PART I

An Intellectual Biography: The Journey to El Escorial and Terra Nostra

Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia.

—JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET

Peoples cannot be sundered from their histories; they are not in any way “they and their history.”

—AMÉRICO CASTRO

In the sixteenth century, the Spanish Crown spread its language, as well as its cultural and political practices, across the vast geographical stretch of the Americas identified today as Latin America. In the second half of the century, the Spanish King Philip II built El Escorial as a monument to God, to the Spanish Empire, to Spain, and, of course, to himself. Philip II was born in 1527. Almost exactly four centuries later, in 1928, the Mexican intellectual Carlos Fuentes was born in Panama City. He has dedicated a lifetime to the analysis and critique of the language, culture, and political practices inherited from Spain—as represented by El Escorial—as well as the other cultures that have been systematically excluded from Spanish tradition (Jewish and Arabic cultures), ignored by Spain (Anglo-American and other Northern European cultures), or dominated by Spain (the indigenous cultures of the Americas). A Mexican by nationality, Fuentes has been a consummate man of the Americas in search of an understanding of his cultural heritage, his history, and his identity as a citizen of the Americas.

Fuentes has explained his beginnings as follows:

I was born on November 11, 1928, under the sign I would have chosen, Scorpio, and on a date shared with Dostoevsky, Crommelynick, and Vonnegut. My mother was rushed from a steaming-hot movie house in those days before Colonel Buendía took his son to discover ice in the tropics. She was seeing King Vidor’s version of La Boheme with John Gilbert and Lillian Gish. Perhaps the pangs of my birth were provoked by this anomaly: a silent screen version of Puccini’s opera. Since then, the operatic and the cinematographic have had a tug-of-war with my words, as if expecting the Scorpio of fiction to rise from silent music and blind images. All this, let me add to clear up my biography, took place in the sweltering heat of Panama City, where my father was beginning his diplomatic career as an attaché to the Mexican legation.1

To be born in Panama City—the geographic center of the Americas—was, indeed, the most appropriate beginning for Fuentes. After that, he lived his childhood in Mexico City, Washington, D.C., Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, and Buenos Aires. He saw the remnants of the Spanish cultural heritage throughout Indo-Afro-Ibero-America well before ever laying eyes on El Escorial several decades later. Mexico left the most definite mark on Fuentes; he spent all his summer vacations as a young child there, and it was there that he was formed intellectually from adolescence through adulthood.

The Fuentes family lived in various cities because of the diplomatic career of Carlos’ father, Rafael Fuentes Boettiger. Consequently, the history and politics of the Americas became part of the young Carlos Fuentes’ daily life. He calls Rafael Fuentes Boettiger a jarocho, a colloquial term referring to his father’s origins in the state of Veracruz. He also had German family roots, and the discipline and work ethic of the Fuentes family have been associated with this part of their heritage. From the Veracruz lineage came the playful, jocular, and open personality that, according to Mexican tradition, often distinguishes the Mexicans of the Caribbean region from their more sober and introspective inland compatriots. Rafael Fuentes Boettiger dreamed of becoming a movie actor, but his father (a banker in Veracruz) would not allow that, so he pursued his diplomatic career. An atheist and a liberal at a time when most Mexicans tended to be Catholic and far more conservative, Rafael Fuentes Boettiger obviously was not a typical man of his times. He participated in the Mexican defense of the city of Veracruz in 1914 when U.S. Marines invaded it. The defense effort was a military failure and an experience that few Mexicans, including Fuentes, have ever forgotten.

The home atmosphere that Rafael established, according to his wife, Berta, was organized and disciplined. Rafael Fuentes Boettiger was known as a man of honesty and integrity who was staunchly loyal to his friends. His contemporaries viewed him as a fundamentally serious person who knew how to enjoy life. Well educated, he read a wide range of books, including North American best-sellers of the 1930s. (Consequently, Carlos Fuentes can discuss North American popular fiction of the 1930s in surprising detail.) His father’s passion for the movies was one of the reasons Carlos saw so many movies from his early childhood on.

Rafael Fuentes Boettiger was twenty-five years old when he married the eighteen-year-old Berta Macías Rivas, a very attractive and intelligent young woman from Mazatlán. Her daughter describes Berta as fanatically Mexican, from a family that Mexicans in the northern region associated with President Alvaro Obregón (1920–1924). Obregón’s northern Mexico was also famous during the 1920s for its exceptionally attractive women, and Berta fit that description. She was never as liberal-minded nor as spontaneous as Rafael Fuentes Boettiger, but she was a relatively open-minded and enlightened woman for her time and society. She lived elegantly during an epoch when life was indeed most privileged for the upper class in Mexico, and even in her eighties she still carried herself with grace and charm.2

When Fuentes was born in Panama City in 1928, Mexico was entering a period of exuberance and confidence. It was not an atmosphere exactly the same as the Roaring Twenties in the United States, for Mexico and its revolution were still being consolidated. A new nation was being forged out of the chaos of the revolution, and a new order was emerging. Mexico was laying the groundwork for its transformation into a modern state. After the revolution, Mexico was institutionalizing the recognition of the pre-Columbian roots of Mexican culture, thus supporting, for example, the muralist movement that actively promoted Indian and mestizo culture.

Fuentes’ initial visual images of Mexico, however, were of neither revolutionary generals nor Indian leaders. They were of two fascinating physical spaces: the Hotel Garci-Crespo in the town of Tehuacán and his grandparents’ home in the genteel Colonia Roma of Mexico City.3 The Hotel Garci-Crespo was Mexico’s 1930s version of present-day Cancún—the trendy vacation spot for Mexico’s upper class and foreigners. Built in 1934, the Garci-Crespo was one of the most beautiful tourist hotels in Mexico at the time and attracted vacationers from throughout the Americas, although mostly from Mexico, the United States, and Cuba. It was a palatial white stucco two-story edifice sitting on several acres of land that served as a playground for adults as well as children. While the nannies took the guests’ children to play in the pool or to go horseback riding, the adults relaxed in thermal spas, played golf, or retired to one of the gambling rooms.

“The Garci-Crespo filled my imagination,” Fuentes has commented on this example of a vanishing genre of hotels, now seen only in a few Caribbean locations and in old Bogart movies.⁴ Indeed, it must have been as much a feast for the imagination for the seven-year-old Carlos in 1935 as Disneyland is for children of the 1990s—and as El Escorial was for Fuentes in 1967. Upon his arrival at the hotel, he saw massive white stucco pillars at the entrance and ten-foot-tall main doors with lathed spindles. He passed by leaded stained-glass windows on each side and then faced a lobby fit for the arrival of eighteenth-century French royalty: a spectacular fifty-foot-high ceiling with finely lathed and stenciled wooden cross-beams and a chandelier suspended from its center; richly painted enamel-covered metal tiels four feet high along the walls, elegantly trimmed in copper. Royal motifs adorned the lobby and the entire hotel, with the royal family crests depicted throughout. Fuentes’ first visual images of Mexico were of wealth, European elegance, and comfort: this was the aristocratic Mexico first exported to the Americas from the Spain of El Escorial; the images of royalty had been inherited from Philip II generations before.

The elegant Guanajuato Street residence in the Colonia Roma of Mexico City was the source of Fuentes’ other first images of Mexico, images from the 1930s, when his family lived in splendor. The area, a few blocks south of the historic center of Mexico City, was a wealthy and graceful neighborhood populated mostly by Mexico’s upper middle class. Its turn-of-the-century stone residences and wide avenues projected an aura more of Paris than of a Third World city. In fact, many of its two- and three-story buildings were patterned after late-nineteenth-century French architectural models. To attend classes in the Escuela Franco-Español of the Colonia San Angel, Carlos took a trolley along the Avenida Alvaro Obregón, hardly different from a pleasant ride along the Boulevard Saint Michel in Paris at the time.

In 1989, Fuentes remembered well the herringbone design, located at a small child’s eye level, on the stonework of the house on Guanajuato Street. He also recalled the boiler heater in the center of the home. This house was a typical two-story stone building of the neighborhood. The family of four stayed at their Guanajuato Street home during Christmas vacations, and Carlos also returned there for the summers after school ended each spring at the Cook School, a public school in Washington, D.C. On his parents’ insistence, Carlos attended school during these summer vacations; year-round education between Washington and Mexico made him actively bilingual and bicultural from an early age. He remembers classes in Mexico where he heard his first lessons in Mexican history: as a young child he was already learning the names of the Aztec and Toltec gods, from Huitzilopochti to Tlaloc—the same gods that appeared decades later in Terra Nostra.

For the young Carlos, one of the most gratifying experiences of the summer vacations in the Colonia Roma was the movies. His parents or his grandmother strolled with him and his younger sister the five blocks down the Avenida Alvaro Obregón to a grand movie house called the Balmori, the first in Mexico to feature sound films. They saw Greta Garbo, Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart, and many other North American movie stars who were as idolized by Fuentes and his generation of Latin American writers as they were by moviegoers in the United States. The names of many of these Hollywood stars appeared later in novels such as Holy Place and A Change of Skin.

Beyond Mexico, two important moments from Fuentes’ early childhood remained in his memory as an adult. One was of Alfonso Reyes in 1931 in Brazil, when Carlos was still a three-year-old boy. Fuentes has often said that he learned literature from the lap of Alfonso Reyes, one of Mexico’s major twentieth-century writers, and this affirmation has its origins in the Brazilian experience. From those days, Carlos remembers Reyes as his most cherished mentor. The author of more than thirty volumes of essays and creative works, Reyes lived in the same world of books and discipline that eventually became Fuentes’ daily regimen.

The other memorable childhood experience took place at the Cook School in Washington, D.C., where Fuentes attended grade school from 1934 to 1940. In his early years there, Carlos had been a well-liked leader among his classmates; he was popular—or, in the parlance of the time, “regular” (Myself, 7). He organized little plays, assigning his friends their parts while he directed. On March 18, 1938, however, he suddenly lost his status as a regular: the president of Mexico, Lázaro Cárdenas, nationalized the oil owned by North American companies, and overnight, Mexicans in Washington were the object of scorn. “Instantly, suprisingly, I became a pariah in my school. Cold shoulders, aggressive stares, epithets, and sometimes blows” (Myself, 7).

Cárdenas, who was president from 1934 to 1940, headed one of the most progressive governments in Mexican history. In addition to nationalizing the oil, he aggressively promoted land reform, parceling out portions of agricultural land to the dispossessed. His was also Mexico’s most nationalistic government of the century. Fuentes has always been an admirer of Cárdenas, whom he has considered a genuine voice of the revolution that most governments of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) have reduced to empty rhetoric. In an essay published in the 1960s, Fuentes wrote of Cárdenas with great admiration, maintaining that this leader still served as a great model for Mexicans in the 1960s.

