Redeemers (32 page)

It was perhaps the first time that Paz quoted Bertrand Russell. He also referred for the first time and at length to a book by the dissident Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov (published in France in 1968) and Hannah Arendt's
Origins of Totalitarianism
(first published in 1951) and two more recent authors who dealt with the aftermath of the revolutionary passion in Russia (James Billington) and the atrocities under Bolshevism (Robert Conquest). The work of Solzhenitsyn especially seemed to Paz a matchless testimony, in the religious sense of the term, “in the century of false testimonies, a writer became a witness for man.” (He would repeatedly defend Solzhenitsyn for his devastating exposure of the gulag system, against Mexican critics who considered Solzhenitsyn “pro-imperialist.” But he also mentioned the archaic and racist Slavic nationalism of the great Russian dissident.)

In the essay, Paz continues the trial. In the dock of the accused he places some of the classics he had so admired, especially Lenin's
The State and the Revolution
, his former bedtime reading. He is still moved by its “enflamed semi-anarchism” but cannot close his eyes to the role of Lenin as the founder of the Cheka and the innovator (at least for the Bolshevik regime) of terror. Trotsky and Bukharin are filtered through the same sieve: “eminent men though tragically mistaken” yet in no way comparable to “a monster like Stalin.” Could Marx and Engels themselves be saved? Partially, for Paz. He recognizes the “germs of authoritarianism” in the mature thought of both writers but he considers the case less severe than with Lenin and Trotsky. Toward the end, the argument leads, unexpectedly, to Bertrand Russell, whose essential objection to Marx was his disastrous abandonment of democracy. Here was another innovation. For the first time—though within a quote from Russell—he writes the word “democracy.” Not “democratization” but democracy. And he points to the double standard with which the Latin American left treated “formal freedoms,” protesting their suppression in Chile while tolerating their repression in Russia or Czechoslovakia (Paz does not mention Cuba). Certainly one had to oppose American imperialism, its racism and its unjust capitalist system, and one had to denounce “caesarism” (the imprisonment of the Uruguayan writer Onetti, Pinochet's slaughter in Chile, torture in Brazil), and the existence of “
ciudad Netzahualcóyotl
with its million human beings living a sub-human life at the very gates of Mexico City forbids us any hypocritical complacency.” But “formal freedoms” had to be defended. Without freedom “of opinion and expression, of association and movement, the right to say
no
to power—there is no fraternity, or justice, or hope of equality.” The encounter with Brodsky and the reading of Solzhenitsyn had made him return, for the first time, to one of his own traditions, even older than his high school anarchist readings, the liberal tradition of his grandfather, the same historical strain that, invited by Paz, Daniel Cosío Villegas defended in the pages of
Plural.

But the time had not yet come for Paz to affirm and identify himself with that tradition. On the verge of his sixtieth year, he was now immersed in a process of self-analysis and contrition. He thought of Aragon, Éluard, Neruda, and other famous poets and writers who had written in favor of Stalin and he compared “the shudder I feel when I read certain passages of Dante's
Inferno
.” He justified the generous impulse of his youth in supporting the victims and opposing imperialism. But he warned that “unknowingly, from compromise to compromise, men find themselves entangled in a net of lies, falsehoods, deceptions and perjuries until they lose their souls.”

One more defendant had to stand trial: Octavio Paz. Could he be “saved”? No, at least not completely. And he would apply the notion with an unexpected Christian overtone:

 

I will add that our political opinions on this subject have not been mere errors or failings in our capacity of judgment. They were a sin, in the ancient religious sense of the word: something that affects the entire being. Very few of us would be able to look a Solzhenitsyn or a Nadezdha Mandelstam in the eyes. This sin has stained us and has also fatally stained our writings. I say this with sadness and humility.

 

PAZ AT
the same time was writing one of his most famous poems: Nocturne of San Ildefonso (
Nocturno de San Ildefonso
—the building that housed his preparatory school), a long poem about returning to the sites of his youth in Mexico City:

 

         
We were carried along

by the wind of thought

         
the verbal wind . . .

 

The good, we wanted the good:

to straighten out the world

 

But Paz's outlook is not, as in '68, festive and hopeful. He finds no joy in his return to the '30s because he has confronted the reality that resulted from that revolutionary passion. He has seen history,
his
history:

 

Circular scenario:

                  
we all have been

in the Great Theater of Filth.

judges, executioners, victims, witnesses

                            
all

have given false testimony

         
against the others

and against ourselves.

                            
And the vilest thing: we were

the public that applauded or yawned in their armchairs.

The guilt that did not know its guilt,

                            
innocence

was the greatest guilt.

                            
Each year was a mountain of bones.

 

Conversions, retractions, excommunications,

reconciliations, apostasies, retractions,

zig-zag of the demonolatries and the androlatries,

the bewitchments and the deviations:

my history . . .

 

Each line, each word seems to refer to a fact, a person, a concrete episode. With those who “yawned in their armchairs,” is he remembering the Congress of Writers in Valencia during the Spanish Civil War, dealing with the proposed condemnation of Gide for his criticism of the Soviet Union? Was Paz innocent because he did not know, because he half knew, because he did not wish to know, because he felt himself innocent? Was he guilty of innocence? “Now we know,” he would write, “that the splendor, which seemed to us the coming of the dawn, was a blood-soaked, burning pyre.” He had believed in that splendor, in that dawn, believed in it too long. His faith in Marxism had lasted to the end of the 1960s. He would dedicate the final three decades of his life to purging that “sin.” And in dealing with the subject, his words would always display the weight of a profound religious conflict, lived at a depth Paz had previously left almost unexplored, the Christianity inculcated by his mother that had formed the very foundation of Mexican identity.

