A Conversation With the Soul of Mexico : In the Friction Between Literature and Politics, Octavio Paz, the Patriarch of Mexican Letters, Has Captured His Country’s Essence. His One-Word Solution to Mexico’s Turmoil? Freedom.

Octavio Paz has done more than anyone in the 20th Century to define the Mexican people. He has limned their features in more than 50 years of poetry. He has celebrated Rufino Tamayo and their other modernist painters and illuminated the long-dark corners of colonial Mexico. And in the book-length essay “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” he created the touchstone by which Mexicans and foreigners alike evaluate modern Mexico.

In late winter, not long before Paz’s 81st birthday, we went down to Mexico City to chat with him. With Mexico in turmoil, we wanted to see it through his eyes. And we wanted to see how he was doing. We knew that he had had a quadruple or quintuple (only his doctor and his wife know which) heart bypass in Houston. (The high cost for U.S. medical care “nearly ruined me,” Paz says.) When one of us had seen him nearly a year before, he was looking tired from his heart trouble, and we had been told by some Mexicans that by now he was looking even worse, a condition hard to imagine in a writer so full of passion and strength for so many years.

We found him in his three-level condominium in a quiet 1950s building just off the noisy, grand boulevard Reforma. His wife of 31 years, Marie-Jose, met us at the door. She led us down a flight of stairs and into a living room furnished with Indian and African sculpture, through a leafy patio open to the sky and into the commodious, book-lined library that she had built for her husband.

It was with relief and pleasure that we found the warm, smiling and bright-eyed man both of us had remembered from earlier years--a little stooped, yes, but no less alert, no less interested in talking about history and politics, love and eroticism and (his two great subjects) poetry and Mexico.

It was 6 in the evening; Marie-Jose had set out on the coffee table a bottle of Port, some whiskey, little sandwiches and cookies. She left to let us talk.

In Mexico, as in Latin America and Spain, the writer has a standing as a public commentator that would be inconceivable in modern American life. There, a man of letters--and Paz, with all his interests, is evidently that--is also a man of public affairs. We asked him about Mexico, the recent political uproar, the financial crisis. The peso had been dropping daily.

“Politics is an art, it is not a science . . . history is subject to accident,” Paz said, in an oblique, if gentle, warning to the younger technocrats ruling Mexico and the outsiders investing in it--both groups bent on wrenching it from its layered history and shaping it into a modern and efficient capitalist state. “We are living through a very difficult period, but it is not the most dangerous, as some journalists have said.” Old enough to remember a childhood in exile for the revolutionary activities of his father, Paz takes a long view that reaches back for decades, even centuries.

“The process of gestation has been long and complicated, with connections between political problems and economic problems. In the short term, the situation looks bad. If we do not solve the financial problem, then it can become a big economic crisis that may create social instability. I think that if we can solve part of the economic problem and part of the political problem, we can reach the 21st Century with more security.”

Paz spoke of the complexities of Mexican history in order to illuminate the difficulties of modernizing his country. Though his strong, handsome face has been softened by time, his voice and demeanor flashed with passion as he talked about his country. “Mexico had a civilization before the arrival of the Spaniards. The Mexican Indians were the builders of very big cities; they had very complex religions and a very complex morality. Well, this world was destroyed in that great encounter between two civilizations, and the Western civilization destroyed the Indian civilization. But there are many remnants, many surviving elements--from cooking to language to ideas about the family. These elements have been very persistent, and we have some groups that have not been totally incorporated into modern Mexico, as is the case of Chiapas.”

That North Americans misunderstand Mexico only complicates the situation, said Paz. “This new Mexico bashing coincides with the electoral triumphs of right-wing populist groups. This new group is reviving the old American nationalism that is racist and isolationist and very dangerous. It is dangerous not only for Mexico, but for the whole world and for the United States. Americans should not be that angry with Mexico, because we are condemned to live side by side.”

The task ahead is not easy, he said, because there are no guarantees things will get better. “The free-market system produces injustice. It is a mechanism, and as all mechanisms, it very efficiently produces goods and also ‘efficiently’ produces poverty, unemployment and inequalities in society. This has been the great problem of the 20th Century. We must find another way to solve this contradiction between the marketplace and social justice.”

Paz’s views are well known to Mexicans, who describe him alternately as pedantic, lucid, impatient, magisterial, choleric, democratic and conservative. International recognition--including a Nobel Prize--for his literary work has given him access to a huge domestic audience, which over the past 50 years has followed his cultural and political commentary in newspapers, his own magazines and on television. The undisputed patriarch of Mexican letters, he has the power to make the career of a young writer, or to shift the tone of the country’s political discussions. And by working the tension between politics and literature, he expands the scope of both, even at the expense of contradicting himself. “I hope there is still a contradiction between my political and my aesthetic ideas,” he said, chuckling, “because if there is no contradiction, there is no life, is there?”

*

We had gone to see Mexican writer and savant Carlos Monsivais, who has been called by some the conscience of the country--Mexico’s I. F. Stone. More to the Left than the centrist Paz, Monsivais has written extensively about both popular culture and Mexican poetry. “Paz,” said Monsivais, “is a great poet because he goes from the high rhetoric of the early poems to the autobiographical splendor of ‘Piedra de Sol’ (‘Sunstone’) and ‘Pasado en claro’ (‘A Draft of Shadows’).” But, he added, “the vision of Mexico that Paz offers in ‘The Labyrinth of Solitude’ is unparalleled in its incisiveness and depth.”

The book is at once a devastatingly critical view of Paz’s countrymen, a lucid critical analysis of Mexican history and an autobiographical search by an author finding his way from a feeling of solitude to that moment of perfect communion called love.

Paz published “The Labyrinth of Solitude” in 1950, while he lived in France, and his examination of Mexicans and their history created a way of seeing and thinking about Mexico that is stamped on the Mexican sensibility. Its insights have become cliches. The beginning student of Mexico is told that if you could read only one book about Mexico, this should be the one.

What does it say? It says that Mexicans live behind a mask of their own creation and are, in the end, always alone. It says that for Mexicans, there are two kinds of women: the Virgin of Guadalupe, the mother of all and the protector of the poor and helpless, and the temptress/whore, the Chingada . It says that for his countrymen, there is one kind of man, the macho, who must have his way. And it says that in myths and fiestas, in art, in love, in poetry, in the theater and in epics, there is, for the Mexican as for all people, if only briefly, the escape from loneliness.

The opening paragraph of the book’s second chapter, “Mexican Masks,” offers a good sample of his elegant and vivid prose style:

“The Mexican, whether young or old, criollo or mestizo , general or laborer or lawyer, seems to me to be a person who shuts himself away to protect himself: His face is a mask and so is his smile. In his harsh solitude, which is both barbed and courteous, everything serves him as a defense: silence and words, politeness and disdain, irony and resignation. He is jealous of his own privacy and that of others, and he is afraid even to glance at his neighbor, because a mere glance can trigger the rage of those electrically charged spirits. He passes through life like a man who has been flayed; everything can hurt him, including words and the very suspicion of words. His language is full of reticences, of metaphors and allusions, of unfinished phrases, while his silence is full of tints, folds, thunderheads, sudden rainbows, indecipherable threats. Even in a quarrel he prefers veiled expressions to outright insults: A word to the wise is sufficient. He builds a wall of indifference and remoteness between reality and himself, a wall that is no less impenetrable for being invisible. The Mexican is always remote, from the world and from other people. And also from himself.”

“The object of these reflections,” wrote Paz in “The Labyrinth,” “is no different from that which troubles other men and other peoples: How can we create a society, a culture, that will not deny our humanity but will also not change it into an empty abstraction?”

Thus, “solitude--the feeling and knowledge that one is alone, alienated from the world and oneself--is not an exclusively Mexican characteristic. All men, at some moment of their lives, feel themselves to be alone.”

Nearly half a century after he wrote those words, Paz believes that they “continue to be true. It is neither pessimistic nor positive--terms I do not like to use.” He adds, though: “I believe that Mexico is finally getting over the great crisis that began in the 19th Century. It is becoming a truly modern country. We’ll see whether we succeed or not. This is the great question for Latin America.”

*

The playwright Hugo Hiriart, who frequently discusses with Paz subjects such as the nature of dreams and the domain of the imagination, spoke to us in his comfortable home in the colonial district of San Angel. When Paz “was in his teens,” Hiriart said, “he decided he would be one of the great world poets. So he left Mexico, mingled with the best literary figures in Europe and the United States and became Mexico’s best known poet.” Lives, like history, are subject to the accidental and the unexpected, but certainly, few American poets built their art and their careers as deliberately as Paz.

So we steered the talk toward poetry. We had assumed that Paz’s work, like the thinking of so many of his compatriots, was influenced mostly by France and the French. That is true, with influence in particular by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and by Andre Breton and the Surrealists. “I used to meet often at the cafe with Breton, Max Ernst, Joan Miro and many other young poets and writers,” Paz said. “I did not believe too much in the poetics of the Surrealists, or in the ‘automatic writing,’ but I wanted to unite poetry and revolution, and that was, along with their ideas about freedom, what attracted me to them, although I always had some reservations. Not so much about morality or politics, but about aesthetics.”

We had not known of the deep affection Paz had for modern American poets, or how greatly impressed he was as a young man by T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” He leaned forward and deposited his cup of tea on the table. His eyes brightened and words began to pour out rapidly. “Reading ‘The Wasteland’ was a kind of revelation. I was very young, and in some way (Eliot) expressed what I felt about modern civilization. I was rather leftist, and he was a religious man and very conservative. Yet, I approved of his revulsion at modern life, at the degradation of mankind through the homogenization of the soul. In some ways, it coincided with my own ideas about the times. He was a poet who introduced history into poetry. I was educated in the Symbolist and Surrealist tradition, where a poem was something very subjective, something that happens to the poet . . . the great novelty for me, first in Eliot and then in the other American poets, in Ezra Pound and then William Carlos Williams, was the introduction of the historical reality of our times . . . with the history of Western civilization . . . And that, for me, was the great new thing of American poetry . . . not only dealing with subjective things, but universal subjects.”

Eliot’s technique was also interesting, Paz explained. Modeled in part on Apollinaire, who in turn drew for inspiration on the Cubist painters, “Eliot presented different aspects of life in a modern city simultaneously.” This is a technique Paz himself used to great effect in his powerful four long poems, written between 1969 and 1976 and collected in “Vuelta” (Return) (1976.) In the main poem, also called “Vuelta,” Paz writes, in echoes of Eliot:

*

Camino sin avanzar estoy rodeado de ciudad Me falta aire me falta cuerpo

(I walk and do not move forward I am surrounded by city I lack air lack body) *

Paz does not work in the the calm order of the library but rather uses it as a place to receive friends and conduct business. Instead, “I write at a small room near the bedroom,” he said, mixing words in English, French and Spanish, shaking his head negatively when we ask if we can see it. Obviously cherishing his privacy, he did not want to take us there, because that would have meant seeing his bedroom. He did, however, confide that he writes with a pen and paper--”You cannot write poetry on a computer.” He writes, gives his work to a secretary to type, hand-writes his corrections and gives the pages back to her to type again.

He has no set schedule, he said. He thinks about a topic, for a long time, he said, then “once I sit down to write I do it very fast.”

*

It was no accident that, as a young man, this Mexican writer would be drawn to poets who dealt not only in the personal and the subjective but also in universal subjects.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City in 1914. His grandfather was an intellectual/journalist/politician. His father, Octavio Paz Solorzano, a lawyer, went into politics and became a supporter of the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. His mother, Josefina Lozano, was the daughter of Spanish immigrants. In 1920, after the Mexican government targeted Zapata and his followers with bloody determination, the Paz family moved to the United States, first to San Antonio and later to Los Angeles, and Octavio’s father began working as the revolutionary leader’s representative in the United States.

Here young Octavio had one of the defining experiences of his childhood. He was 6, in kindergarten. He was less than fluent in English. His teacher noticed that he wasn’t eating lunch. She asked him why. “ Cuchara , cuchara ,” he said, repeating the Spanish word for spoon. He didn’t know the word in English. “ Cuchara ! Cuchara !” the American children teased, and he got into a fight. It was one of three times in his childhood, he wrote in his autobiographical sketch “Itinerary,” when he felt utterly alone, abandoned. “Maybe,” he wrote, “everything I have written about my country has been nothing else but a response to three experiences of childhood helplessness.”

Another of the experiences: Back in Mexico by 1920, Paz again felt out of place, lonely, and was teased, this time--with his knowledge of English, blue eyes, fair skin and clear brownish hair--for being a “ gringo .”

But his earliest experience of abandonment, and the strangest, came, he says, when he was 3 or 4 years old. “I see myself, perhaps I should say I see a blurred figure, a childish bundle, lost in the middle of a huge circular sofa upholstered in worn-out silk, right in the middle of the room . . . there is a party in the house but the little bundle is crying and no one comes. The bundle cries. He has been crying for centuries, but nobody hears him. Only he can hear himself cry. He is lost in a world that is simultaneously familiar and remote, intimate and indifferent . . . . I remember nothing else.

“Most likely, my mother came to comfort me: Women are the door to reconciliation with the world.”

Paz spoke softly in English, in which he is fluent, with only an occasional hesitation. He has taught at Harvard, the University of Texas and Cambridge University, England. From time to time, the eight Paz cats meowed and yowled on the patio. “To think of it,” Marie-Jose had exclaimed, “eight cats, each with nine lives!”

Beginning with that childhood visit to Los Angeles, Paz spent a lot of time in the United States. He came to this country on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1944 and stayed about two years, working at journalism, teaching at Middlebury College in Vermont and doing an odd job here and there.

Journalism “was good preparation for me,” he said, “because journalism is literature at high speed.”

Another exercise involved dubbing MGM films into Spanish (in New York). “It was interesting, because I tried many experiments following the movement of the lips and finding the words to synchronize with them. Being a poet, I could find some rhythms and make sentences more laconic.”

Paz said of those years in this country: “That was a great moment for the United States historically. It was the end of the war, and I found the people full of energy. There were also some bad spots. There was discrimination. But the culture was very energetic, and it was inaugurating a new era in universal history.” He found the Americans “so direct and open--that is the great merit of the Americans . . . but sometimes it is very difficult to talk with the Americans because their origin is very different from ours. Our intellectual and existential antecedents are very different. But if we pass this initial shock it can be marvelous.”

In Los Angeles, he encountered the Pachucos, the “Zoot Suiters,” and wrote about them. His rendering of the Pachuco was not appreciated by Chicanos, who found him condescending and outright insulting. We raised the issue with him; he had heard the complaints, but found them unjustified. “I was attracted to this group of young people who were in revolt,” he said. “Their revolt was not ideological or political. It was a revolt on how to behave and how to dress. In some way, for me, it was a moral and an aesthetic revolt. Aesthetics is one of the weapons of that people who have been defeated. I was Mexican and had the same roots. I thought they were victims.”

*

We first spoke with Paz on a Friday. On the weekend we stayed at an old sugar hacienda in the Valley of Morelos, over the mountain from Mexico City, beyond Cuernavaca. There we were told that even the old gatekeeper was talking about leaving for California. He had not heard about Proposition 187, but he did not care when told about it. “Just last week,” the old man said, “100 men from Tetecala (a small town nearby), left looking for work in el norte .”

The peso fell some more the day we got back to the city.

“It is unfair but natural and human,” Paz said, that former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari has been made a “scapegoat” for the present financial crisis. “Salinas was a very courageous man in economics. He did the right thing to liberate the economy from state control.” In colonial Mexico, the country’s wealth was the property of the state. After independence in 1821, the economy depended more and more on the state, and much more after the revolution of 1910-1921. “Finally, the Marxist influence made the state more and more powerful. Salinas broke this tradition for once and for all” while attempting to modernize the country.

The PRI, created to be “a moderately authoritarian party,” “sometimes reminds me of the Congress Party of India,” he said. “The parties may be very different, but the function remains the same: to maintain cohesion and unity in countries where the centrifugal forces are very powerful.”

We wanted to talk some more with Paz about his own politics. “Whatever you do,” he was to tell us later, “don’t call me a conservative.” His request reflected what we knew of his political history.

He began conventionally enough for a Mexican intellectual, as an atheistic writer of the Left. When he was young, fascism had darkened Italy and was unveiling itself even more terrifyingly in Germany. For many intellectuals around the world, Marxism beckoned with the heady lure of anti-fascism, and Moscow was still seen as the beacon of justice. In Spain, the fascists led by Francisco Franco were trying, with German and Italian help, to overthrow the Moscow-supported Spanish republic. In 1937, already a published poet at the age of 23, he went, at the invitation of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and the Spaniard Rafael Alberti, to attend the Second International Conference of Anti-Fascists in Spain.

On his return, he told us, he engaged in what he describes as his “most intense political activity.” He worked with refugee Spanish Republicans on literary and political journals. By that time he had begun to move away from the comfortable leftiness of his fellow Latin American writers. In Spain “the Communists had started to make me dubious.” But on his return, he cooperated with them. “I was still a fellow traveler.” But gradually, influenced by events--the Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact in 1939, the murder of Leon Trotsky in Mexico on Stalin’s orders in 1940--he moved further away and by 1943 had quit a leftist newspaper.

Paz was in his 30s and in full creative force. He lived in France, visited India and Japan, then returned to Mexico in 1953 after nine years abroad. It was, he says, “a true gestation, only in reverse--outside rather than inside my country of birth.”

By the end of that stay outside Mexico, he had pulled apart the intertwining threads of poetry and politics. “It was before 1950 that I changed my mind regarding the notion that poetry was a weapon for the revolution,” he said. “But I also discovered that the idea of poetry as the embodiment of the revolution was absurd. Back then I also came to the conclusion that the revolution in the U.S.S.R. had been a great catastrophe.”

Somewhat wistfully, he said: “I was very much isolated in Mexico even though I had many friends who were dissidents within the Left.”

Although Paz broke with the Communists before other Latin American intellectuals did, that did not happen until the late ‘70s. When he did break, the Left responded furiously. “Conservative,” that adjective he hates, was the mildest of the labels hurled by its members. He was, for example, accused of being an operative of the CIA. And the Left has still not forgiven him for later having done programs for the obsequiously pro-government TV network Televisa.

But, despite the name-calling, so often a feature of Mexican intellectual politics, Paz has never been a man of the Right. He resigned as ambassador to India in protest against his government after its army shot and killed a large number of demonstrating students in Tlatelolco Square in Mexico City. And in that instant, he became a hero in Mexico, revered by the young and respected by those who only disapproved of the military repression but demanded democracy.

He has continued, since then, to critique the political and artistic conventions of Mexican life. “Criticism,” he has written, “is what imagination has learned in its second round. It is an imagination that, having been cured of fantasy, has decided to face the world’s reality.”

*

On our second and last visit with Paz, we turned the discussion toward his recent work. In 1993, Paz wrote a remarkable book, “The Double Flame,” an encyclopedic account of the interrelationship between sex, eroticism and love in the works of Plato, the medieval poets of Provence and Japan, Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, the Marquis de Sade and Sigmund Freud. “This book on India,” Paz said, referring to “Glimpses of India,” which he has just finished, “as with ‘The Double Flame,’ are both books that I wrote rather late in my life; but both are books I wanted to write many years ago. I am paying, little by little, the debts I have with myself, with at least a 20-year delay.”

We wanted to know more about his long relection on love, the ever-present topic in his life.

“We are never alone,” he replied, as if in answer to the anxieties of the child and the questions of the younger man he once was. “We are always with the other, someone who belongs to the same world but is different--and that is the essence of, perhaps, the secret of attraction . . . .

“Love is part of human life. In the animal world there are sexual passions. But culture has invited a new domain: that kind of relationship that we call love. Love is an invention of mankind . . . .

“All societies have had love, but some have never even thought about love. India, China, Japan. Provence. All the literature of the Western civilization is about love or about power . . . love belongs to the realm of freedom, love is one of those moments when mankind can achieve freedom. Not at all times, but for one moment, for one instant of reciprocity.”

The interview was coming to an end. We had to run to the airport to catch a plane, and Marie-Jose came into the library. She wanted to know how we were doing. Paz looked at her with the same passion he has held for her for the past 30 years. As we prepared to say goodby, we saw his happy face. He is a happy man, he had told us, simply because “Marie-Jose exists, that’s all.”