The Realist Magician

After 45 minutes of waiting to have my picture taken with the president at an environmental fund-raiser in a Bel-Air living room, I finally get to the head of the line. What will I say? People are motioning for me to hurry. I approach the president, who it seems is also motioning for me to hurry.

“Hello,” I say. “Carlos Fuentes says hello.” Talk about currency. The president smiles. “He’s my friend,” he says, to the chagrin of all the handlers. “We had a terrific dinner together once on Martha’s Vineyard with Vargas Llosa and William Styron.” “Yes,” I say, interrupting him. “You quoted Faulkner.” He’s beaming. “They checked on you, you know,” I say (which I probably shouldn’t have). “And they found you’d got it all right.”

He pauses for a second. “There are some things,” he says, grinning as I’m being ushered out the door, “that even a politician can’t fake.”

Such is the power of literature. And such, perhaps, is the power of Carlos Fuentes.

If love and hate are two sides of the same coin, as it is often said, then power and sadness are two sides of a lesser coin.

“Here is the thing I am proudest of,” Fuentes says, picking a small white book from a pile of books that is bigger than the coffee table in his London flat. It is called “La Palabra Sobrevive” (“The Word Survives”), written by his son, Carlos Fuentes Lemus, who died last year at 25 in

Puerto Vallarta. Carlos Jr. was a hemophiliac, and the self-portrait on the cover of this book of poems is a simple pencil drawing with large red blotches over the eyes and throat.

He lived in Cambridge, Mass., London and Mexico during his short life. He was an artist in many mediums: painting, photography and poetry. Reading the poems, it seems clear, as it often does and sometimes incorrectly, that he prophesied his own death.

Maneras de Morir

No le creas nada a mi mente disenada por

los medios

No creas que yo lo crea

Hay cicatrices que se cierran pero se

destacan

Dejame verte

Que milagro Margarita

Solo mi ojo y tu nuca

Hay demasiadas maneras de morir.

Ways of Dying

Don’t believe (anything stemming from)

my media-shaped mind

Don’t believe that I believe it

There are scars that close but still stand

out

Let me see you!

What a surprise, Margarita

Only my eye and your nape

There are too many ways of dying

(translation by Wilfred Ramirez)

Fuentes senior, 72, is a big, straight-spined, handsome man whose carriage evokes both cultures in his family: German and Mexican. He commands a power in literary and political circles that is almost a birthright. His friends are people like Ethel Kennedy and William Styron. His mother went into labor with him while watching a silent-screen version of “La Boheme” with Lillian Gish in a movie house. His father was a Mexican diplomat.

Fuentes spent much of his childhood in Washington, D.C., then in Chile. The family returned to Mexico when he was 15. He studied law, became Mexico’s ambassador to France in the mid-1970s, then taught at Harvard. He now spends half of the year in Mexico City and half in London, where I visited him in his fifth-floor, light-filled Kensington flat.

The writer claims that grandmothers are the best source for all stories. His new novel, “The Years With Laura Diaz,” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is published in English this month, translated by Alfred Mac Adam, a year after its publication in Mexico. The story is based on the life of his paternal grandmother, Emilia Rivas Gil de Macias, from Sonora. But it also draws heavily on the life of his uncle, Carlos Fuentes Boettiger. Uncle Carlos was a poet and a rebel who wrote for a magazine called Bohemian Muse. He died of typhoid fever at the age of 21.

The characters in the novel are drawn from Fuentes’ family constellation, but the breath of the story, its spine of sadness, lies in the death of the young revolutionary uncle. It is his death that inspires the will and idealism of his young half-sister, Laura Diaz, who grows up to be a politically active artist. “The biggest challenge,” says Mac Adam, “was finding a female voice. Carlos rarely has female narrators. This book brings us back to the glory days of ‘Artemio Cruz.’ If Cruz embodied post-revolutionary Mexico, Laura Diaz embodies the new Mexico. She loses everything and gains integrity.”

