Carlos Fuentes - The Eagle's Throne

Let us, through this exercise of love I have professed, arrive at seeing one another in your beauty, where, being one and the same in beauty, we see the both of us in your beauty, possessing your singular beauty; such that, looking at one another, each of us may see in the other his own beauty, since one and the other are both your beauty, and I am engulfed by your beauty, and in that way, I will see you in your beauty, and you will see me in your beauty, and then I will appear as you in your beauty, and you will appear as me in your beauty, and my beauty will be your beauty and your beauty will be my beauty; and that way I will be you in your beauty, and you will be me in your beauty; because your beauty will be my beauty, and that is how you and I will see one another in your beauty. .

You are not Narcissus’ mirror. You are the pool in which the two of us swim naked. You seal my wound. You are my delicate wound. I have loved only one man in my life, and it is You.

P.S. Don’t even think of going into the water at Mocambo. There are sharks off the coast and the nets a few meters from the shore often have holes in them. They could give you quite a scare! Remember, the good thing about sharks is that they never stay still. If a shark stops moving, he sinks to the bottom and dies there. Do you think the shark dreams while moving around like that? Ah, what a question, my love. And don’t walk along the beach. There isn’t any sand. Just mud. Wait for me with clean feet. And throw this letter to the sharks. If they eat it, perhaps they’ll learn something. They’ll learn to love. Did you know that sharks only fuck once in their sad lives?

It is with great pain, Mr. President, that I review the course of our relationship, for as I do so I realize that all along I’ve been the gadfly that criticizes your inactivity. A king sitting on a throne, motionless, believing he was ensuring the kingdom’s peace. If you moved your head to the left, it meant war and death. If you moved it to the right, it meant freedom and well-being, desired but utopian.

And now, as I’ve just seen you, as you’ve allowed me to see you, lying in your bed, emaciated, my friend, now only my friend, good and honest man that you are, a president inspired by his love for his country. . Now that I see you in the throes of death, now I truly understand that a president is neither born nor bred. He’s the product of a national illusion — or perhaps a collective hallucination. Once, I said to you, “Less glory, sir, and more freedom.”

How terrible and cruel politics is: Once you disappear, it’s only a matter of days before your glory and our freedom are lost forever. Mr. President, you’ve left the question of your succession unresolved. How can we make sure the next president is someone like you, a politician who is a decent man like Bernal Herrera, and not a snake like Tácito de la Canal?

How empty and melancholy, my beloved president and friend, my earliest advice to you sounds today: “Take advantage of the grace period at the beginning of the presidency. Honeymoons are brief. And democratic bonds get devalued from one day to the next.”

“The first rule for the exercise of power, Mr. President, is to disregard the immensity of your position.”

“The presidency is like the solar system. You are the sun, and your ministers are the satellites. But you are not God, nor are they angels.”

“The art of politics,” I told you then, “is not the art of the possible. It is the graffiti of the unpredictable. It is the scribble of chance.”

My poor president! Badgered for three years by Herrera’s pragmatism, Tácito’s fawning, and Seneca’s idealism! What would I say to you if this were your first day on the Eagle’s Throne? I’d remind you of the best aspects of our traditional benevolent dictatorship, so that you could endorse them or avoid them as you saw fit: “You don’t have to fear the president who’s passive, rather the president who’s unstoppably active.”

With you the opposite has always been true. Your passivity sparked more doubts than your action. And now, perhaps, you feel the supreme temptation of power. To be a leader who summons the energy of the nation and subjects us all to the voluptuous passivity of total obedience.

That is the easiest thing.

The most comfortable thing.

But it’s also the most dangerous. And you avoided that danger, my beloved, cherished president.

One day you said to me, “They think they’re fooling me by giving me those endless reports to read. They think I’m lethargic — as if I’ve been bitten by a tsetse fly. Wrong. I read at night, and I know everything. I’ve fooled them. I can sleep well at night.”

Yes, but the passive image you projected might be misinterpreted now. People might begin to demand a hyperactive president because authority can change its face from one day to the next (think about the past presidential successions, from Madero to Fox). The public feeds off paradox and adores contrast and contradiction.

Thank you, my dear friend, President Lorenzo Terán, for allowing me into your bedroom, where you’re bedridden, surrounded by nurses, doctors, intravenous tubes, sedatives. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to see your life complete.

I don’t know if we’ll ever see each other again. I know that you haven’t allowed anyone other than your faithful mosquito Seneca to enter this room where power is approaching its end.

Goodbye, Mr. President. .

This letter will be delivered to you by Jesús Ricardo Magón, a young aide to the new interior secretary, Nicolás Valdivia. I’m laughing. I can see you now, red as a beet at the idea of me divulging secrets to a government employee, no matter how lowly. You and I, Onésimo, with our determination and political wiles, can pull our Congress back into shape and put a few obstacles in the government’s way. . You and I, Onésimo, have all the gray matter we need to exploit the diffused power of our party-ocracy and make life hell for Lorenzo Terán. .

You asked for discretion. I’ll give you discretion, Onésimo, together with a present. The medium is the message, they said fifty years ago, and so if Valdivia’s little helper Magón is the medium, then he’s also the message.

This is it. The coast is clear for us to take action. I’ll get straight to the point. Cícero Arruza’s reading of the country’s domestic situation is all wrong. Arruza is a relic left over from another era, his day is over. He believes brute force is the only answer to problems, and that brute force can only be delivered by the army. This is his rather extravagant fantasy: He wants to unite all the governors and local bosses and then stage a military coup so that he can fill what he calls the “power vacuum ” (where would he have learned that?) created by President Lorenzo Terán’s passivity.

I’ve spoken to the leaders of each one of those local power bases, and I tell you, they’re delighted by the president’s passivity. Delighted because it’s in their interests. How could they not be happy about the absence of a central authority? Now they can do exactly what they want. You tell me if Cabezas in Sonora isn’t happy to govern his state with no interference whatsoever from the government. Or look at “Chicho” Delgado in Tijuana, making deals with the coyotes who smuggle illegals across the border and the U.S. immigration patrol that won’t let them through — until Governor Delgado extorts one and pays off the other. It is shameful, my dear Onésimo, an outrage that the forces of law and order in the United States have become so corrupt. I’m blushing. Haven’t I always said that the gringos know how to multiply any Mexican vice by the thousand and hide it by the million?