If asked to list the important Mexican short story writers of today, one would no doubt call to mind the names of the dual deities of short fiction. Juan José Arreola and Juan Rulfo, who during their heyday in the mid-fifties represented the universal-fantasy tendency on one side and the rural-realistic on the other. The third member of this prestigious trinity, and one whose star is in continual ascent, is novelist Carlos Fuentes. Unprecedented success has greeted almost all of Fuentes' novels: numerous editions, translations into more than a dozen languages, purchase of film rights and winning of the coveted Biblioteca Breve prize in Spain. He is one of the rare Latin American writers who can live from his pen. Fuentes plays to the hilt his role of the grand novelist, center of attention, much sought after speaker (and visiting professor), and frequently interviewed expert on everything and anything. His contacts with Latin American and European writers are legion, and he additionally claims intimate ties with such contemporary North American literary giants as Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, and William Styron. Recently I had the occasion to review an anthology of Mexican short story writers all of whom were under thirty years of age. In the introduction each contributor was asked to list his literary influences. With but one or two exceptions, all refused to cite the Mexican narrators of the previous generation, but the influence of Carlos Fuentes was easily detected in the works themselves. And Juan Rulfo [in Narrativa joven de México, 1969]; in one of his rare interviews has observed, "Carlos Fuentes is the foundation of all of today's young literature in Mexico. All the writers want to be like him."

Fuentes' talents, however, do not lie exclusively in the novel. Indeed, he began and ended his first decade of writing with collections of short stories—each very popular and each the center of a heated polemic. Many reviewers have called attention to the structure of Fuentes' novels, which often consist of loosely connected episodes not unlike short stories. One critic of the novel The Death of Artemio Cruz goes so far as to suggest that a lazy reader might skip the chapters told in the first and second person and enjoy the novel reading only those related in the third person [Isabel Fraire in Revista Mexicana de Literatura, julio-agosto 1962]. Carlos Valdés, a Mexican short story writer of considerable note, calls Fuentes "a magnificent painter of small sketches, but a doubtful muralist of unlimited spaces" and suggests that Fuentes' real future belongs in the short story genre ["Un virtuoso gratuito," Revista de la Universidad de Mexico XVI, 1962].

For most Mexicans, Fuentes burst upon the literary scene in December of 1954. His book of short stories The Masked Days (Los días enmascarados) no sooner reached the bookstores than it became embroiled in a heated controversy over its language and themes. Fuentes was accused of taking too many liberties with the Spanish language—an accusation raised with almost every succeeding book. Fuentes on numerous occasions has speculated that the Spanish language needs renovation from its fossilized state, and a critic has praised Fuentes' Where the Air is Clear (La región más transparente) for containing the most extensive vocabulary ever found in a Mexican novel [José Emilio Pacheco, Estaciones III, 1968]. The second accusation against the short stories was that they were not "Mexican" enough. This allegation, while true for several pieces in the collection, is not based on fact when considering the totality of the book. Granted, the stories avoid the long-popular topic of the Mexican Revolution, its causes, results, or actual episodes. Fuentes in these stories was more closely aligned with the fantasy and satire of Arreola, who, incidently, was the director of the series that published Fuentes' book, although the compositions have been classified as "wilder, rawer and more precolumbian" than those of Arreola. [Anonymous, "Fifteen Young Mexican Writers," Recent Books in Mexico, 1957].

The common theme that unites most of the stories in Fuentes' first book is the inescapable past. In "Chac Mool," undoubtedly Fuentes' best known short story and a great favorite with compilers of anthologies, a Mayan rain god returns to life and enslaves his former owner. The latter's desperate attempt to flee from the idol by running away to Acapulco is thwarted when he drowns while swimming—the rain god can still control the elements. This piece, told in the form of a diary that is read by a friend of the dead man, has all the earmarks of a psychological study instead of fantasy until the friend also meets the idol face to face.

