Summary Of Carlos Fuentes Where The Air Is Clear

Jose Sanchez
Professor Cantu
CHS 312
3 December 2014
Mexico through the Eyes of an Author Mexico is a country that like many before it has a turbulent and violent history. It has also experienced the dreadful phase of having to figure out what their identity is. During the days when author Carlos Fuentes was in his prime he saw that Mexico was in an identity crisis. They still had the descendants of the ancient Aztecs and had a new influx of mestizos with Spanish blood infused into their genetics. He decided to use his talent as an author to try and answer the question of Mexico’s identity to the best of his ability. Carlos Fuentes wrote “Where the Air is Clear” in a manner that reflected Mexico’s crisis while stating that Mexico should embrace
its past and future. “Where the Air is Clear” is made up of several characters. Each one of these people and their stories make up the big picture that Fuentes is trying to illustrate. Some of the characters include: Ixca Cienfuegos, Federico Robles, Norma Larragoiti, Manuel Zamacona, Rodrigo Pola, and Pimpinela de Ovando. The most interesting part of the novel is that the true protagonist of the novel never speaks a word and lets her inhabitants talk for her. The main character of the novel is Mexico herself. The point is to show how Mexico is defined. The country is in a state of turmoil and confusion and this can be seen in the lives of the characters that are presented. All of them have their own ideas on the origin, future, and current situation of Mexico. There is no single unanimous agreement among them. It is apparent to the reader that Mexico is in a state of change but the people living in it have yet to figure out what their role truly is. They also give us a look at what happened to some people after the revolution in Mexico. The novel opens up with Ixca Cienguegos. He is a mysterious man of Indian descent. He seems to know every single one of the characters. He listens to their stories and he also gives his own opinions. He serves as the representative to Mexico’s past. He carries a name that has ancient origins and his presence is that of a supernatural being. It is also apparent at the end of the novel when his voice travels throughout the city in a gust of wind and tells Gladys Garcia “Here we bide. What are we going to do about it. Where the air is clear.”(Pg. 373). He also has a mother, Teodula Moctezuma, with whom he plans a sacrifice to the gods. His supernatural essence along with his mission of carrying out an ancient tradition solidifies Ixca’s place in the novel as the past of Mexico. Even though Ixca has an aura of a higher being to him, he still very much acts as a man. He has a sexual relations with Norma Larragoiti, whom he ends up using as the sacrifice when she burns, and then goes on to marry Rosa on the behest of his mother. Ixca was also a character that was critical of Mexico City and Mexico itself. Federico Robles is one of the big players in the novel. He serves as the embodiment of Mexico pre revolution and post revolution. To truly understand how Fuentes personifies certain aspects of Mexico in Robles, his biography must be understood first. He is an Indian with a rags to riches story. He starts out from very humble beginnings. He is born to parents that are peons to the Ovando family. He gets the opportunity to travel to Morelia at the age of ten with a priest whom he will learn and work under. During a conversation with Ixca, he recalls his family visiting him for a while but they stopped after being struck with tragedies. His father dies of diphtheria, his mother is raped, his oldest brother is arrested after trying to seek vengeance and his other brothers did nothing about any of it.(p.76). He them was taken to the Zamacona hacienda where he did manual labor. He met the youngest daughter of the Zamacona family, a girl named Mercedes. After saving her life she is smitten with him. Soon afterwards they have sex but are caught by Mercedes’s sister and their uncle. The family feels disgraced that Mercedes would let herself be touched by a lowly Indian like Federico Robles. Federico leaves the hacienda and he joins the fight of the revolution. Soon after the revolution, Federico goes into law school and works as an assistant to a general. This is where Federico begins to work on his fortune and begins his begins the practice of questionable business. Soon enough Federico made of himself a real estate tycoon. A very wealthy man and as a stamp to his new life he married a woman with fair skin and colored eyes, a woman that would not be confused with an Indian woman. He married Norma Larragoiti, a shallow woman who only cared about money and social status. Robles does not truly love her as he begins an affair with Hortensia Chacon, a typist in his office that was blinded and hospitalized by her abusive husband whom she leaves. Unfortunately for Robles, he begins to face the downfall of his empire when it starts to come to light that he uses dirty tactics and unethical strategies in his business. The façade that is his marriage comes crumbling down. His marriage to Norma can be seen as a business move, she gets wealth and status and he gets a trophy wife. When one of the variables fails the whole relationship unravels and falls apart, as is seen when Robles confronts Larragoiti for her jewels which she refuses to give up. She yells at him that her attachment is to her possessions and not him. (p. 313). Finally, Robles falls and everything he worked so hard