“What will happen to Mexico?” Octavio Paz asked me days before he died, twenty-five years ago. We spoke in the living room of his final resting place, Casa de Alvarado in Coyoacán. Like a lion imprisoned in his body, tied to his wheelchair, covered with a Mexican blanket, he questioned with difficulty, but not waiting for an answer. I was silent. What could I say?

I would like to convey my optimism to you. “Everything is fine with Mexico,” Octavio would tell him; that is, nothing was wrong but could be improved because our dream of freedom and democracy was on its way to being fulfilled. Isn’t that what we fought for in the magazine? Lap so many years?

That would not appease him. He realized a long time ago that the PRI had served its purpose. And already in the seventies, bullied by ideological hatred, he wrote:Without freedom, democracy is the tyranny of the majority; Without democracy, freedom triggers a universal war of individuals and groups. Their union produces tolerance: civilized life. But he feared that the union would not hold, creating a terrifying void that would otherwise have been filled. The poet and prophet, inside the tree, from the rebellious seed of his grandfather and father, seemed to hear that something very serious was brewing in the underground of Mexico, an instinctive eruption of ambition and violence such as those that occasionally – at exact moments naming each century – break out on our historical surface to fulfill the phrase that Vasconcelos heard from Eulalio Gutiérrez in 1915: “the Mexican landscape smells of blood”.

His uncertainty was natural. On the one hand, within the framework of unprecedented freedom of expression and criticism, the country advanced in its democratic structure: the republic took form and meaning: a self-limited presidency, an autonomous judiciary, an independent federal electoral institute, congress and pluralities. But, at the same time, in Chiapas the Zapatista movement persisted, seducing a broad sector of the left, fixed in the paradigm of revolution. Paz himself was not completely unaware of this latest romantic seduction, but I am sure of one thing: he always believed in freedom as the main value. And he always distrusted absolute power: “it is the source of much evil and little good,” he told us.

Mexico was only one of his concerns, but I don’t think the fate of his work was among them. He was sure that both the Círculo de Lectores in Spain and the Fondo de Cultura Económica in Mexico would take care of the validity of the “Complete Works” he had assembled with such care, and that their individual books would still appear on time. manner, in accordance with copyright. The magazine didn’t reveal it either Lap, which has completed its cycle, nor the Foundation that bears his name, endowed with an important heritage of private origin that will house its library. As for his record, he certified his transfer to El Colegio Nacional twenty-five years after his death.

His tortures were physical and he bore them stoically. Also intimate. I do not think I am committing any infidelity if I mention those that I could glimpse, for they ennoble him: the solitude that would wait for his wife; the roof, health and maintenance of his daughter Helena, whom he always cared for and who he tried to provide at all costs in this final transition. Did he confide in God, as his mother would have wanted? I don’t know. Communion was a way out of the labyrinth of solitude.

Another way out, or the same one, was love, the central motif of his poetry. She stuck by him until the end. He wrote to celebrate double flame. On that farewell afternoon I heard him say, “Marie Jo: you are my valley of Mexico.”

What happened to Mexico? The Mexican landscape reeked of blood. Under new aspects, not revolutionary but criminal and populist, the terrible duality of violence and power threatens democracy and freedom.

What happened to the legacy of Paz? The Círculo de Lectores went bankrupt and ceased its work, the FCE has other priorities, many of its books are sold out, the Octavio Paz Foundation is distorted, Helena died on her father’s centenary, Marie Jo five years ago, Paz’s legacy passed to DIF Mexico City, including copyright (which it manages in its sole discretion). The National College is waiting to receive their papers.

But as long as Mexico lasts, the fame and glory of Octavio Paz will not end. (OR)