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(Note: There will be other obituaries, eulogies, attempts to get at the whole of Carlos Fuentes, but this is merely my personal remembrance: subjective, incomplete, and with unstable emphases.)

I was always going to be a writer; as a child, my favorite Christmas gift from my parents was a typewriter. I sold my comics to the other kids beginning in the first grade, started writing short stories as a boy, completed a hilariously bad science fiction novella when I was about 11 (and which only a handful of people have seen – you know who you are.) However, it was not until my late teens that I began to think about becoming a novelist, and more specifically a Latin American novelist, in that sacred tradition.

On the surface, this seems unlikely. Growing up in Laredo, my experience with Mexico had more to do with the local nightclubs across the river than anything literary. It is impossible, however, to grow up in that town without certain influences being cast upon you; a culture that includes La Zona, Taco Palenque, Catholic school, and the sing-song cadence of the demented Spanglish we speak in that region. I am not sure how I first got the idea of being a Latin American novelist, but in retrospect it seems almost inevitable to flirt with the notion.

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Eventually I would find Jorge Amado, and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cortazar, and the almighty Jorge Luis Borges. But before any of those arrived I found Carlos Fuentes. Mexico’s greatest novelist. An international “man of letters,” a concept that hardly exists anymore. Fuentes was probably not the greatest influence on my younger self at that time, but he was midwife to all the others.

Thinking of Fuentes now makes me recall the Laredo Public Library, which was not a place I spent a lot of time in, having grown up near the local university library. I can see the bum sleeping on the bench outside, hear the twitter of birds on the thin trees, smell that unmistakable odor of unwashed clothes and bad ventilation. But mostly I remember exactly where the aisle was where they kept the books by Carlos Fuentes. It’s been more than 20 years, but in my mind’s representation I know just where they are.

I am pretty sure I began with a book called Cambio de Piel (A Change of Skin). It was a baffling exercise of a book to me then, and remains terribly flawed now, but it still remains a favorite. There is, as in all of his writing, power there. Fuerza.

When the four of you entered today all you saw was the narrow filthy streets and the packed houses that are all alike, all of one story, all a blind wall with a too wide door of cracked wood, all daubed yellow and blue.

And I was off.

When I first embarked on this adventure (and adventure it seemed), I had a certain trepidation that the culture of the novel was too different, that I would be literally lost in translation. That fear evaporated. Certainly A Change of Skin was not like any previous novel I had ever read, being metaphysical, self-conscious, political, and utterly alien and strange. The novel is aware of novelistic construction and deliberately subverts it. The characters give long diatribes about their chosen subjects, at times in the voice of Fuentes, at times not. Then, at the end, we find the author of this book signs his name, “Your ever lovin’ Freddy Lambert.” The author signs his work with a fictitious name? Or another character, this narrator distinct from Fuentes? (Hint: the ‘Freddy’ invoked is from Friedrich Nietzsche, perhaps the least ‘Freddy’ sort of person of all time.)

So here we go, Dragoness. That’s called taking the sword in your mouth and swallowing it up to the hilt, and sure enough, the Fair-Haired one told us, “There are eunuchs who have become eunuchs only to win the kingdom of heaven.” So, you see, the Gnostics put their balls on the table so that Baudelaire and Breton could be born, and Genet and Miller, so that we could dream the American Dream that enacts the crimes of Monk Ambrose in the feudal castles of Beverly Hills with the bleeding nun, la Belle Dame Sans Merci, Pollyanna Equanil of our masturbating dreams; you can hear his steps on the carpets of the glass prisons. And in regard to Marcion, when Polycarp saw him, he shouted, “I know you, First-Born of Satan!” simply because Marcion, a hipster if there ever was one, had been the first to understand that God is the Alien, the entirely Other…

You see what I mean by midwife. He actually mentions Hopscotch (Rayuela) by name in the book, leading me by the nose directly to Cortazar.

A Change of Skin was written in 1967 and has the hallmarks, as you can see. But in my teenage self, desiring to know All That There Is, and being presented with a succession of names, some familiar, some unknown, I was driven to find out what Fuentes was going on about. In those pre-Internet days, that meant much time spent in libraries, for whom (yes, whom) I retain a lasting affection. I can see now that this altered my taste in important ways, giving me an unshakable ardor for the Continent, its ideas and customs, its cinema represented by Herzog and Antonioni watched on poor VHS copies on television, its languages manifested in my dabbling with French and German.

