EL NOBEL

Out on Fifth Avenue, the crowd is unusual for an urban evening in the last decade of the American century. Nobody fires a gun. Nobody plays a giant radio. Nobody speaks at full moronic bellow or offers dope for sale or screams in utter loneliness for help. But the people here are as excited as any group in thrall to the usual New York distractions of noise or violence. They are gathered outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art to hear a talk by Octavio Paz.

Paz is seventy-six, Mexican, a poet, an essayist, a critic, and an editor. Naturally, most Americans have never heard of him. Not even on this evening, a few days after Paz has been awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize for literature.

“What’s the line for?” a young American asks me, outside the museum. “Who they waitin’ to see?”

“Octavio Paz.”

“Who?”

In Mexico, of course, Paz is a gigantic, luminous star. So it was no surprise that the Mexican newspapers carried the story of the Nobel award in type sizes usually reserved for declarations of war or victories in the World Cup. Paz is not the first Latin American to win, but he is the first Mexican. And though he has directed the energies of a long lifetime against dumb nationalism, Paz did not defuse the surge of Mexican national pride by turning down the award or the $700,000 that goes with it. And why should he have? In a time of slick frauds, Octavio Paz is an authentic world-class writer; nobody can say of him that he did not deserve the Nobel Prize. And nobody knows this better than Paz.

A great writer belongs to people everywhere. I remember seeing Paz on Avenida Juárez in Mexico City in the early 1970s, after he’d returned from a few years of exile. He came out of a bookstore looking exactly the way a poet should look: handsome, distracted, his hair in need of tending, the collar of his shirt curling, a small bundle of books in his hand. He was alone. A young man recognized him, perhaps for the same reason I did: an appearance on television two nights earlier.

“Don Octavio,” he called, using the aristocratic don to address Paz.

“Please,” Paz said in Spanish, “don’t call me ’don.’

“The man looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I -”

“And don’t apologize,” Paz said.

Then generosity took over. Paz fell into an animated discussion with the young man, who said that he, too, was a poet. They discussed poetry with the seriousness of theologians, mentioning such vanished deities as Ruben Dario and Wallace Stevens. Abruptly, Paz shook the young man’s hand in a gesture that was really an act of polite dismissal. The young man passed into the bookstore while Paz glanced at his watch.

And then an astonishingly beautiful young woman came down the crowded avenue. She had clove-colored mestizo skin, high cheekbones, sleek black hair pulled tight against her skull and tied in a bun. Every man, and some women, turned to look at her.

So did Paz. He froze. His jaw went slack. He gazed at her as she approached, and his eyes followed her as she went by. And then, the moment of erotic transport over, the aesthetic impulse satisfied, he exhaled, shook his head sadly, and hurried across the street.

I thought: Yes, he is one of us.

Standing along the wall in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium all these years later, I remember that small encounter with its perfect mixture of the cerebral and the sensual, thinking: This is the essence of Paz’s writing. That sinuous style (plus the sudden fame of the prize) surely brought most of the crowd to this place, a long way from the Avenida Juárez. All seven hundred seats are filled, with additional spectators sitting on chairs in the aisles and flanking the lectern. This is exhilarating; there are never enough places on earth where poets have sellouts. But to those who know the great poet and his work, there is the usual uncertainty about which Octavio Paz will appear. Like Walt Whitman, or David Bowie, he contains multitudes.

Transcending all other identities is the modernist poet of the senses, shaped in his youth by Paris, admirer of the work of Mallarmé and Baudelaire, and later, in Paris and Mexico City, a close friend of the poet and chief theoretician of Surrealism, André Breton. After Paz the poet, there is Paz the philosophical essayist, whose 1950 classic, The Labyrinth of Solitude, explained the Mexican character and identity both to the world and to other Mexicans.