The Eagle's Throne (24 page)

51

NICOLÁS VALDIVIA TO JESÚS RICARDO MAGÓN

Darling, it’s very hard to trust anyone else. Who knows what the consequences will be of the information you gave to María del Rosario? She used to be my regular correspondent . . . but I’m not sure about her now. Too many crossed wires. Too many interweaving stories. Should I just keep my mouth shut? That would be the safest thing, but I’m terrified of taking the secret with me to my grave. I trust you enough to tell you that. My feelings for you have deepened since I first saw you on the roof and we started working together. At last I’ve found a kindred spirit, someone who reads the same books and who thinks as I do. I feel you very close to me and I want to keep you there.

My secret is your secret, but then you and I are one and the same.

I’m warning you that knowing what I know is dangerous—for me and for whoever hears me. Destroy the tape after listening to it. It will be delivered to you by your father don Cástulo, the safest messenger I can think of.

I went back to Veracruz to talk to the Old Man because he asked me to. There he was, as always, wearing his double-breasted suit and bow tie, with the little parrot on his shoulder and the dominoes laid out on the table, and the waiter, artful as an acrobat, pouring his steaming coffee.

“Sit down, Valdivia,” the Old Man said.

He could tell from my eyes, from the way I moved my head, from my hands open in supplication, that I wanted to meet in private, not in full view in the plaza in Veracruz.

“Sit down, Valdivia. When you do things openly you don’t arouse suspicion. It’s secrecy that wakes up the wolves. We’re not drawing attention to ourselves here under the arches. Look: The vultures are flying over Ulúa Castle again. That’s what people are going to notice, not you and me sitting together over a cup of coffee.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t ask anything. I knew the Old Man was going to talk. By the look on his face I could tell that everything that was going to happen had already happened. I went cold as I realized this. The Old Man was a sorcerer, I knew it, and he understood, Jesús Ricardo, those subtle but significant changes in time and space that affect us all. That was the wisdom he’d gained from living so long. Space and time. How to read them, endure them, and find ourselves in them. Whether we like it or not, space belongs to the order of things that coexist, whereas time belongs to the realm of things that happen. What unites the two is their effect on what
already is
and on what is possible, what can happen. In themselves, they’re abstract notions. They need the concrete here-and-now to have substance.

Didn’t Susan Sontag say that years ago? “Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once. Space exists so that it all doesn’t happen to you.”

In political life, strictly speaking, can we say that chance, sequence, and recurrence belong to the world of the everyday, just as the intensity, simultaneity, and harmony of personal, internal time, yours and mine, my darling, are properties of the soul?

Now, you know what joy it is for me to have a companion whose mind works like mine. Whom else but you can I talk to about things like this? Who else could possibly understand me when I say that the time we’re living in now isn’t just an abstract idea but a useful way of understanding life and
that politics is one way of making time a reality
?

I want to believe that the Old Man read my thoughts. Not literally, of course, but through his intuition—though in his case you’d call it something else, malice, even perversity. . . . He’s a sly old dog.

Anyway, this is what he said to me: “My only regret is that I know all the stories, but I’ll never know the full story.”

“Nor will I,” I ventured.

“Nobody, for sure,” he said, nodding his well-groomed, graying head.

I didn’t want to add anything. He was the boss.

“Just as a person measures out the sugar for his coffee,” he said, “he should know what to tell, when to tell, and to whom. . . .”

“And when to take a secret with him to the grave?”

I don’t know why he found this so funny. He bared his teeth. That was the only time I ever saw him looking hungry.

“Sometimes with a heavy heart, or in the interests of discretion, or out of pride—how many secrets have we never revealed, and only when we’re dead do we regret it? If I’d told this at the right time, everything would have been different. Or better.”

I wasn’t going to rush the Old Man. I’d already decided to keep a very formal, respectful distance that I hoped would intrigue him more than his secret intrigued me. Because there was a secret there, Jesús Ricardo. If you were to add up all my visits to the café in Veracruz, you might think I’d come here because María del Rosario had asked me to, as part of my political education. But little by little I understood that the Old Man was keeping a secret and was waiting for the right moment to reveal it. Maybe at the beginning this was coincidence, whim, or chance. But in the end it was inevitable, necessary.

I was interior secretary at the moment of the president’s death. Congress was selecting an acting president to complete Lorenzo Terán’s term and call an election. My political education, which was the reason for all my trips to Veracruz (how distant it seems today!), was now my political decision. Who would be the acting president? And who would be the candidates in 2024?

I already knew that for the Old Man declarations of conviction came, like hors d’oeuvres, before the main course.

“You know something, Valdivia? I’m tired of keeping secrets that most people have already forgotten or don’t care about. So a president’s brother had his wife’s lover killed and then was poisoned to death? Mystery! So some stripper rammed a guitar into the face of a jealous ex-president and left him with only one eye? Mystery! So a certain ex-president was ruined by a dozen women who conspired to abandon him under the sun on a deserted beach until he burned to a crisp? Mystery! Anecdotes from our national political comedy. You tell me if anyone cares about these things now.”

With his index finger he lifted up the silent parrot and stroked his many-colored feathers.

“There are other secrets, however, that could change the course of history if they ever got out.”

He closed his mouth. The parrot returned to its spot on the Old Man’s shoulder. I kept my expression blank.

“In politics,” he went on, “one mustn’t let the train guide the driver.

María del Rosario sent you here for your baptism of fire. That was what she said, the old bitch. Really she sent you here to find out my secret. And you found out nothing. You went back each time with a heap of advice. A bag of potatoes.”

Then he did something unusual. He tossed his cane aside, and it clattered against the floor. Now, I said to myself, everyone will turn around and look at us. But no. Nobody flinched. The pact between the Old Man and the regulars under the arches was indestructible. He grabbed my fist and with the strength of an athlete tightened his grip until my hand hurt. Strangely, I started to imagine him naked, to wonder what his muscles were like, because at his age flesh usually sags, everything goes soft, but that old man pressed his iron fist around mine with a vigor that seemed to come from his head and his balls.

“Not this time, Valdivia. Not this time.”

What did he mean? The parrot stayed mysteriously silent, as if the Old Man had filled him with Nembutal, or perhaps the parrot knew when to play the fool and distract people, and when to behave with what the Old Man’s nemeses, the French, refer to as
sagesse—
a wisdom that is knowledge, experience, restraint, and courtesy.

“You know, the dirty and the sacred have something in common. We don’t touch either,” he said, gazing at the parrot instead of me.

The rings under his eyes seemed to darken further.

“Do you remember Tomás Moctezuma Moro?”

I was almost offended by the question. Moro was the candidate who had won the 2012 presidential election and then was assassinated before taking office. New elections had been held while the country was still in shock, and in 2013 the colorless president of the Emergency Coalition was sworn into office—a dull, forgettable secondhand president known only for his inefficiency, his obliging transience, his weakness. Congress governed during that period, and governed badly. United at first in elevating a Mr. Nobody to the presidency, they quickly reverted to a gorilla guerrilla war, so to speak. Congress dictated policy to the best of their knowledge and belief, and the president—what was his name, for God’s sake?—simply obeyed, his fingers crossed.

That’s why Lorenzo Terán sparked so much enthusiasm in 2017, when his strength and personality—so evident, so strong—carried him to the presidency on a wave of triumph and hope. He won 75 percent of the votes, the remaining 25 percent divided among the small parties that had long since been unable to inspire the voters.

Tomás Moctezuma Moro. A forgotten moment. Another political ghost. A presence yesterday, a specter today.

“An honest man,” the Old Man said. “I can vouch for that. He thought of himself as the Hercules who was going to clean the stables of Mexican politics. And I warned him, ‘It’s dangerous to be really honest in this country. Honesty may be admirable but it ends up becoming a vice. You have to be flexible about corruption. I know you’re honest, Tomás, but close your eyes—like divine justice—to the corruption around you. Remember, first, that corruption lubricates the system. Most politicians, government employees, contractors, et al. won’t have another opportunity to get rich once the six-year presidential term is over. They’ll go back to oblivion. But they want to be forgotten, so that nobody accuses them of anything, and rich, so that nobody bothers them. Then another gang of villains will turn up, but denying them the chance to pocket anything would be a mistake.

“ ‘What you need,’ I told Tomás, ‘is to surround yourself with opportunists because you can control the corrupt. It’s the pure man who’s the problem, he’s the one who just gets in your way. In Mexico there should be only one honest man, the president, surrounded by a lot of tolerated and tolerable yes-men who in six years’ time will disappear from the political map.

“ ‘The bad thing about you,’ I said to Tomás Moctezuma Moro, ‘is that you want the map and the land to match. Look, live at peace in the center of the map and let the corruption brokers cultivate the land.’ ”

The Old Man sighed and I could almost feel a tremor in the hand that was still pressing down on mine with incredible strength.

“He didn’t listen to me, Valdivia. He proclaimed his redemptive intentions right, left, and center. That way, he believed, he’d gain the greatest popular support. And he was acting out of conviction, without a doubt. He was going to put an end to corruption. He said it was the lowest form of stealing from the poor. That’s what he said. The thieves were going to go to jail. The poor would have protection against abuse.

“ ‘Slow down, Tomás,’ I told him. ‘They’re going to crucify you if you go around playing the redeemer. Don’t announce what you intend to do. Do those things when you’re sitting on the Throne, just like Cárdenas did. Don’t destroy the system. You’re part of it. Good or bad, it’s the only one we’ve got. What are you going to replace it with? You can’t just invent something overnight. Be satisfied with making an example of a few scapegoats at the beginning of your term. Make a moral statement early on and then you can rest.’ But he didn’t listen to me. He was a messiah. He believed in what he was saying.”

I was stunned. He crossed himself.

“Who killed him, Valdivia? The list of potential murderers is as enormous as the cast of
The Ten Commandments.
Do you remember? Drug traffickers. Local bosses. Governors. Local presidents. Corrupt judges. Crooked policemen. Bankers fearful that Moro would take away the public subsidies that financed their private incompetence. Union leaders afraid that Moro would force them to be voted in and approved by their union members. Truck drivers overpricing their merchandise. Millers exploiting the corn-producing local farmers. Loggers turning forests into deserts. New landowners controlling land, seeds, and tractors while impoverished farmers continued to use the ox and the wooden plow.”

Did the Old Man sigh, or was it the parrot?

“The list is endless, I tell you. Then add the mystics, all those mad-men who want to save the country by killing presidents. And then the international conspiracy theories. The gringos scared that Mexico would get out of hand because they knew they weren’t going to have an easy time manipulating Moro. And as always the Cubans—both the ones in Miami afraid that Moro would help Castro, and the ones in Havana afraid that Moro, apostle of human rights that he was, would make problems for Castro. The list of problems went on and on . . .”

Now he looked me in the eye.

“I’ve never met a politician who made as many enemies as quickly as Moro did. He was a thorn in everyone’s side. I told him that he had too many enemies, that he was an obstacle for everyone, that he was in danger. . . .”

He didn’t let go of my hand. But his eyes weren’t his. They were the eyes of the night, of a bat, of prison.