Redeemers (26 page)

The orphanhood of the Conquest, the order of the Colony, the rupture at Independence. Paz sees the nineteenth century as the historical site of a detour, almost an aberration. In terms of his own biography (and his idiosyncratic insistence on the “solitude” not only of himself but of all Mexicans), his words at the end of the initial section for the first time project his categories, derived from poetic introspection and personal experience, onto Mexican history:

 

The Reform is the great Rupture with the mother. This separation was a fatal and necessary act, because every truly autonomous life begins with a rupture with the family and the past. But this separation still grieves us. Even now we breathe through the wound. And so the feeling of orphanhood is the constant background to our attempts at politics and our internal conflicts. Mexico is alone, like every one of her sons. The Mexican and
mexicanidad
are defined as the living consciousness of solitude, historical and personal.

 

With the coming of independence, the colonial order had shattered into fragments. Communion, says Paz, is no longer sustainable and dissolves into solitude. Afterward, with the advent of liberalism, “The lie installs itself in our peoples almost constitutionally.” Years later, the “triple negation” of the age of Liberal reform (with respect to the indigenous, Catholic, and Spanish worlds) “establishes Mexico.” Paz does not deny “grandeur” to this historical process but adds, in decisively judgmental words: “What this negation affirmed—the principles of European liberalism—were beautiful ideas that were precise, sterile and ultimately empty.” The age of Don Porfirio would merely be the extreme continuation of this tendency, a mask covering the lack of authenticity, a pretense converted into the automatic second nature of the era. And positivism, the official philosophy of the Porfiriato, “displayed the liberal principles in all their nakedness: beautiful but inapplicable words. We had lost our historical filiation.” In these lines, almost inadvertently, Paz turns his back on his grandfather Ireneo. But immediately afterward he rescues someone more fragile and perhaps more beloved: his own father. Because the “filiation” that Mexico had lost in the century of liberalism would be regained in the Revolution, which arose “tearing young men away from their paternal homes: it is the Revolution, the magic word, the word that is going to change everything and that will grant us immense joy and a quick death.”

Not only Paz believed that Mexico had encountered its authentic path in the Mexican Revolution. Except for those who remained Porfirians, all of intellectual Mexico thought the same. But it was one thing to encounter the path and another the “filiation” (
filiación
), a key word in
The Labyrinth of Solitude
. For Paz, the authentic revolution would be only one of the Mexican revolutions, the one that had swept away his father: Zapata's revolution.

Perhaps the most intense and impassioned pages of the book are dedicated to the sacred scripture of Zapatismo—the Program of Ayala (
Plan de Ayala
)—with its demands for land and communal rights and for “the most ancient, stable and enduring part of our nation, the indigenous past.” Zapata had been the historical hero of his father. And of Octavio Paz as well, though inserted within his personal category of “solitude”:

 

The traditionalism of Zapata shows the deep historical consciousness of this man, isolated in his village and in his race. His isolation . . . the solitude of the still enclosed seed, gave him the strength and depth to reach the simple truth. For the truth of the Revolution was very simple and consisted of the insurgency of Mexican reality, crushed down by the maneuvers of liberalism as much as by the abuses of conservatives and neo-conservatives.

 

The final part of this second part is the culmination of the book and of Paz's principal poetic thesis in
The
Labyrinth
, in a passage of magnificent Spanish prose but not necessarily valid as a universal and incontrovertible insight:

 

The Revolution is the sudden immersion of Mexico in its own being . . . It is an eruption of reality and a communion, a decanting of old dormant substances, many ferocities coming out into the air, many tendernesses and elegances that had been hidden by the fear of existence. And with whom does Mexico commune in this bloody fiesta? With itself, with its own being. The revolutionary explosion is a marvelous fiesta in which the Mexican drunk with himself, finally, in a mortal embrace, comes to know another Mexican.