The fifth story in Fuentes' book, "By the Mouth of the Gods," also illustrates the influence of the inescapable pre-hispanic past on another resident of Mexico City. After defiantly cutting the mouth from a portrait of an Indian in the art gallery of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the narrator finds himself pursued by a pantheon of Aztec gods. (The painting incidently was by Tamayo, one of the Mexican artists that Fuentes most admires). The pursued locks himself in his hotel room, number 1519. The number itself is but another example of Fuentes' subtlety in presenting pre-hispanic elements—1519 marked the year that Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico. After a narrow escape from the gods in the hotel basement, the "art lover" is lured from his room, according to Fuentes' tongue-in-cheek satire, as only a Mexican could be—by denying his manliness (machismo): "This was the ultimate insult! They had ripped away the last shred of my dignity, my social position, my entire free will. Now they were attacking my sexual prowess. I thrust open the door . . .". He is then stabbed in the abdomen in a manner recalling the Aztec human sacrifices. Another element of fantasy that Fuentes effectively employs is giving life and personality to the lips that were cut off the picture. For a time they fasten themselves to the narrator's mouth and cause him to criticize various levels of Mexican society. The theme of social criticism, which makes itself manifest for the first time, is present to a greater or lesser degree in all of Fuentes' books. This has made him most unpopular in certain government and upper-class circles.

"Tlactocatzine, in the Garden of Flanders" is another story in this collection in which elements from the past destroy a modern Mexican. This destructive force is more recent, coming from the nineteenth century. A first-person narrator relates in his diary his experiences in a haunted house in the center of Mexico City. He is taking care of the old mansion for a friend when he is confronted with the phantom of Carlota, the mad empress, wife of Maximilian. Although the conclusion is somewhat ambiguous, it appears that she lures the narrator to his death. Carlota, made famous in the literature of the previous decade by Rodolfo Usigli in his play Crown of Shadows, will not soon be forgotten by Fuentes. She will appear as the principal protagonist of another short story in 1956, and will be mentioned several years later in the novel Where the Air is Clear; and finally Fuentes himself, in a phonograph recording, treats the listener to strains from "Adiós Mamá Carlota," the insulting song sung by the Juarists based on the melody of La Paloma, the empress' favorite musical composition.

In tracing the theme of the destructive past, it is necessary to leave Fuentes' first book for a moment and examine a forgotten short story he published in 1953. The title is "Panther in Jazz," and curiously Fuentes never mentions it nor has he ever collected it in a book. The victim appears to be a North American student, although the reader can never be sure. The pursuer is a panther escaped from a local circus and lodged in the student's bathroom, or so the boy believes—he thinks he hears growls but never actually sees the animal. The frantic young man listens intently at the door for any sound, and finally, as he loses his mind, he kidnaps a child, tosses it into the bathroom, and seals the door. The student never seeks outside help; calling the police never seems to enter his mind. It is as if he were a primitive man, naked and alone, facing the dreaded beasts of the jungle. Fuentes' interest in popular songs can be observed in this piece with the lyrics from the tunes reinforcing the theme, but also serving as comic relief: "Bingo, bango, bongo, I don't want to leave the Congo," and in another part "Animal crackers in my soup."

Another forgotten short story, "Errant Wheat," which was published in a Mexican university magazine in 1956 [Revista de la Universidad de Mexico XI, September 1956], also treats the theme of the inescapable past, but in an unusual and non-Mexican manner. The scene is Palestine during a recent Arab-Israeli conflict—no doubt the war of 1948 since the story appeared two months before the campaign of 1956. An Arab plane is strafing the countryside while Jewish soldiers string barbed wire. The narrator returns from a distant past of almost two millenniums. He is Lazarus, brother of Mary and Martha, whom Christ raised from the dead. But Fuentes' Lazarus is anything but a contented disciple of Jesus. His raising made him immortal, and now he roams the world as a kind of wandering Jew, incapable of experiencing human emotions or physical satisfactions relating to love or eating. Lazarus is not mentioned by name in the earlier pages, but Fuentes gives the reader enough subtle clues to deduce his identity. "No one saw him grow up," "He had always been there," "Even the old men were used to seeing him there." In another scene Lazarus covers his face with a napkin, recalling his appearance in burial clothing at the moment of his return from the tomb. He laments his raising: "Why did I have to be the proof of a Divinity?" he wails, and even darkly suggests that the resurrected Christ is no happier in His immortality; in fact eternal life is a hellish fate. Lazarus reaches out from the past and somehow infects his companions with his cursed immortality. Jews as leading characters, while rare in Mexican fiction, are not new in Fuentes' writings. They appear as early as 1949 in his first known published story, "Rancid Pastry." [Muñunu XXXVI, November 1949]. A boy returning home to New York City meets and rejects his mother and the Jewish heritage she represents. For the moment it seems that he has overcome his past by denying it, although in doing so he destroys his mother.

In the spring of 1962 Fuentes published his magnificent novella, Aura. Unfortunately, as far as the critical reception of the piece is concerned, it appeared almost simultaneously with Fuentes' controversial major novel, The Death of Artemio Cruz. The reviewers' attention was diverted to the novel, probably Fuentes' fined. Significantly, many of the most perceptive reviews of the novella are of the second or third printings, after the furor of Artemio Cruz had died down.

Aura, too, is the history of an individual's destruction by elements from the past. An impoverished young history teacher answers a newspaper ad and find himself in the old quarter of Mexico City. The 109-year-old widow of one of Maximilian's generals wants her husband's memoirs compiled for publication. The salary is most attractive, as is Aura, the young niece of the widow. The historian is swept along through a series of bewildering episodes of black magic and strange love makings with the girl, finally falling victim to the powers and love potions of Consuelo, the ancient widow. The historian confronts the past not only in the duality of the old woman and Aura, but also in his reincarnation as the widow's husband. As he stares at a faded photograph of the general and Consuelo, he sees Aura and himself: ". . . but it is she, it is he . . . it is you!". Consuelo, who lives in a musty household surrounded in the interior by furnishings from her nineteenth-century world and on the outside by modern steel and glass skyscrapers, represents Mexico's past, which refuses to enter the present day stream of events. As with the owner of the Mayan idol, the defacer of the painting, the contemporary student, the immortal Lazarus and many other character creations by Fuentes, the modern man succumbs to the omnipresent past—he is unable to accept its challenges and is in turn destroyed. Even Fuentes' first novel, Where the Air is Clear, follows the same pattern: Ixca Cienfuegos, a mysterious and symbolic Indian, overcomes an ex-revolutionary now turned banker who represents the present, and also a soul-searching young intellectual who stands for Mexico's future.

Ten years passed between the publication of Fuentes' first and second books of short stories. During this decade he acquired an international reputation with three major novels and a short novel (all translated into English) before returning to the short genre with Song of the Blind (Cantar de ciegos) in 1964. The past is no longer the overriding theme of the work—it surfaces in only two pieces. The book as a whole signals a new direction in Fuentes' writing and in that of the Mexican short narrative in general.

"Doll Queen" is a short story of transition that represents both the old and the new tendencies. The theme is the search of a man for his past, specifically for a young girl he had known as an adolescent. The world of his childhood is recreated in his mind; and by retracing the places they had frequented, he finally finds the child again—still a child in physique, now transformed into a hideous little hunchback. Nevertheless, we can note a number of changes in Fuentes' writing techniques—the story is longer than most of those in the earlier book. The author now develops his characters more profoundly. They become more human and believable, less caricatures or types, as more time is devoted to their background and details of their present activities. Fuentes now gives us people who live rather than puppets who symbolize an idea or are employed for purposes of satire.

Another story illustrating the duality of Fuentes' early and later periods is "A Pure Soul." A young Mexican student has left his family and in particular his adoring younger sister for advanced studies in Geneva. (Of interest are two autobiographical elements: Fuentes also studied in the same Swiss city and has a younger sister). The narration is told mainly by means of flashbacks as the sister arrives in Switzerland to retrieve her brother's body after his suicide. She speaks to her brother as if he were still alive and could hear her in a manner that recalls Camilo José Cela's "Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to her Son." Because of its insight into the brother and sister relationship and the intimate tone of the whole work, this story is one of Fuentes' most successful. It has also been made into a motion picture.

