The Eagle's Throne (3 page)

5

NICOLÁS VALDIVIA TO MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN

I don’t know what to admire more, my dear lady, your beauty or your cruelty. Beauty has but one name, no synonym can do it justice. To what can I compare the incomparable? Please don’t think me innocent, or blind. I’ve seen many (perhaps too many?) women in the nude. Yet I’d never truly seen a woman stripped of all her clothes until I saw you.

I’m not referring to your beauty, my dear lady—I’ll discuss that in due course—but to the obscene totality of your nudity. Nor do I wish to play word games here (you think my knowledge precocious, but in reality I possess only the most meager collection of erudite references), but when I say that, I am saying that your nudity is
ob-scene,
off-scene, incomparable and invisible, and unfathomable if it did not materialize
beyond the stage
of your—and my—ordinary existence, your—our— everyday life, beyond the realm in which you dress and carry yourself in the normal world. . . . When you’re nude,
o f-scene, ob-scene,
and menacing, you are another woman and yet you are the same, do you understand me? You’re the same and yet you are transfigured, as if by taking off your clothes, my dear lady, you hinted at a final beauty, the beauty of a death that lives on eternally. A charming paradox. The way I saw you, that is how you will always be, until your death.

No, let me amend that. I should have said “Even in death” or “Only in death.” Since the day I met you, I sensed you’d give me extraordinary pleasure, the greatest sensuality I’d ever known, not comparable to anything I’d experienced or imagined before. What an undeserved reward to spy on you from the woods while in front of the one lit window in the house you removed your black cocktail dress, and then, arms stretched behind your back, unhooked your black bra in an equally dark and audacious movement, revealing those two cups filled to overflowing, and you lifted up the front part of the bra and freed your breasts with a double caress, and there you were in nothing but your black panties, which you removed as you sat on the edge of a bed that seemed—forgive me for saying so—too cold and lonely, absurdly so, and instantly you rose, my lady, in all the splendor of your sexual maturity, white all over, twice pink, once black, facing me before turning your back to me so that I could admire that ass, the ass of Venus Callipyge, adored until she sank into the earth with trembling buttocks, so I could have what you spoke of the other day, the vision of a pleasure I must conquer at a price— I laugh at myself, madam—that is very possibly beyond my reach.

Yes, that glimpse of you is all I would have needed. And I would have treasured the trifle you deigned to present to me and only me, María del Rosario, because I thought: This is for me, only for me. This midnight spectacle, unfolding before my eyes from the only lit room in a house tucked away in the middle of a pine forest, she offers it all up to me. . . .

Why did you do it, dear lady, what infinite cruelty, what evil compulsion drove you to make me share the vision that I believed was incomparably mine with another peeping tom, another voyeur like myself, standing a few meters in front of me, whose presence was revealed by the rustling of branches, normally an imperceptible noise but thunderous to my sensitive, lovesick ears? Why? Why that intruder into a vision that I thought belonged to me, or us, you and me alone?

Who was the other voyeur? Was he a random intruder? Does he know your habits, my dear mistress? Did he, as I did, keep a date that you had made with him, a rendezvous befitting—forgive me if I offend you—a professional courtesan, a high-class whore? Can you tell me the truth? Can you at the very least save me from being a vile, pathetic peeping tom, a madman, a deceived lover?

6

BERNAL HERRERA TO PRESIDENT LORENZO TERÁN

I write to you now, President Terán, to wish you the best of luck in your annual address to Congress, now rescheduled for early January in light of the current national emergency, so that you, with a courage I admire, will be speaking before the president of the United States delivers her State of the Union address. The White House’s reaction to decisions you made over Christmas and the San Silvestre holiday—to keep the price of oil high and to call for an end to the U.S. occupation of Colombia—can only be described as punishment. I don’t, however, recommend that you use those terms when you make your address: Instead, stick to the pretext of an international communications collapse. Well, don’t say “the system collapsed,” first of all, because that kind of wording will bring back unhappy memories of the old-fashioned frauds committed under the PRI’s “perfect dictatorship,” which we have finally put behind us. And secondly, because “collapse” is the kind of verb that has an unpleasant way of turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy, to use an expression coined by our cousins to the north. Instead I recommend that you avoid any criticism of the U.S. government, and that you present this as a temporary technical mishap in the global satellite-communications network, caused by an unforeseen reaction to the duplication of digits at the start of the present year, 2020. A sort of delayed but likely follow-up to that Y2K phenomenon that had everyone in a panic before the year 2000, when all the computers in the world—personal, governmental, at banks and airports, public, private—were supposedly going to go haywire when their systems went from “19” to “20.” It doesn’t matter if they don’t believe you tomorrow, as long as they buy the story today. Use it. You have nothing to lose. Just don’t mention the U.S. government, Mr. President. Talk about a simple technical malfunction. Forgive me for being so repetitive. More than a reminder to you, these things I write are like little memos to myself—you know how I am. In your great wisdom and trust, I ask you to understand and forgive your old friend. Next: Make sure to touch only very lightly on the topics of Colombia and the oil prices, and focus instead on our domestic problems. I know that some members of the cabinet—mainly those so-called technocrats—will blame things on me as interior secretary. They’ll say I’m out to profit from the situation. That I’m positioning myself—forgive me for being so blunt, but you and I are more than just superior and underling, president and trusted employee; we’re old friends, and I always think of us like that—for the presidential succession that will happen in less than three years, etc. You know me, and you know that I’ve always advised you with two things in mind. One, I am your loyal colleague, and two, I put the interests of Mexico above all else. I wouldn’t be interior secretary if I weren’t able to equate those two things. Loyalty to Mexico and loyalty to the president. Having established that, allow me to reiterate with the greatest conviction that the major problems we need to address swiftly and wisely are the three strikes going on as we speak.

First, the students who are refusing to pay registration fees or take admission exams, and who are presently occupying various buildings on the university campus.

Second, the striking workers at the factory in San Luis Potosí that is majority-owned by a Japanese corporation.

And third, the protest march led by peasants at La Laguna who are calling for restitution of the lands promised to them by President Cárdenas’s agrarian reform, lands which have been wrested from them little by little by the corrupt local bosses in the north.

My recommendations, Mr. President, are as follows:

Ignore the students. They can keep on occupying the dean’s office and every other university building until hell freezes over, for all we care. With the students, anything but repression. Never forget the 1968 massacre in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, and how, believing it had achieved some kind of triumph, the system in fact committed suicide that day by sparking public outrage, collective anguish, and, in the end, the demise of authoritarianism and the single-party system, in addition to eternally disgracing the president at the time and forcing his successors to distance themselves from him, the “butcher of Tlatelolco,” even when it meant defying economic logic. Result: We floundered from crisis to crisis, all because we killed some students. Just let the situation sit and rot. All those students brimming over with solidarity today will come to their senses and think of their careers tomorrow.

Let us remain calm, Mr. President. More imperturbable than Benito Juárez.

Now, with regard to the striking workers at the car factory who are demanding outrageous wage increases and dare to compare their salaries to those of their counterparts in Japan, break the strike by force and announce to the world that Mexico welcomes foreign investment with open arms. We have a massive supply of cheap labor, we ’ll all end up winning. As for the disgruntled workers, they’ll be happy if you give them a free movie theater and a decent hospital.

You might argue that police intervention in San Luis Potosí would work in favor of the inveterate local boss Rodolfo Roque Maldonado, but I would argue that the mere deployment of forces on our part would intimidate Maldonado and get those clever Japanese on our side. It’s a risk, no doubt. Consider it, Mr. President. After all, we don’t want to play around when it comes to our bread and butter. Remember the old Pedro Infante song? The wife’s given two pesos for rent, phone, and electricity. Ah, the nostalgia for those pre-inflation days. Anyway, a little money is better than none, and the families of the San Luis workers won’t put up with their men not bringing money home. Foreign corporations will see that the authorities here are willing and able to defend foreign investment. How else did the Asian tigers make all their money? Just ask the ghost of Lee Kwan Yu. Singapore is a safe place because they cut off your hands if they catch you stealing. In addition, my dear president, a show of force in the region of San Luis Potosí will also serve to subdue the local bosses who take advantage of the vacuums in the regional power structure created by our drawn-out transition to democracy. I know I’m repeating something I’ve just mentioned. Forgive me for belaboring the point. But we have often granted democracy only to lose authority, creating pockets of anarchy filled by an endless string of local bosses and the forces they command: Maldonado in San Luis, Félix Elías Cabezas in Sonora, “Chicho” Delgado in Baja California, José de la Paz Quintero in Tamaulipas.

