The Eagle's Throne

To fellow members of the “Half Century” generation,
at the Law School of the
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México:
the hope of a better Mexico . . .

Praise for
The Eagle’s Throne

“A literary marriage of two great books from the past, that of Machiavelli’s
The Prince
and the eighteenth-century French epistolary novel,
Les Liaisons
Dangereuses
. . . a full-blown triumph . . . Fuentes has never written better.” —
San Francisco Chronicle

“Compelling . . . Fuentes injects the book with uproariously lethal intrigue. . . . [The] reader [is] privy to secret schemes and passions. . . . What makes this satire astute is how Fuentes forces his politicians to face the consequences of their actions.” —
The Denver Post

“Dazzling, razor-sharp . . . provides a feast of political insight, aphorisms and maxims, in the spirit of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
.” —
The Washington Post Book World

“A nerve-grating cautionary tale, and one of [Fuentes’s] best books.” —
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“Daring and original . . . dark, well thought-out . . . The plot is intricate with many unexpected twists. . . . A critical, caustic, analytical, judicious call to arms . . . provocative.” —
San Antonio Express-News

“[The] characters spring to life as true individuals, fully developed in Fuentes’s beguilingly unorthodox fashion. A novel that is truly a tour de force.” —
Booklist
(starred review)

“A political thriller . . . to end all political thrillers. The futuristic tale [is] an old-fashioned epistolary novel in which the characters conspire, deceive, seduce, plea and attack one another entirely through letters. The device is perfect for intrigue. . . .
The Eagle’s Throne
is an exhilarating romp through the cruelty of Mexican politics, but it is also a cautionary tale about the price of ambition.” —
The Columbus Dispatch

L’águila siendo animal
se retrató en el dinero.
Para subir al nopal
pidió permiso primero.
[The eagle, being an animal,
had its picture drawn on coins.
Before climbing up the nopal
it asked for permission first.]
MANUEL ESPERÓN AND ERNESTO CORTÁZAR,
“Me he de comer esa tuna”
[I have to eat that prickly pear]

MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN TO NICOLÁS VALDIVIA

You are going to think badly of me. You are going to say I’m a capricious woman. And you’ll be right. But who would have guessed that things could change so radically overnight? Yesterday, when I first met you, I told you, When it comes to politics, never put anything in writing. Today, I have no other way of communicating with you. That should give you an idea of how dire the situation has become. . . .

You will say that your interest in me—the interest you showed the minute we laid eyes on each other in the vestibule outside the interior secretary’s office—is not political. It’s romantic interest, perhaps physical attraction, or maybe even just simple human affection. You must know at once, Nicolás Valdivia, that with me everything is political, even sex. You may be shocked by this kind of professional voracity. But there’s no changing it. I’m forty-five now, and ever since the age of twenty-two I’ve arranged my life around a single purpose: to be, to shape, to eat, to dream, to savor, and to suffer politics. That is my nature. My vocation. Don’t think this means I’ve had to put aside what I like as a woman, my sexual pleasure, my desire to make love to a young, handsome man—like you. . . .

Simply put, I consider politics to be the public expression of private passions. Including, perhaps most of all, romantic passion. But passions are very arbitrary forms of conduct, and politics is a discipline. We act with the greatest measure of freedom granted us by a universe that is at once multitudinous, uncertain, random, and necessary, fighting for power, competing for a tiny sphere of authority.

Do you think it’s the same with love? You’re wrong. Love has a power that knows no limits, a power that’s called imagination. Even if you were to be locked up in the castle at San Juan de Ulúa, you would still have the freedom of desire, for a man is always the master of his own erotic imagination. In politics, on the other hand, what good is wishing and imagining if you don’t have the power?

I repeat, power is my nature. Power is my vocation. That’s the first thing I want to warn you about. You are a thirty-four-year-old boy. I was drawn to your physical beauty right away. But I can also tell you, lest it go to your head, that attractive men are few and far between in the vestibule to the office of the interior secretary, Bernal Herrera. Beautiful women are also conspicuously absent. My friend the secretary relies on his ascetic reputation. Butterflies don’t go near his garden. Instead, the scorpions of deceit nest under his rug and the bees of ambition buzz around his honeycomb.

Does Bernal Herrera deserve the reputation he has? You’ll find out. All I know is that, one icy afternoon in early January, in the antechamber to the secretary’s office in the old Cobián Palace, a woman pushing fifty but nonetheless still very attractive—your face said it all, darling—exchanged glances with a beautiful young man, every bit as desirable as she, though scarcely over thirty. The spark has been ignited, dear Nicolás. . . .

