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

What the mother — in a peerless performance by the extraordinary Barbara Jefford — does not know is that Coriolanus will never be a great politician because he does not understand the art of adaptation, the art of the chameleon. He is a man of principle, without vanity or airs of importance, vices that a patrician scorns because he has no need to appear a certain way or act in a certain manner other than his own. He is. But Coriolanus’s integrity endangers the vanity and venality of those around him. He is doomed. He makes everyone uncomfortable. He will remain alone. And he knows this. He will be defeated if he acts, and he will be defeated if he doesn’t.

The genius of Shakespeare — and of Fiennes as well — lies in his ability to give this fatal man (a man who is conscious of his own dismal fate) an extraordinary sliver of humanity. A surprising sliver for such a verbal, discursive, occasionally rhetorical author as Shakespeare. That sliver — or crevice, if you will — is silence. The character of the wife Virgilia calls Coriolanus to a love without words. During those quiet moments with his beloved, Coriolanus shows that he is also conscious of what he loses, and that is love, victim of the political web that transforms manna from heaven into bile.

A work of art with a commitment to the political act, with the themes of party and state, Coriolanus has given rise to all sorts of ideological confusion. The French Right, in 1933, applauded it and the Left prohibited it. The Nazis glorified it and the U.S. occupying army, in 1945, banned all performances of it in Germany for a period of eight years. Brecht turned it into a Communist epic about class struggle: the good plebeians versus the bad patricians.

Without these congested ideologies, Coriolanus, a superior work of the Shakespearean canon, is nothing more than the story of a man abandoned by everyone. Shakespeare lends a rather inconclusive air to the work, just as Beethoven, another genius, did with his own Coriolanus, by ending it in an indistinct musical penumbra.

There is, finally, another Shakespeare, and to see it one must turn to the film version of Titus Andronicus, brought to the screen by the famous set designer of The Lion King, Julie Taymor. Ms. Taymor does not beat around the bush; she gives Titus’s daughter, whose tongue and virtue have both been mutilated, branches in place of hands. In this early work, Shakespeare decided to defeat Christopher Marlowe at his game of horrors that are more bearable when seen from the distance offered by the theater, as opposed to the close proximity the camera affords. Men buried up to their necks in sand, almost starving to death. Men who allow their hands to be chopped off in order to save their children’s lives, only to see them in jars alongside the decapitated heads of young princes. Men strung up by their feet, their heads cut off so that the blood will spill out in thick torrents. The children of Tamora, the proto — Lady Macbeth (played by a raging Jessica Lange), served to their father as vengeful cakes cooked up by Titus Andronicus (the chameleonesque Anthony Hopkins).

The list is an endless one and it reminds us that there is truly nothing new under the sun. In the annals of horror, Titus Andronicus beats American Psycho, Crash, and Stephen King. This is what allowed Voltaire to write off the Bard of Avon as “the height of ferocity and horror. . a barbaric buffoon. . whose works deserve the audiences of county fairs of two hundred years ago.” Shakespeare’s assault on “good taste” and “restraint” are truly admirable and remind us of the ferocity with which Octavio Paz responded to the description of Mexican literature as “refined and subtle.” “Give it to them, let them bitch, the whores,” he said.

Shakespeare grabbed words by the ass and made them shriek and bitch, showing us that the range of verbal expression cannot be constrained by the constipated or famished genres of literature. The savage, lyrical, and tragic abundance of William Shakespeare continues to be the greatest evidence to support the conviction that ironclad rules have no place in literature. As well as the fact that critics can often make the funniest, and occasionally most deplorable, mistakes.

The first and the last, says the poet to Artemis in the marvelous poem by Gérard de Nerval. . “Et c’est toujours la seule — ou c’est le seul moment” . . If all the women I have loved could be encapsulated in one, the only woman that I have loved forever encapsulates all the others. They are the stars. Silvia is the galaxy itself. She has everything. Beauty. Erotic pleasure as well as the simple pleasure of being together, eating together, sleeping and waking up, walking, traveling together, sharing friends, discussing doubts, making plans, understanding flaws, accepting mistakes, and loving each other even for the things that we find irritating or unpleasant in our respective personalities and behaviors. The joy of having children. The pain of losing them. The communion of memory. The respect that comes with the passage of time. Different tastes. Our complementary vocations, intellects, emotions: we are different and we each give the other what the other no longer even lacks because all that is mine flows into her just as all that is hers flows into me. The labyrinth of genealogies, friendships, favorite cities, the splendid detail lavished on food, restaurants, our common love of film, theater, opera. All that unites us and even those things that might separate us, become a meeting point, question mark and, in the end, alliance. We are very different physically. She is delicate, petite, blond, with sensual eyes that change from blue to green to gray as the hours go by. Her mien is European, but her skin is olive-colored, with a lovely oriental glow. Her penchant for clothes is extreme, to my delight. I love her because I am the most punctual man in the world and she always arrives, punctually, late. This is part of her charm. To be waited for. The Europeans of the seventeenth century hoped that death would arrive from Spain, so that it would arrive late. No, death arrived early for us when we lost our son Carlos. We were always united, and then death arrived to bring us together even closer than before. She knows how to keep Carlos present at every hour while I, either less sensitive or more cowardly, have learned to summon my son, with a force that surprises me, only at the moment when I begin to write. That is when he appears at my side, in some way fulfilling his truncated destiny through my daily effort to write. That is how everything is perpetuated and then comes back to live inside the union of the couple. Apollinaire once said that some people die so that they may be loved. In our case, my son is alive because the love that drew us (Silvia, Carlos, and me) together continues to live on in our lives. But it is she, the woman, who reveals the specificity and inclusivity of love. It is she, Silvia, who crowns my life’s quest to pay attention— sexual, erotic, political, literary, fraternal. Pay attention, or you will not have the right to love me and be loved by me. When Tomás Eloy Martínez, our dear Argentinian friend, lost his beautiful wife, Susana Rotker, he wrote a vivid, searing requiem that ends by saying, “I would have given everything I am and everything I have to be in your place. I would have loved to watch her grow old. I would have wanted her to watch me die.”

A couple can never know which person will outlive the other, or if they will die together. The one who survives will always be a delegate of death rather than simply grieving. The love that delegates itself through death is Eros. After all the nights, days, years of flesh united, its absence can only be filled through the erotic imagination. “Eroticism is the approval of life, even in death,” Georges Bataille tells us, thinking of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Sexuality necessarily implies death because reproduction signifies eventual disappearance from earth. To understand this is to understand erotic life after the death of a lover. To understand this is to understand the sexual relationship in the present at its most intense degree and to surpass it, erotically speaking, each and every hour that the beloved does not return in the physical sense.