The Eagle's Throne

by Carlos Fuentes

  “Since my name is Bernal Herrera, just like my father, they arrested and tortured me, thinking I was him. Then, finally, the Juárez police chief came in and told them, ‘Don’t be idiots. The father’s dead, and we even buried him.’ ”

  There was suffering in your expression, but it was combined with serenity, and I envied that; it was a look inherited from pain and courage and faith . . . I don’t know.

  You, on the other hand, could see the family bitterness in my eyes, and you reproached me for it.

  “Sweetheart, resentment, envy, and self-pity are poison. Turn what you feel into the will to love. Into the freedom to act. Don’t wear yourself out hating your father. Overcome it. Be more than him. Better than him. But be different from him. That’s what will most rankle inside him.” You laughed, my love.

  You and I in love, Bernal Herrera. It was love at first sight. A love born in lecture rooms and the books we read, in the cafés on the Boul’Mich, on our walks along the Seine, in the old films on the Rue Champollion, during our hurried meals of croque-monsieur and café au lait, our impassioned readings of the immortal Nouvel Obs and Jean Daniel, our study sessions, our book-hunting expeditions along the Rue Soufflot, our passionate nights in your attic flat on the Rue Saint Jacques, the dawn views of the Panthéon, our protection. It was love at first sight.

  “We’re in Paris. Nothing changes here. The city’s always the same. That’s why lovers in Paris will always be lovers!”

  Tra-la-la.

  There were two reasons why I had to rush back to Mexico.

  First, because I found out that my father had cheated my mother out of her money. Once they were married, they combined their assets. My mother had inherited a large beer consortium and it was understood that my parents’ common assets didn’t include my mother’s involvement with the company, only her personal estate.

  One fine day, the executive board of the company summoned my mother and informed her that my father had not only driven her personal fortune into the ground through a series of fraudulent financial operations but that he had also forged the signature of Casilda Galván de Barroso, taken control of the company stock, and cheated everyone out of their money.

  I returned to Mexico in the middle of this melodrama. I only made it worse. That was when I announced to my father that I was in love with you and that I intended to marry you.

  “A Communist! And dirt poor, no less! The son of my archenemies, those trade-union ringleaders in the north! You’ve gone mad!” my father shouted, as he threw his bowl of scalding soup at me, got up from the table, and started hitting me while I cried, “Stop it! Hit me but don’t hit my child!”

  Bernal, my love. Melodrama is inevitable in private life. There’s no family without its soap opera. And what is melodrama, but comedy without the humor?

  “I don’t want sons-in-law!” my father exploded.

  The furies that had always tormented him were unleashed on the accumulated disgrace: the “lost daughter,” the wife who had “ruined him.” Even though he had, in fact, been the one to ruin everything for us with the rage that was too much even for him. It was a storm, a tempest on open ground, the rustling of dry trees and sterile plains and raging skies, Bernal, a raw fury like a resurrection of all the dead seasons of his life—silent springs, long, hot summers, black autumns, discontented winters. Yes, Bernal, my father’s rage was let loose, as if poisoning himself weren’t enough—he had to poison the rest of the world as well.

  “My daughter! Some communist’s whore!” he howled like an animal. “My daughter, the lover of a man who harassed the Barroso family and tried to ruin all of us! My grandson, a child with poisoned blood!

  “Whore, swine, you belong in a pigsty,” he shouted, and he hit me, tearing the tablecloth off the table, destroying all the glasses and plates, staining the rugs, all of it in front of my mother, motionless, cold, dressed in black, reproaching my father with a deadly look. Then, suddenly she stood up and took a gun from her bag, observing the fleeting shock that crossed his face. At that, my father took out his own gun and they faced each other, like in a Posada etching or a Tarantino film, pointing their guns at each other and me in the middle, battered, terrified, wanting to separate them but defeated by my womb, by the instinct to save my child, our child. . . .

  I moved away from the dark, obscene figures of my parents. I backed out of the dining room. I saw them looking at each other with hatred, dollar bills and bile in their eyes. Standing opposite each other, both armed, pointing their guns, waiting. Who would shoot first? The duel was a long time coming.

