When I’ve spoken up for Carlos, people have often asked me, Is he really well known? And yet he was and is, and widely. The French especially loved him for his sharp, gauche views; for a short while in the 1970s he was Mexico’s ambassador in Paris. I have no idea why he was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but I am sure it did not bother him in the least: For Carlos, all that mattered was his current work and the one after that.

The next time I saw Carlos was in London where he lived eight months of the year when he wasn’t in Mexico City, to talk with him about “The Eagle’s Throne,” a full-bore satire on the Mexican elite and the politics of power. His wife, Silvia, served us tea in his light-flooded top-floor apartment. Everywhere there were pictures of family: Those of two children who died when they were adults stopped the eye.

The only child in “The Eagle’s Throne” is a retarded boy wishing for a visit by his powerful parents who never come to see him, who becomes a symbol for what is hidden away about Mexico. I asked Carlos about children, what place they had in his vision of Mexico in the year 2020, and his answer was that there was no room for them among the heartlessness of political supremos. Except for this one boy, a broken infant of selfish, power-mad parents, who gets a single say in the closing pages. He is lost in an imaginary garden with only a nurse who urges him again and again to write in his notebook even though he doesn’t have a pencil because “Lencho love is real Lencho love is real Lencho love is real write it in your blue notebook with your finger remember everything you think and dream because you won’t see them again ... ”

When you’re reading Fuentes you often simply have to stop and steady yourself on the uneven ground, just like you do when you’re writing fiction that surpasses life itself. You see Carlos watching you, then Carlos watching Don Quixote, and Quixote watching the flocks of sheep he thinks are armies. The modern novel begins, for Carlos, with “Don Quixote” and leads straight to the uncertainty of the modern world in which we reside for a time. Everything is old and dusty, as in Mexico, “a country that’s like a shabby aristocrat — not rich, but very courteous.” Which is Carlos in a way, minus any pretense of a grandee, to the end.

When a letter came to me in Paris a few days later he wrote about the brightness of his London lair — because we had spoken enthusiastically of it: “I am convinced that the light comes directly from Mexico, rainy as London might simultaneously be. That is literatura fantástica — of which, Borges said, religion is but a branch.”

Kyle Jarrard is a senior editor at the International Herald Tribune.