And finally, Mr. President, pay attention to the peasants in La Laguna. Use the situation to revive some of those agrarian causes that our pragmatism has forced us to drop. Give your government the support of the rural masses that our enemies—the aforementioned local bosses, for starters—have always manipulated through isolation and ignorance, counting on the fact that our hands would be tied by our proximity with the U.S., as if democracy and authority were incompatible. You know my watchword: authority yes, authoritarianism no. Take advantage of the situation to stick it to the local bosses. The domestic business sector in the north will thank you for it, because they know better than anyone that poverty is the worst investment of all and that a starving peasant can’t buy food in the supermarket or clothes at the local Benetton.

As for the one topic that secretly concerns us the most, the murder of Tomás Moctezuma Moro, my advice is to leave it as it is, as a secret that is convenient for us all.

Mr. President, I sincerely hope you’ll consider my advice in the spirit of patriotism and support with which I offer it. “This,” said a German philosopher, “this,” the word “this,” is the hardest one to say. Very well, Mr. President, that’s what I urge you to do: Do THIS. Say, dare to say, THIS.

Postscript: I enclose the memorandum that I asked Xavier Zaragoza to write, explaining the communications breakdown.

MEMORANDUM

Our modern communications system has suffered a grave paradox. On the one hand, we have striven to become part of the largest global communications network in existence. On the other, we have wanted to monopolize access to information for our government’s benefit. To attain the first goal, we handed over the management of television, radio, telephony, as well as wireless communications, the Internet, etc., to the Florida Satellite Center and the so-called capital of Latin America, Miami. Our hope was that this decision would ensure our global access to communications. We turned our worldwide operations over to private companies such as B4M and X9N, in search of maximum efficiency and maximum range. What we did not know, however, was that these private companies upon whom we depended were, in turn, dependent upon an infrastructure controlled by the U.S. Defense Department. Nor did we know that the Florida Satellite Center was under the auspices of the Pentagon, which controlled the system’s effectiveness or lack thereof, as well as its real, potential, and planned crises, through exclusive access to the synchronized orbits of a number of fixed satellites located 40,000 kilometers above sea level. The precursor to this was the Y2K crisis of the 1999–2000 new year, the so-called “millennium bug” that was thought capable of causing a breakdown in the global communications system, when the computers programmed according to the digits “19” jumped to “20.” The panic, as we now know, was nothing more than the Pentagon’s way of reminding everyone of its ability to decentralize information in the event of an attack on the infrastructure, or to voluntarily destabilize the system, while claiming to be under (nonexistent) attack. The Mexican national mistake, then, was to take the plunge with our eyes closed and with the hope of rapidly globalizing our communications by latching on to an operation we didn’t control ourselves, while politicizing communications internally to thwart the democratic, pluralistic use of these media. The restored PRI government of 2006 opted for external modernity through Florida and internal anachronism through an official monopoly of the grid. Governments are organized vertically. The grid, on the other hand, works horizontally. President César León decided to verticalize all internal communications, which meant that unions, local bosses, universities, local governments, and civil society in general were all deprived of access, while the government’s most favored businesses and, fatally, the entertainment industry were granted horizontal communications access. A lot of Big Brother. No Big Strikes (actually, we haven’t avoided them, we simply declare them null and void; the main thing is to make sure that no one strike senses any kind of emulation or support from another strike). The point is that, while the world’s systems started out small, grew rapidly, and delivered value, the Mexican government started out big, grew slowly, and delivered garbage. Domestically, we restricted ourselves to a narrow portal. Internationally, we exposed ourselves to a massive portal. Thus we became doubly vulnerable. The United States has now cut off our big portal, affecting every aspect of our communications, not just external but internal as well, given that the latter, negligible as they were, also depended on the Florida Satellite Center. The hypothetical Y2K bug was simply replaced by a so-called Y2020 bug exclusively affecting Mexico, as a way of punishing the country for opposing the U.S. military occupation of Colombia and for supporting the rise in oil prices determined by OPEC. It is known as “Operation Cucaracha.” And as you know, Mr. President, according to the ditty, the cockroach can only walk if it’s got something to smoke—marijuana, weed, Fu Manchu chocolate. . . . “20/20” is the term gringos use to describe normal clarity of vision at twenty feet. But the thing that really separates our two countries is a border 1,200 miles long. Draw your own conclusions, Mr. President. And think about how long we’ll be able to pacify the Japanese investors at Coahuila—although, of course, it’s been said they have their own secret methods of making themselves understood.