TIME TO IMAGINE.

• Author: Bach, Caleb

THIS RENOWNED MEXICAN WRITER BALANCES FACT AND FICTION IN MASTERFUL WORKS THAT LEAP ACROSS AGE AND SPACE

Carlos Fuentes, Mexico's master of many genres--essays, novels, reportage, short stories, plays--has assembled a body of work consistently brilliant, innovative, and often laced with a wicked, stinging humor befitting the Scorpio that he is. A very youthful, handsome, highly energized, and supremely disciplined septuagenarian, he continues to write important books at an ever-accelerating rate. He also lectures widely, submits to interviews when time permits, and graciously accepts the many prestigious awards that come his way in recognition of his enduring contribution to world literature.

Fuentes divides his time between a home in Mexico City and a London abode, where fiercely he protects his privacy to focus on the raw, creative act of writing. The latter residence, on the top floor of a nineteenth-century brick row house, overlooks a quiet garden court. Despite London's fog and clouds, large windows admit considerable light, which buoys the spirits of this writer accustomed to the warm rays of a Mexican sun. The living area features works by famous Latin American artists: drawings and watercolors by close friend and fellow countryman Jose Luis Cuevas; an abstract canvas by Venezuela's Jacobo Borges; and a large oil by Mexican painter Alberto Gironella, of a court dwarf in the manner of the Spanish master Diego Velazquez. By his own admission, Fuentes long has been obsessed by Velazquez. His own vivid narratives often cite specific paintings, and his writing is suffused with that sense of mystery, paradox, and ambiguity common to all great works of art. By prior agreement, we begin to talk about this aspect of the Fuentes oeuvre, and on cue, he intones a polished, flowing dissertation on Velazquez and his other great hero, Cervantes.

"I think they go together. For me they are twins. I always bring them up together because, after all, being a writer or painter in Spain of the Counter-Reformation was no easy thing, especially if you were of Jewish or Moorish ancestry with all the prejudices set up by the Catholic kings: purity of race, purity of religion, dogmas, constraints. So to be able, as Cervantes and Velazquez did more than any other two Spanish artists, to found a reality on the imagination, that I believe is a superb feat. It is one of the best examples we have that art is not merely the reflection of reality but it is the creation of a new reality. Perhaps political circumstances of the Counter-Reformation in Spain pushed them towards this. I don't know. I'm not sure. But the fact is Don Quixote and Las Meninas are supreme examples of reality founded on the imagination, a reality that surpasses reality. Don Quixote is immortal. He is more famous and immortal than people you and I know. And so is Las Meninas, as one of those mysterious works that admit multiple readings. The very fact that Velazquez introduces himself into the painting--the act of painting Las Meninas--creates a whole new universe around the painting as you approach it as a viewer, as the painting approaches you as a painting, as the painter is painting: All the elements coalesce into something I can only call a new reality, a reality of the imagination, proof that the imagination creates and founds reality."

In his many essays and lectures, imagination as reality and uncertainty as a constant are core issues. "Cervantes writes the great epic of the uncertain. Everything is uncertain from the word go: In a certain place of La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to remember, what is he called? Is he called Alonso Quixano? Is it Alonso Quixada, this surname Don Quixote? And he names the other characters and makes fun of him: His ideal lady, Dulcinea del Toboso, is really a peasant girl who bellows and smells of garlic: Aldonza Lorenzo. Everything is uncertain. Who is the author? Is it Cervantes? Is it Saavedra? Is it Cide Hamete Benengeli, the Arab historian whose papers are then translated into Spanish by an anonymous Moorish translator, who will be the object of the abject apocryphal version of Avellaneda? The apocryphal work takes Don Quixote to Barcelona to enter, for the first time in history, in literature, a printing shop! The character enters the place where his adventures are being printed! It is such a revolutionary working coming out of Spain of Felipe III, which is absolutely astounding as a testimony to the power of a work of art vis-a-vis the realities of the political domain."

"But wasn't ego involved," I inquire, "when Velazquez decided to portray himself within the inner sanctum of the Spanish court?" "There is always ego involved in a work of art!" Fuentes responds with a hearty laugh. "He had no other way to do it. And Cervantes too. If he had simply been a commonplace writer, with no ulterior motives of expression, he wouldn't have been there. But renown, fame, is a very recent event in history and in aesthetics. A thousand years before, to say this is by Cervantes or this is by Velazquez, especially in the Christian world, would be rather difficult. Montaigne said apart from le nom, now you have le renom--the fame--one of the great inventions of the Renaissance. And with fame begins a long trip of independence for the artist from the state, the court. In the Renaissance this dependence on the good will of the monarch begins to break down and shifts more and more towards public acceptance."

For Fuentes, the history of art always has been a compelling field for investigation. "I am a Mexican! Yes! It has to do with being born and living in the world of Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros, Tamayo--muralists. That was my visual universe as a...