Daring Dreamer

By Guy Garcia

On a cloudless Mexican morning, Carlos Fuentes gazes into the gilded nave of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a colonial church built over the ruins of the massive pyramid at Cholula. As the faithful kneel in prayer, the author of The Old Gringo and The Death of Artemio Cruz shakes his head in wonder. "It's a great example of Mexican culture -- the Indian and the Spanish religion coming together," he says. "What more perfect symbol than a pyramid topped by a church devoted to the Virgin Mary?"

Five hundred years after Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World, the fruits of Latin culture are very much on Fuentes' mind. Mexico's pre-eminent novelist is crisscrossing the U.S., Europe and Latin America to promote his new book, The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World. Published in April, the 399-page, lavishly illustrated volume is climbing best-seller lists from Washington to Los Angeles. Together with a five-hour television series that will be aired on the Discovery Channel in August, the book is Fuentes' answer to Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, which ignored the Spanish- speaking world. Aiming to show that the Latin legacy is as rich as anything in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, Fuentes has condensed five centuries of Hispanic experience into a multimedia saga that ranges, in his words, "from the caves of Altamira to the graffiti of East Los Angeles."

Tanned and trim at 63, Fuentes proves an amiable and erudite video guide, equally at ease critiquing a painting by Goya, sipping coffee in a smoky tango club in Buenos Aires, or pointing out the erotic audacity of the Spanish torerillos ("Where else can the male strike such provocative poses except in the bull ring?").

The Buried Mirror represents an intellectual homecoming for Fuentes, who conceived of the project as "a fantastic opportunity to write my own cultural biography." Yet it also provides a looking glass of sorts for norteamericanos. "I believe in the Latinization of the United States -- we are going to resemble each other more and more," Fuentes says. "Take Detroit or Caracas, Mexico City or Atlanta -- you're going to find the same problems of pollution, crime, drug abuse, homelessness. The U.S. must see itself in that buried mirror of otherness, of tragedy, of bearing up to difficult times, of survival. Mexico is an expert at survival. The U.S. can learn much from the Mexican moral."

Fuentes has learned much from both cultures. The son of a Mexican diplomat, he was born in Panama City and spent much of his youth living in Santiago, Buenos Aires and Washington, where he developed an enduring affection for William Faulkner, Franklin Roosevelt and Hollywood musicals. Until he grew up, Mexico remained an almost mythical country, experienced mainly through the memories of his father or glimpsed during summer vacations.

In 1958 his first novel, a vivid tapestry of postrevolutionary Mexico called Where the Air Is Clear, galvanized that country's literature. Four years later, The Death of Artemio Cruz, a Faulknerian tour de force narrated by a man during the final hours of his life, propelled Fuentes into the front ranks of "el Boom," the globally acclaimed wave of Latin American authors that included Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa.

Like other Latin American writers, Fuentes has never recognized the division between art and politics, and his readiness to speak his mind has provoked officialdom on both sides of the Mexican-U.S. border. Stung by his denunciation of American intervention in Vietnam, the U.S. State Department refused to grant him an entry visa. Until as recently as 1989, Fuentes was required to apply for special permission to enter the U.S. In his own country, Fuentes has drawn fire for his blunt criticism of his government's failure to control Mexico City's air pollution; he has also been attacked as a "guerrilla dandy" who is too European and Americanized for his own good.

"Fuentes is a polymath," observes his friend and fellow novelist William Styron, who accompanied Fuentes on a controversial trip to Nicaragua during the Sandinista regime. "He's not just a glib organizer of facts. He's an authentic iconoclast in the good sense, in that like most good writers he sees through the mask of appearances."

"I think there are things that deserve to be said," Fuentes explains. "I am not a professional rebel or enfant terrible." Yet he knows that controversy will always dog him. "In a way it goes with the territory," he says, "because it is not natural to write. We are created to run and hunt and swim and make love but not to sit hunched with a piece of paper and some ink scribbling hieroglyphs. And when we do it, it is an act of rebellion against God himself, who did not design us to do that. So I've always said the writer in a way is the brother of Lucifer -- he is rebellious and arrogant and condemned, but he is having a good time." Then he adds with a chuckle, "Until the fires start burning!"