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Nonetheless, there were important differences between the views of Cosío Villegas and Paz. Cosío, in his own words, was “a museum quality Liberal,” Paz a moderate Trotskyist in transition toward a perspective of independent socialism with anarchistic tendencies. The “major wound” of Mexico, for Cosío Villegas, was the concentration of power in the hands of the president and other factors that impeded the development of a true electoral democracy. Paz, on the other hand, continued (and would long continue) the use of Marxist tools of analysis. As late as 1967, in his book
Corriente alterna
(Alternating Current), he would write that “Marxism is barely a point of view but it is our point of view. We cannot abandon it, because we have no other.” He would continue to apply class analysis and discount “free enterprise” as a “relic,” would remain for many years disdainful of the inheritance of nineteenth-century liberalism, and would never lose faith in the possibility of an egalitarian community of men (the Golden Age of Zapatismo). Disenchanted with the Soviet Union, he came to regard the Chinese Cultural Revolution with a measure of sympathy (based on inadequate knowledge). He would praise the Yugoslav attempts at self-sufficiency and above all put his trust in the prospect of nationalist revolution among the nations at the periphery of the Western world.

Why then did he become a critic of the Cuban Revolution? The young intellectuals and university students of Mexico—including such friends of his as Carlos Fuentes—had no doubts. For them the Mexican Revolution had died, and almost all of them displayed immense enthusiasm for the “true” Cuban Revolution. Cosío Villegas, who had laid the major responsibility for the “lamentable” turn of Cuba to communism upon the United States, would maintain, from the very beginning, a definite distance toward the events in Cuba. Paz was less of a skeptic. In a letter to Roberto Fernández Retamar, he expressed his “great desire to go to Cuba to see its new face as well as its old one, its ocean and its people, its poets and its trees.” But he soon lost this desire, as shown by his words in a letter to José Bianco (whose support for the Cuban Revolution would lead to his leaving
Sur
) dated May 26, 1961, after the failed CIA-sponsored invasion at the Bay of Pigs:

 

Although I understand your enthusiasm (and I almost envy it) I do not entirely share it. I do not like the language used by the enemies of Castro, nor their actions, nor their morality, nor what they represent and are. But neither does the Cuban Revolution please me. It is not what I wanted (and want) for our countries. Our countries, like those of Africa and Asia, will choose the way of Castro. No other recourse (they are permitted no other) is left to them. Aside from the wars and calamities that [this situation] will unleash, the results can only be dictatorships of the right if the popular movements are destroyed or, if they triumph, totalitarian dictatorships like that of Castro . . . I think that our century will see the triumph of “Marxist ideology”; what it will not see, at least in our generation, is the triumph of socialism.

 

Three times he was invited to visit Cuba as a member of the panel of judges for the Cuban Casa de las Américas literary prize. He never accepted. In 1964 he would refuse to participate in an homage to surrealism sponsored by the Casa de las Américas and he would write to Retamar:

 

I rapidly recognized that a radical dichotomy existed between the regimes of Eastern Europe (now including those who govern China and elsewhere) and the liberating intentions of poetry. This dichotomy is due not only to the nightmare that Stalinism was for my generation (in Latin America for some of my generation) but that it forms part of the nature of things. I won't say more, I don't want to say more. I love Cuba too much . . . and Latin America, to ignite a new polemic now.

 

He would still describe himself, in another letter of 1967 to Retamar, as a “a friend of the Cuban Revolution in what stems from Martí, not Lenin.” It would still be a few years before he would openly break with Cuba.

 

 

XI

In the early sixties, Paz was almost universally beloved, followed, read, and respected not only in Mexico but also, to a growing degree, in France (where he had long been publishing in magazines and translations of his books of poetry were beginning to appear). But still he was not happy. On the one hand, his professional situation was unstable. He was stationed in Mexico but would the Foreign Service send him to France, where he wished to go? Or to UNESCO? Or should he consider accepting a professorship? To make things worse, there was no market for his articles in Latin America and he even thought he might move to Argentina or Venezuela. He was forty-five years old when, in March 1959, he wrote to Bianco:

 

I have passed the last fifteen years doing something I do not like, putting off or killing off my desires (even the most legitimate like writing or doing nothing or falling in love) and hoping that, one fine day, things would change. The only thing that has changed is me: my life goes on in the same way (I work many hours in a ridiculous office, with the pompous title of Director General of International Organizations). I am poorly paid and subjected to the capriciously administered rules of distant bureaucrats.

 

He had survived due to a “salutary innate stupidity—formed of confidence in life, resignation (of an Andalusian peasant, for sure) and being permanently available.” But then, finally, he was transferred to Paris, where he remained for two years and published
Salamandra
, a new collection of poems. The appointment as ambassador to India followed. Jaime Torres Bodet had recommended that he remain in the foreign service where “you will have 60% of your time free to write.”