And the pleasure is to be deferred.
To be deferred,
my young friend.

I admit everything. You’re just the right height for me. As you could see, I myself am quite tall and don’t care for looking up or down. I prefer to look directly into the eyes of my men. Yours are level with mine, and as light—green, gray, ever-changing—as mine are immutably black, although my skin is whiter than yours. But don’t think, in a country as mixed and racist as Mexico, a country so plagued by the issue of skin color (though nobody would ever admit it), that it’s an advantage. Quite the opposite: I attract resentment, that national vice of ours, that miserly king lording it over a court of envious dwarfs. And yet my physical appearance does grant me a kind of unspoken superiority, the tacit tribute we all offer the race of the conqueror.

You, my love, enjoy the fruits of true mestizo beauty. That golden, cinnamon-colored skin that goes so well with the fine features of the Mexican man: linear profile, thin lips, long, flowing hair. I saw how the light played on your head, giving life to a masculine beauty that can often conceal a vast mental void. It took only a few minutes of conversation to realize that you’re as intelligent on the inside as you are beautiful on the outside. And you even have a dimpled chin, to boot.

I must be honest with you: You’re also very wet behind the ears, very naïve. Quite a little green plum, as they say where I come from. Just look at yourself. You know all the catchwords. Democracy, patriotism, rule of law, separation of powers, civil society, moral renewal. The danger is that you believe them. The trouble is that you say them with conviction. My innocent, adorable Nicolás Valdivia. You’ve entered the jungle and want to kill lions before loading your gun.

Secretary Herrera said as much to me after meeting you: “This boy is extremely intelligent,” he said, “but he thinks out loud. He still hasn’t learned to rehearse first what he’ll say later. They say he writes well. I have read his columns in the newspapers. He doesn’t know yet that the only possible dialogue between the journalist and the public servant is the dialogue that falls on deaf ears. Not that I, as secretary of the interior, don’t read what the journalist writes and don’t feel flattered, indifferent, or offended by the things he or she might say about me—what I mean is that for a Mexican politician, the golden rule is never to put anything in writing and especially never to comment on the many opinions that will inevitably rain down upon him.”

Forgive me, I have to laugh at that one!

Today we have no choice but to write letters. All other forms of communication have been cut. We can still, of course, speak to each other in private, but for that, we have to waste precious time making appointments and going from one place to the other, fearful that the one thing still working is the hidden microphone tucked away where we least expect it. In any event, the former tends to encourage a perhaps undesirable intimacy. The latter, on the other hand, may expose one to the most ghastly traffic accidents. And there is no sadder way of being defined than as the casualty of an ordinary traffic accident.

Darling Nicolás, I defy the world. I will write letters. I will expose myself to the greatest danger of politics: I’ll leave a written record. Am I mad? No. Very simply, I’m such a firm believer in my ability to lead that I shall now use it to set an example. When this country’s political class sees that María del Rosario Galván communicates through handwritten letters, everyone will follow suit. Nobody will want to seem inferior to me. Look at how brave María del Rosario is! I can’t let her show me up, can I? That’s what they’ll all say.

I’m laughing, my beautiful young friend. Just you wait and see how many people follow my example as my audacity sets legal precedent. Amusing, isn’t it? To think that only yesterday, on the Paseo de Bucareli, I said to you, Never put anything down in writing, Nicolás. A politician should never allow people to find out about his indiscretions, which erode his credibility, nor his talents, which inspire envy.

Today, however, after this morning’s catastrophe I must eat my words, betray my lifelong philosophy, and implore you, Nicolás, write to me . . . you’re in the presence of a gambling woman. I wasn’t born in Aguascalientes during the San Marcos Festival for nothing, after all. My first breath mixed with horses whinnying, roosters crowing, the sound of knives flying in the cock pits, cards being dealt, tunes played on the bass guitar, the falsetto of the
cantadoras,
mariachi trumpets, and the cries of “Close the doors!”

No more bets.
Les jeux sont faits.
You see, yesterday I placed my bet on silence. I was too busy thinking about how all the things we write in secret could turn against us in public. I was thinking about Richard Nixon’s psychotic fascination with recording his infamy on tape, in the most vulgar language imaginable for a Quaker. I’m telling you straight: To be a politician you must be a hypocrite. To get ahead, anything goes. But, not only do you have to be false, you also have to be cunning. Every politician rises up in the ranks with a bagful of skeletons trailing behind him, like cans of Coca-Cola dragging from the tail of a rebellious but frightened cat. The great politician is the one who reaches the top having purged all his bitterness, his grudges, and his rough moments. A puritan like Nixon is the most dangerous sort of politician, both for his people and for himself. He thinks that everyone has to tolerate him because he rose up from the dregs. His downtrodden humility only feeds his contemptuous arrogance. And that’s what brought Nixon down in the end: a longing for the muck, that desperate need to return to the cesspools of nothingness and purge himself of evil, not realizing that he would only sink back into the slime from which he came, having recovered, I grant you, the ambition to crawl out of his hole and rise again.

La nostalgie de la boue
is what the French call it (and that, by the way, is another thing I adore about you, that you speak French, that you studied at l’École Nationale d’Administration in Paris, that you agree with those of us who gave up English ever since it became a lingua franca, restoring to French the prestige of a secret, almost elitist, form of communication among enlightened politicians).

Nixon in the United States, Díaz Ordaz in Mexico, Berlusconi in Italy, perhaps Hitler in Germany, Stalin in Russia, although the latter two turned evil into grandeur while the others only turned it into misery . . . Study these cases, dear Nicolás. Learn about the extremes if you want to find the golden mean, my love.

Yes, I remember Nixon and his mad obsession with recording all his plots and schemes on tape, spitting out all that foul language, sounding at times like a little boy lashing out at the world, and at others like a hardened criminal. And what can we say about our tropical local bosses, who record their vilest deeds on tape and take sick pleasure in contemplating their despicable murders, which they know will go unpunished? Can you imagine the almost erotic frisson they must feel when they see a group of helpless peasants fall to the ground bleeding, shot down by the troops of his excellency the governor?

Mexico is stained by blood-soaked rivers, ripped open with mass graves, strewn with unburied corpses. Now as you prepare to make your political debut, my beautiful, desirable friend, remember never to lose sight of the desolate landscape of injustice that is the holy scripture of our Latin American countries. Secrets are paramount, yes, but all it takes is one little revelation to turn the complacent impunity of a governor or president into a collective shame that even the cynicism of the powerful cannot subdue.

Nothing could have prepared me for such a radical turn of events as the one that has ushered in the new year. If indeed all our communications systems have failed, if we have neither telephones, nor faxes, nor e-mails, nor even the humble telegraph machines of the past, nor even carrier pigeons (all poisoned as if by a stroke of witchcraft), and all that remains are the smoke signals of the Tarahumara Indians, waving their colored blankets, and if this communications breakdown is not the result of some millennium bug like the one that was going to make computers programmed in the 1900s collapse as they entered the year 2000, but of the oddly pseudo-palindromic number of the present year, then I can freely confess to you that my life will change more than I can bear, and I will be plunged into a state of dumbfounded shock from which, as always, I will somehow emerge and find the strength to remind myself:

María del Rosario, pay attention to your friend Xavier “Seneca” Zaragoza, trusted adviser to President Lorenzo Terán, who says that when the glitter and tinsel of this deceitful world disappear, the ace in the pack, the card hidden up your sleeve, may very well be the one thing everyone scoffs at as ineffective, unrealistic folly: the noble figure whose dignity can redeem the rest of us from our despicable infamy, the virtuous man who may be able to save our system.

Are you that man, Nicolás Valdivia, or has my judgment failed me? Has my legendary intuition faltered? Have politics eaten through my brain so severely that one whole side—the moral side—has stopped functioning altogether? Might you, my ravishing friend, be the person who can revive it miraculously?

Well, if the rule of discretion becomes impossible, perhaps the rules governing corruption, hypocrisy, and lies will go, too. If so, necessity will become my virtue and I will surrender to indiscretion with utter recklessness.

This letter I write to you now, Nicolás Valdivia, is evidence of that. There are no other forms of communication beyond the verbal, the immediate presence, which I feel is too dangerous, or the “mediate,” which is less risky and, in the end, our only practical choice. The question, then, my very desired young man, is knowing which of the two methods—the oral or the written—will hasten the thing we both want, though our timings may differ. The path to my bed is not free of obstacles, dear Nicolás. You’ll have to open a thousand doors before you reach it. It’s almost like one of those Oriental tales, you know the kind I mean. I will put you to the test every single day. The reward will depend on you. I know that my carnal delights would be enough to satisfy you. And I admit that I desire your body, but I desire your success even more. Sex can be immediate, only to end up being a brief, unsatisfying quickie.

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