  Outside the dining room, I began to scream, covering my ears so that I wouldn’t have to hear the shots, trembling, clutching my belly, not daring to go back into the dining room.

  They were dead.

  My father was on the table, his face half-buried in a plate of strawberries and cream.

  My mother was under the table, her black skirt pushed up high above her sex. For the first time I saw the milky whiteness of her legs. She wore ankle socks, I said to myself.

  They were both dead.

  I inherited both fortunes. I liquidated all my father’s debts. I saved my mother’s shares. The beer company was very understanding, even generous with me. But bad luck prevailed. Or rather, bad luck came along with the good luck, as is often the case.

  “Oh, how small my fortune is—when will I see it grow?” as the late general Arruza used to say.

  You came back to Mexico. You asked me to marry you. Now there was nothing in our way. My father was dead. But the little boy was born.

  What is a chromosome? It’s the messenger of heredity. It communicates genetic information. Every human somatic cell has a nucleus that contains twenty-three chromosomes, organized in pairs. One half is paternal and the other maternal. Each chromosome can duplicate: It is its own twin. But when an intrusive chromosome—a “third man”— suddenly appears, the total number of chromosomes is raised to forty-seven, and this abnormality results in a strange creature: a flattened face, mongol eyes, deformed ears, flecked irises, broad hands and stumpy fingers, weak muscles, and the forewarning of arrested mental development. Down syndrome.

  What were you and I to do?

  Keep the child with us, treat him as our son, which is what he was— is? Dedicate ourselves to him? Look after him, me the devoted mother, freeing you to pursue your career?

  Kill him, Bernal, relieve ourselves of the unwanted burden?

  Love him, Bernal, peer into his odd little eyes and see the spark of divinity, that creature’s desire to love and be loved?

  Together we decided that fighting for power was less painful than fighting for a child.

  How cold, how clever we were, Bernal. What did we want, you and I? The same thing. To be active players in politics. To carry out the things we learned at the university in France. To build a better country on top of the ruins of a Mexico cyclically devastated by a combination of excess and shortage: poverty and corruption equally rooted, evil people who were far too competent and good people who were far too incompetent; affectation and pretension at the top and grim resignation down below; lost opportunities; governments blaming everything on the people and their civic passivity, and the people blaming the government’s ineptitude; a general belief in signs, as if instead of federal law, our constitution was the Popol Vuh of Mayan antiquity . . .

  You and I were going to change all that. We had immense confidence in our talent and our education in a country of amateur politicians. We wanted to act legally, but we were also willing to be flexible.

  “Politics is the art of the possible.”

  “No. Politics is the art of the impossible.”

  Who said what? You first, then me, or was it the other way around, as our unforgettable agriculture secretary would put it? The fact is, Bernal, we stopped being parents to one little boy because we thought we would become godparents to a whole country.

  The boy was deposited in an institution. We visited him from t
ime to time. Less and less, after a while, discouraged by the physical distance, the mental wall.

  We didn’t listen to the voices that told us, “Get closer to him. These children are more intelligent than they seem. They have a different kind of intelligence.”

  “And what kind is that, doctor?”

  “The intelligence of a world unto itself.”

  “Impenetrable?”

  “Yes, possibly. We still don’t know. But real. Whose job is it to try?”

  “To try what . . . ?”

  “Whose job is it? Yours, as his parents, or his?”

  We didn’t explore these enigmas. We distanced ourselves from these options. We did what we had to do without the burden of an idiot, yes, I don’t mind going to the root of the word. Idio, what is ours, idios, what is loved, idiosyncratic, what belongs to one person . . . Do you remember Emilio Lledó’s extraordinary lecture at the Collège de France about Plato’s Phaedrus, about that speech that is the seed of language? The language that when “unjustly condemned needs the help of a father, since it is not able to defend itself.” For that reason, Lledó taught us, all language must be interpreted so that it can be “submerged” in “the language of which we are comprised, the language that we are.”

  We’ve spent nearly twenty years, you and I, speaking the conventional language of politics. Wouldn’t we have been capable of speaking the creative language of a child? Perhaps a poetic language?

