The Eagle's Throne

  Tácito’s ardor only grew. The whole office could tell. Finally she agreed to go to his apartment on Calle Río Guadiana. As she walked in, she held her nose and repeated a Bette Davis quote I taught her.

  “What a dump! What a squalid hellhole! Vile shack! Shithole!”

  Nearly dying of laughter, Doris told me that Tácito was so humiliated by this that he took her by the hand, pulled out a set of keys, went over to the tiny kitchen, and unlocked a door, revealing a luxurious panorama within, as if turning a page in one of those picture books. A sumptuous penthouse appeared before Doris’s eyes—a terrace with large flowerpots brimming with flowers, an oblong swimming pool, and chaise longues for sunbathing. And behind the terrace, a vast living room, luxury furniture, expensive collectors’ paintings—lots of fake Rubens, I gather from Doris’s description—Persian rugs, fluffy sofas, cheap glassware, and a door, left ajar, leading into the bedroom.

  Doris, following her instructions precisely, exhibited shock and delight, while Tácito registered insouciance and pride. And when our despicable cabinet chief made a more, shall we say, wanton overture, Doris very coquettishly excused herself and went to the bathroom, as if getting ready for this late-afternoon tryst, and there she took a handkerchief from her bag and let it flutter down from the window into the street. I saw the sign, and within five minutes, feigning the rage of a cuckolded lover, I burst into our incomparable Tácito’s bedroom, and found him stark naked, exposing all that Mother Nature had so cruelly bequeathed him: the bald head, the dense thicket of hair on his chest and legs, not to mention a number of other shaggy areas that I would rather not describe. He ran after the well-trained Doris who, fully dressed, screamed at the top of her voice, “I can’t! What would my mother say!”

  I yanked her away from the birthday-suited chief of staff and held her tight. I showered him with insults, saying Doris was my lover and I was her Pygmalion (the latter being true, the former false, of course), and at that the two of us left, barely able to hold in our laughter, while Tácito stood there naked.

  Our little farce turned out to be quite amusing. But it doesn’t really prove anything, my dear friend, aside from the fact that Tácito’s a ridiculous little satyr and that hair loss is a sign—secondary, perhaps, but a sign nonetheless—of virility. In any event, at least you now have proof of how false his alleged austerity is. Let’s hope I have even better luck next time around!

  17

  GENERAL CÍCERO ARRUZA TO GENERAL MONDRAGÓN VON BERTRAB

  General, my friend and my superior (although never superior to the president himself, whose office makes him the commander in chief of the armed forces), hear me out because I smell a rat. Something fishy is going on.