 

And with whom does Octavio Paz Lozano commune? Whom does he embrace, in this almost rapturous description? The passage deals with mortal combat but also with love and, from the point of view of love (immersed in violence), Paz communes with Octavio Paz Solórzano, his father, “he who went away for a few hours and nobody knows into what silence he entered.” He embraces Octavio Paz, the other and the same. The
fiesta mexicana
, the drunkenness with oneself, the mortal embrace that, for a moment, links them together takes place between two men, father and son, with the same name of Octavio Paz.

 

IX

Writing
The Labyrinth of Solitude
was an act of liberation for Paz, especially in his more obviously personal work. Once the book was finished, he admitted, in a letter to Alfonso Reyes, that the theme of
mexicanidad
was “beginning to weigh me down”:

 

. . . this obsession, in a time of peace, displays a twisted nationalism, that will lead to aggression, when it is strong, and to narcissism and masochism, when it is vile, as is happening with us. An intelligence enamored of particularism . . . begins to lack intelligence . . . I am afraid that, for some, being Mexican consists of something so exclusive that it denies us the possibility of being men.

 

Nonetheless, his own discovery of
mexicanidad
led him to celebrate it in the few visual artists that he saw as deeply involved with the same theme. For Paz the greatest of them was Rufino Tamayo. Around November 1950, for an Exposition of Mexican Art held in Paris, he wrote an essay in which he tried to settle accounts with the three greatest Mexican muralists and argue for Tamayo, a native of Oaxaca, which is in many ways the most profoundly “Indian” state of Mexico. Paz admires the “materialist” flowering of Diego Rivera but criticizes what he calls the “dialectical” harangue expressed in his work. And if Rivera's problem was “statism,” Paz sees in the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros—a painter of movement and dramatic contrasts—another quality to be criticized: “theatrical effectism . . . painted literature.” He finds the work of the third major muralist, José Clemente Orozco, closest of the great triad to his own moral sensibility, as a painter who was less ideological, more rebellious, and more solitary. But in opposition to the muralists, he assigns special value to the painters of his own generation (María Izquierdo, Agustín Lazo, Jesús Reyes, Carlos Mérida, and even Frida Kahlo, among others) who, according to Paz, did not try to preach to the people about the epic of their history nor announce an imminent socialist utopia, but were attempting to reach down into their myths, their dreams, their specific modes (in colors, tones, gestures) of ferocity, tenderness, fiesta, and death. Paz saw this kind of painting (and his interpretation of it) as corresponding to the process of self-knowledge (
autognosis)
preached by Paz himself in
El laberinto de la soledad.
Among all these painters, he points to Rufino Tamayo as representing “a place of communion,” a consecration carried to its limit—like his own—in contact with the deepest waters of the Mexican past:

 

Tamayo does not need to reconquer his innocence; for him it is enough to descend to the deepest part of himself where he encounters the ancient sun, the fountain of images . . . if there is antiquity and innocence in the painting of Tamayo, it is because he bases himself on a people: on a present that is in itself a timeless past.

 

And yet, beyond the “particularism” involved in the search for
mexicanidad
, Paz felt the need for Mexicans to open themselves toward “the possibility of being men” and, in the final phrase of
El laberinto
, “to be contemporary with all men.” As part of this impetus, Paz, while in Paris, would come to identify himself completely with the surrealist movement, a linkage he had rejected in his youth but that his work had prefigured since the 1930s. He grew close to André Breton and to another surrealist, Benjamin Péret, with whom he reinvigorated a long-established relationship. Paz came to feel that surrealism, with its emphasis on releasing emotions through access to the unconscious (and its interest in non-European cultures), was an ideal poetic and intellectual medium for confronting the multilayered reality of Mexico. From his explorations among the images and rites of his culture, its desires and popular myths, and later through the poetic freedom of the prose poems of
Aguila o sol?
(Eagle or Sun?), the direct predecessor of Latin American magic realism, his work never became static but continually expanded, with an extraordinary freedom of imagination and experimentation and an interest in a variety of traditions and cultures.

