Carlos Fuentes - The Eagle's Throne

Did you know he always carries a miniature guillotine in his pocket, and that he plays with it the way other men play with their penises?

President Lorenzo Terán, on the other hand, was too discreet. He said very little or nothing at all. Yes, he did have perfect muscular reflexes. That was why he was so good at handling public relations. He knew that in Mexico the forces of nature are on our side. If it isn’t an earthquake, it’s a flood. Or a drought or a hurricane. In Mexico natural disasters get turned into public profits. All a president has to do is make an appearance at the site of a disaster and disappear again. That’s how he avoids having to deal with the deeper issues.

But tell me, has there ever been anyone more inconspicuous than Onésimo Canabal, president of Congress, that fugitive of the public rest rooms? Mediocre, submissive, embarrassed by his ugly physique and humble background. But wasn’t Jesus born in a stable? Nobody would ever imagine that the real kingmaker of this succession would be poor old Onésimo Canabal.

Nor did anyone know that he was conspiring with your good friend Paulina Tardegarda, a viper capable of repainting paradise with the colors of hell. And I thought it was I who was the double of Madame de Maintenon, the princes’ tutor who ended up marrying the king! Is that what I should do, retire like Louis XIV’s other lover, Madame de Montespan, to a convent to train young nuns to be better courtesans than I? Or do you think that with your current power, Nico, you can somehow prevent the succession process, the 2024 elections that I swear will take Bernal Herrera to the presidency? Yes, Bernal Herrera. For the good of the country, Nicolás. Because Bernal is discreet — that is, if the word “discretion” means prudence, caution, tact, good judgment as well as the measured, intelligent use of uncontested force.

We’re going to fight, you and I, Nicolás Valdivia, because you can’t fool me. You’ve become merely a substitute president until 2024. Did you think I couldn’t sense your ambition? You can’t succeed yourself. But you can immortalize yourself. That’s what I fear. A colossal scheme of yours to stay in power.

You have an arsenal of pretexts. The economic crisis, internal revolutionary uprisings, foreign invasion, power vacuums. What won’t you do to keep yourself in power! Everything short of aspiring to the Nobel Peace Prize. And that ambition will wound you irredeemably, for sure. That aside, I fear you. This is the struggle now. Bernal Herrera and I will do whatever is necessary to make you relinquish the presidency in 2024. Whatever is necessary — even the impossible. Just as you will do all that is necessary and even impossible to stay on the Eagle’s Throne forever.

You’re not Lorenzo Terán, a good and democratic man who was not in love with power. Ah, we always need a dignified, noble figure who can redeem the wretchedness of the rest of us. Now that man is Bernal Herrera, as it was Lorenzo Terán before, but he was ill. You think you’ll go on forever. You do have one virtue, I admit. You stand for new blood. But you’ll be old soon enough — as soon as you begin to spill the blood of others, something you’ll do if you want to stay in power. But remember the price of blood. Tlatelolco, October 2, 1968. It lasted one night but cast a long shadow.

Today you’re lauded for being young and clean. A reason for hope. Worthy of your position. But power will corrupt you in the end. Take it from me. You don’t know how to resist temptation. I know you. You don’t know when to stop. And you’ve proven as much, efficiently and perhaps a bit hastily, ever since you became president. You got rid of Tácito, César León’s back in exile, Cícero Arruza has been assassinated, Andino Almazán publicly cuckolded, and Moro put to rest forever with a lying-in-state, his body riddled with bullets from that little episode in Veracruz that robbed the Old Man of his raison d’être because without the Moro secret he’s just a pathetic old man playing dominoes. However, you still have to face the cabinet you inherited from Lorenzo Terán. And the local bosses in the rest of the country. Let’s see how you do — I’ll be watching.

You know, Nicolás, a man can cease to act in politics, but the consequences of his political actions are there to stay. You do know — and that will be your dilemma. You’ll cover the holes of your mistakes (and your crimes?) but for every hole you cover up, three more will be exposed. That’s what they call “consequences.” That explains President Terán’s passivity. He didn’t want “consequences.” He wanted to retire and live in peace. Then he got blood cancer, leukemia combined with pulmonary emphysema. And yet he still always feared that the “consequences” of his actions — or his inaction, which is also a kind of action, perhaps the most dangerous kind of all — would plague him far beyond his days on the Eagle’s Throne. Destiny intervened. We’ll have to wait and see how he goes down in history.

History. You haven’t made much yet, Valdivia. Remember that you’ll be governing a destructive country that protects itself and deceives itself with false psychology and a sensitivity, born of suffering, to art and death. You tried to court the middle ground. You had no other choice when you were a nobody. But now you harbor, and I admit I encouraged it, what the Germans call the dunker-instinkt, the much-misunderstood but profound desire to have power and exercise it with style.

Style makes the man, they say. Style is everything.

And beauty? Is that part of style? No. Only fools believe that. Beauty, like style, is a question of will. Beauty is also power. Look at me, my conquered one. Do you think I don’t look at myself in the mirror every morning? Without makeup? Do you think I deceive myself? I’m a coquette: I do my best to deceive the rest of the world. Did I tell you that I’m forty-five, forty-seven? I can’t remember. It’s not true. I’m forty-nine. The fact is, I have to recreate my beauty every morning, like someone painting a picture, creating a design, or perhaps more pejoratively, shaping an advertisement. Whether I’m convincing or not, I want to be admired so that I can get what I want. Admired but untouchable. I’d like to be a statue.

Do you know what a lover of mine once said to me? “The trouble with you is that you’re so beautiful on the outside, you must be appalling on the inside.”

“No,” I replied. “The trouble with beauty is that it condemns you to sex, and the trouble with sex is that even though it’s a pleasure it can’t turn bad news into good news.”

“But maybe it saves you, despite the bad things,” he said.

“I want to save myself despite all the good things,” I told him, confusing him forever and forcing him to run away from everything he didn’t understand, which was a lot.

Do you understand me, my poor little Nicolás? Look at me properly. Age is a woman’s unpunished murderer. You’re younger than I. I bet you thought you could enjoy the benefits of my maturity and perhaps be my last good fuck.

Were you stripped of your illusions yesterday, my stupid little sweetheart?

I saw you the day you were sworn in as president at San Lázaro. And I saw a dangerous smile I’d never seen before. You frightened me. It was more a smile of deception than power. The smile of a real-life villain. A smile that said, “I’ve fooled them all.” That’s when I decided to make you suffer for all that I’ve suffered, though not because you’ve done me any harm.

I decided to make you the reason for all the bad things I’d ever experienced — you were to be the bag into which I’d put my suffering, even though you weren’t the cause.

As I watched you fasten the sash with the eagle and the serpent, I realized, “Nicolás Valdivia has become great. But his love is small. He’s a man who doesn’t know how to love.”