Prolific Fuentes Takes a Dire Frolic in ‘Mug Sicko City’

Fresh from “Kafka-pulco” with a redwood tan, author Carlos Fuentes is holding court in his modern Mexico City home. The journalists and intellectuals stream single file through his book-lined living room, his refuge from the assault of a honking, throbbing, smoking capital that he calls “Makesicko Seedy.”

If it’s becoming the hellhole of human waste that Fuentes describes in his novel “Christopher Unborn”--well then, for Fuentes, it is fertilizer; he is flourishing.

Now 60, Fuentes this year has seen his novels “Aura” produced as an opera, “The Old Gringo” made into a Hollywood movie and now, “Christopher Unborn” published in English. His new book, “Constancia and Other Novels for Virgins,” is making its debut in Spain.

In “Christopher Unborn,” an Orwellian story of Mexico City in 1992 narrated by the fetus Christopher, Mexico’s most renowned author sets the tone with political slogans--”Citizens of Mexico: Industrialize. You Won’t Live Longer But You Will Live Better.”

Through his mother’s abdominal wall, Fuentes’ Christopher uses inventive language to describe “Mug Sicko City,” the industrialized capital with a shortage of polluted water, covered by a sky that drips “a black, oily, carboniferous rain” on the skeletons of buildings. Overrun by rats, Mexico City “is an immense, ulcerated crater, a cavity in the universe, the dandruff of the world, the chancre of the Americas, the hemorrhoid of the Tropic of Cancer.”

Not a pretty place.

Suffocating and suffocated, Fuentes’ Mexico is a place where terrorism is an adolescent rite of passage and prizes are given to poets for Not Having Written Anything during 1991. It is where “nothing that is said is done, was done, or will ever be done.” Instead, a new national virgin, Mamadoc, is created to save the nation.

Fuentes tells the apocalyptic tale with the same enthusiasm that he exudes in person. Like a child frolicking in the ocean, Fuentes splashes, tumbles and plays with language. He loves words. The more he talks, the more animated he grows, flailing his arms as he argues that he and his book are, in fact, optimistic about the future of Mexico.

“The book is a warning. It hopes to be an exorcism. I truly hope it is not a prophecy. But many things clash in it and one is the black view of life,” Fuentes said in an interview at his home.

In his lifetime, Fuentes has watched Mexico City grow from less than a million people with a view of magnificent volcanoes into the world’s largest and darkest capital with a population of 20 million. The cries of vendors and organ grinders have been overwhelmed by revving motors and honking cars. The elegant San Jeronimo neighborhood where he lives with his French wife and their two children once was a place for weekend get-aways, far from the capital. Now, it isn’t even the southern rim.

“At least 75% of the city has died on me, so in that sense it has to be a bitter book. It has to be a pessimistic book that asks if we’ve been able to do so much damage in 60 years, what are we capable of doing in the next 10?

“At the same time, I feel that it’s also a book about the tremendous resilience of this city, of this country, of the people of Mexico. I think the energy of Mexico is enormous,” he said.

Fuentes wrote “Christopher Unborn” in 1987, two years after the fatal earthquake that mobilized Mexican society to form neighborhood associations to help each other when the government failed to provide sufficient aid.

But it was conceived long before the historic, 1988 presidential election that shook the foundation of the 60-year-old Mexican political system with an unprecedented vote for the opposition. President Carlos Salinas de Gortari won the election with the lowest vote ever for a PRI candidate, and a questionable count at that.

In the book, a dying Institutional Revolutionary Party, called PRI, still controls the country, or what’s left of it, since much of Mexico has been sold off to pay the foreign debt. But Fuentes puts an opposition National Action Party president in office--an idea, he says, that was as far-fetched at the time as, say, Solidarity taking power in Poland.

Dead Political Party

“I think the PRI is pretty much a dead duck,” Fuentes said. “A new system is struggling to take its place. This is not unique of Mexico, it’s happening in a number of societies where the political systems are disintegrating before our eyes.

“In the novel, an old system has died and we haven’t been capable of inventing a new system. Well, the new system will make its own way through the jungle of Mexican politics, driven by the energy of the Mexican society. As I see it, society--the political parties, unions and business associations in this country--are way up in front of the government,” he said.

If civil society is the motor, Fuentes says it is navigating through uncharted waters of change.

“There is no intellectual conception or ideology that says, ‘This is what we want, this is what is going to happen.’ It is more of trial and error. . . . In Central Europe, where everybody is celebrating the death of 40 years of Stalinism, the Western press is equating it to the triumph of capitalism. That is an enormous mistake. It may be the end of Stalinism, but it is also the result of 40 years of Communist rule. Lech Walesa puts it quite well when he says we are trying to make something better than capitalism.

“My personal feeling is that the future is not capitalism or communism, but some form of democratic socialism,” he said.

‘Guerrilla Dandy’

Fuentes’ politics come as no surprise. Long a defender of revolutionary governments, the well-to-do author once was dubbed “The Guerrilla Dandy,” by New Republic magazine. He was born in Panama, raised partly in the United States and has become a bilingual, bicultural interpreter of Latin America for U.S. audiences.

But, whereas Americans consider him an authority on Mexico, some Mexicans feel Fuentes is too much of a gringo to understand his own country.

While Fuentes envisions a Mexico with democratic socialism, President Salinas is moving the country in the other direction, with an economic modernization program that sells state industries to private enterprise, lessens the power of labor unions and embraces foreign investment.

“There are far too many people in this country who are dispossessed. They believed the Mexican Revolution would give them land or credit or seeds or whatever. That hope has evaporated. But there is political hope. If they can’t give us welfare, they must give us democracy. If they don’t give welfare or democracy, what can they give?”

Like Carlos Monsivais, his friend and fellow intellectual, Fuentes places his faith in civil society.

In “Christopher Unborn,” he says, this optimism is revealed through the struggle of his main characters, Angel, Angeles and the baby Chris--Mexico’s holy trinity--among forces of good and evil. He feels optimism in their capacity for survival amid the horrors of his Mexico City in 1992.

“The beautiful thing about writing novels is that whatever plan you have, the novel will outstrip you. It is like civil society. There is a nonintentional dimension to any novel which is probably the most interesting part,” he said.

Fuentes said he was pleased with the staging of “Aura” as an opera, but cannot yet bring himself to see the film of “The Old Gringo,” which opens Friday in Los Angeles but has been showing in Mexico City for several weeks. An avid movie fan, Fuentes says he fears “two hours of sheer anguish” if the film does not match his imagination.

“I am very aware that the visual imagination is completely different from the verbal imagination, and if I’m sitting there looking for connections between my verbal imagination and the visual imagination on the screen, and feeling frustrated if I do not find them, then I’m going to suffer. And I’d rather not be unfair toward the film in any way,” he said.

The Young Books

As for his own future, Fuentes is characteristically upbeat. He is working hard and happily, he said after a week’s vacation in Acapulco, his favorite beach which he also managed to destroy in the book (an Acapulcalypse). He has has finished the first draft of another novel and is planning several more.

“I am writing my young books, the books I wanted to write when I was 20 but didn’t know how to write. Now I can write them because I have more knowledge. I have greater technical ability, greater freedom for writing,” Fuentes said.

“These are not my last books. They are my first books.”

“THE OLD GRINGO”

A movie review by Sheila Benson and TV documentary review by Ray Loynd appear in Calendar. Pages 1 and 22.