Pete Hamill - Piecework

“Don Octavio,” he called, using the aristocratic don to address Paz.

“Please,” Paz said in Spanish, “don’t call me ’don.’

“The man looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I -”

“And don’t apologize,” Paz said.

Then generosity took over. Paz fell into an animated discussion with the young man, who said that he, too, was a poet. They discussed poetry with the seriousness of theologians, mentioning such vanished deities as Ruben Dario and Wallace Stevens. Abruptly, Paz shook the young man’s hand in a gesture that was really an act of polite dismissal. The young man passed into the bookstore while Paz glanced at his watch.

And then an astonishingly beautiful young woman came down the crowded avenue. She had clove-colored mestizo skin, high cheekbones, sleek black hair pulled tight against her skull and tied in a bun. Every man, and some women, turned to look at her.

So did Paz. He froze. His jaw went slack. He gazed at her as she approached, and his eyes followed her as she went by. And then, the moment of erotic transport over, the aesthetic impulse satisfied, he exhaled, shook his head sadly, and hurried across the street.

I thought: Yes, he is one of us.

Standing along the wall in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium all these years later, I remember that small encounter with its perfect mixture of the cerebral and the sensual, thinking: This is the essence of Paz’s writing. That sinuous style (plus the sudden fame of the prize) surely brought most of the crowd to this place, a long way from the Avenida Juárez. All seven hundred seats are filled, with additional spectators sitting on chairs in the aisles and flanking the lectern. This is exhilarating; there are never enough places on earth where poets have sellouts. But to those who know the great poet and his work, there is the usual uncertainty about which Octavio Paz will appear. Like Walt Whitman, or David Bowie, he contains multitudes.

Transcending all other identities is the modernist poet of the senses, shaped in his youth by Paris, admirer of the work of Mallarmé and Baudelaire, and later, in Paris and Mexico City, a close friend of the poet and chief theoretician of Surrealism, André Breton. After Paz the poet, there is Paz the philosophical essayist, whose 1950 classic, The Labyrinth of Solitude, explained the Mexican character and identity both to the world and to other Mexicans.

But there are even other versions of Octavio Paz. There is the practical public servant who spent decades in his country’s foreign service, living in Tokyo, New York, San Francisco, Paris, and New Delhi; it is hard to imagine such assignments being granted to Robert Lowell or even Robert Penn Warren. There is the public philosopher, the courageous man who has worked so long and hard to create a language for political discourse that would break the century’s ideological ice jams. I was in Mexico once in the 1980s when that Paz was hanged in effigy by a few self-righteous relics of Stalinist romanticism. They objected to paragraphs such as this:

Ideological militance of whatever kind inherently disdains liberty and free will. Its vision of the otherness of each human being, of his unlike likeness to us, is simplistic. When the other is a unique being, irreducible to any category, the possibilities of winning or netting him vanish; the most we can do is enlighten him, awaken him; he, then, not we, will decide. But the other of the militant is a cipher, an abstraction, always reducible to an us or a they. Thus the proselytizer’s concept of his fellow man is totally lacking in imagination. Imagination is the faculty of discovering the uniqueness of our fellow man.

Anybody who has ever heard a Klansman discuss blacks, a Black Panther speak about whites, an ACT UP militant describe Catholics, or Jesse Helms bellow about homosexuals knows the truth of what Paz is saying. He added: “The fusion of belief and system produces the militant, a warrior fighting for an idea. In the militant, two figures are conjoined: the cleric and the soldier.”

Paz has long been a witness to the calamitous results of that fatal union. As a young man in Europe in the 1930s, he rallied to the cause of the Spanish republic, traveled to Madrid, and saw the cynical maneuvers of the Stalinists. Their ruthless assaults on anarchists and socialists cooled his youthful embrace of the Marxist poem, but not his intellectual respect for Marx himself. “Each generation has two or three great conversational partners,” Paz says. “For my generation, Marx is one of them.”

The mature Paz evolved his own clear-eyed view of the world, rooted in a healthy skepticism about all Utopias, all the iron geometries of the state, all social systems imposed by force. “Every system,” he says, “by virtue as much of its abstract nature as of its pretension to totality, is the enemy of life.”

Finally Paz appears in this New York auditorium, clutching his speech. The crowd roars, standing and applauding, shouting “bravo.” He seems at once embarrassed and pleased; in Mexico, those who know him well say that he is not without his small vanities.

“On August 13, 1790 …” he begins. And we know that we shall hear the Paz who is a brooding student of his country’s history, myths, ironies, and contradictions. He speaks about the discovery, reinterment, and rediscovery of a colossal statue of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, and how her passage from temple to museum reveals the changes in our societies over the past four hundred years. The lecture is brilliant, learned, dense, and to some, incomprehensible. “I don’t know what I expected,” one woman says to me later, “but it wasn’t that.”

But still, this is Octavio Paz. A winner of the Nobel Prize. When he is finished, the audience applauds, long and warmly, as much for the prize as for the talk.

Paz remains behind to talk to a few reporters. He’s asked what the end of the Cold War will do to poetry and to Octavio Paz.

“There are two possibilities,” he says. “Countries will organize themselves in regional terms. The model could be the European community of states… Or we could go back to the old nationalist fanaticism — that would be a very devious and bloody solution. But poetry has to face this authority, whatever it is… Poetry is not identical with history, but poets who are leading the struggle know that there are no special answers. The answers are always instantaneous, spontaneous. That is one of the most important things about this great debacle, this great collapse of the communist system. It was based on a great theoretical scheme, and now we know it doesn’t work— ”

He seems uneasy with a question about the role of writers and artists in Latin American politics. “Writers and artists should take part in the public life of their countries, as citizens. That’s all. But I don’t think poets or artists have special duties, or a special role. Of course, many of our greatest poets have been very interested in politics, but the best part of their work is not about politics.”

He says the exhibition of Mexican art then showing at the Metropolitan will help Americans understand Mexicans better. He is equally insistent that Mexicans also make a greater effort to understand their neighbor to the north. “We are going to be neighbors until this planet ceases to exist. Perhaps it’s time to understand each other. The Americans must understand that Mexico is not a picturesque, half-savage country, but a country with a vast past, a long history, a great identity. And Mexicans must stop worrying about losing their identity to the Americans. We Mexicans are not in danger of losing our identity; we have, sometimes, too much identity.”