The worse Pagan Fire ever! (blame my PhD examinations). Enjoy it.
Octavio Paz died at 84, the average age of death for a Mexican bourgeois during the nineties. If statistics are with us, that will be more or less the life expectancy for many decades. As a Literature student I remember that the first "literaturey" thing " I did was to attend a series of readings in honor of Octavio in the Universidad de Sonora in 1997.
Octavio Paz is a Tour de France for all the students of Literature who like to be very deep and attractive for the potential erotic companions who think that Literature is sexy. The arithmetics of this logic goes like this: Octavio Peace plus cigarettes plus alcohol plus a party in a classmate's house equals sexual rock and roll.But for the few whom look for Paz without flamboyant eagerness nor pseudointellectual pretensions the old teacher of Mixcoac can be a true source of adventures, in the reading of his work, in the contemplation of his acute philosophy or in snooping around his scandalous biography.
Able to summarize the history of the culture worldwide in a single fucking line, Octavio Paz is, in my humble opinion, the most brilliant Mexican man who ever step a step on the motherland. Sor Juana is even better than him, but for that reason I said "Mexican man". I'd make her president of Mexico without a doubt; I'd give Octavio Paz a secretariat with good pay.
But I digress, only because I have only read a couple of books by the Mexican intellectual to whom we pay our tribute this Sunday; what I want to do is confess my project. I call it, with unusual originality, "The Octavio Paz Project" and has consisted, since when I started studying Literature, in imitating the most important aspects of the biography of the Nobel Laureate.As Octavio Paz did, I taught classes to poor children in a library of my hometown. As he did it with his diplomatic position after Tlatelolco, I resigned my municipal position as a protest to the repression of the City against strikers in a Technical University in 2001.
After a scandal with a student newspaper of the University of Arizona I put a hiatus in my studies to take refuge in Paris, where I learned to cook. He also went to Paris, as myself, but in 1969.
Just as him, I was with a cat-loving woman, who left me (in Paz's case he was the Mexican macho S.O.B. who perpetrated the abandonment). As him, I visited India and as him I married a beautiful French woman.
When I was in the middle of my studies I robbed several volumes of his essays from the "Post Office Library", a small, ignored library in downtown Hermosillo. One could enter comfortably with an empty backpack and leave with a fattened ballast full of knowledge and sin. At home I read and I read Paz's books with eagerness, which consolidated my project: I would become a shadow of Paz in order to obtain, by parallelism, his successes.
I'm not yet disappointed by Comunism like he was; the State of Sonora hasn't published my excellent and completely fascinating poems yet: I still haven't visited Japan, but, hell, tell me who else has followed these steps as faithfully as me.At the end of my life, by pure inertia, the Nobel Prize will fall in my power like a very mature fruit that falls in the mouth of the persevering quadriplegic who was starving under a tree.
In 1990 Paz summoned a handful of coffee-place-intellectuals, like Mario Vargas Llosa and Jean-Francois Revel for a reunion of "Vuelta", the group-magazine that he founded on legendary times. An aunt gave me that year a pile of VHS cartridges with tapings of those discussions, that, peculiarly, were transmitted in open television.
Dear ladies, I was ten years old and my aunt wanted me to be cultured and exquisite, with a monocle and hunting trophies in my tobacco room. I recorded over those tapes the most varied and amusing things, like the Thundercats, the films of the Ninja Turtles, episodes from soap operas for my mother and some homemade films of when I could borrow a recording camera from my rich uncle.Now those "Vuelta" conversations cannot be obtained nor be seen anywhere. The route of Octavio Paz was his, not mine, but behind that route I have glimpses of a path that I recognize as a priceless lesson: To make oneself present by tracing one's past and to bet on the future. And to rob the life of another dude so you can win the Nobel Prize. God will decide.
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