Bob Rae talks to Mexican writer, Carlos Fuentes, in Toronto in 2000.
This conversation between Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes and Bob Rae, recorded in 2000, offers a time capsule of North American relations at a pivotal moment. The interview captures Fuentes just after Mexico's historic election that ended the PRI party's 71-year rule—a seismic political shift that he explains with characteristic depth and nuance. While Fuentes delves into Mexican politics with a detail that might seem excessive to casual listeners, his purpose is profound: he's illustrating how Mexico's complex political evolution deserves the same serious consideration given to more dominant nations.
What's particularly striking, viewed from today, is Fuentes' perspective on North American identity and free trade. Speaking when NAFTA was relatively new, he offers insights that feel remarkably prescient as we witness the pendulum swing from the market-linked regional identities of the 1990s toward the more protectionist national boundaries of today. As a cosmopolitan intellectual fluent in Spanish, English, and French, Fuentes represents a vision of North America that transcends borders while acknowledging deep cultural differences—"the differences are huge," he admits.
Despite his global perspective, Fuentes finds his deepest meaning in the personal: "Grandmothers are the best novelists," he tells Rae, suggesting that family storytelling contains more authentic truth than official histories. This tension between grand political narratives and intimate personal stories runs throughout their conversation, as Fuentes discusses his disciplined writing routine, his diplomat father's influence, and the powerful female protagonist of his then-new novel, The Years with Laura Diaz.
Throughout this exchange, we witness Fuentes' remarkable ability to weave together cultural creation and political engagement, offering a unified vision of human experience that remains relevant despite—or perhaps because of—the dramatic changes in our world since 2000.
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The audio recording of Carlos Fuentes in conversation with Bob Rae was recorded on stage in Toronto in October of 2000 and is used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Find out more about all of TIFA’s Canadian and international author events, both virtual, in-person and on-demand, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.
Click here to check out Season One of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to all 26 episodes which feature Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Paley and many more.
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SHOW NOTES
Works by Carlos Fuentes
The Old Gringo (ebook) (print edition)
The Years with Laura Diaz (print edition) (ebook)
Vlad: a Novel (audiobook) (ebook)
The Death of Artemio Cruz (print book)
Terra Nostra (print book)
Where the Air is Clear (print book)
Aura (print book)
Other Related Books or Materials
About the Host of Writers Off the Page
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.
Music is by Yuka
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.
OPENING MUSIC SEGMENT (2-3 seconds)
RANDY: Welcome to Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, produced by the Toronto Public Library and in association with the Toronto Festival of Authors. I’m Randy Boyagoda. In this episode, Carlos Fuentes has a conversation with Bob Rae that shows us why he wasn’t just a great Latin American man of letters. He was a great Latin American statesman of letters.
CF teaser: We were together several years ago here in Toronto with Robertson Davies, and the question was, "Is there a common culture of North America?" And we came down to the fact that the differences are huge. The differences are huge. One thing the Canadian audience said is, they were quite surprised that, coming from the weaker and poorer part of the Triple Alliance of North America, I was not that afraid of the gringos. I was not that afraid of the gringos because I admit that they have all the power in the world and they have this great superficial commercial influence. Yes, you will find McDonald's all over the place, and you will find something called Taco... I don't know what….And you will also find the great influence of the best of North American culture, that is the literature. Do you know of something that fills my heart with joy, is that today Mexican salsa sells more in the United States than that abomination called ketchup. And that is something.
