Carlos Fuentes: The Eagle's Throne

Yes, that glimpse of you is all I would have needed. And I would have treasured the trifle you deigned to present to me and only me, María del Rosario, because I thought: This is for me, only for me. This midnight spectacle, unfolding before my eyes from the only lit room in a house tucked away in the middle of a pine forest, she offers it all up to me. .

Why did you do it, dear lady, what infinite cruelty, what evil compulsion drove you to make me share the vision that I believed was incomparably mine with another peeping tom, another voyeur like myself, standing a few meters in front of me, whose presence was revealed by the rustling of branches, normally an imperceptible noise but thunderous to my sensitive, lovesick ears? Why? Why that intruder into a vision that I thought belonged to me, or us, you and me alone?

Who was the other voyeur? Was he a random intruder? Does he know your habits, my dear mistress? Did he, as I did, keep a date that you had made with him, a rendezvous befitting — forgive me if I offend you — a professional courtesan, a high-class whore? Can you tell me the truth? Can you at the very least save me from being a vile, pathetic peeping tom, a madman, a deceived lover?

I write to you now, President Terán, to wish you the best of luck in your annual address to Congress, now rescheduled for early January in light of the current national emergency, so that you, with a courage I admire, will be speaking before the president of the United States delivers her State of the Union address. The White House’s reaction to decisions you made over Christmas and the San Silvestre holiday — to keep the price of oil high and to call for an end to the U.S. occupation of Colombia — can only be described as punishment. I don’t, however, recommend that you use those terms when you make your address: Instead, stick to the pretext of an international communications collapse. Well, don’t say “the system collapsed,” first of all, because that kind of wording will bring back unhappy memories of the old-fashioned frauds committed under the PRI’s “perfect dictatorship,” which we have finally put behind us. And secondly, because “collapse” is the kind of verb that has an unpleasant way of turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy, to use an expression coined by our cousins to the north. Instead I recommend that you avoid any criticism of the U.S. government, and that you present this as a temporary technical mishap in the global satellite-communications network, caused by an unforeseen reaction to the duplication of digits at the start of the present year, 2020. A sort of delayed but likely follow-up to that Y2K phenomenon that had everyone in a panic before the year 2000, when all the computers in the world — personal, governmental, at banks and airports, public, private — were supposedly going to go haywire when their systems went from “19” to “20.” It doesn’t matter if they don’t believe you tomorrow, as long as they buy the story today. Use it. You have nothing to lose. Just don’t mention the U.S. government, Mr. President. Talk about a simple technical malfunction. Forgive me for being so repetitive. More than a reminder to you, these things I write are like little memos to myself — you know how I am. In your great wisdom and trust, I ask you to understand and forgive your old friend. Next: Make sure to touch only very lightly on the topics of Colombia and the oil prices, and focus instead on our domestic problems. I know that some members of the cabinet — mainly those so-called technocrats — will blame things on me as interior secretary. They’ll say I’m out to profit from the situation. That I’m positioning myself — forgive me for being so blunt, but you and I are more than just superior and underling, president and trusted employee; we’re old friends, and I always think of us like that — for the presidential succession that will happen in less than three years, etc. You know me, and you know that I’ve always advised you with two things in mind. One, I am your loyal colleague, and two, I put the interests of Mexico above all else. I wouldn’t be interior secretary if I weren’t able to equate those two things. Loyalty to Mexico and loyalty to the president. Having established that, allow me to reiterate with the greatest conviction that the major problems we need to address swiftly and wisely are the three strikes going on as we speak.

First, the students who are refusing to pay registration fees or take admission exams, and who are presently occupying various buildings on the university campus.

Second, the striking workers at the factory in San Luis Potosí that is majority-owned by a Japanese corporation.

And third, the protest march led by peasants at La Laguna who are calling for restitution of the lands promised to them by President Cárdenas’s agrarian reform, lands which have been wrested from them little by little by the corrupt local bosses in the north.

My recommendations, Mr. President, are as follows:

Ignore the students. They can keep on occupying the dean’s office and every other university building until hell freezes over, for all we care. With the students, anything but repression. Never forget the 1968 massacre in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, and how, believing it had achieved some kind of triumph, the system in fact committed suicide that day by sparking public outrage, collective anguish, and, in the end, the demise of authoritarianism and the single-party system, in addition to eternally disgracing the president at the time and forcing his successors to distance themselves from him, the “butcher of Tlatelolco,” even when it meant defying economic logic. Result: We floundered from crisis to crisis, all because we killed some students. Just let the situation sit and rot. All those students brimming over with solidarity today will come to their senses and think of their careers tomorrow.

Let us remain calm, Mr. President. More imperturbable than Benito Juárez.

Now, with regard to the striking workers at the car factory who are demanding outrageous wage increases and dare to compare their salaries to those of their counterparts in Japan, break the strike by force and announce to the world that Mexico welcomes foreign investment with open arms. We have a massive supply of cheap labor, we ’ll all end up winning. As for the disgruntled workers, they’ll be happy if you give them a free movie theater and a decent hospital.

You might argue that police intervention in San Luis Potosí would work in favor of the inveterate local boss Rodolfo Roque Maldonado, but I would argue that the mere deployment of forces on our part would intimidate Maldonado and get those clever Japanese on our side. It’s a risk, no doubt. Consider it, Mr. President. After all, we don’t want to play around when it comes to our bread and butter. Remember the old Pedro Infante song? The wife’s given two pesos for rent, phone, and electricity. Ah, the nostalgia for those pre-inflation days. Anyway, a little money is better than none, and the families of the San Luis workers won’t put up with their men not bringing money home. Foreign corporations will see that the authorities here are willing and able to defend foreign investment. How else did the Asian tigers make all their money? Just ask the ghost of Lee Kwan Yu. Singapore is a safe place because they cut off your hands if they catch you stealing. In addition, my dear president, a show of force in the region of San Luis Potosí will also serve to subdue the local bosses who take advantage of the vacuums in the regional power structure created by our drawn-out transition to democracy. I know I’m repeating something I’ve just mentioned. Forgive me for belaboring the point. But we have often granted democracy only to lose authority, creating pockets of anarchy filled by an endless string of local bosses and the forces they command: Maldonado in San Luis, Félix Elías Cabezas in Sonora, “Chicho” Delgado in Baja California, José de la Paz Quintero in Tamaulipas.