Carlos Fuentes - This I Believe - An A to Z of a Life

The nostalgic Left that looks back on what no longer exists cannot be the constructive movement that it needs to be. But the Left in power must always admit the existence of the other Left, the one that is not in power, the one that resists power, until (and even when) the Left occupies the seat of power. This is the Left’s great challenge in the twenty-first century: to learn to oppose itself so that it will never again fall into the dogma, chicanery, and tyranny that soiled it so badly during the twentieth century.

The next morning we arrived at the broad causeway. . [which led] to Mexico, and we stood there, marveled at what we saw, and we said it was like those things of enchantment described in the book of Amadís. . some of our soldiers even asked if what they saw was not a dream. .

BERNAL DÍAZ DEL CASTILLO,

THE TRUE STORY OF THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO

The conquistador’s dream — his awe — rapidly turned into the nightmare of the indigenous world. Of that enchanting thing that was once Tenochtitlán, not a single stone remained in the end. The dreamer became the destroyer. Despite all that, however, let us not forget that the conquistador was also a man of desire: a complex desire made of fame and gold, space and energy, imagination and faith.

There is no such thing as innocent desire because desire implies not only possessing the object of our desire but transforming it as well. Discovery leads to conquest: we love the world so that we can change it. Bernal Díaz’s melancholy is that of a pilgrim who finds himself facing a paradise he must immediately destroy. Awe will give way to pain and the only way Bernal Díaz can save both is through memory. He is the first Mexican writer, the one who initiated the Spanish-language narrative tradition of the New World.

An immense country five times the size of France, Mexico loves itself, paradoxically, through all that is small. Not because we Mexicans like to dress fleas but because we compensate for the vastness of our land and landscapes with delicate decorum, meticulous, tender attention to the tasks of daily life, from a cuisine whose preparation often requires hours and even days (“slow food”) to the protracted lunch of three, four, six hours so that we may infuse the acts of community life with words, memories, fraternity, and human joy and warmth. A country of contrasts, despite the cliché, it is a community of space, a gathering place. The saddest songs and the happiest songs. The most humble of men and the most arrogant of men. The most natural, perfect courtesy alongside the most offensive vulgarity. Extremes that are painfully invisible and patently present.

“Who goes there?”

“Nobody, sir.”

“Who goes there?”

“Just your father, you motherfucker.”

“At your service.”

“Go to hell.”

“My house is your house.”

“One more step and you’re a dead man.”

“I’m nobody.”

“You don’t know who you’re talking to, you wretch.”

“I’m the master of my own hunger.”

“I earned my money, and I don’t have to share it with anybody.”

“Whatever you wish, sir.”

“Watch it: around here, what I say goes.”

“What can I do? I’m the one they left behind.”

“Jalisco never loses, and when it does, it steals.”

“Yesterday I may have been marvelous, but today I am not even a shadow.”

“You do whatever I fucking say.”

“Woman, woman divine, your poison is so sublime.”

“You are to blame for all my anguish, all my sorrow. .”

“This is a motherfucking mess.”

“My heart belongs to Daddy.”

“What lovely eyes you have beneath those two lovely eyebrows. .”

“What are you looking at, fucking asshole?”

The Mexican use of language — rich, mutable, serpentine— conceals as much as it reveals. And though I may have selected from the extremes of spoken expression, from genuine humility to insufferable pride, I cannot omit that middle ground of courtesy, intelligence, and the ability to both speak and listen, which are the temperate zone between the convivial tropics and the silent mountainside. The average Mexican speaks in relatively measured tones, with a tendency, yes, toward lowering the voice. The verbal energy of the Spaniards seems downright scandalous to us.

“Why do you speak so loudly?” asks a Mexican intellectual, sitting in a café one day, of the Spanish poet León Felipe, who happens to have the bearing of a towering, thunderous Jupiter.

“ Coño, ” the poet replies, in his booming voice, “because we were the first to shout ‘Land!’ ”

(I should mention, incidentally, that there is nothing louder than a group of gringos who, when convened in public, somehow feel the need to show off what a marvelous time they are having, with eruptions of offensively loud cackles. It’s their money, they can spend it however they want to.)

Mexicans don’t shout. We were shouted at—“Land!” to be precise. Precisely because of this we suffer, not from the complex of a people conquered, but from the complex of a people bewildered by the “modernity” they must confront. We always arrive late at the banquet of civilization, said Alfonso Reyes. And to a certain degree, he is right. Fernando Benítez said that Mexicans haven’t managed to invent a single useful object for the modern world. We are, however, great improvisers: we reassemble things that are broken, connect cables, pirate lights, resuscitate roosters in the cockpit, and ably cook what nature granted us: we are the chefs de cuisine of poverty. But the minute you give us a chance— in an oil well, in a border-town assembly plant, at a modern factory in the center of the republic, at a dynamic corporation in the north, on a movie set — we prove ourselves to be the workers who learn the fastest and who take the greatest advantage of technical progress.

In our better moments, we understand that the more authentic our experience, the deeper we delve into the roots of our origins and the more we reach out toward another excellent formula expressed by Alfonso Reyes: the notion of being generously universal so as to be profitably national. We have by no means learned this lesson perfectly. In Mexico there are far too many sospechosistas, or suspicionists, as Daniel Cosío Villegas called them. Those who see Mexico as the eternal victim of a vast foreign conspiracy to exploit us, belittle us, humiliate us. There is plenty of evidence to prove that this is true, or at least has been true in the past. According to my childhood history book, given to me by a U.S. elementary school (and I quote directly from the text), “Mexico’s backwardness is due to the insurmountable indolence of an inferior race. . ”

But then we are succumbing to mental colonization if we are always so concerned with what foreigners think of us. And the same is true of the attitude that rejects all forms of openness and importation as a mortal danger to the national essence. After all, what does this purported national “essence” consist of if not a multiplicity of encounters between the indigenous, the European, the African? To define the national identity categorically is to transform it into a mausoleum. Modernity is inevitable but it can also mean freedom if we perceive it as opportunity. What we cannot do is condemn all that is new or all that comes from the outside as sickness, misfortune, or shipwreck. Mexico has so much modernity. For the indigenous, Tzotzil, Chamula, or Tarahumara, their culture is their modernity. They deserve respect and yes, even protection. Not adulation that perpetuates the misery, ignorance, and injustice with which they live. In the twenty-first century, will Mexico be a country that is open, that fears neither its indigenous legacy nor its mestizo modernity? Demographically, soon neither a purely indigenous nor a purely white Mexico will exist, and so we are far better off if we can understand the value of both.