Carlos Fuentes - The Eagle's Throne

“My protection,” I murmured, realizing my stupid mistake as soon as the words came out.

The Old Man who never laughed stopped laughing but didn’t stop smiling.

“Never believe in the improbable. Only believe in the incredible.”

“But you’re offering me neither the improbable nor the incredible. You’re offering me nothing.”

“Oh my goodness. What if I told you Mexico needs hope? Someone to create absolute ideals and relative realities? To fuel the imagination?”

“I’d think you were fooling me.”

“See? And yet I’m telling you the truth, the whole truth. And I’m also giving you the key to my secret, just in case you really do want to know what it is.”

“You’re giving me a pebble, and I want the whole rock, Mr. President.”

“A pebble thrown into the water creates a tiny ripple, but the tiny ripple makes waves.”

Pause. Sigh. Resignation.

“And in the end, all those waves are the same.”

In an instant he recovered the energy that had been sucked out of him, as if the Gulf of Mexico were a giant drain. And that afternoon, perhaps it was. On my first visit, the Old Man had talked of the tide of invaders that had entered Mexico through Veracruz. But tides have to go in, taking some of the land with them, land that’s used up, no longer wanted or needed. What would the tides of the gulf carry away with them now? Everything, I thought, if the Old Man let them. Nothing if he was stubborn enough to stop the ebb and flow of the sea.

“The mist of conspiracy hovers over Mexico and no man’s head is higher than the air he breathes,” he said, and for the first time I detected a dreamy note in his voice — perhaps incongruous and rather unjustified, but dreamy nonetheless. Then he looked away toward the docks, the castle, the water. .

“Polluted air, sir.”

“I’m going to tell you one thing,” said the Old Man, his face and tone of voice back to normal now. “If you want to breathe easy, if you want to cut through some of that fog and put an end to all those conspiracies, you need to give the country back its hope.”

“Again?” I asked, resigned.

“I’m talking about a symbol,” the ex-president said, his voice growing stronger. “Cheated, lost, corrupted, this country can only be saved if it finds the symbol that can deliver it the promise of new hope.”

“But for a long time now we’ve given the people new hope — every six years, in fact — and then they lose it. Do you have the key to eternal hope?”

He went silent for some time because he was thinking. Out of courtesy I tried not to look at him. That was when I noticed that the vultures were no longer flying over Ulúa, and I wondered if I’d noticed them in January when I made my first visit to the Old Man. The sense that the vultures weren’t circling overhead may have been something I’d felt before and that now, as if life were a dream, I was feeling for the first time, having only dreamed it before. Or was it the other way around? Did I feel it first and then dream about it afterward?

“There once was a cat with feet made of rags. . ” the parrot interrupted, chirping away.

“A symbol that will offer new hope.”

“Again?”

Silence.

I dared to speak for him.

“You’ve just said it. Mexico needs a symbol. Have you got one?”

He nodded his graying head. His receding hairline lent a noble air to his features. He looked up.

“Haven’t you wondered why the vultures aren’t flying over Ulúa today?”

Now I was the one to respond without words. I shook my head. “I had a very foolish and tactless government minister working under me. My advice to him was this: ‘Be careful. You’ve been accused.’ ”

“Of what, Mr. President?”

“Of telling the truth.”

He went silent, María del Rosario.

I think I understood, María del Rosario.

“The moment still hasn’t arrived?”

“No. Not yet.”

“What message shall I take to the capital?”

“When the coyotes howl, howl along with them. You don’t want people thinking you’re a cat.”

“Do you want me to tell you again?” the parrot chanted.

“Thank you, Mr. President. Is that all?”

“No. One more thing. But it’s for your ears only, Valdivia.”

“I’m listening.”

“My only regret is that I know every last story, and yet I’ll never know the full story.”

He turned to look at San Juan de Ulúa.

“I’ll summon you again for a visit, young man. When the moment arrives.”

The sun-drenched palm trees were nowhere to be seen in the deep circles around his eyes.

“Meanwhile, I can offer you the title for a novel that has yet to be written.”

I waited for him to speak.

“The Man in the Nopal Mask.”

General, if anyone respects hierarchy it is I, your loyal servant Cícero Arruza. Forgive me for being insistent. This time I’m sending my faithful assistant Mauser with a tape for you of my voice so that you can hear out loud my sincerity and my anguish. Now is the time, my general. Things are boiling over and this is our opportunity for action, to make the things you and I want happen. The one thing we can’t have is a power vacuum, but we’re heading straight for that cliff. Ask yourself this: When was the last time the president was seen in public? I can tell you, I’ve been keeping track. The beginning of January, when he read his address and got us into this mess with the gringos. For three months we haven’t seen the so-called head of state’s face! If that isn’t the famous power vacuum we’ve all talked about, it’s a hell of a hole. Holes, holes, everything in life is holes. Crawl out of a hole, get into a hole, shit down a hole, stick it up someone’s or let them stick it up ours. . I’m going to be frank with you, General. Either we act now or they’re going to stick it to us both. You’re waffling, I can tell. I can tell you’ve even distanced yourself a little from your loyal subordinate Cícero Arruza. What’s the matter? Isn’t it kind of late to suddenly discover the kind of man I am? Forgive the frankness. I’m back where I was, at a bar, General — you know what they say, we only win battles in the bar and in bed. Do you remember that man from Tabasco, González Pedrero, who made our lives hell with “the dart of truth”? Wasn’t it González Pedrero who said that the Mexican Revolution may have left a million men dead, but that they’d died in bars during shoot-outs and not on the battlefield? I tell you that just to remind you: You know who I am, you know where I come from, and you know what I’m capable of. And I’m reminding you because I want you to be certain of one thing: Put the violence on my tab. The deaths are on me. . I’m not going to hide anything from you, General, I want you to know who you’re dealing with so that you won’t be cheated on like the husband in the song who asks, “Whose gun is this? Whose watch, whose horse whinnying in the stable?”. . Sorry about my voice. Whenever I drink I always feel the urge to sing. . Remember who’s on your side. . I once told you, didn’t I, how much I miss real violence — not those little exercises where we bust up meetings by letting loose mice or pouring piss down from the balconies. Let me remind you of my credentials, for your peace of mind. As regional commander in various states of our union, General, I finished off the malcontents as well as the rebels in a single stroke of pure genius. I disposed of the opposition leaders in Nayarit by slipping Benzedrine into their rum and Cokes while they were celebrating some supposed electoral victory. They’ve got nothing to celebrate anymore. The opposition candidate in Guadalajara disappeared quietly at a building site for the metro. Building site, my ass, General. More like a grave site. . I eliminated those annoying university students ten years ago by locking them up in a laboratory full of infected rabbits. And people don’t mess around when it comes to hunger, you know. . As for those rebels in Chiapas, I ordered them to be shot in a laundromat in Tuxtla Gutiérrez just because I knew the blood would contrast so well against those white sheets. . When the Yucatán tried to secede from the federation again, backed up by official and popular support, I made the whole bureaucracy disappear (don’t ask me where they ended up), and then I invited the townspeople to visit the empty government offices. There wasn’t a soul there.