He came to play an important role in the defense of Luis Buñuel's great film
Los Olvidados
(The Forgotten), attacked by nationalist critics for its grim portrayal of Mexican urban poverty. When the film was due for its premiere at the Cannes Festival of April 1951, Paz wrote to Buñuel, who was then working in Mexico as a Republican exile from Franco's Spain: “I am proud to fight for you and your film.” He may have remembered the jibes and harsh criticisms his own friends had inflicted on Buñuel's early surrealist film
La Edad de Oro
, on the occasion of André Breton's visit to Mexico in 1938, but also fiercely alive for him were his own memories of the Spanish Civil War. “Thanks to
Los Olvidados
,” he told Buñuel, “in a small way the heroic times return.” Paz put considerable effort into creating “an atmosphere of expectation” around the debut of the film, working his connections and seeking supporters (he spoke with Prévert, Cocteau, Chagall, Picasso and “mobilized the foot soldiers” of journalists). He wrote a text titled “Buñuel the Poet,” which he personally distributed, in loose sheets, twenty-four hours before the premiere. And his dedicated energy may have contributed to Buñuel's winning the prize for Best Director:

 

Los Olvidados
is something more than a realist film. Dream, desire, horror, madness, chance, the nocturnal portion of life also have their part in it. And the weight of reality that it shows us is so atrocious that it ends up seeming impossible to us, unendurable. And it is. The reality is
unendurable
and therefore, because he cannot endure it, man kills and dies, loves and creates.

 

The solitude of the major youthful protagonist may have reminded Paz of his own childhood. Perhaps the tragedy of the mother at the film's conclusion, left alone, helpless, abandoned, “fucked over” (
chingada
), consciously or unconsciously evoked the memory of his own pages on the woman (on indigenous Mexico)
chingada
in
El laberinto.
Whatever the case, Paz felt that Buñuel's masterpiece had touched on the essential fabric of Mexican social reality with a lasting moral and aesthetic power.

Midway through the century, in the city of Paris, as a result of early revelations by the French writer David Rousset on the existence of concentration camps in the Soviet Union, Paz began to liberate himself ideologically. The magazine
Les Lettres Françaises
had slandered Rousset for a supposed falsification of testimonies on the controversial subject (which it was at that time among the French left). Rousset had launched a widely followed suit against the magazine. “The newspapers . . . speak of nothing else,” Paz wrote to his Argentine friend José Bianco, editor of
Sur
:

 

Perhaps it would
also be an opportune time
to publish something in
Sur
about this terrible accusation against the country some people still call “the fatherland of the proletariat.” Do you know that among the witnesses Rousset presents, one finds
El Campesino
(The Peasant) that general to whom Alberti and other poets of the court of Stalin dedicated poems and homages. Now, one more time, they will have to vomit their canticles.

 

Valentín González González, El Campesino, had been a communist hero of the Spanish Civil War and received as such when he took refuge in the Soviet Union. (He was the partial inspiration for a character in André Malraux's
L'espoir
and, at another level of art, for the leader of raids into Franco Spain—which he was—in the early 1960s, portrayed by Gregory Peck in Fred Zinnemann's
Behold a Pale Horse
of 1964, though in contrast to the character played by Peck, he would die in his bed in 1983, back in the Madrid of post-Franco Spain.) He was regarded as one of the bravest and most successful Republican commanders but also the man who ordered the mass execution of hundreds of Nationalist prisoners taken in battle in 1937, as retaliation for Fascist atrocities. He had been sent to a concentration camp for showing his impetuous bravery before Stalin himself, criticizing the Stalinist cult of personality, and after his release eventually fled to France. According to the testimony of her daughter, Elena Garro attended the hearing of Rousset's suit against
Les Lettres Françaises
, spoke with El Campesino, and collected information. Relying on Garro's investigation (and the evidence offered by Rousset), Paz wrote his first openly critical piece on Stalinism. No one would publish it in Mexico but José Bianco did in
Sur
. Paz now put himself into an unusual position within Latin America, especially at the outset of the full-blown Cold War—that of an independent socialist. The only other outstanding instance of a similar position was taken by a man of exactly Paz's age, the Argentine Ernesto Sabato, with his book
Hombres y Engranajes
(Men and Gears).