Carlos Fuentes Lemus: An Abbreviated Life

E. Shaskan Bumas Carlos Fuentes Lemus: An Abbreviated Life To understand peoples' lives, we tend to construct something of a plot based on what we know of them, with tropes as simple as beginning and end. My friend Carlos Fuentes Lemus was born August 22, 1973 and died May 5, 1999. This is the kind of information that goes in parentheses after his name: Carlos Rafael Fuentes Lemus (1973-1999), the en-dash, a fill in the blank representing his life and work. By way ofdisclaimer, I find myselfvery careful, knowing that any of his friends or family might say no, that is only what Carlos was like to me, and perhaps was not even like that to me. Because I mostly knew him over the many years we spent together through short intense bursts, small stars, different from each other, I am trying to connect them in the constellation of our lives. In order to know and explain Carlitos better, now that it is too late to just call him up, I try to understand him in the way that those closest to him have, although I am all too aware that this is a limited variation of their understandings, based on what they have allowed me to know. And he too, if he were alive, might say I had left out the good stuff, told only the embarrassing things, omitted the seedier aspects, inserted myself in his story. My friendship with Carlos Fuentes Lemus was something of an arranged marriage. His father had been my professor when I was an undergraduate and Carlitos was still a little boy. Later Carlitos and I liked each other, cared about each other, and grew used to each other. In the last two-thirds of Carlos Fuentes Lemus's abbreviated life, I observed, or emplotted, if not exactly a change, then something that may be better described by the rhetorical term chiasmus, from the symmetrical Greek letter X, a repetition that is a reversal. I explain this to myself in terms of his inheritance. When he was really just a child, he was rather like his father, erudite and encyclopedic, an old soul. Carlitos was, after all, born while his father , Carlos Fuentes, was finishing the grand, scholarly epic novel of Latin civilization, Terra nostra. He was a memory bank of biographical information ofartists and pop lyrics. The older thatCarlos Fuentes Lemus became, the more I found him like his mother, more of an innocent. His mother, Silvia Lemus, is best known for her intellectual talk show on Mexican television's cultural Channel 22, Tratos y retratos ("Relations and Portraits"). She is the most non-confrontational interviewer, the best listener, the perfect example of the ideal reader/critic Henry James asked for, one who would grant a writer his or herdonnée. She is a proper lady who handles a fork and 74 the minnesota review knife with a surgeon's exactitude, though with less blood, but likes to tell bawdy jokes about various clergies or Bill and Monica. The older Carlos Fuentes Lemus became, the more I noticed his youthfulness . Carlitos's talent was to see things new. He would stare at a reproduction of an Egon Schiele painting until the lines formed a constellation and he would point out the presence ofa face and there it would be. If no one was talking to him, he would write a poem or paint a picture. Trim, small, and handsome, Carlitos looked like his grandfather , that is, his grandfather before a battle wound took his eye. In Carlitos, that eye was restored. Somehow this process makes sense to me when I remember how Carlitos, when he became a young filmmaker, liked to brag that, as an infant, he had been given a bath by the master of surrealist cinema, Luis Bunuel—baptized by the most beloved anti-cleric in history. In Buñuel's first short feature, An Andalusian Dog (1929), the director appears on screen sharpening a razor. One of the main characters is seated staring blankly ahead, in the position of a movie viewer. A cloud passes across the moon, and Buñuel cuts her eye open. In the next...