The Eagle's Throne

47. XAVIER “SENECA” ZARAGOZA TO PRESIDENT LORENZO TERÁN

It is with great pain, Mr. President, that I review the course of our relationship, for as I do so I realize that all along I’ve been the gadfly that criticizes your inactivity. A king sitting on a throne, motionless, believing he was ensuring the kingdom’s peace. If you moved your head to the left, it meant war and death. If you moved it to the right, it meant freedom and well-being, desired but utopian.

And now, as I’ve just seen you, as you’ve allowed me to see you, lying in your bed, emaciated, my friend, now only my friend, good and honest man that you are, a president inspired by his love for his country. . Now that I see you in the throes of death, now I truly understand that a president is neither born nor bred. He’s the product of a national illusion — or perhaps a collective hallucination. Once, I said to you, “Less glory, sir, and more freedom.”

How terrible and cruel politics is: Once you disappear, it’s only a matter of days before your glory and our freedom are lost forever. Mr. President, you’ve left the question of your succession unresolved. How can we make sure the next president is someone like you, a politician who is a decent man like Bernal Herrera, and not a snake like Tácito de la Canal?

How empty and melancholy, my beloved president and friend, my earliest advice to you sounds today: “Take advantage of the grace period at the beginning of the presidency. Honeymoons are brief. And democratic bonds get devalued from one day to the next.”

“The first rule for the exercise of power, Mr. President, is to disregard the immensity of your position.”

“The presidency is like the solar system. You are the sun, and your ministers are the satellites. But you are not God, nor are they angels.”

“The art of politics,” I told you then, “is not the art of the possible. It is the graffiti of the unpredictable. It is the scribble of chance.”

My poor president! Badgered for three years by Herrera’s pragmatism, Tácito’s fawning, and Seneca’s idealism! What would I say to you if this were your first day on the Eagle’s Throne? I’d remind you of the best aspects of our traditional benevolent dictatorship, so that you could endorse them or avoid them as you saw fit: “You don’t have to fear the president who’s passive, rather the president who’s unstoppably active.”

With you the opposite has always been true. Your passivity sparked more doubts than your action. And now, perhaps, you feel the supreme temptation of power. To be a leader who summons the energy of the nation and subjects us all to the voluptuous passivity of total obedience.

That is the easiest thing.

The most comfortable thing.

But it’s also the most dangerous. And you avoided that danger, my beloved, cherished president.

One day you said to me, “They think they’re fooling me by giving me those endless reports to read. They think I’m lethargic — as if I’ve been bitten by a tsetse fly. Wrong. I read at night, and I know everything. I’ve fooled them. I can sleep well at night.”

Yes, but the passive image you projected might be misinterpreted now. People might begin to demand a hyperactive president because authority can change its face from one day to the next (think about the past presidential successions, from Madero to Fox). The public feeds off paradox and adores contrast and contradiction.

Thank you, my dear friend, President Lorenzo Terán, for allowing me into your bedroom, where you’re bedridden, surrounded by nurses, doctors, intravenous tubes, sedatives. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to see your life complete.

I don’t know if we’ll ever see each other again. I know that you haven’t allowed anyone other than your faithful mosquito Seneca to enter this room where power is approaching its end.

Goodbye, Mr. President. .