Carlos Fuentes - The Eagle's Throne

Reforming the constitution takes time, you say? I know that. That’s why we have to start now, nearly three years before the next election. Start raising the issue discreetly with the grass roots, the strongmen, governors, local legislators, businessmen, labor and agricultural leaders, intellectuals. We have to modernize the presidential succession just as we modernized the status of the legislators. Long live re-election.

Don’t think I’ve been wasting my time doing crossword puzzles. I’ve already spoken to your nemesis, Dark Hand Vidales (though not his Nine Evil Sons), and he seems quite sympathetic to my ideas. He takes the long view, because he’s the patriarch of a dynasty. But I must admit, Vidales is his own man. He doesn’t like being in debt to anyone and I’m afraid — alas! — that he wants to use me, and knows how to use me, more than I know how to use him.

You, on the other hand, are my beloved Play-Doh. You can and will do what I want because you owe me everything. You have one political virtue that will give you staying power, Onésimo. You’re ugly but not outrageously so. You’re ugly, fat, dark, and short in the most typical sense. You’re not even pockmarked or scarred. You could pass for a truck driver, or a rest room attendant, which is what you were when I met you. But since you’re invisible you’re not dangerous, and since you’re not dangerous, you know how to placate and handle large groups of insecure men. And who could be more insecure than our vociferous legislators?

Oh, Onésimo. Let’s work together. Remember, you can keep on pretending to serve the current president as you start to lay down the rules that will pave the way for me — and you, of course. The real problem of the presidential succession is not who, but how. You just keep on assuring the outgoing head of state, Lorenzo Terán, that you’re going to protect his property, his privileges, his family. That’s more than enough. Security is gold. In fact, it’s priceless. We all dream of it. Let the incumbent and his people dream of it, too.

Do you realize what a massive banquet of vengeance is going to take place in three years? Who is exempt? Our shameless Tácito, with his closet full of skeletons? The irreproachable Andino, with a wife who cheats on him all day long with every pair of trousers that comes her way? The untouchable María del Rosario, cold as an iceberg but who, like any iceberg worth its name, keeps three-quarters of herself submerged, revealing only the tip of her true self and none of her secrets? The upstanding, energetic Bernal, whose love affair with the aforementioned is a mere screen behind which lies an even bigger secret that will soon come to light? My old predecessor under the arches in Veracruz, keeper of another secret that he holds on to like a domino player hanging on to that double-white? And then we have the mysterious wild card in this great game, the callow Nicolás Valdivia, hoisted up to the position of undersecretary of the interior, thanks to the efforts and good graces of María del Rosario, and who, consequently, has set his sights on becoming secretary so that when Terán leaves office he can become a presidential candidate. There isn’t a single one of them, Onésimo, not one, I’m telling you, who isn’t expendable. But let me give you three rules of good political conduct.

First, kill your political enemy and mourn him for a month. Second, if you’re going to be the executioner, make sure you’re invisible.

And third, be afraid of the ghost of the political enemy you’ve killed. In other words, my near-illiterate Onésimo, you’d do well to read a little play called Macbeth, and wait for the day when the woods of your crimes begin to move toward the castle of your power.

And don’t rule out pure dumb luck. Like the kind that came my way the day three separate strikes broke out simultaneously on my watch and I crushed them, causing the death of thirteen strikers, but nobody realized because that was the day Axayácatl Pérez — the so-called Sultan of the Cha-cha-cha, and the most popular musician at the time— died. Everyone went to pay their respects to the great idol at the Gran León dance hall and then followed the coffin to the cemetery, and everyone forgot all about the nameless dead. The ones I was responsible for.

I write to you openly, Onésimo. I know that you’re the very soul of discretion, simply because nobody believes in your disclosures and you’re able to hide conveniently behind a veil of silence. Keep on doing that and keep me informed.

P.S. Don’t worry about keeping this letter. As soon as you’ve finished reading, it will self-incinerate chemically. You can’t copy it or show it to anyone, you bastard. Didn’t you ever see Mission Impossible ? The past is full of lessons for our present situation. Just ask yourself, in these dark days of our republic, how many letters, how many tapes, how many cassettes are being destroyed by their terrified recipients as soon as they read or listen to them? Just imagine. And don’t burn your sweet little fingers with my message.

Most dignified lady, is it possible to blackmail the blackmailed? I wouldn’t want to debase myself in your eyes, since I’m already so far down that you don’t even deign to look at me. I, on the other hand, look up: up, up, and away. Farther up and farther away, I dare say, than the two of you — and by “the two of you” I’m referring to Bernal Herrera, interior secretary, and you, María del Rosario Galván, his lover and the mother of his child. Yes, you.

Allow me to quote from a classic: “In the midst of the broad expanses surrounding Berchtesgaden, isolated from the quotidian world, my creative genius produces ideas that shake the world. At these moments, I no longer feel my mortality, my ideas transcend the mind and are transformed into facts of enormous dimension.”

Don’t think me presumptuous for invoking the words of Adolf Hitler. Whatever you think about the German Führer, he got as high and went as far as he wanted. His fall was terrible, true enough, but to fall from such heights is, in and of itself, a victory.

In other words, if I don’t know the limits of my own ambition, how will others know them? The question is one of proper timing, just as you yourself say in your letters to Bernal Herrera, which I take delight in reading before I go to sleep, as if they were a romantic advice column in a newspaper. Believe me, my dear lady, I know how to time things. Don’t forget — I have power because I, more than anyone else, have access. Need I say more? Other people have access, too. But I have it before anyone else. And don’t think I’m fooling myself. You and Herrera tell each other: “Tácito has access, but he’s totally unpopular.”

You, you diabolical little duo, lay traps for me. Very amusing ones, by the way. I know that you two are behind all those tributes in my honor carried out by powerful interest groups — unions and business associations where someone paid off by you praises me to the skies before some other crony of yours rips me apart. Nobody gets up to defend me. You think, don’t you, that you’ve both flattered my vanity and mocked my pride. That you’ve undermined me.

Wrong. You’ve only strengthened me. Every humiliating act, every cheap shot you fire my way strengthens me, stokes my courage, steels my spirit. Would you like to know how good I am at resisting offense? The other day I received a visit from César León, the ex-president for whom I worked as a young aide, some ten years ago. He complained about the way people have treated him since leaving the Eagle’s Throne, and accused me of mounting a smear campaign against him.