RANDY: Early in this interview with Canadian political leader and public figure Bob Rae, Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes describes how he spends his days in the six months of the year he spends in London. Invoking Goethe’s prizing of early morning time as the best time to work – the cream of the day, he called it – Fuentes gets up at 5 o’clock, writes all morning, goes for an hour-long walk in a London cemetery, taking note of especially memorable epitaphs, buys and reads several newspapers, has lunch with his wife, reads books for the afternoon, and then goes out for dinner and a show. Again, he only does this for the six months of the year he spends in London; when he’s in his native Mexico, Fuentes explains, he has a glorious breakfast, a late and long lunch, and an even later, even longer dinner, with visitors and conversations taking up the time in between. While obviously the London model, with its neatness and order, is more conducive to the practicalities of the writing life, the Mexico model is more conducive to its inspiration, given the elaborate sensory and interpersonal intensities it suggests. Likewise, in this interview Fuentes notes, as he did at other points in his career, that grandmothers write the best novels, which he glosses by explaining that his current London-Mexico pattern has a deep source: he lived abroad for much of the year as a child, and his parents always sent him back to Mexico for summer stays with his grandmothers. Their first-person sense of living, continuous Mexican history is what Fuentes tries to recreate in his work, accounting for its sprawling, mysterious, chaotic, beautiful features. Indeed, The Years with Laura Diaz, the novel he’s in Toronto to read from and discuss, is nothing less than a decade-by-decade chronicle of one woman’s dramatic life pursued in concert with many of the great artistic and political dramas of the twentieth century. I offer this very brief summary here because you won’t hear much about the novel for a while, in the interview itself. To be sure, eventually it comes up, but that’s after Bob Rae and Fuentes – both the sons of diplomats, both diplomats, themselves – discuss Mexican and North American culture and politics with wonkish gusto. More than two decades later, their analyses are obviously dated, particularly when it comes to commentary about globalization and intercultural contact and influence between Mexico and the United States, never mind Fuentes’ passing, quickly disavowed joke about sex with hotel chambermaids. But what you learn from their exchange, before Rae asks Fuentes to say more, more directly about The Years with Laura Diaz, is that this eminent man of letters understood himself as being responsible, beyond the pages of his many novels, for understanding and commenting on the state of his nation, and on the state of the world around his nation, not least its neighbour immediately to the north. This leads, yes, to a few easy jokes about ketchup versus salsa and about Taco Bell, but also to more emphatic expressions of disappointment about dividedness within and between nations and peoples, and expressions of hope for the prospect of fusion and transformation across those divides. These statements of disappointment and hope remain relevant, even if they weren’t authored by Carlos Fuentes’ grandmothers.
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Bob Rae: Good evening, everyone. My name is Bob Rae and I'm going to be in conversation with Carlos Fuentes this evening, and we both agreed that this would be the Bob and Carlos Show. So Carlos, let me start by welcoming you to Toronto and to Canada...
Carlos Fuentes: Thank you, Bob.
BR: And say how delighted we are to have you with us. At the end of the book which is, by the way, a wonderful book, you tell... In the acknowledgements, you talk about your own life and you start with the wonderful sentence saying that the best... "Grandmothers are the best novelists." And perhaps you could tell us a little bit about how this novel fits into the context of your own life and really the life of your family.
CF: Yes. Well, let me tell you, Bob, I am a diplomat's son.
BR: Me too. Maybe that's why we're here, I don't know.
[laughter]
CF: We started on the right footing, you see? This is not the Bob and Carlos Show for nothing. Is it?
[laughter]
CF: And so I grew up in many cities, Rio De Janeiro and Washington DC, and there was Chile, Buenos Aires, but I had the good fortune that every summer, wherever I was, I was sent back to Mexico so as not to forget the Spanish language when I was living in Washington and to be near my grandmothers, to live with them during the summer months. And the stories I heard from them, I think, really were the breeding ground of my fiction, of my interest in writing. There were such fantastic stories that I said, "One day I have to write them down." And especially in this book that tells the story of my migrant families from Spain and Germany. I was tempted to write when I was 15, when I was 20, when I was 30. I said, "No, no, I have to wait, I have to wait, I have to wait until I have the age in which I can see the totality of these stories as they would have evolved, not only as they were told to me by my grandmothers, but as they could have evolved in the imagination of future generations," because actually this is a novel told by the great grandson of Laura Diaz. It would seem that it is a narrative strictly in the third person, but it isn't, it's actually a memoir from one of her descendants.
BR: But the novel really reflects the... You go on a voyage of discovery in writing this book.
CF: Yep.
BR: You started... You went back to the towns and villages, including and the City of Veracruz but you really took yourself on a journey in which you tried to recreate in a sense your own family history, as well as the fiction, the story of Laura.
CF: Yeah, of course. But what happens always is that no matter how autobiographical or biographical this might be, there comes a moment when the novel decides to fly on its own, to take wings and leave the author and his memories and his biographies and take on its own life. All novelists know that you can sit down the night before and write a little resume of what I'm going to write tomorrow. And it's very clear and rational, you've thought it out. Then something happens during the night, dreams, nightmares, love affairs. I don't know what. Maybe too much alcohol.
BR: Right. It could be.
CF: But the next day you start writing with clear purpose knowing what you're doing, and then something mysterious, very mysterious happens, and you go off into directions you had never thought about, as though someone else were writing the novel. And this happens partially and also some ways as a totality, the novel starts by writing itself or something writes through you and it becomes a combination of your will, but also of your dreams and of aspects of your own psychology that you had never discovered and would never discovered if you didn't sit down and write.
CF: I'm interested in the the act of actually sitting down to write itself. I mean when I meet real writers, not just people who scribble little books, but real writers. Tell us about the discipline of your day, because people know you were Mexico's ambassador to France, you've been a professor of literature in many different countries, you've always worked at different things. Tell us about the discipline of actually sitting down to write what... How do you do it?
CF: Well, you've just said the key word, which is discipline. I was very close to a great Mexican writer because I first met him when I was two years old. He was the Mexican ambassador to Brazil, Alfonso Reyes. Great humanist. Borges considered him the best prose writer in the Spanish language. And I always said that I learned literature sitting on the knees of Alfonso Reyes. But when I was 17, 18 years old, he was living in Cuernavaca, and I went a lot to live with him and to learn from him. He was a magnificent human being, a warm personality and a sage. And sometimes, I would go off …
[foreign language]
CF: In the evening with mariachis and all that. And I would come back and I would find at 5:00 in the morning the light in Alfonso Reyes' study was lit. And he was sitting there writing, and I say "hello" to Alfonso, "Why, you are up at 5:00, writing?" He says, "Yes, I believe in gratis dictum. One must get up early and take the cream off the top of a day." And then you can study the theory of colours, intrigues in the court of Weimar, make love to chambermaids, all the things got to did. But the thing was to get the work done, first of all. And I followed that...
BR: What, the chambermaids part or just the...
[laughter]
CF: No, no, no, no. That goes without saying, up to a certain age, huh? Because there's nothing more ridiculous than a middle-aged Don Juan. One should avoid that. Bunielle paints it very well in his pictures, You become Fernando Ray and start trying to break through corsets and horrible things. But the important thing was to learn that discipline... And I am a very disciplined writer. I get up at 6:00 in the morning, I start writing at 7:00. I write from 7:00 to 12:00. I do this in London where I live part of the year, then I take a big stroll, an hour stroll through the old Brompton Cemetery, which is a quiet place where you can think and read the extraordinary inscriptions in English tombs. The best I found is "here lies lady so and so. She went from illusion to reality."
[laughter]
CF: So it sums up the whole philosophy of life.
BR: I heard one...
CF: I buy my newspapers, I have lunch with my wife, I read three hours in the afternoon, and then you have London, the theatre, movies, opera, all that. So it's a very disciplined life. In Mexico, you start by having an incredible breakfast of huevos rancheros with politicians at 8:00. Then you have a lunch that begins at 3:00 and ends at 6:00. Then you have a dinner that begins at 10:30 and ends at 2:30 in the morning. Goodbye writing. No writing gets done that way.
[laughter]
BR: So that explains why you spend all your time in London.
CF: No, half a year. Half a year. Then … you know, writing is a very solitary profession. Writing is not done by a committee, so there comes a moment when you have to be in touch with people and that happens in Mexico. That happens tonight, I come here to Harbourfront or I give lectures in the United States, other parts of Europe, because you need to be in contact with other human beings.
