The Eagle's Throne

by Carlos Fuentes

  Don Cástulo, to judge by his bone structure, should be skinny, but he possesses the inevitable pot belly of someone who’s eaten bean tortas and peppers and fried pork all his life, washed down with the occasional beer. Doña Serafina works miracles, María del Rosario. She contributes to the household economy by baking cakes and pastries. The kitchen is hers. No one else enters it, and it happens to be the largest room in the apartment.

  “That was why we picked it,” she says.

  The kitchen has everything, including a long table coated with flour and even a baker’s oven. This is where the good woman prepares her meringues, wedding towers, and all kinds of fanciful concoctions for parties, first communions, and dances, and thanks to this little business, she manages to bring home 1,000 dollars a month—which would be 2,000 if she didn’t have to spend half her earnings on “raw materials,” as she calls them with pride, efficiently wiping her hands on her apron. Picture Andrea Palma at sixty. Picture that slender, languid beauty from the film Woman of the Port, who sold her love “to the men who come back from the sea,” only now with a body that’s less than slender and a bearing that’s anything but languid except in the very deepest recesses of her eyes. And if her husband’s eyes are as opaque as a visor, Serafina’s are as melancholy as a sudden twilight in the middle of the day.

  “Businesslike,” the gringos say, don’t they? Well, that’s what Serafina is, my friend—not a minute of rest and not a single complaint, except in those eyes that yearn for something that never was. I repeat. I emphasize. Something that never was. The expression that speaks of a promise unfulfilled gives both the lady of the house and the house itself their melancholy. Nostalgia, lost dreams, what could have been . . .

  Imagine that expression, my powerful patroness, because I’ve never seen it in your eyes. It’s as if you already had it all—all but the realms unconquered by your ambition. Doña Serafina has eyes that no longer aspire to anything. As I watch her working in her kitchen, I see no ambition, just the pure and simple will to survive. And there’s Cástulo, reading the newspaper in the cramped living room. The television, he tells me, has been pawned, and that’s despite the fact that in Mexico even people from the most squalid slums, the lost cities, have televisions. But he says that he grew up reading newspapers and he isn’t about to give up his slow archivist’s habits for those little pills of information they serve up on TV. Of course now without satellite signals for TV antennae, he couldn’t watch anything even if he wanted to. . . .

  All in the name of God. Or rather in the name of their irrepressible twenty-year-old daughter, Araceli, who spends all day lying on her bed reading ¡Hola! magazine and dreaming, I suppose, of being Charlotte of Monaco or someone like her, and then spends hours beautifying herself for a boyfriend who picks her up in a convertible at nine o’clock to take her out to dinner and then dancing. She’s not out of control, her mother claims. She’s just young, she has a right to have fun, and anyway, she always comes back with a plastic doggie bag filled with leftovers from the restaurants she dines at thanks to Hugo Patrón, her boyfriend from the Yucatán, who runs a travel agency that has been idling lately since the computers aren’t working and the gringos have their doubts about traveling to Mexico these days. Still, the walls of Araceli’s bedroom are covered with the posters Hugo gives her—of the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, Paris, and Venice. He’s a well-intentioned boy, doña Serafina says, even if he is a bit old-fashioned. You see, he refuses to let Araceli work at all; he wants to save up enough money for an apartment and a honeymoon, and he doesn’t ever want his girlfriend—and future wife—to work. My conclusion is that he associates leisure with virginity.

  Serafina occasionally pulls herself together and summons the spoiled young lady from her room to deliver cakes when clients don’t send their chauffeurs to pick them up. You should see the scowl that comes over that little girl’s face. She was born to be a princess, with that head full of silly dreams, and quite frankly she even flirts with me when I visit. Yes, I’m a better catch than Hugo Patrón, but the minute I start talking she becomes very shy, and as I play the role of the erudite professional educated in Paris, sprinkling my conversation with French, I can see a mixture of ennui, respect, and detachment come over her pretty, moon-colored face, as if I were the “black cloud of destiny,” a wondrous soul descended from his pedestal to visit the humble of this world—like her, a girl who has no visible prospects in life other than a marriage to the travel agent Hugo Patrón and a honeymoon in Miami.

