The Eagle's Throne

by Carlos Fuentes

  You also bear the burden, Onésimo, of sharing your last name with another Tabasco strongman, the implacable anticlerical governor Tomás Garrido Canabal. You may remember what Gonzalo N. Santos, yet another name in our long list of strongmen, had to say about him: “He’s got the balls of a bull.”

  And balls were exactly what he needed when he drove every last priest out of Tabasco, shut down all the churches, and even banned crosses in cemeteries. Don Tomás was such a priest-hater that he even prohibited the people of Tabasco from saying Adiós and made them say Hasta luego instead.

  Your secret’s safe with me, Onésimo. I know you moved from Tabasco to Campeche to escape Dark Hand and his Nine Evil Sons, so that you could create your own power base, because nobody can compete with Dark Hand. You went to Campeche to make hell for your rival Vidales, and to escape the specter of Garrido Canabal.

  Yes, my dear Onésimo, you did your best to get away. Unfortunately, a man can’t hide from his destiny, because it resides in his soul— it’s not a matter of geography. And your destiny, Onésimo, is that of serving the man who protected you and who continues to protect you from the vengeful hatred of Dark Hand Vidales. The person who protected you in the past, and can protect you in the future, your friend César León.

  Let’s see just how well I know you. You’re politically neutral. You prefer obedience to debate. You would always rather subject yourself to real power than to the grass roots. And you have a tremendous virtue, Onésimo. You’re a prehistoric politician, and for you public life has become a succession of ghosts that once were important but now are mere shadows in the platonic Cacahuamilpa grotto that is your memory. They’re all “exes,” aren’t they? And you seem to think that they’ve been vaporized, that only you remain because nobody watches you as you watch all the presidential contenders turn into ghosts. Let’s see, who were Martínez Manatou, Corona del Rosal, García Paniagua, Flores Muñoz, Sánchez Tapia, Rojo Gómez? Ghosts, my dear Onésimo, specters of the misty world of Mexican politics. Light one day, dark the next—and burned-out forever.

  Now look me in the eye, Onésimo. I refuse to become a ghost. I’ve settled my debt with the past, if that’s how you want to view things. Exiled, battered, mocked, vilified—but not defeated.

  Don’t be scared. Your ghost has returned and is going to make you pay your debts. I’ve been watching you, Onésimo—you feel perfectly secure because you go on playing the same old role and repeating the same old lines without realizing that the stage is different now, as is the playwright. We’re in a new theater, and I want to be the star of the show again. You, my favorite friend, will be the man who puts my name back in the limelight.

  Re-election? The unmentionable word of our political theater. Although perhaps it’s not quite so unmentionable after all, what with the amendment of Article 59 of the constitution and the resurgence of the spirit of the 1917 constitutional congress: The possibility of reelecting senators and congressmen is what has allowed you, my Solon of Solons, to remain in Congress for ten years. Very well, now we must take this further: Allow for the president to be reelected. Reform that damn Article 83 and pave the way for my return.

  Reforming the constitution takes time, you say? I know that. That’s why we have to start now, nearly three years before the next election. Start raising the issue discreetly with the grass roots, the strongmen, governors, local legislators, businessmen, labor and agricultural leaders, intellectuals. We have to modernize the presidential succession just as we modernized the status of the legislators. Long live re-election.

  Don’t think I’ve been wasting my time doing crossword puzzles. I’ve already spoken to your nemesis, Dark Hand Vidales (though not his Nine Evil Sons), and he seems quite sympathetic to my ideas. He takes the long view, because he’s the patriarch of a dynasty. But I must admit, Vidales is his own man. He doesn’t like being in debt to anyone and I’m afraid—alas!—that he wants to use me, and knows how to use me, more than I know how to use him.