To write but also to reach some resolution in his intimate life. “Why did Octavio Paz and Elena Garro separate?” wrote the philosopher María Zambrano, who had lived with them in Paris. “They had achieved the most difficult thing: hell on earth.” For years, Paz and Garro had lived apart, in an “open marriage.” He had frequently considered divorce but kept putting it off. In 1959 he would tell Bianco that the situation had become unendurable. He would soon be divorced and he let slip one weighty reason: “I think that I am—I have been, I will be—in love. It makes me more miserable but gives me vitality. Or at least it nourishes my plans, my hunger for the future.” The woman he alluded to (without mentioning her name) was the beautiful Italian painter Bona Tibertelli de Pisis, the wife of the French writer André Pieyre de Mandiargues. Octavio and Elena had been friends, since Paris, with the partners in that other “open marriage.” The French edition of
Águila o sol?
(published in 1957) included five etchings by Bona. And in 1958, André and Bona had traveled in Mexico, visiting the coasts and colonial cities and attending ancient festivals accompanied by one of the best guides possible: the author of
El laberinto de la soledad
.

The tormented relationship between Octavio and Elena was finally broken, after twenty-two years. “Helena,” he confessed to Bianco (still using the name he had once given her), “is a wound that will never close, a sore, a vice, an illness, a fixed idea.” But despite his animosity, Paz would retain the intellectual admiration he felt for Garro. Encouraged by Octavio, she had achieved literary success in the 1950s with works of the theater and short stories of a style similar to the oneiric and spiritual universe of Juan Rulfo. But with her novel
Recuerdos del porvenir
(Memories of the Future), her prestige was firmly established. Paz would write to Bianco, his great respect for her writing coupled with an undertone of intimate hostility:

 

Did you get Helena's book? What do you think of it? I'm surprised and amazed by it. How much life! How much poetry! Everything seems like a pirouette, a rocket, a magical flower! Helena is a
magician
! She is a sorceress (and also a witch: Artemisa, the huntress, the perpetual Virgin, mistress of the knife, enemy of man). Now I can judge her with objectivity.

 

The quality of Garro's novel had astonished him. Later, after Bianco had responded with his own words of admiration, Paz would write: “About this, at least, I was not mistaken.” He had always believed “in her sensibility and spiritual insight, in her gaze of a true creator, of a poet and never, not even in the worst moments and most sordid situations, have I renounced her.” And he concluded: “To have known, loved and lived with her for so many years and to finish it now with a eulogy of her as a writer! Does only what they call ‘the work' remain of us?” And he added a surprising coda: “I say to myself: you can sleep in peace: you came to know a really marvelous being.”

In 1960, the affair with Bona had advanced to the point that Paz—after securing a divorce by proxy from Elena—announced his imminent wedding in another letter to Bianco. “Bona is the niece of De Pisis, that Italian painter of Chirico's generation, whom perhaps you may know. Ungaretti, Ponge, Mandiargues and others have written about her painting. She will soon be my wife. We are going to marry.” But in 1962, when he was already in India, the relationship fell apart.

There seemed to be a fatal pattern: all the blessings of life (creativity, recognition, security) except that of love. In 1963, his faithful and generous friend José Luis Martínez proposed him for an International Poetry Prize at the Biennial of Knokke-le-Zoute, in Belgium. Against potent rivals—Vicente Aleixandre and Henri Michaux—Paz was awarded the prize. The Mexican press showered him with praise. The philosopher José Gaos predicted that “the next Nobel Prize for the Spanish language will be yours.” The articles he published in the journal of the National University (collected in the book
Corriente alterna
) were received with reverence. But Paz, now fifty years old, had returned to his state of solitude. When he invited Martínez and his wife, Lydia, to visit him in New Delhi, Paz described “a very pleasant house, with a marvelous garden of 3000 meters. The only thing that troubles me is to live in it alone.”

Writing from Paris in 1964, he reviewed the broad picture of his emotional life:

 

Elena was an illness . . . if I had stayed with her, I would have died, I would have gone mad. But I haven't encountered “health.” Maybe now . . . Will it not be too late? In recent years, after some blows and brutal surprises (not the slow and exasperating psychic splintering that was my amorous illness with Elena but the blow of a hatchet, the treacherous dagger, the thunderbolt [of his breakup with Bona], I aspire to a degree of wisdom. Not resignation but tranquil desperation—not death but learning to see death and woman face to face. Eroticism bores me and frightens me (it's like religion: either one is a devotee or a saint—I am neither Casanova nor Sade . . .) I believe in what is deepest, in love . . .

 

But in the very year he wrote this letter, the skies had cleared for him in a miraculous and lasting way. In India at the age of fifty he had come to know a young woman—in one poem he calls her a girl (
muchacha
)—who would accompany him for the rest of his life, in a full and vigorous love. She was extraordinarily beautiful and talented. And cheerful, respectful, and faithful to him. She was Corsican and her name was Marie-José Tramini. When they met, in India, she was married to a French diplomat and so their mutual attraction had to be treated with reserve. In the subcontinent, their paths crossed briefly and then they went their own ways. By chance they traveled separately to Paris and met there, again by chance, on the street. And suddenly (the expression “suddenly”—
de pronto
—is frequent in Paz's poetry as a marker of chance) one of those moments of “objective chance” changed their lives, as Paz had once fore-shadowed it in a lecture on surrealism delivered in 1954: “this encounter, major, decisive, destined to mark us forever with its golden talon, is called love, person beloved.” Marie-Jo would recall, “I met him then and I never left him.” Together they returned to India and were married in Delhi on January 20, 1966. “Meeting her was the best thing that happened to me after being born,” Paz would say.

