Where the Air Is Clear

Ixca Cienfuegos moves through nearly every strand of Where the Air Is Clear's sprawling Mexico City cast, aristocrats, financiers, artists, servants, prostitutes, without ever quite functioning as a conventional character himself, and Fuentes eventually makes explicit what the novel has been implying all along: Ixca is bound up with Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war and sun, an ancient, indigenous consciousness persisting underneath the modern capital's steel and concrete, watching the city's new elite congratulate itself on having escaped its own history. His conversations with other characters function less as dialogue than as a kind of interrogation the pre-Columbian past is conducting on the postrevolutionary present.

Federico Robles, who rose from genuine peasant poverty through the Revolution into a banking fortune, is the novel's central case study in what that escape from history actually costs. His marriage to the vain, status-obsessed Norma Larragoiti curdles into mutual contempt, and his accumulated wealth buys him respectability without ever converting into anything he recognizes as satisfaction. Fuentes uses Robles's rise to indict the Revolution's own outcome: a generation that fought to redistribute power in Mexico produced, one generation later, a financial aristocracy nearly indistinguishable from the one it replaced.

Rodrigo Pola, a failed poet who eventually sells out into commercial screenwriting, gives Fuentes his second case study in the same corruption, run through art rather than finance. Where Robles built a fortune on top of buried peasant origins he'd rather forget, Rodrigo builds a screenwriting career on top of buried literary ambitions he can no longer take seriously, and Fuentes treats the two men's parallel compromises as evidence that the postrevolutionary bargain, trade your original convictions for security, corrupted Mexico City's cultural class exactly as thoroughly as it corrupted its financiers.

Fuentes builds the novel's structure around retroceso, a technique of dropping backward into a character's earlier life mid-scene without warning or transition, so that Robles's peasant childhood, his combat years, and his banking present all sit layered on top of each other rather than arranged in sequence. That refusal of chronological order isn't just a modernist flourish borrowed from Faulkner and Dos Passos, both clear influences, it's argument by form: Mexico City's present, the novel keeps insisting, cannot actually be understood without its past intruding on it constantly, uninvited, mid-sentence, exactly the way retroceso intrudes on the reading experience itself.