Fuentes sat in the room adjacent to mine on the sixth floor of the Coolidge Hall, which housed Harvard University’s Centre for International Affairs. I was a Visiting Fellow for a year (1987-88). Fuentes was the Robert F. Kennedy Professor in Latin American Studies, fresh from a year ‘in the other Cambridge’ as the Simon Bolivar Professor. We met occasionally and had a lot to talk about: our common friend Octavio Paz; ‘the other Cambridge’; the problems of reconciling economic development and cultural heritage in the third world countries like Mexico and India; the connection between history and novel; my own poetry and the oral poetry of the primitive tribes of India; Christopher Unborn , the novel he had just completed, and Myself with Others , a volume of essays he was finalising.
Fuentes enjoyed teaching and contrasted it with writing. “Writing is an extremely lonely business; you are very much by yourself. It is like being in air. Teaching is a decent way to be in touch with younger people, with their thoughts, and getting your juices flowing again.” He emphasised the tradition of Cervantes in the Spanish novel. His Christopher Unborn , he felt, was a fine reconciliation between what he called the La Mancha tradition of Sterne and Diderot and the Waterloo tradition symbolised by writers like Stendhal and Balzac and ending with Dostoevsky. I discovered that, like me, he held Dostoevsky in very high regard. He lamented the growing ‘provincialisation’ of the modern novel, its lack of density and epic range. It rarely attempted an archetypal image of life in our times linking it to other times. Its concern seemed to be too much in the passing phenomenon, the events of the day and rarely did t seek to sum up or symbolise an age and its anguished destiny.
Fuentes emphasised the cultural continuity in the Mexican tradition; something that has survived the fragmentation created by political and economic models. And this continuity, he said, stretched all the way from Indian cultures prior to the Spanish conquest right down to the present day.
I told him about the Meriah sacrifice of the Kondhs, an aboriginal tribe in my state Odisha. I mentioned the invocation to earth-mother accompanying this ritual. We discussed the corresponding ritual in ancient Mexico at the sun pyramid: the human sacrifice to the Sun God so that he is rejuvenated by the infusion of fresh blood and does not die away by shedding energy day after day for the benefit of the earth and its inmates. Mexico was the middle kingdom with ancient Tenochtitlan, at the site of today’s Mexico City, considered to be the centre of the universe. Spanish language, culture and governance replaced the Aztecs in the 16th century but a grand civilisation had bloomed and faded even before the Aztecs. Like Octavio Paz, Fuentes also felt that modern Mexico had to look back to and derive strength from its ancient heritage.
Fuentes was critical of modern Mexico’s many ills and the city that is its nerve centre. He insisted on calling it the ‘make-sick-o-city’, and yet, hehad a love-hate relationship with it. “There is a nostalgia developing within me when I am away.” At the same time, he was critical of its inadequacies, its growing squalor and its commercialisation.
We talked about the dichotomy in the societies with an inherited great tradition: India, Mexico, Greece, Egypt, Italy and China. Each of these countries was haunted by a glorious past that contrasted sharply with cruel situations and realities of today. Vedic chants and communal riots; Plato’s dialogues and a young Greek selling steaks in Manhattan; Aztec grandeur and corruption in the most polluted metropolis in the world; Confucius and the happenings at Tiananmen Square… They made strange dichotomies, binary oppositions. The past that haunts, the future that beckons and the present that has many irritations hanging as a mist.
We agreed that our countries needed a new baptism in fire and water: to purify, to eliminate the dross and to rejuvenate. I reminded Fuentes of ‘Concord’, the poem that Paz had marked for him: Water above/ Grove below/ Wind on the roads/ Quiet well/ Bucket’s black spring water/ Water coming down to the trees/ Sky rising to the lips .
Yes, he agreed, with such baptism, the sky would rise one day to our lips and give us a new vision of life.
Sitakant Mahapatra is a renowned Odia poet and author and a Jnanpith awardee.