  The apartment has two bedrooms. One for the parents and the other for Araceli. On the roof, in a wooden hut next to a makeshift pigeon loft, lives the son, Ricardo, who very tenderly looks after those birds, reminding me of Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint on the rickety rooftops by New York’s waterfront. He’s an extraordinary young man, María del Rosario, and I’m telling you straight because I know that you fancy yourself a kind of headhunter extraordinaire (please forgive these occasional ironies of mine, I have no other way to tone down the resentment you inspire in me).

  Ricardo is exceptional first of all in the physical sense. A son who was very much planned and hoped for by his parents, he must be about twenty-six, very slim without being skinny, with severe but very delicate musculature. He’s taller than me—about five foot eleven—and has the kind of head you only see in Italian museums: every detail finely chiseled, thin lips, sharp nose, high cheekbones, large, almost Asian eyes, broad forehead, and a mane of black hair that reaches his shoulders.

  Am I describing an object of desire? In all sincerity, I believe so. You, my beautiful and elusive lady, a woman who has indulged and continues to indulge in so many wonderful delights, surely understand what I mean. This boy is so beautiful that nobody—neither woman nor man—could possibly help desiring him. Tight jeans, short T-shirt, bare feet when he comes out, surprised, to see who’s there, and when I tell him who I am he turns to scatter corn for the pigeons. He knows that I’ve helped his father and he’s grateful to me for that.

  He looks me straight in the eye, a bit mocking, a bit skeptical, and says, “I don’t go to the university because it’s been closed down for two years.”

  He throws some birdseed to the pigeons.

  “Would you pay for me to go to a private university?”

  His dark eyes are so intelligent that I don’t even have to ask the next question.

  “It would be a waste of time for me to get one of those rotten jobs that drive you out of your mind with boredom. . . .”

  “And end up stifling your ambition and talent forever,” I say, finishing his sentence as he looks me over with scornful admiration.

  Then he points to the inside of his little “cabin in the clouds,” where I see a folding canvas bed, a wobbly table, a stool (“so that I don’t fall asleep while reading”) and, most importantly, a crudely fashioned bookshelf filled with books, old books, the kind they sell on the Calle de Donceles for two pesos each, with the bindings falling off, from musty old publishing houses, as extinct as animals from some long-gone era: Espasa Calpe, Botas, Herrero, Santiago Rueda, Emecé . . . like a harvest of dry wheat from Argentina, Spain, and Mexico. . . . I have an urge to poke through those shelves, I who have had the privilege of reading in the French National Library, but he stops me, pointing at the three volumes on his desk, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Montesquieu.

  He doesn’t have to say a word. The look on his face says it all.

  “I am a young man who keeps his eyes open, Mr. Valdivia.”

  Ah, my dangerous lady and mistress, if one day you tire of me (and that day will come), I have a new candidate for you here, a masculine Galatea to satisfy your Pygmalion vocation, my fair lady.

  His name is Jesús Ricardo Magón.

  He is twenty-six years old.

  He lives in a squalid little hut on the roof of a building on Calzada Cuitláhuac.

  Hurry up, María del Rosario, or I’ll get to him first.

  And what, I ask him, does he talk abou
t with his harebrained little sister?

  “I tell her all about the lives of the European princesses she reads about in ¡Hola! magazine and I help her finish the crosswords. She’s going to have a very boring life.”

  25

  ANDINO ALMAZÁN TO PRESIDENT LORENZO TERÁN

  Mr. President, you and I can’t fool ourselves about the problems our country now faces. Some of these problems are technical: how to control inflation, attract foreign investment, raise the employment level without increasing pay. Others are international and, inevitably and monomaniacally, inextricably linked to our proximity to the United States. Others are domestic: the students, the peasants, the factory workers. Lastly, there are the political problems: the presidential succession in less than three years’ time.

  With the honesty that you ask of me, I shall put my cards on the table. You have earned a reputation for solving problems by avoiding them. As I see it, this has happened because of your great confidence in civil society, the judicial system and its decisions, and the rule of law. You’ve relinquished the traditional arrogance of the executive office.

  I, on the other hand, have a doubly bad reputation. They say I am “the Job of the cabinet.” That I have infinite patience, but that my virtue is also my greatest weakness. According to my detractors, my passivity is such that the only action I should take is that of resigning. I shrug my shoulders, though, and tell you, Mr. President, that I’m the only member of your cabinet who has turned all four cheeks to your enemies. I’m your lightning rod. Now, my strategy may seem paradoxical at first. You’ll note that I’m the person who invents the problems that you’re supposed to solve. And one of your problems is that you have to turn the opposition into your greatest ally. The more problems I create, the more they shout at me. True enough. But more problems also mean more money that we can squeeze out of the budget for our purposes. It’s an infallible parliamentary game, especially when, in cases like yours, the president doesn’t enjoy majority support in Congress.

  Everyone opposes your tax bills, which I faithfully send to Congress knowing they’ll be rejected, while up my sleeve I keep the reforms that I know Congress will approve simply because they don’t want to seem like deadbeats, idiots, or enemies of fiscal responsibility. There you have it. We still haven’t received approval for a VAT on medicine and food—something we proposed—but Congress is favoring progressive and redistributive taxation, something we didn’t propose so as not to alienate the wealthy, even though we obviously want it passed in order to bolster the country’s finances.

  I tell you all this, Mr. President, to remind you of what we already know. You and I make a good team. The opposition is our best friend. The more they shout at us for reason A, the more budget they give us for reason B. In our case, the opposite is always true: We don’t want the things we propose, and we desperately desire the things we ostensibly don’t care about.

  We live in the most ravaged and, financially speaking, idiotic part of the world: Latin America. Latin America is important because it lacks sound finances. We are important because we create problems for everyone else. I’ve said this to you time and again. We are not, contrary to the vulgar, populist conventional wisdom, victims of the International Monetary Fund, nor are we slaves of the First World. Quite the opposite. They are our victims. Thanks to all our calculated mistakes and shortcomings, Latin America derives from them its one source of strength: deferral.

  One deferral after another. Debt. Devaluation. Floating the currency. Public services. Education. Health. Empowerment of human capital. We defer everything because as long as we continue producing “crises” that other people can save us from over and over again, we can keep on putting off our problems and solutions until hell freezes over.

  What do you want me to tell you, Mr. President? The strategy works for us. It keeps us afloat, keeps our head just above water. And that’s what worries me. Add up all our problems and think calmly: Is it in our interest to mess with the status quo? Not really, right? That’s what worries me, and that’s what prompts me to write these words.

  Mr. President: The head of the federal police, General Cícero Arruza, is growing dangerously impatient. Luckily, despite his persistence and reiterated arguments he hasn’t yet been able to pass his jitters on to the defense secretary (with whom I have a good working relationship, and who apprised me of all this). You do the math: students, factory workers, and peasants demonstrating; foreign aggression; endemic poverty—these are things we all know. But now there’s a new factor at play. Power vacuums. Power vacuums, I emphasize, Mr. President. The total absence of authority here, there, and everywhere. Mexican workers who can’t gain entry into the United States camping out in the northern states or going home, restless and discouraged, to Guanajuato, Puebla, and Oaxaca. Guatemalan workers sneaking in through our unprotected southern border and demanding nonexistent jobs or else robbing Mexicans of the ones that do exist. And then there are the drug traffickers crisscrossing the country from south to north and east to west, from the borders and the coastlines, with no barriers whatsoever and moreover bolstered by a tremendous power base: that of the resurrected local bosses, some of whom are allied with the drug cartels (Narciso “Chicho” Delgado in Baja California and José de la Paz Quintero in Tamaulipas), others who are more independent and as such more dangerous (Félix Elías Cabezas in Sonora), and still others who are more closely linked to the movements driven by unemployment, poverty, and general unrest (Rodolfo Roque Maldonado in San Luis Potosí and “Dark Hand” Vidales in Tabasco, who brags that if he gets killed his “Nine Evil Sons” will succeed him). And then, lording it over the land and sea borders, the King of the Cartels, Silvestre Pardo.

