Interview: Carlos Fuentes
Author, Scholar & Diplomat

What was your childhood like, growing up as the son of a diplomat?

Carlos Fuentes: Well, it was packing and unpacking a great deal. Also, a challenge to your capacity of adaptation.

Being the son of a diplomat, you are constantly forced as a child to change schools, language, friends, ambience. So I had to go from Spanish to English to Portuguese, back to Spanish, back to English, make new friends -- but it was challenging. Well, it makes you a person. I'm not unhappy about my childhood. On the contrary, I am grateful for it.

What kind of a kid were you?

Carlos Fuentes: I was a very studious young man. As a little boy, I read a lot. That was solitary in a way, because I knew my friends wouldn't last more than two or three years, then another change, new friends. So I had to build my own inner world through reading, movies, radio at the time. Radio was so important in the life of kids in the United States in the 1930s, when I was growing up here. So it meant really, in a word, building up your own personal world and traveling with it.

Can you recall books or radio programs or movies that were important to you?

Carlos Fuentes: Oh, yes. Very much so.

I belong to two cultures. That means that the books you read as a child were different in the Anglo-Saxon world and in the Latin American world. We were reading, as children, books that have never been read in the United States, Italian swashbuckling stories of The Black Corsair by Emilio Salgari, the swashbuckling French tales of the Pardaillan. These were not read. Here you were reading Nancy Drew, and the Dixon Boys I remember were read very much at that time. But there were the common classics that you found in all cultures: Jules Verne; (Alexandre) Dumas, The Three Musketeers; Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island. Mark Twain was immensely popular throughout the world -- Huckleberry Finn.

So there were common readings. There was also on my part a great passion for film. Living in the United States in the 1930s, my father loved film, and once a week he took me to films. And I became very versed in films. I remember there was a moment when several movie stars were declared "box office poison." They were the likes of Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn! And people started to shy away from the movies, for some reason.

I went to all the movies, and when you left the movie, you were handed a questionnaire. And if you answered the questionnaire correctly, well, you won some money. It so happened that I won in the children's category, and I got $50 for it, which was immense! It was like $5,000 today. So I said, "There's money in movies." That's as far as I went in money-making in movies. And there was radio. Sometimes I feigned I was sick, so I wouldn't go to school, and listened to Terry and the Pirates, Don Winslow of the Navy, all these great serials that were meant for housewives who were at home doing the work and hearing the radio programs. I was fascinated by all these melodramas that went through. So that formed my imaginary life in the United States in the 1930s to a big, big measure.

We've read that you spent summers in Mexico with your grandmother, who was a storyteller.

Carlos Fuentes: I had two grandmothers, and both were storytellers. One was from Vera Cruz, on the gulf coast; the other one was from Mazatlan in Sinaloa on the Pacific Coast. So I had two oceans at my disposal. I spent my summers with my grannies in Mexico. My father was counselor of the Mexican Embassy in Washington at the time. I think that I became a writer because I heard those stories -- all the stories that I didn't know about Mexico, about my own land. They were the storehouse of these great tales of migrants, revolution, highway robberies, bandits, love affairs, ways of dressing, eating -- they had the whole storehouse of the past in their heads and their hearts. So this was, for me, very fascinating, this relationship with my two grannies -- the two authors of my books really.

The radio shows you enjoyed were also a kind of oral storytelling, where you had to use your imagination. Do you think you benefited from that?

Carlos Fuentes: Yeah. You had to use your imagination. Now you see men landing on the moon, or you see the bombing of Baghdad, and that's it! You don't have to imagine anything. We had to imagine everything. We heard the great speeches of Franklin Roosevelt, the fireside chats. We had to imagine the man who was saying these warm, beautifully enunciated words.

You were in Washington when Mexico nationalized its oil industry. Was your father involved in those negotiations?

Carlos Fuentes: Not my father. He was simply the legal counselor of the embassy. The negotiation really went on at the top.

