A New Time for Mexico - Couverture souple

Fuentes, Carlos

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0520211839 ISBN 13 : 9780520211834

Editeur : University of California Press, 1997

Synopsis

Fuentes's bold and timely study discusses the origins and nature of the tumultuous events that have recently transformed Mexican politics and society. The rebellion in Chiapas, a rash of assassinations, the break between Presidents Salinas and Zedillo, the continual struggle for democratic self-rule: These and other developments are addressed by one of Mexico's wisest, most influential commentators.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Carlos Fuentes, Mexico's leading novelist, is also an essayist and writer of screenplays as well as political commentary. Trained as a lawyer, he was Mexico's ambassador to France in the 1970s. Among his many novels are Terra Nostra, The Death of Artemio Cruz, The Old Gringo and Christopher Unborn.

À propos de la quatrième de couverture

"No one who is interested in Mexico, its past and its future, can afford to miss this brilliant book."—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

À propos de la deuxième de couverture

"No one who is interested in Mexico, its past and its future, can afford to miss this brilliant book."—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

New Time for Mexico (with a New Preface)

By Carlos Fuentes

University of California Press

Copyright © 1997 Carlos Fuentes
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520211834

CHAPTER ONE

MEXICO........The Face of Creation

To see Mexico from the air is to look upon the face of creation.Our everyday, earthbound vision takes flight and is transformedinto a vision of the elements. Mexico is a creation of water andfire, of wind and earthquake, of the moon and the sun.

Not just one sun but the five suns of ancient Mexican cosmogony.First comes the Sun of Water, which presides over the creationof the world and ends in the storms and floods that foretell thecoming eras--Sun of Earth, Sun of Wind, and Sun of Fire--eachending in catastrophe until we arrive at the fifth sun, our own,which awaits the final cataclysm.

Sun of Water

Coursing through Mexico are serpentine rivers, mere threads offertility in the midst of deserts, opulent tropical undulations pouringslow and wide into the sea Over the flowing waters of thePapaloapan, river of butterflies, over the still waters of Lake Patzcuaro,furrowed by dragonflies, flutters the goddess Itzpapalotl, astar in the Aztec pantheon. Her very name, Obsidian Butterfly,resounds with the ambiguity of all the elements, her fragile multicoloredwing at once a fearful sacrificial knife.

She is the first sign of creation, proclaimed by the fleeting liquidelement. It is not the nature of water to be always placid, and whenit lies as calm as a mirror locked in the crater of a volcano, itsimage is ominous indeed, for its supernatural tranquillity promisesan imminent commotion. What are our years when seen againstthe mountains, millennia of stone? Who can really believe thatthese rock-encircled lakes in the craters of Toluca and Puebla alwayswore, and always will, this same metallic, motionless sheen?

Now everything moves again. The Usumacinta River flows on,inseparable from the forest it waters, equally inseparable from theclouds that gather over both jungle and river, as if they, too, weredrawn along by the current. We know that all three--sky, river,and jungle--hide and protect the civilizations that slumber beneaththem, pretending to be dead, giving signs of life only in the mysteryof the figures drawn on the rocks beside the Planchon River andin the ghostly processions of the frescoes at Bonampak.

The stillness of the waters is illusory. Majestic waterfalls cascade,washing away the land and its history. Mountains collapse into thesea. Sandbars break the very waters of the sea. And the surf on thecoast of Jalisco shows the earth as a dark-clawed monster, besiegedand battered by the fury of the sea.

The land is a portrait drawn by the sea. But we have only toturn the picture around to imagine the contrary. Is this not ratherthe portrait of the sea as it is attacked by a hungry, ferocious land,an ambitious, aggressive, imprisoned land that challenges the sea,ruler of the greater part of the planet's surface, for its dominion?

Unquiet, tremulous, and insatiable, fearful and defensive, landof teeth and nails, jaws and talons--for a moment the land ofMexico shakes. The earth is about to speak. Earth will come todominate water. The second sun comes to life amid awe and terror.

