Carlos Fuentes - The Eagle's Throne

In any case, we ought to think of it as a fight among equals. Now, will your protégé Valdivia, embedded as he is in Tácito’s bureaucracy, be able to come up with the one secret that can ruin him, something more damaging than Tácito’s habit of seducing secretaries?

Poor results, María del Rosario, very poor. If we don’t produce solid evidence soon to bring Tácito de la Canal down, he and I will start the fight with equal strength. I cannot tolerate that. I want to have an indisputable advantage. What will it be? I can only count on your well-deserved reputation as a woman who is intelligent, intuitive. . and seductive.

So, my beloved and admired lady, I’ve yet again followed your instructions (which you euphemistically call suggestions) and traveled to the port of Veracruz in the interest of “earning points” and “polishing my political education,” as you put it. I arrived with the letter of introduction you gave me for the Old Man.

There he was, just as you said he’d be, sitting at a table under the great colonnade of the Café de la Parroquia, cane in hand and with a steaming cup of coffee in front of him. He still looks exactly as you and I and the rest of the country remember him. The noble head atop the fragile body. Broad forehead, receding hairline as wide as a boulevard, perfectly clipped and well-combed salt-and-pepper hair. (I don’t know why but he gave me the impression of having been combed from head to toe.) And of course, the most arresting thing about him, his gaze: as absentminded as a sparrow and as keen as a hawk! He really is an eagle, though, in every sense of the word, no matter how intense or distracted his perfectly calculated gaze may be. No other president of the republic has embodied such a perfect symbiosis of the person and the symbol. When he sat on the Eagle’s Throne, the Old Man was the original eagle.

Now he’s known to all as “the Old Man Under the Arches.” Although he may change his name and lie about his age, the deep, dark rings that make his eyelids look like two great black curtains remain, softened only by his wide eyebrows. They say that some mountains are covered by “perpetual snow.” The Old Man Under the Arches has “perpetual darkness” in those eyebrows that would almost seem diabolical if they didn’t contrast so starkly with the petrified smile across his thick lips, rosy for someone so advanced in years, framed and accentuated by deep lines on either side. And in between mouth and eyes, his straight but flat nose, discreet but for the broad, flared nostrils like a bloodhound’s.

I’m describing someone you’re more than familiar with in order to confirm my own impression of the Old Man. Because that’s how he’s known around here: the Old Man under the Arches, sitting all day long at one of the Café de la Parroquia’s outdoor tables, sipping the aromatic coffee from Coatepec in between sips of mineral water, a copy of La Opinión spread out on his lap. Dressed to the nines, as always, in his dark gray pinstriped suit, white shirt, the inevitable polka-dotted bow tie, his cuff links bearing the image of the eagle and the serpent, his flecked socks, and his well-polished black shoes.

I introduced myself, gave him your letter and, just as you warned me, the Old Man Under the Arches launched into a litany of political definitions and recommendations like a priest reciting the Creed. The Old Man doesn’t lack a sense of humor. He knows full well that he is an old, old man and that the younger generation condemned him a long time ago to death by oblivion.

“Some people think it would be humane to hasten my journey to the grave,” he said, laughing without laughing — a habit of his, it seems. “I won’t give them that pleasure. I’ll continue to be what some people call ‘a political nuisance.’ ”

Then, without missing a beat (just as you said he would and just as he knew you would tell me he would), he began spewing out his famous sayings, now so old and universally known that they’re part of our political folklore. But as I said before, the Old Man doesn’t lack a sense of humor, nor is he incapable of deadpan self-criticism.

“Let’s get through all those sayings attributed to me, so we don’t have to go over them again. . ”

“I’m one of the young people who wouldn’t mind that, Mr. President. Everything about you is new to me.”

“What do you mean, ‘about me’? And don’t call me ‘Mr. President.’ Remember, I’m not president anymore.”

“It’s my French education, Mr. President. In France, nobody is ex-anything. That would be considered rude.”

“Another Frenchman in Veracruz!” he exclaimed without smiling. “Those damn Frogs again!”

“What I was going to say is that I studied at l’École Nationale d’Administration in Paris. . ”

“French battleships disembarked here, you know, during the Pastry War.”

“The what. .?” I asked, revealing my scant knowledge of Mexican history.

“Yes,” he said, sipping his coffee. “A French pastry chef by the name of Remortel in Mexico City complained that during a riot the rabble had destroyed his éclairs and croissants, and so in 1838 the French deployed a fleet to bomb Veracruz and demand payment for the ruined pastries. How about that, then? Haven’t you ever seen the movie with Mapy Cortés?”

“Mapy. .”

“A Puerto Rican beauty, oh, yes. A knockout. Thighs so perfect you could cry. She danced a conga called the pim-pam-pum, ” he said, and took another sip.

“Of course,” I replied in an attempt to recover a bit of my bruised credibility, realizing now that Mapy Cortés and her pim-pam-pum were more important than l’École Nationale d’Administration. “Of course— the whole world has come to Mexico via Veracruz, ever since Hernán Cortés arrived on these shores in 1519. . ”

“And the French came back in 1862 to help defend the empire of Maximilian and Carlota.” Nostalgia brought a momentary sparkle to his hooded eyes. “Just picture the troop of Belgians, Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, men from Prague, Trieste, Marseilles, the Zouaves, Bohemians, Flemish, who landed here with their flags held high, my little friend, and every last flag had an eagle, two-headed eagles, crowned eagles, heraldic eagles, and here we were with one poor little eagle of our own — but what an eagle, my little friend Valdivia, a bloody fine eagle, incomparable, its talons perched atop a nopal and devouring a serpent. Those Europeans weren’t expecting that, now, were they?”

“I suppose not, sir.”

“Oh, and the trail of dark-skinned blue-eyed children those imperial troops left behind in Veracruz. Did you ever see the film Imperial Cavalry ?”

“No, but I read a marvelous novel, News from the Empire, by Fernando del Paso.”

“Thank goodness,” he said, with a note of pity in his voice. “At least you know something.”

He looked into the distance toward the sea and the San Juan de Ulúa fortress, an imposing, uninviting gray mass on a forbidding island. The Old Man saw me watching and seemed to know what I was thinking.

I spoke as if he’d asked me something.

“Forgive me, Mr. President. . It’s just that when I was a child there was a breakwater that connected the castle to the mainland.”

“I had the breakwater removed. It was a blight on the landscape,” he said, as the waiter, arm raised high above his head, poured steaming coffee with perfect aim straight into our glass coffee cups.

The Old Man kept talking.

“That’s why I sit here, looking out at the port of Veracruz, so that I can give warning should any foreign enemy dare to profane our land with his soles, as our national anthem puts it.”