  You and I both know that there are times when the deployment of armed forces is our only option. The army intervention in San Luis Potosí against strikers who are causing trouble for the Japanese and acting like real-life samurai made it very clear that around here foreign investment is respected—why, if it weren’t for the cheap labor they wouldn’t have come here in the first place, and where would that have left us? Twiddling our thumbs. I commend you for executing such a clean, swift operation, General. Anyway, I’m glad that these shows of force are your responsibility. As the saying goes, in Mexico we like our deals crystal clear and our hot chocolate thick, but all too often we end up with watery chocolate and shady deals. What I mean is that, historically speaking, they’ve always slipped a little goat’s meat into our tamales, if you know what I mean. You know well enough, General, that there’s always been a big difference between officers trained at military academies, like you, and those of us who’ve risen up through the ranks. I’m not saying that one is better than the other. You yourself know that our great general Felipe Ángeles came out of the Saint-Cyr Academy in France and went on to win the battle against his former fellow soldiers in the Federal Army in 1914. But our general Pancho Villa was a fugitive rancher, a man who had killed his sister’s rapist, an out-and-out bandit, a rustler, a cattle thief, and so on, and one fine day he found his calling and put together a rural army of eighty thousand men, almost all of them peasants, joined later by ranchers from the north, merchants, and even writers and professionals. And Villa accomplished everything that Ángeles accomplished, but he hadn’t attended any fancy foreign academy—he didn’t even know how to read and write! Even so, he beat the Federal Army. What I’m trying to say, General, is that I’m not checking up on you, nor should you underestimate me. Deal? We are— oh, what’s the word—complementary, like salt and lime to a good tequila, wouldn’t you say? You win the big national battles, and I take care of the little local skirmishes. You finish off the car workers striking in San Luis Potosí. But I’m not allowed to beat the shit out of those snot-nosed sons of bitches at the university. They claim it’s because the university’s autonomy can’t be violated. But didn’t those little savages already violate it themselves by destroying the science labs and pissing on the dean’s chair? You’ll tell me, General, that I already have my hands full in a city plagued by fear, express kidnappings, extortion, robbery, murder. . . . You know the problem well enough. Say I decide to clean up the police force. So I get rid of one or two thousand crooked policemen. What do I accomplish? I end up swelling the ranks of the criminal rings by a thousand, two thousand. Ex-cops go straight into kidnapping, drug dealing, or robbery. Nice one. So I find another two thousand boys, young kids, clean, idealistic. Can’t be accused of not trying, and you know it. But I’m so unlucky. When will I get a break? Within a year all my men are corrupt, because how can my five-thousand-peso salary compete with the five-million-peso sweetener that my crooked policeman gets for doing a single job for some well-known drug dealer? I’m not lacking in goodwill, General. I’m one of those men who’d gladly kill a thousand innocent people to keep one guilty man from going free. And speaking of policemen, don’t forget that I wasn’t trained like our dear Cantinflas in that movie, walking the beat and seducing maids to get a free plate of beans (but allow me to share a little joke with you: When it comes to maids, first you wash them, then you screw them, and then, as a reward, you send them to the brothel). What I’m really trying to say here is that I got my education fighting guerrillas, rebels, and insurrectionist groups that have existed in Mexico for as long as I can remember—one day in Morelos, another day in Chiapas, another day in Guerrero. . . . And what did I learn from all that, General? One glaring truth: The night is worth a million recruits. That’s why I hate mysteries—they’re like the night. It’s in the darkness that all those invisible armies are born and, one fine day, without even having to show their faces, they’ve got us fucked. But in the fight against the guerrillas, General, we have the advantage of being able to break all the rules, because that’s exactly what the enemy does. General, the best way to get your troops to love you is to let them pillage what they want and then blame it on the enemy. To go out to kill for food—tell me, can there be anything more appealing to a poor Mexican soldier, one of those crew-cut recruits who are the usual cannon fodder since we don’t have blacks like they do in the U.S.? Tell me, you who went to a German academy. Oh, how good it is to give orders like you do, my general, from afar, like in a computer game, knowing that your enemies are a fortress that must be attacked with military might, by discovering their weak side, breaking through their lines, scaring civilians, since all successful rebellions have plenty of civilian support, don’t they? Do you think I don’t feel some longing, even nostalgia, for the days when I was a line commander, face-to-face with demanding, tough, challenging enemies? Well, just look at me now, using kindergarten stunts to keep things in order—break up the protest, General Arruza, they tell me, let rats out into the auditorium, drop plastic bags full of piss from the upstairs balconies. . . . Every night I still dream of our beautiful countryside, of the dogs barking at the stars, of dead bodies hanging from posts, the wind whistling in their wide-open mouths. And now, General, all of a sudden I spot an opportunity and I ver
y loyally communicate it to you, because its execution will be your responsibility, although the information may come to me first. And if so, we’ll have no choice but to join forces, my good general. Some things we feel with our skin, others we see with our eyes, and still others just beat away in our hearts. To cut a long story short, there’s a secret, General. A very well-kept secret at the San Juan de Ulúa fortress. Yes, right at the entrance to the port of Veracruz. How do I know this? Because a spy told me. Or, if you will, a little bird. An affectionate little lady bird who is not only mine . . . or in other words she’s the very lovely cage where my own little birdie sings. Ulúa, cage, castle, and prison. You may be wondering how this could possibly be connected with all the other issues we face now—whether the president will rise to the occasion, the matter of the gringos who’ve threatened and isolated us, the question of who will become the next president, the matter of the students, the peasants, the factory workers. . . .