Despite the disappointing experiences of his final year at the Cook School, Fuentes’ early childhood was generally rich and fulfilling. His mother, Berta, insisted that the family’s home always be essentially Mexican, no matter where they lived: they spoke only Spanish at home (even during the stay in Washington), and they played popular Mexican music on the old 78 rpm records. According to her, even during the years in Washington, Fuentes “never felt unconnected to Mexico.” Indeed, in 1939 his father took him to see a film, Man of Conquest, at the old RKO-Keith in Washington, and when the protagonist proclaimed the secession of the Republic of Texas from Mexico, the eleven-year-old Carlos jumped up on the theater seat and proclaimed, “Viva México! Death to the gringos!” (Myself, 9). It was a declaration of citizenship perhaps even more convincing than his diplomatic passport.

The young Carlos could hardly have enjoyed a better family life: He, his parents, and his sister represented an exceptionally close family unit that functioned in a surprisingly democratic fashion for 1930s Mexico. They always dined together, and the children had the right to express their opinions at the dinner table—certainly not a common practice in Mexican society at that time. Carlos was encouraged to develop his own independent mind. The parents even upheld a family tradition of calling a mesa redonda, or “round table,” meeting when important decisions were to be made. They often participated in social and cultural events together—concerts, opera, and film being their preferences. Consequently, at a young age Carlos became exceptionally knowlegeable about film and music from the United States and Mexico.

Early Adolescence: 1941–1944

Fuentes spent his early adolescence, ages twelve to fifteen, in the two most European countries of South America, Chile and Argentina. Unlike his life in Washington, he now lived the Spanish language fully, and his Southern Cone experience in these two countries marked his cultural and political formation for a lifetime. He was living in two countries where the populace was intensely politicized. It was an experience that provided Fuentes with his initiation into a lifetime involvement with progressive politics. During these years, he also encountered the cultural legacy of Spain outside Mexico for the first time: it was an initial glimpse of the culture and ideology propagated from El Escorial several centuries before. During his stay in the Southern Cone, the young Carlos began writing and published his first story in a school magazine.

When the Fuentes family arrived in Santiago in 1941, Chile was experiencing the democratic revolution of the Popular Front, which had been in power from 1938 to the end of 1941. Three decades later, Fuentes remembered one of the chief politicians and spokespersons for the Socialists, Oscar Schnake, as well as the leader Marmaduke Grove. He also recalled the political satire magazine that ridiculed Schnake most severely, Topaze. The electrified political atmosphere and Marxist ideas in the air offered a marked contrast to his recent experience in Washington. Indeed, Fuentes was living in one of the most politicized nations of the Americas.

While in Chile, Fuentes studied in two of Santiago’s better private schools: the Cambridge School and the Grange School. “I’m half Aztec,” the adolescent Carlos enjoyed telling his classmates at the Grange School—his latest imaginative method of articulating the Mexican identity he had first declared publicly in the movie theater in Washington, D.C. Children of diplomats and foreigners, and mostly white upper class, the boys at the school had no reason to doubt the proud young Mexican’s story. This was only one of numerous imaginative ventures in which Fuentes was engaged during the year at the Grange School, for he also wrote stories and even coauthored a novel with his best friend at the school, Roberto Torretti. Fuentes still remembers that one of his teachers in Chile, Alejandro Tarragó, told him, “You have to be a writer,” and that Fuentes took his advice to heart. Several of the boys at the Grange School wrote fiction, but the one story their teacher Julio Durán selected for publication in the magazine of another high school had been penned by Fuentes. In addition, Fuentes and Torretti, avid readers of Dumas, decided to write their own adventure novel; the result was a two-hundred-page manuscript, a historical novel, but projected into the future. (Years later, Fuentes-the-professional-writer frequently admonished his readers to “imagine the past and remember the future,” and he wrote a novel projecting into the future, Christopher Unborn.) Fuentes and Torretti divided their novel into two parts. The first part of the novel, “The Cycle and the Hammer,” took place from 1945 forward and dealt with a young French boy’s experience in a postwar France entirely dominated by the Soviet Union, for Fuentes and Torretti hypothesized that Europe after the war would be communist and in the hands of the Soviets. Torretti said that the story, however, “seemed very boring to us,” so they wrote a second part, which took place in approximately 1980 and in which the Soviet bloc was disintegrating. (This was the first of several remarkably accurate political prophecies that Fuentes has made.) The second part was more playful, perhaps more like Dumas, with adventure and royalty. Fuentes made drawings of the faces of the main characters.5

Fuentes’ life in 1943 was centered on the Grange School, a private secondary school (grades seven through twelve) founded in 1936 by John Jackson, a Chilean of British background who, despite being born in Chile, spoke Spanish with a heavy British accent and who was the school’s headmaster. Located just on the north of Santiago with a superb view of the cordillera of the Andes mountains, the Grange School of 1943 was outside the city of Santiago, on the grounds of the Prince of Wales Country Club. It was a school for Chile’s upper class, its foreign diplomats, and its foreign businessmen. The institution’s basic entrance requirements were a knowlege of English and the financial ability to pay tuition. Consequently, the Grange School tended to draw students from a social rather than intellectual elite. The curriculum at the school was originally taught half in English and half in Spanish, but by the time Fuentes enrolled in 1943, the nationalist government of the Popular Front required that all the classes be taught in Spanish. Students attended school for a full day Monday through Friday, and half a day on Saturday. A typical school day for Fuentes began with an inspection of all the students and a brief Anglican religious service (in English), followed by a morning of classes and lunch. After lunch, the students were free for an hour of recess on the school’s ample grounds. Carlos and Roberto Torretti were in the third year of secondary school (the equivalent of ninth grade in a high school in the United States) in 1943. The school stressed academics less than some of the other private secondary schools because of its promotion of sports—cricket, rugby, and soccer. Rather than emphasizing academics exclusively (as did the best French lycées in Chile), the Grange School’s program was intended to build “character” in the Anglo-American tradition. Its unofficial agenda was to make its students Europeans—Brits of good character.

“We were enormously pretentious,” Roberto Torretti has explained, describing the attitudes of the young Carlos and the group at the Grange School.6 Torretti himself was already reading Dostoevski at age thirteen, and Fuentes was no more modest in his literary undertakings. As already cosmopolitan and multilingual young men, they exuded confidence. What they lacked as athletes at the Grange School (neither Fuentes nor Torretti performed well in sports), they more than compensated for with their ambitious and sometimes pretentious intellectual activities. They were already imagining the possibility of being the formidable intellectuals that they were indeed to become: Torretti is an internationally recognized philosopher on the faculty of the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, and he has had books published in both Latin America and the United States.⁷

The political scenario that the Fuentes family participated in had been set in motion in 1938 when the Chileans elected Pedro Aguirre Cerda, leader of the Popular Front, as president. The most powerful in this alliance of leftist parties was the Socialist Party, led by Oscar Schnake and Marmaduke Grove. Aguirre Cerda actually represented the Radical Party in this fragile conglomeration of the Left. Nevertheless, with the support of the verbose Grove, who accompanied him during his campaign, Aguirre Cerda was elected in December 1938. The Popular Front became “a symbol of union in the minds of the masses, union against oppression.”⁸ Despite this seemingly mystical feeling of support among the masses, Aguirre Cerda was unable to carry out most of his progressive agenda, for he was under attack from the opposition parties as well as those within his own Popular Front. Oscar Schnake, now the minister of development, was under severe attack by the communists. By late 1941, when the Fuentes family arrived in Santiago, the Popular Front was in crisis and Aguirre Cerda was about to die.

Fuentes remembered the situation in Chile for many years, and the Chilean experience was a significant stage in the development of a political vision that would later question authoritarian politics and, more specifically, the ideology of El Escorial. Above all, Fuentes vividly remembered Oscar Schnake, the former secretary general of the Socialist Party and the minister of development who revolutionized the workers’ union in Chile. He and Marmaduke Grove headed the left wing of the Socialist Party, frequently intimidating Chile’s traditional upper class. Fuentes saw both of them lead the opposition against President-elect Juan Antonio Ríos, who represented a center/conservative alliance.

Fuentes was a precocious and acute critic of international politics. He and his friends invented and played a game of international political intrigue in which each of the players assumed the role of a country. Moreover, in 1944 and 1945, when he was sixteen and seventeen years old, Fuentes maintained a correspondence with Torretti that dealt mostly with national and international politics. From early adolescence, then, Fuentes was an informed and shrewd observer of international politics. He tended to be more interested in the international scenario—the grand narrative—than local situations. During his correspondence with Torretti, Fuentes also met censorship for the first time: his letters to Torretti, written during World War II, were frequently intercepted and opened in Panama by U.S. authorities. Testing the accuracy of the censors, Fuentes and Torretti purposely wrote political commentary, only to find these lines blotted out of their letters by the authorities.

Near the end of the year in Chile, Rafael Fuentes Boettiger called a family “round table” meeting and proposed the idea of moving to Buenos Aires. The family reached an agreement to relocate, and in October 1943, they crossed the Andes to Buenos Aires, to reside in an apartment on the corner of Callao and Quintana in the center of the Argentine capital. The military governed Argentina, and Juan Perón was an increasingly visible minister of labor. The Fuentes family was not at all pleased with the conservative curriculum offered in the public schools under the direction of the right-wing Gustavo Adolfo Martínez Zuviría (who wrote novels under the pen name of “Hugo Wast”). Consequently, Fuentes’ parents allowed him a vacation from school in Argentina, so he explored Buenos Aires for several months, an experience that included following tango orchestras and reading the new Argentine comic books—Billiken and Patarozú. Despite these pleasures, life in the Argentina of the 1940s was always strained: Nazism was fervent and quite tangible in the streets of Buenos Aires. According to Fuentes’ sister, Berta, the Argentine citizens’ reputation for being the most snobbish people of Latin America was well justified.9 Nevertheless, Fuentes himself has fond memories of his year in Buenos Aires, including the discovery of Borges and his first sexual experience—Fuentes had an affair with a beautiful thirty-year-old Czech woman.

Fuentes’ ongoing discovery of the cultural heritage of the Americas now involved Argentine literature, too. He had read Argentine letters from gaucho poems to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Memories of Provincial Life to Miguel Cané’s Juvenilia and Ricardo Güiraldes’ Don Segundo Sombra. Most important, he discovered the writer who was at the forefront of the Argentine avant-garde and who was promoting modern literature in Argentina in general: Jorge Luis Borges. The discovery of Borges was essential to the formation of Fuentes-the-modern-writer.

After a year in Argentina, Fuentes requested a family “round table” and asked to return to Mexico. The family agreed to split up temporarily so that Carlos could live in his homeland. His father remained in Buenos Aires in his diplomatic position, and his mother and sister returned with Carlos to Mexico City. The trip from Buenos Aires was a memorable weeklong adventure: They traveled on a Pan American Airways flight full of soldiers that, for security reasons, landed every afternoon and took six days to fly from Buenos Aires to Miami. Fuentes remembers well reading Borges’ Ficciones on that flight. This volume of now classic Borges narratives, so important to several generations of Latin American writers, appeared in print in the year of Fuentes’ return to Mexico City. With Ficciones, Latin American writers of Fuentes’ generation discovered a freedom to invent as never before. Borges undermined many of the assumptions of the realist-naturalist tradition.

From Miami, the three members of the Fuentes family flew directly to Mexico City, where they moved into the home of Carlos’ maternal grandmother at Calle Montes de Oca No. 37 in the Colonia Condesa, a comfortable two-story house located in one of the most charming neighborhoods in the Mexico City of the 1940s.

The Formative Years: 1944–1952

When the sixteen-year-old Carlos Fuentes arrived in Mexico in 1944, his country was experiencing what the international business community later called the “Mexican Miracle.” Under the presidency of Manuel Avila Camacho (1940–1946), the revolution of Cárdenas was attenuated, and Mexico underwent a period of industrialization and modernization. The nationalism of the 1930s was still extant, but it was affected by an increasingly international vision: muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Siqueiros were losing popularity to the new universal painting of Rufino Tamayo and Juan Soriano.10 The cosmopolitan and universal Alfonso Reyes, an unorthodox voice of diversity in the 1930s, became a major presence of the new establishment of the 1940s. His was the voice of the grand narrative—Mexican adaptations of Western canonical literature. Fuentes was in Mexico during all these formative years except 1950, when he was studying in Geneva. He finished his secondary education in Mexico, began studying law at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and wrote his first stories. During the 1940s, Reyes had a significant influence on Fuentes: Reyes believed firmly in the value of cultural traditions in all societies, and first Reyes and later Fuentes worked toward defining these cultural values for Indo-Afro-Ibero-American society.

In the 1940s, Mexico City was a small town in the process of being transformed into a city. As Fuentes’ sister, Berta, remembers, it still seemed “very provincial” to the family when they returned from cosmopolitan Buenos Aires.¹¹ These were golden years in the capital, a city in which the wealthy drove their sleek Packards, Lincolns, and Cadillacs. President Avila Camacho’s strategy was to gain the confidence of investors and use the second European war as an opportunity to industrialize. He loosened many of the nationalistic policies of the Cárdenas government, including the law against private religious education. Consequently, the children of the upper class could attend schools operated by the Marists, the Jesuits, and other religious groups.

Mexico was institutionalizing a culture that was nationalistic while attempting to be universal. Consequently, Mexican muralists were institutionalized during the 1930s and 1940s. The writers Samuel Ramos and José Vasconcelos attempted to define a Mexican identity in a universal context, and their works were amply read—indeed, they were best-sellers—during the 1940s. Fuentes inherited the problem of identity as a central issue for Latin American intellectuals of the 1940s and a matter of particular interest in a rapidly transforming Mexico.

During these years, the Fuentes family inhabited three residences in Mexico City, corresponding to different periods in Fuentes’ intellectual development. Upon their arrival, as mentioned, they lived with their grandparents in the Colonia Condesa. When Rafael Fuentes Boettiger returned from Argentina, they moved into a strikingly contemporary home in what the Mexicans call “California Style,” with smooth lines, ample open space and light, located at Calle Louisiana No. 10, in the Colonia Nápoles, where they lived from 1945 to 1948. Then they moved to the Colonia Roma, where they occupied a more traditional gray stone two-story home at Calle Tíber No. 10 until 1955. Carlos Fuentes’ friends from the university, such as Víctor Flores Olea, visited him on Tíber, where he hosted his very first cultural activities (frequently poetry readings) and wrote the stories appearing in the volume Los días enmascarados. Flores Olea remembers the home on Tíber as one where Fuentes organized tertulias to create dialogue among the future intellectuals of their generation. Fuentes’ friends also remember him during this period as the gracious host who generously offered drinks from an always well-stocked liquor cabinet.

From 1944 to 1946 Fuentes attended the Colegio México (not to be confused with the Colegio de México, an institution of higher education), a secondary school operated by Marists that received well-prepared students from the middle and upper-middle sectors of Mexican society. Fuentes’ sister described Carlos as “very sociable” during this period and “always very involved.” His inquietud was expressed in his voracious desire for knowledge: in high school he was constantly reading and writing, always enthusiastic about learning everything from European literature to the neighborhoods in Mexico City. He usually rode public transportation to school, rubbing shoulders with the people on the street and hearing the Spanish language as it was spoken by his compatriots of all social classes.

He often visited his old family friend and now mentor, the venerable Alfonso Reyes. Fuentes and future writer Sergio Pitol would meet at the home library of Reyes, listening to his opinions and advice on a wide range of subjects. Don Alfonso exercised a regular regimen, writing from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. daily. The rigid discipline of Reyes and Rafael Fuentes Boettinger explains much of Fuentes’ arduous work schedule and remarkable productivity. Reyes also left his intellectual mark on Fuentes, as the latter has explained: “He taught me that culture had a smile, that the intellectual tradition of the whole world was ours by birthright, and that Mexican literature was important because it was literature, not because it was Mexican” (Myself, 19).

During the years from 1947 to 1953 Fuentes became an intellectual. He read literature, continued writing, studied law, and made some of his lifelong literary friends. He attended a college preparatory school, the Colegio Francés, studied in Geneva in 1950, and from there made trips to Paris and other parts of Europe. Fuentes enjoyed an active social life, dividing his time between his friends and his family. Mexico’s upper class lived a genteel life of concerts, operas, and parties, to which the men wore tuxedos and the women the latest fashions from the United States and Europe. Social and moral mores were rigidly conservative and notably ceremonial. These were the years when Fuentes’ closest friends from the UNAM, such as Víctor Flores Olea, were making the rounds in México City, becoming acquainted with the setting later fictionalized in Where the Air Is Clear.

During his years as a high school and law student, Fuentes did not yet have any real presence on the Mexican cultural scene. The most influential cultural organ for the reading public, the Sunday cultural supplement of the newspaper Novedades (“México en la Cultura”), dedicated its weekly pieces to established writers, such as Alfonso Reyes and Mariano Azuela. The youngest Mexican to appear with any regularity was Octavio Paz, then in his thirties, a decade older than Fuentes. For the most part, however, Novedades dealt with the latest trends in foreign art, pre-Columbian art and culture, and the established men of letters. Young writers in Mexico were virtually ignored.

Fuentes’ intellectual life at the university and with friends, nevertheless, was stimulating and intense. These were important years of literary apprenticeship, and he dedicated much time to writing. Even though he was still unpublished and unknown as a writer, his family and friends were well aware of his creative activity and his aspirations to be a professional writer. For example, the Mexican diplomat and writer Mario Moya Palencia, who also studied at the Colegio México, has told how, as a high school student, he anonymously submitted a short story for a contest. When the prizes were announced and the names of the anonymous contestants revealed, Moya Palencia received nothing and Carlos Fuentes was named as the winner of the first, second, and third prizes.

Fuentes belongs to a generation of intellectuals that called itself the “Generation of Medio Siglo.” As young students in the early 1950s, they felt destined to play a major role in Mexico’s cultural and political future. They were the Mexicans who could have been equated in some ways with what was once called “the best and the brightest” in the United States, and they were well aware of their privileged status. Fuentes became acquainted with them in 1951 upon returning from Switzerland. The group consisted of Víctor Flores Olea (who became an astute political analyst, and later a diplomat as well as a political and cultural figure in Mexico), Sergio Pitol (who became one of Mexico’s major novelists), Porfirio Muñoz Ledo (subsequently a political leader in the PRI and then in the opposition to the PRI), Miguel de la Madrid (president of Mexico, 1982–1988), and others who have led successful professional and political careers in Mexico, such as Javier Wimer and Enrique González Pedrero. All these young men were progressive and cosmopolitan, politically sophisticated, and fluent in several languages. Many of them had completed their high school studies at the Colegio México. One of their former law professors from the UNAM, José Campillo Sainz, looking back forty years later, described the group as “exceptionally intelligent and motivated” and spoke of Fuentes as an “excellent student.”12 They were groomed to become Mexico’s leaders.

The generation of Medio Siglo was politically well educated, informed by readings from Machiavelli to Erasmus, from the Enlightenment of David Hume to Rousseau, and in Marxism from Marx to Lukacs. (Fuentes, in fact, has been citing Machiavelli, Erasmus, and the rest throughout his life.) They were admirers of the last Mexican president to practice revolutionary ideals, Cárdenas, and later were strongly affected by the Cuban Revolution. Reared and educated in a world polarized by the Iron Curtain, they never accepted the Manichaean dichotomy of only two political alternatives.13 In Fuentes’ case, it is important to keep in mind his formative political experiences: the New Deal in Washington, the Mexican Revolution as promoted by the progressive Cárdenas, and the Popular Front in Chile. The educational background of the generation of Medio Siglo, as well as the experience with these governments, explain much of Fuentes’ always-progressive political vision.

Fuentes was the catalyst for one project that brought his generation together when they were students—the publication of a magazine called Medio Siglo. The idea for Medio Siglo had come from their professor Mario de la Cueva, and it was soon in the hands of two of the most capable youths of the group, Carlos Fuentes and Porfirio Muñoz Ledo. Others who worked closely with them in 1952 and 1953 were Salvador Elizondo, Sergio Pitol, Víctor Flores Olea, and Javier Wimer. The magazine described itself as “the expression of the law students” and covered a broad range of cultural and political topics. The intellectual horizons and quality of Medio Siglo were remarkably high for a student magazine. For example, Salvador Elizondo and Víctor Flores Olea published an incisive article titled “The Idea of Man in the Contemporary Novel,” which included commentary on Hesse, Huxley, Faulkner, Kafka, Joyce, and others. Fuentes served as the president of the editorial board. The magazine had two groups: one headed by Fuentes and Flores Olea, and the other led by Muñoz Ledo and Wimer. The latter were more radical in their politics than Fuentes and Flores Olea were, according to Muñoz Ledo.¹⁴ Fuentes’ own contributions to Medio Siglo included both cultural and political topics. He published essays on José Clemente Orozco and on Mexico within the Latin American political scenario, and reviews of recent books of literary and political interest. With the publication of Medio Siglo, Fuentes and his friends were announcing their generation’s presence in Mexico.

Another unifying factor for Fuentes and the group was the intellectual and social life they shared. They were great admirers of several of their outstanding professors, particularly Manuel Pedroso, José Campillo Sainz, and Mario de la Cueva. Pedroso, a Spanish exile and former diplomat, was a brilliant liberal humanist—a twentieth-century Renaissance man who mentored the group. His students often approached him after class for informal discussions that turned out to be Pedroso’s monologues on a multiplicity of issues. Sergio Pitol recalls that once Fuentes arrived from Switzerland and joined the group, the level of the discourse in these conversations was immediately raised.15 Pedroso recommended many readings that Carlos and the group diligently undertook. In the early 1950s, the law school of the UNAM was still located in the heart of Mexico City, on Calle San Ildefonso, and the discussions with Professor Pedroso often drifted out of the classroom, down San Ildefonso, and into nearby cafés. With mentors such as Reyes and Pedroso, Fuentes was under the tutelage of the most prominent teachers in Mexico at the time. He adored Pedroso and often spoke of him later in essays and interviews. Like Reyes, Pedroso believed in the crucial role of culture and the intellectuals in the political process.

Fuentes and this group socialized regularly, and one of their most memorable rituals was the dinners they enjoyed together approximately once a month at the Restaurante Bavaria near the corner of Insurgentes Sur and Pennsylvania Street in the Colonia Nápoles of Mexico City. In the early 1950s, the Colonia Nápoles was one of the chic areas of the city, and the Restaurante Bavaria was a congenial place to drink beer, eat, and talk endlessly about politics, the university, literature, and the like.¹⁶ An L-shaped restaurant with a capacity for approximately two hundred people, the Bavaria was an informal meeting place where the group could pull tables together for ten or twelve in one of the corners and hold forth until the management finally put the chairs on the remaining empty tables and turned off the lights—which they frequently needed to do to get Fuentes and his friends to leave at closing time.¹⁷ Usually a dozen of them met at the Bavaria, including Professor Campillo Sainz, who maintains that what unified them was their spirit of young inquietos. When closing time came at the Bavaria, Campillo Sainz, who was thirty years old and married, returned home to his family, and Fuentes and his friends departed to explore the city. More than one member of the group has described Fuentes in his early twenties as “friendly,” “pleasant,” and quite entertaining with his exceptional ability to mimic.

“Carlos has been a lover of Mexico City,” Campillo Sainz has explained, and nightlife was indeed a significant part of Fuentes’ ongoing love affair with that city. The typical student with his class background met with friends at Sanborns Restaurante (Sanborns de los Azulejos) and might frequent the better restaurants in the Colonia Roma and Colonia Nápoles. In Mexico City, Fuentes accepted few limits, however, for he and his friends ventured everywhere, from the most chic nightclubs to the most down-and-out flophouses. “We would go to a whorehouse oddly called El Buen Tono, choose a poor Mexican girl who usually said her name was Gladys and she came from Guadalajara, and go to our respective rooms” (Myself, 21).

Mexico City in the early 1950s offered a vital and exciting urban center for these energetic and inquisitive young intellectuals in their twenties, and their experience provided Fuentes with much of the anecdotal material that appeared later in Where the Air Is Clear. “These were the years we lived Where the Air Is Clear,” his friend Flores Olea (his most frequent companion) explained years later when evoking the early 1950s.18 These were also the years when they discovered the writings of D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, André Gide, T. S. Eliot, and Thomas Mann—usually on the recommendation of Professor Pedroso. These readings, after Cervantes and Borges, were keys to the formation of Fuentes-the-modern-writer. By the time he was writing Where the Air Is Clear in the mid-1950s, Fuentes had assimilated many of the narrative strategies of the modernists that he had read as an adolescent.

During the period from 1946 to 1952, the other important facet of Fuentes’ social life was his family. The Fuentes family sometimes appeared in the social pages of the newspapers, with Rafael Fuentes Boettiger and Carlos Fuentes smartly dressed in black tuxedos. Fuentes loved the opera, and his sister, Berta, remembers that he was an accomplished mimic of the opera singers.¹⁹ In 1948, Fuentes appeared in a newspaper in his first tuxedo—a handsome, heavyset, long-haired twenty-year-old with black-rimmed glasses.²⁰ He was also shown in pictures with family and friends of the family in such places as the private home of his cousins the Romandía family in 1948 and at a party in the Chilean Embassy in 1949. In the spring of 1950, his picture was published in the newspaper for his farewell party as he boarded the plane for his trip to Switzerland.

On the flight to Switzerland, Fuentes stopped in Paris, where he met Octavio Paz—then a young poet and a budding author, with The Labyrinth of Solitude already published—for the first time. Fuentes recalls, “I remember Paz in the so-called existentialist nightclubs of the time in Paris, in discussion with the very animated and handsome Albert Camus, who alternated philosophy and the boogie-woogie in La Rose Rouge” (Myself, 22). He also remembers Paz in a gallery on the Place Vendome, reflecting on Max Ernst’s postwar painting Europe after the Rain. Paz treated Fuentes kindly, and they immediately became friends, attending the opening of Ernst’s exhibition together and dedicating a week to incessant conversation about books and art. Paz was clearly influential in Fuentes’ early intellectual formation, particularly in the promotion and defense of literary modernism in Mexico. Writing in the mid-1980s, Fuentes explained the importance of Paz for him: “In the generous friendship of Octavio Paz, I learned that there were no privileged centers of culture, race, or politics; that nothing should be left out of literature, because our time is a time of deadly reduction” (Myself, 22). This important lesson would later represent a foundation for Fuentes’ aesthetics and politics, culminating in the novel that questions privileged centers of culture, Terra Nostra.

Fuentes’ trip to Europe in 1950 was also his introduction to the Great Britain of Prime Minister Clement R. Attlee and the postwar devastation and deprivation of London. Fuentes was particularly impressed with the sense of solidarity among the British, despite the difficult postwar living conditions.21 When the twenty-two-year-old Fuentes arrived at the magnificent Regent Palace Hotel in London, it was a memorable multicultural experience for him, for he took as much note of the East Indians—the first time he had ever seen Indians wearing turbans—as of the splendid structure with its neoclassic motifs. He was located near the square of Piccadilly Circus, in the heart of London’s vibrant theater district. Access to the fine European theater of the time was one of the most memorable cultural experiences of his first trip to Great Britain.²² He was also excited about the discovery of Foyles’ bookstore (Foyle W. & G. Ltd.) on Charing Cross Road, a massive edifice of four floors well stocked with books.

Fuentes spent the year in Geneva studying at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales and living in a garret overlooking the beautiful square of the Bourg-du-Four, with its many coffeehouses and old bookstores. He frequently took a book to read on Jean-Jacques Rousseau Island, where Lake Geneva meets the Rhone River. The time spent reading Western canonical literature was accompanied by reflections on his own possibilities, as a Mexican, of writing literature and traveling the road of Don Quixote. Above all, it was an important year in the formation of Fuentes-the-modern-writer, for he read many of the modern classics, from Cervantes to Faulkner. Reflecting on that period and on the adventurous path offered by Cervantes, Fuentes explains: “In my way, this is the road I wanted to travel. I read Rousseau, or the adventures of the I; Joyce and Faulkner, or the adventures of the We; Cervantes, or the adventures of the You he calls the Idle, the Amiable Reader: you. And I read, in shower of fire and in the lightning of enthusiasm, Rimbaud” (Myself, 24).

The climax of Fuentes’ first European experience came in the summer of 1950 at a dinner with some Mexican friends in the Baur-au-Lac Hotel on Lake Zurich. He noticed three ladies sitting in the restaurant with a gentleman in his seventies, and suddenly realized that the solitary man was Thomas Mann. As he studied Mann, Fuentes came to the realization that “Thomas Mann had managed, out of his solitude, to find the affinity between the personal destiny of the author and that of his contemporaries in general” (Myself, 25–26). Seeing Mann that evening and reflecting upon him were important experiences for Fuentes: “I shall always thank him for silently teaching me that, in literature, you know only what you imagine” (Myself, 26). Fuentes’ belief in the role of imagination, indeed, became a doctrine of a lifetime, a lesson learned not only from Mann but also from Cervantes and Borges.

The Search for Identity: 1953–1957

Fuentes’ career as a professional writer blossomed from 1953 to 1957, and he became a well-known literary figure in Mexico. Before the publication of his first book, the story “Chac Mool” had appeared in the prestigious Revista de la Universidad de México, and by the end of the year, Los días enmascarados, his first volume of stories, was circulating in Mexico City. He also cofounded a prominent literary journal in Mexico, Revista Mexicana de Literatura, in 1955. Like many young Mexican intellectuals of the 1950s who were writing under the shadow of Paz’s powerful Labyrinth of Solitude, Fuentes was searching for a concept of Mexican identity. This was a symbolic beginning along the path to El Escorial and the eventual writing of Terra Nostra.

Fuentes’ active social life with his family in Mexico City ended in 1953, for on November 3 of that year his family left for Panama, where Rafael Fuentes Boettiger accepted his first position as ambassador, given to him under the government of President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines. Engaged in the completion of the stories for Los días enmascarados, Fuentes decided to remain in Mexico, where he lived in the family’s apartment on Rubén Darío Street, overlooking Chapultepec Park, and wrote Where the Air Is Clear.

During these years, Ruiz Cortines (president of Mexico from 1952 to 1958) continued many of the policies and programs of Manuel Avila Camacho (1940–1946) and Miguel Alemán (1946–1952). Ruiz Cortines developed a similar program of industrialization, coupled with a strategy of encouraging foreign investment, exports, and tourism. Mexico’s political leaders systematically used their power to move into related personal economic investments. Consequently, as one scholar explained, “the country has enjoyed rapid industrialization but at the cost of high levels of official corruption.”23 In the 1950s, the expanding economy was able to absorb the increased production of large-scale products. Mexico also continued its trend toward political and economic centralization, which had been initiated in the 1940s. The growth of a centralized government meant the expansion of the bureaucracy, which, in turn, attracted people to the mushrooming metropolis of Mexico City.

These were the years when Octavio Paz rose to prominence in Mexico and in the central intellectual debate focused on Mexican identity. Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude set the tone for many of these discussions. Some of his ideas actually had their origins in well-known concepts of Mexican character and Mexican identity that had been set forth by Samuel Ramos in the 1930s. Indeed, both Ramos and Paz enhanced Fuentes’ understanding, as evidenced particularly in Los días enmascarados and Where the Air Is Clear.

In December 1954 a small, innocuous note appeared at the bottom of the second page of the Sunday cultural supplement of Novedades announcing the publication of a volume of short stories by Carlos Fuentes, titled Los días enmascarados—his first book. Next to the note was a one-by-two-inch black-and-white reproduction of the new book’s cover. To the left of that was a similar commentary and picture announcing a book by Juan José Arreola, and to the right appeared announcements of books by the young Mexican writers Tomás Segovia and Elena Poniatowska. The very brief and anonymous commmentary on Fuentes described him as an “excellent writer.”24 Despite the laudatory tone of these few sentences, the comment was certainly an inauspicious beginning for a major writer. Nevertheless, it marked the real birth of his literary career, for when Los días enmascarados appeared in print, Fuentes committed himself to a lifetime of writing, even though in the 1950s no one in Mexico made a living from publishing fiction.

Fuentes had made an agreement with his father that he would study law if he could dedicate himself to writing afterward.²⁵ In the interim, between finishing law school and launching his career as a professional writer, he held various positions. During 1954 he worked as assistant press secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but his primary intellectual activity in the mid-1950s was writing Where the Air Is Clear from his home on Rubén Darío Street.

Fuentes and Emmanuel Carballo cofounded the journal Revista Mexicana de Literatura, which, according to one knowledgeable critic, “promoted Mexican literature while maintaining an awareness of writing in other countries.”26 With this journal, Fuentes clearly put into practice one of the lessons he had learned from Alfonso Reyes—that Mexican literature was important because it was literature, not because it was Mexican. Adhering to this universal message inherited from Reyes, the Revista Mexicana de Literatura served the cosmopolitan function of magazines that appeared throughout Latin America in the 1950s: in Colombia, the equivalent publication was Mito, which was also founded in 1955, in Cuba it was Orígenes, and in Venezuela it was Sardio. Like them, the Revista Mexicana de Literatura brought modern European and North American cultural practices to Latin America, from the T. S. Eliot generation to Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who were in vogue in the 1950s. The journal was a combination of modernist aesthetics and social commitment; Sartre was extraordinarily influential in Mexico and the remainder of the Americas in the 1950s, and his idea of the engagé writer became virtually sacred. Some other writers whose names graced the pages of the Revista Mexicana de Literatura included Leonora Carrington, Mariano Picón Salas, and Juan Rulfo. Following the cosmopolitan line that Paz, Octavio G. Barreda, Alí Chumacero, Xavier Villaurrutia, Gilberto Owen, and others had established with their magazine El hijo pródigo, the Revista Mexicana de Literatura represented an attempt to universalize the Mexican literary vision. In this context, “universalization” also meant modernization; the readings of Fuentes and his generation of the Western modernists had its impact as Fuentes popularized modern literature in Mexico. Evidence of his work on Where the Air Is Clear during his editorship of the Revista Mexicana de Literatura was the publication of “Fragment of a Novel” in 1956.²⁷

Los días enmascarados was very well received in Mexico, although it was published by a small press, Los Presentes, founded by Juan José Arreola. The publications of this press were not accessible enough to the general reading public in Mexico in 1954 and 1955 to sell in great volume. The best-seller of the year 1955, in fact, was a scandalous novel of political muckraking, Luis Spota’s Casi el paraíso. Spota earned money; Fuentes earned the respect of Mexico’s intellectuals. Sergio Pitol, who began writing at the same time, remembers Los días enmascarados as a seminal book for Mexican literature at the time it appeared, for its use of fantasy and innovative narrative technique was a relative anomaly compared to the fiction in vogue. Fuentes’ underrepresented kind of writing was known and read by a small group of Mexican intellectuals who were also reading Borges and Arreola.²⁸

Indeed, Los días enmascarados represented a substantial innovation in Mexican literature, although Arreola, Agustín Yáñez, and Julio Torri had already begun to explore some of the possibilities of the fantastic in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Mexican fiction in the 1950s was still predominantly rural and quite traditional, even though literary historians can point to selected cases of (relatively ignored) modernist novels ranging from 1920s avant-garde fiction—such as that of Jaime Torres Bodet—to Agustín Yáñez’s Al filo del agua, published in 1947. Nevertheless, Al filo del agua was not widely read in Mexico in the early 1950s.²⁹

Los días enmascarados consists of six stories, all of which contain some element of fantasy. Three of the stories are inventive Borgesian games of pure fantasy: “En defensa de la Trigolibia,” “Letanía de la orquídea,” and “El que inventó la pólvora.” “En defensa de la Trigolibia” is one of those games that functions as an autonomous verbal construct, a fictional world of “Nusitanios” who speak an invented language called Trigolibia. It is a game of language invention, full of neologisms. In “Letanía de la Orquídea,” a character sprouts an orchid from his body, while in “El que inventó la pólvora,” the material world melts away. The three other stories also have some fantastic elements, but they are set in Mexico and have fantasy interwoven with Mexican history and indigenous cultural traditions. “Chac Mool” is a fantasy constructed around a plot involving a Mexican pre-Columbian rain god. Fuentes returns to Mexican history and the story of the Empress Carlota in Mexico in “Tlactocatzine, del Jardín de Flandes,” a precursor of Terra Nostra. “Por la boca de los dioses,” like “Chac Mool,” uses a pre-Columbian deity, as well as fantasy, to develop a story dealing with power and control. Fuentes’ Los días enmascarados, along with Arreola’s Confabulario, brought to Mexican fiction the inventive possibilities that Borges had initially explored in his Ficciones: the spirit of modernity. In these stories, Borges pioneered such “classic” Borgesian concepts as the universe as a library, all books as one book, and the death of the author, concepts treated by numerous theorists and later fictionalized by Fuentes in Terra Nostra.

With the rise of Fuentes and the Revista Mexicana de Literatura, the group of writers and artists of the generation of Medio Siglo began establishing themselves in Mexico as a cultural force. The fiction writers of this generation were Sergio Pitol, Elena Poniatowska, Sergio Galindo, Juan García Ponce, Rosario Castellanos, Inés Arredondo, Josefina Vicens, Vicente Leñero, Juan Vicente Melo, José de la Colina, and Emilio Carballido. They have all become recognized modern writers in Mexico, and the fiction of Castellanos, Poniatowska, Pitol, and García Ponce is well respected throughout the Hispanic world and beyond. Equally recognized as poets of what Fuentes has called “mi generación” were José Emilio Pacheco, Alí Chumacero, Jaime Sabines, Jaime García Terrés, Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, and Montes de Oca. The painter José Luis Cuevas, about whom Fuentes has occasionally written, also was part of the generation. They were all thoroughly modern; they were the generation that first popularized and then even institutionalized modern literature in Mexico.

This rebellious group was ripe for a radical change in the Mexican cultural scene when a fictional revolution arrived in the form of Where the Air Is Clear. They were also searching for new ways of defining themselves. By the mid-1950s, their leaders had fully discovered their modernity: “For my generation in Mexico, the problem did not consist in discovering our modernity but in discovering our tradition,” Fuentes has explained (Myself, 23). After Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude, the major statement to be made about both Mexican tradition and identity was to be found in Where the Air Is Clear.

The Years of the Boom: 1958–1971

When Where the Air Is Clear appeared in April 1958, Fuentes ceased being just another of Mexico’s promising young intellectuals and became one of its major novelists. He also became an instant celebrity, even though the initial reception of the book was quite negative. From that time through the 1960s, as his books and articles appeared, his star continued to rise in Mexico as well as in the remainder of Indo-Afro-Ibero-America: having gained celebrity status in Mexico in the late 1950s, in the early 1960s he attained similar status in all of the Hispanic world; by the late 1960s his fame had spread to Europe and the United States. These were the years when he pursued some of the issues set forth in Where the Air Is Clear, The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), and A Change of Skin (1967). They were also the years of the Cuban Revolution and of the internationally recognized boom of the Latin American novel. During this period he married Mexican actress Rita Macedo, and in 1967 he was honored with one of the major literary prizes in the Hispanic world, the Biblioteca Breve Prize, which resulted in his first trip to Spain and El Escorial. The encounter with El Escorial, in turn, was followed by a twenty-year meditation on Hispanic culture.

During these years, Mexico was led by PRI presidents Adolfo López Mateos (1958–1964) and Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964–1970). The nation’s economic “miracle” continued with moderate inflation (less than 3 percent in the 1960s), but Mexico had one of the most unequal income distributions in Latin America. In 1969, the bottom half of the population received 15 percent of the national income and the top 20 percent received 64 percent.30 The shift from an agricultural economy to an industrial one continued. In 1940, agriculture occupied 67 percent of the population and represented 18 percent of the gross national product; in 1970, 50 percent of the population worked in agriculture, and it constituted 11 percent of the GNP. International prestige was signaled by the selling of Mexican bonds on the United States and European markets for the first time since the nineteenth century. Mexico City’s being awarded the opportunity to host the 1968 Olympics was also viewed as an internationally prestigious event.

The late 1950s and the 1960s in Mexico were characterized by labor strikes and peasant unrest. Genaro Vásquez and Lucio Cabañas led an armed revolt in the southwestern state of Guerrero; tens of thousands of army troops eliminated the rebels. The government also subdued an urban guerrilla movement. President Díaz Ordaz fired the reform-minded president of the PRI, Carlos Madrazo, soon after he attempted to democratize the selection of PRI candidates at the local level in 1965.

Fuentes and Rita Macedo met in 1958 on a double date with Octavio Paz and Maka Tchernicha to see Camus’ play Requiem for a Nun, based on Faulkner. When they married later that year, the newlyweds moved into a penthouse in the chic Zona Rosa area of downtown Mexico City, on the fifth floor of a shiny glass and metal building at Liverpool No. 170, near the corner of Liverpool and Florencia Streets.

During the first week of April 1958, the imminent appearance of Where the Air Is Clear was publicized in articles in Novedades, announcing that it would be available in bookstores throughout the nation on Monday, April 7. The novel instantly became the focus of national polemics; at age thirty, Fuentes was at the center of the Mexican cultural scene. One of the Sunday issues of Novedades was particularly notable, for in the left-hand column of the page was a picture of Alfonso Reyes with an accompanying article about him; a picture of identical size of Fuentes appeared, also with an article, in the right-hand column. Obviously, Novedades was portraying visually the past and the future of Mexican letters.

Where the Air Is Clear is a lengthy novel dealing with many subjects: it was Fuentes’ novelistic response to Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude and the question of identity in Mexico; it was his novel about Mexico City; it was his technical tour de force, using the narrative strategies of Manhattan Transfer and Berlin Alexanderplatz. Fuentes’ first novel portrays a panorama of Mexico’s social classes and tells the story of several Mexican families in their class settings. Above all, it was Fuentes’ first critique of the nationally institutionalized modernization and industrialization project that had been developing in Mexico since the 1940s. In addition, Where the Air Is Clear began to introduce some of the themes of Terra Nostra.

The years from 1958 to 1961, when Carlos and Rita lived on Liverpool Street, were intellectually active ones. He received the full impact of Where the Air Is Clear: the praise, the negative reviews, the defenses written of the book, the sales of the novel, and the like. They were also the most exhilarating and polemical years of the Cuban Revolution. Next, Fuentes wrote The Good Conscience and then began The Death of Artemio Cruz. He also frequented the French Institute’s Cine Club to see the latest European and American films. With respect to politics, Fuentes was one of the most prominent Indo-Afro-Ibero-American intellectuals to support the Cuban Revolution immediately. In fact, he was among the very first foreign intellectuals to arrive in Cuba when the revolution triumphed: on January 2, 1959, Fuentes, Fernando Benítez, and Manuel Becerra Acosta were on a Mexicana Airlines flight for Havana at the same time that Fidel Castro rode triumphantly in a jeep from Santiago to the Cuban capital. Fuentes, upon arriving, found a “great jubilation” in Havana, as the populace celebrated the revolution. The three Mexicans experienced an intense week of the Cuban Revolution, watching the celebrations and festivities, meeting with Fidel Castro, and lending their support.

In the early stages of the Cuban Revolution, Fuentes was one of its most energetic defenders and proponents, his affirmative voice resonating from Mexico to Chile. The Chilean writer José Donoso has related how Fuentes strongly influenced the political awareness of his generation of writers, who had been relatively uninformed of Latin American politics beyond their respective home countries. When in 1962 Fuentes went to the Congreso de Intelectuales de la Universidad de Concepción in Chile, and spoke fervently in favor of the revolution, this political discourse and political commitment was, in fact, a revelation for Donoso.31 Before the Boom, according to Donoso, Latin American writers were isolated geographically, culturally, and politically. The Cuban Revolution served as a rallying point for many Latin American intellectuals, and Fuentes was the principal catalyst for their political awakening.

The late 1950s and early 1960s were the most politically radical period of Fuentes’ intellectual life. He, Flores Olea, and the others of the generation of Medio Siglo all had been trained with ideas ranging from Rousseau to Marx, and many of them were firmly aligned with the international Left from the 1950s. Fuentes published some of his most radical political essays during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and he dedicated his novel The Death of Artemio Cruz to the Marxist scholar C. Wright Mills.

Most of Fuentes’ political essays of this period appeared in the Mexican magazines El Espectador and La Política. In 1959, a group of young intellectuals sympathetic to the political Left had established El Espectador, urging the creation of “a new left that was undogmatic, cultured, informed.”32 The collaborators, in addition to Fuentes, were Víctor Flores Olea, Enrique González Pedrero, Jaime García Terrés, Francisco López Cámara, and Luis Villoro. El Espectador was short-lived, but some of the same group, along with several others, founded another political magazine, La Política. It appeared from 1961 to 1967, with collaborations from Fuentes, Alonso Aguilar, Fernando Benítez, Fernando Carmona, José de la Colina, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, Salvador Novo, Emilio Uranga, Víctor Rico Galán, Víctor Flores Olea, Alejandro Gómez Arias, Enrique González Pedrero, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Angel Bassols Batalla. They all supported the Cuban Revolution in its early years and were stridently critical of the Mexican political establishment. Fuentes has remained consistently on the Left throughout his life; his politics were those of a radical democrat in the 1980s and early 1990s.³³ Whether it be Nicaragua or any other nation, Fuentes insisted on the right to national sovereignty and the democratic process. In the 1980s and 1990s, then, Fuentes became critical of the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro because of the lack of human rights, freedom of speech, and democratic processes.³⁴

To understand fully this generation’s politics, it is useful to keep in mind, first, that their mentors, Manuel Pedroso and Mario de la Cueva, were progressive social democrats. In the case of Fuentes, in particular, an important factor was his father, Rafael Fuentes Boettiger—an atheist, a political progressive, and an enthusiastic supporter of Lázaro Cárdenas. The other key to understanding Fuentes’ political vision is that during his formative years he lived with three very progressive governments: the Mexico of Lázaro Cárdenas, the United States of the New Deal, and Chile in the wake of the Popular Front.

Fuentes’ second novel, The Good Conscience (1959), an explicitly political work, is deeply historical, with a strong sense of class history. It is a traditional family story, written in the realist mode, that relates how the nineteenth-century oligarchy in Guanajuato exercised its economic and political power. The Ceballos family allies itself with local governors and ministers through several generations. The protagonist, Jaime Ceballos, suffers the repressive atmosphere and hypocrisy of Guanajuato. A sensitive young man, he grows in social conscience, religious faith, and sensuality as he experiences the contradictions of traditional upper-class life there. In the end, nevertheless, he conforms to the expectations of his family and class.

The cultural and political revolution of the 1960s in the West began for Fuentes in the early years of the decade. Energetic and vital in his early thirties, he was as enthralled with film and fiction writing as he was with revolutionary politics and rock and roll music. (During the 1960s, he usually wrote with rock and roll blasting in the background.) According to Gabriel García Márquez, he and Fuentes “made the Zona Rosa a cultural center” in Mexico City, starting tertulias, or literary soirées, in two cafés, one called El Tirol and the other the Kineret.³⁵ These tertulias not only were a stimulus for the intellectual life of Fuentes and García Márquez but also contributed to the creation of an entirely new film movement in Mexico.

García Márquez and Fuentes had met in 1962 when they began collaborating on the dialogue for the film El Gallo de Oro, a work by Juan Rulfo. García Márquez had written the original dialogue for this film, but the language was too Colombian for a Mexican audience. Consequently, the director, Manuel Barbachano, suggested to García Márquez that he work with Fuentes, who was returning from Europe, in order to Mexicanize the language. The two writers thought initially that they would be able to revise the script in a few days, but they worked together every night for three months. According to García Márquez, suffering together through this process created a strong bond between the two. A very private person, García Márquez has considered Fuentes a respected and close friend ever since.36

The Death of Artemio Cruz, Fuentes’ critique of the Mexican Revolution and one of his most important novels, appeared in Mexico in 1962. It reflected his assimilation of the modern novel in the West; his use of narrative points of view was typical of William Faulkner and John Dos Passos, who had been so important to him. It was also a portrayal and condemnation of the new ruling class in Mexico, the upper-middle class that fought in the Mexican Revolution and built the new modern capitalistic state that was being formed in the 1940s precisely when the Fuentes family arrived in Mexico City from Buenos Aires. The strident politics of this novel corresponded to Fuentes’ political writings since the Cuban Revolution.

The reaction to The Death of Artemio Cruz was swift and strong; this novel had more international impact than Where the Air Is Clear. The Death of Artemio Cruz drew immediate international attention as one of the early masterpieces of the Boom. It is one of the best-selling books ever printed by the Fondo de Cultura Económica in Mexico and has been published in more than twenty languages. During the same year, Fuentes’ novella Aura appeared; consequently, from 1958 to 1962 Fuentes published a substantial body of work: four novels. With this narrative corpus, he had established at least four of the important constants in his fictional work: a strong historical vision of reality, a portrayal of pre-Hispanic myth, a commitment to critique and social change, and innovation in narrative strategies. This was the Fuentes of the grand narrative; the broad scope and deep historical consciousness, among other factors, made him a major modern writer of the Americas.

In Aura, Fuentes turns to the world of another reality, one in which mysterious forces lead to a supernatural denouement. The protagonist, a young historian named Felipe Montero, answers an advertisement to edit the papers of the deceased husband of an elderly woman, Consuelo. Montero receives a good salary, as well as room and board, for his work. Once in the home, he falls in love with Aura, Consuelo’s niece. As Montero reads the love letters that General Llorente wrote to Consuelo when she was fifteen, he associates Aura with Consuelo. He also discovers himself in General Llorente. At the end of the novel, as Felipe holds Aura in his arms, she is transformed into Consuelo.37

Two years after the publication of Aura, Fuentes published a volume of short stories titled Cantar de ciegos, whose seven cosmopolitan fictions are set in Mexico City. One of the most successful was “Las dos Elenas,” a story dedicated to José Luis Cuevas that deals with the triangular relationship between a young and hip married couple and the wife’s mother, who has an affair with her son-in-law. The triangular relationship and the symbolic incest prefigure Terra Nostra. The other stories also deal with human relationships within the spatial limits of “small-screen fiction.”³⁸

The social, the purely intellectual, and the cultural in general reached notable levels of interaction for Fuentes and the intellectuals of his generation in Mexico during the late 1960s. He was surrounded by a group of key individuals on the cultural scene whom outsiders in Mexico began to call “la Mafia.” They included Fernando Benítez, Carlos Monsivais, Octavio Paz, Emmanuel Carballo, Juan García Ponce, José Luis Cuevas, Jaime García Terrés, Huberto Batis, Juan Vicente Melo, Sergio Pitol, and Salvador Elizondo. They seemed to control all the most influential literary and cultural organs, among them Siempre, Plural, and Novedades. The nonmember Vicente Leñero protested that writers excluded from La Mafia found it difficult to survive in Mexico. Fuentes and the rest of La Mafia did indeed exercise a virtual hegemony over Mexican literary culture during the late 1960s. And there were some talented writers, besides Leñero, who were excluded. Nevertheless, La Mafia sometimes incorporated Mexico’s most promising young writers, such as José Emilio Pacheco, Carlos Monsivais, and Gustavo Sainz, who gained considerable access to Mexican cultural organs during the 1960s.

One center of cultural life in Mexico City during this period was Fuentes’ second home in the wealthy Colonia San Angel on the south side of Mexico City, a Spanish Colonial–style home located at Segunda Cerrada de Galeana No. 16. For several years, Fuentes and Rita Macedo hosted social gatherings that have been described by intellectuals as literary soirées or tertulias and that often ended as lively parties. Rarely did an international celebrity—writer or actor—pass through Mexico City without a visit to the Fuentes home in San Angel on Sunday afternoon.39 This Sunday ritual began in 1964, when Carlos and Rita moved from his first house in San Angel to this residence and invited García Márquez and his wife, Mercedes, for tea one Sunday. After a few Sundays with the four of them, Fuentes began inviting others, and the soirées became progressively larger.⁴⁰ Luis Buñuel and Rodman Rockefeller were among the numerous celebrities whom Fuentes hosted.

For many foreign artists and writers, the most vivid memory of their first trip to Mexico was a party at the Fuentes home in San Angel. In 1992, William Styron remembered well when he first met Fuentes in 1964 and was invited to a swinging sixties party in San Angel—with many celebrities and “beautiful people.” One of these guests was the painter José Luis Cuevas. Styron described the Fuentes of 1964 as “very much like he is now [in 1992]. Very outgoing, expansive, engaging, very vital, filled with ideas.” ⁴¹ Styron and Fuentes had corresponded before meeting and, on the basis of this correspondence and having read each other’s work, had formed a “mutual admiration society,” according to Styron.⁴²

The Boom of the Latin American novel in the 1960s was a result of numerous institutions, individuals, and circumstances, among them the Cuban Revolution (which bonded Latin American intellectuals), Harper and Row Publishing Company in the United States, the Spanish literary agent Carmen Balcells, the Spanish publishing firm Seix Barral, the rise of international Latin Americanism as an academic discipline, the publication of the magazine Mundo Nuevo in Paris by Emir Rodríguez Monegal beginning in the mid-1960s, and the appearance on the scene of a brilliant translator, Gregory Rabassa. As José Donoso documents in his Historia personal del Boom, however, Fuentes was central to making all these factors work together; he brought together many of the different strands. Most of the writers of the Boom were even guests at the Fuentes home in San Angel, including Mario Vargas Llosa and José Donoso. The latter, in fact, lived in a bungalow in Fuentes’ backyard, writing there for three years in the early 1960s.

Fuentes followed closely and supported the writing of one of the major novels of the Boom, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. García Márquez liked to chat about his work when it was in progress, and he found in Fuentes the ideal dialogic friend while he was writing the novel in 1965 and 1966, the same period when he was joining in the Sunday soirées in San Angel. Fuentes was also one of the few individuals to read the manuscript before its publication, prompting him to write an article of considerable impact in the principal Spanish-language literary organ of the Boom, Mundo Nuevo.

The year 1967 was an important one for Fuentes for several reasons. He published the novels A Change of Skin and Holy Place, received the prestigious Spanish prize Biblioteca Breve, and made his first trip to Spain, when he first visited El Escorial. This visit to the enormous monument to Philip II’s genius, ambition, and religious faith opened the door to the writing of Terra Nostra. Fuentes had been interested for years in the relationship between Spain and Indo-Afro-Ibero-America, but the austere structure of El Escorial, about which Luis Buñuel had spoken so much to Fuentes, was a key experience for Fuentes with respect to Spain and Terra Nostra. From Spain he went to Venice, Paris, and London in 1967. Once in London, he moved into a home in Hampstead Hills Gardens, from which he took the tube daily to the British Museum, working in the Reading Room to do research for Terra Nostra. In the domed Reading Room, a treasury of Western civilization, Fuentes relived the world of Renaissance Europe, researching medieval esoteric religious practices, sixteenth-century hunting customs, Italian Renaissance art, and the like.

Holy Place was a short and intense psychological novel narrated by its protagonist, Guillermo, who has sexual desire for his mother, a movie actress. Experimental in structure and style, this entire novel is an interior monologue directed to the mother. Guillermo attends the best schools in Switzerland, spends time in Mexico City, and near the end of the novel follows his mother to Italy. As in Terra Nostra, many of the scenes are possible scenarios rather than “facts.” At the end, Guillermo is apparently transformed into a dog, thus prefiguring the multiple transformations in Terra Nostra.

In A Change of Skin, Fuentes continued with the experimentation of Holy Place. The novel deals with the car trip of the four main characters—Javier, Elizabeth, Franz, and Isabel—from Mexico City to Veracruz. They spend the night in a small hotel in the town of Cholula when their car breaks down. During the night, the couples switch partners, but then they return to their original partners. They also explore an ancient Aztec pyramid. The novel delves into the pasts of the four characters, describing key scenes of their respective lives. Through interior monologues and dialogues that function as flashbacks, the reader learns that Franz was a Nazi, that Elizabeth and Javier met in New York, and that Javier teaches at a university. Different strands of the novel’s plot are more possibilities than real accounts of actions, as is the case for the “events” of Terra Nostra. As one critic has pointed out, “Here, even more than in Fuentes’ earlier novels, rules of temporal logic do not apply.”43

Fuentes’ main work in the late 1960s and early 1970s was Terra Nostra. He continued working on this book in London in 1968, and his first published product was a short text titled “Nowhere,” an early version of a section of Terra Nostra that appeared in print in his volume Cuerpos y ofrendas in 1972. In the spring of 1968, Fuentes went to Paris, where he continued work on Terra Nostra.

Fuentes experienced two important upheavals in 1968. He witnessed the May 1968 uprising on the streets of Paris and wrote of that Parisian spring in a short book, París: O la revolución de mayo (1968), offering Latin American readers journalistic impressions of a writer’s experience in the strife-torn French capital.

Mexico City also was the setting for a historic uprising on the streets in 1968, and no Mexican intellectual, including Fuentes, would be exactly the same after the momentous events of that October, a watershed period in the history of modern Mexico. In September and October 1968 students and other groups critical of the government organized sporadic protests that had begun, in fact, in July. As the 1968 Olympic Games approached and tensions grew, several intellectuals, including Octavio Paz (who was then serving as ambassador to India), recommended to President Díaz Ordaz that he find a solution in conciliation and compromise. Paz’s letter to Díaz Ordaz pointed out that some aspects of the criticism directed toward the government, as well as some of the demands, had validity and were grounds for dialogue and understanding. The government chose not to listen, however, and when the students organized a massive protest in October, government soldiers killed hundreds of Mexican citizens. Fuentes returned from Europe to Mexico in November 1968 to face the crisis there. Large portions of the Mexican populace, including most of its intellectuals, had lost confidence in the government. Octavio Paz resigned his ambassadorial post, and numerous intellectuals who were associated with the Left, including Fuentes, José Emilio Pacheco, and Carlos Monsivais, publicly defended Paz’s position. From that moment, students and intellectuals in Mexico, including Fuentes, have had a different and more difficult relationship with the state—ranging from discreetly ambiguous at best to overtly antagonistic at worst.

The late 1960s and early 1970s were agitated and unstable years for Mexico, and for Fuentes as well, for he separated from Rita Macedo and was engaged in a wide range of literary and political activities. In February 1969 he went to Cuernavaca, where he wrote the novel Birthday (1969) and the essay La nueva novela hispanoamericana. Birthday, one of the most radical experiments in his fiction, placed Fuentes momentarily in the postmodern camp. La nueva novela hispanoamericana deals with Julio Cortázar, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Donoso, and others. Fuentes was at the forefront of a search for a new critical language with which to read the novels of the Boom. This essay, which appeared in six editions from 1969 to 1980, provided much of the language used through the following decade; it became, moreover, a seminal book for critics and scholars of the Indo-Afro-Ibero-American novel, for in it Fuentes provided new criteria for reading the contemporary novel. He set forth the oftmentioned concept of the “novel of language” used by numerous critics of Latin American literature after 1969. And in it he also emphasized the role of myth in this fiction. Without this book and Luis Harss’s Into the Mainstream, it would have been difficult to sustain the Boom of the Latin American novel.

For the most part, Fuentes was in Mexico writing from 1969 to 1971, the years when the Boom was at its zenith and the personal relationships among Fuentes, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, and Donoso were at their best. García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and Donoso lived primarily in Barcelona, and Fuentes frequently visited them there. In December 1968, García Márquez, Cortázar, and Fuentes boarded a train in Paris for Prague and then toured several countries of the former Soviet bloc. As well as close friends, they were a united front politically and aesthetically. This was an intensely creative period for the writers of the Boom, as demonstrated by their landmark novels: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by García Márquez, A Change of Skin (1967) by Fuentes, 62: A Model Kit (1968) by Cortázar, Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) by Vargas Llosa, and The Obscene Bird of the Night (1970) by Donoso.

Despite the friendships, schisms among the writers of the Boom began to surface, for both political and personal reasons. The first major public forum over which political differences appeared was Cuba and the celebrated case of the poet Heberto Padilla. When Padilla was arrested for writing poetry that the Cuban government considered unacceptable, several of Latin America’s most prominent intellectuals protested. Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Donoso, and others signed a letter directed to Castro demanding the release of Padilla. Over the ensuing years, García Márquez and Cortázar remained firmly aligned with Fidel Castro; Fuentes, Donoso, and Vargas Llosa have been more distanced and occasionally critical.

The last time the writers of the Boom were all together, in fact, was in 1970 in France. A theater festival in Avignon included a presentation of Fuentes’ play El tuerto es rey. Julio Cortázar owned a home near Avignon, in the small town of Saignon, so Fuentes, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and Donoso, along with the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, stayed together there. In Avignon the six writers made plans for the critical quarterly magazine Libre. Goytisolo was the editor of this journal, which, according to him, “should have welded us together [but] became, in fact, for a series of imponderable reasons, a weapon pitting us against each other, till in the end we were enemies.”44 Goytisolo explains how the Padilla affair produced feelings of doubt, mistrust, and even outright hostility in place of the old warmth and camaraderie among these friends. Libre was financed by a millionaire, Albina de Boisrourray, a young, beautiful woman with a passion for literature and cinema. She offered to fund the magazine if Goytisolo would serve as editor. When Goytisolo met with Fuentes and the other writers of the Boom in Avignon, he intended to publish a magazine that would support the Cuban regime from the outside and also strengthen the position of intellectuals who, like Padilla, were struggling from the inside for freedom of expression and real democracy. But Libre soon resulted in further divisions among the writers of the Boom. Since then, the friendships and alliances among Latin American writers have been defined, to a large extent, by positions in favor of or against the Cuban government.⁴⁵

Fuentes’ last novel of the 1958–1971 Boom years was Birthday (1969), a work pointing more to his postmodern projects of the 1970s and 1980s than to his grand narrative schemes of the 1960s. It follows the experimental mode of A Change of Skin, with little concern for chronological order, causality, or the rational development of plot. The contradictions that subvert the already established characters and events of the plot multiply beyond those of A Change of Skin and prefigure the contradictions and subversion of Terra Nostra. Birthday opens with George and Emily (husband and wife) entering their son George’s room to sing “Happy Birthday.” Then follows a series of ambiguous scenes with an old man, a boy, and a woman. George and Georgie function as doubles in the novel, and, as in Terra Nostra, characters merge and exchange places. Farris points out that “the fluid narrative force that snakes in and out of characters who in turn are also fluid, like those in A Change of Skin and Terra Nostra, illustrates Fuentes’ theory of ‘de-I-ification’—the disappearance of a defined narrator.” ⁴⁶

Terra Nostra: 1971–1992

During the period from 1971 to 1992, Fuentes returned to the lifestyle of an international itinerant that had characterized his youth before he settled in Mexico City in 1944. He dedicated most of the year 1971 to working on Terra Nostra in Mexico. On November 20, 1970, he had met the Mexican journalist Sylvia Lemus, and after a yearlong romance, they were married on January 24, 1972, in Mexico City. From 1972 to 1992 they lived in twenty-two different homes, mostly in Mexico, France, Great Britain, and the United States. During this time, Fuentes was as productive as during the earlier period, publishing the major novel of his career, Terra Nostra, as well as Hydra Head (1978), Distant Relations (1981), Old Gringo (1985), Christopher Unborn (1987), The Campaign (1991), and two volumes of short fiction. Recognition of his work took many forms, including two of the most prestigious awards in the Hispanic world, the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, which he received in Caracas in 1975, and the Cervantes Prize, which he accepted in Madrid in 1987. In addition to his constant writing during this period, he served as ambassador to France from 1975 to 1977 and taught on the faculty of several universities, including Harvard and Cambridge. He continued with some of his modern and utopian grand narratives, but the Fuentes of the 1970s and 1980s was also affected by postmodern culture.

After their marriage in Mexico City, Carlos and Sylvia moved to Paris (8, rue de Bievre), where he continued working on Terra Nostra. He had begun the actual writing of the novel in London in 1967 and continued it in London and Paris the following year and in Mexico City in 1969. He also dedicated a considerable amount of time in the early 1970s, in Paris and Barcelona, to working on Terra Nostra. In 1973, Sylvia gave birth to their son, Carlos Rafael. The family then moved to McLean, Virginia, and Fuentes commuted daily to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., where he continued his novel project. He recalls that it was an exhilarating year, with Terra Nostra in its final stages.47 When completed in early 1975, Terra Nostra represented Fuentes’ major opus on the cultures and history of the Americas and the culmination of his lifelong meditation on the history and identity of Indo-Afro-Ibero-America. He had fictionalized the architecture and ideology of El Escorial. He also published a book that complemented his major statements to date on the cultures of Indo-Afro-Ibero-America: Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura.

