29 page)

 

The mediocre order of the “developed” world is teetering. The reappearance of my old masters thrills and exalts me: Bakunin, Fourier, the Spanish anarchists. And with them the return of the poet seers: Blake, Rimbaud etc. The great tradition which runs from German and English romanticism to surrealism. It is my tradition. Charles,
poetry is turning into action.
I think that we are on the point of exit from the tunnel, this tunnel that began with the fall of Spain, the Moscow trials, the ascent of Hitler, the tunnel dug by Stalin and that the Eisenhowers, the Johnsons and the capitalist and communist technocrats told us was the road to progress and well-being. Whatever may be the immediate result of the French crisis, I am certain that something has begun in Paris that will decisively change the history of Europe and, perhaps, of the world. The true socialist revolution—Marx was right about this—can only happen in the developed countries. What he did not say (although at the end of his life, after the Paris Commune, he partly accepted it) was that the revolution should be socialist and
libertarian.
What is now beginning is not only the crisis of capitalism and the gloomy caricatures of socialism that are the Soviet Union and its satellites and rivals (the delirious China of Mao)—it is the crisis of the oldest and most solid instrument of oppression that men have known since the end of the neolithic age: the State.

 

On July 28, 1968, the Mexican student movement erupted. A minor incident among students provoked police repression in Mexico City, and from there the movement escalated until it reached national dimensions. The army, in a senseless act of exaggerated aggression, used a bazooka to shatter the centuries-old door of the National Preparatory School. Some high school students were wounded, and the authorities of the National Autonomous University (to which the preparatory was formally connected), precisely in defense of their autonomy, led the first of a number of marches in which thousands of people (for the first time in decades) took part in street demonstrations against the government, which they saw as stagnant, corrupt, demagogic, and authoritarian. Certainly the Mexican political system had no concentration camps. Nor did it propagate the ideology of a Supreme State free to enter into all areas of experience. But it did wield almost absolute power based on the convergence of a party (the PRI, which functioned as a centralized agency for employment, corruption, and perquisites while at the national level it always triumphed in the regularly held, thoroughly manipulated elections) and a monarchical president, selected every six years by the outgoing president and party elders and endowed with all-embracing powers over the treasury, national resources, state-owned enterprises, the army, Congress, the courts, governors, mayors, and the major means of communications. His only limit was temporal—a president could not serve more than one term.

Mexican intellectuals (like Paz himself) were traditionally integrated into the structure of the state and were expected to collaborate in “the building of the nation.” For those who instead chose to oppose the regime—trying to form opposition parties or criticize government actions—the machinery of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional would usually find ways—sometimes violent—to crush their efforts. But in reaction to the student movement, one of Mexico's most respected intellectuals, the historian, editor, and essayist Daniel Cosío Villegas, now seventy years old, ended his career in public service and began to contribute—in the newspaper
Excélsior—
weekly articles in which he renewed a critical attitude that had remained dormant since the publication, back in 1947, of his famous essay on “The Crisis of Mexico.” Like Paz, Cosío Villegas had participated in a succession of PRIista governments, as both diplomat and financial advisor. He recognized that, despite all its faults, Mexico had achieved a significant degree of material development: a sustained growth of 7 percent a year with a stable currency and no appreciable inflation. Recognizing its long period of stability and development, the international community had honored Mexico with the forthcoming (in October 1968) Summer Olympics. But for Cosío Villegas, the intolerant treatment of students by the government was unacceptable, and he saw the responsibility of the intellectual as “to make public life truly public.” His present duty was not to integrate himself into the workings of power but to criticize it, an activity that also made more sense now that the Mexican reading public had grown considerably. Paz had quarreled with Cosío Villegas over the cancellation of a scholarship Paz had been receiving from the Colegio de México but their paths now would converge around the issue of critical freedom.

From New Delhi, Ambassador Paz was following the events with a growing sense of unease and seriously considered resigning his post. On August 3, he wrote to Tomlinson:

 

It seems that the repression in Mexico is severe, brutal . . . I am afraid these disturbances will strengthen the right. The inheritance of the revolution is dissipating . . . For quite some time I have been planning on resigning my post and what has been happening now contributes to or dissipates my last hesitations. I will go to Mexico in November and there definitely settle my situation. Maybe I can obtain something at the University or the Colegio de México.

 

One month later, after the “March of Silence,” when four hundred thousand demonstrators paraded through the streets with kerchiefs or shawls over their mouths to protest government brutality, and after the presidential “state of the country” address (the yearly
informe
), in which President Díaz Ordaz clearly threatened the use of force to stifle the protests, Paz wrote to Secretary of Foreign Relations Antonio Carrillo Flores:

 

Although at times the phraseology of the students . . . recalls that of other young [protesters], French, North-American and German, the problem is absolutely distinct. The issue is not social revolution—though many of the leaders are radical revolutionaries—but of accomplishing a
reform
in our political system. If we do not begin now, the next decade in Mexico will be violent.

 

On September 18, the army violently occupied the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In that period when the Cold War was still at its height, Díaz Ordaz was convinced that the country could fall into the hands of the communists. On September 27, in another letter to Tomlinson, Paz confessed his feeling of acute remorse for not having already acted:

 

My remaining in the Mexican foreign service is incongruous—from a moral point of view as much as an emotional one. Specifically I have now initiated the process to secure my retirement. What is going on now reveals to me that I should have done this
earlier
. All of it keeps me anguished, ashamed and furious—with others and, above all, with myself.

 

On October 2, 1968, the government massacred hundreds of students in the ancient Plaza of Tlatelolco. Their crime had been to raise the banner of political liberty. On the very next day, Paz wrote a poem of shame and fury about the collective crime: “Mexico, Olympiad of 1968.” And after “examining my conscience” on October 4, he wrote Carrillo Flores a long letter attacking the violent policies of the government and submitting his resignation: “I am absolutely not in agreement with the methods used to resolve (in reality to repress) the demands and problems that our youth has presented.” It was his first firmly political act since the Spanish Civil War. But this time it was
his
rebellion. This public step was also the completion of an intimate cycle, the promise inscribed in his lineage—to go off to the Revolution. In communion with the student revolt, Paz went off to
his
revolution by breaking with a petrified revolution. He began to convert himself into the third protagonist of his “Mexican Song.” “About whom could I speak?” he had written about his father's and grandfather's heroes and now the answer was himself. His gesture had made him a hero to young Mexico. Even the delay in his resignation, about which he had felt “ashamed,” fell “suddenly” into place, because it would by chance permit him to resign as a Mexican ambassador in direct response to the worst, most murderous crime of the Díaz Ordaz regime. It was his finest hour, an unheard-of gesture in the history of Mexico. And it would change not only his own life but the intellectual life of Mexico and, to a considerable degree, of Latin America.

To explain the atrocity to himself, Paz searched for a myth or an episode of the historic past that could illuminate it.
Behind and below
the facts, he felt a mythic reality moving the strings. What had happened, he decided, in poetic and in actual terms, was nothing less than an act of human sacrifice. He sketches it as such when writing to Tomlinson on October 6, alluding to his vision of archaic power in
El cántaro roto
: “The old gods are unleashed again, and our president has become the Grand Priest of Huitzilopochtli [the Aztec god of war],” and he adds, “I chose not to continue as a representative of the Great Moctezuma (the First, famous for the number of victims he sacrificed on the Teocalli).”

Octavio and Marie-Jo Paz spent the rest of Díaz Ordaz's presidential term in voluntary exile at the University of Cambridge in England, and later, in the United States, at the University of Texas. Paz was writing his book of political essays,
Posdata
(Postscript), clearly meant as a sequel to
El laberinto
. In it, surprisingly, he affirms that Mexico does not have “an essence but rather a history.” Nevertheless, he will continue probing for the essence of history within myths that are still alive in the culture. He explores the pros and cons of the student movement, giving special weight to its call for democratizing the government. But in a long and controversial chapter, he turns to the Aztec worldview to reaffirm and expand on his vision of the slaughter as an atavistic act, almost as if it were prescribed, magically and fatally, by the ancient gods. The conceit also leads him to a more convincing assertion. He sees the PRI as a
pyramid
—both “tangible reality and subconscious premise.” At its apex stood the President of Mexico (Díaz Ordaz or his predecessors), who is not the typical, charismatic nineteenth-century
caudillo
but a figure whose legitimacy stems not from his personal qualities but from another source. The President was an
institutional
figure, with almost theocratic powers, like the Aztec emperor, the Tlatoani. The country was subordinated pyramidally to him—in its political structure and the paths available for social advancement. This political invention, Paz affirmed, had until then freed the country of anarchy and blatant dictatorship, but by 1968 the system had become oppressive and asphyxiating. Paz believed that he saw, in the bureaucratic petrification of the PRI, a parallel with the Soviet Union. His conclusion: “In Mexico there is no greater dictatorship than that of the PRI and no greater danger of anarchy than that provoked by the unnatural prolongation of the PRI's political monopoly . . . Whatever correction or transformation may be attempted will require, first of all and as a necessary precondition, the democratic reform of the regime.”

 

WHILE PAZ
was writing his book, an old comrade of his was serving a sentence (yet one more time) for sedition in Mexico City's notorious Lecumberri prison. He was José Revueltas, who had been one of the intellectual leaders of the student movement. He was now fifty-five years old and had retained the faith and force to still believe in the Revolution but also the courage to denounce the crimes of Stalinism and oppose the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He was the eldest among Díaz Ordaz's political prisoners. He had been jailed for nine months and there was no way for him to know when, if ever, he would be freed. Imprisoned with him were many young men from the student movement. He was sharing his cell with a young teacher named Martín Dozal. In August 1969, in a message sent to his friend and comrade Paz, Revueltas described a poetic connection between the prisoners and the poet who had resigned a distinguished position in solidarity with their suffering.

Revueltas wrote: “Martín Dozal reads your poems, Octavio, your essays, he reads them, he goes over them again and then he meditates at length, he loves you at length, he reflects upon you, here in prison we all think of Octavio Paz, all these young men of Mexico think of you, Octavio . . .” And who is Martín Dozal, a young man whose destiny was inscribed in
El cántaro roto
? “He is twenty-four years old . . . he was a teacher of poetry or mathematics and he moved from one place to another, with his angry mane, with his arms, between the dry stones of this country, among the denuded bones which crush other bones, among the drums of human skin, in the country occupied by the sinister chieftain of Cempoala.” And who were the young prisoners who read Octavio Paz? “These are not the young men already solemn and obese there on the outside . . . the future chieftains of Cempoala, the immortal toad.” They are “the other face of Mexico, the true Mexico, and you, Octavio, see them! Look at the prisoners, look at our country imprisoned with them.” The mere fact that Dozal and other young prisoners were reading Octavio Paz filled Revueltas with “profound hope.”

But Mexico, in 1969, was passing through a long night. Not only power but public opinion seemed to have forgotten these political prisoners. The final months of the Díaz Ordaz government were, in effect, a night of silence, complicity, fear, lies, and death. It was the darkness Paz had laid out in
El cántaro roto
, a poem that these young people read and reread, like an implacable prophecy, come to fulfillment in their own lives:

 

Ay, the night of Mexico, the night of Cempoala, the night of Tlatelolco, the sculptured face of flint that inhales the smoke of executions by gunfire. That magnificent poem of yours, that lightning bolt, Octavio, and the hypocritical respect, the false consternation, and the vile repentance of those who were accused, of the newspapers, the priests, the publishing houses, the poet-counselors, well-off, soiled, tranquil, who shouted “thief, thief!” and rapidly hid their money, their excrement, to conjure away what had been said, to forget it, so as to feign ignorance while Martín Dozal—who was then fifteen years old, or eighteen, I don't remember—was reading it and weeping with rage and we asked ourselves all the same questions as the poem: “Is only the toad immortal?”