He says the exhibition of Mexican art then showing at the Metropolitan will help Americans understand Mexicans better. He is equally insistent that Mexicans also make a greater effort to understand their neighbor to the north. “We are going to be neighbors until this planet ceases to exist. Perhaps it’s time to understand each other. The Americans must understand that Mexico is not a picturesque, half-savage country, but a country with a vast past, a long history, a great identity. And Mexicans must stop worrying about losing their identity to the Americans. We Mexicans are not in danger of losing our identity; we have, sometimes, too much identity.”

Everybody laughs. There are handshakes, a few autographs to sign, and abrazos for friends just arrived from Mexico and Paris. Slowly, Paz and his people walk out to Fifth Avenue. There, a car is waiting for the great poet. There is a final joke, a few small goodbyes, and then Octavio Paz, with all of his sheer vitality and appetite for being, gets into the backseat, closes the door, and waves farewell. A derelict in a filthy camouflage jacket stares at the car as it pulls away.

“Who the hell is that?” the derelict says.

“A poet,” someone explains. “From Mexico.”

The man snorts. “All we need is more fuckin’ Mexicans,” he says, and shambles into the New York night.

March 1991

IN PUERTO VALLARTA

It was dusk in Puerto Vallarta, and we were in a restaurant called El Panorama, dining with a Mexican woman we’d met that afternoon. The restaurant was on the top floor of the Hotel La Siesta, rising seven precarious stories above the ground on a hill overlooking the town. For once the name of a restaurant was accurate. From our table, while the mariachis played the aching old songs of love and betrayal, we could see a panorama of cobblestoned streets glistening after a frail afternoon rain. We saw the terra-cotta patterns of a thousand tiled rooftops, along with church steeples and flagpoles, palm trees and small green yards, and little girls eating ice-cream cones. The aroma of the Mexican evening rose around us: charcoal fires, frying beans, fish baking in stone ovens. Over to the left in the distance was the dense green thicket where the Rio Cuale tumbled down from the fierce mountains of the interior. And beyond all of this, stretching away to the hard blue line of the horizon, there was the sea, the vast and placid Pacific.

“It’s so beautiful,” the Mexican woman said, gesturing toward the sea. My wife followed her gesture to gaze at the rioting sky, which was all purple and carmine and tinged with orange from the dying sun. The woman’s face trembled as she talked about her husband and her son. They had died within six months of each other, the husband of a heart attack after many years in the Uruguayan foreign service, the son in a senseless shooting at a party in Mexico City.

“When those things happened,” the Mexican woman said, “I couldn’t live anymore. I didn’t want to. I sat at home in the dark.” She sipped her drink. “My daughter was the one who told me to come to Vallarta. She said I had to heal myself. I had to go away and get well. And she was right. Beauty heals. Don’t ever forget that. Beauty heals. I hurt still. But I am healed.”

Not all the stories we heard in Puerto Vallarta contained such elements of melodrama and redemption. But there were other tales of healing — the woman from Minnesota, broken by a difficult divorce, who wandered south with a vague hope for escape. Now the gray years were erased by the sun and sea and the sound of children laughing in the still hours of the siesta; she worked in a clothing store and was catching up on two decades of lost laughter. There was a man broken by the culture of greed during the American eighties; back in Boston he had left a bankrupt company, a ruined marriage, a defaulted mortgage; now in the mornings he took a boat out on the blue water to fish for shark. Another man had lost a much loved son to drugs; another had lost a career to whiskey; a third had postponed an old dream of becoming a painter. All had come to Puerto Vallarta to live a little longer or, perhaps, for the first time.

For centuries it was a fishing village, a few huts thatched with palm dozing along the shore of the great natural harbor called the Bahia de Banderas, which is 25 miles wide. The town was built around the Rio Cuale, one of the four streams that now traverse the city. It never became a major port, because the merchants of Mexico preferred to greet their Manila galleons in Acapulco, 800 miles to the south and a much shorter journey to the capital, Mexico City. For years no roads connected the tiny village to the large cities of the interior; mule trains labored for weeks to travel the 220 miles due east to Guadalajara. And Mexico City, 550 mountainous miles to the southeast, was beyond reach.