The Eagle's Throne (12 page)

23

GENERAL CÍCERO ARRUZA TO GENERAL MONDRAGÓN VON BERTRAB

General, you and I are in constant and amicable communication. You know that I’ve always acknowledged your superiority and, above all else, above you and me, the superiority of the president of the republic, commander in chief of the armed forces. Well, General, with my usual frankness I must warn you that this goddamn country is getting out of control. Sure, we’re all so damn proud of the fact that in Mexico there are seventy million people under the age of twenty. A country full of kids. Have you ever heard them? Have you ever put your ear to the ground? How do you think those kids see the old mummies that govern them?

How old are you? Fifty? Fifty-two? And me, sixty-four, sixty-five? The record books are a little sketchy in the tiny village where I was born, in the state of Hidalgo—that is, if you can say that Hidalgo exists and wasn’t just an invention to separate Mexico City from dangerous rival states like Michoacán and Jalisco. Hidalgo is the Uruguay of Mexico, but poor and without any records. Anyhow, General, my point is that you and I are in our prime, as my granny would have said. But to youngsters we’re old. They want a young leader. Young like Madero, Calles, Obregón, Villa, and Zapata were when they threw themselves into the Revolution—all of them under thirty.

Keep your eyes peeled, Mr. Secretary. Where’s our fresh-faced leader? How old is that ass-kisser Tácito de la Canal? Fifty-two like you? And his opponent, Bernal Herrera, isn’t he in his early fifties, or maybe late forties? Do you think today’s kids trust them at all? Do you think those millions of kids who cruise on their motorcycles as if their Harley-Davidsons were Pancho Villa’s horse, old Siete Leguas himself, and those half-naked party animals who spend all night clubbing, and those DJs who fly from Los Angeles to Mexico City to Honolulu for twenty-five thousand dollars a pop to play CDs, and the children of serial millionaires who’ve been inheriting fortunes passed down since 1941, will trust any of us?

That’s what the elite are saying in the newspapers, General. But what about the middle-class kid who has had to watch how every six years his parents lose their car, their house, and their washing machine because they can’t keep up with the monthly payments? Or students who can’t even study because public universities are constantly paralyzed by strikes and private universities cost a fortune?

Look at them, General—they wanted to be engineers, lawyers, big shots, but look at them now—they’re driving taxis, delivering pizzas, working as ushers in movie theaters, browbeaten into making a living parking other people’s cars. They’re broken people who should have become something better, and now all they get are kicks in the ass. And all the sweet young things who only dreamed of becoming decent, middle-class housewives? They’re out there working as typists, sales girls, and waitresses—if they’re lucky. Otherwise it’s lap dancing and the brothel. And don’t even get me started on the stories of the little farm girls who find work in factories and dream that some gringo will one day want to marry them, the stupid idiots, and then the factory goes under or moves to China, where the workers make 10 percent of what Mexican workers earn, and they’re back out on the street again begging, or back in their villages eating
nopalitos,
with their babies bundled up in their shawls, wanting to cross the border and become gringos like so many young men and women trying to find work on the other side of the fence—even if it means drowning in a river or suffocating in some trafficker’s truck or dying of thirst in the desert or getting shot full of holes, like a sieve, by the gringo border patrol’s bullets. Tell me, General, what can those seventy million kids look forward to? Who will they look to? Think about it while there’s still time, General.

And remember, in these matters you have to act quickly.

24

NICOLÁS VALDIVIA TO MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN

So, my lovely and demanding lady, you warned me from the start that everything is politics with you, but I had my doubts the day you told me to come to the woods outside your house at night and watch you undress. As if that weren’t enough, I was beaten to it (surely through my beautiful lady’s doing) by Tácito de la Canal. Is that politics, too, or is it just sex? Oh, my good lady María del Rosario, how many other secrets do you keep that have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with that region of “the heart that has its reasons” that reason (or politics) doesn’t understand?

Well, I’ve learned another lesson, though perhaps more of a human one than a political one. After all, in our country, can politics exist without that thing we call
endurance
? As I mentioned to you the other day, I’ve become quite friendly with one of the archivists in the presidential office, an old man I described to you a while back. He was kind enough to invite me to his house. Well, it isn’t exactly a house, it’s an apartment, a third-floor flat with a little terrace roof, in the Vallejo area, near the Monumento a la Raza.

You enter the place through a little shop between the front door and the stairway. I couldn’t describe the building to you even if I tried. It’s a place, my dear lady, that slips from the memory the minute one lays eyes on it. Some events, some people, some places are like that—as much as you try to remember them, they simply refuse to appear in the mind’s eye. And it’s sad not to remember them, until you realize that the memory has no room for the unremarkable. There are some people, though, that we can never forget, my dear lady, because the only possessions they have are the impressions they leave in other people’s minds, and their eyes are none other than those of the people who see them.