It went between President Roosevelt of the United States and President Cárdenas in Mexico. It was a turning point in the history of relations between the U.S. and Latin America, and between the U.S. and Mexico, which until then had been fraught with confrontation, dangers, war, interventions, invasions, all kinds of troubles. When Cárdenas nationalized Mexican oil in 1938 -- President Cárdenas -- Roosevelt decided to respect that decision and said, "Let us sit with the Mexicans and negotiate with them. We're not going to confront them. They have a right. But we will negotiate repayment of the companies and all that." So began the new era in Mexican-American relations which thankfully has lasted to this day. We have never come to blows. We know how to negotiate.

As a boy, were you aware of what was going on?

Carlos Fuentes: Very much so.

I was 10 years old at the time, so I was very much aware, and it was the topic around the table -- the dinner table at home or with the other colleagues of the embassy who were all talking about these things. Very conscious of them. Very conscious of the Mexican situation, of the New Deal, of the Spanish Civil War, of the rise of Hitler and Nazism, of the coming Second World War. You were extremely conscious of this. You saw the newsreels, which were also extremely important to see the images, the actual images of the führer or children being taken to camps in the countryside to avoid the bombing. All these things become a part of your life in the 1930s and '40s.

So you were introduced to politics at a very young age.

Carlos Fuentes: Very young age. It was dinner table talk.

Were you affected by these negotiations?

Carlos Fuentes: Yes. In the sense that...

When Mexico nationalized the oil in 1938, I became unpopular at school, when I had been popular, because there were these great banner headlines, "Mexican Communists Steal Our Oil!" So therefore, I was not the favorite. Then -- American kids are quite nice -- so eventually they forgot I was a Communist and they brought me back into the fold.

Were there any difficulties for you being a Mexican?

Carlos Fuentes: No. No, no, no. Just a cold shoulder sometimes, or suspicions or, "Who is this man? We thought he was like us. He's different. He's from another country." Which was good for me to realize that, indeed, I was not a gringo. I was a Mexican. I belonged to another country, another culture. Okay. I lived with that very comfortably.

What did you like about school when you were growing up?

Carlos Fuentes: Oh, in the United States I liked the teacher I had. I always remember her. I remember her by her name, Miss Painter. Miss Florence Painter at the Henry D. Cooke Public School on 13th Street in Washington, D.C. At that time, there was not something called "general studies," as today. At that time, you were taught arithmetic. You were taught language. You were taught history. You were taught geography. They had proper names. And she taught everything. She made us achieve interest in the world, in geography, in history, in language, in speech and arithmetic too. So it was really an extraordinarily good public school system. I think it's gone down the drain today, but at that time I think it was one of the best public school systems in the world, and I profited from it. I was educated by the public school system of the United States.

You didn't have any difficulty going between cultures and languages?

Carlos Fuentes: No, no, no. I adapted very easily.

I was a child without vacations, because at that time, during the summer months there were vacations in the United States, but there was school in Mexico. Vacations in Mexico came December, January. So when I was finished with school in the U.S., I was taken down to school in Mexico so I would not forget the Spanish language. I lived with my grannies, and I went to school every day. So I was a boy without vacations. Well, I profited from that. It was a bit sad at the time to say, "Oh, my friends in the United States are out fishing and playing baseball, and here I am learning verbs." So it turned out okay. It gave me fortitude, if you wish.

Was there anything in school that was difficult for you?

Carlos Fuentes: Not particularly.

I adapted quite well. I had the spirit of adaptation, as I told you, because of my father's diplomatic career. So I got along well with people, adapted myself to the customs, the language, the slang, the jokes, whatever. It came very easily, not only in the United States. Mexico, Chile, Argentina -- I adapted quite easily, like a chameleon. Although I am not a chameleon, I was able to adapt quite easily.

Did you have heroes as a young boy?

Carlos Fuentes: Franklin Roosevelt was my hero, a political hero, if you wish. I grew up at that time, and I saw that the Depression -- the Great Depression of 1929 -- had fostered dictatorships in Germany, it had strengthened Mussolini in Italy, it had strengthened Stalin in the Soviet Union, the rise of Japanese militarism, the weakness of the Western democracies. And Roosevelt was capable of solving the Depression through democratic means, by appealing to the people, to the social work force of the country: "Let us together solve these problems." That is a lesson I have never forgotten. It was my prime lesson in politics. I owe it to FDR.