It is the other stories in the collection, however, that really mark a new trail in Fuentes' narrative career and pinpoint his role as an innovator of Mexican fiction. In "The Two Elenas" and "Fortune Always has Her Way" we observe the complete absence of his pre-occupation with the past. Gone, too, is the satire and social criticism of The Masked Days. The plots of both stories are thin—what is essential are the marvelous character portraits. Elena is a vivacious wife who is constantly seeking new excitement; she is intrigued with North American jazz musicians, the Black Muslim sect, and Beat painting. Her uncomplaining husband realizes that it is her nature always to be interested in some new fad. A friend asks her why she remains faithful to her husband: "Elena answered that nowadays infidelity was the rule . . . she meant that now fidelity was the rebellious attitude." This piece was filmed in 1964 with Julissa, Fuentes' stepdaughter and Enrique Alvarez Félix, son of actress María Félix, playing the leading roles. Elena portrays the same passion for motion pictures that Fuentes does in real life. Ever since seeing Jules et Jim, Elena wants her husband to invite another man into their home. She is planning to view "a mythological western: High Noon" and has recently attended a private showing of Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel. (Fuentes' second novel is dedicated to Buñuel).

The other story, "Fortune Always has Her Way," refers to the fickleness of life. As a character observes, "I have done what I could, and Fortune what it has wanted to do." The fascinating character who is the center of this work is a Beat painter who has enjoyed the favors of dozens of-women only to be rejected by the one who really intrigues him. His most recent creation is a painting of a jar of instant coffee: "NESTLE CAFE INSTANTANEA SIN CAFEINA, HECHO EN OCTLAN, JAL. MARCA REG." It is probably no coincidence that Sevilla, the painter, resembles Fuentes' good friend, next door neighbor, and famous Mexican artist, José Luis Cuevas. Incidently, it is "The Two Elenas" that is dedicated to Cuevas, not this one.

The uniqueness of these two stories is the focus upon individuals rather than themes. Also Fuentes seems to have chosen to write pieces for sheer entertainment in and of themselves. He has opted for mid-twentieth-century types who are universal rather than Mexican in their concept and interests. Except for a few minor details, the stories could take place anywhere in the world. Fuentes has also returned to the high society and International Set, which he so successfully pictured in his first novel, a group that Fuentes with his well-to-do family background and riotous youthful escapades knows very intimately. This novel, Where the Air is Clear, first published in Mexico in 1958 and widely reprinted and translated, signals the end of the rural novel, often based on the Revolution, and the emergence of the city as the focal point of Mexican and Latin American life. Many critics, among them Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, have underlined Fuentes' significance in the rise of the urban novel [in Tientos y diferencias, 1964]. What he did in his novel, Fuentes does in these metropolitan short stories. Not that he is the first or that there are not many earlier examples in this genre, but Fuentes' prestige and his acquaintance with urban high society have made his contributions very visible to the young generation of writers.

"Old Morality" is another short story that in its choice of hero and theme may well have influenced such young Mexican writers as Gustavo Sainz and José Agustín, who while in their late teens and early twenties became famous in Mexican letters with their novels and short stories depicting problems of adolescents. Alberto in Fuentes' narration is a teenager who lives a life of innocence on a farm in Michoacan with his grandfather and the old man's mistress. The boy's old-maid aunts from the city obtain legal permission to liberate the boy from this degrading influence; they, in their turn, seduce the handsome youth. The latter soon becomes bored with the city and writes his grandfather, "Come and get me, please. I think there is more morality on our rancho. I'll tell you all about it." This is probably one of the most humorous pieces that Fuentes has written, although the humor tends toward irony. Alberto is presented in a very sympathetic manner as are most young men in the fiction of Fuentes. The author seems to suggest that time and society corrupt the innocence of youth. One can see examples of this in Fuentes' first three novels, where the young men Federico Robles, Jamie Ceballos, and even Artemio Cruz, all succumb to the corrupt ways of the world upon reaching manhood.

