Carlos Fuentes: Tribute to a Mexican literary and political icon

Whatever they may have thought of his politics, anyone fortunate enough to have conversed with author Carlos Fuentes couldn't help but be taken by his patrician good looks and his love affair with language.

I was struck by this the first time I met Fuentes at his Mexico City home in 1989 following the publication of "Christopher Unborn," his Orwellian story of the "Makesicko Seedy" capital narrated by a fetus.

And I saw it again nearly two decades later over lunch in Los Angeles, where he was promoting the English version of his book "The Eagle's Throne," a satire on Mexico's revolutionary history and political baggage.

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Fuentes, who died Tuesday, loved good food and conversation, perhaps most of all when served up together. Words spilled out of him like water, and he played with them like a child frolicking in the sea.

Unbeknownst to Fuentes, I was interviewing him for his obituary, which is an awkwardly common practice in journalism. We keep prepared obits of famous people on file. In most cases reporters don't tell the subject, as I did not. I also never wrote the obit, but now I find I want to share a bit of the delightful afternoon in which we discussed life, art and politics at the classic Water Grill with our spouses.

Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, Fuentes belonged to a generation of Latin American writers who were both literary and political, author and social commentator. He was a public intellectual.

"I wear two hats," he said, likening himself to French author Honore de Balzac in producing a combination of human comedy, acute social portraits and ghost stories. "The imagination exists and social commentary exists. They are not at war with each other."

Though he dressed beautifully and lived well from London to New York to Mexico, his politics were left-of-center, supportive of Fidel Castro's Cuba early on and of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. That combination long ago prompted Mexican commentator Enrique Krauze to dub him "the Guerrilla Dandy," and call him an intellectual lightweight next to the more conservative Mexican thinker and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz.

When Castro repressed writers and intellectuals, though, Fuentes spoke out against him.

The son of a career diplomat, Fuentes grew up abroad and spoke English like a native for having studied in the United States. For many years, that branded him as too much of "a gringo" for many Mexicans, while in the States he was seen by many as anti-American for his frequent disagreements with U.S. policy in Latin America and elsewhere.

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