The Last Giant

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

© 1998