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TO WRITE, TO FIGHT, TO DIE

Date: October 27, 1985, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline: By Earl Shorris; Earl Shorris is the author of ''Under the Fifth Sun, a Novel of Pancho Villa'' and ''The Death of the Great Spirit.''
Lead:

THE OLD GRINGO By Carlos Fuentes. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden and the author. 199 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $14.95.

TEN years ago, Octavio Paz told an interviewer there was not one Carlos Fuentes, but two, the European voice and the Mexican voice. Since then, more have emerged. Carlos Fuentes has been the palimpsest of Mexican history and culture separated into its discrete layers: Indian, Spanish, French, revolutionary, aristocratic, leftist, centrist, expatriate. In this analyzed presentation of the person, this soul shown after the centrifuge, Mr. Fuentes demonstrates the complexity of the Mexican character and the artistic difficulties peculiar to the novelist born in the Navel of the Universe, which is where the Aztecs placed Mexico.

For the North American reader to appreciate the levels and enjoy the discoveries of the sensual and mind-pleasing new novel by Mr. Fuentes, it may be helpful to provide the context to a tale that is, on casual reading, an imagined conclusion to the life of Ambrose Bierce, the San Francisco writer of sentimental stories and misanthropic newspaper columns who disappeared in Mexico in 1914.
Text:

The pattern of the Mexican character was set early in the 16th century: When the Spaniards came to Mexico, they put the conquest of the population in the hands of the priests, and those wily psychologists chose to overlay Christianity on pagan religions like paper on a wall. Near the city of Tenochtitlan, at the shrine of Tonantzin (Our Mother), the Virgin Mary miraculously appeared to Juan Diego, a recent convert. On the very hill where the Temple of Tonantzin had been, the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico, was erected; the soul of a nation in the form of a palimpsest was carved in stone, and the problems of the Mexican in life and art were forever complicated.

The intellectual and social life of France was then piled on the converted Indian during the brief reign of Maximilian, who arrived in 1864 and was executed in 1867. Yet the positivism of Auguste Comte was the main philosophical influence in the oppressive government of Porfirio Diaz, which was overthrown in the revolution of 1910. The Socialist constitution of 1917 added another layer. Then came the betrayal of the revolution by a class of robber barons like Artemio Cruz, the dying monster of Carlos Fuentes's best known novel. But in all these changes nothing disappeared; there were only additions: Every Mexican knows that we live in the fifth and final age, quinto sol, and that the world will end in earthquake and fire; every Mexican has a nahual, an alter ego, a magical twin, a mirror image; no Mexican can help but be awed by the figure of Coatlicue, she who exists between life and death, reaching into both, mother of the moon and the stars, the goddess who swallowed a white feather and gave birth to Huitzilopochtli, the warrior sun, Coatlicue the earth and Our Mother; and every Mexican knows what lies to the north and how behemoth America affects every moment of his days and nights for as long as it suffers him to live.

It is in this Mexican mind that Carlos Fuentes sets his most ambitious novel, the first in which he attempts to integrate all that he knows and can call up of history, myth and thought. He uses the opposition between nations, the tension of unequals that share a common border, to drive the plot of the novel and to motivate the revelations of history and analogue. He calls North America ''the land without memory'' and says there is a ''memorious dust'' in Mexico that blows across the river, all the way to Washington, where the heroine of the novel, Harriet Winslow, now sits and remembers. So begins the story of ''The Old Gringo,'' looking down through the topmost layer to the exhumation of the body of the old writer who had said, ''To be a gringo in Mexico, that is euthanasia.''

The exhumation and manner of death of the old gringo echo the killing of William Benton by one of Pancho Villa's generals during the revolution that began in 1910. Benton, a British citizen with connections to the great landowners of northern Mexico, was bludgeoned to death, causing an international scandal. Pancho Villa ordered the body dug up, properly executed, and sent home. It is a grisly incident even in a revolution, but Mr. Fuentes uses it as a turn of plot and a layer of imagination. Before half a dozen pages have gone by, the mind of the reader has been awakened to the author's dissatisfaction with history. The Miranda ranch in the novel will resemble the famed Terrazas ranch, which before the revolution was so large the owners replied to an order for 10,000 head of cattle by asking, ''What color?'' The generals of the novel will resemble the generals of history, but nothing will be exact, everything will be imagined from the shards of history and made to serve the fiction. Even Ambrose Bierce's famous story of patricide, ''A Horseman in the Sky,'' will appear in the novel as past and present, imagination and history, part of the distinction between Mexicans and North Americans. Quotations from his stories will be revised to fit the Ambrose Bierce invented by Mr. Fuentes. I N a novel of layers and connections such as this, the surface action must move quickly, there must be a good story to keep the reader from drowning in the depths. The genius of ''The Old Gringo'' is the choice of a character as rich as Ambrose Bierce, who is at the center of a famous mystery. At the age of 71, tossed between memory and death, Bierce crossed the border into Mexico in search of Pancho Villa, perhaps to find the stuff of stories again, perhaps to soldier as he had during the Civil War, perhaps to die. His last message came out of Mexico in December 1913, and he is presumed to have died the next year, some say in the battle of Ojinaga, but no one really knows.

Carlos Fuentes picks up the story at El Paso, loading Bierce's suitcase with sandwiches and symbols to carry across the border: ''If they opened his suitcase at customs, all they'd find would be a few ham sandwiches, a safety razor, a toothbrush, a couple of his own books, a copy of Don Quixote, a clean shirt, and a Colt .44 wrapped in his underclothes.'' Bierce soon encounters the troops of Gen. Tomas Arroyo, makes a show of his nerve and marksmanship and is invited to join Pancho Villa's Northern Division. It is clear to the young Villista general that the old gringo wants to die. The Villistas occupy the remains of the great Miranda ranch. Arroyo's troops destroy everything but the mirrored ballroom of the hacienda. In the ruins Arroyo and Bierce meet Harriet Winslow, the American woman from Washington who had been hired as a governess and teacher for the Miranda children, and the curious triangle of the novel is formed. Once the three are known and related, lives can be attached to them -Harriet Winslow's father disappeared or was killed in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and he is or is not buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Suicides and parenticides (as Bierce called them) are connected to Bierce in what may be history, tricks of memory, or the imagination of the artist. But it is Tomas Arroyo whose history and imaginings reach all the way down through the origins of his people under the earth in Aztlan to the mythical base upon which the Mexican character is constructed; the nahual life of his life is allegorical: he belongs to the basic myth of Coatlicue whose son was born full-grown and armed, able to save himself from the murderous jealousy of his siblings, the moon and the stars. To point up the allegory, General Arroyo travels with a woman named La Luna (The Moon), and her relation to him is far more complicated than that of a mere camp follower.

In the memories, dreams and actions of the triangle, the tension between the neighborly adversaries along the Rio Grande/ Rio Bravo becomes comprehensible in a more complete way than any analytical writer can tell, for Carlos Fuentes takes the reader into the mythical, sexual, political, economic, moral maelstrom of inter-American relations. Like some feverishly sensual Latin American Socrates, he uses imagination and irony to lead the reader to discover through feeling as well as thinking why and how the river is a scar. T HE novel has the magical form invented by the Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo and carried on by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Mr. Fuentes and others. In this form, roles change, characters exist and speak in more than one frame of time on the same page, dream and reality are interchangeable, inconsistencies abound and lead to revelations. The intellectual excitement of these novels is often greater than their poetic achievement.

