Muerto. Octavio Paz is dead. Mexican President Zedillo announced the Nobel Prize winner's death yesterday while traveling enroute home from the Summit of the Americas.

"What does it tell you?" Richard Rodriguez was asked on The News Hour last night.

Rodriguez's answer followed a circuitous route. Here was a man critical of the government. It was ironic, he said. Paz' life was full of contradictions, an American saga, hemispherically speaking. He was orphaned, caught between two strains, borrowing from everywhere. His most recent book was a study of the Marquis de Sade. Where do you find such a scope, but in an American?

These public deaths, these international losses, are mourned in official ways but the private grief is such a strange experience. An icon like Paz is someone most of us have never met... at best we know them vicariously through their works. I was reminded of the passages in Moritz Thomsen's The Farm on the River of Emeralds when he describes Ramón coming out to the fields to tell him that Igor Stravinski (1882-1971) had died, an event doubly meaningful both for the loss and for Ramon's recognition of its importance to Moritz. I have never even finished one of Paz' books and yet I carry around the secret of his passing like a cobblestone in my pocket. The Nobel Laureate is dead. A man of letters, a poet and essayist of the highest achievement.

The news reports etch the broad achievements of his life but there are small details that have greater power for me. Some of these fragments of his world are drawn from the article by Steve Fainaru: during this last year the workers at the National Library in Mexico City had tried to reconstruct some of the books that had been burned in the fire that charred his apartment--his own manuscripts as well as those rare volumes that he had collected. He had been working on revised editions of his books. He lived in downtown Mexico City, above the Paseo de Reforma. Other minute shards were contained in an article written by Ferdinand Protzmanⁱ over three years ago: Paz had provided the name for the Société Imaginaire founded by the painter Batuz. This society of leading artists, poets, writers, intellectuals and politicians has 500 members in Europe, and North and South America. Its purpose is to bring these people together and then maintain an archive of their correspondence--a pen pal project.

All of those wonderful ideals that were agreed to at the Summit in Santiago... commitments to hemispheric guarantees of press freedoms, universal access to education, and so on. Who wouldn't applaud such things?

A little over a month ago the death of another Latin American writer was noted in the press with less fanfare. Because none of Adolfo Couve's work has been translated into English there were no obituaries here but this terse report appeared in CHIP News on Friday, March 13, 1998:

Adolfo Couve, renowned Chilean writer and University of Chile professor, took his life Wednesday at his home in Cartegena, on Chile's coast.

He was 58.

Couve was apparently suffering from clinical depression and had isolated himself from friends and family in recent weeks. He also stopped attending meetings of the Cartegena Lover's Society, the cultural society that Couve helped found. A friend discovered the professor hanging from a nylon cord in his home Wednesday morning.

Couve studied painting in Paris and New York, but turned his attention to writing in recent years. His short stories and novels, including "Balneario" and "La Lección de Pintura," are well known in Chile and Latin America.

What is one to add? The man chose to end his life. Is it important to point out that his body was discovered the morning after Pinochet took his seat as senator for life?

-April 21, 1998

Endnotes

ⁱ Protzman, "Intellectual Oz Embracing an Ideal Grounded in Reality," New York Times, December 31, 1994.

© Copyright 2003 Eric Metcalf