to build was destroyed. He then proceeded to embrace his relationship with Hortensia. He impregnated her and they moved out to the country side where he was determined to build himself back up. Fuentes uses Robles as his depiction of the sentiment that was being felt throughout Mexico after the revolution. Federico started out as a lowly Indian who would never amount to anything more than what his parents did. This was a common perception to anyone who was not a mestizo. Then the revolution came along and it brought about a change in Mexico. Fuentes’s writing makes it seem that it is not totally clear whether the revolution was a good or bad thing. Robles used the end of the revolution to build himself up. He began to deny and suppress his Indian origin in favor for a bourgeois image and life. Many people in Mexico began to emulate the life styles that were seen in European and even American cultures. Robles also demonstrated the corrupt and dark nature that many of Mexico’s businessmen and government officials began to partake in. All in the chase for money and power. At the end of his journey in the novel, Robles falls and returns back to an honest lifestyle. He rejects his Indian heritage in favor for the person he believes he built in the revolution. His mask falls when he loses his wealth, his wife, and finds himself in love with an Indian woman with whom he will have a child and working cotton fields. Robles traveled a journey that parallels Mexico. He descended from an old society, he was poor and looked down upon, he then went through a great and bloody conflict, adopted a new identity he thought made him happy, and returned to his roots when he realized that he was being nothing but a farce. Norma Larragoiti is a very beautiful woman that shares much with her husband Federico Robles.
She too comes from humble beginnings but is driven by vicious ambition. She has Indian blood in her but much to her joy her physical appearance does not give it away. She looks nothing like an Indian which helps her reject her roots. Her father committed suicide after his small business collapsed in the post-revolution economy. Her mother was a maid and sent her to Mexico City to live with her aunt and uncle. Once there, she decided to cut all ties with her poor and low class status. She told her friends she came from an aristocratic family and absolutely banned anything that could even hint to her not being who she claimed out of her life. She eventually meets and marries Federico Robles. She does not love him and even tells him as much before her sacrificial death. Their marriage was one of mutual benefit, she gets to have wealth, material possessions, and high social status. He in return gets a trophy wife that can be displayed to the world as a symbol of his power and
status. She meets Ixca Cienfuegos and she is smitten by him. She becomes completely aware that he is looking for a sacrifice and that he has his sights on her. This is not enough to dissuade her and she and the mutually attracted Ixca engage in an affair. At one point, Ixca throws her off a boat into the sea in a storm. Norma survives but her near death experience affects her greatly. When Federico loses his wealth, Norma refuses to stick by her husband. She locks herself in her room and that becomes her grave. The house catches fire and Norma cannot find the key to unlock her door. She dies a fiery death and becomes Ixca’s sacrifice. The death of Norma is significant on several levels. Her death serves as the sacrifice that Ixca and his mother need to uphold an ancient tradition. A tradition that is deep rooted in the history of Mexico with the Aztecs. Her death also lets her keep her place as Robles’s status marker. In life she represented everything he had worked to accomplish and her death symbolized the great social fall he suffered. Finally, the life and death of Norma represents another piece of Mexico itself. She suffers a loss after the revolution in the suicide of her father. Mexico was thrown into a massive state of suffering and chaos during and after the revolution. Like many Mexicans, she began to cut ties with her past and let herself be overtaken by ambition and a desire of higher social standing. She also represents the sacrifice that Mexico and its inhabitants went through because the present began to clash with the past. Rodrigo Pola is a character that represents the internal conflict that was happening in Mexico. Rodrigo’s father left his mother to fight in the revolution when she was only two week’s pregnant. He was ultimately executed during the war. Pola’s mother then became very protective and she worked hard to have him be well educated. He grows up in poverty under her stern vigilance and clinginess. While in school, Pola befriends a man named Roberto Regales who only serves to completely throw his worldview into utter chaos. Regales shows Pola the effects of using deceit and manipulation to accomplish one’s goals. Due to this, he finds consolation in the world of poetry where idealism can be accomplished. He soon leaves his mother after a confrontation and soon after that meets and falls in love with Norma Larragoiti. She dates him for a while but then leaves him because she sees that he is going nowhere. Pola becomes a failed poet that desperately clings to his high society life. He oftens complains, mostly to Ixca, about his terrible luck. Ixca helps Pola improve his life. Pola becomes a movie writer and amasses great wealth. His scripts are B-class scripts but they help him achieve what high