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Did these positions make Paz a “rightist”? Those who, like him, were turning away from Marxism as well as many social democrats would say that he was not. But for many left-wing academics—and their intellectual spokesmen—his words were all they needed to present him as a man of the right. The historian and essayist Héctor Aguilar Camín published an article titled “The Apocalypse of Octavio Paz” in which he merely reproduced a number of Paz's statements as if they refuted each other. Paz's problem, he went on to argue, was that he was “aging badly”:

 

from the bohemian of his twenties and thirties to—in his sixties—the disconsolate clarifier of his past, from the healthy, foundational nationalist of
El laberinto de la soledad
to the buffoon with socially vacuous myths and circular images of
Posdata
, from the indisputable, captivating intellectual of barely a decade ago—school and emblem of a generation—to the Jeremiah of recent years. Paz is substantially inferior to his past and is, politically, to the right of Octavio Paz.

 

It should be noted that, with the passage of years, Monsiváis came to share many of Paz's opinions and Aguilar Camín, in a gradual process, even more.

 

BUT AMONG
those who disliked Paz's politics, there were also more dangerous individuals, in an epoch of sporadic but active urban guerrilla warfare. On August 29, 1978, the battle of the generations reached into the inner circle of
Vuelta
, not with words but with lacerating violence. A frequent contributor to the journal, Hugo Margáin Charles (the young philosopher who had won the Tamayo painting in the raffle organized to benefit
Vuelta
), was kidnapped by a guerrilla commando and later found dead, bled dry, with a bullet in his knee. (The author or authors of the crime would never be caught.) A few days later, an envelope with no return address arrived at the offices of
Vuelta.
In it was a piece of writing signed by “J.D.A., Poetry in Arms” that included a threat: “you will hear from us again.” The text was titled “Epistle on the Death of Hugo Margáin Charles.” It condemned the public outrage of
Vuelta
over the murder. Every day, it affirmed, peasants in Latin America and Mexico were dying “machine-gunned in their fields or on their way home” and workers were “cut to pieces in a drainage ditch with twenty stab wounds.” And then it proceeded to justify the killing. Margáin was the dog who had to be killed so as to continue the process of eliminating rabies.

Octavio Paz thought that his last hour had come. And he faced it with courage. He wrote a poem in which he challenged the author of the anonymous letter and almost seemed to be calling for his own immolation. The editorial board, and especially Gabriel Zaid, dissuaded him. The poem was never published but in the November issue an editorial from the board appeared with the title “The Motives of the Wolf.” It quoted a substantial portion of the letter and went on to note:

 

Beyond the threats and the cowardice of cloaking yourself in the shadows to spit on a corpse, the message is pathetic for its circular and necrophilic logic. It preaches the murder of innocent people because if “capitalism and not the dog engenders purulent rabies” then “to finish off the dogs will result in the long run in rabies having no defense.” The wolf is thus concerned with the purity of the flock. It kills to finish off death . . . We are not supposed to condemn the assassination but rather understand the motives of the assassin.

 

In relation to the murderers' complaint that
Vuelta
had no right to complain, the board simply stated that it would have been a monstrous thing if his friends did not proclaim their grief over the murder of a man of worth.
Vuelta
was accusing no one specifically because it had no proof against anyone. But yes, it condemned the assassination, wherever it may have stemmed from, whatever the source: terrorists or authorities, left or right, stupid adventurism or cold calculation:

 

The nihilist Nechaev [a nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary committed to violence] is repugnant to us just like . . . all those intellectuals—philosophers, professors, writers, theologians—who tacitly justify murder. In the end, however condemnable may be the motives of the exterminating angels (whether it be Somoza or Pinochet or the Red Brigades) they are to be condemned in the first place for their actions.