Another contemporary Mexican described in this book is the innocent abroad who is deceived by foreigners. In "Sea Serpent" Isabel Valles climbs aboard an ocean liner off the port of Acapulco for her first ocean cruise. Although she is in her thirties, awkward and self conscious, she is swept off her feet by a charming Briton who marries her only to turn out to be a North American confidence man who escapes with her money. As in most of Fuentes' books, North Americans come off second best as admirable people. They always manage to swindle or exploit their more innocent Latin counterparts. Another character in the story is Mrs. Jenkins, an old maid school teacher from Los Angeles, who is a formidable candidate for the "Ugly American" award in both appearance and actions. She is thought to weigh ninety-eight kilograms, and several times is compared with an elephant. Another passenger calls her a "pink zeppelin of liberty". Her language is most unbecoming a teacher or a lady, and she delights in criticizing the United States: "Jack Paar is our Homer and Fulton Sheen our baby sitter .. . in San Quentin we'll fry Chessman." With the British crewmen and numerous North Americans speaking English, whole paragraphs are in this language. Critics of this book and many others by Fuentes have often complained that a reader must be bilingual or even trilingual to understand them. Fuentes' usage of English, even slang, is nearly perfect.

Another stylistic feature of this story is its unusual structure. There is no division into chapters but rather an alternating of scenes in a most distinctive manner. First come the scenes treating the adventures of Isabel Valles, which make up the bulk of the action. Alternating with these are other scenes that in all but one instance are straight dialogue between two sailors. Functioning like a Greek chorus, they always comment upon Isabel or inform the reader of events not depicted. Only in the final scene is the pattern broken, and the reader for the first time follows the scheme of the confidence man. This story is dedicated to Fuentes' friend the Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar. No doubt Fuentes recalled the latter's The Winners, a novel whose action also takes place on board an ocean liner.

In "Song of the Blind" Fuentes has departed from his Mexican themes, settings and characters. Elena and the artist, Sevilla, for example, are universal in their way of life and preoccupations. Alberto and his relatives are very Mexican, but his worries are those of a harried adolescent. Whereas in his first stories Fuentes had been a follower, essentially of Arreola's fantasy, although a very capable follower, in "Song of the Blind" Fuentes forms the vanguard of a new trend—to make stories interesting for their own sake. There need be no underlying social or political criticism nor reliance upon the overwhelming forces of nature, themes which have been so prominent in the regional literature of Latin America. Mexico's mythical past is also forgotten.

More than six years have passed since Fuentes has published a short story—several novel fragments have appeared during this time, but they belong to another genre and were not conceived as short fiction even though they may stand alone. We might ask ourselves what will be the direction of Fuentes' future short narratives? Studying the evolution of his literary career and analyzing several recent publications, one can put forth a few intelligent speculations. First we may expect to see even more universal or international characters. This reflects Fuentes' lengthy residence abroad in recent years. In his novel A Change of Skin (1967), one of the four principal characters is a Mexican girl, another a Mexican who has lived abroad much of his life, a third a Jewish woman from New York City, and the fourth, a German. In Fuentes' most recent short novel, Birthday ("Cumpleaños"), which appeared in late 1969, his characters are a French university professor residing on the Adriatic coast and a British family in Hamstead, England. Not once is Mexico even mentioned. A third selection from 1968, "Flesh Spheres, Grey Eves Along the Seine," at first glance seems to be a short story, but Fuentes advises me that it is part of a novel now under construction. The setting is Paris. These latter two works especially mark another change of direction—away from the real people and places of "Song of the Blind." To a degree, they are a return to fantasy, but not on the elementary level of his first short stories, in which perhaps one natural law suddenly changed. These recent books picture a mysterious surrealistic world full of symbolism, contamination of levels of time and meaning, speculation on metaphysical problems such as the meaning of reality or the probability of reincarnation. They leave the reader with multiple possibilities for interpretation.

The Mexican critic Emmanuel Carballo has stated [in Excélsion, 1 junio 1969] that Fuentes is "the writer responsible for the Mexican prose of the last few years, a man of the Vanguard, he is three steps ahead of the other writers of his time." Regardless of which direction he takes, we can rest assured that Carlos Fuentes will continue to produce short fiction of top quality, at the same time experimenting with new and exciting techniques; all the while baffling his readers, teasing the critics, and teaching his numerous literary disciples.