social standing. When Pola is faced with the decision to write movie scripts, his lack of identity becomes apparent and he ultimately chooses to vanish his ideals for something more. To help solidify his social standing, he marries a woman whose name carries much weight in social circles. Even though Pimpinela Ovando’s family is struggling financially, their name is still very well known. Pola marries her and helps restore the Ovando family with his wealth in exchange for their name helping solidify him in the high social circles. Pola is a walking crisis. He does not truly know who he is and does not know what the identity of his own country is. This is a problem that Mexico faced, it was unsure of its identity. It did not know what it wanted to be. Pola is a struggling poet because he does not want to accept the power that comes with lying and manipulation. However, this decision leads to a constant struggle. A struggle that Mexico had to deal with. It wanted to believe that it could be a great country and held great ideals but the reality was something completely different. It had to put up with corruption and greed. Just like Pola eventually realized that existential ideals were not something a person could build a living off of, he made a decision to let them go and deal with his problems and bad luck another way. Mexico too had to realize that it had to find a way to deal with the problems it faced without letting itself get too caught up in pure idealism. Rodrigo Pola married a woman named Pimpinela de Ovando. Her family was a big name before the revolution swept across Mexico. Her father saw the changes that were coming to Mexico and strategically managed his finances and assets so as to ensure the financial security of his family. After the revolution, however, Pimpinela’s mother sees that the top of classes in Mexican society are no longer the same. People from the lower classes are climbing the ladder and establishing themselves at the top next to the Ovandos. The mother fears this change and takes Pimpinela to Europe as a means to protect her daughter from this infusion of new money into the high class. She refuses to accept the changes being swept in with the revolution and her pride as old money will not let her follow these changes. Pimpinela is different, she accepts the changes. When she returns from the exile imposed by her mother, she tries to use her name to make social connections with the people at the top. At one point she introduces her old aunt to Norma Larragoiti and uses that connection to get her cousin a job at Federico Pola’s bank. Pimpinela is aware that the funds in the Ovando family are fading away and that if nothing is done her name will fade along with them. She falls in love with Roberto Regules but at the objection of her mother she lets him go. She regrets this decision greatly when Roberto carves out a name for himself and amasses money. Finally, she solves the family’s monetary issue by marrying the newly successful Rodrigo Pola. Fuentes uses the character of Pimpinela De Ovando and her family as tools to illustrate the conflict that was faced by many old money aristocrats when the revolution took place. Many of them refused to adapt with the changes being swept in by the revolution choosing instead to hold stubbornly onto their current ideals and standards. Then you have the people like Pimpinela that like their place at the top of the social ladder but also realize that changes need to be made in order to continue there. She does not let her mother’s stubbornness and antiquated ideals to get in the way of her keeping her social status. The powerful families of Mexico had to realize this as well. If they could not accept the new money and the new standards that were being introduced, they would die out and fall in disgrace from their place in high class society. Carlos Fuentes was well aware of the state of flux and confusion that Mexico was in.
He wrote the novel “Where the Air is Clear” in a peculiar way to help him illustrate this. “Where the Air is Clear” is a book that, while widely considered a master piece in literature, has polarizing features about it. It is certainly not an easy book to read and that causes problems to some of its readers. It is written in a manner that seems abstract and possibly even disorganized. It has many stories being told about several of its characters and they are intertwined. The book does not follow a linear structure but one that is abstract and can be confusing. In one paragraph it will be one character speaker and in the next it can be someone totally different as can be seen in the first few paragraphs of page nine. It demands careful attention to detail and this can be off putting to some people. This abstract and modern style of writing helped Fuentes form a surreal and engaging platform on which to have his characters perform. Even in its structure the novel represented Mexico. Mexico had overlapping stories, disorganization, and an overall surreal feel to it. He uses Ixca Cienfuegos, the representation of the past, to open and close the novel. This helps establish that Mexico’s history is in the past but also was the catalyst for the future. His other characters served to answer important questions. The wonder of the individual’s identity as well as the country’s and what moral and
ethical boundaries were pushed. It also showed how, no matter the circumstances, Mexico as a whole needed to adapt to the new changes and find its own identity instead of trying to pointlessly emulate someone else’s.