Besides families and tragedy, one theme in Fuentes’ writing is the difference between the soul of a bureaucrat and the soul of a revolutionary. Sometimes they inhabit the same body, but often, romantically, they do not. Fuentes has often said it is impossible “to have art and life at the same time.” He talks about an early point in his life when he could have entered the Mexican government as a representative of labor. “Where will I end up?” he thought. “With a big car and a house in Bosques de Las Lomas [a fancy Mexico City neighborhood]. I will end up dead. I decided right there that I would do what I liked.”

*

He has written 19 books, contributed to countless volumes on the history of Latin America and Spanish literature. “We are often told,” he says of the gang of four, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the late Octavio Paz and himself, “you guys write history with a capital H. We did,” he admits, “feel a need to fill vast silences of Spain and Latin America, to contradict those who felt there was no great novel, for example, in Spanish after ‘Don Quixote.’ ” These days, he says, he is interested in history with a small h.

In many of his books, men hold the power in the world, and women hold its sadness. But in private, at home, men carry the sadness and women hold the power. There is a phrase embedded in “The Years with Laura Diaz” that reads like a haiku. It describes the relationship between men and women in the world of the novel: “The man stared at the woman. The woman stared at the sky.”

It is often said that London is a man’s city and truly, this October, it seems overrun with men. Women’s voices on this afternoon seem louder than necessary, as they lead their reluctant children from shop to shop, as though they were fighting to be heard above all the humming masculinity. It’s good to enter the dark hallway and walk up to the apartment Fuentes and his wife, Sylvia, have lived in for part of each year since 1990. She has her own television show in Mexico for which she interviews artists, writers and other cultural figures. “One day,” Fuentes says proudly, “she interviewed Seamus Heaney and Neil Jordan on the same day. She’s interviewed Marc Chagall! Ionesco!”

The room we sit in is filled with paintings and family photos (Fuentes also has a 25-year-old daughter, Natasha). But it is not possible to ignore in particular a photograph of fine-featured Carlos Jr. that holds pride of place over books and art.

“There are moments in your life when you want to exorcise something, reach some kind of understanding,” he says of the impulse to write a book. “Sometimes it is a death. I lost,” Fuentes sighs, “a young son full of promise.”

“Will is essential,” he adds, drawing himself up again. “Without will, you cannot shape your world. Without will, you are a vegetable. Memory is also essential, the habit of memory.” He talks a bit about friendship, and about Styron, who is suffering again from the depression he described so beautifully in his book “Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness.” It is as if Fuentes has given his face permission to fall. “Sometimes there is nothing you can do, except let them know you care about them.”

Fuentes remembers his own father, who died at 69. “He was full of kindness, and he had great taste.” His mother, 92, is alive and living in Mexico. She calls frequently with extremely lucid gossip for her son. “She does not give in to sentimentality,” he says, proud or rueful or both. “She is full of loyalty and uprightness. I mean this physically: She watches her weight! She used to make me stand against the wall for half an hour for my posture.”

“Let’s see who he is,” he says when I ask him about Mexico’s president-elect, Vicente Fox. “Is he the 20th Century Fox? Or the 19th century Fox? It was a nasty campaign, but in the end, the PRI was corrupt and exhausted, with nothing more to give the country.” He is worried about the reactionary nature of the Guanajuato legislature, the province in which Fox was governor. “They are against abortion!” he says. “Overrun with clericalism!” Ever the aristocratic intellectual, a man of the left, he despises provincialism, American or Latin.

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And yet, for all his good posture, his good bones, his hatred of provincialism, his will and control, it often seems Fuentes inhabits a fantasy world of his own. “Every single dream I’ve ever remembered becomes banal. It’s the dreams I have forgotten that are important,” he says. Magical realism, that much-overused phrase, is not what Fuentes writes, it’s realist magic.

The alchemy is more important than the explanation to Fuentes. Even as the maid neatly brings a tray with water, even as the weak London sun begins to set, he is making up words. “Children are our hopes,” he muses. And a burden--but a burden with wings. He shakes his head, envisioning angels. He does a minor alchemy, spelling out a new word for me: “birden.”