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.
His subsequent two decades in the Foreign Service both nurtured Paz's hatred of all isms and crafted his poetry. In Japan he absorbed haiku and its clarity. In Paris, he immersed himself in the surrealists. And in India, he found a dualism in Hindu thought that was sympathetic to his own beliefs. Paz saw in mestizo Mexico a coexistence of Indian and Spanish, life and death. In his poem ""Eagle or Sun?'' he talked about the two sides of the Mexican coin. ""Burnt water'' was a recurring image in his poetry. He best expressed the duality in his 1957 poem ""Sun Stone,'' which had 584 lines like the days of the circular Aztec calendar and contemplated death, time and love. Paz wanted to be remembered as a love poet.
MANY WILL REMEMBER HIM, rather, as a political voice. When the Mexican government massacred hundreds of protesting students in 1968 before the opening of the Olympics, Paz quit his job as ambassador to India, and became a national hero. Mexican intellectual Carlos Monsivais remembers reaching the poet on a crackling phone line in India a few days later. Paz expressed his outrage by reading him a new poem; poetry and politics for him were forever entwined. But Paz didn't always couch his views in lyrical stanzas. He broke with Monsivais and others over the socialist revolutions in Cuba and Nicaragua. He compared the left's beloved Fidel Castro to Chile's vilified military dictator Augusto Pinochet and he dismissed Nicaragua's revolution as ""inconsequential.'' Pro-Sandinistas burned Paz in effigy outside the U.S. Embassy after he was misquoted as calling for an American invasion of Nicaragua.
The poet loved to quarrel, especially about politics. He would take on anybody on any topic. ""It was hard to speak to him, especially on the phone,'' says literary critic Christopher Dominguez. ""There was always an argument.'' Whether he was discussing Ming vases or ""The Simpsons'' (later in life, his favorite TV show), he was in it to win. ""Sometimes his criticism crossed the line to impertinence, as if God had conceded the truth to him,'' says Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo I.
Paz's opinions were not always welcome, but they were weighty. ""No one was read more by politicians than Octavio Paz,'' Monsivais says. The government sought his views. But his influence came at a price. He accepted a stipend from the government. During former President Carlos Salinas's halcyon years, critics of Paz said he became a shill for the government and free trade. As someone steeped in the Mexican revolution, he still had faith in Mexico's ailing institutions. A self-described ""disillusioned leftist'' turned libertarian (he despised the term ""conservative''), Paz believed in opening markets. But many thought he was used by Salinas to win credibility. He earned the derisive nickname ""Pazcarraga'' because of a cultural TV series on Televisa, the media giant owned by government apologist Emilio Azcarraga. ""He succumbed to the temptations the oligarchy offered him,'' says Cuban novelist Lisandro Otero.
Most forgave Paz his transgressions. ""You could hate part of Paz, but never all of him,'' says Monsivais, who concedes that the poet turned out to be right about the ""philanthropic ogre'' of socialism. His only lasting feud, with Carlos Fuentes, was personal, not political. In a 1988 article published both in The New Republic and in Vuelta, the influential literary magazine Paz founded in the 1970s, Paz disciple Enrique Krauze called Fuentes a ""guerrilla dandy,'' a ""foreigner in his own country,'' and called his work ""insubstantial.'' Aguilar, who runs Nexos, a rival literary magazine, says that the article was ""silliness'' and that ""Paz started it.'' Since then, Fuentes had not said a word to Paz, his dear friend and mentor for 38 years. ""It is a shame that Fuentes's bitterness and vanity didn't let him put this aside,'' says Dominguez.
Mexico's temperamental intellectuals do agree on one thing: no one will replace Paz as poet-in-chief. The age of Mexican giants is ending. Last year both Televisa's Azcarraga and the labor movement's longtime leader, Fidel Velazquez, died. With Paz's death, says Aguilar, ""the Mexican corporatism of labor, mass media and, now, culture, is over.'' Says Monsivais: ""The role of the intellectual has been democratized. There are no more prophets.''
Toward the end of his life Paz stopped writing about politics. He was disillusioned by the economic and political fallout of the Salinas years. With a few close friends, he talked about the peasant uprising and violence in southern Chiapas, but didn't write about it. Paz once said peasant leader Subcomandante Marcos was a better poet than a politician. And, of course, he didn't like Marcos's mask.
In his last months, Paz began studying nature. Late at night, his wife, Marie-Jose, would roll him into the garden in his wheelchair and he would question the stars. ""I am a man,'' he wrote, ""and the sky is immense.'' Until his final days, the duality of Mexico, and of man and nature, haunted him still. Que descanse en paz.
"The Mexican, whether young or old, criollo or mestizo, general or laborer or lawyer, seems to me to be a person who shut himself away to protect himself: His face is a mask and so is his smile."
--from 'The Labyrinth of Solitude'
MARIA AMPARO LASSO and GREGORY BEALS