  You, on the other hand, are my beloved Play-Doh. You can and will do what I want because you owe me everything. You have one political virtue that will give you staying power, Onésimo. You’re ugly but not outrageously so. You’re ugly, fat, dark, and short in the most typical sense. You’re not even pockmarked or scarred. You could pass for a truck driver, or a rest room attendant, which is what you were when I met you. But since you’re invisible you’re not dangerous, and since you’re not dangerous, you know how to placate and handle large groups of insecure men. And who could be more insecure than our vociferous legislators?

  Oh, Onésimo. Let’s work together. Remember, you can keep on pretending to serve the current president as you start to lay down the rules that will pave the way for me—and you, of course. The real problem of the presidential succession is not who, but how. You just keep on assuring the outgoing head of state, Lorenzo Terán, that you’re going to protect his property, his privileges, his family. That’s more than enough. Security is gold. In fact, it’s priceless. We all dream of it. Let the incumbent and his people dream of it, too.

  Do you realize what a massive banquet of vengeance is going to take place in three years? Who is exempt? Our shameless Tácito, with his closet full of skeletons? The irreproachable Andino, with a wife who cheats on him all day long with every pair of trousers that comes her way? The untouchable María del Rosario, cold as an iceberg but who, like any iceberg worth its name, keeps three-quarters of herself submerged, revealing only the tip of her true self and none of her secrets? The upstanding, energetic Bernal, whose love affair with the aforementioned is a mere screen behind which lies an even bigger secret that will soon come to light? My old predecessor under the arches in Veracruz, keeper of another secret that he holds on to like a domino player hanging on to that double-white? And then we have the mysterious wild card in this great game, the callow Nicolás Valdivia, hoisted up to the position of undersecretary of the interior, thanks to the efforts and good graces of María del Rosario, and who, consequently, has set his sights on becoming secretary so that when Terán leaves office he can become a presidential candidate. There isn’t a single one of them, Onésimo, not one, I’m telling you, who isn’t expendable. But let me give you three rules of good political conduct.

  First, kill your political enemy and mourn him for a month. Second, if you’re going to be the executioner, make sure you’re invisible.

  And third, be afraid of the ghost of the political enemy you’ve killed. In other words, my near-illiterate Onésimo, you’d do well to read a little play called Macbeth, and wait for the day when the woods of your crimes begin to move toward the castle of your power.

  And don’t rule out pure dumb luck. Like the kind that came my way the day three separate strikes broke out simultaneously on my watch and I crushed them, causing the death of thirteen strikers, but nobody realized because that was the day Axayácatl Pérez—the so-called Sultan of the Cha-cha-cha, and the most popular musician at the time— died. Everyone went to pay their respects to the great idol at the Gran León dance hall and then followed the coffin to the cemetery, and everyone forgot all about the nameless dead. The ones I was responsible for.

  I write to you openly, Onésimo. I know that you’re the very soul of discretion, simply because nobody believes in your disclosures and you’re able to hide conveniently behind a veil of silence. Keep on doing that and keep me informed.

  P.S. Don’t worry about keeping this letter. As soon as you’ve finished reading, it will self-incinerate chemically. You can’t copy it or show it to anyone, you bastard. Didn’t you ever see Mission Impossible? The past is full of lessons for our present situation. Just ask yourself, in these dark days of our republic, how many letters, how many tapes, how many cassettes are being destroyed by their terrified recipients as soon as they read or listen to them? Just imagine. And don’t burn your sweet little fingers with my message.

  41

  TÁCITO DE LA CANAL TO MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN

 
Most dignified lady, is it possible to blackmail the blackmailed? I wouldn’t want to debase myself in your eyes, since I’m already so far down that you don’t even deign to look at me. I, on the other hand, look up: up, up, and away. Farther up and farther away, I dare say, than the two of you—and by “the two of you” I’m referring to Bernal Herrera, interior secretary, and you, María del Rosario Galván, his lover and the mother of his child. Yes, you.

  Allow me to quote from a classic: “In the midst of the broad expanses surrounding Berchtesgaden, isolated from the quotidian world, my creative genius produces ideas that shake the world. At these moments, I no longer feel my mortality, my ideas transcend the mind and are transformed into facts of enormous dimension.”

