The Eagle's Throne (30 page)

63

MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN TO NICOLÁS VALDIVIA

“In the dark night, a beautiful stranger . . .” as the song goes. You, a stranger? Someone I don’t know? You’re my creation, my clay, my male Galatea. Yes, you do owe me. A lot. Everything, I’d say. Everything. Except the final prize. The jackpot. You owe that to people less significant. You used the dwarfs to get where you are. Why? Were you afraid of me? Were you afraid that if you owed me everything I’d turn you into nothing?

You’ve learned a lot, apart from knowing whom to trust. All we can do, Nicolás, is study character as much if not more than actions. What did Gregorio Marañón say about Tiberius? That power corrupted him. No!
He was always evil.
But, you see, the light of power is so
powerful
that it reveals what we’ve always been but have kept hidden in the shadows.

Your power and my power reveal our true selves. A couple of opportunists. Gangsters. Blackmailers. Predators. Criminals. Surely both of us know that the most ambitious person is always the one who dramatizes himself the least.

Be careful, then, of the least conspicuous. I told you this at the beginning so that you wouldn’t be taken in by Tácito de la Canal’s pretensions—he was the most transparent politician I’ve ever known. The only thing you could trust was his untrustworthiness. How could a hypocrite like Tácito have become president, a man who pretended to be on the brink of abject poverty so that one of us would rescue him?

And poor Seneca—he was the anti-Tácito. He wore his intelligence on his sleeve. He was what the fastidious English most deplore. Too clever by half. Too much brilliance blinds those who live in the shadows of mediocrity. Seneca offended people with his intelligence, just as Tácito offended people with his hypocrisy.

Seneca criticized himself: “My principles are solid, but my practice is terrible. All I can do now is grow old and cynical.”

No. He committed suicide. Despite not being married, marriage being the surest path to suicide.

César León. There you have him, discreet with the people who were useful to him, but brutally indiscreet with those he despised. Indiscretion won out. In his heart, he was a sentimental person. Outside politics, though, he felt displaced. As if the land he lived in as president was the only land that existed. In a play this would have been his closing speech: “I spoke to Destiny like an equal. I defied Fortune. I said: I dare you, bitch. I’m invulnerable to goodness. And better still, I’m invulnerable to evil.”

Did you know he always carries a miniature guillotine in his pocket, and that he plays with it the way other men play with their penises?

President Lorenzo Terán, on the other hand, was
too
discreet. He said very little or nothing at all. Yes, he did have perfect muscular reflexes. That was why he was so good at handling public relations. He knew that in Mexico the forces of nature are on our side. If it isn’t an earthquake, it’s a flood. Or a drought or a hurricane. In Mexico natural disasters get turned into public profits. All a president has to do is make an appearance at the site of a disaster and disappear again. That’s how he avoids having to deal with the deeper issues.

But tell me, has there ever been anyone more inconspicuous than Onésimo Canabal, president of Congress, that fugitive of the public rest rooms? Mediocre, submissive, embarrassed by his ugly physique and humble background. But wasn’t Jesus born in a stable? Nobody would ever imagine that the real kingmaker of this succession would be poor old Onésimo Canabal.

Nor did anyone know that he was conspiring with your good friend Paulina Tardegarda, a viper capable of repainting paradise with the colors of hell. And I thought it was I who was the double of Madame de Maintenon, the princes’ tutor who ended up marrying the king! Is that what I should do, retire like Louis XIV’s other lover, Madame de Montespan, to a convent to train young nuns to be better courtesans than I? Or do you think that with your current power, Nico, you can somehow prevent the succession process, the 2024 elections that I swear will take Bernal Herrera to the presidency? Yes, Bernal Herrera. For the good of the country, Nicolás. Because Bernal is discreet—that is, if the word “discretion” means prudence, caution, tact, good judgment as well as the measured, intelligent use of uncontested force.

We’re going to fight, you and I, Nicolás Valdivia, because you can’t fool me. You’ve become merely a substitute president until 2024. Did you think I couldn’t sense your ambition? You can’t succeed yourself. But you can immortalize yourself. That’s what I fear. A colossal scheme of yours to stay in power.

You have an arsenal of pretexts. The economic crisis, internal revolutionary uprisings, foreign invasion, power vacuums. What won’t you do to keep yourself in power! Everything short of aspiring to the Nobel Peace Prize. And that ambition will wound you irredeemably, for sure. That aside, I fear you. This is the struggle now. Bernal Herrera and I will do whatever is necessary to make you relinquish the presidency in 2024. Whatever is necessary—even the impossible. Just as you will do all that is necessary and even impossible to stay on the Eagle’s Throne forever.

You’re not Lorenzo Terán, a good and democratic man who was not in love with power. Ah, we always need a dignified, noble figure who can redeem the wretchedness of the rest of us. Now that man is Bernal Herrera, as it was Lorenzo Terán before, but he was ill. You think you’ll go on forever. You do have one virtue, I admit. You stand for new blood. But you’ll be old soon enough—as soon as you begin to spill the blood of others, something you’ll do if you want to stay in power. But remember the price of blood. Tlatelolco, October 2, 1968. It lasted one night but cast a long shadow.

Today you’re lauded for being young and clean. A reason for hope. Worthy of your position. But power will corrupt you in the end. Take it from me. You don’t know how to resist temptation. I know you. You don’t know when to stop. And you’ve proven as much, efficiently and perhaps a bit hastily, ever since you became president. You got rid of Tácito, César León’s back in exile, Cícero Arruza has been assassinated, Andino Almazán publicly cuckolded, and Moro put to rest forever with a lying-in-state, his body riddled with bullets from that little episode in Veracruz that robbed the Old Man of his raison d’être because without the Moro secret he’s just a pathetic old man playing dominoes. However, you still have to face the cabinet you inherited from Lorenzo Terán. And the local bosses in the rest of the country. Let’s see how you do—I’ll be watching.

You know, Nicolás, a man can cease to act in politics, but the consequences of his political actions are there to stay. You do know—and that will be your dilemma. You’ll cover the holes of your mistakes (and your crimes?) but for every hole you cover up, three more will be exposed. That’s what they call “consequences.” That explains President Terán’s passivity. He didn’t want “consequences.” He wanted to retire and live in peace. Then he got blood cancer, leukemia combined with pulmonary emphysema. And yet he still always feared that the “consequences” of his actions—or his inaction, which is also a kind of action, perhaps the most dangerous kind of all—would plague him far beyond his days on the Eagle’s Throne. Destiny intervened. We’ll have to wait and see how he goes down in history.

History. You haven’t made much yet, Valdivia. Remember that you’ll be governing a destructive country that protects itself and deceives itself with false psychology and a sensitivity, born of suffering, to art and death. You tried to court the middle ground. You had no other choice when you were a nobody. But now you harbor, and I admit I encouraged it, what the Germans call the
dunker-instinkt,
the much-misunderstood but profound desire to have power and exercise it with style.

Style makes the man, they say. Style is everything.

And beauty? Is that part of style? No. Only fools believe that. Beauty, like style, is a question of will. Beauty is also power. Look at me, my conquered one. Do you think I don’t look at myself in the mirror every morning? Without makeup? Do you think I deceive myself? I’m a coquette: I do my best to deceive the rest of the world. Did I tell you that I’m forty-five, forty-seven? I can’t remember. It’s not true. I’m forty-nine. The fact is, I have to recreate my beauty every morning, like someone painting a picture, creating a design, or perhaps more pejoratively, shaping an advertisement. Whether I’m convincing or not, I want to be admired so that I can get what I want. Admired but untouchable. I’d like to be a statue.

Do you know what a lover of mine once said to me? “The trouble with you is that you’re so beautiful on the outside, you must be appalling on the inside.”

“No,” I replied. “The trouble with beauty is that it condemns you to sex, and the trouble with sex is that even though it’s a pleasure it can’t turn bad news into good news.”

“But maybe it saves you, despite the bad things,” he said.

“I want to save myself despite all the good things,” I told him, confusing him forever and forcing him to run away from everything he didn’t understand, which was a lot.

Do you understand me, my poor little Nicolás? Look at me properly. Age is a woman’s unpunished murderer. You’re younger than I. I bet you thought you could enjoy the benefits of my maturity and perhaps be my last good fuck.

Were you stripped of your illusions yesterday, my stupid little sweetheart?

I saw you the day you were sworn in as president at San Lázaro. And I saw a dangerous smile I’d never seen before. You frightened me. It was more a smile of deception than power. The smile of a real-life villain. A smile that said, “I’ve fooled them all.” That’s when I decided to make you suffer for all that I’ve suffered, though not because you’ve done me any harm.

I decided to make you the reason for all the bad things I’d ever experienced—you were to be the bag into which I’d put my suffering, even though you weren’t the cause.

As I watched you fasten the sash with the eagle and the serpent, I realized, “Nicolás Valdivia has become great. But his love is small. He’s a man who doesn’t know how to love.”

I read you in an instant, like an open book. There’s no love in your life. Father, mother, family. Girlfriends. Lovers. You’re like an island in the middle of a huge river. Preoccupied by ambition, never creating a deep connection with anyone. Licked by the waters of the river but unable to bathe in them.

Tell me if you know of an absence of love that can’t be healed by the experience of being loved. That was my promise. I showed you the path that led to me. But you went off course. You postponed things. You humiliated me. You separated “achieving power” from “achieving power because she allowed me to.” Do you think I can forgive you for that?

I want you to suffer how I’ve suffered. See how truthful I am? See how I debase myself? See how I let myself get carried away out of passion, against the calm, better judgment of my true soul mate, Bernal Herrera? But understand one thing. I want you to suffer for all that I’ve suffered since I was born, not because you’ve done me harm. Nor because I believe for an instant that you ever loved me, or that I ever loved you.

You kept to our arrangement, our rendezvous in front of my window, just as you did in January.

Did it hurt to see me last night in the window?

Did it hurt to see me naked again?

Did it hurt to see me in the arms of another man?

Did you hear, confused with the weeping of the trees, my sighs of orgasm, my moans of pleasure?

You postponed things. Forgive me. You always told me how much you liked him. You shouldn’t have. I took him away from you. You played your cards well—all of them except that one.

Should I thank you for having introduced me to the best, most beautiful lover I’ve ever known, someone who shamelessly licks my ass, my clitoris, puts his fingers inside, and makes me come twice, with his tongue and with his cock, crying out to me, begging me to stroke his anus, which is what all men secretly wish for, to help them come faster and harder—the anus, closest to the prostate, the hole of the most secret, least confessed, least demanded pleasure.

He asks me for it.

“Your finger. Up my ass, María del Rosario. Please, make me come. . . .”

Dark, tall, muscular, tender, rough, passionate, and young . . .

What a marvelous lover you gave me, Nicolás! From the beginning he spoke to me in the familiar!

But be very wary of him.

Jesús Ricardo Magón is convinced that you want to kill him.

This is my final piece of advice. I think you’re the one who should make sure that he doesn’t kill you.

Crimes committed out of the fear of being killed are far more common than crimes committed from a desire to kill.

Forget about me as your lover. Fear me as your political rival.

And go. You’re searching in vain for a crack in my soul. You’ll never find it because it doesn’t exist. Am I different from everyone else? Who is master of his own soul? The man who believes he is is only deluding himself. We can’t be. We are in the process of being. We don’t submit ourselves to reality. We create it. Go, little creature,
mon choux. . . .