  What was the price, Bernal? Accept it. Not only did we distance ourselves from the boy that was ours, our own. After a while, deeply involved in our respective political careers, we distanced ourselves from each other. We never stopped loving each other, seeing each other, talking to each other, conspiring together . . . but we were no longer idiots, we were no longer ours, we no longer lived together—sometimes we’d go out to a bar and sometimes, even, we went to bed together. But it didn’t work. There was no passion. We preferred to abstain so as not to sour our great friendship.

  You are a good man, and that’s why we couldn’t live together. Without you, I could freely exercise the dark part of my soul, the part I inherited from my father, without hurting you.

  I’ve always told you about my love affairs before the poisonous gossip reached your ears. I know that in politics skill, not truth, is what wins arguments. I’ve told you before, “A liar falls sooner than a one-legged man.” Being a good liar is a full-time job. You have to devote yourself to it entirely. And that’s precisely what politics allows you to do.

  Long ago, the liar was often sent to purge his guilt in a monastery. But Mexico is neither a convent nor a monastery. It’s a whorehouse. And you’ve been the austere monk of the whorehouse of Mexican politics. That’s always been your strength. Morality. Contrast. You’ve cultivated them in the name of what used to be called “moral renewal.” You’ve been tough and pragmatic when necessary, fair and legalistic when appropriate.

  You never told me anything about your private life and sometimes I think you had no private life at all. Or, as my father, Leonardo Barroso, Jr., once said, very cynically, “We all have the right to a private life. As long as we have the wherewithal to pay for it.”

  I’ve worked with you unconditionally. I knew Lorenzo Terán was terminally ill since the day he became president, in fact. He wasn’t the first ill man to take office. François Mitterrand became president of France knowing he’d die in the Elysée Palace. Roosevelt knew it, too, when he allowed himself to be elected for the fourth time. Perhaps that knowledge gave them the will to survive with the energy we remember them for. And the will to keep their secrets, just as Terán kept his. He trusted me completely. His illness was the reason I began to prepare an inexperienced young man, someone who’d barely started to shave, someone I could mold. He’d take over the presidency if Terán died— he’d be interim president if Terán died during his first two years in office, and acting president if he died in the last four years. But he was only meant to be passing through; Nicolás Valdivia would only be passing through, until your own presidency, Bernal, once your adversary Tácito was eliminated.

  Valdivia complied very conscientiously with all I told him to do. But he always believed that when I said, “You will be president,” I meant a full six-year term. He never suspected that I only considered him feasible as acting president because President Terán was ill. A new Emilio Portes Gil. He was obedient and loyal. There were certain things that he—and nobody else—could control. The Old Man Under the Arches. The simpering passion of that soap opera queen Dulce, whatever her name is. The impenetrable mystery of Ulúa. The Moro affair that you and I wanted to make invisible by eliminating it from public discourse, as if it didn’t exist at all, a secret sealed up forever at the bottom of the sea . . .

  But then again, Valdivia was useful for spoiling the ex-president’s little schemes, not to mention the heinous general Arruza’s plot—we never imagined Nicolás would overtake us and get in with General von Bertrab to find out what Arruza was up to, to say nothing of what he found out about the idiotic pretensions of Almazán, that Yucatecan whore, and Andino, her bottomless pit of economic science and political mediocrity.

  All of it under control and all of it in your favor, Bernal. Fate smiled on you. The coast was clear. Onésimo Canabal, the president of Congress, plays the fool, but he’s craftier than a pirate, and he knows which way the wind blows. All of us have our secret vendettas. And Canabal’s vendetta was that of avenging the humiliations heaped on him by the terrible ex, César León (no adversary should ever be underestimated). Eliminating César León has been Onésimo Canabal’s obsession. Andino made him laugh, but not Pepa, because he knew about the Mexican Madame Pompadour’s secret affairs with Tácito and Arruza. Onésimo, sneaky son of a bitch that he is, calculated that these deceitful affairs would end up like the liar and the one-legged man—flat on their faces. Onésimo also knew how to take advantage of our balkanized Congress, so that he could divide and conquer.