The years in India with Marie-Jo were a period of unalloyed happiness for Octavio Paz, perhaps for the first time in his life. “It must be very delightful to be so much in love,” the wife of the writer Agustín Yáñez commented when seeing them together. It was a period of great productivity for Paz, including the poems published in
Ladera este
(Eastern Slope) and
Hacia el comienzo
(Toward the Beginning). Scattered through the poems are moments of his rapt middle-aged love in the heated air of India:

 

                      
Space spins

the world tears up its roots.

Weighing no more than the dawn are our bodies

                      
stretched out

(from
Viento Entero
)

You are dressed in red

                             
you are

the seal of the burned-up year

the carnal firebrand

                      
the fruit-bearing star.

In you I eat sun

(from “Cima y gravedad”)

 

Or in the long poem
Maithuna
(a technical Sanskrit word for the sacralized act of love), Paz moves across his beloved's body:

 

To sleep to sleep in you

Or better to wake up

                      
to open my eyes

at your center

           
black white black

white

       
To be sleepless sun

that your memory sets on fire

                             
(and

the memory of me within your memory . . .

 

For Paz, who was so often a poet of desire, “woman is the gate of reconciliation with the world.” After decades of loves marked in part by anguish and uncertainty, pain and drought, fleeting and insubstantial affairs, Marie-Jo opened this “gate of reconciliation.” She lessened his sense of emptiness, his feelings of need. She saved him from his personal labyrinth of solitude and was his constant inspiration.

 

SINCE THE
days of
Barandal
, Paz had felt that something was missing in his life, his ancestral avocation of founding and editing journals. He began to explore the possibility of publishing a literary and critical magazine that could speak to all of Latin America. For now he had no luck, even with a proposal he and Carlos Fuentes made to the government of France, whose minister of culture was then André Malraux.

And something even deeper within him had failed to come to pass: the greatest public event, the Revolution. Paz remained obsessed by the idea of the Revolution, but he encountered and reworked it in only one area of experience, the incessant subversion and free experimentation of his poetry. Since his youth, with less luck but with nobility and enthusiasm, he had sought the Revolution also in action: working for a time in Yucatán, writing for revolutionary Mexican newspapers, going to Spain during the Civil War and seeing there the unforgettable visage of hope, of possible fraternity, the “creative spontaneity and direct and daily participation of the people.” And perhaps, above all, he had gone looking for the Revolution in the world of thought, among the great “possessed” writers of Russia, in the canonic texts of Marxism, the heretical texts of Trotsky, and later, in the polemics of Camus and Sartre.

He could not renounce his hopes for it. In the essays of
Corriente alterna
, he devotes his most inspired and poetic prose to the central myth of his time, to the Revolution:

 

Revolution designates the new virtue: justice. All the others—fraternity, equality, liberty—are based on it . . . As universal as reason, it admits no exceptions and is equally ignorant of arbitrariness and of pity . . . Revolution: word for the just and for those who deal out justice. For revolutionaries, evil does not reside in the excesses of the established order but in that order itself.

 

And among the India-centered poems of
Ladera este
comes “An Interruption from the West, a Mexican Song,” which succinctly sketches his revolutionary pedigree and the dilemma of his political life, a poem that recalls, with nostalgia, his grandfather and his father and how Paz felt himself to be history's orphan, an orphan of Revolution. Drinking their coffee or their alcohol they spoke to him of great national events, of true heroes “and the tablecloth smelled of gunpowder”:

 

I kept my silence:

About whom could I speak?

 

XII

And “suddenly” (
de pronto
) the winds from the West brought the smell of gunpowder to Octavio Paz in India. While he and Marie-Jo were at a hotel in the Himalayas in the summer of 1968, Paz received with “incredible emotion” news of the rebellion of students in Paris and saw, in the possible fusion of the student movement with the French working class, the long-awaited fulfillment of Marx's prophecy, the beginning of revolution in the Western world. Finally, thought Paz, the Revolution was being born in the “splendid attitude” of the young generation of the West, the new nomads of the industrial age, reinventors of neolithic values, scornful of the future, worshippers of the instant, and in the no less hopeful attitude of the young people of Eastern Europe, not only disillusioned but disgusted with Marxism. On June 6, Paz wrote to José Luis Martínez: “The revolt of young people is one of the surest signs of change in our society—at times it seems to me that I'm returning to the thirties.” Six days later, he wrote an impassioned letter to the English poet Charles Tomlinson in which he reaffirmed his feeling of returning to his origins, to his conversations with his anarchist friend Bosch, his readings before he became a convinced Marxist, a return that was also a new beginning and a change of direction: