Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  The people of Zapata country soon had to face a harder task than the fighting of a revolution. As Mexico’s population soared in the 1940s, a new generation soon learned the obvious: There simply wasn’t enough arable land to be divided up, generation after generation; even the holy Mexican tierra was finite. Many young people from Morelos began to emigrate, to Cuernavaca, to Mexico City, to the United States. Some never came back. Obviously, agrarian reform wasn’t the answer to all of the problems of Morelos or Mexico; in this world, nothing is the answer.

  And yet, for all of the disappointments, there is something about the people of Morelos that is healthy and enduring: They bow their heads to no man. That is surely the most valuable inheritance passed down by the generation of Emiliano Zapata. That is Zapata’s triumph. He wanted humble people to be proud. Not vain. Not haughty. Proud. And you sense that pride here in the way ordinary citizens move, in the confident (if reserved) way in which they deal with strangers. You see it in the way they take care of their children and their homes. You see it in the poorest barrios, where flowers are planted in tin cans on doorsteps and windowsills.

  The pride is not merely in self, but in place. The anthropologist Oscar Lewis believed that the name Tepoztlán means “place of the broken rocks,” after the spectacular peaks and buttes that rise above the town. If so, the name is no longer completely accurate. The name doesn’t truly describe the abundant beauty of bougainvillea and avocado trees, the citrus green in the sun, the mango and papaya trees, the fields of coffee and bananas appearing around a sudden bend. Nor does it portray the handsome homes of the city people who have moved here in the past few decades, adding the bright shimmer of swimming pools to the town, behind walls of volcanic rock. Nor does the name explain why so many of those who went away have begun to return, as dismayed as Zapata by what they encountered in the cement streets of big cities, explaining that at least here they had “petates y parientes “ — a place to sleep, and parents, too.

  In short, the name of Tepoztlán doesn’t explain the beauty of the place, or its mood, or its ghosts. Sometimes they all appear after the sun has vanished. You walk here at night with no sense of the menace that stains the night in almost all the cities of el Norte. On the dirt roads of the lower town, faceless strangers pass in the dark and murmur hello. A few drunks sing the old canciones. Somewhere, but never seen, dogs are always barking, and the odor of jasmine thickens the air. On such a night not long ago, as I sat behind the house, gazing up at the black silhouette of the mountains, the wind shifted subtly and a cloud acquired the gleaming texture of mother-of-pearl: still, beautiful, perfect. The moon was hidden. A lone dog howled. And I swear that up on the ridge, high above this dark valley in Morelos, I saw a white horse.

  TRAVEL HOLIDAY,

  October 1990

  EL NOBEL

  Out on Fifth Avenue, the crowd is unusual for an urban evening in the last decade of the American century. Nobody fires a gun. Nobody plays a giant radio. Nobody speaks at full moronic bellow or offers dope for sale or screams in utter loneliness for help. But the people here are as excited as any group in thrall to the usual New York distractions of noise or violence. They are gathered outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art to hear a talk by Octavio Paz.

  Paz is seventy-six, Mexican, a poet, an essayist, a critic, and an editor. Naturally, most Americans have never heard of him. Not even on this evening, a few days after Paz has been awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize for literature.

  “What’s the line for?” a young American asks me, outside the museum. “Who they waitin’ to see?”

  “Octavio Paz.”

  “Who?”

  In Mexico, of course, Paz is a gigantic, luminous star. So it was no surprise that the Mexican newspapers carried the story of the Nobel award in type sizes usually reserved for declarations of war or victories in the World Cup. Paz is not the first Latin American to win, but he is the first Mexican. And though he has directed the energies of a long lifetime against dumb nationalism, Paz did not defuse the surge of Mexican national pride by turning down the award or the $700,000 that goes with it. And why should he have? In a time of slick frauds, Octavio Paz is an authentic world-class writer; nobody can say of him that he did not deserve the Nobel Prize. And nobody knows this better than Paz.

  A great writer belongs to people everywhere. I remember seeing Paz on Avenida Juárez in Mexico City in the early 1970s, after he’d returned from a few years of exile. He came out of a bookstore looking exactly the way a poet should look: handsome, distracted, his hair in need of tending, the collar of his shirt curling, a small bundle of books in his hand. He was alone. A young man recognized him, perhaps for the same reason I did: an appearance on television two nights earlier.

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

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

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

  “And don’t apologize,” Paz said.

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

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

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

  I thought: Yes, he is one of us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Everybody laughs. There are handshakes, a few autographs to sign, and abrazos for friends just arrived from Mexico and Paris. Slowly, Paz and his people walk out to Fifth Avenue. There, a car is waiting for the great poet. There is a final joke, a few small goodbyes, and then Octavio Paz, with all of his sheer vitality and appetite for being, gets into the backseat, closes the door, and waves farewell. A derelict in a filthy camouflage jacket stares at the car as it pulls away.

  “Who the hell is that?” the derelict says.

  “A poet,” someone explains. “From Mexico.”