  What neither you nor I calculated, Bernal Herrera, was that Onésimo, more astute than we gave him credit for, would co-opt a secret agent, an unglamorous old woman, more changeable than a chameleon, a woman who could blend into anything from the Chihuahua desert to the jungles of Tabasco, Paulina Tardegarda, who has the air of a nun, a virgin, a martyr. Not only was she a bottomless pit of information for Onésimo, but she was something far worse, something that, quite frankly, makes me seethe, Bernal.

  I promised Nicolás Valdivia: “You will be president of Mexico.”

  Subtext: “I will make you president of Mexico.”

  It wasn’t like that. The person who made Valdivia president was that convent escapee Paulina Tardegarda. Valdivia can thank Paulina and Onésimo, not you and me, for making it to the Eagle’s Throne.

  I’m seething, Bernal, I admit it, and I’m frightened.

  Nicolás Valdivia was going to be the don Tancredo, the sitting duck in our monumental bullfight, the immobile buffoon in charge of diverting the bull as it entered the ring, so that the matador could shine. Well, well. Now it turns out that you and I have been the Tancredos and that Nicolás Valdivia owes his position to Onésimo and Paulina, not you and me.

  However, you are who you are, my old sweetheart, and your candidacy has the most promise and the best chance to win the 2024 elections. But “life brings us surprises,” as the Panamanian bard Rubén Blades said. Life brings us surprises. Other candidates may appear on the scene. That’s to be expected. In fact, I think we should encourage other candidacies. When I survey the political horizon, I don’t see a candidate stronger than you. In any case, you can breathe easy. Article 82 of the constitution states that any citizen who has served as president of the republic—whether elected, interim, acting, provisional—may not serve in that position again. Under no circumstances, the law says. That was why César León was trying so hard to intimidate Onésimo Canabal into starting that complicated constitutional reform process—because he wanted to scrap Article 82 and become
president again. Blessed re-election, Bernal. Nobody has the right to screw us twice.

  Except Nicolás Valdivia perhaps?

  My creation.

  My anointed one, à la mode démocratique.

  The docile puppet who was going to deliver us to the presidency without a problem.

  Well, look what happened. The maid turned out to have a mind of her own.

  No, I don’t think that you’ll be defeated in free, democratic elections. Your victory is assured. But what I am afraid of, Bernal, is that Valdivia will find some way to stay on the Eagle’s Throne. Do you think he’s going to be satisfied with a mere three years? Do you think he isn’t already plotting with that Paulina to see how he can hang on to the throne?

  Maybe not. But better to be safe than sorry. Remember always that under no circumstances should we forgive Nicolás Valdivia for deceiving us. But you leave that to me. If you forgive the person who did you wrong, your enemies will take note and screw you over twice as badly.

  I’m telling you this, my good Bernal, because you’re the one who always goes around saying, “I can’t be unjust with my enemy.”

  You’re wrong. Be unjust. Because your enemy will be unjust with you.

  65

  CONGRESSWOMAN PAULINA TARDEGARDA TO NICOLÁS VALDIVIA

  Dear Nicolás, I think you’re covered from all sides. You were wise to leave President Terán’s cabinet intact with the exception of the secretary for public works, Antonio Bejarano, and the communications secretary, Felipe Aguirre. Their corruption was too well known. By sacrificing them you’ll satisfy public opinion and demonstrate your commitment to justice. That’s the system’s weakness: justice. We don’t have a culture of legality, and we resign ourselves to throwing meat to the lions every six years. But the system doesn’t change.

  It would be a good idea to reform the judiciary right away in all those states where doing so doesn’t compromise our political power. The public will be paying so much attention to the acts of justice you carry out in Oaxaca and Guerrero, Nayarit and Jalisco, Hidalgo and Michoacán, that they won’t have time to think about Sonora and Baja California, Tamaulipas and San Luis Potosí, where you won’t touch any of those old local bosses. I’ve spoken to all of them. To Cabezas, Maldonado, Quintero, Delgado. They understand your proposal. Low profile. Nothing showy. Invisibility. Local authorities will work with them, do whatever they want, but all with the utmost discretion.