  There are a thousand threads in this fabric, General, and yet my old soldier’s intuition keeps on asking: Ulúa, Ulúa, what’s going on in Ulúa?

  18

  BERNAL HERRERA TO MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN

  Ex-President César León came to visit me. At first I didn’t even recognize him. That young man with wavy black hair is now a mature man with wavy white hair. Those matinee idol’s wavy locks are what define him for me, politically and morally as well as physically. They remind me of that old song, “The Waves of the Lagoon”: “Some waves come, while others go, some to Sayula, some to Zapotlán. . . .” The question is: Where is Sayula in the mind of César León, and where is Zapotlán?

  What follows is a summary of the brief conversation we had, along with my conclusions, since León was (and perhaps still is?) your friend. You gave him the advice that ensured his popularity early on. Free the political prisoners, president. Flatter the intellectuals. Attend all the civic and cultural ceremonies. Assume Benito Juárez’s republican mantle. Replace the trade unions’ leadership. New faces. Change is accepted as a sign of moral renewal. (We all know that the opposite is true: A new bureaucrat has all the ambitions that the old one has already fulfilled. Thus the new one will be more voracious than the old one.) Cooperate with the gringos on everything, except Cuba. Cuba has provided and continues to provide the opportunity to pay lip service to our independence. Thanks to Cuba we’re no longer the main target of the campaigns, plots, and occasional violence that the United States has unleashed on Latin America. The United States is a kind of Captain Ahab on the quest for a Moby Dick that may yet satisfy the American obsession with viewing the world in black and white. Gringos go mad if they can’t tell who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy—and Mexico was the bad guy for a century and a half until, thank God, Fidel Castro turned up and became our lightning conductor. César León made the gringos understand that the problem was a bit more complex than the plot of an old Western. Mexico would be the United States’ most loyal Latin American ally, but this would only be plausible if Mexico maintained a healthy relationship with Castro in the interest of keeping the lines of communication open (issue number one) and playing a role in Cuba’s transition after Castro’s death (issue number two). It was the latter promise that failed us all. The old comandante is still there, ninety-three years old, and I read in the paper that he’s just opened a Sierra Maestra theme park.

  Now, I’m not saying that you yourself invented Mexico’s policies toward Cuba and the United States, my dear friend, because that would be like saying you discovered lukewarm water. With the seductive wiles for which you are famous, you simply planted these policies in the mind of the young president César León, who was practically a gringo then— trained at Princeton and MIT before he had to take on Mexico’s defensive foreign policy, a bit like the tortoise sleeping alongside the elephant.

  You also reminded him that a newly elected president in the newly restored PRI system (this was fourteen years ago) would do well to be a thorn in the side of relatives and friends of the outgoing head of state, because that was the way to satisfy public opinion and give people the illusion of a fresh start.

  César León. We haven’t even mentioned his name since he won the 2006 elections. We decided, simply, that he was a nonperson.

  But the fact is that he’s come back. And President Terán has welcomed him with open arms.

  I said to him, “Be careful, Mr. President. César León is like the scorpion that says to the frog, ‘Carry me on your back across the river. I promise not to sting you.’ And nevertheless, the scorpion stings the frog. . . .”

  “I know the fable,” the president said to me, smiling. “ ‘It’s in my nature,’ the scorpion says. In this case, though, León is the frog and I’m the scorpion.”

  “What do you want, then? To sting him or to make it to the other side?”

  “That’s something I’ll decide in good time. Patience.”

  I’m giving you this background information, my dear friend, so that you can understand my chat with César León last night.

  He began with his little “humility” recital.

  “I’ve learned so many things in exile. I want to be a factor for unity. Soon, someone will have to take President Terán’s place and we’ll be holding elections in the middle of some very serious difficulties.”

  He enumerated the latter, which you and I know very well: the students, the workers, the peasants, the gringos. . . . He practically volunteered to act as intermediary in every case. He talked about the support he has in the old PRI, splintered apart primarily because of his intolerant, authoritarian, and arrogant attitude toward the end of his term. He even threw in a Latin quotation (he seems to have spent his time in Europe reading the classics): “ Divide et impera. . . .”

  I played dumb, asked him to translate for me.

  “ ‘Divide and rule,’ ” he said smugly.

  So that’s it, I said to myself, you’re here to triumph by dividing, bastard. I kept the comment to myself. I wanted to hear him say it—it would be like hearing a song that was a hit twenty years ago played on an old scratched record. He repeated the bit about wanting to be the best ex-president ever, a Mexican Jimmy Carter, never complaining, behaving as if nobody had ever done him any wrong. In other words: He’s come back, thirsting for power, just like the shipwreck survivor floating adrift on the raft of the Medusa for years and years, surrounded by water and yet unable to drink a drop.

  He said that he wanted to be a factor for unity and cooperation in what remained of the old, fractured PRI. In other words: He wants to take over the party and rebuild it by making promises to all the old corporate bases, weakened at present but not without latent power, and then bring together all the disparate interest groups, the local power bases and strongmen—unfortunately spawned by our fledgling democracy and our president’s laissez-faire attitude—in a unified opposition party that can kick us out of power.

  And he very cynically suggested that he could act as a go-between, connecting the presidency and our unmanageable Congress, given that there’s no majority at San Lázaro and all bills proposed by the executive branch are either stalled or shelved entirely.

  In a word, he was offering me his help to head off these obstacles and to clear the path to the presidential elections.

  I sat there looking at him, totally speechless. I don’t have to tell you that this didn’t make him uncomfortable at all. His scheming little eyes sparkled and he said very slowly, “Herrera . . . Whatever happened . . . didn’t happen.”

  I stared at him intensely.

  “Mr. President,” I said, with due courtesy, “when you were incomparable, you didn’t hate anyone. Now that you’re among equals, who is it that you hate?”

  His answer was cunning and self-satisfied.

  “The question, Mr. Secretary, is to whom are you equal?”

  I had to laugh at his undeniably sharp wit, but the laugh froze on my lips when his eyes suddenly stopped sparkling and he said something to me in
that powerful, menacing voice he always used to use to intimidate his allies as well as his enemies.

  “If you want my advice, stay out of the Moro case.”

  I can only assume that he’d already anticipated my reaction, unless he’d become incredibly stupid or incredibly naïve, which in the end are one and the same thing. My reaction, you understand, was essential in the presence of such a wily, dangerous man.

  “Apparently, Mr. President, you don’t seem to realize that your days are over. . . .”

  “And everything that happened then . . . never happened? Let’s see, how can that be possible?”

  “Quite simply, the laws you once abided by have nothing to do with the laws we live by today. . . . The problems have changed, the solutions have changed and, I must reiterate, times themselves have changed.”

  “Ah, but you and I, despite our different problems and times, will always, ultimately, commit evil acts if committing evil acts is necessary, won’t we?”

  He then raised his leonine head and looked at me with arrogance and scorn.

  “Don’t touch the Moro case, Mr. Secretary. As long as you don’t touch it we’ll get along famously.”

  “Oh, shut up!” I said, losing my patience. “I know what really happened in the Moro case, but I’m not interested in doing the police’s work.”

  “Well, let’s see. The police might do their job so thoroughly that you’ll be the one who ends up in prison.”

  At that, I jumped up and snapped, “You’re nothing but a lost dream.”

  “No.” He smiled as he walked to the door before turning to face me one last time. “Quite the opposite. I’m a living nightmare.”

  I slammed my fist into my forehead after César León closed the door behind him. I should never have lost control in the presence of that viper.