My Son: A Man until the Very End

Carlos Fuentes My Son: A Man until the Very End He was a young artist initiating a destiny that no one could undo because this was the destiny ofart, ofworks that would survive the artist. Touching thefeverish head ofher son, the mother wondered ifthis young artist who was her child had not too strongly linked that initiation with the ensuing destiny. The tortured and erotic images ofhis paintings were not a promise; they were a conclusion. They were not a beginning. Unredeemably, they were an end. Understanding this filled the mother with anguish because she had hoped to witness the complete realization of a personality whose happiness depended on his creativity. It was unjust that his body would betray him so calamitously, and that his body would be independent ofhis will. I watched my son at work, absorbed,fascinated. My son will reveal his gifts, but he will not have timefor his conquests; he will work, he will imagine, but he will not have time to produce. His painting is inevitable, that is the prize, my son cannot substitutefor another or be substitutedfor himselfin what only he does,for whatever length oftime. There is nofrustration in his work, however abbreviated might be his life... When I wrote these words, a few years ago, I imagined them as an exorcism, not a prophecy. I was thinking ofmy son, Carlos Fuentes Lemus, born in Paris on August 22, 1973, who died in Puerto Vallarta, in the Mexican State of Jalisco, on May 5, 1999. About the time he first began to walk, when his mother, Silvia, and I lived on a farm in Virginia, his body would colorwith bruises and hisjoints swell. Soon we knew the reason. Carlos, because of a genetic mutation, suffered from hemophilia, the disease thatpreventsblood from clotting. From the time he was very young, he had to submit to injections of the coagulant element he lacked, Factor 8. We thought that, although bothersome, this procedure would alleviate the pain for the rest of his life. Then the contamination of the blood reserves by the AIDS virus made all hemophiliacs vulnerable, on some occasions because of mistaken medical decisions, other times because of criminally negligent acts on the parts of the responsible authorities in Europe and the United States. A hemophiliac was left defenseless, susceptible to terrible infections and the weakening of his immune system. Throughout his childhood Carlos suffered severe pain, butvery quickly—in a mannerbeyond intuition, as though his precocity were both an anticipation of death and an acceleration of his creativelife— devoted his time to the verbal, musical, and visual arts. When he was five years old, he won the Shankar Prize for Children's Art in New Delhi, India. His elementary school teachers in Princeton, New Jersey, unbeknownst to Carlos or to us, had entered his first works 86 the minnesota review in the competition. From then on, Carlos never abandoned the pen first, the pencil second, nor his artistic heroes: Van Gogh and Egon Schiele. I remember him during a summer vacation in Andalucía, insisting that we stop the car every minute to photograph, to admire , and sometimes to pick sunflowers, as though he were collecting the elements of a picture by the Dutch painter. He planted sunflower seeds in the garden beside our house at Cambridge University . We were sure that they would perish in the English cold, but when we returned for spring semester, they had bloomed as though within a painting ... Then, in a remarkable turn to the past, Carlos discovered the precious and luminous art of the Renaissance painter Giovanni Bellini and the expressive formality of theJapanese painter Utamaro. The center of Carlos' life began to be occupied by the image. First the painted image, then the literary image, leading to the immobile photographic image and then to the fluid cinematographic image. It was as though he understood that the image escaped all reductive definitions and set off, in an act not unlike love, the senses of sight, hearing, smell, and taste... That realization made all the more painful for him the meningitis that almost destroyed him in March 1996, depriving him of most of his sight and of...