Fuentes accepted President Luis Echeverría’s offer of the Mexican ambassadorship to France in 1975, and in February of that year he and Sylvia arrived in Paris to assume the post. Fuentes took the position in a ceremony in which he was wearing the suit of his father, Rafael Fuentes Boettiger, who had died in 1971. During the twenty-six-month stay in Paris, Fuentes took some rest from the intensity of writing Terra Nostra and engaged in a variety of cultural and political activities. The Fuentes family lived quite well in Paris; William Styron recalls a sumptuous dinner at the Mexican Embassy in Paris one Christmas in the mid-1970s, graciously hosted by Carlos and Sylvia.48

After the Parisian diplomatic residency, Fuentes returned to academic life. The year 1977 was a transition between his life in France and the next stage, in the Americas. Leaving Paris in April 1977, he then lectured at the Colegio Nacional in Mexico City, at Cambridge University, and at Barnard College. He also served on the jury at the Cannes film festival, but the most important event of the year for him was receiving the Rómulo Gallegos Novel Prize in Caracas for Terra Nostra. Among his predecessors for this prestigious award were Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.

In 1978 the Fuentes family began a decade-long residence in the Americas, North and South, living until 1989 mostly in Mexico and the United States. They moved to New Jersey in July 1978. That year, Fuentes taught at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, and his novel Hydra Head appeared in print. Although not considered one of his major novels by some critics, this excursion into the genre of the spy thriller did receive a positive critical reception in several languages. Clearly less ambitious than any of his previous novels, Hydra Head is nevertheless one of his most entertaining works. Returning to the games of international political intrigue that he had played with Roberto Torretti and his other adolescent friends in Chile, Fuentes in this novel deals with the struggle of Arabs and Israelis to obtain knowledge and control of Mexico’s oil reserves. A character named Timon of Athens works in favor of Mexico’s interests. Fuentes explained the novel as follows: “The characters’ names and actions are verbs. The verb and the action have a protagonistic quality in this genre … so I tried to write this novel based on characters who are nothing but their names and actions which are nothing but verbs.”⁴⁹

From 1979 through 1983, Fuentes’ principal residence was Princeton, New Jersey, although he and his family traveled regularly to Mexico City and elsewhere. For example, they spent the spring semester of 1981 at Dartmouth College and the fall of 1983 (September through December) in Mexico City. During these years, Fuentes published the novel Distant Relations (1980) and the short story collection Burnt Water (1981). In Distant Relations, Fuentes returned to interests exploited in Terra Nostra: identity and its relationship to the past and history. Like Aura and Birthday, Distant Relations contains characters who have parallel lives or seem to function as reincarnations. When the story begins, Fuentes-as-narrator meets his old friend Count Branly in Paris, and Branly recounts his family history. Branly’s recollections involve encounters with Hugo Heredia, a Mexican archeologist, and Hugo’s son Víctor. At the end of the novel, a double figure pursues Fuentes, just as some doubles have followed the Heredia family. Burnt Water is a narrative quartet that returns to a more traditional use of narrative technique. The four stories evoke something of The Good Conscience, Fuentes’ previous treatment of the old order in Mexico. The main characters represent the old aristocracy from the days of Porfirio Díaz.

The winter of 1981 at Dartmouth College was a most stimulating and productive experience for Fuentes. On the one hand, he thoroughly enjoyed working on his playful and satirical novel Christopher Unborn there. On the other, it was during this highly creative period that he conceived his plan for his total work as “La Edad del Tiempo.” When he published Cristóbal nonato in 1987, it included a page titled “La Edad del Tiempo,” with his total fictional work—past and future—divided into fourteen cycles. His subsequent books have also included a page with the plan for “La Edad del Tiempo,” with minor revisions to the original plan.50

Fuentes spent the spring of 1984 as the Lewin Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, where he offered an undergraduate seminar on Latin American literature. His weekly lecture in that seminar was open to the public; these lectures eventually became the material for the collection of essays titled Valiente mundo nuevo (1990). In the essays, Fuentes reviews Latin American literature (which he identifies as Indo-Afro-Ibero-American literature) from the Colonial writer Bernal Díaz del Castillo to Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar.

The Fuentes family spent the autumns of 1984 and 1985 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Carlos lectured in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. During these two years, he also lectured regularly at universities in the United States and, in addition, did stints in Mexico City. In 1985 he published The Old Gringo, the novel that deals most directly with the relationship between the United States and Mexico and with the clichés and stereotypes that Mexicans hold of Americans and vice versa. The novel and many of its clichés were made into a less-than-successful film of the same title, with Fuentes’ friend Jane Fonda in a lead role opposite Gregory Peck.

After a semester at Cornell University during the spring of 1986, the Fuentes family moved to Cambridge, Great Britain, where they lived for a year in the elegant Merton House in St. John’s College of Cambridge University. Carlos gave weekly public lectures on a broad range of cultural topics, thoroughly enjoyed the intellectual ambience and architectural splendor of Cambridge University, and wrote the stories he later published as Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins (1989). Like Burnt Water, these stories represented a return to many of Fuentes’ storytelling strategies of the early 1960s.

After staying for a few months in Washington, D.C., and Mexico City in 1988 and 1989, the Fuentes family moved to London in January 1990, where they remained through 1992. Fuentes dedicated most of his time in London to the book and BBC program titled The Buried Mirror, yet another chapter of his ongoing analysis of the cultures of the Americas and Spain. Both the book and the program appeared in 1992; before that, he had published the novel The Campaign, the first volume in a series of novels on the history of the Americas. This series is a continuation of many of the issues of Terra Nostra: Terra Nostra deals with the origins of the cultures and history of the Americas; The Campaign begins the history of the Americas from the independence in the Southern Cone and can be read as a parody of a nineteenth-century historical novel.

In February, March, and April of 1992, Fuentes was featured in the Mexican media with regularity because of a conflict with his longtime friend Octavio Paz. Tensions had been growing between these two giants of contemporary Mexican literature since the late 1980s. The Mexican Enrique Krauze, a historian and close collaborator with Paz in the publication of Paz’s magazine Vuelta, had published an attack on Fuentes in the form of an article that appeared in Vuelta and The New Republic in 1988.51 The essence of his critique was that Krauze believed Fuentes was not a very good historian in his novels. Fuentes did not respond. In 1990 Paz organized an international symposium in Mexico City, inviting economic and political figures who defended the neoliberal political and economic programs that were sweeping Eastern Europe and Latin America as a reaction against Marxism and the Left. (He declined to invite Fuentes or García Márquez on the grounds that they were “novelists” and not “thinkers.”) In February 1992, Víctor Flores Olea (then director of the Consejo Nacional para las Artes y la Cultura) and José Sarakaún (then chancellor of the National University, or UNAM) organized an international symposium, “Coloquio de Invierno,” with keynote speakers on the Left, such as Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, William Styron, Sergio Ramírez from Nicaragua, and a host of other distinguished participants. Octavio Paz was not invited initially, so he protested—and then received his official letter of invitation, which he promptly refused to accept. The day before the symposium opened, Paz denounced it publicly on the basis that government funds were being used to support a conference dedicated exclusively to the Left, thus excluding the opposition. For the remainder of the two-week conference, the debate continued between the supporters of Paz (the Mexican center-to-Right) and the supporters of Fuentes (the Mexican center-to-Left).

The conflict between Paz and Fuentes was amply covered by the national media for three months, finally resulting in the inevitable split between Mexico’s two major living intellectual figures. In 1992, for the first time since they became friends in Paris in 1950, Fuentes and Paz no longer spoke to each other as friends. For several months, Vuelta dedicated considerable space to denouncing the “Coloquio de Invierno” and criticizing Fuentes.⁵² The conflicts between Paz and Fuentes, which were articulated primarily by the followers of the two in Mexico, were covered by the Mexican media regularly from February through April 1992.

After 1992

Despite the polemics in Mexico, Fuentes continued his intense writing program into the 1990s. One of his most successful works, The Orange Tree, appeared in 1993. In this book, Fuentes returned to some of the foundational issues originally explored in Terra Nostra: the book’s central image, the orange, represents Spanish identity. Fuentes finished this book in the fall of 1992, when the relationship between Spain and the Americas was foremost in the minds of many intellectuals of the Americas; some of it was actually written in the town of El Escorial in the summer of 1992.

In the 1990s, the Fuentes family has divided its time between Mexico City and London, usually living approximately half of the year in Mexico City and the other half in Great Britain. Fuentes owns a flat in London and a home in the Colonia San Jerónimo of Mexico City. (He has also frequently gone on lecture tours in the United States, once each autumn and once each spring.) In addition to his lifelong discipline of writing daily, Fuentes enjoys the opera and theater of London and finds that attending theater often stimulates his own writing.53 In the 1990s, he has also traveled regularly to Argentina and Colombia, usually visiting each country once or twice a year, always maintaining contact with the different regions of the Americas.

Imagining the Past and Remembering the Future

Historical understanding of the cultures of the Americas and the identity of the citizen of Indo-Afro-Ibero-America, both of which have their roots in medieval Spain, have been the constant interests of Carlos Fuentes. In this sense, Fuentes’ literary career has been a continual writing and rewriting of Terra Nostra. This ongoing project has been a lifelong search for the historical origins and identity of Mexico in particular and Indo-Afro-Ibero-America in general. Their expression in his work relates closely to his political vision, which has been progressive and fully committed to social change and to multiculturalism.

Fuentes’ writing affirms the belief that high culture can contribute to the improvement of society. This liberal humanism in general and his firm conviction in the role of culture were inherited from his mentors Alfonso Reyes and Manuel Pedroso, who, in turn, were strongly influenced by Ortega y Gasset and Américo Castro. In the early years of his writing, Octavio Paz also exerted considerable influence on Fuentes; Fuentes undertook Paz’s search for identity in Mexican terms and as a part of an affirmation of Mexico’s modernity. Under the tutelage of Reyes and Pedroso, Fuentes gained respect for the powerful role a cultural heritage can play, be it Spanish, Mexican, Indo-Afro-Ibero-American, or “universal.” A fundamental difference between the generation of Reyes and the generation of Fuentes is the latter’s more progressive political vision, again, tempered by influences such as the New Deal, Lázaro Cárdenas, the Chilean Popular Front, and the Cuban Revolution.

In firm solidarity with Cervantes and Borges, Fuentes has stood consistently in defense of imagination as the quintessential agent of transformation. In this sense, he is as utopian as the men of the Renaissance who came to the Americas in search of El Dorado. Fuentes’ sense of the geopolitics of the Americas is vastly more sophisticated than that of these first Europeans in the Americas. Nevertheless, they were perhaps the first Europeans to follow Fuentes’ admonition to imagine the past and remember the future. Through his interpretation and critique of the images of El Escorial, through his lifelong meditation on Hispanic culture, and through his writing and rewriting of Terra Nostra, Fuentes has dedicated a lifetime to imagining the past and remembering the future.