Carlos Fuentes - The Eagle's Throne

Mission accomplished, Mr. President. With the authority you lend me, I find all doors wide open. Even the doors of a fortress like the one at San Juan de Ulúa, that castle to which you sent me because you can trust me, because I answer only to you, because I hold your secrets and because if I betray you I betray myself.

“Only you can do me this immense favor,” you said to me, Nicolás. “There’s no one else I can trust.”

With sadness I looked at your sadness. It was almost as if you were saying to me, “This is the last favor I’ll ask of you. After this, if that’s what you want, we won’t see each other again!. .”

Instead, you said, “You’re going to drink from the most bitter chalice of all.”

You looked at me with an intolerable air of philosophical complicity. (Oh, how I have begun to identify and despise your tics.)

“Drink it down to the bottom. This act is the culmination of the political education I promised you on your pigeon-infested rooftop. Do you remember? Set off on your own path, if you want. Go back to being a long-haired anarchist, if that’s what you want. Your paideia is complete.”

If only you’d sent me alone, Nicolás. That was my one consolation. I’ll do what he asks me, I said to myself. When I accepted the pact with this devil disguised as an angel, which you are, Nicolás Valdivia, I knew in my heart of hearts I couldn’t avoid a final test, that “test of God” to which the old Norse heroes were subjected. Afterward I’d leave in a Viking ship. Even if the ship burned like a funeral pyre and I were the sacrificial victim. .

I was going to a funeral. But it was my own funeral. You’ve tested my loyalty to the point of making me a murderer. Your armed thug. And despite everything, look at how things are, look at what twins you and I’ve become, in the way we speak, walk, dress. . You Pygmalionized me completely, Nicolás Valdivia, you turned me into the mirror that you needed in order to feel secure, to feel that you, too, were young, intelligent, beautiful, rebellious. I’ve been your clone — in the way I talk, the way I walk. . and now, in the way I kill.

“Is it necessary?” I dared to ask you, recovering some of that old rebelliousness that you crushed with equal measures of passion and tyranny. .

“We can’t go on living with a ghost.”

“No. You can’t go on living with a ghost, Nicolás. Don’t generalize.”

“All right. I can’t live with a ghost.”

You chewed on those words like a bull until you belched in my face, “A restless ghost.”

You made me believe that I was going to the Ulúa dungeon alone. “Nobody will know but the two of us.”

You didn’t have to say any more. You and I always keep our secrets.

One by one, the prison guards opened the heavy metal doors for me, each one closing behind me like a symphony of iron, like in those old black-and-white James Cagney films that we loved to watch late at night, you and I. A melody of metal that I heard for the first and last time.

But it was just me. Me, with my own name, Jesús Ricardo Magón, son of an archivist and a baker; sole inhabitant of a utopia of pigeons and words; avid reader of Rousseau and Bakunin and Andreyev; the Anarchist of the Clouds; the Tarzan of the Rooftops; long hair and no more clothes than a pair of torn jeans and a Che Guevara T-shirt. Stained.

There I was, the pure young man who was going to depose all the corrupt tyrants, standing in front of the prison cell of Tomás Moctezuma Moro inside the San Juan de Ulúa Castle — the purest hero, the incorruptible politician who was so very irritating to everyone, and intolerable to you. A restless ghost, did you say? So restless that he could turn you into a scheming, weak person — one more over-ambitious, vulgar political arriviste. Is that why you feared Moro, because of the brutal contrast between his personality and yours? Was he such a threat to you, even in prison?

Tell me, have you thought about it? Even dead, might he still be a threat to you, my love ?

And there I was, standing in front of the door to Moro’s cell, almost agreeing with what you said: “There’s no such thing as an anarchist who doesn’t eventually turn into a terrorist. Your language is impotent, so you compensate with criminal action. Quod erat demonstratum. ”

I accepted it. It’s a crime, but a crime of state. Weren’t all the anarchists’ acts of terror against the kings, presidents, and empresses of the Belle Epoque? Don’t smile. Haven’t you read Conrad’s Under Western Eyes ?

“Women, children, and revolutionists hate irony.”

Anarchists don’t have the right to humor. Not even black humor, Mr. President?

I stopped in front of Tomás Moctezuma Moro’s cell. I was about to go in, to kill that symbol of legitimacy and purity that so many people find uncomfortable.

That was when, just behind me, I heard faint steps, as light as a butterfly. The cell door opened and I turned away from the infernal stench, as if that subterranean tunnel were the road to hell itself, the meeting place of all demons, this underground tunnel beneath the Castle of San Juan de Ulúa, its ceilings dripping not just with saltwater but liquefied blood, blood so old that it had become part of the universal currents of the oceans, the blood of hungry dogs and drowned sharks and hanged pirates and mermaid whores, and in that tunnel were vast jungles of seaweed and tightly shut oysters with baroque pearls. All this I felt pounding inside my head, Nicolás. The sunken, watery crypt of Ulúa, and I was going to have to walk through it alone, no one else would have this wretched experience but me.

No one but you and I would know what happened on that evening in May in the dungeons under the Ulúa Castle.

“Good evening, young man,” the greasy creature said to me. His presence engulfed me, like the smell of rancid pig’s fat. He was breathing in and out, in a stinking gasp, his voice both sleepy and threatening, like the voice of a sleepwalker who doesn’t know what he’s doing. .

A fetid odor emanated from his body, even from his sickly eyes— and from his insolent hand brazenly holding a Colt.45 automatic that seemed like a natural extension of his arm.

He wore black gloves.

Even in the darkness of the tunnel his raccoon eyes blazed with insanity.

“Come on, what are you waiting for, you idiot?” he called out, shoving the barrel of the gun into my ribs.

“I. . I thought I was alone,” I stammered.

“Alone? The crabs in Tecolutilla — now, they’re alone, and they walk backward. But me and you, my friend, we’re going to walk forward now.”

“I don’t want witnesses,” I said, summoning up my courage. “I thought it was just supposed to be me.”

“Yeah, so did I,” laughed the legendary strongman from Tabasco, Humberto Vidales, also known as “Dark Hand”—as if you, Nicolás, didn’t know he was going to be my partner in crime. “But the new president’s clever, he wants two witnesses for every crime. Even if both of them are guilty. That way, he says, one cancels out the other. As if murderers were marbles — same color, same size — that you could just swap, one for the other,” he said, laughing monstrously and expelling another gust of that sickly breath that could have awakened the dead.

Vidales opened the door to the cell.

Tomás Moctezuma Moro was asleep.

The famous nopal mask covered his face.

“He never takes it off, not even to sleep,” the obliging warden had said to me.

He didn’t want anyone to be able to tell what he was feeling, to detect tenderness or passion, to see the “still life” of his inner world, Nicolás, the “cold wounds,” as we put it one day here in Veracruz — but in very different circumstances.