In the moment of the word: the late Mexican author Salvador Elizondo pursued spontaneity in the act of writing daring, unorthodox works.

• Author: Bach, Caleb

Salvador Elizondo, Mexico's daring man of letters, wrote this perplexing passage in the early seventies and dedicated it to his close friend, the poet and essayist Octavio Paz. The text introduced a collection of short pieces he called El grafografo [The Graphographer] to celebrate both the physical and metaphysical act of writing: that special moment when hand grasps pen to touch paper to capture a fleeting impulse.

As Paulina Lavista, his devoted wife of nearly forty years, says, "Salvador has always written a la prima, like Velazquez did as a painter. He first reads and thinks a great deal and then ... he writes fluidly with very few changes. He has always wanted to preserve that initial spontaneity of an image or idea. He has no use for the computer, believing it can only destroy the fresh quality he's after and deprive him of the tactile aspect of writing he so treasures. I recall when he wrote 'Escribo. Escribo que escribo.' He said, 'Look what I've done.' He was laughing. Writing for him has always been a joy. He never struggles or suffers. Later our friend Ulalume Gonzalez de Leon, the Uruguayan poet who has lived in Mexico for many years, gave Salvador a line drawing of himself drawing himself drawing himself and called it Autorretrato del grafografo. "

The author and his wife, a prominent photographer in her own right, live on a shady, cobbled street in the historic Coyoacan district of Mexico City. Given the temperate climate, they spend considerable time outdoors on a covered porch overlooking an attractive garden, where their several dogs and a cat romp to the sounds of a squawking parrot named Currito (meaning "a bit of work"). They entertain friends on their veranda, which has also served as the site for interviews, including a session depicted in Ida y Vuelta (1999), a video biography of Elizondo produced and directed by his wife. The author once wrote a meditative essay called "Desde la veranda," which pays homage to that Kiplingesque age of the Raj when civilized people sat and talked while nursing a gimlet or smoking a cheroot. During much of his life, Elizondo, seventy-three, enjoyed alcohol and tobacco. Indeed, many photos show him puffing on cigarettes, an addiction that led to bone cancer, a delicate operation, and an extended period of recuperation.

"I met Salvador because his father, Santiago Elizondo Pani, one of the most important figures during the golden age of Mexican film--he ran Clasa Films Mundiales--worked with my father, Raul Lavista, who was a conductor and composer of film scores. My father collected records and on Sundays people came over to listen, including Salvador. At the time I was fifteen. He was thirteen years older, married, and had a young daughter. Salvador had a very unusual childhood. As a little boy, he grew up with film but also literature because his mother used to read to him, including poems by her uncle, Enrique Gonzalez Martinez. When he was just four, his father accepted an appointment as commercial attache at the Mexican embassy in Berlin. Salvador was placed in the care of a German nanny who admired the Fuhrer and tried to inculcate him with her own anti-Semitic opinions. While learning to read in German, he was exposed to an infamous child's book by Heinrich Hoffman, Der Strummelpeter, with sordid tales like the one about the boy whose fingers are cut off because he sucks his thumb.... Just before the war--it was 1938--local officials mistakenly put him in a school for Jews and then transferred him to another school where he had to salute in the Nazi manner."

Elizondo relates in his Autobiografia precoz (1966) that when the war broke out the family returned to Mexico City. To maintain his ability to speak German, his parents enrolled him at the Colegio Aleman on Avenida Tacubaya. It too proved to be a stronghold of Nazi sentiment, for which reason local authorities closed it in 1941. Soon after, his father decided to enroll him at the Elsinore Naval and Military School in Southern California. He spent his years from age eleven to fifteen at this notoriously strict academy, a painful time but rich in adventures he would recount later in a touching, often funny...