Carlos Fuentes: Myself with Others: Selected Essays

Two very important things happened. First, I lost my virginity. We lived in an apartment building on the leafy corner of Callao and Quintana, and after 10 a.m. nobody was there except myself, an old and deaf Polish doorkeeper, and a beautiful Czech woman, aged thirty, whose husband was a film producer. I went up to ask her for her Sintonía, which was the radio guide of the forties, because I wanted to know when Evita was doing Joan of Arc. She said that had passed, but the next program was Madame Du Barry. I wondered if Madame Du Barry’s life was as interesting as Joan of Arc’s. She said it was certainly less saintly, and, besides, it could be emulated. How? I said innocently. And thereby my beautiful apprenticeship. We made each other very happy. And also very sad: this was not the liberty of love, but rather its libertine variety: we loved in hiding. I was too young to be a real sadist. So it had to end.

The other important thing was that I started reading Argentine literature, from the gaucho poems to Sarmiento’s Memories of Provincial Life to Cané’s Juvenilia to Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra to … to … to — and this was as good as discovering that Joan of Arc was also sexy — to Borges. I have never wanted to meet Borges personally because he belongs to that summer in B.A. He belongs to my personal discovery of Latin American literature.

II

Latin American extremes: if Cuba is the Andalusia of the New World, the Mexican plateau is its Castile. Parched and brown, inhabited by suspicious cats burnt too many times by foreign invasions, Mexico is the sacred zone of a secret hope: the gods shall return.

Mexican space is closed, jealous, and self-contained. In contrast, Argentine space is open and dependent on the foreign: migrations, exports, imports, words. Mexican space was vertically sacralized thousands of years ago. Argentine space patiently awaits its horizontal profanation.

I arrived on the Mexican highland from the Argentine pampa when I was sixteen years old. As I said, it was better to study in a country where the Minister of Education was Jaime Torres Bodet than in a country where he was Hugo Wast. This was not the only contrast, or the most important one. A land isolated by its very nature — desert, mountain, chasm, sea, jungle, fire, ice, fugitive mists, and a sun that never blinks — Mexico is a multi-level temple that rises abruptly, blind to horizons, an arrow that wounds the sky but refuses the dangerous frontiers of the land, the canyons, the sierras without a human footprint, whereas the pampa is nothing if not an eternal frontier, the very portrait of the horizon, the sprawling flatland of a latent expansion awaiting, like a passive lover, the vast and rich overflow from that concentration of the transitory represented by the commercial metropolis of Buenos Aires, what Ezequiel Martínez Estrada called Goliath’s head on David’s body.

A well-read teenager, I had tasted the literary culture of Buenos Aires, then dominated by Sur magazine and Victoria Ocampo’s enlightened mixture of the cattle oligarchy of the Pampas and the cultural clerisy of Paris, a sort of Argentinian cosmopolitanism. It then became important to appreciate the verbal differences between the Mexican culture, which, long before Paul Valéry, knew itself to be mortal, and the Argentine culture, founded on the optimism of powerful migratory currents from Europe, innocent of sacred stones or aboriginal promises. Mexico, closed to immigration by the TTT — the Tremendous Texas Trauma that in 1836 cured us once and for all of the temptation to receive Caucasian colonists because they had airport names like Houston and Austin and Dallas — devoted its population to breeding like rabbits. Blessed by the Pope, Coatlicue, and Jorge Negrete, we are, all eighty million of us. Catholics in the Virgin Mary, misogynists in the stone goddesses, and machistas in the singing, pistol-packing charro.

The pampa goes on waiting: twenty-five million Argentinians today; scarcely five million more than in 1945, half of them in Buenos Aires.

Language in Mexico is ancient, old as the oldest dead. The eagles of the Indian empire fell, and it suffices to read the poems of the defeated to understand the vein of sadness that runs through Mexican literature, the feeling that words are identical to a farewell: “Where shall we go to now, O my friends?” asks the Aztec poet of the Fall of Tenochtitlán: “The smoke lifts; the fog extends. Cry, my friends. Cry, oh cry.” And the contemporary poet Xavier Villaurrutia, four centuries later, sings from the bed of the same lake, now dried up, from its dry stones:

In the midst of a silence deserted as a street before the crime

Without even breathing so that nothing may disturb my death

In this wall-less solitude

When the angels fled

In the grave of my bed I leave my bloodless statue.

A sad, underground language, forever being lost and recovered. I soon learned that Spanish as spoken in Mexico answered to six unwritten rules:

• Never use the familiar tu —thou — if you can use the formal you— usted.

• Never use the first-person possessive pronoun, but rather the second-person, as in “This is your home.”

• Always use the first-person singular to refer to your own troubles, as in “Me fue del carajo, mano.” But use the first-person plural when referring to your successes, as in “During our term, we distributed three million acres.”

• Never use one diminutive if you can use five in a row.

• Never use the imperative when you can use the subjunctive.

• And only then, when you have exhausted these ceremonies of communication, bring out your verbal knife and plunge it deep into the other’s heart: “Chinga a tu madre, cabrón.”

The language of Mexicans springs from abysmal extremes of power and impotence, domination and resentment. It is the mirror of an overabundance of history, a history that devours itself before extinguishing and then regenerating itself, phoenix-like, once again. Argentina, on the contrary, is a tabula rasa, and it demands a passionate verbalization. I do not know another country that so fervently — with the fervor of Buenos Aires, Borges would say — opposes the silence of its infinite space, its physical and mental pampa, demanding: Please, verbalize me! Martin Fierro, Carlos Gardel, Jorge Luis Borges: reality must be captured, desperately, in the verbal web of the gaucho poem, the sentimental tango, the metaphysical tale: the pampa of the gaucho becomes the garden of the tango becomes the forked paths of literature.

What is forked? What is said.

What is said? What is forked.

Everything: Space. Time. Language. History. Our history. The history of Spanish America.

I read Ficciones as I flew north on a pontoon plane, courtesy of Pan American Airways. It was wartime, we had to have priority; all cameras were banned, and glazed plastic screens were put on our windows several minutes before we landed. Since I was not an Axis spy, I read Borges as we splashed into Santos, saying that the best proof that the Koran is an Arab book is that not a single camel is mentioned in its pages. I started thinking that the best proof that Borges is an Argentinian is in everything he has to evoke because it isn’t there, as we glided into an invisible Rio de Janeiro. And as we flew out of Bahia, I thought that Borges invents a world because he needs it. I need, therefore I imagine.

By the time we landed in Trinidad, “Funes the Memorious” and “Pierre Ménard, Author of Don Quixote” had introduced me, without my being aware, to the genealogy of the serene madmen, the children of Erasmus. I did not know then that this was the most illustrious family of modern fiction, since it went, backwards, from Pierre Ménard to Don Quixote himself. During two short lulls in Santo Domingo (then, horrifyingly, called Ciudad Trujillo) and Port-au-Prince, I had been prepared by Borges to encounter my wonderful friends Toby Shandy, who reconstructs in his miniature cabbage patch the battlefields of Flanders he was not able to experience historically; Jane Austen’s Catherine Moreland and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, who like Don Quixote believe in what they read; Dickens’s Mr. Micawber, who takes his hopes to be realities; Dostoevsky’s Myshkin, an idiot because he gives the benefit of the doubt to the good possibility of mankind; Pérez Galdós’s Nazarín, who is mad because he believes that each human being can daily be Christ, and who is truly St. Paul’s madman: “Let him who seems wise among you become mad, so that he might truly become wise.”