Review: Àlvaro Enrigue on José Emilio Pacheco

The year may have been 1999 and it happened while rambling around the aisles of the bookstore Politics and Prose. José Emilio Pacheco—then the celebrity professor of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland in College Park—didn’t visit bookstores, he raided them, walking around with a box that he filled as if picking apples. He would buy some books in multiples and give copies to you at the end of the ride. Then he would call a week later to discuss them. It was intense and, considering the reading requirements for a PhD student in that particular program, could become a nightmare too: José Emilio bought books of every possible kind and read from the pile at an impossible rate. He belonged to a very specific type of intellectual: the Mexican who has read it all.

It was there, in whatever aisle, that he told me, in the very mortified way in which he always evaluated the future—his face thrown forward with a sad frown, his index finger pushing up his super dirty glasses—“Like me, you will never make it to the encyclopedia, because we both were born in a year 9.” He was born in 1939, I in 1969. “Why?” I probably asked, when I should have said: “What are you talking about?” His mind reacted to the smallest environmental changes, so conversations always began with random-seeming sentences. “Because”, he answered, “you will be considered too young to be catalogued with writers of the sixties and too old for those of the seventies.” We didn’t know yet, of course, that printed encyclopedias—those well-guarded sanctuaries composed of articles written in Europe and the US—would become relics in the very near future. But at that time they were still a thing and the ultimate measure of literary success.

There was one fallacy in his formula. As happened many times when having a conversation with Pacheco, facts were altered to fit his sense of humility: by then his name was already in all the encyclopedias. But the general theory—a “Nescafé Theory,” as he called his own impulsive ideas, because they were instant and lacked substance—held true for him. José Emilio was never considered part of the Francophile, prone-to-experimentation set of Mexican writers born in the 1930s (known as the Casa del Lago generation—Inés Arredondo, Sergio Pitol, Margo Glantz, Salvador Elizondo, and a long untranslated etcetera), nor was he grouped with the Anglophile lovers of the Beats and everything psychedelic that followed. Those first Mexico City rock-and-roll kids would be called by Carlos Monsiváis, the monumental social critic and best friend of José Emilio, “the first generation of Americans born in Mexico.” Pacheco was somewhere in the middle: he found The Beatles childish—I don’t think he knew who David Bowie was—and he also distrusted the opacity of the Maoist Tel Quel crew. He considered the suits and ties he was forced to wear as a college student in the National University an abomination, but he never graduated to jeans—which he, symptomatically, called “cowboy pants.”