The Eagle's Throne (5 page)

That’s precisely it. He’s built but one house: his own.

That man with the dumbfounded look on his face is Juan de Dios Molinar, secretary for information and media, who, thanks to the work of our powerful neighbors, has been effectively stripped of his informative capacity, apart from being able to write letters, as I have decided to do (and may they all follow my example). Look at him, how badly designed he is, poor thing: saturnine air, timid smile, the eyes of a tiger, the hands of a carpenter, and the torso of an Italian tenor. Mother Nature can be such a bitch sometimes! And to top it all off, mouth shut like a padlock. He’s the living image of moronic stupor and I feel sorry for him. My friend Herrera says it’s better this way. Since the secretary for information doesn’t inform, the interior secretary can manipulate the news as he sees fit.

In contrast, look at the smiling attorney general, Paladio Villaseñor, who goes around saying “That’s great, that’s great” to everyone. It’s no wonder he’s nicknamed “Mr. That’s Great,” but I think he’s a lot sharper than he seems and that his reputation as a fool saves him from making crucial decisions or publicly offending the people he screws under the table. As you can see, that has its virtues and its drawbacks. Not for nothing, depending on the circumstances, can he be an eel or a clam.

And now, my darling Nicolás, come the serious players. The treasury secretary, Andino Almazán, is a steely technocrat who refuses to budge an inch from his convictions about the economy. He’s a theologian of Economics with a gothic and capital “E.” For Andino, devaluing our currency would be like having a prostitute for a daughter. What the poor man doesn’t know is that his wife, whom everyone calls “La Pepa,” is a slut who cheats on him day and night. But more about that later, darling.

I am anxious to get to the worst, to end this presentation with naked horror itself, the most inexplicable voice in this republican choir: President Lorenzo Terán’s chief of staff, the fawning, despicable, grotesque Tácito de la Canal. Look closely: He shouldn’t be seen in daylight. His head is like one big scar, from chin to occiput, both areas covered with prickly stubble that does little to hide his egg of a bald skull. Look at how he rubs his hands together in an effort to appear humble. He cultivates the look of the perpetually destitute, as if always on the point of begging. He’s the doormat, the paillason, the president’s rug in every sense. He controls access to the executive office and volunteers to clean the president’s soles before the chief executive sets foot in the Office of Offices. Tácito de la Canal is the kind of man who looks as though he’s never breathed fresh air in his life. That’s what they say about him. But I know better. Tácito de la Canal is the man who watches me from a certain spot in the woods every night as I take off my clothes. He’s the voyeur who beat you to my window, the repulsive peeping tom you saw the other night. . . .

That is the cast of characters in this little show. I’ll wait for a better time to give you the lowdown on another singular group of characters: the third-rate legislators, the congressmen and senators who, pulverized into tiny minority factions, leave the management of Congress in the hands of the inept president of Congress, Onésimo Canabal, while preventing the passing of essential laws, which forces the president and Secretary Herrera to act with a pragmatism that is occasionally legal, occasionally not, but occasionally, like now (Colombia, the oil issue), one that must invoke principle as a way of making up for the pragmatism forced upon them by Congress’s fragmentation, which they have had to accept as part and parcel of the system.

And now the good news, my beautiful prince of the night. My very close friend, Interior Secretary Bernal Herrera, has asked the president for a personal favor: to appoint you adviser to the presidential office at Los Pinos, where you’ll be working for none other than Tácito de la Canal.

Am I giving you a poisoned chalice? No. I’m giving you the opportunity, my love, to bring me a golden apple from the very heart of a subverted Eden. Make the most of it, Valdivia. Any questions?

8

XAVIER “SENECA” ZARAGOZA TO PRESIDENT LORENZO TERÁN

Oh, Mr. President! How could I ever forget what you said to me twenty-four hours after entering office?

“They swear you in as president, Seneca, they place the tricolor sash over your chest, you take your seat on the Eagle’s Throne and—you’re off! It’s like being on a roller coaster, they send you down, you grab hold of the chair as best you can and a shocked expression etches itself onto your face, a tight grimace that quickly turns into a mask that you can’t remove. The expression on your face that day will stay there for six years, no matter how many different ways you may try to smile or look serious, pensive, angry—you’ll always be stuck with the look that was on your face that terrifying moment when you realized, my friend, that the presidential seat, the Eagle’s Throne, is nothing more and nothing less than a seat on the roller coaster that we call the Republic of Mexico.”

