The Eagle's Throne

46. NICOLÁS VALDIVIA TO JESÚS RICARDO MAGÓN

My love, this letter goes out without a signature but you know who it’s for and who it comes from. . what a lovely verb, “to come.” It can be conjugated in every imaginable form. . I’m leaving Veracruz today and I’ll be waiting for you at the Hotel Mocambo. Don’t let it faze you. It’s a kind of Marienbad-on-the-Gulf. A hotel with a hundred years of solitude behind it, inhabited by the ghosts of its golden days circa 1940. Picture it. Eight decades ago. It’s like a white labyrinth, délabré. You go in and out without knowing where you’re going. Just getting to your bedroom is a delicious adventure — or it will be if you’re there waiting for me. I’ve reserved separate rooms, but I can hardly bear the time and distance that keep me from your cinnamon body, like a living tropical statue, replete with jungles and flowers, blackness and sun, secret places and wide open fields. .

I don’t think I need to remind you that I love women with equal intensity because in women I see and desire the one thing I’m not. But I also love you, without denying my heterosexual nature, because I see myself in you. In women I see the other and I find that equally alluring. In you I see myself and my passion is enhanced by melancholy. Yes, we’re men, we’re young, but I’ll grow old before you and in that sense, I know that when I make love to you I’m giving you what’s left of my youth. I entrust you with my youth. I love you just as Saint John of the Cross said one should love, unrestrainedly repeating the word “beauty.”

Let us, through this exercise of love I have professed, arrive at seeing one another in your beauty, where, being one and the same in beauty, we see the both of us in your beauty, possessing your singular beauty; such that, looking at one another, each of us may see in the other his own beauty, since one and the other are both your beauty, and I am engulfed by your beauty, and in that way, I will see you in your beauty, and you will see me in your beauty, and then I will appear as you in your beauty, and you will appear as me in your beauty, and my beauty will be your beauty and your beauty will be my beauty; and that way I will be you in your beauty, and you will be me in your beauty; because your beauty will be my beauty, and that is how you and I will see one another in your beauty. .

You are not Narcissus’ mirror. You are the pool in which the two of us swim naked. You seal my wound. You are my delicate wound. I have loved only one man in my life, and it is You.

P.S. Don’t even think of going into the water at Mocambo. There are sharks off the coast and the nets a few meters from the shore often have holes in them. They could give you quite a scare! Remember, the good thing about sharks is that they never stay still. If a shark stops moving, he sinks to the bottom and dies there. Do you think the shark dreams while moving around like that? Ah, what a question, my love. And don’t walk along the beach. There isn’t any sand. Just mud. Wait for me with clean feet. And throw this letter to the sharks. If they eat it, perhaps they’ll learn something. They’ll learn to love. Did you know that sharks only fuck once in their sad lives?