The Last Giant

ONLY IN MEXICO WOULD A POET get a burial fit for a president. Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, who died last week of cancer at 84, was laid out in a coffin draped with the Mexican flag at the Palace of Fine Arts. Hundreds of mourners, some holding his books, waited in line for hours to pay their respects. Politicians and playwrights alike bowed their heads as the national hymn was played for the man whose essays explained Mexico to the world. Universities and political parties took out ads expressing condolences. So ended ""a torrent of beauty that has saturated the 20th century from one end to the other,'' wrote Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez in one of the many eulogies.

No one mentioned that Garcia Marquez and Paz had clashed over Fidel Castro. Let alone that the man being lauded had once been burned in effigy in the streets of Mexico City. Members of the leftist glitterati conveniently forgot their decades-old grudge against the contrarian and acutely political Paz. (All but one: Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, Paz's protege turned antagonist, stayed out of sight at a book fair in Argentina.) The only evidence that Paz was not simply a beloved poet was a homemade sign held up outside the palace: YOUR POETRY, YES! YOUR POLITICS, NO!

Octavio Paz blended both in a cosmopolitan and cantankerous mix. In Mexico, intellectuals have not been mere dusty professors opining into the wind. Rather, they are cultural celebrities who play the role of national conscience, as Jean-Paul Sartre once did for France. In a country where one party has squelched political expression for nearly 70 years, intellectuals have been the voice of the voiceless. Paz not only felt obliged to speak (or write) out, he loved politics almost as much as poetry. He wrote more than 40 volumes of poems and essays and played diplomat for two decades. When he won Mexico's only Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990, his voice found a megaphone. He used his influence both wisely and carelessly. He was alternately a thorn and a champion of the state, and his death ends an era. ""In the Spanish-speaking world, Octavio Paz was the last intellectual mandarin,'' Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa wrote last week.

No work has defined Paz more than his 1950 essay, ""The Labyrinth of Solitude.'' Hailed abroad as a road map to the Mexican character, it was met with groans at home for portraying Mexicans as backward. ""His face is a mask and so is his smile,'' Paz wrote about his people. ""In his harsh solitude, which is both barbed and courteous, everything serves him as a defense.'' Paz never intended the essay to be the definitive primer on Mexicans. In fact, he explained later, he wrote the work mainly to figure out himself. But outside Mexico it became gospel. ""If I arrive late to an appointment in New York they say: "Of course, it's like Paz explains, you Mexicans suffer the trauma of the Conquest','' says novelist Jose Emilio Pacheco.

Mexicans see ""El Laberinto'' as a great literary work but question its anthropological value. ""How useful is it for understanding what's happening in Mexico today? Not very,'' says writer Hector Aguilar Camin. ""Today we have polls.'' The quest to define Mexican identity is no longer as fashionable as it was when Paz was young. Few Mexican writers these days would dare to generalize about a country of 90 million that has the soul of an Indian in the south and the mind of a gringo in the north. When Paz wrote ""The Labyrinth,'' Mexico was still a largely rural, uneducated and insular place. ""Paz belongs to the Mexican 20th century,'' says poet David Huerta, whose father was a close childhood friend of Paz's. ""You can't understand this century in Mexico without reading Paz.''

Neither can you understand Paz without the 20th century. His life mirrored the country's struggle with modernity. Born into the aftermath of the Mexican revolution in 1914, Paz wrangled with his family legacy: His father was a lawyer who fought with revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata. The younger Paz seemed to have all the credentials of a Mexican leftist. His first poem, written at the age of 17, caught the eye of Chilean poet and avowed communist Pablo Neruda. On Neruda's encouragement, Paz packed off to Spain in the 1930s to fight Fascism. But even then his status as a true believer was in doubt: his conviction was suspect and he was never given a weapon. He soon returned home with the first seeds of doubt in leftist causes firmly planted.