Was there anyone in your youth who served as an inspiration to you or challenged you or helped you develop?

Carlos Fuentes: My father was a great educator for me. He taught me so many things. He named me Carlos after a brother he lost -- a very brilliant young man who died at 21 in Mexico. He had written very good poems. He was an intellectual. I think my father wanted to see his brother in me, so he put books into my hands at a very early age. He fostered my literary and artistic inclinations. So he was my best teacher. Then I was lucky in having good teachers throughout my life, in secondary school and then at the University of Mexico as well.

You went on to study law?

Carlos Fuentes: Yes. You know...

I wanted to be a writer always. I had published my first stories in Chile when I was 11 years old, and went on from there and won contests in high school. Well, that was my vocation, no doubt about it. So when I was told, "Now you have to do law school," I said, "Why? I want to be a writer; I don't want to be a lawyer." But the pressure in Mexico at the time was if you are a writer, you will die of hunger, so you must have a professional title. I remember visiting the great Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes, who my father told, "Convince Carlos he has to be a lawyer." And he said -- and Alfonso was the greatest Mexican writer at the time -- and he said, "I am a writer, but first I am a lawyer, because Mexico is a formalistic country. We are all hot cups of coffee, and if you don't have the handle to pick us up, people will burn their hands. You have to be Doctor something, Licenciado something, Engineer something or other." So I obeyed him and I went to school in Mexico. I went to school in Geneva. I achieved a broadness of education I would not have had otherwise. By reading law -- going back to read philosophy, Roman law, the medieval times, which are so important to understand Latin America, the philosophy of the Middle Ages -- I got a whole picture of the world that I would not have had if I had not studied law. So I'm very grateful for it.

How did you know at such a young age that you wanted to be a writer?

Carlos Fuentes: It's like walking, or singing in the bathtub. It comes naturally. It is there. I was writing -- indeed, at seven, I was writing my own magazine in the apartment building in Washington, and circulating it through all seven stories. I did it myself. News, movie reviews, reviews of books I had read. I mean, who cared? I cared. But it's a vocation that was there for me from the earliest time, the earliest age. Then it sort of spawned out into other activities, but always the center, the core of my life has been writing. The proof is that I have more than 20 books. I wrote them some time, huh?

Was it always there, or was there an epiphany, a moment of realization?

Carlos Fuentes: No, it was always there, but there were epiphanies, certainly.

One epiphany which I will never forget is reading Kafka's Metamorphosis. I must have been 17. And that really burned through my heart and my mind. I remember I started smacking the light bulb, I was so excited. I think the world was turning around me. "See! This you can do with literature! If you can write this, that's all you want from life. You want nothing more."

The epiphany was reading Kafka, I think.

What did your father do when you said you wanted to be a writer?

Carlos Fuentes: Oh, he was very happy, but he said, "Also you're going to be a lawyer. You must be two things."

You have been so prolific in your writing -- novels and essays and commentaries. How do you decide what to write and when to write it?

Carlos Fuentes: It's very curious, because there is an element that comes into this which is very fascinating and inexplicable.

I say, "I'm going to write this book," and now I sit down and I start sorting out chapters and imagining the book and saying, "Tonight, I think that tomorrow I will write such and such." I go to sleep. I wake up in the morning. I go to my table. I take the pen and something totally different comes out, which means that perhaps dreams are dictating part of your writing life in a very mysterious way. You have silly dreams. We all have silly dreams. We are naked on the street. How terrible! We fall off a roof. We're drowning in the sea. Those are the dreams you remember. But what about the dreams you don't remember? I think these are the really important dreams in your life, the underground dreams, the subterranean dreams that come out somehow in your life, and in my case, through literature. Because I can't explain otherwise why I write certain things I have never thought about before. And always on the day after a dreaming night. It's very magical.

As a writer, is it important to have a daily routine?