Sun of Earth

From the heights, the dead volcanoes--Popocatepetl, Iztaccihuatl,the Nevado de Toluca--signal that their silence is no insuranceagainst catastrophe, but rather a portent of the next tremor. Paricutin,the youngest volcano, smiles like a mischievous child, warningus that one day. curl of smoke may appear in a Michoacanfarmer's field, spiraling up from the bowels of the furrowed earththat shakes its shoulders, vomiting flame and ash until, in a matterof hours, it reaches the sky.

And there is more: Chichon, that dark, active giant, proclaimsthat its quaking and smoking will cease only in foreboding of thenext great commotion of this restless land, where creation has notyet ended its labors. Each volcano ends only to pass the flamingbaton to the next.

Sun of Water, Sun of Earth. From the air, we can see the originsof the land and all that flows over its surface. We can take a pictureof the very point where the Sierra Madre Oriental begins, proudlyabandoning plains and deserts as it starts its climb, then shootstoward its vibrant coupling with the western chain in the NudoMixteco. Linked forever, the two chains then run on together totheir ultimate extinction at the southern extreme of the continentin Chile and Argentina, where the Andes bud off from the chainlike frigid grapes. We can also take a picture of the source of theConchos River and see the birth of its waters from the womb ofthe land.

As we see all of this, we are present at the creation of nature.Not as something that happened illo tempore, in the age of thegods, but as something that is happening to us now, in our owntime and before our very eyes.

The Nevado de Colima shows itself a mature gentleman, a bitgray around the temples, reminding us of the ambiguity of naturein Mexico. But neither he nor any of the great slumbering patriarchswatching over the earth can deny us our own time in thisland.

For it is we--you and I--who see and touch and smell and tasteand feel today, even as we witness the perpetual rebirth of the landhere and now. We are the witnesses to creation, because of themountains that watch us and in spite of their warning: "We willendure; you will not." Our response to this warning can be assinful as pride, but also as virtuous as charity. We take the earthin our hands and re-create it in our own image.

Geometry, Einstein said, is not inherent in nature. Our mindimposes it on reality. Man's geometric imagination can be marvelouslyobserved, from the air, in the incomparable clash of jungleand architecture in Palenque and Yaxchilan. It is at these sites thatthe primeval struggle between nature and civilization seems to havetaken place; indeed it is still going on. Nature embraces architecture,but the human creation suffers because, while desiring to giveitself up to nature's almost maternal tenderness, it also fears beingsuffocated by it. And as human beings, we also fear that we willbe expelled from that great, moist womb that nurtures and protectsus, cast out into the shelterless world.

The great art of ancient Mexico is born from this tension betweennature and civilization, between fear of enclosure and fearof exposure. The splendors of the great acropolis at Monte Albanand the sacred spaces of Teotihuacan are the triumphs of but aninstant of human domination over nature, yet also of human equilibriumwith it. In these places, man has met time and made theshapes of time his own.

Nevertheless, man looks around him and sees the seductivethreat of the sierras, deep gorges, the devouring tangle of the jungle,and the latent tremor of the mountains. He responds by gentlycaressing the slopes of the mountains, festooning them with terracedgardens; by stroking the plains and planting them with wheatand maize; and by building cities, shelters of his own making tosubstitute for the protection of trees, caves, and craters.

Mexico is a land of walls. Like all other peoples, we built themfirst to defend ourselves against inclement weather, marauding animals,and enemy attacks. Soon, however, architecture found othermotives. First was the need to distinguish the sacred from the profane.Then came the need to segregate the conqueror from his subjects.And finally it becomes necessary to distance the rich fromthe poor.

In spite of these divisions, our cities transcend their limits and,with the very walls that divide and separate, create movement, acirculation that reunites us in the public square--the commonplace, the central site--and later in atriums and naves, chapels andportals, patios and gardens, until a network of communications isestablished that defies, and sometimes even defeats, the walls ofisolation.

