Carlos Fuentes - The Eagle's Throne

And remember, in these matters you have to act quickly.

So, my lovely and demanding lady, you warned me from the start that everything is politics with you, but I had my doubts the day you told me to come to the woods outside your house at night and watch you undress. As if that weren’t enough, I was beaten to it (surely through my beautiful lady’s doing) by Tácito de la Canal. Is that politics, too, or is it just sex? Oh, my good lady María del Rosario, how many other secrets do you keep that have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with that region of “the heart that has its reasons” that reason (or politics) doesn’t understand?

Well, I’ve learned another lesson, though perhaps more of a human one than a political one. After all, in our country, can politics exist without that thing we call endurance ? As I mentioned to you the other day, I’ve become quite friendly with one of the archivists in the presidential office, an old man I described to you a while back. He was kind enough to invite me to his house. Well, it isn’t exactly a house, it’s an apartment, a third-floor flat with a little terrace roof, in the Vallejo area, near the Monumento a la Raza.

You enter the place through a little shop between the front door and the stairway. I couldn’t describe the building to you even if I tried. It’s a place, my dear lady, that slips from the memory the minute one lays eyes on it. Some events, some people, some places are like that — as much as you try to remember them, they simply refuse to appear in the mind’s eye. And it’s sad not to remember them, until you realize that the memory has no room for the unremarkable. There are some people, though, that we can never forget, my dear lady, because the only possessions they have are the impressions they leave in other people’s minds, and their eyes are none other than those of the people who see them.

Do you understand what I mean? For me it was something of a revelation precisely because they asked nothing of me and yet I found myself fascinated, drawn to the pleas of these people who wanted nothing. What pleas am I talking about? you may ask. The archivist is a man named Cástulo Magón, who told me, when I noted the connection between their last names, that he is indeed distantly related to the revolutionaries Ricardo and Jesús Flores Magón, the anarchist brothers who languished away during Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship inside the San Juan de Ulúa fortress at Veracruz, which I saw the other day when you sent me to visit the Old Man Under the Arches. Well, don Cástulo is almost sixty and has been an archivist for nearly forty years, since the time of the López Portillo government. He married late because it took him a while to put the money together for a wedding and to find a woman who suited him and who was willing to work to make ends meet every month.

Don Cástulo has that tired, dreary look of the classic archivist and, as I said before, he even wears the ubiquitous green eyeshade and arm garters that make him look like the typical minor bureaucrat, straight out of a soap opera. Archives are dark places — perhaps out of fear that the papers might grow faded and illegible if exposed to sunlight, or perhaps simply to allow the documents to fall into oblivion as they lie in their yellow folders in gunmetal gray tombs. Perhaps, my scornful mistress, so that they may be exorcised of all, shall we say, luminous content. Yes, don Cástulo is the phantom of the archives. Just like the character dreamed up by Gaston Leroux who lived in the subterranean bowels of the Paris Opera, Cástulo Magón lives beneath the offices of the president of the republic.

His face is gray and his eyes, while not tired, convey a sense of resignation. But his fingers, María del Rosario, are astonishingly nimble— you should see the speed and precision with which he flips through the different files! At that moment his age, his tired, careworn appearance, and his exhausted body are transfigured and Cástulo becomes something like the alchemist of the public records office. He knows where everything is but even more importantly he also knows where to find everything that shouldn’t be there, those things he was told to destroy. Cástulo, not out of disobedience, but simply because he’d never really thought about it, you see, archived the unarchivable according to an eccentrically Mexican filing system: He didn’t file by name (Galván, María del Rosario, or Herrera, Bernal), nor by section (Ministry of the Interior, Congress) but by reference.

Arcane references. Where would you think I, for example, might be found in the archives at Los Pinos? Under my name, “Valdivia, Nicolás”? Under my position, “Chief of Cabinet, Assistant to”? “Presidency of the Republic, Office of ”? No, my dear María del Rosario. As it turns out, I appear in a file entitled “ENA.” Now, what is ENA? you might ask. École Nationale d’Administration, Paris. In other words, the college I went to. Take note, madam! If you’re looking for a labyrinth of solitude, this takes the cake. And our friend the archivist Cástulo Magón can find his way around the files using those hands of his, like the hands of a blind pianist, more blind than Hipólito in Santa. The fact that his economic status in no way reflects his professional abilities is almost tautological. Cástulo receives a meager salary, some 500 dollars a month, which, given the cost of living these days, is barely enough to spruce up the white locks framing his temples and whip them up into a slick bridge from left to right across his head to hide the balding pate. (For what? From whom? Tell me — after all, you’re a woman who knows so much about human vanity, especially that of the dispossessed and humiliated like myself, your hapless soupirant .) Don Cástulo, believe it or not, still uses homemade hair pomade, even though it went out of fashion about a hundred years ago. I believe it to be the only evidence of his vanity in the tiny bathroom largely taken over by his family: his wife, Serafina, his daughter, Araceli, and his son, Jesús Ricardo, named after the aforementioned heroes of Ulúa, the Flores Magón brothers.

Don Cástulo, to judge by his bone structure, should be skinny, but he possesses the inevitable pot belly of someone who’s eaten bean tortas and peppers and fried pork all his life, washed down with the occasional beer. Doña Serafina works miracles, María del Rosario. She contributes to the household economy by baking cakes and pastries. The kitchen is hers. No one else enters it, and it happens to be the largest room in the apartment.

“That was why we picked it,” she says.

The kitchen has everything, including a long table coated with flour and even a baker’s oven. This is where the good woman prepares her meringues, wedding towers, and all kinds of fanciful concoctions for parties, first communions, and dances, and thanks to this little business, she manages to bring home 1,000 dollars a month — which would be 2,000 if she didn’t have to spend half her earnings on “raw materials,” as she calls them with pride, efficiently wiping her hands on her apron. Picture Andrea Palma at sixty. Picture that slender, languid beauty from the film Woman of the Port, who sold her love “to the men who come back from the sea,” only now with a body that’s less than slender and a bearing that’s anything but languid except in the very deepest recesses of her eyes. And if her husband’s eyes are as opaque as a visor, Serafina’s are as melancholy as a sudden twilight in the middle of the day.

“Businesslike,” the gringos say, don’t they? Well, that’s what Serafina is, my friend — not a minute of rest and not a single complaint, except in those eyes that yearn for something that never was. I repeat. I emphasize. Something that never was. The expression that speaks of a promise unfulfilled gives both the lady of the house and the house itself their melancholy. Nostalgia, lost dreams, what could have been. .