Carlos Fuentes
The Eagle's Throne
To fellow members of the “Half Century” generation,
at the Law School of the
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México:
the hope of a better Mexico. .
L’águila siendo animal
se retrató en el dinero.
Para subir al nopal
pidió permiso primero.
[The eagle, being an animal,
had its picture drawn on coins.
Before climbing up the nopal
it asked for permission first.]
PRAISE FOR THE EAGLE’S THRONE
“A literary marriage of two great books from the past, that of Machiavelli’s The Prince and the eighteenth-century French epistolary novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses . . a full-blown triumph. . Fuentes has never written better.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Compelling. . Fuentes injects the book with uproariously lethal intrigue. . [The] reader [is] privy to secret schemes and passions. . What makes this satire astute is how Fuentes forces his politicians to face the consequences of their actions.” —The Denver Post
“Dazzling, razor-sharp. . provides a feast of political insight, aphorisms and maxims, in the spirit of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.” —The Washington Post Book World
“A nerve-grating cautionary tale, and one of [Fuentes’s] best books.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Daring and original. . dark, well thought-out. . The plot is intricate with many unexpected twists. . A critical, caustic, analytical, judicious call to arms. . provocative.” —San Antonio Express-News
“[The] characters spring to life as true individuals, fully developed in Fuentes’s beguilingly unorthodox fashion. A novel that is truly a tour de force.” —Booklist (starred review)
“A political thriller. . to end all political thrillers. The futuristic tale [is] an old-fashioned epistolary novel in which the characters conspire, deceive, seduce, plea and attack one another entirely through letters. The device is perfect for intrigue. . The Eagle’s Throne is an exhilarating romp through the cruelty of Mexican politics, but it is also a cautionary tale about the price of ambition.” —The Columbus Dispatch
1. MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN TO NICOLÁS VALDIVIA
You are going to think badly of me. You are going to say I’m a capricious woman. And you’ll be right. But who would have guessed that things could change so radically overnight? Yesterday, when I first met you, I told you, When it comes to politics, never put anything in writing. Today, I have no other way of communicating with you. That should give you an idea of how dire the situation has become. .
You will say that your interest in me — the interest you showed the minute we laid eyes on each other in the vestibule outside the interior secretary’s office — is not political. It’s romantic interest, perhaps physical attraction, or maybe even just simple human affection. You must know at once, Nicolás Valdivia, that with me everything is political, even sex. You may be shocked by this kind of professional voracity. But there’s no changing it. I’m forty-five now, and ever since the age of twenty-two I’ve arranged my life around a single purpose: to be, to shape, to eat, to dream, to savor, and to suffer politics. That is my nature. My vocation. Don’t think this means I’ve had to put aside what I like as a woman, my sexual pleasure, my desire to make love to a young, handsome man — like you. .
Simply put, I consider politics to be the public expression of private passions. Including, perhaps most of all, romantic passion. But passions are very arbitrary forms of conduct, and politics is a discipline. We act with the greatest measure of freedom granted us by a universe that is at once multitudinous, uncertain, random, and necessary, fighting for power, competing for a tiny sphere of authority.
Do you think it’s the same with love? You’re wrong. Love has a power that knows no limits, a power that’s called imagination. Even if you were to be locked up in the castle at San Juan de Ulúa, you would still have the freedom of desire, for a man is always the master of his own erotic imagination. In politics, on the other hand, what good is wishing and imagining if you don’t have the power?
I repeat, power is my nature. Power is my vocation. That’s the first thing I want to warn you about. You are a thirty-four-year-old boy. I was drawn to your physical beauty right away. But I can also tell you, lest it go to your head, that attractive men are few and far between in the vestibule to the office of the interior secretary, Bernal Herrera. Beautiful women are also conspicuously absent. My friend the secretary relies on his ascetic reputation. Butterflies don’t go near his garden. Instead, the scorpions of deceit nest under his rug and the bees of ambition buzz around his honeycomb.
Does Bernal Herrera deserve the reputation he has? You’ll find out. All I know is that, one icy afternoon in early January, in the antechamber to the secretary’s office in the old Cobián Palace, a woman pushing fifty but nonetheless still very attractive — your face said it all, darling — exchanged glances with a beautiful young man, every bit as desirable as she, though scarcely over thirty. The spark has been ignited, dear Nicolás. .
And the pleasure is to be deferred. To be deferred, my young friend.
I admit everything. You’re just the right height for me. As you could see, I myself am quite tall and don’t care for looking up or down. I prefer to look directly into the eyes of my men. Yours are level with mine, and as light — green, gray, ever-changing — as mine are immutably black, although my skin is whiter than yours. But don’t think, in a country as mixed and racist as Mexico, a country so plagued by the issue of skin color (though nobody would ever admit it), that it’s an advantage. Quite the opposite: I attract resentment, that national vice of ours, that miserly king lording it over a court of envious dwarfs. And yet my physical appearance does grant me a kind of unspoken superiority, the tacit tribute we all offer the race of the conqueror.
You, my love, enjoy the fruits of true mestizo beauty. That golden, cinnamon-colored skin that goes so well with the fine features of the Mexican man: linear profile, thin lips, long, flowing hair. I saw how the light played on your head, giving life to a masculine beauty that can often conceal a vast mental void. It took only a few minutes of conversation to realize that you’re as intelligent on the inside as you are beautiful on the outside. And you even have a dimpled chin, to boot.
I must be honest with you: You’re also very wet behind the ears, very naïve. Quite a little green plum, as they say where I come from. Just look at yourself. You know all the catchwords. Democracy, patriotism, rule of law, separation of powers, civil society, moral renewal. The danger is that you believe them. The trouble is that you say them with conviction. My innocent, adorable Nicolás Valdivia. You’ve entered the jungle and want to kill lions before loading your gun.
Secretary Herrera said as much to me after meeting you: “This boy is extremely intelligent,” he said, “but he thinks out loud. He still hasn’t learned to rehearse first what he’ll say later. They say he writes well. I have read his columns in the newspapers. He doesn’t know yet that the only possible dialogue between the journalist and the public servant is the dialogue that falls on deaf ears. Not that I, as secretary of the interior, don’t read what the journalist writes and don’t feel flattered, indifferent, or offended by the things he or she might say about me — what I mean is that for a Mexican politician, the golden rule is never to put anything in writing and especially never to comment on the many opinions that will inevitably rain down upon him.”