The Eagle's Throne (36 page)
1
Stop asking me questions/let me imagine/that the past does not exist/and that we
were born/the very instant/we first met. . . .
2
The eagle, being an animal,/had its picture drawn on coins./Before climbing up the
nopal/it asked for permission first.
3
See “Malintzin of the Maquilas” in Fuentes’s
The Crystal Frontier.
4
The colonel asks him,/how many men are with you?/Eight hundred soldiers/led
through the mountains by Mariano Mejía.
5
Valentín, being a man,/told them nothing.
6
And I am one of the true men/who invented the Revolution . . .
7
See “A Capital Girl” in
The Crystal Frontier.
8
See “The Line of Oblivion” in
The Crystal Frontier.
9
There nightfall/is so bleak that one might say:/night thus begotten will be eternal.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
KRISTINA CORDERO is a translator of fiction and nonfiction, including
In Search of Klingsor
by Jorge Volpi,
The
Country Under My Skin
by Giaconda Belli,
The Best Thing
That Can Happen to a Croissant
by Pablo Tusset, and
This I
Believe
by Carlos Fuentes. She is presently at work on an anthology of the writings of Saint Teresa of Avila.
CARLOS FUENTES, Mexico’s leading novelist, was born in Panama City in 1928 and educated in Mexico, the United States, Geneva, and various cities in South America. He has been his country’s ambassador to France and is the author of more than ten novels, including
The Death of
Artemio Cruz, Terra Nostra, The Old Gringo, The Years with
Laura Díaz, Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone,
and
Inez.
His nonfiction includes
The Crystal Frontier
and
This
I Believe: An A to Z of a Life. He has received many awards for his accomplishments, among them the Mexican National Award for Literature in 1984, the Cervantes Prize in 1987, and the Légion d’Honneur in 1992.
ALSO BY CARLOS FUENTES
Aura
The Buried Mirror
Burnt Water
The Campaign
A Change of Skin
Christopher Unborn
Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins
The Crystal Frontier
The Death of Artemio Cruz
Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone
Distant Relations
The Good Conscience
The Hydra Head
Inez
Myself with Others
A New Time for Mexico
The Old Gringo
The Orange Tree
Terra Nostra
This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life
Where the Air Is Clear
The Years with Laura Díaz
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2007 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2006 by Carlos Fuentes
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Published in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury Publishing. Originally published in Spanish in 2002
as
La silla del águila
by Alfaguara, Mexico, copyright © 2002 by Carlos Fuentes.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
PQ7297.F793S5513 2006
863’.64—dc22 2006040806
www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-43216-2
v3.0