This is so because the human creation of the city acquires, in theIberian New World, a sense of paradox. Civilization means livingin the city, in the civitas. But in Ibero-America the paradox is thatthe city is simultaneously a creation of the will and a product ofchance. Perhaps this true of all cities, simply because thecivitas--the place of civilization, the space where we coexist--isalso the polls, the place of politics, the space where we debate. Andboth civilization and politics, much as they may imagine themselvesto be projections of the will, are also the result of necessity andchance.

The cities of Mexico, I hasten to add, temper these characteristicswith powerful admixtures of tradition and novelty. First tradition:the energetic plan of the new Spanish city replaces its Indian counterpart,supplants the traditional ceremonial, political, and religiousfunctions, only to find itself obliged to take them on anew.And then novelty: the Spanish-American city offers the opportunityto create new, regular, chessboard cities, as rectangular as the gridon which Saint Lawrence burned.

During the Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti dreamt of makingthe ideal Platonic city real. The novelty of America permitted sucha thing. Here one can leave the walled agglomeration of the medievalcity behind. But the past does not allow itself to be buriedso easily. On the one hand, the previous tradition--the Indiancenter--struggles to reassert itself from under the very foundationsof the new city, as recently happened in Mexico City when theAztecs, Templo Mayor was uncovered in the central square, at theheart of the modern metropolis. On the other hand, racial noveltytransforms both the Indian and the European city into a mestizocity, a city of mixed bloods. And economic demands--mining, thehaphazard topography of gold and silver--also cause the Renaissancecity to revert to the medieval hive of narrow alleys, tunnels,stairways, and pits.

From the air, Puebla, Oaxaca, and Morelia display their checkeredinnovations as well as their mestizo ambiguity, while Taxco,Zacatecas, and Guanajuato yield to the serpentine cityscapes calledfor in the mining districts. Like the gold seekers themselves, thesecities scramble up mountainsides, tumble down slopes, and sniffout the precious metals there. When they find them, they adorntheir altars with them, pave the streets with silver when theirdaughters get married, or lose their gold forever on a bet, on awhim, at a fiesta.

There is a splendid photograph by Michael Calderwood, the distinguishedBritish artist, of the Barranca del Cobre, the CopperGorge, in Chihuahua. Like the other canyons of the Americas, especiallythe most glorious of them all, the Grand Canyon, this greatMexican abyss bears witness to the two extremes of creation, birthand death. If this is a picture of the first day of creation, it is alsoa portrait of the last. Nevertheless, the drama of these places doesnot end in an affirmation of the beginning and end of the earth:their greatest effect lies in how they define our frame of referencestep by step as our vision moves through space. In Arizona orChihuahua, the reality of these natural wonders is actually determined by our movements. A step to the right or left and the greatstone abyss that we see changes so fundamentally that we neverlook on the same gorge twice. The movements of our body, ourchange in point of view, transform what on the surface seemed anunalterable monument of nature.

Am I not defining the Baroque and searching for its specificAmerican form? The Baroque is always an art of displacement,requiring the movement of the spectator if the work of art is to beseen at all--and, perhaps even more important, if it is to see itself.For the Baroque is a circular, not a frontal, art. The Byzantine iconmust be seen from the front. Bernini and Michelangelo, on theother hand, invite the spectator to see the icon in the round. Andwhen, in Las Meninas, Velazquez liberates painting from sculpture--touse Ortega y Gasset's phrase--his instrument of liberationis that circular gaze which enters the painting and observesthe painter at work, as it were, from behind his back. In this way,the Baroque painting paints itself a second time.