This was also during the period in which I became aware of Freytag’s Triangle – the arc of drama – and so there were certain technical innovations that struck me. In The Death of Artemio Cruz, he distinguishes passages from one another by using first, second, and third-person narration. In Distant Relations the tense changes continually (but logically). However, beyond technique and the Continental obsessions, Fuentes did have a flair for gorgeous observation. In Distant Relations (a book that may have been one of the inspirations for My Dinner with Andre; in any case it is in the same métier) the storyteller remarks:

The elderly sleep very little, Branly repeats now. They feel besieged by the need for vigilance, and in this, old age is wise. Adjustments are made so that it is not psychologically necessary to sleep as much as before, as in the days when one came home worn out after poking into every corner of one’s grandfather’s castle, or after playing in the Parc Monceau, after making love with Myrtho in a nest of rose-colored eiderdowns, or after nights beneath the sulphurous lightning flashes of the trenches.

***

There were once Gods, and the Gods were defeated, or taken, or razed without mercy, but now and again they may flex their divinity among us moderns.

As in H. P. Lovecraft, there is a sense of historical foreboding in all of Fuentes’ work. Underneath the surface of things there is a past which has been trampled on by those same Europeans whose art we so admire. Sometimes it happens directly, as in the short story “Chac-Mool,” from his collection Burnt Water (and it is interesting, perhaps, to cross-reference the direct apparition in this story with “The Idol of the Cyclades” from Blowup and Other Stories by Cortazar, which features possession), but most often it is inherent in the structures, the people, the social world without direct manifestation. Sometimes this is handled with humor, as in Christopher Unborn, in which Mexico decides that a child born on October 12 with the appropriate surname will be “proclaimed PRODIGAL SON OF THE NATION, with practically unlimited powers of election, succession, and selection…MEXICAN MACHOS, IMPREGNATE YOUR WIVES – RIGHT AWAY!

TOMORROW MAY BE TOO LATE

WHEN THE FROST IS ON THE PUNKIN

THAT’S THE TIME FOR DICKIE DUNKIN”

However, in most cases, the historical reality of this living past, which achieved perhaps its most definitive expression in Octavio Paz, is a subject for philosophical reflection, whether in the remembrances of Artemio Cruz or the adventures of Baltasar Bustos in the struggle for Mexican independence in The Campaign. The Mexican story of invasion and manipulation from outside countries, conquest and control, is a constant theme of Fuentes’s work. It appeared to some extent in his most famous novel – one of his worst – called Old Gringo, which has a fascinating subject (what happened to Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared in Mexico?) but a certain laziness in execution.

We’re always being remembered for all the wrong things.

That probably makes sense in this case, however. It sets the paradigm, fits in with the theme. The past viewed without nostalgia, the old gods respected, the cycles of generative pain acknowledged.

In his story “Constancia,” Fuentes describes the feelings of an El Salvadoran refugee couple forced to part with their daughter:

Stay here, be reborn here, let us die, but you must go on living, Constancia, in our name, don’t let yourself be vanquished, don’t let yourself be destroyed by the violence of history, you must live, Constancia, you musn’t yield to exile, you must stem the tide of fugitives, at least save yourself, dear daughter, mother, sister, don’t let yourself be pulled under the current of exile, you at least remain, grow, be a sign: they survived here. Protect us with your memory, seal us with your eyes…

I imagine, I can only imagine; I do not know anything, even though I have felt the pain of  separation, being far from the one I love, have felt it deeply, to the point of tears. But now I can only imagine them – Constancia, Plotnikov, the dead child – because I finally see them as part of something greater, something I had not understood before. How long, Constancia, did you give life – my life – to your dead?

I understand that better now than I ever have.

I turned out not to be a novelist. Wrote some novels, none I deemed publishable, found a niche as an essayist and film critic, eventually put out some short stories with a screenplay on the way. I’ve stayed with the written word even when it didn’t seem to care for me too much.

We’re all more indebted to others, near and far, for the collage that constitutes ourselves. Carlos – hopefully I can call you Carlos – I never met you but I owe you a lot. See you soon, I’m sure.

And don’t forget your ever lovin’,

Joe Green

Article source: http://www.examiner.com/article/remembering-carlos-fuentes-1