Carlos Fuentes
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by Philip Gambone

A Titan of Mexican literature, Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) was one of the most prolific and awarded writers of the Latin American "Boom." He wrote more than two dozen novels, several collections of short stories, essays, plays and screenplays. So brilliant was Fuentes' output that he was frequently mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize, a distinction that he never won. Nevertheless, it would not be an exaggeration to say of his outstanding literary achievement that, as André Gide once wrote in another context, it "plunges us into a sort of almost loving bewilderment."

Fuentes began publishing novels in 1958. His eleventh novel, The Old Gringo, was published in 1985. An English translation by the redoubtable Margaret Sayers Peden, came out the same year and became the first novel by a Mexican to reach the U.S. best seller list. "A perfect little gemstone, faceted by a master craftsman," wrote Charles Larsen in the Chicago Tribune.

In the opening pages of the novel, two Americans—the old gringo of the title and a young woman named Harriet Winslow—arrive in Mexico during the height of the Revolution—"he consciously, she unintentionally, to confront the next frontier of American consciousness, the most difficult of all." The old gringo (never named but modeled after the American writer Ambrose Bierce), has spent much of his life as a muckraking reporter against corruption. "My name was synonymous with coldness and anti-sentimentality," he says. Now, at 71, this Don Quixote-like "avenging angel" has crossed the border in order to die, because everything he has loved has died before him. "I was the friend of Truth … who even believed he could shape the destinies of others through a journalism of accusation and satire."

Ambrose Bierce
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The old gringo attaches himself to a "floating brigade" of rebels under the command of General Tomás Arroyo, who are on their way to join the bulk of Pancho Villa's army. Arroyo—a man with "a strong jawbone, sparse mustache, and narrow yellow eyes"—is a passionate revolutionary. "We are tired of a world ruled by the caciques, the Church, and the strutting aristocrats we've always had here," he proclaims.

The other American, 31-year-old Harriet Winslow, has naively come to Mexico to teach the children of the Miranda hacienda, a vast, opulent ranch, and to break out of the stifling confines of her life in Washington, DC. But the Mirandas have fled, leaving the grand house, whose mirrored ballroom is a miniature Versailles, in the hands of the revolutionaries. Nevertheless, Harriet feels it's her duty to take charge of the hacienda until the legitimate owners are able to return. Harriet's attitude toward the Revolution is prissily scornful, believing the revolutionaries are only after booty: "Look at them, what these people need is education, not rifles. A good scrubbing, followed by a few lessons on how we do things in the United States, and you'd see an end to this chaos."

Pancho Villa
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The old gringo admonishes her to look more deeply at Mexico: "Open your eyes, Miss Harriet, and remember how we killed our Redskins and never had the courage to fornicate with the squaws and at least create a half-breed nation. We are caught in the business of forever killing people whose skin is of a different color. Mexico is the proof of what we could have been, so keep your eyes wide open."

Arroyo, too, knows firsthand about the injustice of a world ruled by those who consider themselves entitled to trample over others. As a boy, he worked—and suffered indignities—on the Miranda hacienda. As proof of his justification to take over the estate, he is holding a box of ancient royal papers that give the right to the land to the people. "The King of Spain himself said so," Arroyo declares. "This is his signature. I am the keeper of these papers. The papers prove that no one else has a right to these lands."

As much as he is a revolutionary, Arroyo is also a "quintessentially uncomplicated stud" who is "naked, even when he had clothes on." This "fluid stream of sex" offers Harriet love, but a kind that repulses her. To Harriet, Arroyo has "more words than feelings." At the same time, she cannot forgive the passion that he arouses in her.

As the novel develops, Harriet's fascination with both the old gringo and Arroyo grows. The simultaneous presence of both beauty and danger in these two men—so different and yet so alike in their imperfect heroic quests—radically changes her perspective, preparing her for a new compassion—a compassion "she owed to a young Mexican revolutionary who offered her life and to an old American writer who sought death."

It's quite breathtaking what Fuentes packs into the less than 200 pages of this novel—multiple points of view (a homage to Faulkner, whose style Fuentes loved), sumptuous description, visceral sexuality, and the philosophical dialogue he sets up between the Mexican and American points of view. For Fuentes, Mexico is the place that invites us to come out to the life outside our cramped, stiff, blind, and careful selves. The novel, which reminds me of a complex fugue of many voices, concludes in a juxtaposition of dark and light motifs, somber and quietly heroic.

The Old Gringo explores many themes, among them the duty to be brave in facing life, the validity of the body and its passions, and the perilous journey we undertake when we cross frontiers: "There's one frontier we only dare to cross at night," Arroyo says early on, "The frontier of our differences with others, of our battles with ourselves." Like all great writers of literature, Fuentes is less interested in taking sides than he is in presenting the complex web of reality, a complexity we dare ignore at our moral and psychological peril.

"Don't you want to save Mexico for democracy and progress, Miss Winslow?" a reporter asks Harriet in the novel's final pages.

"No! No!" she protests. "I want to learn to live with Mexico. I don't want to save it." Saving Mexico for progress and democracy are words that mean nothing to her. "What mattered was to live with Mexico in spite of progress and democracy, that each of us carries his Mexico and his United States within him, a dark and bloody frontier we dare cross only at night."

Feuntes' contemporary, Octavio Paz, once wrote, "The literature we [Hispano-Americans] write doesn't turn its back on history, though it rejects the simplifications of ideological art and its categorical affirmations and negations." He might well have been thinking of The Old Gringo.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of six books, including As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, has just been published by Rattling Good Yarn Press and is available on Amazon and at the Biblioteca bookshop.

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