In Mexico, as throughout Spanish and Portuguese America, theBaroque goes well beyond the sensual intellectual reason of theEuropeans. For among us, the Baroque is a necessity, a vital, resoundingaffirmation--or, better yet, the affirmation of a necessity.A devastated, conquered land, a land of hunger and of dreams,finds in the Baroque the art of those who, having nothing at all,want everything. The Ibero-American Baroque is born of the abundanceof need; it is an art desiring what is not there, a triple somersaultover the abyss of desire with the hope of landing on one'sfeet on the other side and touching at last the object of desire: thefraternal hand, the body of love. The harsh, abysmal landscape ofMexico is, in its savage solitude, the picture of the Baroque hungerfor its opposite, abundance and sharing.

The Sun of Earth, seemingly the most solid, the most long-lasting,thus shows that it, too, is a passing phenomenon. Its trueimage is that of a cloud in the artificial heaven of a Baroque altar.But the real heaven of Mexico offers more clouds than any altardoes. Clouds are the crowns of Mexico's second geography.

Sun of Wind

Mexico is a country of prolonged, tranquil, luminous clouds. Andclouds are the favorite daughters of the next sun, the Sun of Wind,which erodes coastlines and mountain peaks, that sculpts thestones and reshapes the tilled land.

At times, Mexico's opulent clouds are like a shroud tenderlyshielding our eyes from a stiff or moribund body. Clouds hide fromus the agony of the Lacandon rain forest and its people. Both aredestined to extinction. At times, though, clouds are but the veil ofcivilizations unwilling to be disturbed. Most subtle of shields, theSun of Wind protects all things in our country that await anothertime, a better time, to become manifest. In the meantime, cloudsdisguise the persistence of a sacred, magical world that the active,Faustian will of the West strives to annihilate.

Yet the clouds of Mexico carry out another, more disinterestedtask: they constantly soften the harder contours of the elements.Sea and land, volcano and air, ancient ruin and jungle, river anddesert all clash head-on in Mexico. Here the elements war amongthemselves for their moment in the sun, and whole eras are namedafter each--water, fire, earth, and wind.

Everything in Mexico vibrates simultaneously, perhaps becausethe clouds constantly soften the harshness of the imperiousMexican elements, so none truly triumphs over the others. Windpushes the clouds, the airy spray dissolves the roughest peaks,clouds intertwine surf and shore and commingle waterfalls withcascades of flowers--hibiscus, bougainvillea, yellow marigolds forthe dead. The cloud is an all-embracing mist, a smoke dissolvingall things and rendering all distances deceptive.

An encounter and a coupling, at times a confusion, a triumphof light, a blurring of the slashing strokes so often present in Mexicanart. The hardest lines of Rivera or Siqueiros are as fearsomeas the brutal natural encounters we see in the Mexican landscape.The Isla Tiburon with its point--appropriately named Chueca,Crooked--is like a shadowy wing menaced by a dagger-coloredsea. It is as if the island wanted to fly away and the sea wereholding it down, reminding the island that its destiny is to livebetween land and sea in perpetual confrontation.

The Sun of Wind then intervenes to dissolve all borders, to stillevery quarrel, to silence all shouts. The Sun of Wind ruffles thesand, softly caresses the face of the water, reveals the textureof the undersea depths, and pulverizes the many varieties of stone:porous, basalt, chalk, and sand. In Mexico this region of the airbelongs to the painter Ricardo Martinez, in Europe to J. M. W.Turner. The Sun of Wind has been photographed by Gabriel Figueroahere, by Michael Calderwood there.

In this way, the Sun of Wind reveals a third Mexico within thevery element from which we see the country: the air. The wind thatblows through the mouths of two twin gods, one Mediterraneanand the other Mexican, Aeolus and Ehecatl, dissolves the rigidityof the earth and the immobility of the sea as they confront eachother. The wind is a gift, a godly one. But like all other divineofferings, it is ambiguous. And it has three names. The first is metamorphosis.The second is harmony. And the third is death.

