Carlos Fuentes - The Eagle's Throne

Wherein lies the greatness, I ask you, of Plato’s dialogues, which serve as the basis for all human discourse in a Western world freed from Oriental despotism? In the fact that they set the stage for you and me talking on a rooftop in Mexico City in the year 2020. The Socrates— Plato duo transforms two random interlocutors into companions in a place and at a time that otherwise — i.e., without the word — would never exist. If we didn’t have this time and place to share, we’d know nothing about each other. In fact, we wouldn’t even know the other existed. We would be alien to each other, like ships crossing in the night, strangers walking past each other on the great boulevard of the silent.

What is it that unites this time and place we share, Jesús Ricardo?

The word, the word brings us together one minute and then tears us apart the next, the word that, whether friend or enemy, in the end acquires an independent meaning. And it’s that transience that drives us, my young and beloved friend, in this hopelessly polluted stoa covered in pigeon shit, to utter the next word, knowing that it too will slip from our grasp and enter into the great realm of reason that engulfs us.

“Don’t ever stop talking. Don’t ever say the last word.”

Plato said that writing was parricide because it continues to signify in the absence of the interlocutor. As long as I write to you, then, it will be fratricide. And only on the day — distant if not altogether impossible — that you write to me, can we begin to speak of parricide. Parricide: Scarcely nine years separate us. And I’m already playing the role of a perverse Mephistopheles, offering the young Faust his chance to be old. To grow up.

Have you read Gombrowicz’s marvelous Ferdydurke, the great twentieth-century Polish novel? For him, growing up is tantamount to growing corrupt. We kill the advantages of adolescence by becoming adults. We kill the inconsolable youth by corrupting him with maturity. But since we are, inevitably, not alone in our youth, we end up creating one another, running the risk of creating ourselves from the outside, deformed and inauthentic. “To be a man means never to be oneself.” If that’s how you want to view our relationship, so be it. Let yourself get a bit corrupted.

“Being partly corrupt is like being partly a virgin,” you say.

And I tell you the same thing over and over again.

You can’t reject what you don’t know. Put your ideas to the test. That’s the only measure of the intellectual integrity you preach. You don’t have to commit to anything. Come and work with me in the president’s office — that’s where you’ll see “the belly of the beast,” as José Martí said when living in the United States. You don’t have to sacrifice your ideas. In fact, you’ll see how resilient they are. All you have to sacrifice is your appearance. You can’t work in Los Pinos with that Tarzan hair of yours. You’ll have to cut it. And you can’t go to work in blue jeans. But you don’t need to go overboard, either. Don’t dress in that vulgar middle-class office-worker style like Hugo Patrón, your sister’s little boyfriend. Let Armani be your best friend. I’ll see to that. Make up your mind, you heir to utopia. Stick with me. Let me save you from your impotent language that can only lead to criminal action when desperation sets in.

I ask this of you as a double test.

First of all, a test of your ideas. You’re an ideological coward if you don’t put your ideas to the challenge.

Second, a test of my friendship, which deepens with each passing day. I love and desire you for who you are — you know that. But also because I see myself in you. Not a duplicate of myself but a similar, separate being. I admit that to love you is to love myself. To love myself as I would like to be. I like women. I love them as intensely as I love you. In women I’m always shocked to see the person that I’m not. I see the other and it dazzles me. That’s why I adore women and fall, time and time again, into the abyss of passion for women. The passion for all that’s different. With you, Jesús Ricardo, I feel that I can love myself as I would like to be loved by me.

Consider my offer. This gate, unlike the one in the Bible, is not a narrow one.

My very old and dear friend, the time has come to unleash the hounds of war. We can no longer put off the selection of the person who will succeed you as president of the republic. The return of our ex-president César León is a part in the well-oiled machine of our electoral democracy. And it’s not the only one. León is plotting with the president of Congress to declare you incapacitated so that Onésimo Canabal himself can take your place and push through the constitutional reform that will permit the re-election of, guess who, César León. On the other hand, a constitutional amendment requires time: It will take at least a year to get a majority vote either way from all the states in the federation. And that can only happen after the amendment has been passed by two thirds of Congress.

So César León must have another ace up his sleeve. What it is, we don’t know. And that, my friend, is our weakness. The constitutional reform has the whiff of a smoke screen to me. The real blow is going to come at us from another direction. Make no mistake about that. And be prepared.

Too much time, Mr. President, too much waste. You can be sure that as long as the pawn in this game, Onésimo Canabal, follows César León’s advice, León is going to give us a scare and end up with all the chips in his pocket. Which ones? I don’t know, I don’t know, Mr. President. The only advice I can give you, from my head and from my heart, is that you have to act. Now. Get ahead of the game. Set up separate meetings with your two aspiring successors, Tácito de la Canal and Bernal Herrera. Order them to tender their resignations, announce their candidacies, and launch their campaigns.

They won’t have any choice but to do what you say. And if they hesitate, just fire them. You’ll see how they listen to you, Mr. President. My feminine intuition tells me that this is all you have to do if you want to win this round against our very astute ex-president.

What have I always told you, Mr. President? Not making decisions is worse than making mistakes. Make a decision. Remember, there are no beginnings in politics. Only moments. And the ability to seize them before they’re gone. To be cunning, in other words. Cunning in what sense? you may ask. Well, your interior secretary has shown it in each one of the cases currently at hand. Either you deal with a problem or bury it. What you can’t do is leave a request to languish without rejecting or accepting it. You might say, rightly, that the lack of decisiveness in the case of the university strikes means that the problem is unsolvable. But that lack of decisiveness, you see, is precisely the solution: Let there be no solution, until all the parties are tired out. On the other hand, you’ve kept your investors happy with your policies, and the workers’ unrest has subsided because of need — their need to eat. Meanwhile, allowing the peasants a meaningless victory would be a defeat for the local bosses who’ve always counted on that eternal cannon fodder, the indentured agricultural slave. Very well. But what we’re facing now, Mr. President, is a strictly political test.

Who will succeed you in the 2024 election?

What forces can he rely on?

Who will challenge him?

And don’t ever let yourself wonder, Who will be most loyal to me?

Everyone, Mr. President, will betray you. Even — and I’m telling you this so that you see the extent of my frankness and my friendship— the man who’s my favorite for the succession. .