Redeemers (36 page)

 

PAZ RARELY
mentioned God. Toward religion, he was closer to his Liberal, antireligious grandfather than to his mother, the pious Doña Josefina. He saw in the three major monotheistic religions a legacy of intolerance incompatible with his commitment to plurality. He liked to tell the story of a fervent Muslim he and Marie-Jo had met in the Himalayas and who had said to them, partly in sign language, “Moses,
kaput
! Jesus,
kaput
! Only Mohammed lives!” Paz believed that even this most recent prophet was
kaput!
and that the only religion that made any sense about the process of living and dying was Buddhism. Paz was drawn to the wisdom of Socrates, not Solomon; he read and reread Lucretius, not the Bible; he admired not the emperor Constantine, but Julian the Apostate for his attempt to revive worship of the pagan gods. (Paz devoted a poem, as had the great Greek modernist Cavafy, to Julian.) In his universal curiosity about art, thought, and science, Paz was a man of the Renaissance. In his free spirit and his touch of libertinism, he was an eighteenth-century philosopher. His creative verve and his political and poetic passion were those of a revolutionary romantic of the nineteenth and of the twentieth centuries.

And yet he wrote his greatest book about a nun and, in 1979, he treated the life of his friend Revueltas as an atheist
Imitation of Christ
. When Paz's mother died in 1980, Gabriel Zaid, a practicing Catholic, arranged for a
novenario
, nine days of prayer for the dead. Paz was deeply moved by the gesture.

 

XIX

In 1981, Gabriel Zaid published a long piece in
Vuelta
(it appeared simultaneously in
Dissent
and
Esprit
) on the civil war in El Salvador, titled “Enemy Colleagues, a Reading of the Salvadorean Tragedy,” and another, three years later, in 1984, on the sequel to the Sandinista Revolution: “Nicaragua, the Enigma of the Elections.” According to Zaid, both were conflicts between university-educated people of the left and the right, to the cost of the general population. In both cases, Zaid argued for the solution of democracy: clean elections in El Salvador, and submitting the Sandinista government to a popular vote in Nicaragua.

His arguments were given respectful, even enthusiastic attention (especially abroad, for instance by Murray Kempton in the
New York Review of Books
) but were strongly attacked by many Mexican publications. Octavio Paz had defended Zaid's positions and in 1984, on a stage in Frankfurt while accepting the Prize of the Association of German Editors and Booksellers, Paz—without mentioning Zaid directly—alluded to his younger colleague's position on Nicaragua. He traced the history of the Somoza “hereditary dictatorship,” which “had been born and had grown under the protection of Washington,” and the factors that had led to the Sandinista uprising and the fall of the regime. He would add:

 

Shortly after the triumph, the case of Cuba was repeated: the revolution was confiscated by an elite of revolutionary leaders . . . Almost all of them came from a native oligarchy and had passed from Catholicism to Marxist-Leninism or formed a curious mixture of both doctrines. From the beginning the Sandinista leaders sought inspiration in Cuba. They have received military and technical aid from the Soviet Union and its allies. The actions of the Sandinista regime show its will to install a bureaucratic-military dictatorship in Nicaragua according to the model of Havana. They have thus denaturalized the original meaning of the revolutionary movement.

 

Paz then mentioned that the anti-Sandinista groups had various components (he specifically mentioned the Miskito Indians) and noted that the technical and military aid supplied to the anti-Sandinista Contras was encountering growing criticism from the U.S. Senate and American opinion. He then pointed to the recent elections in El Salvador as a model to follow.

In Mexico, the reaction to Paz's speech was ferocious. A large crowd marched in front of the American embassy on Paseo de la Reforma (a short distance from Paz's apartment) carrying effigies of President Ronald Reagan and Octavio Paz. Some of them chanted “Rapacious Reagan, your friend is Octavio Paz” (“Reagan rapaz, tu amigo es Octavio Paz”). Someone lit a match and the effigy of Paz went up in flames. On the following day, the great cartoonist Abel Quezada published a cartoon titled “The Traps of Faith,” in which Paz appeared hanging from a rope, devoured by fire as if in an auto-da-fe of the Holy Inquisition and repeating a sentence from his Frankfurt speech: “The defeat of democracy signifies the perpetuation of injustice and physical and moral misery, whoever may win, the coronel or the commissar.” Quezada himself added, “The communists burned the effigy of Octavio Paz . . . If they did this to the best writer in Mexico now that they are in opposition [to the ruling government], they won't let anybody speak if they rise to power.”

The episode was the culmination of the long and often sordid onslaught against Paz. He himself would later write, in a letter to his Catalan editor Pere Gimferrer:

 

My first reaction was an incredulous laugh. How was it possible that a rather moderate speech unleashed such violence? Then a certain melancholy satisfaction. If they attack me, it's because [what I said] hurts them. But—I confess to you—it also hurt me. I felt (and I still feel it, though not the emotional hurt) that I was the victim of an injustice and of a misunderstanding. In the first place . . . it was an action conceived and directed by a group with the intention of intimidating me and intimidating all those who think as I do and dare to say it . . . In the second place, the national combustible: envy, resentment. It is the passion that rules the class of intellectuals in our era, especially in our [Latin American] countries. In Mexico, it is a chronic illness and its effects have been terrible. To it I attribute—in large part—the sterility of our literati. It is a deaf and dumb anger that surfaces at times in certain glances—a furtive, yellowish, metallic light . . . In my case, that passion has attained a seldom seen virulence through the union of resentment with ideological fanaticism.

 

IN
1979 Paz had collected his polemical essays against Dogma and the Lie, against Catholic and Marxist orthodoxy, in
El ogro filantrópico
(The Philanthropic Ogre). The title essay revealed another aspect of Paz's duality, this time in relation to the political system he had served from 1945 to 1968. He recognized the corruption of the PRI and pointed to certain unpardonable crimes, especially the events of 1968, but he felt that neither the left nor the right (represented by the National Action Party, the PAN) had formulated a realistic and responsible project for the country. The PRI had the advantage of having launched the Political Reform and this, he felt, would shape democracy in Mexico. Toward the system in power, his attitude was almost optimistic. By dissolving its own duality (a process he saw as under way), the hegemony of the PRI could lose its quality of “ogre” and retain its “philanthropy” but within a context of political freedom.

The book was published during a period of the greatest oil boom (and euphoria) of the century in Mexico. OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) had utilized the occasion of the Yom Kippur War (between Israel and Egypt, supported by Syria) to impose a boycott on shipments to pro-Israeli countries and enormously increase the worldwide price of oil. Mexico was not an OPEC member but benefited all the same.

The “pharaonic” president López Portillo applied the oil revenue to numerous and extremely expensive projects. Two men trained as engineers, Gabriel Zaid and, to his left, Heberto Castillo, pointed out (in the face of general support for the president's policies) that the enormous overspending was based on a very fragile foundation, the price of a barrel of oil. If the price fell, everything would collapse. And it did, in September 1982, driving Mexico to bankruptcy.

The political system was thrown into crisis. López Portillo, in his farewell address to the country, broke into tears and nationalized the banks. The general opinion on the left was that this had been a brave and revolutionary action. Writers in
Vuelta
criticized the nationalization as a distracting populist gesture and suggested that the only reasonable alternative for the country was to fully establish democracy. In January 1984, I published an essay in the journal, which was entitled “For a Democracy without Adjectives.” The article argued for an immediate transition to a democratic system and against the assignment of the usual Marxist adjectives appended to the word “democracy,” words like “formal” and “bourgeois.” What was needed was simply an electoral democracy.

A sector of the intellectual and political left responded positively to the idea. The Trotskyite activist Adolfo Gilly called it a prospect for “a modest utopia,” and Heberto Castillo, respected head of the Mexican Workers' Party (who had been Lázaro Cárdenas's friend and a mentor to his son Cuauhtémoc), also publicly supported an immediate transition. In those years, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo and other members of the PRI began to form a Democratic Current, which would lead to the postulation of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas as a presidential candidate and the final unification, after 1989, of most of the Mexican left under the banner of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, the PRD (
Partido de la Revolución Democrática
).

Paz himself was in a bind. The system had not fulfilled his hopes and expectations. What direction should he take?

