By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service

MEXICO CITY -- She, beautiful and romantic and still grieving over the loss of her husband, writer Octavio Paz, surrounds herself with his books and takes telephone
calls on one side of the centuries-old hacienda. He, a historian and disciple of the poet and essayist, answers e-mail on the other side of the historic home.

These days the two barely speak and their feud has become the talk of Mexico. At stake is the legacy of one of Mexico's icons, its only Nobel Prize winner (in 1990) in
literature.

His widow, Marie-Jose Tramini, is the heir to a mountain of his unpublished work, including Paz's correspondence with many of the greatest minds of the 20th century. A
brilliant man who traveled the world teaching at Harvard and Oxford, and living as a diplomat in New Delhi, Tokyo and New York, among other places, Paz is a
Mexican celebrity known worldwide.

When he died at 84 in April 1998, he was honored with the trappings of a state funeral. Then-President Ernesto Zedillo came, praising Paz as a "universal Mexican," and
saying Mexico had "lost its greatest thinker and poet." Many American literary stars paid homage to Paz at a memorial service at the Metropolitan Museum in New York
City.

"I am the only one responsible for that which Octavio left to me," says Marie Jose, "Marijo" as her friends call her. She has kept, in an undisclosed location for their
safety, Paz's letters and works: "It's a treasure. It's a great responsibility."

She was married to Paz for 34 years.

"I am not a recent wife," she says, emphasizing that she is not some opportunistic latecomer in a grab for money.

As she sits on a sofa in the house where he died -- a mansion donated by the president of Mexico for the Paz Foundation -- she says she needs more time to decide the
most "trustworthy" hands for his multimillion-dollar collection. She resents the pressure she feels to rush her husband's unpublished work into the open.

His death from cancer, she says, nearly took her spirit, too. "I have been more than depressed. It is as though I disappeared with him. We had an intense love
relationship. I thought I would be completely destroyed. . . . What saved me was to take care of his works. I spend my time reading and reading and reading him. Of
course I cry. But it has sustained me psychologically and emotionally."

Just out her window and across the courtyard, Guillermo Sheridan sits in the foundation offices. He was the academic and novelist selected to head the Paz Foundation
while Paz was still alive. As he speaks, two packs of Pall Malls on his desk disappear fast. Pages and pages of a book he is writing about Paz fill the desk. He insists that
he knows that Paz himself wanted his work to stay in Mexico and he's worried that Paz's legacy could go to a university in the United States -- the fate of the
masterpieces of so many great Latin American writers.

"I hope this place one day, eventually, is fully and completely in the service of the people," he says. "It could be a place with a nice library and garden, a place where a
young poet could sit under a tree and write a beautiful sonnet."

His dream is to make the Paz Foundation the first top-notch, privately funded repository of great Mexican literature, a place that could guarantee the preservation of the
essays, manuscripts, poems, photographs and videotapes of Paz and other great writers.

At the moment, the somewhat crumbling mansion is unmarked. It is located on a narrow cobblestone street, a guard at each of the two doors. There is no library or
archives, but at times it is open for exhibitions and lectures on Paz. Scholars come to discuss and dissect the words and thoughts of the author who once famously
described "modernity" as "a kind of air-conditioned hell."

Paz's most famous essay, "The Labyrinth of Solitude," is still read in dozens of languages around the world 50 years after it was published. In it, Paz explores the
complexity of the Mexican psyche:

"The Mexican seems to me to be a person who shuts himself away to protect himself. His face is a mask and so is his smile," Paz wrote.

He often described the difference between the United States and Mexico. In one of his often repeated passages he wrote: "North Americans want to understand and we
want to contemplate. They are activists and we are quietists; we enjoy our wounds and they enjoy their inventions. It seems to me that North Americans consider the
world to be something that can be perfected, and that we consider it to be something that can be redeemed."

Sheridan laments that while Mexicans would stage fierce street protests if someone were trying to expropriate a common old Mexican statue to a museum in the United
States, there is no such outcry for literature that leaves its borders.

"There is almost a disdain for literature," he says. "Who cares about stinking, dusty papers?"

He had hoped, still does, that for Paz it would be different.

The board of patrons that oversees the foundation is made up of famous Mexican millionaires and businessmen. They have so far stayed out of the feud; several declined
to talk about the subject to The Washington Post.

These wealthy patrons already have put significant money into the Paz Foundation, which annually awards a prestigious $100,000 poetry prize. Critics note that these
patrons certainly have the resources to spend the millions of dollars needed to refurbish the old hacienda and to give the guarantee Paz's widow wants that her husband's
archives would be safely preserved.

Though Mexico has some great public cultural institutions, there have been famous cases of lost or stolen valuables. Too often, Mexican institutions do not have the
funding to buy, preserve and promote great Mexican works.

As a result, many other writers have felt that the wisest and best way to ensure a careful handling of precious literature and art was to send it abroad. Carlos Fuentes,
Mexico's premier living novelist, has already promised his works to Princeton University.

"Princeton is buying up everything," says Hugo Verani, a Latin American specialist who teaches in both California and Mexico, and who has given lectures at the Paz
Foundation.

Verani says the Paz Foundation was established "with the expectation that his archives would be housed there."

"Of course the situation is complex," he says, and legally the widow is the heir to the papers.

"Never in his life did Sheridan call my husband 'Octavio.' Now he calls him 'Octavio,' " says Marie-Jose, fuming at what she calls this "stupid provocation" by Sheridan,
that has enlivened the pages of the Mexican press and dinner table conversations. She says it is ironic, now that they rarely talk, that she helped select Sheridan for his
post.

She says she, not Sheridan, knows best about what her husband wanted. She also seems particularly disturbed about what she senses is a move to oust her from these
quarters. Most days, she travels between her downtown apartment and the foundation in the southern part of this sprawling city. In her apartment, a 1996 fire destroyed
many of Paz's rare books and forced the couple to climb out of the smoke on their hands and knees. After the fire and when Paz was sick, it was easier for the couple to
live at the foundation quarters.

"I am now in the room where Octavio died," she says in a follow-up phone conversation. "I cannot leave. It is my link to him. His things are here. The day will come, but
I cannot go yet."

Marijo, who was Paz's second wife, declines to give her age, as though that were a ridiculous bit of information for anyone but her to have. She was far younger than her
husband when they met in 1964 and she still reminds one of a Hollywood star with her trademark long blond locks.

Many of Paz's poems and books were dedicated to this French-born woman, an artist herself. Friends describe the two as unusually close.

"I am the only heir of his work," she says. "Tomorrow I can say I want to move his foundation to Timbuktu." She chuckles at this thought, recalling how her husband
delighted in how she made him laugh. She comes alive as she digresses into stories about her husband. "He was so intense . . ."

Homero Aridjis, a Mexican poet who is also the current president of the London-based PEN International writers association, says many heirs of famous writers get in
similar public disputes over the legacies they inherit if the works are deemed of national importance.

"My point of view is that Marijo is the owner of the files and it is her decision to do what she thinks is best. It is a private decision, though of course it is of public
interest."

                                                   © 2001