Carlos Fuentes, you stole my heart. Not for yourself - I was born about half a century too late for that. You stole it on behalf of your country, with your eloquent and brutal and revelatory writings about Mexico. You present the land, the nation, as a personality - as a person, almost - and one that I find a very deep sympathy with. Empathy, even, in many suprising ways. Empathy with the country's lifelong struggle to survive, to remain, in the face of attack, incursion, exclusion. Its multiple personalities confined to life in one body. Its essential wealth and wisdom, contrasted with the poverty and corruptibility of its historical circumstance. I have travelled through Mexico, the summers of the past two years, in search of this elusive and enchanting entity that I see in your writings, both fiction and otherwise. And not only have I begun to find some of it, but it's found me. It's not just tourism, this. It's a journey that seeks to understand some of the prime movers of my own life, and the life of the world in which I live. This search is a river that I can channel underground for a time, but it doesn't look likely to dry up anytime soon. Ongoing conversations with friends - last night the most recent - bring its flow within sight, or at least within tantalizing hearing. For now, I have to recognize it with this, the most mindbending quote gleaned from your writings, Mr. Fuentes, so far. And the quote with which my own idealist soul finds the deepest, most startling resonance.
"In the land of need that is Mexico, desire is a central fact of life and imagination. Western civilization, in a certain sense, has been one long road toward the encounter of desire and its objects. In our time, we realize that a permanent contradiction has presided over this journey: the desire of the Western world diminishes in inverse proportion to the number of objects capable of satisfying it. The desires and the objects have often been false, and today they are in any case diminished: smaller desires, smaller objects...
In Mexico, the impossible distance between desire and the thing desired has given both yearning and object an incandescent purity. The bridges drawn from the shore of aspiration to the shore of satisfaction must override, by force, all "realistic" contingency. In Mexican popular life, in our definitive acts of love and death, passion and revolution, art and celebration, opposites meet and desire is nothing but the acknowledgment of the estrangement previous to the reunion. It is, perhaps, even the condition for the reunion to take place. Death shall become life, revolution shall be a fiesta, passion shall become art, spirit matter, accident essence, and body soul. You shall be I. A mask, a word, a greeting, or a farewell, a way of walking or looking will be enough for the meeting to occur: any celebration that ensures that we come closer -- before sickness, death, separation, or distance triumphs all over again. A disguise, a dance are sufficient to obtain the desired beauty, courage, sensuality, identity: I shall be You. For after all, desire is love for something else; it is transfiguration. Desire must assail reality to meet its object, to recover the unity of the subverted Eden that is our country. The nostalgia of paradise lost, the impossibility of paradise future leave most Mexicans with no possibility other than paradise in the present, the most difficult of all paradises to inhabit because so fugitive -- the past one instant, the future the next."
- Carlos Fuentes, _A New Time For Mexico_
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