O.C. Talks Scheduled : Fuentes Agonizes at Gulf Between Fiction and Film

Carlos Fuentes is touring California this week and next--the perfect chance, it would seem, for the Mexican author and essayist to catch the big-budget film adaptation of his novel “The Old Gringo,” which opens Friday. But he says he’s not ready.

“Not yet, not yet, not yet,” he said with a laugh from his hotel in Tempe, Ariz., during a stop last week at Arizona State University. “I’m putting it off.”

Although films based on Fuentes’ novels and short stories have been made in Mexico, Italy and Colombia, “Old Gringo” marks the first time Hollywood has tackled one of his works. And although Fuentes--who speaks tonight at Cal State Fullerton and later this month in Irvine--professes a respect for film, he approaches each adaptation of his work with trepidation.

“I’m anguished. I’m always anguished about the passage from fiction to film, because the two media are so different,” he said. Much of that anguish, he allowed, stems from “not being any longer what a writer is accustomed to being, which is the little god of his own creation.”

Fuentes, 60, also has written “Where the Air is Clear,” “The Death of Artemio Cruz” and the newly published “Christopher Unborn.” The son of a career diplomat, he attended primary school in Washington and has taught frequently in the United States; last year, he completed a stint at Harvard. He lives in Mexico City.

He long has observed a gulf in understanding between the United States and Mexico, an issue he addressed in “The Old Gringo” (“Gringo Viejo”), a fictionalized account of the last days of real-life journalist Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared in 1914 during the Mexican Revolution. Fuentes invented a triangle involving Bierce, an American spinster schoolteacher named Harriet Winslow and revolutionary general Tomas Arroyo.

He conceived the story in the ‘40s, began writing it in the ‘60s and finished it in the late ‘70s. He met Jane Fonda in 1979 and described it to her; a year later, while filming “On Golden Pond,” she received the manuscript and embarked on an arduous nine-year journey to bring the story to the screen. Fuentes visited the set in Mexico last year but was not involved in the production.

In a departure for Hollywood studios, “Old Gringo” was released in Latin America before it came to the United States. “It’s a big box-office success, all the way from Buenos Aires to Mexico City,” Fuentes said. “The critical reaction was quite mixed, I understand, but the popular success is very good.”

While he professes an admiration for specific directors--Bunuel, Welles, Hitchcock, Renoir, Lang, Fellini and Antonioni--he believes that most Hollywood product is derivative of earlier literary traditions.

“Hollywood itself, I think, is the final gasp of the Romantic movement,” Fuentes said. “Most of the themes, the characters, the stereotypes, the subjects, the mood, the music come from the great Romantic century, the 19th Century, so I don’t think it’s a particularly original medium in that sense.”

Still, the author professes a fascination with Hollywood, and film characters and references turn up often in his work.

“I hope to be in touch with popular culture,” he said, “since it expresses deeper currents of the culture itself.”

In the apocalyptic, “Christopher Unborn,” set in the Mexico of 1992, the ruling party attempts to distract the people from the country’s disastrous straits with a symbolic figurehead, Mamadoc, described by Fuentes as equal parts Virgin of Guadaloupe, Aztec goddess and Mae West.

“The human imagination is very fertile in relation to gods and goddesses. It can create them out of practically nothing and throw them in the ashcan and create something new again,” Fuentes said. “Gods and goddesses are really in constant metamorphosis, I think, and Mamadoc is just one more indication of that.”

“Christopher Unborn” is narrated from the womb by Christopher Palomar, who is to be born on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in America. Fuentes started writing the book at Dartmouth College in the winter of 1981, “looking out at the snow and the mountains and saying, ‘It would be nice to be in Acapulco (making love) right now.’ ” The novel opens with Christopher’s conception on the beach of the resort city.

Fuentes imagines the worst in the satiric novel: Mexico City’s population has climbed to 30 million and is so polluted that the sun never appears; the Yucatan has been sold to Club Med; the national debt continues to multiply; U.S. Marines are invading, apparently with the blessing of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI); a zone 100 miles north and south of the U.S.-Mexican border has become a lawless no man’s land called Mexamerica.

“I hope that by mentioning all these horrors I will be able to exorcise them, and I hope it doesn’t become a prophesy,” Fuentes said. “I don’t want it to become a prophesy, but it could.”

Fuentes sees hope in the recent elections, in which the PRI lost its first governorship in 60 years. “I think the elections . . . were a fundamental event signaling a new direction in Mexican life and politics,” he said. Ironically, Fuentes added, he believes that this new direction has its roots in the devastating Mexico City earthquake of 1985. When the government proved ineffectual in responding to the disaster, city residents led their own rescue and recovery efforts.

“I think the people discovered they had their own power, the power to mobilize socially without practically any help from the government,” Fuentes said. “And so this was a tremendous event in a country that has been traditionally governed from the top down.”

There is a pivotal scene in “The Old Gringo,” both the book and the film: Gen. Arroyo, the bastard son of a wealthy landowner, has captured the hacienda of his youth and leads his peasant followers into a great room of mirrors to gaze upon themselves.

The revolution “made us realize who we were,” Fuentes said. “We thought we could imitate Europe or imitate the United States and then become happy and prosperous. When this failed, we were forced to look at ourselves and say, ‘Hey, this is what we are.’ . . . It was a fundamental act of a whole people, of a whole nation, to look at themselves, to look at their past and see it, warts and all.”

But the revolution’s promise has gone unfulfilled, Fuentes said. “The people today, (who) have been educated by the government of the revolution since 1920, say, ‘Hey, I want this. You promised me democracy and social justice,’ ” Fuentes said. “They’re fighting for it politically today.”

Carlos Fuentes will speak about his writings tonight at 8 in Cal State Fullerton’s University Center Titan Hall. Admission: free. Information: (714) 773-3731. Fuentes will speak on “Spain’s Art and Image: The Relationship Between Painting and Literature” on Oct. 10 at 8 p.m. at South Coast Community Church in Irvine. Admission: $8. Information: (714) 856-5000. Fuentes will participate in two roundtable discussions on Oct. 11 at the UC Irvine University Club, one at 10 a.m. in English and one at 11 p.m. in Spanish. Both will be free and open to the public.