The Eagle's Throne (27 page)

57

TÁCITO DE LA CANAL TO “LA PEPA” ALMAZÁN

Don’t worry about me, my love. I’ve lost everything. Except the most intimate refuge of my soul, which is my love for you. I don’t care if you mock me, insult me, push me away forever. I don’t care. I’ve come back to the safest harbor. I want you to know that. It’s neither a triumph nor a defeat. You reproach me for my servility and vanity. You humiliate me and I deserve it. Everything I thought was fortune has suddenly, instantly, changed.

Yes, I’m the man to whom the president could say, “Tácito. Jump out the window.” And I would reply, “With your permission, sir, I’ll gladly jump from the roof.”

I had a premonition, you know, the day a foreign head of state came to Los Pinos to see the president. I was waiting for him at the door, and he handed me his raincoat as if I were a servant. That’s what he thought I was. I should have crossed my hands behind my back, like British royalty do, to indicate politely that I was not a palace servant. But since that was, in fact, exactly what I was, I took the man’s raincoat, bowed my head, and ushered him into the office. He didn’t even glance at me. And there I was, clutching the president of Paraguay’s raincoat, as he walked away from me remarking, “It’s so cold here in Mexico!”

I was definitely the servant. And again I asked myself what I’d asked when I started working for President Lorenzo Terán. “What the hell do they want from me? I’m nobody.”

You’ll say, “Sure, now that you’re no one you can play at false humility.”

Believe me. Don’t believe me. What does it matter? I’m writing to you for the last time, Pepona. I’ll never write to you again, I swear. I only want you to know how and where I’ve ended up, and I want you to know that I accept it with genuine humility.

My father lives in a tiny, isolated house in the Desierto de los Leones. It’s a modest, decent little house, very hidden away. The only way to get there is by taking those very steep, winding roads from where you can see Ajusco. My father is very old. I call him my AP, my “Aged Parent,” as a tribute to something I read in a novel by Dickens when I was young. Yes, I was young once, my Pepa, hard as it may be for you and the rest of the world to believe. I was young, I studied, I read, I prepared for the future. I was driven by ambition and by something else: my father’s destiny. Not to repeat it, to be precise. I couldn’t bear to be like him.

For three consecutive six-year cycles, the AP was a significant influence on Mexican politics. He went from one government ministry to the next, always wielding his power from the shadows, always as a political operator working for the big payoff—that is, getting the PRI to put his minister on the presidential ticket, and then push him into office. He never managed to do it, and so he always gained the winner’s trust. Nothing gains people’s trust quite like losing. Always in the shadows. Always a secret operator. He couldn’t hope for anything more than that because he was born in Italy of Italian parents, the Canalis of Naples. That was why people could trust him: His ambitions were thwarted by the law. He himself could never be president. Three six-year periods. But then the day came when he had too many secrets under his hat. That was the problem. So many secrets, in fact, that nobody believed they could possibly all be true because secrets are, by nature, contradictory and ambiguous, and what is inevitable for A is nonsense for B, what is virtue for X is vice for Z, and so on. In other words, everything my father knew, everything he knew too much about, turned against him in the end.

“A” reproached him for keeping a secret when it could have been useful to expose it.

“B” pounced on him because he didn’t understand that my father’s silence protected him, while what B really wanted was for his secret to get out and become a political threat.

“X” wanted my father sacrificed precisely because of his secrecy: The secrets he kept were crimes of state.

And “Z” reproached him, on the other hand, for a series of supposed indiscretions. . . .

Yes, he was pulling strings on too many puppets and the theater of his life was a house of cards.

My father was clever.
Too
clever. Too clever for his own good. He overdid it. He forgot to purge those who purge. He forgot that the best way to secure your enemy’s life is by killing him. He forgot the immortal lessons of the longest dictatorships: Invisible service to the powerful can bring reward but also punishment. After a time my father knew so many secrets that people began to fear him, and he became famous. His silence didn’t save him. On the contrary, they decided to bury him before he could open his mouth.

How did they destroy him? With flattery, my Pepa. Heaping praise on him. Dragging him out of the shadows that were his natural habitat. Showing him off and applauding him at the political circus, trotting him around the ring. My poor father suffered—he couldn’t decide if he should stay in the shadows or revel in his public adulation. He forgot the cry of one of Stalin’s close collaborators: “Please! Don’t flatter me! Don’t send me to Siberia!”

Yes, my AP had too much applause. Not the public kind, which doesn’t matter, but the private: the applause of the president, which inspires people to feel envy and spite for the president’s favorite. . . .

In short: He spent too much time being both the light of the house and the darkness of the streets.

They say that public figures are condemned to live in constant anguish but must never show it. And yet sometimes anguish must be translated into action. Stalin was terrified of dentists. He preferred to let his teeth rot rather than risk going to the dentist. In other words, one believes that loyalty, not ability, is what gets rewarded in the end. Laugh at me if you want, remember all my despicable acts, mock me for my vanity. And take pity on my defeat. It is simply act two of my own father’s downfall.

It had been years since I’d last seen him. I always sent him money, but I was afraid to go near him. Failure is contagious, and I didn’t want to end up like him. I was going to succeed where he failed. I was going to make it to the Eagle’s Throne. Bernal Herrera, María del Rosario, my great enemies, you, the woman who betrayed me, the little enemies that one should never underestimate, the little snakes inside my own office: Dorita with her sky-blue ribbons; Penélope with her hulking frame and dark skin; and the true architect of my downfall, Nicolás Valdivia, who is now interior secretary, the man who thought up the scheme that cost me my power, those damned documents kept by that imbecile archivist Cástulo Magón, those documents that I signed only because President César León asked me to, a request that was an order and a consolation:

“Don’t worry, Tácito. I have an archive all ready for the moment I leave office. I need it for my memoirs. I’ll be selective, I promise. But I can’t sacrifice a single document from my administration. You understand. A president of Mexico doesn’t govern for just six years. He governs for posterity. Everything must be saved, the good and the bad. Who knows, my good Tácito, time might prove you were right about those necessary legal oversights. What will matter more in the end, the fact that we cheated a group of small shareholders or that we saved the great companies that are the driving force behind an export economy like ours?”

He smiled mischievously.

“And besides, the archivist has orders to put the originals through the shredder. I’ll keep certified copies.”

There was a blatant threat in his beady fly’s eyes. Oh yes, my Pepa, that man is just like a fly, his eyes can look in every direction simultaneously. He has very long antennae on his head. He has two pairs of wings, one for flying and the other for keeping his balance. He always lands on trash dumps. He’s an old fly, gray with a yellow belly. That’s what gives him away. Be wary of him. He can stick to walls and crawl across ceilings. He uses maggots as bait, and everyone knows maggots feed on dead flesh. You despise me. I don’t despise you, and that’s why I’m warning you now: Don’t rest on your laurels with Arruza. Don’t be taken in by the pure brute force of the general. And keep your eye on César León. He always has an ace up his sleeve.

I told Valdivia all this and now I’m telling you, especially now that you’re in bed with a wolf. Let Arruza the wolf fear León the fly. Whoever thinks the ex-president is willing to retire is sorely mistaken. He’ll keep on being a nuisance until the day he dies.

But I want to get back to my Aged Parent. The world was his downfall, my Pepa, just as it was mine, but it was worse for him because he never aspired to the Eagle’s Throne; all he wanted was to keep on operating from the shadows. Yes, and since he was less ambitious, it hurt more to lose. It was like an affront to his moral code of discretion, you see. Thanks to his modesty, a vast horizon stretched before him, as long as his career as a trusted political adviser—like Talleyrand, Fouché, and Father Joseph Le Clerc de Tremblay, the original éminence grise at the side of Richelieu. Look how quickly my memory comes back—I’m the passionate student of history again. Oh, but that only shows how much I’ve changed, Josefa. I’m someone else—do you see? I feel purified by this moment of emotion. My father’s greatest gift, his greatest strength, was that of being invisible. It earned him the trust of powerful men. But it made him expendable when he finally knew everything but was still nobody.

I went into the little house in the Desierto de los Leones.

The girl that looks after the AP was wearing the traditional outfit of the china poblana.

“What’s your name?” I asked her, because although I pay her salary I’d never seen her.

“Gloria Marín, at your service.”

I smiled.

“Oh, just like the actress.”

“No, sir. I
am
the actress Gloria Marín.”

And it was true, she looked exactly like one of those disturbingly beautiful belles of the Mexican cinema. Gloria Marín: jet-black hair, eyes wistful and suspicious but sensual behind the inevitable defensive-ness of the world-weary Mexican woman. Her profile was perfect, her face oval, light brown. And those lips, always on the verge of a bitter smile. In appearance, submissive. In reality, a rebel.

“Where is my father?”

“Where he always is. Watching television. Day and night.”

She wrapped her shawl gracefully over her breasts. I didn’t bother telling her that the television antennae had been dead since January.

“Oh. Day and night?”

“Yes. He sleeps there, he eats there, he says he can’t miss a moment’s television. He says those people might come and kill him at any moment, and he has to be ready to defend himself.”

“Who wants to kill him?”

“Bad people.”

“What are their names?”

“Oh . . . Sute Cúpira. The other one’s Cholo Parima. I dream about them, sir. He says they’re Venezuelans and they live in a jungle called Canaima.”

I stared at her, more and more bewildered by the minute.

“All right. Your name’s Gloria Marín. And the man you work for, what’s his name?”

“Jorge Negrete.”

“No. His name’s Enrico Canali. Where did you get the name Jorge Negrete from, bitch? Negrete was a movie star, a matinee idol, the kind of heartbreaker that women like you used to dream about. He died nearly a century ago.”

Gloria Marín started crying.

“Oh, sir. Don’t tell him that. Don’t kill him. He’s Jorge Negrete. He really believes that. Don’t take that away from him. I swear it will kill him.”

She lowered her eyes.

“Call me whatever you want. At your service.”

I sighed as I used to sigh when I was a young man. Then I walked into the tiny living room, which opened onto a neglected patio where grass grew between the cracks in the tiles, and a solitary
pirú
tree made its penance. And there, in an easy chair facing the television sat my AP, my Aged Parent, his eyes fixed on the screen. He was talking to himself, in a reverie.

“Now I go into the bar and I give everyone a dirty look. ‘Machine gun’s here!’ I shout, my hair in my face, and the whole place goes quiet, they’re scared, and I grab the prettiest girl by the waist—I’m sorry, Gloria, not you, you weren’t in this movie—and I sing ‘Oh, Jalisco, don’t back out . . .’ ”

He felt my presence, and his cold, freckled hand that felt like marble settled on top of mine and guided it up to his shoulder, as if thanking me for being there without knowing who I was. He changed the picture with the remote control. You see, he was only watching a homemade montage of scenes from a bunch of different old movies. Suddenly, there was Jorge Negrete dancing away on a Veracruz stage to the melody of the Niño Aparecido
son
with the stunning Gloria Marín dressed like an aristocratic lady from the nineteenth century in a mantilla and ankle-length silk skirts, and Negrete dressed up like a
chinaco.
The two of them gaze at each other with a defiant passion until the villain, an apothecary named Vitriolo, mad with jealousy, stabs Gloria with a knife. . . . My AP fast-forwarded the tape, his hand trembling in anticipation of the excitement of watching Jorge give Gloria a long, slow kiss in the film
A Letter of Love.