BR: Now, I have to ask you, are you a word... Have you become a word processor person, or are you just...
CF: Oh, no. I write with this. This is the only way, with a pen and paper, that I feel the emotion and the sensuality of writing going from my heart and brain through my hand to my pen to the paper. The rest is like making love with a condom, I don't know about that.
[laughter]
CF: Excuse me.
BR: So much for... So much for the theory of safe writing, I was gonna say.
[laughter]
CF: Okay.
BR: Carlos, we have to take advantage of your being with us to talk about the extraordinary changes that have been happening in Mexico the last while. The theme of many of your novels, of course, 3D has been the history of the pre... The history of the revolution, and its institutionalization and its corruption. I think of The Death of Artemio Cruz, which is perhaps one of your best known novels in Canada and North America.
CF: Yeah.
BR: Give us your take now on what's happened in the last while.
CF: Well, you know, if you look at the history of Mexico, Mexico has had authoritarian governments throughout its history, from the authoritarian rule of the Aztecs through Spanish Royal Absolutism for three centuries, the colony. Then Republican authoritarianism with two brief interludes. The what we call a Republica Restaurada of Benito Juarez after the defeat of the French and the execution of Maximilian, a brief period of democracy, and then the extremely brief period of Francisco Madero and his immediate sacrifice. And then the revolution, and the revolution, as you say, institutionalized through a peculiar pact with the people saying, we will give you education, we will give you social benefits, we'll give you stability, but we won't give you democracy.
CF: And this worked for quite some time, you think of Lázaro Cárdenas, the governor, Lázaro Cárdenas indeed brought a lot of benefits to the people. But then the regime of the PRI became so corrupt, so self-satisfied, so uncritical, it muffled criticism, and it spoke of the Mexican miracle as though we were Germany. They became bananas, really. But this ended tragically in a terrible night, the night of October 2, 1968, the massacre at Tlatelolco. And that is where the PRI government lost legitimacy. And in spite of the efforts of many succeeding governments to restore that legitimacy, it was broken, it was broken forever. Democratic gains were made little by little, little by little by opposition parties, by a more and more critical press, by civil society, basically. A civil society...
CF: you know, the young men and women who were murdered at Tlatelolco had been educated by the governments of the revolution and the ideals of the revolution, of democracy, of freedom, of free speech. And when they decided to exercise them on the street, they got killed. So the underlying event was really a new Mexican society that was breaking through the strictures, the corset imposed by the PRI. And the result of this long process, well, finally has been that in July of this year, at last, the PRI was beaten at the polls. It had to relinquish power. It had already lost the Chamber of Deputies. It had lost many state governorships, many municipalities, 53% of Mexico was already governed by opposition parties when Fox won the presidency. But to win the presidency has been of course a tremendous event in Mexican history. The PRI ruled Mexico for 71 consecutive years. I think there are a few parties in the world that can beat that. We beat Franco and the Soviet Union.
CF: Although, let me tell you, Mexico has been governed, more than anyone else by the Habsburgs. The Spanish Habsburgs, 200 years, and Maximilian of Austria, five years. So 205 years of Austrian Habsburg rule, very curious. Then come the Bourbons and then the PRI. So now they're out of office but we have celebrated this. President Zedillo has behaved like a Democrat, he has recognized the triumph of the opposition alternation power, but this does not mean that the problems of Mexico have been solved, or have evaporated. Now, the challenge the new president and all of us as citizens and society have are really tremendous. Now we can't blame the PRI. But that's over.
BR: But the victory was one that came in a sense, from the conservative side. I mean Vicente Fox appears to be... From a North American perspective, he's more of a conservative Republican style leader and making those kinds of arguments about more free market, smaller government, lower taxes, all those kinds of arguments. So where does that put the social democratic tradition in Mexico?
CF: You are touching on a very sore point, which is the fact that...
BR: Sorry.
CF: No. No. No. I'm glad you do it. I'm glad you do it because I can explain this. And it is that all three major parties in Mexico are in crisis today. The PRI is in crisis because it existed only as the union of the party and the president. The party without the president is nothing. It has no ideology. Rather, it has had all the ideologies you can imagine from Marxism to neo-liberalism. It has worn all the masks of the past 17 years. The PRD on the left reached only 17% of the vote. It did badly at the polls. And the PAN on the right... President Fox comes from the PAN but he has distanced himself from the parties. He says, "I owe nothing to the party. I owe everything to the friends of Fox and to the people who elected me." So all three parties are in a state of crisis. In a state of dissolution, really. And I think that eventually Mexico must have a modern two-party system.
CF: What I hope will emerge from this whole process is on the left a social democratic party, a modern social democratic party, and on the right a conservative party. And let's play it out that way. In any case, whatever the crisis of the parties, President Fox is going to have to deal with the Congress he does not dominate. The PRI still has a slight majority in the Congress, he will not be able to pass laws easily and so there's going to be a real democratic give and take in Mexican politics. We're going to learn a lot. We're going to learn and we're going to have to face problems that will not be solved only by the government, only by Fox, but will have to be solved by citizens. By citizens' associations, by civil society at large. So this puts a great responsibility on us as Mexican citizens, and that I think is a great victory of democracy, more than the victory of Vicente Fox and the opposition in the PAN. It is the victory of the citizens of Mexico, that is what counts.
BR: Now, just one last one on politics, and then I really want to close our conversation by focusing on this wonderful book because I think it's important that people have a chance to hear you talk about it. But the last political question just really relates to... I think if I may inject a little of myself, and this is just a tad, I think you and I probably had a similar view about NAFTA, skeptical about what it would mean for sovereignty, not very enthusiastic really about its implications for much greater role for the corporate sector and much less of a role for how the public sector's gonna be able to handle this process of globalization. But there we are, it's there.
CF: Yeah.
BR: Is there a sense... Do you have a sense in Mexico... Is there a sense that there is a North American civil society? I mean that carefully. North American civil society, which Canada and Mexico both play a part. Do you have a sense of that emerging or is that just too abstract an idea?
CF: We were together several years ago here in Toronto with Robertson Davies, and the question was, "Is there a common culture of North America?" And we came down to the fact that the differences are huge. The differences are huge. One thing the Canadian audience said is, they were quite surprised that coming from the weaker and poorer part of the Triple Alliance of North America, I was not that afraid of the gringos. I was not that afraid of the gringos because I admit that they have all the power in the world and they have this great superficial commercial influence. Yes, you will find McDonald's all over the place and you will find something called Taco... I don't know what.
[laughter]
CF: And you will also find the great influence of the best of North American culture, that is the literature. I think that if you ask Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Mario Vargas Llosa or myself, we will readily admit the great influence of William Faulkner, of Hemingway, of Dos Passos, of jazz, in the case of Julio Cortez in our writings, we're very close to the great events of North American culture. But I think this does not compare with the extraordinary event, with the extraordinary event that in the United States, there are 35 million people who speak Spanish. How many people speak English in Latin America? Very few. The presence of Latin Americans, especially of Mexico, 'cause the majority are Mexicans in the United States is present in family, in religion, in communal bonds, in shared memories and in something very important, which is cuisine, like water for chocolates.
BR: Right.
CF: Do you know of something that fills my heart with joy, is that today Mexican salsa sells more in the United States than that abomination called ketchup. And that is something.
[laughter]
[applause]
BR: So there is emerging something. Something is happening.
CF: Something is emerging. And we have this tremendous common frontier. I'm not telling you anything new, you also share a tremendous frontier with the United States, but sometimes, I fear that it is the... How do you call them? How do you call a country that calls itself America when all the continent is America?
BR: Or the World Series?
CF: How do you call it? North...
[laughter]
CF: How do you call it? Norte America. North America. You're a North American.
BR: Yes.
CF: So am I. So you call them gringos, it's benevolent.
BR: We can start. We can start.
CF: I can start by calling them gringos. You can call them Colombians or excess Colombians. Maybe in honour of the other half of Amerigo we should call them Vespuccians. What do you think?
[laughter]
CF: There would be a neologism. But the fact is that they're there, they're strong, but they sometimes are more afraid of us than we are of them. They talk of La Reconquista of Mexican territories. Less than half our territories went to the United States after 1848. Soon, already Latinos are the largest minority in the United States. They're the majority of minorities. In California, they will soon be the majority of people. So there is this extraordinary event, plus the economic event that goes with NAFTA and the border and the porosity of the border.
CF: Now, Vicente Fox is proposing something which I find very interesting, and it is to look South. If we have NAFTA in the North, why don't we have some kind of economic association with the countries of Central America? The countries of Central America have been ravaged by war. The terrible wars brought upon the people of Central America, which were escalated by the blindness and the stupidity of the Reagan administration. What they did in El Salvador, what they did in Nicaragua, what they did in Honduras was absolutely horrifying. The way they escalated that war after the initial mistake of overthrowing the popularly democratically elected government in Guatemala in 1954 is being a history of genocide and horror. And now to recreate a Central American community in conjunction with Mexico, I think that is a good idea that we really... There we can join forces and do many, many things together that will strengthen Latin America vis-à-vis the United States.
BR: So that's a sense of the geopolitics of how that will emerge.
CF: Yeah, I think so. Plus the fact that we have to be more and more related with Europe. Mexico is now being admitted as a member of the European Economic Commission, and that is another opening we have. Jose Martí used to say, "If you sell to only one country, you become the slave of that country." And we have to... If we're going to really going to live in a globalized world, we're going to have relations with many other sectors, with Asia, with Europe, and not only with the United States. I think that's very important.
BR: Let's turn our attention now to this wonderful book because, do you see it in some sense... I mean, without wanting... Do you see it as a greater reflection on the century than anything you've written recently?
CF: I think very much as a companion to another book of mine, The Death of Artemio Cruz, which was very much centred on the century as lived by a powerful man, would been a revolutionary, and on the events of the Mexican Revolution. But in Laura Diaz, perhaps because of the origin of the family in Germany and in Spain, I wanted to remember that Mexico was part of the world, that it is not a planet apart.
BR: It's an immigrant country.
CF: It's to a lesser degree than Canada or the United States. That is not so much a question as reflecting my own context with the world of the 20th century. Events that marked me profoundly as a child and as a young man, which were the Spanish Civil War, then the Second World War, the Holocaust, the rise of fascism in Europe, and then the McCarthyite Persecution and the witch hunt in the United States, they're all reflected very much in this book. They're preoccupations of mine, things that I lived, but things that also become a part of The Years with Laura Diaz.
BR: Is there a significance in the fact that you've chosen a woman as the hero of the story, as the central figure in the story, as somebody who really broke all the rules? I mean she left her husband, she went to her first husband, she went off, she had a life of her own. At age 70, she became a photographer and set off in her new... Really a remarkable, powerful figure. Why did you choose to make her the centre of the story?
CF: Well, I wanted to have an anti-Artemio Cruz, an anti-macho figure. And it reflects a profound change in Mexican society. They always told me, "Artemio Cruz, the women are so submissive, they're subjective to the macho." But that was the reality of the country, that was the reality. There's been a big change in which women have come forward, have asserted themselves, their personality. They are active in politics, in business, in the arts. There's the figure of Frida Kahlo, which I will evoke tomorrow in the reading. All figures that have given women a new status and a new power.
CF: And I come back to your original question. Grandmothers are the best novelists. Because I had two very powerful grandmothers. They were early widows. They had to work. And to sustain their families, one of my grandmothers was a school teacher, was an inspector of schools during the years when Vasconcelos was a Minister of Education, which were the first years of education in Revolutionary Mexico when Vasconcelos sent the teachers out to the fields, to the haciendas. And sometimes, these teachers returned with their noses and their ears cut off by the haciendas. They did not want the peasants to learn to read and write, as simple as that. And my grandmother was involved in this. I saw her as a very strong woman. My other grandmother from Vera Cruz, who taught me all these stories as well. So it was an homage to them, but also an homage to the emerging power and presence of women in Mexico.
CF: You know what? There are still many pockets. There was a terrifying story of a young girl who was denied an abortion in [0:32:03.2] ____ a few months ago. Then the legislature of Juan Aguato declared abortion a crime, expelled it from the books. And the extraordinary response of the population against this limitation of a woman's freedom on her own body was quite extraordinary. It really revealed that there is a modern civil society in Mexico.
BR: Which is gonna continue to transform the political structure.
CF: I think so. I think so. Absolutely. Yes. Yes. Yes it is, it's a country that is evolving very quickly, as is the whole of Latin America. Now we have a problem in Latin America. We have left behind the hard dictatorships of the Southern Cone, Argentina and Chile, and also the wars of Central America. And more or less, there are democratic institutions and situations but there is something essential in all of this. That people are now saying in Latin America, "Okay, we have democracy, we have elections, we have political parties, we have a free press. When do we get work? When do we eat?" It's as simple as that. And if democracy very soon in Latin America is not accompanied by social benefits for the majority of the people, there might be a grave danger of reversion to the authoritarian tradition which has been the tradition of Latin America. And we have seen it in Peru, and we're seeing it in Venezuela. And there are many instances that I find are dangerous.
BR: The character of Laura's first husband, I found him to be a very tragic character who kept his secret till the end of his early life and who he was until it emerges at the end, which I won't reveal, so it'll take away the surprise for the reader. But in a sense, he is a second violin to Artemio Cruz. I mean a sadder figure but also very much corrupted by the revolution.
CF: But more than that, he is the case. I am sure we all know that particular case of a man who has given or finds for himself one shining hour in his life, one moment which is his, one moment in which his whole life seems to make sense. And once that moment passes, it's over, it's over. He lives that moment, he lives it gloriously as a labour leader in the difficult years of labour organization in Mexico during the revolution. And then he is absorbed by the cooperative operators of the PRI. And the moment is gone, the moment is gone. The moment that Laura Diaz loved in him disappears. But I think that's quite a universal event in many people's lives now.
BR: To what extent would Laura's decision to leave him and Laura's decision to lead a dramatically independent life, to abandon her children, to leave them in the care of her relatives in order to lead the life that she led, how extra historical is this? I mean, there are... Can you...
CF: No. There are many, many cases. You remember a film by Louis Malle with Jeanne Moreau called Les Amants.
BR: Oui. Oui. Oui.
CF: Yeah. And that is precisely what happened, and it shocked people out of their wits. I went to see that film with Louis Malle at the National Auditorium in Mexico. And it was the first time that a certain sexual activity was shown on the screen. Even if it's shown off the screen, you realized what was going on. And the people were screaming, it was horrifying. Louis Malle went down and said, "What have I done? Why are they screaming in this way? It's a normal event." Well, it was the first time it was portrayed, and the fact that Jeanne Moreau leaves husband and children also was considered scandalous.
CF: Now, I think that there are many situations in life. Sometimes you can judge them from a moralistic point of view or you can condemn them. And then you realize that it was part of the evolution of personalities that are always caught up between the demands of freedom and of chance and of necessity and how much in life belongs to chance, how much belongs to necessity, how much belongs to freedom. I think this is one of the constant themes of human nature as reflected in the novel. So Laura Diaz is not an exception to this. Sometimes she is driven by necessity, sometimes she's driven by passion, by chance, by freedom, sometimes by fatality also, also by fatality. So I'm simply reflecting the possible contradictions in her life as it is lived. I don't want to... Didn't want to make her Pollyanna, the Glad girl.
BR: Well, no, certainly, that she is not.
CF: She is not. She's a conflicted human being, and that's why she's an important and interesting woman.
BR: Oh, fascinating.
CF: If she were a goody two shoes while I...
BR: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's a nice interesting... Last question about the book. The character of Harry Jaffe and the McCarthy experience obviously had a clear impact on you.
CF: Indeed.
BR: Can you tell us a bit more about that?
CF: Yes. I was in Mexico when The Hollywood Ten were thrown out of their jobs, lost their jobs because of the persecution of the Un-American Activities Committee in the United States and McCarthy. So I got to knew the problems quite well. There was a British Marxist living in Cuernavaca called Cedric Belfrage. And around him, there was this whole group of Dalton Trumbull and all these people expelled from Hollywood. And for me, it was very shocking, I have to tell you, because I grew up in the United States of Franklin Roosevelt, in the United States of the New Deal, and when the strength of the United States was its human capital, what Roosevelt understood was that the greatest wealth of that country was its human capital, and he saved the United States from the recession by the employment of human capital.
CF: When suddenly you have a cynic like John Foster Dulles saying, "The United States doesn't have friends, it has interests." This happened in 1954, when the Guatemala government was overthrown, and you had these persecution... For me, it was like the breaking of something I had cherished all my life, and which I will continue to cherish, this vision Franklin Roosevelt had of the United States as a country that had something more than money. It had human beings that had to be taken care of, that had to be given freedoms and speech and opportunities in life.
BR: But the Jaffe character was not of... He also was a tragic figure because he was not a hero, he was not somebody... He did name names.
CF: Yes. A very peculiar way out that McCarthy sometimes offered people, to denounce without it being known that they had given names, that there is the suspicion. So he's in a very ambiguous situation in Cuernavaca because he's part of the exiles, but they also suspect that he did name names. So this makes him a very tragic, a very conflicted character, a man who fought besides in the Spanish Civil War. I've just read a book called The Dark Valley by a Cambridge historian, Piers Brendon. And it is the story of the politics of the 1930s. And it is the history of human horror and stupidity. The worst culprits I think are the British and the French. The way they did not see what was going on and the way they played ostriches, and their cowardice was incredible, plus the rise of Hitler and Mussolini and Stalinist Russia. He tells a few examples that are almost Kafkian. There was a commissar. He tells a story of a commissar who arrives in Siberia to replace a former commissar, and discovers that the former commissar is not there because he was sent to prison, and all the bureaucracy with him. So he sits in the chair and says, "Well, I'm next." And a reign of terror is established that way.
CF: And in that book, I have to say that it is the United States and Roosevelt that come out best, that come out best. And to see that dream lost through so many events that have followed is painful for someone who really admires the United States and loves the United States as I do. I wish that there was a comeback of that spirit, but it's gonna be difficult.
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Carlos Fuentes was born in 1928 to a Mexican diplomat and spent the majority of his childhood living in various South American countries before his father was posted to Washington, where Fuentes learned to speak English. Throughout this time, he would return to Mexico for summers, which he spent under the care of his grandmothers. This combination of the international and local remained with him for the rest of his life, a life marked by an initial foray into public service, himself, before his first novel, Where the Air is Clear, was publishing to great acclaim in 1958. He devoted himself more fully to writing thereafter, while also serving as Mexico’s ambassador to France in the 1970s; twenty years later, France awarded him its National Order of Merit in recognition of his books, which include The Old Gringo, the first book by a Mexican writer to have been a bestseller in the United States. Regularly named alongside Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa as a leading figure in Latin America’s literary Boom period, Carlos Fuentes died in 2012, in Mexico City.
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The audio recording of Carlos Fuentes in conversation with Bob Rae was recorded on stage at in Toronto in October of 2000 and is used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Find out more about all of TIFA’s Canadian and international author events, both virtual, in-person and on-demand, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.
Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives is produced by Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode was produced by Gregory McCormick and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou, marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, graphic design by Amy Haakmat and research support from Greg Ellis.
For more about Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find links to the books mentioned in each episode and links to other relevant materials in TPL’s collections. You can also listen to all 26 episodes of season one as well with interviews and readings by Susan Sontag, Grace Paley, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Kramer, Lee Maracle and much, much more. For all of Toronto Public Library’s podcast series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts.
Music is by YUKA.
I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon with another episode of Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives.