Carlos Fuentes - The Eagle's Throne

“Whore, swine, you belong in a pigsty,” he shouted, and he hit me, tearing the tablecloth off the table, destroying all the glasses and plates, staining the rugs, all of it in front of my mother, motionless, cold, dressed in black, reproaching my father with a deadly look. Then, suddenly she stood up and took a gun from her bag, observing the fleeting shock that crossed his face. At that, my father took out his own gun and they faced each other, like in a Posada etching or a Tarantino film, pointing their guns at each other and me in the middle, battered, terrified, wanting to separate them but defeated by my womb, by the instinct to save my child, our child. .

I moved away from the dark, obscene figures of my parents. I backed out of the dining room. I saw them looking at each other with hatred, dollar bills and bile in their eyes. Standing opposite each other, both armed, pointing their guns, waiting. Who would shoot first? The duel was a long time coming.

Outside the dining room, I began to scream, covering my ears so that I wouldn’t have to hear the shots, trembling, clutching my belly, not daring to go back into the dining room.

They were dead.

My father was on the table, his face half-buried in a plate of strawberries and cream.

My mother was under the table, her black skirt pushed up high above her sex. For the first time I saw the milky whiteness of her legs. She wore ankle socks, I said to myself.

They were both dead.

I inherited both fortunes. I liquidated all my father’s debts. I saved my mother’s shares. The beer company was very understanding, even generous with me. But bad luck prevailed. Or rather, bad luck came along with the good luck, as is often the case.

“Oh, how small my fortune is — when will I see it grow?” as the late general Arruza used to say.

You came back to Mexico. You asked me to marry you. Now there was nothing in our way. My father was dead. But the little boy was born.

What is a chromosome? It’s the messenger of heredity. It communicates genetic information. Every human somatic cell has a nucleus that contains twenty-three chromosomes, organized in pairs. One half is paternal and the other maternal. Each chromosome can duplicate: It is its own twin. But when an intrusive chromosome — a “third man”— suddenly appears, the total number of chromosomes is raised to forty-seven, and this abnormality results in a strange creature: a flattened face, mongol eyes, deformed ears, flecked irises, broad hands and stumpy fingers, weak muscles, and the forewarning of arrested mental development. Down syndrome.

What were you and I to do?

Keep the child with us, treat him as our son, which is what he was— is? Dedicate ourselves to him? Look after him, me the devoted mother, freeing you to pursue your career?

Kill him, Bernal, relieve ourselves of the unwanted burden?

Love him, Bernal, peer into his odd little eyes and see the spark of divinity, that creature’s desire to love and be loved?

Together we decided that fighting for power was less painful than fighting for a child.

How cold, how clever we were, Bernal. What did we want, you and I? The same thing. To be active players in politics. To carry out the things we learned at the university in France. To build a better country on top of the ruins of a Mexico cyclically devastated by a combination of excess and shortage: poverty and corruption equally rooted, evil people who were far too competent and good people who were far too incompetent; affectation and pretension at the top and grim resignation down below; lost opportunities; governments blaming everything on the people and their civic passivity, and the people blaming the government’s ineptitude; a general belief in signs, as if instead of federal law, our constitution was the Popol Vuh of Mayan antiquity. .

You and I were going to change all that. We had immense confidence in our talent and our education in a country of amateur politicians. We wanted to act legally, but we were also willing to be flexible.

“Politics is the art of the possible.”

“No. Politics is the art of the impossible.”

Who said what? You first, then me, or was it the other way around, as our unforgettable agriculture secretary would put it? The fact is, Bernal, we stopped being parents to one little boy because we thought we would become godparents to a whole country.

The boy was deposited in an institution. We visited him from time to time. Less and less, after a while, discouraged by the physical distance, the mental wall.

We didn’t listen to the voices that told us, “Get closer to him. These children are more intelligent than they seem. They have a different kind of intelligence.”

“And what kind is that, doctor?”

“The intelligence of a world unto itself.”

“Impenetrable?”

“Yes, possibly. We still don’t know. But real. Whose job is it to try?”

“To try what. .?”

“Whose job is it? Yours, as his parents, or his?”

We didn’t explore these enigmas. We distanced ourselves from these options. We did what we had to do without the burden of an idiot, yes, I don’t mind going to the root of the word. Idio, what is ours, idios, what is loved, idiosyncratic, what belongs to one person. . Do you remember Emilio Lledó’s extraordinary lecture at the Collège de France about Plato’s Phaedrus, about that speech that is the seed of language? The language that when “unjustly condemned needs the help of a father, since it is not able to defend itself.” For that reason, Lledó taught us, all language must be interpreted so that it can be “submerged” in “the language of which we are comprised, the language that we are. ”

We’ve spent nearly twenty years, you and I, speaking the conventional language of politics. Wouldn’t we have been capable of speaking the creative language of a child? Perhaps a poetic language?

What was the price, Bernal? Accept it. Not only did we distance ourselves from the boy that was ours, our own. After a while, deeply involved in our respective political careers, we distanced ourselves from each other. We never stopped loving each other, seeing each other, talking to each other, conspiring together. . but we were no longer idiots, we were no longer ours, we no longer lived together — sometimes we’d go out to a bar and sometimes, even, we went to bed together. But it didn’t work. There was no passion. We preferred to abstain so as not to sour our great friendship.

You are a good man, and that’s why we couldn’t live together. Without you, I could freely exercise the dark part of my soul, the part I inherited from my father, without hurting you.

I’ve always told you about my love affairs before the poisonous gossip reached your ears. I know that in politics skill, not truth, is what wins arguments. I’ve told you before, “A liar falls sooner than a one-legged man.” Being a good liar is a full-time job. You have to devote yourself to it entirely. And that’s precisely what politics allows you to do.

Long ago, the liar was often sent to purge his guilt in a monastery. But Mexico is neither a convent nor a monastery. It’s a whorehouse. And you’ve been the austere monk of the whorehouse of Mexican politics. That’s always been your strength. Morality. Contrast. You’ve cultivated them in the name of what used to be called “moral renewal.” You’ve been tough and pragmatic when necessary, fair and legalistic when appropriate.

You never told me anything about your private life and sometimes I think you had no private life at all. Or, as my father, Leonardo Barroso, Jr., once said, very cynically, “We all have the right to a private life. As long as we have the wherewithal to pay for it.”