The Sun of Wind transforms the unmoving landscape into amovable passageway. Things that seemed eternal prove to bechangeable. Forms come together and pull apart to create newforms. The Pinacate crater in Sonora becomes a delectable woman'snipple. A river in Baja California acquires a surprising shape:a pink scorpion nestling in a bed of black earth. Are those realcows crossing the lagoon at Mexcaltitan or merely a mirage?Aren't those fishing boats anchored around a buoy at Puerto Penascoreally a butterfly freshly emerged from the chrysalis of thesea? Are the cupolas of Cholula mushrooms? Are the tiger cagesin Chapultepec Park made only of air?

Sun of Wind, my sun. On the cover of the geography book Iused in school as a boy was a picture of Mexico as a horn ofplenty, out of which flowed an overwhelming wealth of fruit aswell as a long stalk of wheat that turned into the Baja Californiapeninsula. That cornucopia appeared to be floating in midair. Nohand, no land held Mexico up in the sky. It was like a free-floatingplanet of infinite riches.

I had to believe in the powers of the god of wind, Ehecatl, inorder to hold in my imagination that Mexican cornucopia floatingin the sky, scattering its fruits and fertilizing the fields with windborneseeds.

To penetrate the wealth of Mexico is to discover at one and thesame time its permanence and its transience. For one moment,nothing changes and all the elements unite harmoniously. Whitebirds resting in the waters of a power dam rob it of its engineeredcoldness. Cattle and wheat fields, derricks, hotels, haciendas, moderncities, and beach resorts--these are all names for abundance.But do they express harmony as well? Perhaps real serenity is farmore modest and intimate. I find it in an aerial view of Tlacotalpan,with its peculiar knack for harmonizing gaiety and reserve.Here is a livable sensuality, the very definition of life in Veracruz.

Abundance also means the flight of the flamingos coming to feed,the pink blur of the birds on an orange sea, the silhouette of thejungle's green shadows. The shock of Mexican colors and the mutablehues of nature come together in a recently repainted villagechurch or in the haven of a Oaxaca hamlet. This is perfection, theharmony we long for, the peace of the elements.

Sun of Fire

Peace does not last. The fourth sun, Fire, is ready to scorch theearth, to make it resemble those craters that--only because whimsyis more necessary than need itself--allow themselves the luxury ofsurrounding a cornfield near the sky. From the air we can see asoccer field, its outlines burned into the asphalt of the city like theburning graphics of that portrait of the sky on the earth at Nazca,in Peru, which can only be seen from the air.

There is a stony place in Chihuahua called Rocas de Lumbre,Rocks of Fire. Only, the fire is not necessarily a visible flame butrather, at times, the paradox of burning water--the atl tlachinolliof the Nahuas--the inner conflagration that we know, that knowsitself, as death. As in the prose of the Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo,the lowest-lying field and the highest mountain have a hole in themthrough which escapes the heat of sexuality and death. Eros andThanatos are both entryways into the invisible underworld, theMictlan of the ancient Mexicans, where we enter wearing masks.We need another face for death, a mask that makes us acceptablefor the other life--a better face perhaps than the one we had whenwe lived on earth, when we were bathed by water and animatedby wind.

To see the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque from the air is tolook upon death. This pyramid was erected by Lord Pacal, first toanticipate and then to commemorate forever his own death. Fromabove, the extensive fields of zempuzuchil, the yellow flower of theDay of the Dead, are a sign of the service nature always providesfor death. Flowers the color of fire associate death with an invisiblefire disguised as life: the Sun of Fire that proclaims death does notexhaust itself in death, even though it brings it, as it were, to life.For life in Mexico foresees death; it knows that death is the originof all things. The past, the ancestors, are the source of the present.Now the craters are lakes, are cornfields; once they were boilersfilled with fire. Could they be that again? Of course--just as lifewill come back again, because death precedes it.

The Sun of Fire is not, then, an omen of inexorable destructionand catastrophe but a link in a circle where fire consumes air onlyto become its opposite, and then earth and then air again, beforeit burns and starts the cycle over.

