Redeemers (33 page)

of a fly-blown, dusty railroad station,

one evening, we picked up the pieces of him.

 

In life, there was silence. In death, there is a dialogue, where the two never confront the horror of the elder Octavio's death:

 

I could never speak with him

I meet him now in dreams,

that blurry fatherland of the dead.

We always talk about other things.

 

The theme of the father appears again, ennobled by politics, in a long interview Paz gave in November 1975, titled “Return to The Labyrinth of Solitude.” He reveals some previously unknown details of his own personal and historical genealogy. When the questions turn to Zapatismo, the tone of his responses intensifies and he hammers home the filial connection, historical and personal, with his father. “From that time on my father thought that Zapatismo was the truth about Mexico. I think that he was right.” The subject leads him to evoke the friendship of his father with the Indian peasants to the south of Mexico City, the defense of their lands and even the delights of the pre-Columbian delicacy, “mudded duck,” that he ate with his father in the villages. The conjunction of tradition and revolution, a mark of Zapatismo, had “impassioned” him. “Zapatismo was a revelation, the coming to the surface of certain hidden and repressed realities.” More than a revolution or a rebellion, it was a revolt (
revuelta
), a turn and return (
vuelta
) of deepest Mexico and a movement toward that profundity. “Zapata,” he concluded, “was beyond the controversy between liberals and conservatives, Marxists and neocapitalists. Zapata exists
before
—and, perhaps, if Mexico does not extinguish itself—he will exist
afterwards
.”

Poems, interviews, the recuperation of historic and family origins, of the landscape of infancy and juvenile geography, acts of contrition, examinations of conscience, confessions—all ways for the past to turn clear and clean—foreshadowings of his return to Mexico.

 

XVI

On March 10, 1976, when Daniel Cosío Villegas died, Paz was already back in Mexico. Since the 1950s they had frequently been in disagreement and had never really been friends. Cosío Villegas had stood neither with the government nor with the left. He was, by his own definition, “a museum quality Liberal” and a moderate nationalist. He enjoyed immense public prestige. Paz attended his funeral, alone, with a serious and thoughtful demeanor, keeping himself toward the rear of the mourners. He would dedicate the April issue (number 55) of
Plural
to Cosío's memory. His own deeply felt contribution was an article titled “Illusions and Convictions.” It was a dialogue with the historical vision of Cosío Villegas, who had considered the political liberalism of the nineteenth century, as expressed in the federal Constitution of 1857, to be the cornerstone of modern Mexico. He had also contended that both the long dictatorship of Don Porfirio and the governments of the Revolution had abandoned this project of constitutional liberalism to replace it with a centralized state, monopolizing power. This movement had led—at least until 1970—to a notable material modernization of the country but had seriously limited political progress. Cosío had felt that the social aims of the Revolution (such as the agrarian reform, labor legislation, and universal education) were not incompatible with democracy and freedom. The central problem of Mexico was the need for political reform—limiting the concentration of power in the hands of the president and developing a system of government that would be more open, free, and responsible. Strangely, though, he never really treated the theme of electoral democracy.

Paz experienced Mexican history with autobiographical passion but his emphasis (and really his knowledge) were not those of an historian but of a philosopher and poet of history. Like Cosío, he was a son of the Mexican Revolution and shared his ideas on the positive “constructive” aspect of the governments that succeeded it, but he still considered the constitutional liberalism of the nineteenth century as an “abject” period, a historical
fall
, the imposition of a European doctrine upon a reality alien to it, a tragic negation of the indigenous and Spanish roots of Mexico. Paz was not advocating an impossible return to those roots but calling for a creative synthesis of the three “Mexicos”: the Indian, the Spanish/Catholic, and the modern. (He never spoke of the most striking synthesis in Mexican cultural history,
mestizaje
, the “mixing” of races physically and culturally.) In his historical judgment, the three Mexicos should have carried on a fruitful interchange but the political suppression of the Conservatives in the nineteenth century, accomplished by the Liberal reform of Benito Juárez, had driven a part of Mexico's profound reality (which the Conservatives represented) underground. But it had proceeded to insinuate itself surreptitiously into the political life of the country, enthroning “the Lie.” Through this striking, almost Freudian explication, Paz would explain, for example, the conservatism of the PRI, the formal heir to liberalism but, in his view, the actual descendant of the centralist and even monarchical thought of the nineteenth-century Conservatives.

Though Paz and Cosío differed significantly in their historical overviews, they agreed on one premise: the need for free discussion of problems, causes, projects. Cosío Villegas, the liberal nationalist, would have wanted the PRI itself to lead a political and moral renovation. Paz, as an “anti-authoritarian” socialist, had trusted in the rise of a party and project of the left but he now considered his hopes to be vain illusions. He recognized the public trajectory of Cosío Villegas—a half century of service as an editor, essayist, historian, diplomat, and critic—to have been marked by clarity and bravery. “Cosío Villegas, with a smile, passed through the funereal dance of disguises that is our public life and emerged clean, undamaged . . . upright, ironic and incorruptible.” As an epigraph to the article, Paz used a quotation from. W. B. Yeats: “He served human liberty.”

In July 1976, freedom of expression in Mexico suffered a blow that confirmed Cosío Villegas's contention that Mexico needed to impose a legal and institutional limit on the power of the president. Tired of the criticisms directed at his policies in the pages of
Excélsior
, President Echeverría orchestrated a coup against Julio Scherer within the
Excélsior
cooperative. Scherer left the newspaper and a few months later founded
Proceso
, a magazine of news and analysis that would become Mexico's most respected weekly magazine right up to the present day. Paz and the writers of
Plural
resigned in solidarity with Scherer. They soon decided to start a new, independent intellectual journal.

To assemble the small amount of initial capital needed, a raffle was held to which 763 people gave donations. The prize was a painting donated by Rufino Tamayo and the winner was a young and promising Oxford-educated philosopher, Hugo Margáin Charles.

The collaborators met to decide on a proper name for the new journal. Paz was about to publish a new collection of poems, with the same introspective tilt as in
Pasado en claro
. It would be entitled
Vuelta
and in its keynote poem with the same title, Paz had raised the question:

 

             
I have returned where I began

Have I won or lost?

              (Questions

What laws determine “success” and “failure”?

The songs of the fishermen float by

before the motionless shore.

 

The last four lines are Paz's rendering from an English translation of a poem by the great Chinese poet and painter Wang Wei (699–759
A.D.
) who, in the autumn of his life, now without “eagerness to return,” distances himself “from the world and its struggles” to “forget his learning among the trees.” Paz, in the autumn of his life, chooses a different path, which, within the poem, closes the above parenthesis:

 

      
But I do not want

an intellectual hermitage

in San Angel or Coyoacán)
[districts of Mexico City where many intellectuals then lived].

 

And the new review would not be intended as an intellectual hermitage but more precisely a fortress. Alejandro Rossi suggested the name. Paz had his doubts but then agreed. It would be called
Vuelta
, a word with the double meaning of “return” and “change of direction.”

 

XVII

The magazine set up its offices very near the “big house” of Don Ireneo, in the same quarter of Mixcoac where Paz had grown up. It was a small building with two floors, the first very small but large enough for meetings, the second with offices for the deputy editor and the proofreader. The street adjoined an old market and a pulque bar.

The first issue came out in November 1976. It seemed as if the mechanics of publication did not require Paz to live in Mexico. When he was out of the country, the magazine was administered by its assistant director, Alejandro Rossi, assisted by José de la Colina as literary editor. Paz seemed happy with his partial return and with the journal. At the beginning of 1977, he completed an authorized compendium of the work he wished to preserve, his
Obra poética
. A poem written in 1977 is interesting for its attitude toward Mixcoac and the ambiguity he felt about returning to Mexico. It was called
Epitafio sobre ninguna piedra
(Epitaph Upon No Stone), in the style of a memorial poem from
The Greek Anthology
:

 

Mixcoac was my village. Three nocturnal syllables:

a mask of shadow over a face of sun.

Our Lady came, the Dustcloud Mother.

Came and ate it up. I went off through the world.

My words were my house, my tomb the air.

 

Things quickly became more complicated for Paz. He returned to Cambridge, England, but in March a cancer was discovered. He underwent a successful operation, but it left its traces. Meanwhile, Rossi and Gabriel Zaid (who had articulated a plan for the business aspect of the journal) recommended me to Paz. I was to become Deputy Editor and general administrator of the magazine. After his operation, the Editor in Chief, Octavio Paz, returned in good spirits to Mexico. From then on, though he would often leave the country, he would never spend long periods attached to foreign universities. He now, for the first time, had a journal that was really his own, modest, with a limited number of pages, without the color supplements of
Plural
, but much more independently
his
than
Barandal
,
Taller
,
El hijo pródigo,
and even
Plural
had ever been.

He would write: “We abandoned
Plural
so as not to lose our independence, we publish
Vuelta
to continue being independent.” That independence had, first of all, to be financial. Depending entirely on the government (the traditional mode in Mexico) would force him to negotiate the journal's editorial line. It would be desirable but impossible to depend entirely on buyers and subscribers (who would never number more than ten thousand). Paz and his collaborators opted for a balance, accepting a degree of government sponsorship but looking for funds in a direction formerly unthinkable (for an intellectual journal): the private sector.
Plural
had been completely financed by the newspaper
Excélsior
.
Vuelta
had no such luxury. After much effort, various national and foreign companies were persuaded to purchase advertisements in the journal. Subscriptions began to arrive, from Mexico and abroad. The journal showed a modest profit. It was a viable enterprise.

For the next twenty-two years,
Vuelta
would be Paz's fortress but also his literary workshop. In his apartment on the historic avenue of the Paseo de la Reforma he set up his library, a replica of his first library in Mixcoac, with his grandfather's books all included. He would phone the journal daily and discuss articles, reviews, translations, stories, poems, which he had previously sent to them by messenger. He kept up with dozens of European, American, and Latin American publications, and he maintained contact with hundreds of authors and publishing houses. He never hired a literary agent. Alfonso Reyes, the prolific man of letters who had preceded Octavio Paz as the presiding eminence of Mexican literature, had once complained that “Latin America is a late arrival at the feast of world culture.” Since his early youth, Paz had decided to join that feast, and
Vuelta
would set out places for the earliest companions of his intellectual life: Ortega y Gasset, Sartre, Camus, Breton, Buñuel, Vasconcelos. But
Vuelta
would also create a banquet of its own, with the literary presence of hundreds of writers from various continents and generations.

Literature was the center of Paz's life. His library was his intellectual hermitage and he never maintained an office in the
Vuelta
building. (He had spent too many years of his life working in offices.) He taught no classes at Mexican universities. Conversation with him in person or by telephone was a constant exploration. Although he admitted having the “irritable nature” that Horace ascribes to poets (especially in the morning), he was invariably serious about all issues. But he could also show an almost childlike enthusiasm in the breadth and degree of his intellectual curiosity. Large themes fascinated him and he wrote about them at length: reflections on poetic creation and language; articles on the course of Western poetry from the enthusiasms of Romanticism to the ironic vision of the modern avant-garde, in which he compared not only works in different languages but placed them against the background of other, non-Western poetics; his thoughts on modern culture, politics, and society, always emphasizing the need for a careful, critical outlook on the world. And he was excited by new scientific discoveries or intellectual inquiries: the latest theory on the Big Bang, debates about the nature of the mind or the decipherment of the Mayan script. Then unexpectedly signaled by a sudden change of gesture or of manner, his conversation would swerve toward unpredictable subjects: French erotic literature of the eighteenth century, medieval theories on love or melancholy.