  Don’t think me presumptuous for invoking the words of Adolf Hitler. Whatever you think about the German Führer, he got as high and went as far as he wanted. His fall was terrible, true enough, but to fall from such heights is, in and of itself, a victory.

  In other words, if I don’t know the limits of my own ambition, how will others know them? The question is one of proper timing, just as you yourself say in your letters to Bernal Herrera, which I take delight in reading before I go to sleep, as if they were a romantic advice column in a newspaper. Believe me, my dear lady, I know how to time things. Don’t forget—I have power because I, more than anyone else, have access. Need I say more? Other people have access, too. But I have it before anyone else. And don’t think I’m fooling myself. You and Herrera tell each other: “Tácito has access, but he’s totally unpopular.”

  You, you diabolical little duo, lay traps for me. Very amusing ones, by the way. I know that you two are behind all those tributes in my honor carried out by powerful interest groups—unions and business associations where someone paid off by you praises me to the skies before some other crony of yours rips me apart. Nobody gets up to defend me. You think, don’t you, that you’ve both flattered my vanity and mocked my pride. That you’ve undermined me.

  Wrong. You’ve only strengthened me. Every humiliating act, every cheap shot you fire my way strengthens me, stokes my courage, steels my spirit. Would you like to know how good I am at resisting offense? The other day I received a visit from César León, the ex-president for whom I worked as a young aide, some ten years ago. He complained about the way people have treated him since leaving the Eagle’s Throne, and accused me of mounting a smear campaign against him.

  “I make you uncomfortable only because that’s what the president wants,” I replied.

  “They aren’t making me uncomfortable—they’re hunting me down,” said the ex, in a voice that was commanding, not plaintive.

  “I simply work for the president.”

  “Were those his orders?”

  “No, but I can predict what the president is thinking.”

  Madam, I want you and Herrera to see the risks I’m willing to take, so that you understand that I’m not easily offended. I’m hardly a sensitive, romantic fifteen-year-old girl.

  So that you see the extremes of my endurance, my serenity, and my determination, I’m going to tell you a little story.

  President Terán made it clear that he hadn’t authorized what he considered to be my tactless treatment of ex-President León.

  “But, Mr. President, I did it for you.”

  “I never asked you to do that, Tácito.”

  “Well, I thought it was obvious. . . .”

  “Ah! So you think you can read my mind, is that it? And did you read my mind when I thought to myself, If Tácito does this again, he’s sacked?”

  I didn’t have to read anyone’s mind, my dear friend. I knew that the president would have to reprimand me pro forma, but that deep down he was glad that I’d done something he could never have done himself, or ordered me to do in any explicit way. I’m not called Tácito for nothing, you know. . . .

  My distinguished friend: I know how to take risks. I know how to suffer humiliation without flinching. That is my strength. Do you think I don’t know what you tell the president?

  “Tácito is a sign of your weakness, Lorenzo. You don’t need him. Only the weakest leaders need a favorite.”

  Oh, the court favorite! An adviser who exercises real power on behalf of a weak or harebrained monarch. Nicholas Perrenot de Granvelle for Charles V; Antonio Pérez for Philip II; the Duke of Lerma for Philip III, Philip IV, and the Count-Duke of Olivares. Some are more fortunate than others, some return from previous obsolescence, others betray and flee to enemy ranks disguised as women (Pérez, who only had to slap on an eye patch to imitate his one-eyed lover, the Princess of Eboli), while others drown in their own incompetence, even worse than that of the real monarch (Lerma), and still others are lionized for their success in running the empire.

  Historical models, madam. Which of them will I resemble in the end? Oh, a favorite is as good as his protector—but also as good as his enemies. And to tell the truth, you and Bernal are completely useless to me.

  “You are nothing but a flimsy reed disguised as a sword,” our beloved interior secretary once said to me.

  “And you are a sardine who thinks himself a shark,” I replied.

  “And me?” you dared to ask, petulantly.

  “A noodle, nothing but a noodle.”