Carlos Fuentes: A writer is no different than a bricklayer or a bus driver in that sense. You must have discipline. Oscar Wilde said that writing is 10 percent genius, 90 percent discipline. You must have discipline for writing. It is not an easy task. It is very lonely. You're all alone. You are not in company. You are not enjoying yourself in that sense. You are enjoying yourself in another sense. You are delving into your depths, but you are profoundly lonely. It is one of the loneliest careers in the world. In the theater, you are with companions, with directors, actors. In film. In an office. In writing, you are alone. That takes a lot of strength and a lot of will to do it. You must really be in love with what you're doing to tolerate the huge loneliness of writing.

As part of your process, how important is rewriting?

Carlos Fuentes: Not that important. I seem to rewrite in my head a great deal. I write in these English ruled notebooks. So I write on the right, and then I correct on the left. Then, when it's typed out, I even make another correction, and then maybe in the typed sheets also. But not that much. I seem to have a great facility to go right into what I want to say. I do correct, but not like Balzac, who went crazy over the printing presses. He was correcting at the last minute.

What about the proverbial writer's block?

Carlos Fuentes: No, no. I have never suffered that.

I have friends who have practically died from writer's block. I had a good Chilean friend, José Donoso, a novelist, who had such a writer's block that I think it killed him eventually. He was so anguished. He suffered so much from that. I have never, thank God, suffered from writer's block. Never. That's why I produce so many articles and speeches and lectures at the same time, because when I do have writer's block for literature, I say, "Now is the time to write that speech. Now is the time to write that op-ed piece." So I am a well-oiled writing machine. I am always on the job.

How can a writer not suffer?

Carlos Fuentes: You suffer in another sense. Not from writer's block. There are other anguishes -- of expression, of not finding the right adjective, of doubting what you have written and throwing a lot of things into the wastebasket and all that kind of thing. Yes, that happens, but not writer's block in the sense of not being able to sit down and write. That I have never had, as long as I can write trash and then destroy it. But that's not the same as writer's block.

In any career -- and now I'm just speaking of your career as a writer -- there are disappointments. There are setbacks. Have you experienced that?

Carlos Fuentes: Not career-wise. There are difficulties, tragedies, disappointments in life, but not so much in reading and writing -- it is a pleasure always. It is a great paradise. To read and write is a paradise.

What about criticism? How do you handle that?

Carlos Fuentes: I don't read it.

At the same time that you were writing, presumably every day, you had another career in government, in diplomacy. How did you manage that

Carlos Fuentes: That has been kind of a vacation. Only twice in my life have I been in government.

I was in government as a very young man, in the diplomatic service of Mexico when I was in my early 20s. Then, with the success of my first novel, Where the Air is Clear, in 1958, I left the bureaucracy, and I did not come back until the 1970s, when I was ambassador to France for a couple of years. That's it. I have been offered, by other presidents "nearer-to-us" posts as ambassador, but I have always refused them, because I know from my experience that I am unhappy in diplomatic and governmental posts. I am happy when I am a free agent, writing what I like.

Although I know that it is a service, and I do not look down on it -- on the contrary. My father was a career diplomat, so I respect diplomacy and government service very much. Simply, I'm not happy in it. Why? Because I am away from my writing desk.

When I was ambassador in France, I could not write a single line, because I was constantly on the call for functions, for memoranda, for speeches, for this, for that. There was a time difference with Mexico, so I had to be with the French during the day and then with Mexico from 7:00 p.m. on, because of the time lag. So I never had any time for myself, which was okay. It was interesting. I got to know France well, a fascinating country. So many levels of interest and artistic community, business, ecclesiastical, the army, the political parties -- everything is interesting in France. Gastronomy. So I didn't have time for writing there. I did other things. That was a parenthesis in my life.

Although you were a prominent writer, the son of a diplomat, and a diplomat yourself, in the 1960s you were denied a visa to the United States. Could you tell us about that?

Carlos Fuentes: Yes. I was invited by NBC in 1962, I think, for a debate with Richard Goodwin -- who was then the Under Secretary of State for Latin America at the State Department -- on the Alliance for Progress. I said, "Sure, sure. Let's go. He has the advantage of being in the administration, of speaking English better than I do, and all these things, but I'll be happy to do that." So I was invited. I accepted the invitation.

I went to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, and was promptly denied a visa. I asked why, and they said, "We can't tell you why. It's a secret." So I was left stranded and classified forever under the Undesirable Aliens list. I asked once, "Do you ever get out of that list? Can I ever get out?" and they said, "No, no, no." I said, "Even hell has its limits. Even in hell you are promised that one day everybody will go to purgatory or to heaven; hell is not forever. Surely, the denial of a visa is not forever." They said, "No, no, you can come out with a visa." How? "If you demonstrate your allegiance to the cause of anti-Communism." I said, "Well, that is something I will never do just on the principle of it. I am not a Communist, but I will not go to that McCarthyite length."

So I was there on that blacklist. I was denied entry into Puerto Rico in 1967. And then Senator Fulbright took the floor and demanded that I be given a special waiver so that I could come to the United States, lecture and be in this country without problems. So I got that waiver, which was very extraordinary, because it meant that I applied for a visa and I was denied the visa on the presence of the Unwanted Persons Act -- the McCarran-Walter Bill it was called. Then I applied again, and I was granted the visa on the strength of the Fulbright Act. So it was very Kafkian -- we're speaking of Kafka today, but this is an actual Kafkian situation.

It wasn't until the Clinton administration that this list became history, and all us who were on the list -- García Márquez, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Foucault, Graham Greene, myself -- it was a very distinguished list. We were very happy to be on the "unwanted persons of the United States" list. Then we were all free from that and now we can come and go as we wish. It was a ridiculous Cold War situation. You know, McCarran and Walter were very, very reactionary senators. Arthur Miller tells in his biography how he was put in the unwanted persons list and was denied a passport to travel from the United States, but he went with Marilyn Monroe to see Senators McCarran and Walter, and on the strength of the presence of Marilyn Monroe, they gave him back his passport.

What is the responsibility of the writer in society, as you see it?

Carlos Fuentes: To write books. To write books as best he can. To write good books. And then all things flow from that. There was a moment when this idea of the political responsibility of the writer -- to proclaim yourself, "I am on the left," and "I am for the people," and you made a declaration and then wrote bad books, but it was pardoned because you were on the right side -- this is over. A lot of bad books were written -- by good people maybe, but bad books. In Latin America, it's clear why this was the case.

Pablo Neruda once said to me, "You know, we Latin American writers, we all travel with the bodies of our countries on our back. We carry our countries on our back. We are responsible to our countries, because our countries don't have political freedom, because illiteracy is in the 80s. For all the reasons you know, it is up to us to give voice to the voiceless." Today that is no longer true. Most Latin American countries are democracies, with regular elections, political parties, liberty for the unions, agrarian co-ops. In general, there is democratic freedom in Latin America. So if you want to be a writer that participates in politics, you do so with the honesty of saying, "I am in politics. I am a writer. Being a writer doesn't give me special privileges. Let me be judged by my political thoughts and actions."

That is one part of it. But...

There are writers who say, "I will have nothing to do with politics. I stay on the side. I write my books and I am merely a literary figure." But even then, the writer is working with language, with ideas, with memory. And as soon as you are working with language, you are working with a social medium, whether you like it or not. That book you are writing without any political conviction will have the political effect of giving value to language. Language is usually debased by the constant social use, by the rhetoric of politics or religion or whatever you wish. To give back what (Stephane) Mallarmé has said -- "the purity of the language of the tribe." To give the tribe back its language continues to be a mission of the writer, whether he or she likes it or not.

Is a novelist a provocateur by nature?

Carlos Fuentes: Yes, in the sense that you don't say things that people are comfortable with, generally.

