The Eagle's Throne (13 page)

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 about 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 through 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.

Just look at the mess our “regime” is in. The P first, of course. Who doesn’t wonder what’s going on in the P’s head? What’s his strategy? What does he know? What doesn’t he know? What is he plotting? What is he anticipating? Who does he favor? Who does he despise? There isn’t a single soul, inside or outside the government, who isn’t asking himself this all day long, and that’s why I’m not asking you what you think of the P. Don’t answer that. Just remember that there’s no mystery there. A P has nowhere to hide.

Don’t answer me, I repeat. You’re better off asking yourself the question in private. And be careful. You’re closer to him than anyone else in the C, and we know that a presidential C is a fruit salad. Who are you going to trust, my love, the cherry or the grape? That’s the bad thing about sharing secrets and that’s where we must proceed with the most caution. Well, at least nobody can ever make heads or tails of the system for filing documents at Los Pinos, and that old archivist— Magoo, Magón, whatever he’s called—doesn’t even know his own name, much less where documents are filed, and which ones have been destroyed as per your orders. Your grand idea—or
our
grand idea, if you want to be generous with your little darling—was to make all those compromising documents disappear without destroying them, in case they ever came in handy. If our partners started talking we just might or might not happen to have documents to shut them up. . . .

But the danger’s there, my dear, so don’t ever let your guard down. You know how a P’s mind starts to work when he feels that one of his ministers is no longer useful to him. He doesn’t say, “This man is useless.” Oh no. He says, “This man betrayed me.”

Now, let’s go over the usual suspects. Who’s your main rival? We know that—Secretary BH. Why is he feared? As far as I can tell he’s a man with no sex appeal who, as such, doesn’t have the slightest chance of becoming a charismatic candidate. Could he nevertheless ascend to the throne? He’s quite an eagle, that one. Everyone considers him a kind of pre-candidate even though his face always seems to say, “Me? I can’t imagine why!”

For goodness’ sake, of course you and I know why: because he thinks he’s utterly beyond reproach, an idea that he’s been fed over and over again by that political vixen MR. But me, I’ve got another idea bouncing around inside my little head. How can we convince him the old bag’s fooling him by making him believe he’s the P’s favorite successor? Nobody will ever say that to him. He’d have to hit himself on the head with a brick to work it out. But those of us from the Yucatán, my darling, we’re veritable artists of invention, you know that. And that’s where you and I come in to make sure that all this funny business reflects badly on BH and his people. We want everyone to say, “The P made him candidate to get rid of an undesirable politician.”

Luckily, there are so many power factors, so much wild ambition, my beautiful one, that you and I can indeed do a fair amount of fishing in those turbulent waters. Turbulent due to all the contradictory fishermen out there—that self-serving ex, for one, then that ex-ex-ex in Veracruz, and then that idiot that presides over Congress (let him hear!), the rookie NV, and even MR herself, who’s gotten so out of hand with all that sage advice that one day someone’s going to throw it back at her, using the very same words she uses to warn people with that Cruella De Vil face of hers: “You’re no longer convincing, dear. No matter what you do, they’ll criticize you for it. You’re boring everyone with so much advice.”

Be careful. Don’t let her know that you despise her and much less that you pity her because she isn’t as beautiful as me, or because you prefer me to her. You have to realize, my darling, that she already despises and pities you and would be all too thrilled to find out you feel the same way.

But back to our subject, my beloved T. Never forget, not for a second, that all human beings have both defects and virtues, and that our enemies can take advantage of both. Look at me, my lovely. Haven’t you ever noticed that I never look at my hands? Can you guess why? Because when I was a young girl I learned that if I looked down at one of my fingers men would think I was asking for a ring. Or worse—that I’d lost a ring because I was too stupid to hang on to it. And if I could lose a ring, I could lose anything—a fortune, a husband, my virginity, the lottery even!

That’s why you always see me wearing gloves, even in the sweltering heat of Mérida. But I also wear them so that the tips of my fingers touch no skin but yours, my beautiful bonbon. From time to time you ask, my jealous darling, if there are other men in my life. My love, you don’t need to. I’m an object of desire, that’s all.