  You say that I’m a masochist who derives pleasure from recounting the humiliation I’m forced to endure in my service to the president. The simple truth is that I walk through the corridors of the presidential house thinking about these things, and I chastise myself for the vileness of my acts, but I congratulate myself because my despicable nature not only keeps me alive, it keeps me on top. Your friend, the so-called Seneca, has this to say about me: “Tácito could corrupt the devil.”

  And as I walk by, he murmurs, “There goes His Excellency the Evil One.”

  (He borrowed that one from Talleyrand, as you probably know since you were educated by the Frogs.)

  But me? I put lead in my shoes so that no sudden gust of wind can carry me off into thin air. I endure everything, madam, because the man with the greatest endurance is the man who laughs last. And as you so carelessly say in your letter, I too could fall at any moment. But I warn both of you that I’ll drag you down with me into the abyss.

  You once said to me, “You’re a bat, Tácito. Don’t show your face by day.”

  I didn’t dare confess that I admire you by night, madam, as you strip off your clothes with the light on. I was a gentleman.

  “Certainly not, I’m nothing but a harmless little dove.”

  “That would make you the first hawk ever to turn into a dove.”

  “Nonsense. You and I are birds of the same feather.”

  Your comparisons are not very accurate, María del Rosario. You’d be a lot better off thinking of me as “the man in the mist.” You’ll see that I’m not so easy to catch, and that I can get in under unguarded doors. Like yours, and your lover Bernal Herrera’s. Not to mention that of the wretched bastard born from your love affair and abandoned in an asylum for idiots.

  42

  BERNAL HERRERA TO MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN

  Marucha, my Marucha, what’s happened to you? I hardly recognize you, I hardly recognize myself. Why have you let a vengeful impulse get the better of you? Why haven’t you controlled your passion? Why have you let your hormones hasten the plan that you and I agreed to, the two of us together, as ever, always so synchronized? You and I have never confused our loyalties. . . . Our political bond grew out of a carnal bond, and only now am I struck by how very different we were when we met and fell in love, before we paid the inevitable price of all romantic beginnings. It was in our nature, psychological and political, to doubt everything. We met. We were drawn to each other. But you doubted me, just as I doubted you. Until the night we shared a bottle of Petrus and realized that we loved each other even though we couldn’t trust each other. We laughed (was it the wine, was it the lust, or was it the risk, without which no erotic encounter is possible?) and said
to each other, “If we doubt everything, we’ll understand each other perfectly.”

  I told you that a public figure should never stop doubting, even though that means living in perpetual anguish and insecurity without ever revealing it to anyone. That’s the other rule, my Marucha. Doubt and anguish leaven our public clarity and serenity. We’ve become professional politicians because we don’t suppress our insecurity—that is, our capacity for suspicion. Profession: politician. Party: suspicionist. In other words, we make the most of our anguish so that our serene facade is fed by human matter. We had a son, María del Rosario. A mongoloid child or, to speak scientifically, a child with Down syndrome. We had to make a choice. We could have lived together, looked after our child, and sacrificed our political ambitions. Or you could have kept the child and set me free, free and doubly condemned for having frustrated your ambitions and abandoned our child. Or we could have done what we did: Put him in an institution, visit him now and then—increasingly less often, let’s be honest, increasingly less connected to that fateless fate, increasingly worried that that defenseless creature with a face tender and happy yet distant and indifferent, that child whose future holds nothing but premature death, will wrench our lives away from us in exchange for nothing.

  These were our reasons and we’ve kept the secret for fourteen years. I warned you, María del Rosario, that I was never to receive the bills from the institution at my office. I’m so scrutinized and besieged, I’m so surrounded by spies working for my enemies (who are also your enemies, don’t forget) that the least little oversight can and will be used against me—and you.

  So it has happened. Guess who saw the bill from the institution and sniffed out the truth. Do you think I don’t know? My friends claim to despise Tácito—but I can only suspect they say the same thing to him: “We are your friends. We despise Herrera. We’re with you all the way.”