This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

C–Children

I have witnessed the births of all three of my children. My first daughter, Cecilia, was born in Mexico City in 1962. Her mother, my first wife, was Rita Macedo, a beautiful actress of mestizo appearance — dark-skinned, with large, almond-shaped eyes and prominent cheekbones. She had just begun filming El ángel exterminador with Luis Buñuel when she became pregnant and her doctors told her that bed rest was in order: the birth would be a difficult one. In fact, Rita appears in the last scene of the film, when the people who have escaped from their confinement convene in the church to offer their thanks, only to discover, once again, that they cannot leave. . As often happens in the movies, that last scene was the first to be filmed. That is why Rita only appears at the end.

As things turned out, Cecilia’s birth was not difficult. It was, as this natural, universal event always is, in every part of the world, unique and miraculous. Every father confers upon the birth of his child a series of marvelous, singular qualities that are difficult for anyone else to understand; every father also knows that he too will add his own unique quality to the birth of his child. Cecilia’s birth was a musical event. I might have heard or remembered words, images of flowers or fruits, animals or birds, rivers, oceans. But all I heard was music. I cannot explain it. Nor can I imagine it. I can only bear witness to it. The moment Cecilia emerged and cried out for the first time, I knew that I was hearing a proclamation of nature, the newest, but also the most ancient. To hear the voice of a human being coming into the world is to hear the echo of the origin of all things. To hear an impassioned song. When a little girl is born she doesn’t cry out simply because it is the most natural thing to do. Her true nature is asserting itself at that moment, through her voice, the conduit that carries her toward society, culture, love. The miracle of birth is nothing more than that.

When Cecilia arrived she was quick to reveal the voice of tenderness, and as I held her in my arms for the first time I felt my body and hers fully, freely expressing themselves. Father and daughter, different — yet both of them, in the beauty of that single moment, possessed a free sexuality, the kind in which desire and the joy of the amorous-filial relationship become fused and confused.

“La Fuentecita,” “La Gordita,” “La Ex Gordita” (Little Miss Fuentes, Little Miss Chubby, Little Miss Ex-Chubby) were the nicknames Luis Buñuel bestowed upon Cecilia as she grew up, and he abandoned his cruel fantasy of yanking off my little girl’s round head so that he might play soccer with it. She grew up with tension, with feelings of abandonment, and a keenly critical, realistic view of things. Even today, as she approaches the age of forty, she increasingly demonstrates a tender strength and a manner of being that is never complacent — with either herself or others. I, however, am exempt from this severity and am welcomed into her affections.

Nevertheless, as I watch my daughter’s life unfold, I still find myself caught in the moment she appeared for the first time, when I heard that music of necessity and desire. A voice of supplication, happiness, sadness, that would all eventually dissipate because the sounds of words and song are simply not the same. The practical aspects of life do not allow this. The privilege of birth is to arrive in song. And that is why, then and there, I named her Cecilia, patron saint of music, condemned to death by suffocation in her own bath, decapitated only after a Roman soldier tried and failed three times, leaving her to die over three agonizing, slow days. We give names to exorcise.

In 1972 I married Silvia Lemus, my second wife. Natasha, my second daughter, was born in Washington in 1974. She was a bouncy, happy baby, bubbling over with imagination and glee. A father’s greatest wish is that his daughter will always be a source of tenderness, that she will always come skipping her way into the living room. But the photographs fade, the organdy snags, the silks grow yellow with age. The First Communion is not an eternal event.

“Melanie,” Natasha called out to her playmate as the two little girls, just having celebrated their fourth birthdays, bounded their way through my library, “this is my father. He’s a hundred years old.” We all age at our own pace. In between separations and reunions, conflicts emerge. When the separation wins out, there shouldn’t be innocent or guilty parties, just the eternal effort to settle old issues and find balance within ourselves, with our parents, with our children.

Natasha and I have been as close to and as distant from each other as we have been from our respective inner selves. She speaks of the “sad winter” of her childhood, and of her repeated attempts to become a woman, to invent and reinvent herself over and over again. She wanted to please. She wanted to shock. At times she was the hungry exile in her own home. On a desert island she found a box filled with books and came back to surprise her teachers — and to correct them, now that she was far ahead of them, to the point of exasperating them: “You have been doing too much reading, little girl.”

She knew too much, and she shielded herself with a culture as brilliant as it was damned. She didn’t know how to invent herself on a stage, on a piece of paper. She needed to leave behind the prison of foggy, intangible places and come out into a space where she might communicate with others — writing, acting, giving her talents a chance. She needed to discover the place where being everything you want to be is a virtue.

I named Natasha after the lovely Natasha Rostova of War and Peace, although her name is also an ode to Dostoevsky’s Filippovna.

My son was a young artist, embarking on a destiny that nobody could wrest from him because his was the destiny of art, works of art that would long outlast the artist. Touching the feverish temples of her son, the mother wondered, nevertheless, if this young artist that was also her son had not created too close a bond between starting point and ultimate destiny. The tortured, erotic figures of his paintings were not a promise but a conclusion. They were not a beginning. They were, irremediably, an ending. Understanding this was anguish for his mother, because in her son she wanted to see the full realization of a person whose joy depended on his creativity. It was unfair that his body was betraying him, that the body was calamitously independent of his will.

She would watch her son at work, absorbed and fascinated: my son will soon reveal his gifts, but he will not have the time for conquests, he will work, he will envision things, but he will not have the time to produce. His painting is inevitable — that is the reward, she said, my son will not replace or be replaced in the thing that only he can do, it doesn’t matter for how long, there is no frustration in his work, even though his life will be cut short. . ¹

When I wrote these lines some years ago, I envisioned them as a kind of exorcism, not a prophecy. I thought about my son, Carlos Fuentes Lemus, who was born in Paris on August 22, 1973, and died in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, on May 5, 1999. Just as he started to take his first steps — his mother Silvia and I were living on a farm in Virginia — bruises began to appear all over his body and his joints swelled up. We soon found out why. Carlos, as a result of a genetic mutation, was suffering from hemophilia, the illness that prevents blood from coagulating. From a very early age, he had to receive injections of the coagulating agent he lacked, factor VIII. Although it was tedious, we believed that this procedure would bring him relief from his affliction for the rest of his life. The contamination of blood banks as the result of the AIDS outbreak left hemophiliacs dangerously unprotected— sometimes because of erroneous medical decisions, sometimes because of acts of criminal irresponsibility on the part of European and American authorities. Because of this, the hemophiliac was completely vulnerable and exposed to dire infections and the weakening of the immune system.

Carlos’s childhood was filled with aches and pains, but very early on, in a way that was more than intuitive — it was as if his precociousness was an augury of his own death and a catalyst for his creative life — he dedicated his hours to the art of words, music, and forms. When he was five years old, he won the Shankar Prize for Children’s Drawing in New Delhi, India: without our knowledge, the teachers at the elementary school in Princeton that Carlos attended had submitted his very first works to be considered for the prize. From that point on, Carlos never abandoned the pencil that came first, the paintbrush that followed soon after, and the early artistic influences to which he was devoted and which would stay with him always: Vincent van Gogh and Egon Schiele. I remember one summer trip through Andalucía: he made us stop the car every other second to photograph, admire the landscape, and occasionally pluck sunflowers from the ground as if picking up a painting by the great Dutch artist and taking it away with him. He planted sunflower seeds in the garden of our house at Cambridge University, which we assumed would perish in the English chill, but we returned in the spring to find them blooming, just like in a painting. . Then, taking a remarkable leap into the past, Carlos discovered the precise, luminous work of the Renaissance artist Giovanni Bellini and the expressive formalism of Utamaru, the Japanese painter. This was his pictorial legacy.

Images became the center of Carlos’s life. First it was the pictorial image, soon afterward the literary image, eventually the immobile photographic image, and finally the fluid image of the cinema. He seemed to understand that the image resists reductive definition and encompasses, in a manner that is almost an act of love, all the senses. . sight, sound, smell, taste. That was why the meningitis that almost destroyed him in January 1994 was so particularly painful, because it practically robbed him of his sight and his hearing — the most intimate and sensual company his ailing body knew. His passions were Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, but most of all Elvis: every year, every August 16, Carlos would travel to Memphis to commemorate the anniversary of Elvis’s death. The collection of photographs he took constitute a singular archive and testament to the immortality of the King.

Like many parents who remained stuck on José Alfredo Jiménez and Ella Fitzgerald, I had quite a time following my son in his musical meanderings. I did, however, feel a very affectionate identification with his literary tastes. The poetry of Keats, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, the plays of Oscar Wilde, the novels of Jack Kerouac, the philosophy of Nietzsche. . I realized that when Carlos read, he transcended the image eagerly to seek out — though perhaps not necessarily to find — the metaphor, the incarnation of worldly things in their most mysterious form, more distant but more accurate: the most forgotten relationship but also the most natural — simply, the relationship between this and that.

Carlos, from the many hospital beds he had to lie in as he miraculously recovered his sight and hearing but lost other vital functions — at times because of irresponsible and unforgivable surgical errors — never abandoned his pen and paper, drawing and poetry, in his feverish search for the profound meaning of all the things that both illuminated his life and stole it away from him. I say “miraculously,” and the miracle has a name: the attentions of a preeminent Mexican epidemiologist, Dr. Juan Sierra, who time and again gave Carlos back his creative life.

Carlos forged his artistic path with urgency, with joy, with pain, without a single complaint. His deep eyes, occasionally brilliant, occasionally absent, told us of how the body’s individual pain can be neither transferred nor imagined by others. And if that pain could not be transmitted through a poem or a painting, then the pain would be forever silenced, alone, inside the suffering body. There is a tremendous difference between saying “My body hurts” and “The body hurts.” How to ascribe a voice to some pain or other is the enigma that Elaine Scarry considers in her excellent book The Body in Pain. My son Carlos conceived this experience in terms of visual and verbal urgency. “Will I live tomorrow?” he asks himself in one of his poems.

Will I live tomorrow, just can’t say.

But I ain’t goin’ away without a fight.

This room is my nucleus.

To think huddled under a blanket is my escape,

I close my eyes

and hear my fear hidden within silence.

My fear: when broken it becomes

the evil unknown.

Welcome, my mystery.

But my reaction, unknown as well,

frightens my soul.

Except when it’s really unexpected.

My fear, then, has no time

to think its own terror

and the fullness of beauty takes over

my soul.

I hide my things away,

not out of fright,

but because I refuse to deal

with half-thinking brains.

“Ignorances liberate.”

I want to see you

in the same position, rocking yourself

in tears,

deprived for just one week

of your weak supporters.

“Each man kills the thing he loves.”

Each woman will let herself

be loved to death.

Which is the love that lasts

to death?

Is it only a pilgrim

of all resemblance?

My son identified strongly with artists who died young: John Keats, Egon Schiele, James Dean, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. . They didn’t have the time, Carlos would say to me, to be anything but themselves. At one point I told him the story of his long-dead uncle, my father’s brother, Carlos Fuentes Boettiger, who died of typhus as he was beginning his studies in Mexico City at the age of twenty-one. Just like my son Carlos, our uncle Carlos began to write from a very early age and in fact published a literary magazine in Jalapa, Veracruz, with the support of the poet Salvador Díaz Mirón. There is a strange resemblance between the poem of my son, dead at twenty-five, and the poem of my uncle, dead at twenty-one. In the magazine Musa Bohemia, I found a poem that my uncle Carlos Fuentes wrote when he was fourteen.

I am frightened of repose, I despise rest. .

The night intimidates me.

Because that is when my life rises up in reproach,

looks at me, leaden, and then shows me

the tremendous ghost, the horror of old age. .

Neither Carlos my son nor Carlos my uncle reached “the horror of old age,” but that fear of the unpredictable is something that has brought my wife and I, parents of Carlos Fuentes Lemus, closer to the pain we understand so much better now, the pain that so many of our friends have suffered through, the death of a child.

Confederacy of shadows, intertwined destinies and death, along with people and all they leave behind, inert, in a drawer, in a closet, on an empty canvas or a blank page. And despite everything, we fight to hold on to the heat of the object, the force of the brushstroke, the footprint of the man who walks. . What joy it was to learn that Carlos, gifted with an intuition that was both wonderful and terrible, spent the last evening of his existence, in Puerto Vallarta, phoning all his friends, all over the world, telling them about his plans to finish his movie, publish his book of poems, exhibit his artwork, telling them he was happy, strong, full of creativity, in love with his girlfriend Yvette. The following morning he collapsed under the weight of a pulmonary infarction.

We were left alone, Silvia and I. Our warm and wonderful friend Carmen Balcells understood, better than anyone, the relationship between mother and son.

I think of Silvia most especially, because she has always been so extraordinarily devoted to your boy and has lived in a perpetual state of terror about his health. I remember so clearly one time when I visited Carlos in New York, and how startled I was by his fragility and Silvia’s fatigue — more than a mother, she seemed like a girlfriend or a confidante offering her unyielding support to a boy full of that childish desire and eagerness to enter a kind of normality that would never be possible for him. .

Exorcisms of death sometimes become prophecies for life. Carmen Balcells was right. In The Years with Laura Díaz, I evoke the death of my uncle Carlos Fuentes in Veracruz at the turn of the twentieth century, but as I wrote I wanted to prevent the death of my son Carlos, embodied by the second Santiago of the Laura Díaz genealogy:

Silence. Tranquillity. Solitude. That’s what unites us, thought Laura, holding Santiago’s burning hand in her own. There is no greater respect or tenderness than that of being together and silent, living together but living the one for the other without ever saying so. With no need to say so. Being explicit might betray that deep tenderness which was only revealed in a tapestry of complicity, intuition, and acts of grace. . Laura and Santiago experienced all this while he was dying, both of them knowing that he was dying, but both conspiratorial, knowing, and thankful to one another because the only thing they wordlessly decided to banish was compassion. The shining eyes of the boy, sinking deeper and deeper by the day, asked the world and the mother, the two forever identified in the son’s spirit, “Who has the right to pity me? Don’t betray me with pity. I’ll be a man to the end.”

The person who works by night inevitably ends up feeling like the creator of the world. If he doesn’t work through the night, the sun will not come out the following day. As I would be getting ready for bed, Carlos would come in to say good night, wrapped in an old beach robe. Only once, thinking that I was asleep, did he retreat from me murmuring, “I am damned.” Then the night would come and give him all the education he needed. The night was his metaphor. The night came and no one could stop it. It is the hour for the creation that battles with darkness and death.

Carlos’s death left his mother and me with the reality of all that is indestructible. He already lived inside us, even though we were unaware of this. I don’t know if this solace is enough to answer the nagging question left behind by the loss of such promise. “Dying young is a bitch,” our friend Terenci Moix commented. We feel the spontaneous, happy obligation of doing for the dead person the things that he can no longer do for himself. But this vicarious experience is not enough. One must come to learn that children, dead or alive, happy or miserable, active or passive, have what the parent does not. They are more than their parents and more than themselves. They are our time out. And they oblige us to assume the paternal courtesy of being invisible so as not ever to diminish the honor of the creature, the responsibility of the child who needs to grow up in his own freedom and see himself as the shaper of his own destiny. Our children are ghosts of our descendants. And the child, as Wordsworth so marvelously put it, is “the father of the Man.”

Carlos’s sisters remained with him beyond his death. Natasha wrote of him, “Carlos was romantic at heart and I think that for his world and his mind — healthier than most — his death was more beautiful than two months in the hospital. Prince Creole, there is no one who does not love you.” And Cecilia, who was at our side every step of the way, put together a video of all the moments of her brother’s life that had ever been recorded. Watching the tribute my daughters had made for my only son, I realized that a child deserves the gratitude of a father, even if only for one single day of existence on earth.