To me, the greatest novelistic tradition in the world is the English novel. It's been going on for a long time, producing masterpieces, and all of them are against the grain of the English society. My wife and I live in England part of the year, and we realize how conservative and staid and conformist that society can be. And if, in that society, you get Emily Brontë and D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, you are going to have something that goes against the grain of the society, that confronts the society with a mirror of itself as it is not, as it could be, as it would wish or not wish to be. It is another vision of reality that is presented, the alternatives to reality are presented to a society by the novelist. So naturally, there is always an element of revolt -- of contrariness -- in writing novels. It is very different from writing political speeches.

You have generated controversy. How do you handle it?

Carlos Fuentes: Oh, very, very simply. Very calmly. It doesn't affect me at all. It comes with the turf. It's part of the job. It doesn't alarm you at all to provoke anger, hatred, responses, criticism, envy -- all the things you can provoke as a writer, or even as a public figure. I take it in my stride. It doesn't bother me at all. I never answer an attack. Never. Never. Never.

What are your sources of inspiration when you choose your subjects?

Carlos Fuentes: I think it's part of the dream work, the unfathomable subconscious.

I want to write a novel now about the last day of the life of Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican guerrilla leader. The day he was shot, what else happened in the country? It's something I want to write. There you have a subject which is clear-cut. But the way I write it, the style in which I write it, the components, I don't know yet. Apart from the bare bones of the structure, I am not certain how I am going to go about it, because that is going to depend on my memory, on my fears, on my dreams, on my desires, on a million things that are unaccountable this moment when we're talking together here.

Is there an audience that you're trying to reach in particular?

Carlos Fuentes: I'm not sure. I am translated into 36 or 37 languages, so how can I account for the Lithuanian or Uzbekistanian reader? He or she cannot come into my conscience when I write or I would go bananas. So maybe I think of a small circle of friends, or I think of my wife -- I think of a very small group of people, if I think at all of anybody, except the blank page, which is my real interlocutor when I'm writing. A blank page is staring at me, and I say, "You cannot go on being blank for long, and I have to talk to you, and you have to talk back to me," and there we go. You start writing.

Is writing a dialogue with yourself? A dialogue with society?

Carlos Fuentes: Yes, with your own culture, with your civilization, with all the things you know, all the things you ignore. What you ignore is more important for writing than what you know, because what you know is known. What you don't know is what you imagine. That gives force to the writing. If it's not there, the writing is not very good, because you're just reflecting on things and imitating life. But when you're talking about what isn't there yet, or what is there but is hidden or forbidden, then you come into something more interesting.

How do you prepare for a life as a writer?

Carlos Fuentes: You read a lot. You read a lot. You read a lot. Reading is essential. You have to read a lot.

You have to love reading in order to be a good writer. Because writing doesn't start with you. It doesn't spring from nothing. It doesn't start at zero. You have to be conscious that there is a tremendous tradition behind you, a tradition that goes way back to the Bible and Homer and whatever you wish -- and Aztec myths. You have to see yourself as part of the chain of being, if you wish. You are part of a process of language and memory and imagination. To put it in a nutshell, I think that to create, you have to be conscious of tradition. But to keep the tradition alive, you have to create something new. That would be my formula.

How do you measure achievement for a writer?

Carlos Fuentes: Certainly not like Dan Brown, I can assure you.

I think that writing is like a message put in a bottle and thrown into the sea. So whoever fishes that bottle out of the sea and reads the message, that is the "destinatary" (addressee) of the book. I mean, in other words, you cannot have a prefabricated audience, as a lot of best seller authors have. They know exactly who they're writing for. They pander to the tastes of that audience. That, for me, is not writing. That deprives writing of its mystery, of its importance, of its imagination finally. You have to be in ignorance, in a way, of the reader if you are to write a good book. You have to create readers, not just give them what they want. That is a big difference.

Not having pandered, not having sought out this great popular audience, how do you account for your achievements?

Carlos Fuentes: Total mystery. I am in awe at anybody who buys a book of mine. I want to go and buy it back and say, "Don't do it. Here is your money. Take it back." For me it is a great mystery.