Again, the Sun of Water

From on high, the four suns are consecutive but also simultaneous.As our gaze descends to the earth, it assigns precise names andplaces to each of the suns of creation. The name of Water may beAcapulco or Careyes, Puerto Escondido or Mazatlan, Veracruz orCancun. Three seas--the Pacific, the Caribbean, and the Gulf ofMexico--surround our land with more than six thousand miles ofcoastline. And these seas, although they are ours, bring news fromthe outside world on every wave.

From the gulf coast the god Quetzalcoatl journeyed to the Dawn,promising to return, to see if the people had put his principles ofpeace and brotherhood into practice. To that same coast came theSpanish conquistadors on the day prophesied for Quetzalcoatl'sreturn, thus appropriating to themselves an omen that was theirsonly by chance: the gods have returned to settle accounts withus. . . .

The Gulf of Mexico became from that day on the last culturalport of call of the Mediterranean in the Americas. Soldiers andmonks, scribes and merchants, pirates and poets, invaders and exilesbrought with them and carried through Veracruz the news oftwo worlds: America and Europe, Gulf and Mediterranean. Finalresting place of the waves of the Bosporus, the Cyclades, Sicily,and Andalusia, the Mare Nostrum of European antiquity comes toan end in Tampico, Villahermosa, and Campeche.

But the waters of Mexico also send back their waves throughthe Atlantic to the Mediterranean, and their message is the newsthat the New World so desired by Europe is yet to be discovered,is yet to be imagined. It harbors mankind's oldest myths, its mostsecret truths, its dreams of the creation of the world and of manamid violence, pain, hope; and joy.

"Let the day break!" exclaims the Popol Vuh. "Let the dawnappear in the sky and on the earth. There will be neither glory norgrandeur until the human creature exists."

In Mexico's second sea, the Caribbean, an invisible sentinelstands guard at Tulum, waiting for the impossible return of thegod. Sun and sea meet here. The watch is sleepless and eternal. Butno god will return, because the earth is demanding that its childrenrebuild it, that they themselves be the creators now.

Finally, on the Pacific coast, the waves tell of a world even moredistant than Europe--Cathay, the Kingdom of the Middle Earth,Cipango, the Land of the Rising Sun, and our vaporous sisters inthe shadows, the Philippines. Each of these islands and kingdomssends us its wealth--"Japan its silks, the South Sea its treasure ofrich pearls, China its mother-of-pearl," as the colonial poet Bernardode Balbuena says in his Grandeur of Mexico (1602).

In you are their grandeurs condensed, For you supply them with gold and fine silver, While they give you things more precious still.

The Sun of Water does not enclose us. It opens us, puts us incommunication, breaks down the barriers of isolation; it makes uscirculate within and without. We receive, we give, exchange, preparethe passage of water to land, of land to air, of air to fire, offire to water again.

Mexico is a portrait of the cycles of creation, a portrait of theskies and a succession of suns and elements that give no quarter.The portrait of the Mexicans is the portrait of creation.

That is why human victories are greater in Mexico. No matterhow harsh our reality may be, we do not deny any facet of creation,we do not deny any reality. We try, instead, to integrate allaspects of the cosmos into our art, our way of seeing, our sense oftaste, our dreams, our music, our language.

From the roof of Mexico, one can better appreciate this way ofbeing. We are like Calderwood's picture of Rivera's sculpture of agod that can be truly seen only at a distance, from on high.

This is a portrait of a creation that never rests, because its workis not yet complete.

Continues...

Excerpted from New Time for Mexico (with a New Preface)by Carlos Fuentes Copyright © 1997 by Carlos Fuentes. Excerpted by permission.
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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of California Press
• Date d'édition: 1997
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0520211839
• ISBN 13: 9780520211834
• Reliure: Broché
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 216
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible