The Eagle's Throne (32 page)

Outside the dining room, I began to scream, covering my ears so that I wouldn’t have to hear the shots, trembling, clutching my belly, not daring to go back into the dining room.

They were dead.

My father was on the table, his face half-buried in a plate of strawberries and cream.

My mother was under the table, her black skirt pushed up high above her sex. For the first time I saw the milky whiteness of her legs. She wore ankle socks, I said to myself.

They were both dead.

I inherited both fortunes. I liquidated all my father’s debts. I saved my mother’s shares. The beer company was very understanding, even generous with me. But bad luck prevailed. Or rather, bad luck came along with the good luck, as is often the case.

“Oh, how small my fortune is—when will I see it grow?” as the late general Arruza used to say.

You came back to Mexico. You asked me to marry you. Now there was nothing in our way. My father was dead. But the little boy was born.

What is a chromosome? It’s the messenger of heredity. It communicates genetic information. Every human somatic cell has a nucleus that contains twenty-three chromosomes, organized in pairs. One half is paternal and the other maternal. Each chromosome can duplicate: It is its own twin. But when an intrusive chromosome—a “third man”— suddenly appears, the total number of chromosomes is raised to forty-seven, and this abnormality results in a strange creature: a flattened face, mongol eyes, deformed ears, flecked irises, broad hands and stumpy fingers, weak muscles, and the forewarning of arrested mental development. Down syndrome.

What were you and I to do?

Keep the child with us, treat him as our son, which is what he was— is? Dedicate ourselves to him? Look after him, me the devoted mother, freeing you to pursue your career?

Kill him, Bernal, relieve ourselves of the unwanted burden?

Love him, Bernal, peer into his odd little eyes and see the spark of divinity, that creature’s desire to love and be loved?

Together we decided that fighting for power was less painful than fighting for a child.

How cold, how clever we were, Bernal. What did we want, you and I? The same thing. To be active players in politics. To carry out the things we learned at the university in France. To build a better country on top of the ruins of a Mexico cyclically devastated by a combination of excess and shortage: poverty and corruption equally rooted, evil people who were far too competent and good people who were far too incompetent; affectation and pretension at the top and grim resignation down below; lost opportunities; governments blaming everything on the people and their civic passivity, and the people blaming the government’s ineptitude; a general belief in signs, as if instead of federal law, our constitution was the
Popol Vuh
of Mayan antiquity . . .

You and I were going to change all that. We had immense confidence in our talent and our education in a country of amateur politicians. We wanted to act legally, but we were also willing to be flexible.

“Politics is the art of the possible.”

“No. Politics is the art of the impossible.”

Who said what? You first, then me, or was it the other way around, as our unforgettable agriculture secretary would put it? The fact is, Bernal, we stopped being parents to one little boy because we thought we would become godparents to a whole country.

The boy was deposited in an institution. We visited him from time to time. Less and less, after a while, discouraged by the physical distance, the mental wall.

We didn’t listen to the voices that told us, “Get closer to him. These children are more intelligent than they seem. They have a different kind of intelligence.”

“And what kind is that, doctor?”

“The intelligence of a world unto itself.”

“Impenetrable?”

“Yes, possibly. We still don’t know. But real. Whose job is it to try?”

“To try what . . . ?”

“Whose job is it? Yours, as his parents, or his?”

We didn’t explore these enigmas. We distanced ourselves from these options. We did what we had to do without the burden of an
idiot,
yes, I don’t mind going to the root of the word.
Idio,
what is ours,
idios,
what is loved,
idiosyncratic,
what belongs to one person . . . Do you remember Emilio Lledó’s extraordinary lecture at the Collège de France about Plato’s
Phaedrus,
about that speech that is the seed of language? The language that when “unjustly condemned needs the help of a father, since it is not able to defend itself.” For that reason, Lledó taught us, all language must be interpreted so that it can be “submerged” in “the language of which we are comprised, the language that
we are.
”

We’ve spent nearly twenty years, you and I, speaking the conventional language of politics. Wouldn’t we have been capable of speaking the creative language of a child? Perhaps a poetic language?

What was the price, Bernal? Accept it. Not only did we distance ourselves from the boy that was ours, our own. After a while, deeply involved in our respective political careers, we distanced ourselves from each other. We never stopped loving each other, seeing each other, talking to each other, conspiring together . . . but we were no longer
idiots,
we were no longer ours, we no longer lived together—sometimes we’d go out to a bar and sometimes, even, we went to bed together. But it didn’t work. There was no passion. We preferred to abstain so as not to sour our great friendship.

You are a good man, and that’s why we couldn’t live together. Without you, I could freely exercise the dark part of my soul, the part I inherited from my father, without hurting you.

I’ve always told you about my love affairs before the poisonous gossip reached your ears. I know that in politics skill, not truth, is what wins arguments. I’ve told you before, “A liar falls sooner than a one-legged man.” Being a good liar is a full-time job. You have to devote yourself to it entirely. And that’s precisely what politics allows you to do.

Long ago, the liar was often sent to purge his guilt in a monastery. But Mexico is neither a convent nor a monastery. It’s a whorehouse. And you’ve been the austere monk of the whorehouse of Mexican politics. That’s always been your strength. Morality. Contrast. You’ve cultivated them in the name of what used to be called “moral renewal.” You’ve been tough and pragmatic when necessary, fair and legalistic when appropriate.

You never told me anything about your private life and sometimes I think you had no private life at all. Or, as my father, Leonardo Barroso, Jr., once said, very cynically, “We all have the right to a private life. As long as we have the wherewithal to pay for it.”

I’ve worked with you unconditionally. I knew Lorenzo Terán was terminally ill since the day he became president, in fact. He wasn’t the first ill man to take office. François Mitterrand became president of France knowing he’d die in the Elysée Palace. Roosevelt knew it, too, when he allowed himself to be elected for the fourth time. Perhaps that knowledge gave them the will to survive with the energy we remember them for. And the will to keep their secrets, just as Terán kept his. He trusted me completely. His illness was the reason I began to prepare an inexperienced young man, someone who’d barely started to shave, someone I could mold. He’d take over the presidency if Terán died— he’d be interim president if Terán died during his first two years in office, and acting president if he died in the last four years. But he was only meant to be passing through; Nicolás Valdivia would only be passing through, until your own presidency, Bernal, once your adversary Tácito was eliminated.

Valdivia complied very conscientiously with all I told him to do. But he always believed that when I said, “You will be president,” I meant a full six-year term. He never suspected that I only considered him feasible as acting president because President Terán was ill. A new Emilio Portes Gil. He was obedient and loyal. There were certain things that he—and nobody else—could control. The Old Man Under the Arches. The simpering passion of that soap opera queen Dulce, whatever her name is. The impenetrable mystery of Ulúa. The Moro affair that you and I wanted to make invisible by eliminating it from public discourse, as if it didn’t exist at all, a secret sealed up forever at the bottom of the sea . . .

But then again, Valdivia was useful for spoiling the ex-president’s little schemes, not to mention the heinous general Arruza’s plot—we never imagined Nicolás would overtake us and get in with General von Bertrab to find out what Arruza was up to, to say nothing of what he found out about the idiotic pretensions of Almazán, that Yucatecan whore, and Andino, her bottomless pit of economic science and political mediocrity.

All of it under control and all of it in your favor, Bernal. Fate smiled on you. The coast was clear. Onésimo Canabal, the president of Congress, plays the fool, but he’s craftier than a pirate, and he knows which way the wind blows. All of us have our secret vendettas. And Canabal’s vendetta was that of avenging the humiliations heaped on him by the terrible ex, César León (no adversary should ever be underestimated). Eliminating César León has been Onésimo Canabal’s obsession. Andino made him laugh, but not Pepa, because he knew about the Mexican Madame Pompadour’s secret affairs with Tácito and Arruza. Onésimo, sneaky son of a bitch that he is, calculated that these deceitful affairs would end up like the liar and the one-legged man—flat on their faces. Onésimo also knew how to take advantage of our balkanized Congress, so that he could divide and conquer.

What neither you nor I calculated, Bernal Herrera, was that Onésimo, more astute than we gave him credit for, would co-opt a secret agent, an unglamorous old woman, more changeable than a chameleon, a woman who could blend into anything from the Chihuahua desert to the jungles of Tabasco, Paulina Tardegarda, who has the air of a nun, a virgin, a martyr. Not only was she a bottomless pit of information for Onésimo, but she was something far worse, something that, quite frankly, makes me seethe, Bernal.

I promised Nicolás Valdivia: “You will be president of Mexico.”

Subtext: “I will
make
you president of Mexico.”

It wasn’t like that. The person who made Valdivia president was that convent escapee Paulina Tardegarda. Valdivia can thank Paulina and Onésimo, not you and me, for making it to the Eagle’s Throne.

I’m seething, Bernal, I admit it, and I’m frightened.

Nicolás Valdivia was going to be the don Tancredo, the sitting duck in our monumental bullfight, the immobile buffoon in charge of diverting the bull as it entered the ring, so that the matador could shine. Well, well. Now it turns out that you and I have been the Tancredos and that Nicolás Valdivia owes his position to Onésimo and Paulina, not you and me.

However, you are who you are, my old sweetheart, and your candidacy has the most promise and the best chance to win the 2024 elections. But “life brings us surprises,” as the Panamanian bard Rubén Blades said. Life brings us surprises. Other candidates may appear on the scene. That’s to be expected. In fact, I think we should encourage other candidacies. When I survey the political horizon, I don’t see a candidate stronger than you. In any case, you can breathe easy. Article 82 of the constitution states that any citizen who has served as president of the republic—whether elected, interim, acting, provisional—may not serve in that position again. Under no circumstances, the law says. That was why César León was trying so hard to intimidate Onésimo Canabal into starting that complicated constitutional reform process—because he wanted to scrap Article 82 and become president again. Blessed re-election, Bernal. Nobody has the right to screw us twice.

Except Nicolás Valdivia perhaps?

My creation.

My anointed one,
à la mode démocratique.

The docile puppet who was going to deliver us to the presidency without a problem.

Well, look what happened. The maid turned out to have a mind of her own.

No, I don’t think that you’ll be defeated in free, democratic elections. Your victory is assured. But what I am afraid of, Bernal, is that Valdivia will find some way to stay on the Eagle’s Throne. Do you think he’s going to be satisfied with a mere three years? Do you think he isn’t already plotting with that Paulina to see how he can hang on to the throne?

Maybe not. But better to be safe than sorry. Remember always that under no circumstances should we forgive Nicolás Valdivia for deceiving us. But you leave that to me. If you forgive the person who did you wrong, your enemies will take note and screw you over twice as badly.

I’m telling you this, my good Bernal, because you’re the one who always goes around saying, “I can’t be unjust with my enemy.”

You’re wrong. Be unjust. Because your enemy will be unjust with you.

65

CONGRESSWOMAN PAULINA TARDEGARDA TO NICOLÁS VALDIVIA

Dear Nicolás, I think you’re covered from all sides. You were wise to leave President Terán’s cabinet intact with the exception of the secretary for public works, Antonio Bejarano, and the communications secretary, Felipe Aguirre. Their corruption was too well known. By sacrificing them you’ll satisfy public opinion and demonstrate your commitment to justice. That’s the system’s weakness: justice. We don’t have a culture of legality, and we resign ourselves to throwing meat to the lions every six years. But the system doesn’t change.

It would be a good idea to reform the judiciary right away in all those states where doing so doesn’t compromise our political power. The public will be paying so much attention to the acts of justice you carry out in Oaxaca and Guerrero, Nayarit and Jalisco, Hidalgo and Michoacán, that they won’t have time to think about Sonora and Baja California, Tamaulipas and San Luis Potosí, where you won’t touch any of those old local bosses. I’ve spoken to all of them. To Cabezas, Maldonado, Quintero, Delgado. They understand your proposal. Low profile. Nothing showy. Invisibility. Local authorities will work with them, do whatever they want, but all with the utmost discretion.

“What do you want, money or fame?” I asked them on your behalf. “Because you’ll have to choose, gentlemen. Fame you’ve got a lot of, and it’s not the good kind. You’ve got a lot of money, too, and you could have more. And bad money is a contradiction in terms. Doesn’t exist. Money or fame. You can’t be political bigamists.”

Obviously they prefer money. They’ll be your silent allies. They pull the strings of repression and persuasion, too. Everything on the sly. They know you can rule with an iron hand. Your decision to extradite the
capo di tutti capi
Silvestre Pardo has terrified them. And they know that if you want to, you can connect any of them to the drug cartels and send them straight to the U.S., where they would await the death penalty. And you, the gratitude of the White House.

Another immediate success for you. The gringos have pardoned us. Your decision to support U.S. military intervention in Colombia has been presented as part of the war on drugs. What would become of the U.S. financial markets without all that money being laundered for the drug empires? And as for oil, you convinced President Condoleezza Rice that you’ll let the market determine the price, and we won’t need to make any statements of support for the Arabs.

“Necessity knows no law,” you told Condoleezza over the phone, something she understands perfectly.

Over the phone, Nicolás! Can you believe it? That was all it took, a few little acts of deference for Washington to lift the sanctions. And as President Terán was discreet enough not to complain, what happened between January and May . . . never happened. That’s all.

“There are blank pages in all history books,” Condoleezza said to you.

The fact is, starting today all communications will resume and we can finally say goodbye to this tedious task of writing letters.

Why then do I write to you now?

For the record.

You know, I love poking around in the archives. Like you. Thanks to the absentminded Cástulo Magón, Tácito de la Canal is through. When I saw your folder from the ENA in Paris, I started connecting the dots, and like Sherlock Holmes I set out on my investigation. Is that how you spell “Sherlock Holmes”? Because I had a Cuban friend once who used to pronounce it “Chelmojones.” He was one of those memorable Cubans who reinvent a whole life on the basis of pronunciation. How do we know who the famous film actor was if they pronounce his name “Cagable”? And how can we recognize “Retamar” if it’s pronounced “Letamale”?

Anyway, I started to make my deductions, from the specific to the general, piece by piece.

You came to Mexico straight from the ENA in Paris, and settled into your “native” city of Juarez, crossing the border every day so that you could study at the library of the University of Texas at El Paso, where you devoured everything that had to do with Mexican politics, from Salinas onward. You applied for residence in Juárez and produced a confusing birth certificate—the son of a Mexican father and a North American mother, both accountants by profession, employed by companies that were fronts for a U.S. business empire with double and sometimes even triple accounting, run by the business magnate Leonardo Barroso, Sr. In other words, your family background was shady, and any revelation could compromise a number of companies on both sides of the border. The secrecy was justified. You were born in a clinic in Texas, but granted Mexican citizenship thanks to Article 30, section
A.ii
, which guaranteed it to all children born out of the country to Mexican parents. You were more fortunate than José Córdoba or Rogerio de la Selva, strongmen in the Carlos Salinas and Miguel Alemán administrations, but constitutionally barred from the Eagle’s Throne because of being “foreign.” But you know all this, because nobody knows more about Mexican political history than you, since you studied it so intensively and so recently, too. . . . Not like the rest of us, who learned it in elementary school. Or were weaned on it.

Moving on, my good friend Valdivia, your parents died in a car accident in Texas when you were fifteen. Since you had the right to dual citizenship, you buried them in the U.S. That’s where the documents are with the name you used on the other side of the border, “Nick Val,” so you could get work, you said, and avoid discrimination.

There’s a gap between the Nick Val who buried his parents in Texas and the Nicolás Valdivia who studied at the École Nationale d’Administration in Paris and was much engaged with Mexican student groups in France—they vividly remember you talking to them, observing them, finding out about their family backgrounds, trying to score points for being an orphan as well as a foreigner.

You wanted to know everything about the country you missed so much!

You were preparing to serve Mexico by studying in France—just like María del Rosario Galván and Bernal Herrera—as is fashionable now. It distinguishes us from the gringos and gives us cachet.

You’re not the only one who knows how to use the archives. Take the file you’re familiar with because Cástulo Magón showed it to you when you went to work at Los Pinos.

ENA PARIS VALDIVIA NICOLÁS

Student. Open courses. École Nationale d’Administration, Paris. Mexican passport. Date of birth: December 12, 1986. Residence: Paris, France. Professional plans: Return to Mexico. Education and discipline: Optimal. Physical description: Darkish skin. Green eyes. Regular features. Black hair. Height: 1.79 meters. Distinguishing marks: Dimpled chin.

That’s the file on you from Paris, with photo and everything. But then, my curiosity got the better of me. Where were you before you went to Paris, during that gap between the age of fifteen and twenty-two? Well, since I’m a member of Congress, I had no trouble sending your details to the people at Interpol. They needed only your initials. In that, my dear Nicolás, you weren’t very clever, no. All I had to do was go through the lists of Mexican students in Europe between 2010 and 2015. A little exhaustive, but it wasn’t that hard, what with modern methods of locating information—methods unknown to men like our good Cástulo Magón.

Nicolás Valdivia in Paris disappeared without trace. A file on someone named Nico Valdés, however, did turn up, and it included a dossier from the Swiss police department and a photograph: yours.

NICO VALDÉS, Student. University of Geneva, Switzerland. Registered for courses in political economy and constitutional theory. Expelled upon discovery of falsified academic record. Address unknown.

What were those false documents? The Swiss hang on to every scrap of paper, as you know well. It turns out that “Nico Valdés” was already registered as a foreigner—same photo as “Nico Lavat”—and the Swiss justice system doesn’t like double identities because they can lead to double indemnities.

Who was this Nico Lavat unjustly detained in Switzerland? As you know, photographs can be scanned through electronic imaging processes that can show how a person ages—fascinating, isn’t it? The point is, though, among these facial “identities” was one of your twin brother, Nicolás.

NICOLÁS LAVAT. Spanish employee hired as doorman to the building that was the main office of the Le Rhône publishing house, April 25, 2006. Considered an exemplary employee. Dedicated reader when not fulfilling professional obligations. Perfect French. Accused of conspiring with a gang to rob banks and of the theft of 250,000 Swiss francs. Released due to inconclusive evidence. Physical description: Dark skin. Light green eyes. Normal features. Black permed hair. Height 1.79 meters. Distinguishing traits: Dimpled chin.

One thing leads to another. Elementary, my dear Watson. Just use Hercule Poirot’s little gray cells—he’s another of my favorites when it comes to the art of detection. Consider, for example, this report found in the files of the Barcelona police department.

NICO LAVAT, b. December 12, 1986, in Marseilles, France, Catalan parents, migrant workers. Associated since adolescence with Marseilles criminal elements. Drugs, male prostitution, “scab” gangs. Active in Le Pen’s National Front. Two years in prison for anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic vandalism, 2000–2002. Whereabouts unknown following release from prison. Failed to meet obligations to report to authorities and renew documents. Physical description: Dark skin. Green eyes. Normal features. Shaved head. Height. 1.79 meters.

Good Lord! First a black woman president and now a Catalan president!

I’m sending you copies of these documents, my sweet. I’ll keep the originals in my office at Congress, in a sealed envelope that I’ll open only in the event of violence against my person. A remote possibility, if I’ve got someone as affectionate and understanding as you to protect me. No, I don’t think I should accept your marriage proposal. If you want me to be your Evita Perón, fine, as long as I don’t have to sleep under the same roof as you, hire a food taster like the Borgias did, or go mad, thinking I’m in a Hitchcock film every time I have a shower.

No, we’re better off as we are, affectionate friends, secret conspirators, highly discreet lovers.

Let me tell you something, Nicolás. There is nothing I want more than to be the companion of a politician whose personal passions don’t concern me. I can save you from the perils of love. With me you don’t have to pretend, like you had to with your Mexican Dulcinea, María del Rosario Galván.

It’s difficult to assume power knowing that it’s impossible to exercise it in a calm and objective fashion. Power is always subject to passion, pleasure, pain, love, fear. You know, I’m enormously impressed by the amount of knowledge and experience you’ve managed to acquire, coming from where you come from. No wonder you’re always quoting those Greek philosophers. “Power is a slave to everything else.” (Protagoras? Nice name. If you and I ever had a baby . . .) But I live for my own destiny, and for the years I have left. I have no dynastic pretensions like your friend “Dark Hand” Vidales and his Nine Evil Sons. I can’t wait to see how you settle things with him! But as for me . . . I don’t have to subject myself to the terrors of marital intimacy. I don’t need a man. I’d lose my independence. I’d squash you, don’t you see? Protagoras Valdivia Tardegarda? Or just plain old Protagoras Lavat? They could be names from a Joaquín Pardavé film comedy. Now there’s a name: Pardavé. No! Nicolás Laxativa!

With me you won’t run that risk. I’ll protect you from all the snares, Nicolás. I’ll protect you from others and I’ll protect you from yourself.

I like the cold, efficient, practiced way you make love to me. They say all young women are beautiful. Not me. I think I’ve learned to make up for my lack of beauty with talent, and to make my personality more attractive than my ugliness. I want them to envy my personality, not my face.

And you, handsome? Who’s really handsome when the time comes to uncover his soul and confront his truth, his secret, his transgression?

How fortunate that you and I have no intimacy to remember. We have no shared moments of laughter, confiding, cuddles. None of that nonsense. What we have is politics.

What we have is the determination to keep you in power for longer than the three years granted by law. Three years. That should be enough time, if we play our cards right, to amend the constitution and allow for re-election. Enough time if we keep up the legalistic energy and practical flexibility. If we choose the right sacrificial victims— Galván and Herrera (I don’t know if that sounds like a trademark or a comic strip). If we maintain the facade of seriousness and credibility. Proceed with caution, Nicolás. Remember that folly has destroyed more Latin American governments than ineptitude or crime.

A Mexican witch discovering the bones of a disappeared congressman in her garden, except that they turned out to be the bones of her grandfather, or something like that. (It was a long time ago.)

An Argentinian witch making decisions for a cabaret dancer who rose to the presidency. (That was a thousand years ago.)

Argentinian, Brazilian, Peruvian presidents publicly airing their marital conflicts.