From the moment you said those words to me, Mr. President, both of us understood that you had called me to your side because you wanted someone who would be honest with you, who would offer you objective advice, and who would help you hide the bewildered look on your face that comes from the feeling of being thrown into the void from the steep slope of that fairground ride known as the presidency of the republic.

“They elect you, Seneca. From that moment on, you lose all real contact with people. Not even your best friends are willing to criticize you anymore.”

Very well, I’ve tried to prove myself worthy of your trust and, though my advice may not always be the best, you always have the right to consider opposing points of view—and there is no dearth of them in the editorial pages and the political cartoons. My duty (at least as I understand it) is to tell you what I think with total candor. Now, a few days after you have completed your third year in office, Mr. President, my sincere criticism is that you’re perceived as a little ineffectual. People don’t see you as a man who
makes
things happen. They see you as a man who lets things happen to him. I know what your philosophy is: We’re past the age of authoritarianism, when the president’s will was the only thing that mattered, from Sonora to the Yucatán, like the hats by Tardán that are back in fashion now. How things come and go!

Now we know that the PRI’s soft dictatorship was tempered by a certain degree of tolerance for the Mexican elite and their generally ill-informed opinions, criticism, and scorn. Poets, novelists, the occasional journalist, circus clowns, cartoonists, our ineffable muralists—all of them were allowed to say, write, and draw more or less what they wanted. It was a case of the intellectual elite criticizing the governmental elite, a very necessary escape valve that even extended to comedians—from Soto to Beristaín to Cantinflas and Palillo, they were all granted this very gracious concession. Filmmakers, however, were not, nor were most journalists, to say nothing of the independent trade unions. But then what about governors, small-time mayors, provincial military authorities, the police force in general, even lowly customs officers? A multitude of local powers, Mr. President, acting with corrupt, willful impunity. Only those who were corrupt were free. We created a culture of illegality, even when the president himself worked within the boundaries of the law or launched moral crusades.

For God’s sake, Mr. President! Even in colonial times people in Madrid talked about the
unto mexicano,
the Mexican unguent, and about
mordida—
corruption, payoffs and bribes that were used and continue to be used to “influence” people. You know what they say: “He who doesn’t deceive, doesn’t achieve.”

What, then, has happened to you, a pure man who came from the opposition to clean the stables of Augeas? You’ve turned out to be a democratic Hercules who trusts society’s power to do a cleanup job that the mythical Hercules performed with brute force, just as that other divine Hercules—Jesus Christ—drove the merchants out of the temple with lashes.

Morally speaking, Mr. President, you’re to be admired. Let society clean itself up. Let the impure among us be purged by the pure—or let them purge themselves. Once again, forgive me for being blunt, Mr. President, and allow me to qualify my criticisms. You yourself are aware that certain areas of Mexican reality are so dark that only people with dirty hands can effectively control them. At the same time, you’ve gone to great pains to promote honest government officials who can give your regime a pretty public face. Take your defense secretary, a military officer of proven integrity, General Mondragón von Bertrab. Or the interior secretary, Bernal Herrera, an honorable professional who obeys the law but also understands the Latin maxim
dura lex sed
lex. The law is tough, but it’s the law. But then, on the other hand, both you and von Bertrab know perfectly well that the chief of police, Cícero Arruza, is a violent thug who won’t hold back when it comes to exercising repression with or without justification.

A necessary evil? Perhaps. But there’s another case, Mr. President, that you refuse to consider, and I’m referring to your cabinet chief, Tácito de la Canal. Now I know that by saying this I’m going out on a limb: I accuse and yet I have no proof. Very well. I’ll limit myself, then, to a simple moral observation. Can someone as ingratiating as Tácito de la Canal possibly be an honest man? Don’t you suspect that a deep well of hypocrisy lies beneath his servile fawning? Don’t you think that Tácito de la Canal merits a bit more caution on your part? Or shall I assume that you’re playing dumb on purpose and allowing Tácito to be your disagreeable, sycophantic guard just so that you can live in peace, flattered by your slave and defended by your dog? Believe me when I say that I fully understand the need for a shifty-looking dwarf at the door to the castle to keep the bothersome, the undesirable, and the ambitious at bay. But you might want to consider that the guard dog you put out for show might also be driving away the honest counselor, the loyal friend, the useful technocrat, the concerned intellectual, simply because he rightly believes that they, even more than all the other shameless attention seekers, are his greatest rivals in the battle for the president’s attention.

I repeat, Mr. President, please pardon the occasionally brutal honesty with which I advise you, but that’s why you took me on: to tell you the truth. I warned you of this from the very first day. A politician can pay an intellectual, but he can never trust him. The intellectual will eventually, inevitably, disagree with the politician, and for the politician this will always be construed as a betrayal. Malicious or ingenuous, Machiavellian or utopian, the powerful man always thinks he’s right, and the person who opposes him is either a traitor, or at least dispensable.

9

MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN TO BERNAL HERRERA

I realize, Bernal, that you must carry out a full security check before allowing a complete unknown like Nicolás Valdivia into the inner sanctum of the presidency. I’ve read with great care the dossier you sent me. Born December 12, 1986, in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Mexican father, American mother. Both worked in El Paso, Texas, but were Mexican residents. Nicolás’s birth certificate can be found in the public records office of Ciudad Juárez. Parents killed in a car accident when Valdivia was fifteen.

Then there’s a very large gap until Valdivia reappears in Paris, a student at the same college you and I attended. I tested him out. He’s very familiar with the subjects and the teachers there. At the Mexican embassy in France he met General Mondragón von Bertrab, at the time the military attaché to the mission. Von Bertrab used the young ENA student for writing up reports, collecting information, etc. It was the general who brought him back to Mexico, where Valdivia spent five years studying on his own in his native state of Chihuahua.

What happened to him between the age of fifteen and twenty-two? I’ve asked our current defense secretary, von Bertrab, for information. He simply smiled. What can one really know about the life of a teenage orphan forced to earn a living all on his own?

Von Bertrab assuaged my fears. If you need confirmation, just ask him. Nicolás was a bit of a vagabond: working on Mexican tankers and Dutch freighters that often dropped anchor at Tampico, reading a lot, studying when he could find the time, finishing off the subjects he needed for his degree. And then finally, he got himself accepted at the ENA thanks to the intervention of the general, who backed the application with all the necessary documents attesting to Valdivia’s unusual and difficult education, his hard work, his tremendous efforts. You know—a youth straight out of a story by Jack London or Ernest Hemingway. . . .

Can you ask for a better recommendation, Bernal? Perhaps he has some mistakes buried in his past, but I must ask you once again to trust my feminine intuition. Nicolás Valdivia looks at me with the face of an angel. He tells me he loves me. And I let him love me. But I’ve also seen that other look, surreptitious, the one he has when he thinks I’m not looking. That “lean and hungry” look that Shakespeare portrayed in
Julius Caesar.
The look of ambition. A little devil with the face of an angel? What else could we possibly ask for if not this, dear friend, to defeat Tácito de la Canal? Let Valdivia owe us everything, and give us everything, too. My intuition tells me that he’s our ideal agent. You yourself have always told me that in politics new blood is necessary, even if it’s dangerous.

Darling, let me be the one to take the risk and pay the price for the damage, if any. You and I are playing a game of political realism. Idealistic at times, like our president was, so disastrously on January 1. But in the end, we must be realists, because we must deal with de facto responses to our de jure behavior. The good thing about realpolitik is that you can do an about-face and still keep your basic principles intact. Nicolás Valdivia is an accident of realpolitik, yours and mine. We can get rid of him as easily as we’ve furthered his career.

Believe it or not, I’ve gone so far as to tell him that when he makes it to the presidency I’ll be his, sexually. And I think he believed me! Or at least my proposal sparked his imagination and his desire.

Be that as it may, we needed to get one of our own into the tarantula’s cave. If our little ant Valdivia gets stung and dies,
tant pis pour lui.
We’ll just replace him with someone else. For the moment, he’s our man in Los Pinos. Leave it to me, I’ll take care of duping and manipulating him as I see fit. And rest assured, if he’s smart, he’ll be a faithful servant.

When I said to him, “You’ll be the president of Mexico,” young Valdivia didn’t even flinch. He showed no astonishment. Perhaps he thought just what you’re thinking now: What if he betrays us, what if his indiscretion or ambition gets the better of him and he reveals our plan?

I think this boy is very intelligent. He knows how to read people’s eyes. He read mine: If you betray me, nobody will believe you. They’ll just think you’re an ambitious little operator and perhaps a very big fool. I don’t need you as a victim. I need you as an ally. A little Lucifer like you is exactly what I need.

He’s as vain as he is astute. He believes me. We will, however, run into problems when he’s stripped of his illusions. He may react vindictively. We must make very sure that our victims have no weapons for revenge.