Do you understand what I mean? For me it was something of a revelation precisely because they asked nothing of me and yet I found myself fascinated, drawn to the pleas of these people who wanted nothing. What pleas am I talking about? you may ask. The archivist is a man named Cástulo Magón, who told me, when I noted the connection between their last names, that he is indeed distantly related to the revolutionaries Ricardo and Jesús Flores Magón, the anarchist brothers who languished away during Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship inside the San Juan de Ulúa fortress at Veracruz, which I saw the other day when you sent me to visit the Old Man Under the Arches. Well, don Cástulo is almost sixty and has been an archivist for nearly forty years, since the time of the López Portillo government. He married late because it took him a while to put the money together for a wedding and to find a woman who suited him and who was willing to work to make ends meet every month.

Don Cástulo has that tired, dreary look of the classic archivist and, as I said before, he even wears the ubiquitous green eyeshade and arm garters that make him look like the typical minor bureaucrat, straight out of a soap opera. Archives are dark places—perhaps out of fear that the papers might grow faded and illegible if exposed to sunlight, or perhaps simply to allow the documents to fall into oblivion as they lie in their yellow folders in gunmetal gray tombs. Perhaps, my scornful mistress, so that they may be exorcised of all, shall we say, luminous content. Yes, don Cástulo is the phantom of the archives. Just like the character dreamed up by Gaston Leroux who lived in the subterranean bowels of the Paris Opera, Cástulo Magón lives beneath the offices of the president of the republic.

His face is gray and his eyes, while not tired, convey a sense of resignation. But his fingers, María del Rosario, are astonishingly nimble— you should see the speed and precision with which he flips through the different files! At that moment his age, his tired, careworn appearance, and his exhausted body are transfigured and Cástulo becomes something like the alchemist of the public records office. He knows where everything is but even more importantly he also knows where to find everything that
shouldn’t be there,
those things he was told to destroy. Cástulo, not out of disobedience, but simply because he’d never really thought about it, you see, archived the unarchivable according to an eccentrically Mexican filing system: He didn’t file by name (Galván, María del Rosario, or Herrera, Bernal), nor by section (Ministry of the Interior, Congress) but by
reference.

Arcane references. Where would you think I, for example, might be found in the archives at Los Pinos? Under my name, “Valdivia, Nicolás”? Under my position, “Chief of Cabinet, Assistant to”? “Presidency of the Republic, Office of ”? No, my dear María del Rosario. As it turns out, I appear in a file entitled “ENA.” Now, what is ENA? you might ask. École Nationale d’Administration, Paris. In other words, the college I went to. Take note, madam! If you’re looking for a labyrinth of solitude, this takes the cake. And our friend the archivist Cástulo Magón can find his way around the files using those hands of his, like the hands of a blind pianist, more blind than Hipólito in
Santa.
The fact that his economic status in no way reflects his professional abilities is almost tautological. Cástulo receives a meager salary, some 500 dollars a month, which, given the cost of living these days, is barely enough to spruce up the white locks framing his temples and whip them up into a slick bridge from left to right across his head to hide the balding pate. (For what? From whom? Tell me—after all, you’re a woman who knows so much about human vanity, especially that of the dispossessed and humiliated like myself, your hapless
soupirant
.) Don Cástulo, believe it or not, still uses homemade hair pomade, even though it went out of fashion about a hundred years ago. I believe it to be the only evidence of his vanity in the tiny bathroom largely taken over by his family: his wife, Serafina, his daughter, Araceli, and his son, Jesús Ricardo, named after the aforementioned heroes of Ulúa, the Flores Magón brothers.

Don Cástulo, to judge by his bone structure, should be skinny, but he possesses the inevitable pot belly of someone who’s eaten bean
tortas
and peppers and fried pork all his life, washed down with the occasional beer. Doña Serafina works miracles, María del Rosario. She contributes to the household economy by baking cakes and pastries. The kitchen is hers. No one else enters it, and it happens to be the largest room in the apartment.

“That was why we picked it,” she says.

The kitchen has everything, including a long table coated with flour and even a baker’s oven. This is where the good woman prepares her meringues, wedding towers, and all kinds of fanciful concoctions for parties, first communions, and dances, and thanks to this little business, she manages to bring home 1,000 dollars a month—which would be 2,000 if she didn’t have to spend half her earnings on “raw materials,” as she calls them with pride, efficiently wiping her hands on her apron. Picture Andrea Palma at sixty. Picture that slender, languid beauty from the film
Woman of the Port,
who sold her love “to the men who come back from the sea,” only now with a body that’s less than slender and a bearing that’s anything but languid except in the very deepest recesses of her eyes. And if her husband’s eyes are as opaque as a visor, Serafina’s are as melancholy as a sudden twilight in the middle of the day.

“Businesslike,” the gringos say, don’t they? Well, that’s what Serafina is, my friend—not a minute of rest and not a single complaint, except in those eyes that yearn for something that never was. I repeat. I emphasize.
Something that never was.
The expression that speaks of a promise unfulfilled gives both the lady of the house and the house itself their melancholy. Nostalgia, lost dreams,
what could have been . . .

Imagine that expression, my powerful patroness, because I’ve never seen it in your eyes. It’s as if you already had it all—all but the realms unconquered by your ambition. Doña Serafina has eyes that no longer aspire to anything. As I watch her working in her kitchen, I see no ambition, just the pure and simple will to survive. And there’s Cástulo, reading the newspaper in the cramped living room. The television, he tells me, has been pawned, and that’s despite the fact that in Mexico even people from the most squalid slums, the lost cities, have televisions. But he says that he grew up reading newspapers and he isn’t about to give up his slow archivist’s habits for those little pills of information they serve up on TV. Of course now without satellite signals for TV antennae, he couldn’t watch anything even if he wanted to. . . .

All in the name of God. Or rather in the name of their irrepressible twenty-year-old daughter, Araceli, who spends all day lying on her bed reading
¡Hola!
magazine and dreaming, I suppose, of being Charlotte of Monaco or someone like her, and then spends hours beautifying herself for a boyfriend who picks her up in a convertible at nine o’clock to take her out to dinner and then dancing. She’s not out of control, her mother claims. She’s just young, she has a right to have fun, and anyway, she always comes back with a plastic doggie bag filled with leftovers from the restaurants she dines at thanks to Hugo Patrón, her boyfriend from the Yucatán, who runs a travel agency that has been idling lately since the computers aren’t working and the gringos have their doubts about traveling to Mexico these days. Still, the walls of Araceli’s bedroom are covered with the posters Hugo gives her—of the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, Paris, and Venice. He’s a well-intentioned boy, doña Serafina says, even if he is a bit old-fashioned. You see, he refuses to let Araceli work at all; he wants to save up enough money for an apartment and a honeymoon, and he doesn’t ever want his girlfriend—and future wife—to work. My conclusion is that he associates leisure with virginity.

Serafina occasionally pulls herself together and summons the spoiled young lady from her room to deliver cakes when clients don’t send their chauffeurs to pick them up. You should see the scowl that comes over that little girl’s face. She was born to be a princess, with that head full of silly dreams, and quite frankly she even flirts with me when I visit. Yes, I’m a better catch than Hugo Patrón, but the minute I start talking she becomes very shy, and as I play the role of the erudite professional educated in Paris, sprinkling my conversation with French, I can see a mixture of ennui, respect, and detachment come over her pretty, moon-colored face, as if I were the “black cloud of destiny,” a wondrous soul descended from his pedestal to visit the humble of this world—like her, a girl who has no visible prospects in life other than a marriage to the travel agent Hugo Patrón and a honeymoon in Miami.

The apartment has two bedrooms. One for the parents and the other for Araceli. On the roof, in a wooden hut next to a makeshift pigeon loft, lives the son, Ricardo, who very tenderly looks after those birds, reminding me of Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint on the rickety rooftops by New York’s waterfront. He’s an extraordinary young man, María del Rosario, and I’m telling you straight because I know that you fancy yourself a kind of headhunter extraordinaire (please forgive these occasional ironies of mine, I have no other way to tone down the resentment you inspire in me).

Ricardo is exceptional first of all in the physical sense. A son who was very much planned and hoped for by his parents, he must be about twenty-six, very slim without being skinny, with severe but very delicate musculature. He’s taller than me—about five foot eleven—and has the kind of head you only see in Italian museums: every detail finely chiseled, thin lips, sharp nose, high cheekbones, large, almost Asian eyes, broad forehead, and a mane of black hair that reaches his shoulders.

Am I describing an object of desire? In all sincerity, I believe so. You, my beautiful and elusive lady, a woman who has indulged and continues to indulge in so many wonderful delights, surely understand what I mean. This boy is so beautiful that nobody—neither woman nor man—could possibly help desiring him. Tight jeans, short T-shirt, bare feet when he comes out, surprised, to see who’s there, and when I tell him who I am he turns to scatter corn for the pigeons. He knows that I’ve helped his father and he’s grateful to me for that.

He looks me straight in the eye, a bit mocking, a bit skeptical, and says, “I don’t go to the university because it’s been closed down for two years.”

He throws some birdseed to the pigeons.

“Would you pay for me to go to a private university?”

His dark eyes are so intelligent that I don’t even have to ask the next question.

“It would be a waste of time for me to get one of those rotten jobs that drive you out of your mind with boredom. . . .”

“And end up stifling your ambition and talent forever,” I say, finishing his sentence as he looks me over with scornful admiration.

Then he points to the inside of his little “cabin in the clouds,” where I see a folding canvas bed, a wobbly table, a stool (“so that I don’t fall asleep while reading”) and, most importantly, a crudely fashioned bookshelf filled with books, old books, the kind they sell on the Calle de Donceles for two pesos each, with the bindings falling off, from musty old publishing houses, as extinct as animals from some long-gone era: Espasa Calpe, Botas, Herrero, Santiago Rueda, Emecé . . . like a harvest of dry wheat from Argentina, Spain, and Mexico. . . . I have an urge to poke through those shelves, I who have had the privilege of reading in the French National Library, but he stops me, pointing at the three volumes on his desk, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Montesquieu.