  The man snorts. “All we need is more fuckin’ Mexicans,” he says, and shambles into the New York night.

  ESQUIRE,

  March 1991

  IN PUERTO VALLARTA

  It was dusk in Puerto Vallarta, and we were in a restaurant called El Panorama, dining with a Mexican woman we’d met that afternoon. The restaurant was on the top floor of the Hotel La Siesta, rising seven precarious stories above the ground on a hill overlooking the town. For once the name of a restaurant was accurate. From our table, while the mariachis played the aching old songs of love and betrayal, we could see a panorama of cobblestoned streets glistening after a frail afternoon rain. We saw the terra-cotta patterns of a thousand tiled rooftops, along with church steeples and flagpoles, palm trees and small green yards, and little girls eating ice-cream cones. The aroma of the Mexican evening rose around us: charcoal fires, frying beans, fish baking in stone ovens. Over to the left in the distance was the dense green thicket where the Rio Cuale tumbled down from the fierce mountains of the interior. And beyond all of this, stretching away to the hard blue line of the horizon, there was the sea, the vast and placid Pacific.

  “It’s so beautiful,” the Mexican woman said, gesturing toward the sea. My wife followed her gesture to gaze at the rioting sky, which was all purple and carmine and tinged with orange from the dying sun. The woman’s face trembled as she talked about her husband and her son. They had died within six months of each other, the husband of a heart attack after many years in the Uruguayan foreign service, the son in a senseless shooting at a party in Mexico City.

  “When those things happened,” the Mexican woman said, “I couldn’t live anymore. I didn’t want to. I sat at home in the dark.” She sipped her drink. “My daughter was the one who told me to come to Vallarta. She said I had to heal myself. I had to go away and get well. And she was right. Beauty heals. Don’t ever forget that. Beauty heals. I hurt still. But I am healed.”

  Not all the stories we heard in Puerto Vallarta contained such elements of melodrama and redemption. But there were other tales of healing — the woman from Minnesota, broken by a difficult divorce, who wandered south with a vague hope for escape. Now the gray years were erased by the sun and sea and the sound of children laughing in the still hours of the siesta; she worked in a clothing store and was catching up on two decades of lost laughter. There was a man broken by the culture of greed during the American eighties; back in Boston he had left a bankrupt company, a ruined marriage, a defaulted mortgage; now in the mornings he took a boat out on the blue water to fish for shark. Another man had lost a much loved son to drugs; another had lost a career to whiskey; a third had postponed an old dream of becoming a painter. All had come to Puerto Vallarta to live a little longer or, perhaps, for the first time.

  For centuries it was a fishing village, a few huts thatched with palm dozing along the shore of the great natural harbor called the Bahia de Banderas, which is 25 miles wide. The town was built around the Rio Cuale, one of the four streams that now traverse the city. It never became a major port, because the merchants of Mexico preferred to greet their Manila galleons in Acapulco, 800 miles to the south and a much shorter journey to the capital, Mexico City. For years no roads connected the tiny village to the large cities of the interior; mule trains labored for weeks to travel the 220 miles due east to Guadalajara. And Mexico City, 550 mountainous miles to the southeast
, was beyond reach.

  In 1851 a man named Guadalupe Sanchez settled his family on the edge of the Rio Cuale, which divides the present Vallarta into north and south, and he is usually credited with transforming the cluster of fishing shacks into a town. But it did not prosper, and the locals apparently preferred it that way. They lived out their lives in its quiet cobblestoned streets to the familiar rhythms of day and night, rainy summers and balmy winters. Even the great upheaval of the Mexican revolution had little effect on the fishermen and small farmers who lived on the adjoining coastal plains. Occasionally cruise ships or tramp steamers would drop anchor in the empty bay, and locals went out in dugout canoes to sell chili and beans. The ships would vanish and leave Vallarta in its solitude. After World War II some of the Guadalajara upper classes discovered the town. A rough road was built, followed by a small airstrip. By the end of the 1950s the population was about 5,000.

  Then, in 1963, everything changed. That year John Huston arrived with a crew of 130 to direct the movie version of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana. This produced one of the most amusing scenes in movie history and the true beginning of modern Puerto Vallarta. The star of the movie was Richard Burton, out of Wales and Shakespeare. His female costars were Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, and Sue Lyon. Miss Gardner had abandoned Hollywood for Europe after disastrous marriages to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra. She arrived with a personal entourage and her Ferrari and soon became interested in a beachboy named Tony. Miss Kerr was married to Peter Viertel, who had written a scathing novel about Huston and was once involved with Ava. The 17-year-old Miss Lyon, who had become a star as the nymphet in Lolita, was there with her boyfriend, while the boyfriend’s wife shared quarters with Miss Lyon’s mother. The cinematographer was the splendid Gabriel Figueroa, who burst into operatic song while drinking, and Huston was supported in his work by the Mexican director Indio Fernandez, who had shot his last producer. For good measure, Tennessee Williams was there with his lover and his dog.