Carlos Fuentes - The Eagle's Throne

1 Stop asking me questions/let me imagine/that the past does not exist/and that we were born/the very instant/we first met. .

2 The eagle, being an animal,/had its picture drawn on coins./Before climbing up the nopal/it asked for permission first.

3 See “Malintzin of the Maquilas” in Fuentes’s The Crystal Frontier.

4 The colonel asks him,/how many men are with you?/Eight hundred soldiers/led through the mountains by Mariano Mejía.

5 Valentín, being a man,/told them nothing.

6 And I am one of the true men/who invented the Revolution. .

7 See “A Capital Girl” in The Crystal Frontier.

8 See “The Line of Oblivion” in The Crystal Frontier.

9 There nightfall/is so bleak that one might say:/night thus begotten will be eternal.

KRISTINA CORDERO is a translator of fiction and nonfiction, including In Search of Klingsor by Jorge Volpi, The Country Under My Skin by Giaconda Belli, The Best Thing That Can Happen to a Croissant by Pablo Tusset, and This I Believe by Carlos Fuentes. She is presently at work on an anthology of the writings of Saint Teresa of Avila.

CARLOS FUENTES, Mexico’s leading novelist, was born in Panama City in 1928 and educated in Mexico, the United States, Geneva, and various cities in South America. He has been his country’s ambassador to France and is the author of more than ten novels, including The Death of Artemio Cruz, Terra Nostra, The Old Gringo, The Years with Laura Díaz, Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone, and Inez. His nonfiction includes The Crystal Frontier and This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life. He has received many awards for his accomplishments, among them the Mexican National Award for Literature in 1984, the Cervantes Prize in 1987, and the Légion d’Honneur in 1992.