Carlos Fuentes - The Eagle's Throne

Vidales sensed what I was feeling.

“Don’t be sentimental. I know what you’re thinking. It’s better like this, while he’s sleeping, don’t you think? He won’t even know. More charitable, wouldn’t you say?”

He cackled.

“Only nuns are charitable. That’s what my old mentor Tomás Garrido always said, governor like me of Tabasco. He’s got his memorial stone in the Arch of the Revolution. You and me, boy, we’ll be lucky if we get ourselves a little brick in the Arch of the Transition, in the service of Lady Democracy. . ”

Again he laughed in his sinister way and nudged the back of the sleeping Tomás Moctezuma Moro with his foot. As quick as lightning, the Man in the Nopal Mask was awake and on his feet, peering out at us through the terrible slit in the mask that was like a metal gash. Moro stood still, like a heroic statue. Serene and unshakable. A statue — it was frightening, as if he were dead before he’d died.

Vidales fired.

Moro didn’t speak.

He fell on his face, as it were.

There was no display of emotion.

He didn’t cry, “Murderers!”

He didn’t beg for mercy.

He didn’t say a word.

We heard the dry sound of the iron mask hitting the floor.

That was how Tomás Moctezuma Moro died for the second time.

That, Mr. President, is how the ghost of Banquo was laid. Only it wasn’t Macbeth who occupied the empty seat of power. Because although it ended as it did in the Shakespeare play, this drama smacked of Veracruz, Mexico City, and Tabasco, as “Dark Hand” Vidales pointed out.

“Very clever, this new president,” he said, smiling and offering me a cigar. “I don’t turn you in and you don’t turn me in, right?”

He gave me an ugly look.

“Don’t forget — if anything happens to me I’ve got my dynasty of Nine Evil Sons to take revenge. Who’ve you got, smartass?”

Now he smiled.

“Go on, take it. It’s a Cumanguillo. I don’t go around offering these cigars to just anybody.”

He glanced down at Moro’s bleeding body.

“Get out of here. And don’t forget: this didn’t happen and neither of us was here. I’m in Villahermosa celebrating Son Number Eight’s eighteenth birthday. What about you, you little bastard?”

He closed the cell door and we were out in the eternal cold of the Ulúa labyrinth. There was no end to his conversation.

“You know who committed this crime?”

I shook my head, disquieted.

“One-Eyed Filiberto and don Chencho Abascal.”

“Who?” I asked idiotically.

Dark Hand laughed.

“One-Eyed Filiberto and don Chencho. They commit all my crimes. They’re invisible. No one will find them, because I made them up.” He stopped laughing.

“Don’t you forget. I’m not just the governor, I’m the boss. And when I die, I told you, I’ve got Nine Evil Sons to carry on the killing. We’re a dynasty, and we have our own motto: ‘Stone by stone and hit by hit, the Vidales men win with grit and spit.’ ”

And he went, leaving behind an aroma of Cumanguillo cigar and narcotic weed.

Don Jesús Reyes Heroles was right when he said that barbaric Mexico dozes but never dies, and wakes up furious at the slightest provocation.

Thank you, dear president, for making me see that with my own eyes.

Thank you for letting me be the person I was before I met you.

Thank you for proving to me that the anarchist always, inevitably, becomes a terrorist in the end.

Thank you for making me see that the doctrinaire rebel will inevitably make his insurrection a reality.

And watch out, Nicolás Valdivia, because now I’m a murderer.

And my next victim will be you.

My beautiful lady, I don’t want to seem insistent, but I do feel it’s time for you to honor the promise you made to me when we first met. I am what I am and that was your condition, wasn’t it?

“Nicolás Valdivia: I’ll be yours when you’re president of Mexico.” That’s why I’m at your window. I adore your coquettish ways. Before you open the doors of your house to me will we be repeating our initial rite? That’s fine. I’ll go along with your whims. You have the right to ask what you want of me. Your prophecy came true. I’ve arrived, as you so boldly foretold in January. Or should I say promised.

I realize that I owe my position not to María del Rosario Galván, but rather to a chain of events that nobody could have predicted at the beginning of this fateful (or very fortunate) year. Once again, need is a matter of chance. Don’t think that I’m any less grateful for that. On the contrary. I came to you with no commitments, pure and free. I have you to thank for my political education. I’m the star student who has come to give his teacher her prize. Might I now complete my erotic education in her bed?

I’ll follow your instructions. Tonight I’ll return to the woods surrounding your house and from there I’ll watch you take off your clothes in front of the lit window. Give me a sign. Turn off the other lights, light a candle, as if you were in one of those old mystery films — and I’ll come to the “beds of battle, soft field.”

Anxiously yours, N.

“In the dark night, a beautiful stranger. .” as the song goes. You, a stranger? Someone I don’t know? You’re my creation, my clay, my male Galatea. Yes, you do owe me. A lot. Everything, I’d say. Everything. Except the final prize. The jackpot. You owe that to people less significant. You used the dwarfs to get where you are. Why? Were you afraid of me? Were you afraid that if you owed me everything I’d turn you into nothing?

You’ve learned a lot, apart from knowing whom to trust. All we can do, Nicolás, is study character as much if not more than actions. What did Gregorio Marañón say about Tiberius? That power corrupted him. No! He was always evil. But, you see, the light of power is so powerful that it reveals what we’ve always been but have kept hidden in the shadows.

Your power and my power reveal our true selves. A couple of opportunists. Gangsters. Blackmailers. Predators. Criminals. Surely both of us know that the most ambitious person is always the one who dramatizes himself the least.

Be careful, then, of the least conspicuous. I told you this at the beginning so that you wouldn’t be taken in by Tácito de la Canal’s pretensions — he was the most transparent politician I’ve ever known. The only thing you could trust was his untrustworthiness. How could a hypocrite like Tácito have become president, a man who pretended to be on the brink of abject poverty so that one of us would rescue him?

And poor Seneca — he was the anti-Tácito. He wore his intelligence on his sleeve. He was what the fastidious English most deplore. Too clever by half. Too much brilliance blinds those who live in the shadows of mediocrity. Seneca offended people with his intelligence, just as Tácito offended people with his hypocrisy.

Seneca criticized himself: “My principles are solid, but my practice is terrible. All I can do now is grow old and cynical.”

No. He committed suicide. Despite not being married, marriage being the surest path to suicide.

César León. There you have him, discreet with the people who were useful to him, but brutally indiscreet with those he despised. Indiscretion won out. In his heart, he was a sentimental person. Outside politics, though, he felt displaced. As if the land he lived in as president was the only land that existed. In a play this would have been his closing speech: “I spoke to Destiny like an equal. I defied Fortune. I said: I dare you, bitch. I’m invulnerable to goodness. And better still, I’m invulnerable to evil.”