 

XIV

Plural
had remained faithful to Paz's resolutions. He had kept the magazine at a distance from the government. His first objective (a serious criticism of the PRI) was furthered in the pages of
Plural
by Paz himself and, most especially, three other contributors. Daniel Cosío Villegas systematically analyzed the antidemocratic usages of the PRI and denounced the “personal style” (rhetorical, wasteful, often rife with megalomania) of the successive oligarchs in the Presidential Chair. Richard. Morse published a piece in which he sustained that Mexico still lived under the cultural paradigm of neo-Thomistic thinking produced by Spain in the seventeenth century and represented chiefly by Francisco Suárez. Gabriel Zaid concentrated on the serious consequences (in the 1970s) of economic policy controlled by a single man: severe currency devaluation (which would reach 100 percent), a sixfold increase in foreign debt, double-digit inflation, the loss of stability and of potential growth. And by publishing writers like Brodsky, Aron, Kolakowski, and Djilas, Paz opposed the dominant ideological current in Mexico, which he vilified as “worthless people defending their Dogma, who dress like bearded guerrillas and are revolutionary a la Guevara.” But he also complained that “except for two or three isolated figures,” almost all the Mexicans who wrote for
Plural
showed no interest in political and ideological criticism.

Meanwhile, young thinkers on the left continued their verbal attacks against him: he had abandoned the left, he was now on the right, he was doing the work of the government, he was “a liberal” (which, strictly speaking, he was not, least of all in his economic preferences). Paz responded with language that grew more and more bitter, qualifying intellectual life in Mexico as “mean-spirited” and “heinous [
infame
].” His personal solution was the same as always:

 

One has to write, to write—black on white—while the presidents, the executives, the bankers, the dogmatics and the swine, laid out on immense mountains of three-colored [referring to the Mexican flag] garbage or just entirely red, talk, listen to each other, digest, defecate and go back to talking.

 

Plural
was swimming against the current even within its own host newspaper,
Excélsior
, where Julio Scherer had to continually defend Paz against those who considered him an elitist and no longer of practical worth to the newspaper. Even his most recent book of essays published in Spain,
Los hijos del limo
(The Sons of the Slime, published in translation as
Children of the Mire
), an ambitious meditation on romantic poetry and its relation to the modern avant-garde, only received two reviews in Mexico, described by Paz as “one of them incompetent and the other distracted, inexact and with its embellishments of ill will.” Earlier he had vented his dissatisfaction with the Mexican intellectual climate to his friend Tomlinson:

 

Mexico makes me suffer but I make the Mexicans suffer. At times I think they don't like me but I am exaggerating: I don't exist, I don't belong, I'm not one of them. The same happened to Reyes, the same is happening to Tamayo. Their painter is Siqueiros—they adore him. And their true poet should have been Neruda . . . What bad luck they have had with me—and I with them.

 

Life in Mexico seemed almost unbearable for him, but he knew that, sometime soon, he would have to return physically and live in his native country. Except for five years (1954–59) the parenthesis of his exile had lasted twenty-five years. Soon he would have to find his way back.

 

XV

His poetry had begun that return, veering away from the avant-garde and its emphasis on experimentation, returning to a more classical (though still free verse style), returning to the examination of his fundamental beliefs, returning to his origins. In 1975 Paz wrote (in the vein of
Nocturno de San Ildefonso
) one of his longest and most celebrated poems,
Pasado en claro
(Clean Copy, or The Past Turned Clear and Clean, though it has been previously translated into English, by Eliot Weinberger, as A Draft of Shadows). The poem is no longer the site of memory, the revelation and consecration of the past, but rather the magic corridor that leads the poet “to the encounter with himself.” And here appear—with the wonder of the past suddenly renewed—the “big house” in Mixcoac “foundered in time,” “the patio, the wall, the ash tree, the well,” the garden and the trees, the (tastes, colors, stalls) of the plaza and its swarming humanity. There appears “the fig tree, its fallacies and its wisdom”—and for the first time in this remembered setting, Octavio Paz himself appears, reading at night in the library:

 

By the light of the lamp—the night

now mistress of the house and the ghost

of my grandfather now master of the night—

I would penetrate into the silence,

body without body, time

without hours. Each night,

transparent machines of delirium

within me the books were building

architectures raised upon a chasm.

A breath of the spirit raises them,

a blink of the eye undoes them.

 

It is the child within the first circle of his solitary labyrinth:

 

Child among taciturn adults

and their terrible childishness,

child along the corridors with high doors

rooms with portraits

crepuscular brotherhoods of the missing

child survivor

of the mirrors with no memory . . .

 

“In my house the dead were more than the living.” And the poet sketches in some of them. His mother, Josefina, “a child a thousand years old, mother of the world, my orphan,” and his aunt Amalia, “a virgin talking in her sleep” who “taught [him] to see with eyes closed, to see within and through the wall.” The memory of his grandfather Ireneo is soft and sweet, but that of his father, Octavio, is sorrowful:

 

Between vomiting and thirst,

lashed to the colt of alcohol,

my father passed back and forth in flames.

Among the rails and the crossties