Carlos Fuentes - The Eagle's Throne

Let’s move on to the cabinet, sitting in the front row of the congressional chamber.

The interior secretary, Bernal Herrera, is my friend and confidant. He has experience and solid common sense. He’s aware that order has its limits, but that disorder is boundless. His political balancing act consists of avoiding endemic disorder and the extreme evils that feed it: hunger, demoralization, public mistrust. Herrera knows that chaos provokes irrational actions and facilitates political adventures, which eventually prove to be misadventures. Bitterness opens many wounds, and gives them little time to heal. Herrera, then, is a man who promotes three kinds of laws: laws that can be enforced, laws that will never be enforced, and laws that give people hope, whether they are enforceable or not, whether they are more for the future than for today. He is our best government minister and politician.

The foreign affairs secretary, Patricio Palafox, sitting next to Herrera, is another experienced man, idealistic but pragmatic. He understands that we happen to live next door to the single great superpower in the world, and that we may be able to choose our friends but we can’t choose our neighbors (just as we can’t choose our relatives, as inconvenient as they often are). Palafox is good at working closely with the gringos, but he’s especially good at making them see that Mexico is also a democracy and must pay attention to its own public opinion. Sometimes, he tells them, we can’t go against public opinion, just as the U.S. can’t, either. Unfortunately, however, they tend to stick to that principle at all costs. The U.S. always operates according to polls, congressional opposition, or opinions in the national press, and the executive branch only gets its own way insofar as its ideas jibe with all these factors.

We, on the other hand, pay a high price for our independent decisions — this has been proved in the case of Colombia. We found ourselves forced to support the new president, Juan Manuel Santos, and call for the withdrawal of the gringos from the country. It wasn’t enough that we caved in on trade agreements, antiterrorism measures, votes of support in a number of international organizations, and the protection of Mexicans unjustly imprisoned and even sentenced to death in the U.S. All it took were two panic buttons — Colombia and oil — to elicit this cruel, draconian response from Washington: cutting us off from all communications, leaving us in the globalized world’s equivalent of a desert.

Nevertheless, you won’t see the slightest concern on Secretary Palafox’s face. He comes from a very old family that has lived through three centuries of turbulent Mexican history. Nothing ruffles him. He has nerves of steel. He is every bit a professional, even though there are always a few spiteful people around who say things like, “Secretary Palafox’s unassailable serenity is not the result of his blue blood, but of his hard-earned reputation as a poker player.”

It seems that Palafox’s training grounds were not the halls of Versailles but rather the gambling halls, those rooms full of cigarette smoke, dim lights, and card tables. The kingdom of chance, so to speak. And tell me, my lovely protégé, how does one reconcile necessity with chance? That’s the great unanswered question of all time, says my dear friend Xavier Zaragoza, misleadingly nicknamed Seneca — I, for one, have learned more from him than I ever learned from studying political science. If you want to know more, have a look at yesterday’s paper: There is a marvelous article by don Federico Reyes Heroles, his reflections on turning sixty-five.

From now on things start to go downhill, my darling disciple Nicolás Valdivia. Now, the comptroller general, don Domingo de la Rosa, is known to many as “the Flamingo” because he never knows which leg to stand on, the left or the right. Since our current president’s government is one of so-called national unity, sometimes it has to appease the conservatives, sometimes the liberals. The trouble is that both sides are honest only when they’re the opposition. The minute they take over the government, they soon learn the saying coined by that very colorful character from our country’s extravagant past, César Garizurieta, aka “the Possum”: “He who does not live off the public purse lives in error.”

But I can tell you now that the man who, like him, tries to be everyone’s friend by granting concessions left, right, and center will never have enough money. And if the comptroller doesn’t have enough money, how can the republic?

You’re right, my darling Nicolás. Education Secretary Ulises Barragán is a perfect disaster. They say he lies more than a dentist and that his perpetual and endless monologue has but one virtue: It has the power to turn practically any audience catatonic, which is useful when it comes to dealing with the Educational Workers’ Union and its two million frightful members when they all gather in the Elba Esther Gordillo Auditorium. The bad thing about Secretary Barragán is that his speeches are so boring that he doesn’t just put his audiences to sleep, he puts himself to sleep, too! At one particular event, for example, a prolonged silence aroused the suspicion of the porter at the Colegio Nacional, who found everyone in the lecture hall asleep: the sixty-six people in the audience plus the lecturer, Secretary Barragán himself.

The health secretary, Abundio Colmenares, performs his job with a certain aplomb, panache even. He’s an incorrigible lech who uses his political position to get his jollies, all under the pretext of healing. Quite a piece of work, but he can be awfully nice when he wants to. They say he’s both tough and passionate: Neither the men he hates nor the women he desires stand a chance when they’re in his clutches.

The environment secretary, Madame Guillermina Guillén, sparkles with good intentions. She’s so full of fantasy that all she has to do is the opposite of what she thinks in order to be realistic. She protects bird sanctuaries by fumigating them to the point of killing off anything and everything that flies. She hands out logging licenses, turning a blind eye to the fact that soon there’ll be no more forests to protect. Problem solved. She recently divorced her husband because she discovered that the good man only put on his false teeth when he visited his lover.

The labor secretary, Basilio Taracena, is exactly the opposite of what he appears to be. Just look at his eyes, the eyes of a criollo straight out of Guadalajara — light, but not serene. Hooded, clouded over, misty, and if there’s anything that gives him cause for labor, it’s his own body. Notice the copious collection of nervous tics, the way he constantly scratches himself, his neck, his armpits, his inner thigh, as if he were plagued by lice. .

The agriculture secretary, don Epifanio Alatorre, has been a fixture in national politics ever since the days of López Mateos and is famous for his predictions regarding crops and weather: “Depending on the rains, crops this year might be good, they might be bad, or they might be the very opposite.”

Since he’s been in politics for over half a century many people have asked him how he’s survived so much change, from López Mateos to Fox to Terán. And don Epifanio just licks his index finger and raises it in the air as if to say he always knows which way the wind blows. Don’t ever get into a debate with him. It’s like arguing with a mariachi band.

You should also be careful not to trust the communications secretary, Felipe Aguirre. You’ll notice that his face is the same color as his socks, a sure sign of a vile nature. Or at least a lack of imagination. His famous adage about marriage just about sums it up: “Want to become an old man? Then spend your whole life with the same old woman.”