You have so many cases of great writers who have achieved great popular success -- Balzac, García Márquez -- two examples. There are writers who have not had immediate success -- Stendhal, William Faulkner. But eventually they come into their own with time. Balzac and García Márquez will be popular forever. They are great writers, and they deserve their popularity. Stendhal was a failure, complete -- his novels. A lot of Faulkner was unread until he got the Nobel Prize practically, but the books were always great. The same year -- I think it was the same year -- Anthony Adverse came out, Hervey Allen novel, and Absalom, Absalom! by Faulkner. The Hervey Allen novel was a huge bestseller, huge bestseller -- the great bestseller of the year. I think nobody reads it today. Faulkner is read throughout the world.

So you have to be very faithful to what you're doing. The rest is the gift of the gods. That's it.

Is it important to be a risk-taker? Do you take risks as a writer?

Carlos Fuentes: Absolutely. Absolutely.

One can write comfortable novels, become a best seller, make yourself simpatico to a lot of readers. That's not my way. I want to take a risk with every book I write, and pose challenges to myself and to the reader. Sometimes I'm not an easy read, but I want the reader to come along with me and realize that he's climbing a mountain with me, that sometimes it may be difficult and sometimes even useless -- I don't care. But I'm not going to make the path just easy by writing something that I know will be popular or easy to read. That's not in my nature. I would rather rewrite my books the way I have already written them than debase myself in some way and say, "Now this is easy. Munch it up. It's easy to digest." No, no, no. Life is hard, difficult. Thought is difficult. Situations are extreme, and you must make an effort with the writer to travel this road. It is not easy for you. It wasn't easy for me either. But maybe there is a reward at the end. Maybe there isn't a reward. Maybe you have failed. But if there is a reward at the end of a hard trail, then you've done a good job.

In the 1960s, you were part of the great literary boom in Latin America. How important was that moment in Latin culture?

Carlos Fuentes: It was very, very important. We've always had a great literary tradition in some countries of Latin America, starting with the Indian cultures. The Aztecs, the Incas produced great literature. There is a folk literature, a verbal literature of the Indian people of the Americas.

Then we have a great colonial literature, starting with the chronicles of the conquest, which are our first novels, Bernal Diaz, Hernan Cortez. And a great colonial period, the great poet, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz in Mexico. Then a not-so-good 19th century because we were very imitative of European models and fashions.

But then a recovery through great poetry -- Ruben Dario, Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo -- great poets that brought the language to the fore and showed us their language and said, "It's your language as well."

From them sprang a generation of very good novelists, Borges, Carpentier, Asturias, Onetti, and we are their heirs. I mean,

We didn't come out of nothing; we came out of a very rich tradition. That tradition coincided with interest in Latin America, worldwide interest, because of the Cuban revolution. The Cuban revolution brought Latin America into focus after a long period of dictatorships and ignorance of what was going on. So there was this leader, Fidel Castro, and a lot of attention on Latin America -- and who are the writers in Latin America? It happened to be us. It could have been another generation that had preceded us, or a generation yet to come. We coincided with a historical event, which was the Cuban revolution, and with the Alliance for Progress and Kennedy and a whole new interest in Latin America. So that is the publicity of the affair. I think we also wrote good books, naturally. If not, we wouldn't be talking here. But the publicity moment was very good, and the books were good as well, so it was a very felicitous moment for our literature.

At the time, in the wake of the Castro revolution, when you were denied a visa to America, you were quoted as saying, "Books are my bombs." What did you mean by that?

Carlos Fuentes: I was very, very amazed that I would be denied a personal visa to enter the United States when one of my books was published in translation. In 1963, my publisher -- Roger Strauss of Farrar Strauss -- invited me, and I was promptly denied the visa. And I said, "The real bombs are my books, not me. I'm not going to put a bomb in a post office in the U.S.A. But my books may be more dangerous than I am. They maybe should ban the books, not the person." It was logical.

You have done so many things. You have won prizes. You have been given honorary degrees. You are a celebrated figure. What gives you the most satisfaction? What gives you your greatest sense of achievement?

Carlos Fuentes: It is personal things, always. The love of my wife, the love of my children. My parents. It is personal things that give you the greatest satisfaction even if you have never written a book.