  Movements arising from unemployment, poverty, and unrest . . . and generational ambition. What is the average age in your cabinet, President Terán? Fifty, sixty? We are relics, mummies, prehistoric mammoths in a country with seventy million men and women under the age of twenty. These are the armies that the local bosses want to mobilize and Cícero Arruza knows it. He knows it and he wants to control it so that he can create pandemonium and seize power before the electoral campaigns begin, and he has a year to do it.

  What do you and I want, then? We want the status quo with all its defects, but without chaos or bloodshed. What do the local kingpins want? They want to fish in turbulent waters. They want a country with no other law but their own, balkanized like Argentina, once a united republic and now an appalling assortment of petty “independent” republics, Córdoba, San Luis, La Rioja, Catamarca, Jujuy, Santiago del Estero, each one with its own local Facundo, its own autocratic local boss, and its own worthless paper currency. Argentina: miserable Cockaigne, ravaged Eden, barbaric Pampa once again . . . Seneca says that culture is what always saves that country. César Aira is, after all, the first Argentinian to receive the Nobel Prize.

  Is that what we want to happen to Mexico? Don’t close your eyes to Cícero’s strategy. First, destroy the established order. Second, balkanization. Third, reestablish unity with military force. And when that happens, the very professional and loyal general Mondragón von Bertrab will join the military regime in the name of patriotism.

  How do I know all this? Is it simple conjecture on my part, telepathy? No, Mr. President. Forgive me for being so blunt, but my loyalty is to you, first and foremost. I know all this because it came straight from the mouth of the defense secretary, Mondragón von Bertrab himself. Why did he tell me? So that I would tell you. Did he ask me point-blank to tell you? No, but he must have assumed I would. Why didn’t he just tell you himself?

  “With the president, I don’t assume. I state facts.”

  So why did he tell me? To warn you about what’s going on. With this strategy von Bertrab will remain in good standing with you—but also with the recalcitrants, if they succeed. It’s the classic game of two-timing that you find in politics everywhere. But that doesn’t make the situation any less dangerous or real, Mr. President. We’re walking throu
gh this like a bumbling blind man wandering across a busy street while everyone standing on the sidewalk yells at him to get out of the way of the oncoming cars racing toward him from every direction. Is it possible that the blind man is deaf, too?

  26

  “LA PEPA” ALMAZÁN TO TÁCITO DE LA CANAL

  My love, don’t err on the side of discretion, not now. Wake up. The clock is about to strike midnight and our enemies aren’t sleeping. Time is slipping out of our hands. As my adorable old grandmother, may she rest in everlasting peace, used to say, “You have to be Beelzebub if you want to beat Satan.”

  You and I have to be more diabolical than the devil himself. Set your sights skyward. If you want to conquer the heavens you have to look up to God. And bear in mind that you’re surrounded on all sides by the crooked and the perverse. Your P only pretends to be an idiot and hopes people will believe it. BH has allied himself with that Lucrezia Borgia of posh Las Lomas, that whore MR. Darling, open your eyes. The couple have planted that rookie NV in your office, but I never trust the so-called innocent. They’re cynics who just pretend to be saints so that they can deceive the Lord and get into heaven. You and I will just have to apply that reliable old “Herod’s Law”: Either get screwed or get fucked.

  The return of our ex-leader complicates things somewhat because he plays his own game and neither you nor I have the marbles to compete with him, my sweet. Down there in Veracruz the Old Man plays mysterious with his dominoes and there’s no telling when he’s going to come around and block our double six. In other words, we’re surrounded by enemy forces. On the bright side, you don’t have to do all that much to get some good slander going. That old bag from Las Lomas says that you’d kill your own mother if it would help you seize power. Oh, my saint, I know you’d never do such a thing. Better to kill your enemy’s mother.