 

PAZ CONSIDERED
himself liberal by descent, and also through his distance from the Church, his knowledge of the French Revolution, and his impassioned reading of the
Episodios nacionales
(by the Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós), with whose protagonist, Salvador Monsalud, he strongly identified. But for him the word “liberal”—Spanish in its origin as a noun—alluded to a mood, an attitude, an adjective. His liberalism was literary rather than historical, juridical, and political. There was a duality in his vision of liberalism, as in his view of Catholicism, the same kind of duality but seen from the opposite extreme, since it began with a rejection rather than an acceptance (of what he had seen as the benefits of colonial Catholicism for the “orphaned” Indians). In
El laberinto
, he had conceded “grandeur” to the nineteenth-century Liberals but considered their movement a historical “fall.” With independence and then, most especially, the Reform under Benito Juárez, Mexico according to Paz had lost its “filiation” with its Catholic (and presumably Indian) past. But in confronting the closed and oppressive political structures of the twentieth century, Paz (as he had applied his new views in a different way to Sor Juana) came to reevaluate the liberal tradition he had disdained in his classic study. To the nineteenth-century Liberals and their heir, the assassinated president and initial leader of the Revolution, Francisco I. Madero, Mexico owed the possibility of a democratic and constitutional government just barely on the horizon in 1984. Before the cameras of Televisa, Paz would declare: “the salvation of Mexico rests on the possibility of realizing the revolution of Juárez and Madero.”

But liberal democracy could not satisfy Octavio Paz. It was too insipid and formal a concept. It had no “transcendental” content. And so Paz would try to combine his new commitment with his historical-poetical vision of the Mexican Revolution as a return to origins and a revelation of the hidden face of his people. He wanted to maintain the validity of the Revolution as he had imbibed it from his father:

 

I think that in Mexico, the Zapatista inheritance is still alive, above all morally. In three aspects . . . First of all, it was an anti-authoritarian revolution: Zapata had a true aversion to the Presidential Chair . . . Secondly, it was an anti-centralist revolt . . . Zapatismo affirms the original nature not only of states and regions but even of each locality . . . And finally, Zapatismo is a traditionalist revolt. It does not affirm modernity, it does not affirm the future. It affirms that there are profound, ancient, permanent values.

 

One had to vindicate the liberals Juárez and Madero, but also to “correct Liberalism with Zapatismo.” This was his formula for national redemption.

“We Mexicans must reconcile ourselves with our past,” Paz had insisted. In
The Labyrinth of Solitude
, he had reconciled himself with his father, seeing in the Zapatista revolution “a communion of Mexico with itself,” with its Indian and Spanish roots. But in the 1980s another character began to sit down at his table—his grandfather Ireneo Paz. Confronted with the corrupt, inefficient, paternalistic, and authoritarian Mexican state, it seemed right to recover liberal and democratic values. By embracing them, Paz began to close the cycle of his life. Now it was possible for the three Pazes—Ireneo the grandfather, Octavio the father, and Octavio the son—to sit together, equals, at the same table. The tablecloth smelled of gunpowder, but also of the prospect of political freedom.

In 1985, Paz published an article in
Vuelta
, titled “PRI. Hora cumplida” (The PRI. The Time Has Come). It was his final appeal to the system, asking that the party allow free and competitive elections. Paz did not foresee the PRI losing power (and even less did he wish for it to do so). But he did conceive of a gradual transition in which the ruling party would yield more space to the opposition both in Congress and the individual states.

At that time the PAN (
Partido Acción Nacional
) was gaining strength in the northern states of the country. Since its foundation in 1939, it had become (though at first as a very small party) the opposition force on the center right. Paz had not conceded even a minimal instinct for democracy to the PAN. He considered them a retrograde, Catholic, nationalist party, heirs to the conservative, antiliberal forces of the nineteenth century, and especially to the nineteenth-century ideologue Lucas Alamán. Certainly, in the area of social morality, the PAN had always maintained a conservative attitude, close to the upper hierarchy of the Church. And it was true that many of its members had been pro-Franco in the 1930s and, even after the formation of the party, some of its leaders had shown sympathy for the Axis in World War II. But the political behavior of the PAN in its legislative proposals and its internal workings had been democratic and its economic ideology was liberal rather than following the statist and protectionist principles of Alamán. Paz would always keep his distance from the PAN and would frequently criticize the party, but when an especially egregious voting fraud deprived the PAN of its victory in the Chihuahua governmental elections, Paz agreed to join a group of Mexico's most prominent intellectuals (including some of his longtime critics) in signing a petition asking that the rigged election be annulled. This event was an important catalyst for Mexico's democratic transition. Now not only the PAN but the parties of the left would commit themselves to democracy rather than revolution.