Distance is not a problem in this book, however. Carlos Fuentes is not a cold writer, and he and Margaret Sayers Peden, who translated the book together, have maintained the tem-perature of his style, as in this description of a scene at the Miranda ranch: ''A never-ending fiesta, a proliferating energy that fed on its own excesses of color and fever and sacrifice. The old gringo did not want to read omens or perceive destinies in the thronging life surrounding him, pressing and pushing him slowly into the chapel, a strong and irradicable snaking of faith incarnate and sacrifice and waste, toward the altar, farther and farther from them, the old man separated from Arroyo and Harriet, the man and woman together now, embraced by a blind destiny the old gringo could understand in Harriet's face but not on his. Arroyo's face. The old gringo's face, saying to Arroyo: Take her, take my daughter. Into the middle of the kneeling penitents, the thick incense and scapulars, rolled a perfect silver peso, and young Pedrito, on all fours like a little animal, scrambled after it, fearful of losing his only treasure.''

The oppositions in ''The Old Gringo'' are like armies across a border, waiting for the starburst that signals the commencement of war. Bierce and Winslow, Arroyo and La Luna; and after these surfaces there is the nation of the mother and the nation of the father, Coatlicue and Zeus, Freud and the poet/kings of the Valley of Mexico. ''Half of the world is transparent; the other half, opaque,'' according to Mr. Fuentes. On one side, the people do not move from the place in which they were born; on the other side, their restlessness knows no limit. On one side there is no memory and on the other even the dust carries a history. War is engagement, however, and revolution is always parenticide; it is the same in both camps.

The truth of the conflict, however, may be revealed by the dominant symbol in ''The Old Gringo,'' the mirror. In the mirror we see ourselves or the opposite of ourselves; the reflection proves the reality of the viewer or the existence of the nahual. If the father of the schoolteacher from Washington died in Cuba, who is the old gringo who has come to die in Mexico, and how is he related to the teacher and to Arroyo except as a symbol? How is the moon-faced woman who sleeps with the young general connected to the sun? In the intertwining of the schoolteacher and the general, the child of the father and the child of the mother, who will dominate? And what have these symbolic children to do with the death and exhumation of the old gringo? T HERE are devilish bargains, the destruction of a precious patrimony, murder, betrayal and a great deceit, all growing out of the reconstructed, comprehensible history imagined by Carlos Fuentes. It is the kind of work one hoped would follow the brilliant excoriation of a perverted revolution in ''The Death of Artemio Cruz,'' which was published more than 20 years ago; it is the work of an integrated personality, the artist who contains and illuminates all the layers of all the times and cultures of a nation.

If there are moments in the novel when the artist is overwhelmed by the analyst, or the political fervor of the author leads him to write an unseemly rhetoric into the mouths of his characters, the reader does best to move on, keeping to the pace of the plot, ignoring the fleas. The only serious flaw for me is that the book may be too concise; I wished for details to more fully realize the characters, to limit them less by their symbolic roles. Perhaps that would have obscured the depth of the novel; I don't know; the book is a siege of echoes, it goes by in a moment, and that is enough. FROM ONE CIVIL WAR TO ANOTHER With ''The Old Gringo,'' the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has returned to one of his favorite themes - the uneasy and unequal relationship between the United States and Mexico. ''What sparked this novel was my admiration for Ambrose Bierce and for his 'Tales of Soldiers and Civilians,' '' Mr. Fuentes said by telephone from Cambridge, Mass., where he is teaching comparative literature at Harvard University this fall. ''I was fascinated by the idea of a man who fought in the United States Civil War and dies in a Mexican civil war.'' The title page for ''The Old Gringo'' lists the book's author as one of its translators, a development that Mr. Fuentes, who spent part of his childhood in Washington and has been fluent in English all his life, considers natural. His first decision as a writer, he recalled, was ''whether to write in the language of my father or the language of my teachers.'' He chose Spanish, he said, because it offered ''a lot more to recover, transform and fill in,'' compared to English, which, ''with a long and uninterrupted literary tradition, did not need one more writer.'' Mr. Fuentes examines Mexico and the United States from another perspective in the novel he is now finishing, tentatively called ''Christopher Unborn.'' It is set in Mexico on Oct. 12, 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the Americas. But, as Mr. Fuentes notes, it ''deals a lot with the United States as well,'' since he imagines an army of Central Americans and Puerto Ricans, directed from Washington, occupying the state of Veracruz. - Larry Rohter