 

IN THE
end it was not the army that ended the guerrilla war in Mexico. It was the Political Reform conceived and implemented in 1978 by a prominent political liberal, Jesús Reyes Heroles, who was secretary of the interior during the first years of the José López Portillo administration (1976–82). The Communist Party was legalized and, together with other leftist groups, entered Congress and the field of public politics. From that moment, the left began to take on a new strength, although its true consolidation in the realm of electoral politics would wait till 1988, when a dissident group within the PRI—headed by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the son of Mexico's most socially progressive president—left the party that his father had helped to found. Cuauhtémoc would run for president and after losing to Carlos Salinas de Gortari, in an election heavily marred by suspicious manipulations, formed a party that Don Lázaro might have wished for but never dared to establish, a party that would unify the left under the banner of the Mexican Revolution but with no connection to the communists.

Though the Political Reform corresponded to the democratic ideas Paz had been proposing to both the left and the government since the essays of
Posdata
, the ideological war did not let up. In 1979,
Vuelta
welcomed the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua against what had seemed the endless family tyranny of the Somozas. The magazine continued to publish articles analyzing and criticizing the military regimes of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. From 1980 until the reestablishment of democracy in Argentina,
Vuelta
was banned by the generals in power. But in 1984, to give its own small welcome to democracy,
Vuelta
initiated a South American edition published in Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, the insults, the constant accusations of “rightist,” continued against Octavio Paz. Toward the close of the 1970s (and after the murder of Margáin), Paz, feeling himself harassed and isolated, broadened his presence in the media. He would publish not only in
Vuelta
but also in the pages of the newspaper
El Universal,
where two of his friends—José de la Colina and Eduardo Lizalde—were in charge of a weekly literary supplement “The Letter and the Image” (
La letra y la imagen
). Soon after, Paz also began to appear on television, on the dominant private network Televisa, providing commentaries on international affairs for its major evening news broadcast, Jacobo Zabludovsky's
24 horas
. He had decided not to permit people to “take him lightly.” The decision (to appear on a network that many Mexicans regarded as far too closely linked to the PRI) drew new verbal attacks. But Paz recognized, earlier than most Mexican intellectuals who later followed his path, the power to spread the influence of his ideas and his persona afforded by the medium of television.

 

XVIII

For several years, Paz had been working on his book about the poetess Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. It was his definitive return to a study of the order imposed by Catholicism, which he had viewed (in
El laber-into
) positively, as an essentially benevolent force that had mitigated the “orphanhood” of the conquered Indians and, according to
El laberinto
, given them a sense of protection and relevance. But he was no longer the same man who had written
The Labyrinth
of
Solitude
more than twenty years before. His criticism of the order imposed by twentieth-century communism had awakened a new, less positive opinion: the lingering presence of the colonial and Catholic form of order through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century had impeded the modernization of the country to a degree that perhaps he had not sufficiently considered, even if he had, in
The Labyrinth of Solitude,
referred to the petrified scholasticism, “the relative infecundity of colonial Catholicism.” In Paz's vision of the colonial centuries, there was an inescapable duality (based on a real enough historical duality). But now he was dealing with it directly, in the biography of a great poet and a woman who had suffered grievously from the antifeminine atmosphere of the Church, especially during the Counter-Reformation (an environment opposed as well to her considerable secular learning and surely jealous of her beauty and her talent). She had chosen a monastic life at least in part because, in a context that denied educational equality to women, it promised her more freedom to study and to write. She had been driven into expressions of unwarranted contrition, like her famous statement that she was “the worst of all” (
la peor de todas
), and later a forced renunciation of writing.

Paz had been interested in Sor Juana since the 1940s. He would now produce his
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe
(Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz or the Traps of Faith), published in 1982. Clearly he felt her to be a sister soul. They both saw themselves as solitary individuals and both, separated by three centuries, were seekers. Their trajectories had been parallel but inverse. Since his youth, in a world at war but in a country free of it, he had sought for order and reconciliation, which were qualities of her world under the aegis of a dominating religion. Sor Juana, within her closed and ecstatic personal universe, had sought an opening outward, the capacity for liberty, which was his environment and his chosen world. He had written in
El laberinto
, “The solitary figure of Sor Juana becomes more isolated within this world formed of affirmations and negations, which ignores the value of uncertainty and of inquiry . . . Her renunciation, which ended in silence, was not a commitment to God but a negation of herself.”

Negation of herself or affirmation of herself? Paz would not admit (as some angry Catholic critics insisted he should) that Sor Juana had denied her creative life for another, truer commitment. He saw the two rigid orthodoxies, of Marxism and Catholicism, as convergent. Both felt they were “owners of the truth.” He poured his own feelings of contrition about the past into his portrait of Sor Juana. Why had she obeyed the orders of her confessor and burned her extensive library? Why had she sacrificed her intellectual curiosity (which had nourished her since childhood) on the altar of faith? Why, after rising to the literary, philosophical, and intellectual summit of her age, had she completed the sacrifice of her liberty and her genius, and died not long after (from an illness contracted while tending to grievously ill nuns)? Sor Juana, thought Paz, must have incorporated the same kind of baseless guilt expressed by the victims of Stalin's party purges in the 1930s. But he would not renounce his freedom nor stop testifying to what he saw as the truth in confrontation with both orthodoxies. Before the guardians of the Catholic faith, he had written a book that claimed the nun as a martyr to liberty. Before the new “clergy” of the left, he would continue pointing to political crimes. He would not fall into “the traps of faith.”

 

FREEDOM WAS
incompatible with rigid Catholic orthodoxy, but was it incompatible with Christianity? In 1979 Paz had addressed the issue in a brief and striking essay on the death of his friend, the leftist José Revueltas. He described Revueltas (a totally convinced atheist) as a Christian Marxist, disillusioned with his original faith but nevertheless impregnated with the deep Catholicism of his parents, his infancy, and the Mexican people. He had transformed his original faith into Marxism and lived his revolutionary passion as a
via crucis
. In his journey through the stations of his suffering (prison terms, countless deprivations) Revueltas had often come up against the dictates of orthodoxy. Confronted with dogmas, precepts, party discipline, he had shown not obedience but doubts when he truly felt them. But “there is something distinctive about the doubts and criticisms of Revueltas, the tone, the religious passion . . . The questions that Revueltas raised on different occasions make no sense nor can they be deciphered except within a religious perspective . . . and precisely that of Christianity.” Paz sees him as a primitive Christian confronting the evil of the world (capitalism, poverty, oppression, injustice) and also, sometimes, the power of his own secular church.

 

Revueltas, intuitively and passionately, resorted to a return toward the most ancient part of himself, to the religious answers, mingled with the millenarist ideas and hopes of the revolutionary movement. His religious temperament led him to communism, which he lived like a road of sacrifice and communion. This same temperament, inseparable from the love of truth and the good, led him at the end of his life to a critique of bureaucratic socialism and Marxist clericalism.

 

Within the Catholic Church, Paz concluded, “Revueltas would have been a heretic, as he was within communist orthodoxy.”

His depiction of Revueltas was an indirect self-portrait. Their lives could not have been more disparate. Paz's personal and existential suffering cannot be compared to the sufferings of Revueltas in the flesh. But both in a way had been Christians without a church, Christian Marxists opposed to the dogmas of Catholicism or the Comintern. Each was possessed by the absolute. Both born in 1914, they had at first embraced the same faith, moved away (though differently) from their fixed convictions, and continued believing in the possibility of hope. Revueltas had died “lashed to the colt of alcohol” like Paz's own revolutionary father. It was now up to Paz to continue on the path of heresy, because—like some of the Russian writers he so loved—his dissidence was not merely political but a heterodoxy based on his strong feelings of guilt over previous silences, previous blindnesses, conscious or not, in the 1930s and much later. A very Christian heresy, the product of sin and contrition.