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He composed a long poem on this theme, modeled on Eliot's
The Waste-Land,
and titled it “Between the Stone and the Flower” (
Entre la piedra y la flor
). It was his first attempt to insert poetry into history, to create revolutionary poetry that was not demagogic. Many years later, he would remember, “I wanted to show the relation that, like a real hangman's knot, bound the concrete life of the peasants to the impersonal, abstract structure of the capitalist economy: a community of men and women engaged in the satisfaction of basic material necessities and of rites and traditional precepts but subjected to a remote mechanism. This mechanism was grinding them up but they were ignorant not only of its functioning but of its very existence”:

 

At the dawn of silenced poisons

we wake up as serpents

 

We wake up as stones,

stubborn roots

fleshless thirst, mineral lips . . .

 

Under this light of frozen lamentation

the henequen, motionless and furious

in its green forefingers

turns visible that which stirs us

the silenced rage that devours us . . .

 

Magical money!

It rises up on the bones,

on the bones of men it rises up.

 

You pass like a flower through this sterile hell,

formed only of shackled time,

mechanical running, empty wheel

that squeezes us out and leaves us empty

and dries up our blood,

and the place of tears is killing us.

 

Because money is infinite and creates infinite deserts . . .

 

In Yucatán, Paz taught classes in literature to workers and peasants, published articles, and lectured on the Spanish Civil War. The passion in Latin America for the war was even stronger than in Europe: as in 1898, Latin American intellectuals once again identified themselves with Spain. In '98 they were against American imperialism in Cuba, now (most of them) against fascism in Spain. Paz would live the war as his first great public passion. And in Yucatán he was surprised by an invitation to attend the Second International Congress of Writers for the defense of culture, scheduled to be held in Valencia at the beginning of July 1937. His poem
No pasarán
had made him famous. He had to act very quickly. He had to almost kidnap the reluctant and elusive Elena and marry her (on May 25, 1937) and then mount the gangplank of the boat of History. To write, with words and deeds, the poetry of History. Yet one more romantic poet, “the Lord Byron of Mixcoac,” signing on for the salvation of an heroic people.

 

V

The newly married couple arrived in Spain in early July. The Mexican delegation included the poet Carlos Pellicer—Paz's friend and teacher since preparatory school; the novelist Juan de la Cabada; the historian José Mancisidor (both of them active members of LEAR); and the great composer Silvestre Revueltas, elder brother of José.

The Spanish Generation of '98, whose journals, poems, and essays had educated Paz in his craft, was now almost entirely absent. Ortega y Gasset was in exile in Buenos Aires. Unamuno had died after publicly condemning the shouted fascist slogan of “Long live Death!” (
Viva la Muerte!
). Machado kept to his home, languishing there. But the later generations were still active, especially around the review
Hora de España,
which had brought together a number of poets, playwrights, philosophers, and essayists of about the same age and horizons as the Mexican Contemporáneos. Paz sought them out (Manuel Altolaguirre, Luis Cernuda, María Zambrano, Rafael Dieste) as well as the most radical among them: Rafael Alberti and José Bergamín. He met—among a multitude of other writers—some of Latin America's greatest poets (Pablo Neruda, Vicente Huidobro, César Vallejo, Nicolás Guillén); he saw Hemingway, Dos Passos, Silone, and the president of the Congress, André Malraux.

In the meetings, José Bergamín introduced a motion of condemnation against André Gide, who had just published some additions to his polemical
Retour de l'URSS.
The writers connected with
Hora de España
, loyal to their humanist tradition, refused to support the motion. One of them, the Galician poet and dramatist Rafael Dieste, declared that he was “popular front, leftist, liberal, non-sectarian.” The Latin American representation voted for the motion, with the exception of Pellicer and Paz. But neither of the two protested publicly. Paz would always reproach himself for that choice of silence. Malraux as chairman bluntly refused to let the motion pass.

In her
Memorias de España 1937
, a humorous and irreverent book but one that also shows her indignation before the ideological and moral confusions she witnessed, Elena Garro writes:

 

In Minglamilla, where there was another big banquet in the city hall, women from the village surrounded us, asking us to give them something that was going to be left over from the banquet. I was very moved. There, despite the prohibition of our compatriots against making ourselves public, Stephen Spender and other writers invited us to go out on the balcony of the city hall. From there I saw the women dressed in mourning and the children asking for bread and I burst into tears. I sat down exhausted and . . . during the banquet, I felt like going back to my house. Nordahl Grieg proposed that we give the food set out on the table to the people. With no success . . .

 

But Octavio Paz had not gone to Spain as a tourist but as a valiant poetic agitator. It was how his Spanish friends would see him. The experience of Spain lasted almost four months and included everything except direct enrollment in the war: revolutionary fraternity, courageous visits to the front, heartbreaking scenes with children and families, rationing, bombardments from the air and from the sea, a “tempest of shells” and mortar fire before which Elena was terrified but Octavio would exclaim: “This is magnificent!” And although he did not take part in battles or return to Mexico with scars (like the painter Siqueiros), he did propose to enlist as a political commissar on the Teruel front. His Spanish friends dissuaded him; he could serve the cause better with the pen than with the rifle. He lived in a state of continuous exaltation: he read and he wrote poems of war, he gave a lecture on Silvestre Revueltas, and in the House of Culture of Valencia he announced the coming of a
new man
: “We yearn for a man who, from his own ashes, in a revolutionary way, would be reborn more alive every time.” He continued to believe in “the Revolution” as a new human creation, a fountain of “new life,” a “total phenomenon,” the advent of a “world of poetry capable of containing that which is born and that which is dying.”

