Carlos Fuentes - The Eagle's Throne

A time for war, a time for peace. How are we to separate them, to distinguish them? Let me tell you. Eight years ago, Tomás Moctezuma Moro started his candidacy with a platform of combative idealism that stirred up a lot of animosity — and there’s plenty of that in this country. His government would have been impossible. They would have attacked him from every side. They would have paralyzed him and plunged the country into a tub of molasses. They would have frozen him as ice freezes, without the slightest breath of wind. Because wind is a hammer, but ice is a tomb. And that is that.

Paulina, you were the person who gave me the idea when you were inspired to say that the cold was the “secret ministry.” And Paulina, is there any place colder, darker, more humid, more resistant to wind, but hammer and ice at the same time, than a prison cell in the fortress of San Juan de Ulúa?

The Man in the Nopal Mask. A symbol, Paulina, a symbol in a world that can’t live without them. A symbol. The iron mask, but painted nopal green so that the poor prisoner feels comfortable, at home, less displaced. For eight years he’s been believed to be dead. A wax figure melting under his tombstone, which reads:

TOMÁS MOCTEZUMA MORO

1973–2012

and a man in a green iron mask languishing in the dungeons of Ulúa for his own good, Paulina, you must understand that, for his own good, to save him from the death to which his impetuous idealism would have condemned him, to save him from the inevitable bullet of the hit man, the local boss, the drug trafficker, to save him from the vultures ready to eat him alive, I killed him, Paulina, I ordered his kidnapping for his own good and I myself, with the authority of an old patriarch from Veracruz, announced his assassination to the shocked country, and ordered the immediate capture and death of the assassin, an Argentinian madman called Martín Caparrós, a militant from the underground party Cattle to the Slaughterhouse: pure fiction, all of it, but the best fiction — that is, impossible to confirm. .

I organized the funeral here in Veracruz, since Tomás was originally from Alvarado, where every May the landscape is a forest of crosses asking forgiveness for that obscene language they use. In Alvarado that means a lot of crosses. You’ll think I’m digressing, getting carried away about the place I came from. No, Paulina, Tomás Moctezuma Moro was the favorite son of this state; he deserved all the crosses in Alvarado.

I made all the people who participated in the funeral farce disappear (don’t ask me how or where). The bogus embalmers, the manufacturers of the wax model, the inevitable witnesses (very few, only two or three) of the invented crime. . And then one dark night, Tomás Moctezuma Moro entered the Ulúa fortress with no identity beyond that of “The Man in the Nopal Mask.” And he’s been there for the past eight years, his existence unknown, his mask part of his face, stuck to his skin. .

Why, what for, my dear child? To save him from himself, from his fatal idealism, from the inevitable swarm of enemies he’d aroused. Anyone could have murdered him! He was a threat not to too many, but to all vested interests. My idealistic, pure, dedicated, passionate disciple, why, he was like my son: Tomás Moctezuma Moro, eight years locked up in the castle fortress, eight years with the nopal mask, eight years waiting to be released and brought back into the light, when his virtues would no longer be a threat but a guarantee of legitimacy, butter instead of mustard for the national sandwich, my dear Paulina.

Let them not look for five legs when the cat’s only got four. Let’s not deceive ourselves, because Mexico already has a president elected according to the constitution.

His name is Tomás Moctezuma Moro.

He’s our cat — but tomorrow he’ll be a tiger capable of finishing off all those mediocre pretenders aspiring to succeed Lorenzo Terán.

Paulina. Set the wheels in motion for Congress to reinstate Tomás Moctezuma Moro and inaugurate him as the legitimate president elect — we don’t need an interim president, an acting president, or new elections. Stop César León in his tracks. Push that pusillanimous Onésimo Canabal out of the way. We have our president. It’s Moro’s hour. Eight years ago he was killed. And today his restless idealism is the best medicine we can give this country after Lorenzo Terán’s infuriating spinelessness.

Look me in the eye, Paulina. Look at me and see everything that’s going to happen. Better still, imagine that everything that’s going to happen has already happened.

And when you look at me again, don’t be afraid. My blood has to run cold in order to freeze everyone else’s.

So, my precious little melon, you were going to become president with my help? So first you had to become the perfect smoke screen that would fool the world, and you and I were going to form an alliance to make my husband Andino Almazán acting president so that he’d haul you up onto the Eagle’s Throne? So I was to deceive my husband and lead him to believe I was working on his behalf to make him president? Is it possible I actually trusted you and your cynicism to get me where I wanted to go?

“My morals are inferior to my genius,” you whispered to me as you blew your fetid breath into my ear.

Let me laugh out loud at your vanity, you disgusting idiot. You’ve been the doormat of Mexican politics. They say you chose the wrong vocation. That you should have been a priest, not a politician.

“You’re wrong. He’s both.”

That’s what my husband said when he told me that the interior secretary, Valdivia, had you by the balls with that MEXEN scheme, and that he had to appeal to Andino to make sure the treasury kept it under wraps. . And now, as if that weren’t enough, you’re trying to rope my husband into your corruption with a new financial scam.

You’re a priest. You’re a politician. But you’re also an idiot.

In other words you’re a piece of shit, and your only consolation is that in this goddamn country shit attracts ass-kissers, who are like flies. How will you go down in history, poor Tácito?

“Tácito de la Canal? He had problems with his digestion. A saintly aunt. A senile father. A bald head. Nails that went farther than his eyes could see. Programmed nightmares.”

“Was he a fag?”

“Not that I know of.”

“But he was a bachelor.”

“That doesn’t prove anything.”

“Who did he sleep with?”

Oh, you bastard, they can link you with every last secretary and waitress for all I care, but I don’t want anyone mentioning my name in connection with you. I’m warning you. I don’t want to hear anyone say, “Of course. He was sleeping with Josefina Almazán, ‘La Pepa,’ you know. . ”

Did you think I’d go that far to defend you, you loser? What haven’t you done in order to get to the top? Do you think I haven’t seen you talking on the phone to the late president (when we had telephones, you bastard), standing up as you talked, clicking your heels every time you said “Yes, sir!”? Do you think I haven’t seen you saving the stubs of the cigarettes that killed President Terán in the end? Do you think I haven’t seen you standing in front of the mirror, saying, “Nothing defines me more than my desires. They are unique. Mine and mine alone!”

Oh, and to think of how I put up with your nonsense, your vain pretensions. I was working on you the way they do in the Yucatán, using you to help my husband — I was always Andino Almazán’s loyal wife, even when I let you lick my ass, you worm. Look at yourself in the mirror. Do you really think a woman could fall in love with you, my beautiful darling? Do you think I didn’t want to piss myself laughing when after your pitiful orgasms you’d say, “I’m devoured by ambition. I want to leave my mark on the wall of time, and all I have, like a lion, are my claws”?