Is there anything you haven't done that you would like to do?

Carlos Fuentes: Yes, but I wouldn't tell you.

As we look ahead into the 21st Century, what most concerns you?

Carlos Fuentes: The list of concerns is so great, I wouldn't know where to begin. I think the future of the globe, the future of the Earth as such would be my prime concern. What we are doing to devastate our habitat, the place we live in, the air, the sea, the animals -- we're destroying everything.

We have heard news today about the possible devastation of Alaska with a petroleum pipeline, instead of conserving that nature, which is the air we breathe and the food we eat, the water we drink. This is amazing -- a planet bent on suicide if it is not stopped, and I don't know how to stop it. There are all the good voices we have heard here in the Academy pleading for attention to save the planet.

That is probably the greatest concern we have, because if we don't save the planet, goodbye Michelangelo, goodbye Rembrandt, goodbye Walt Disney, goodbye everything. There will be desolation. It will be like Mars. Do we want that? Can we do anything about it? I think this is the great concern right now.

If one of the bright young people who read this came to you seeking advice, what would you say to them?

Carlos Fuentes: Precisely that. In your own life, in your own career, be very much aware that you are here for the next 50 years. Be sure you're here for the next 50 years. Maybe there won't be a planet in the next 50 years. Do the utmost to preserve our habitat.

If you had it to do all over again, is there anything you would do differently? Any regrets?

Carlos Fuentes: I don't think so, no. I don't have regrets, not real regrets, no.

In so many words, what's most important to you? What is really important to you?

Carlos Fuentes: Life and love. The quality of love around me. Yes. And the quality of your life.

How would you like to be remembered?

Carlos Fuentes: In what world would I be remembered is the question? It depends on what world. I don't want to be put on the wall of infamy by a dictatorship, no. Maybe our destiny is dust and anonymity and who survives, yes.

It is astonishing how people are forgotten. How many people of the past do we remember? Remember great artists, remember great writers, famous statesmen, warriors. But these are not the majority. The majority are the people who go to an unknown grave. It is very sad to think of it. You cannot think back -- if you're a normal citizen, not a prince or a king -- you can't go back more than three, four generations. Then your past is lost. You can't go further back than that. I can go back to my great-grandparents. After that, I don't know who they were. They're lost forever. So we write books in order to remember that past, to give it some semblance of reality, some possibility of survival through fictional characters. Anna Karenina will go on living, and Don Quixote. They will go on living, I'm sure of that.

There is a question that's very much at issue in the United States today. Everyone's talking about the immigration issue and what to do about our border with Mexico. We'd love to hear your views about that.

Carlos Fuentes: Listen, there are two sides to that. One is the fact that the United States needs workers. They happen to be Mexican workers because that's the neighboring country. But let us imagine that Mexico had full employment one day. The workers would still be needed. Who would pick the fruit? Who would cook? Who would serve at tables? Who would take care of the children? Who would drive the buses? Who would do the catering and work in the hotels? You have to get them from somewhere. Or generate those jobs for Americans who don't want to take them, obviously. So you are profiting from our labor.

In Mexico, we have a duty as well, and it is to provide labor to these workers. I wish they had never left Mexico. In the future, I want them to stay in Mexico. Mexico is a deeply divided country -- 50 percent of the population of 100 million is poor. There should be jobs waiting for them. There are not. They have to come to the United States. We should provide jobs for 50 million Mexicans and help us step out of poverty. We're still mired in poverty in Mexico. So I wish we had the offer of these jobs. If we had a Franklin Roosevelt, he would find a way to give jobs to the 50 million, who would not migrate. But then that would be your problem: Where are your workers coming from?

This has always been a country of immigrants.

Carlos Fuentes: Of course it is. Besides, I don't want to be nasty about that, but for many Mexicans who come here, they say, "Hey, this used to be our land! We are now foreigners here."

Now, is there any other question that you wished we had asked?

Carlos Fuentes: No. No. You have asked everything. I can't think of anything you could ask.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.