Carlos Fuentes - The Eagle's Throne

And as for the Tampico — Matamoros axis, General, where the drug traffic comes in like Adelita in that old song — if by sea on a warship, if by land on a military train — who runs things there? The president? You? Secretary Herrera? No, the guy in charge is the drug-traffickers’ top dog, don Silvestre Pardo, along with the local boss working for him, José de la Paz Quintero. On the Tijuana — Mexicali strip, the whole prostitution racket is controlled by Narciso “Chicho” Delgado, the big boss who poses as a whale lover but makes a living trading in monkey flesh, if you know what I mean, General.

Shall I go on? Am I telling you anything you don’t already know? Must I tell you that we’ve lost control of both borders, the one in the north to drug cartels, prostitution, and human traffickers; the one in the south to the European revolutionary-tourist trade that inherited those ski mask things from the late (disappeared) Subcomandante Marcos in order to found the Chiapas Socialist Collective, selling junk— balaclavas, huipiles, wooden rifles, manuscripts written by Marcos, condoms with the registered trademark “The Uprising,” Zapatista hats, and miniatures of the Virgin of Guadalupe — to tourists looking for a thrill, and devoting themselves to opening “humanitarian” doors to the Guatemalan Indians fleeing the torture, death, and arson meted out by Guatemala’s elite. Why don’t those white Guatemalans take a lesson from us and promote some interracial mixing so that there isn’t a single pure Indian left? Aside from all that there’s the whole of the southeast, dominated by the sinister “Dark Hand” Vidales from Tabasco.

For fuck’s sake, General! For fuck’s sake! Are we going to let things go on festering like this? Or are we finally going to take action, you and I, to save the nation through the purifying work of the armed forces, the last stronghold of Mexican patriotism? Are we going to sit through that endless electoral process that will drag on for almost three years? Are we going to let a couple of damn lapdogs like de la Canal or Bernal Herrera get into Los Pinos so that they can string us along even more? Or are we going to find the way, General, to replace President Lorenzo Terán, who has been badmouthed by the press and the general public as an ineffectual bureaucrat with a cushion stuck to his ass? Are we going to find the way, General, to get ourselves a president with a strong hand and a tough character, who can get this damned country in order?

I know you don’t write letters, not even condolence cards, or Christmas cards, but give me a sign, General, my good friend, one little sign — I’m real good at reading them. .

Oh, Tomás, I wish I could cry over your grave. But I know the grave is empty. The headstone is there. Your name is there. The dates of birth and death are there:

TOMÁS MOCTEZUMA MORO

1973–2012

But you’re not there. There were two coffins, one on top of the other. A box with a false bottom, with a wax model of you melting away in the top part, and nothing below. Nothing, my love, except for the little pin with the eagle and the serpent that you always wore on your lapel, which ended up in the corner of that false coffin — either because the people who buried you were careless, or because you yourself left it there as a sign of your presence, a way of saying to me, “Dulce, I was here, look for me. . ”

What little I have to give me hope! A forgotten pin! An empty coffin! And your wax figure melting away into a puddle of make-believe.

“Make-believe life.” I learned that from you. That’s what you always said about politics. And yet my pain and loneliness today are so real, Tomás.

Nobody has helped me. I exist for no one. I existed only for you because that was what you wanted, and I accepted it gratefully.

I bribed the cemetery guard to let me open the grave. You yourself were the one who said to me, “Everything in Mexico can be bought. How can we put an end to that curse?”

After they killed you, nobody ever saw your remains. They said that you had been completely disfigured by the bullet that entered your brain. Respect for the dead! But then why is it that your wax figure in the first coffin didn’t have a single wound? Why did your head remain intact, even when it melted? Respect for the dead!

I had no idea who you were. And you had no idea who I was. We loved each other without knowing, without asking questions. It wasn’t a pact. We didn’t talk about it. The way we met was too mysterious. Mystery is what brought us together and mystery was to keep us together.

I didn’t know what my body was until you taught me to love it and discover it because you loved it and discovered it, over and over again, revealing it to me. .

“Your eyes change color in the daylight, and at night they become the only light. . Your earlobe doesn’t need an earring, just as your sweet, clean hands need no jewels. . Your mouth is always as fresh as a fountain. . and your vagina is the wound that doesn’t scar so that I can hurt it as much as I want. . If you had no hair there, I would paint it on, Dulce María. . I travel up your body, touching your belly as if it were the naked field where I want to be buried. . Your breasts are restless, they bounce up and cry out for attention. . Deeper, deeper, deeper as I caress your ass, strong, hard, and generous, as if to compensate for your waist, slender as a birch tree, and I bury my face forever in your long black hair, and make you swear to me that you’ll never cut off that hair, my darling, the black cascade that brings me closer to nature, the true essence of nature that I find in the landscape of your body, the nature I can’t live without. . and if I die, I want them to wrap my head in your hair so that I can breathe in your scent until the end of the world, my love, my woman, my bride. . ”

I can’t remember a time when you didn’t make me feel that I was revealing something that I’d never known I had. The right to my body.

“Oh, the majesty of your body, Dulce.”

That wasn’t your real body in the grave. I didn’t know who to go to. And that’s because I’m nobody, my love. The secret lover of Tomás Moctezuma Moro. Nobody. Secret. Like at the beginning. The same. My darling, imagine my shock, my desolation, when I didn’t find you in your own grave and I became mysteriously, once again, the stranger who saw you for the first time nine years ago, and whom you looked at, too, like the stranger you were to me.

That feeling stays in my soul, my darling. We saw each other without knowing who we were. You were my nameless love, and I your anonymous bride. . Because we were already lovers, if not before we met, then from the moment we laid eyes on each other, at that José Luis Cuevas retrospective at the Modern Art Museum in Monterrey, both of us lost in that world of vanished figures and almost invisible colors, as if instead of painting, Cuevas “filled the air,” as you said when you walked over. How could I ever forget your first words: “Cuevas fills the air. . ”

I didn’t fully understand what you meant, but I knew, I knew, yes, I realized that only you appreciated what mattered: You had an eye for art and an eye for women.

I said to myself, “I am woman,” and I smiled.

I wasted little time in correcting myself.

“I am a woman,” I said, and stopped smiling.

Then I felt happy again.

“I am the woman.”

You stared at me boldly, with impudence, desire, tenderness, who knows what else. . I looked into your eyes, as black and deep as two pebbles stuck forever at the bottom of the sea, which you offered me as if I were a little girl playing on the beach.