Fuentes the Memorious

• The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden and Carlos Fuentes
  Deutsch, 199 pp, £8.95, May 1986, ISBN 0 233 97862 3
• Where the air is clear by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Sam Hileman
  Deutsch, 376 pp, £4.95, June 1986, ISBN 0 233 97937 9
• Farewell to the Sea by Reinaldo Arenas, translated by Andrew Hurley
  Viking, 412 pp, £12.95, May 1986, ISBN 0 670 52960 5
• Digging up the mountains by Neil Bissoondath
  Deutsch, 247 pp, £8.95, May 1986, ISBN 0 233 97851 8

Carlos Fuentes is one of those unusual novelists who would make the International Who’s Who even if he had never written a novel. As a public man, Fuentes’s career has been directed to Mexico’s uneasy relationship with the outside world – he was Mexican Ambassador to France from 1975 to 1977. As a novelist, he explores the internal character of his country, in Where the air is clear, his first novel, originally published in 1958, in The Death of Artemio Cruz and in Terra Nostra. His novels feel their way along the paradoxes and social contradictions of Mexico: the complicated assimilations of its Indian, Spanish, French and North American legacies, its two natures as a state founded in socialist revolution yet effectively governed by feudal gangsters, or jefes. Mexico is a country where, as the sardonic proverb has it, ‘the law is obeyed, then it is disregarded.’ Eccentricity is written into a constitution which awards every citizen an inalienable 50 hectares of land, but very prudently does not specify where the land is. Fuentes sees Mexico as the site of two great and conflicting American myths: the myth of epic conquest, and the myth of a pre-existent utopia. And for Fuentes, Mexico is a country whose strangeness defies and yet can only be understood by the imaginations of fiction. Hence every worthwhile Mexican novel must, directly or indirectly, be a historical novel, a novel about ‘our land’.

Fuentes has what strikes the modern Anglo-Saxon reader as an extraordinarily lofty, not to say pompous, notion of the novelist’s commission. In the absence of trustworthy state authority, he sees the Latin American novelist as a moral legislator, the uniquely impartial and wise arbiter of values. Fuentes’s ideal novelist also works under the stern injunction to ‘write everything that history has not said, otherwise it will be forgotten’. This is not, as the smug Anglo-Saxon might surmise, because semi-literate Latin America has too little written history, but because it has much more than Clio in her official capacity as recorder can handle. As Fuentes puts it in the prelude to The Old Gringo, the very dust of Mexico is ‘memorious’: the allusion to Borges’s Funes the Memorious, the man condemned to forget nothing, is surely deliberate. By contrast, the United States is ‘a land without memory’. Put genetically, contemporary Mexico has a blood connection with the 1913 Revolution, and with the Conquistadores. Contemporary America has no such vital connection with its Civil War, or with its Puritan foundation. Fuentes suggests that the Americans have lost their past by virtue of ancestral sexual timidity. The conquerors of America (unlike those of Mexico) killed, but they did not sufficiently rape. The result was genocide, not miscegenation. As the American hero of The Old Gringo puts it: ‘we killed our Redskins and never had the courage to fornicate with the squaws and at least create a half-breed nation. We are caught in the business of forever killing people whose skin is of a different colour. Mexico is the proof of what we could have been.’ If the Mexican is doomed for ever to remember his bloody past, the North American is doomed for ever unconsciously to repeat his, by insatiable imperialism.

Recently Fuentes has become preoccupied by what he calls the ‘universal communicability’ of fiction – its ability (like his other avocation, diplomacy) to cross frontiers and make international contact. This has coincided with what has been called the post-1960s ‘boom’, which has brought world-wide readership to Latin American literature, particularly the novel. The Old Gringo is the most international work of fiction Fuentes has hitherto written, and deals principally with the relationship of the so-called distant neighbours, the USA and Mexico. The action of the novel is set during the early revolution of 1913, the most tormented passage of Mexican history since the conquest. Upheaval at this period was made inevitable by the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, which bottled up all reform for 35 years, until, in 1910, the old patriarch was finally forced to resign. Diaz was immensely popular in the United States, where popular opinion credited him as the man who had put the country’s economy on a sound footing. He was replaced by the constitutionalist Madero, who was promptly murdered by the American stooge Huerta, provoking confused revolutionary insurrection in 1913.