In Barcelona, Paz read his “Elegy to a Comrade Dead on the Aragon Front” (
Elegía a un compañero muerto en el frente de Aragón
), a poem he had written in Mexico and that had contributed considerably to his fame:

 

You have died, comrade

in the blazing dawn of the world

 

And from your death sprout up

your gaze, your blue uniform

your face surprised by the gunpowder

your hands, no longer able to touch anything.

 

You have died. Irremediably.

Halted is your voice, your blood in earth.

What earth will rise and not lift you?

What blood will run and not name you?

What word will we speak that does not speak

your name, your silence,

the stilled pain of not having you with us? . . .

 

The comrade was José Bosch, his old anarchist friend from preparatory school, about whose death he had received apparently trustworthy accounts. But Paz was astonished to see Bosch seated right out there in his audience. Later, after the emotions of reunion, he heard Bosch describe a very different war from the one he had been observing: the struggle (often to the death) between the socialists of the primarily Trotskyite POUM and the anarchists of the CNT on the one hand and the communists on the other. “They killed my comrades . . . they did, they did! the communists!”

It had been three months since the POUM and CNT had fought the communists in the streets of Barcelona, a conflict that would be described by the POUM militiaman George Orwell in his soon to be famous
Homage to Catalonia.
Andrés Nin, the most important leader of the POUM, had been arrested and mysteriously disappeared (later to die in the hands of the Soviet NKVD, who were also busily engaged in claiming their rivals had pacted with “fascism,” an assertion accepted by much of the Western press but fiercely denied by Orwell, who had survived the Barcelona purge and left Spain in 1937 to begin writing
Homage
). As for Bosch, at that moment, all he wanted was a passport to Mexico. But it was impossible to obtain one. According to Elena Garro, Paz lived through this episode “in great anguish.” He was aware of the climate of espionage in Spain, the inquisitorial language of many comrades, the barely disguised presence of spies and of agents of the NKVD, the news of Stalin's recent execution (on January 12, 1937) of Marshal Tukhachevsky, who was a hero of the old-guard communists. But the information supplied by Bosch contrasted with accounts Paz had earlier received and he decided that he had to travel to the Soviet Union to (in Elena's words) “see with his own eyes the country in which the fate of the world was at stake.” But he never got there. And in October, the boat in which the couple were returning to Mexico made a stop in Cuba, where the long-established leaders of the Cuban Communist Party, Juan Marinello and the younger Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, introduced him to the exiled Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez.

Traveling with Paz and Garro were the Spanish poet León Felipe and his Mexican wife, Berta Gamboa, “Bertuca.” At the age of fifty-three, Felipe had long been an icon in Spain. A pharmacist in his professional training and a wanderer by avocation, he had been a professor in Mexico and the United States, a friend of García Lorca and a translator of Whitman, Eliot, and Blake. His long poems were strangely infused with a sometimes ingenuous, sometimes solemn religious sense. They included prayers, invective, psalms, parables, and allegories. “A furious holy prophet,” Rafael Alberti had called him, and Alberti was right. There was always something biblical in Felipe's harsh and sonorous voice, his physical appearance, his moral passion, indignation, and fierce tenderness. When the outbreak of the war caught him by surprise in Panama, he had returned to Spain. On meeting him, Pablo Neruda had found him Nietzschean and charming: “among his attractive traits, the best was an anarchic sense of indiscipline and mocking rebellion . . . He would go to the battlefronts held by the anarchists, where he expounded his thoughts and read his iconoclastic poems. They reflected a vaguely non-conformist ideology, anticlerical, full of invocations and blasphemies.”

In Mexico he and Bertuca would live for a while with Octavio and Elena. Octavio truly loved him and once would describe him as “pale, with his hands crossed on the handle of his curved cane and his chin leaning on his hands.” Once Elena asked him, “What's going on, León Felipe?” “Spain pains me, my girl,” he answered. “Spain pains me.” And it would pain Paz as well. In
Oda a España
, a poem of 1937, he had written:

 

It is not love, no, it is not

but rather your outcry, Oh Earth,

hard-working Spain

universal Spanish earth,

it stirs my roots,

the elemental earth that sustains me

and your voice, invading me, penetrates my throat

and your breath hidden deep within my bones . . .

 

The Spanish Civil War would leave a lasting mark on his political consciousness. In one of his most famous poems,
Piedra de sol
(“Sun-stone,” of 1957), in lines that many Mexicans know by heart, he would evoke the double communion that he and his wife had lived in Spain:

 

Madrid, 1937,

in the Plaza del Angel, the women

were sewing and singing with their children,

then the alarm sounded and there were screams

houses on their knees in the dust

towers split open, housefronts spat out

and the hurricane of the motors, unremitting:

the two took off their clothes and made love

to defend our eternal portion

our ration of time and paradise . . .

 

In Spain, Paz had seen “creative and revolutionary spontaneity” and “the direct and daily intervention of the people.” He had “seen hope” and he would not forget. But he had also seen, seen without seeing, the other, darker side of the Revolution. And as time went on, his silence before this half-glimpsed but rejected reality would torment him.

 

VI

Back in Mexico at the beginning of 1938, Paz participated in public events where he enthusiastically discussed the culture, the young people, the poetry of the war in Spain. The background of all his emotion was
Hope
, felt as a substitute for the theological Catholic virtue. It was his confidence in an achievable future world of brotherhood, justice, and equality as inscribed for him within the word itself of Revolution. But suddenly his replacement for another Catholic virtue, his new
Faith,
began to weaken. There had been glimpses of doubt for him even in Spain, where he could not escape the atmosphere of spying and persecution that surrounded him. His friend, the painter Juan Soriano, said that “Paz returned from the Civil War very disillusioned with the forces of the left. Something among them didn't work, pure dogmatism, pure fanaticism.”