The Eagle's Throne

64. MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN TO BERNAL HERRERA

I know there’s a hint of mockery in your smile, Bernal, but there’s affection in your eyes, an affection we’ve always shared. By “always” I mean since we were young.

Since then we’ve never hidden anything from each other, you and I. We know each other’s personal history and family history, which in the end are one and the same. In fact — you know this better than anyone — the most mysterious thing, and perhaps the most exciting, is that ever since childhood we’ve learned to create an interior world, and we’ve developed a kind of double commitment: to our objective environment and to our subjective one. The exterior world changes and so does the interior. On the one hand, there are the things that are outside us and contain us; on the other are the things inside us that we contain. All of life is a struggle between these two forces. Sometimes it’s harmonious, as it’s been mostly for you. Other times it’s an uphill battle, like swimming upstream, difficult as mine’s been.

How lucky we were to have met when we were young, and to have known instantly that we each gave what the other lacked. Your steadfast nature comes from your parents. You’re the son of humble and honest social activists, Bernal and Candelaria Herrera,³ labor organizers at a factory up in the north. You owe them your solidarity with the people who most need to know that they too count and that they have the shelter of a political roof. That is the mission of the eternal left, you say, to tell people, “You’re not alone. You have a roof here.”

From your parents you also understood that purity of ideals is not enough in itself. That in order to gain half of what we want, sometimes we have to sacrifice the other half. Your parents never accepted that compromise. They were heroes of the labor movement and their sacrifice was surely not in vain. Who deceived them? Who made them cross the Rio Grande by night, making them believe they were saving a group of illegal immigrants, only to fall into the hands of the U.S. immigration service? They were shot in the back as they fled and subjected to the “Fleeing Fugitives Law,” Bernal — the unjust and searing lie — you who knew your parents, Bernal and Candelaria, so well. They never ran from anyone. They never turned their backs on anyone.

The “Fleeing Fugitives Law.” How can they call such an abominable act a law?

When we met in Paris, you told me all about your life and about how your parents had been sacrificed because of a sinister conspiracy hatched by the drug traffickers in the north, the corrupt politicians on both sides of the border — Chihuahua and Texas — and the corruptible forces of law and order in Mexico and the United States.

You told me, “I’m not going to be a pure idealist like my parents. I’m going to be able to tell the difference between the lesser evil and the greater good. I’ll serve the greater good by making concessions to the lesser evil.”

I envy you those parents, Bernal. I said it then and I’ll say it again now as I look back on the farce and tragedy that was my family life. I wasn’t born into poverty like you. I didn’t have to escape hardship as you did. On the contrary. I had to overcome wealth. The table was set. I was born into privilege. My father made me a rebel; I had to oppose him, be different from him, ignore his cynical tirades, his rather admirable lack of hypocrisy as he openly talked of his frauds, his illegal schemes, his business acumen. In politics, one must pretend. In business, one can be openly brutal and cynical.

My father frightened me so much I had to spy on him if I wanted to see him at all. I began listening in on his telephone conversations from a phone in the hall.

“Sell the fleet of old trucks to the Ascent to Heaven Company for the highest price you can. . ”

“But Ascent to Heaven is our company, sir.”

“Exactly. We claim the capital profit as earnings and then sell shares at the highest price possible.”

“The Herreras are stirring up trouble in the north, demanding legislation for job security in your factories, sir. . ”

“Well, let’s do the same as we did when they wanted to save that ecological mountain site full of birds and ocelots. No laws protecting the environment, no laws protecting job security, Domínguez. Buy as many legislators as you have to.”

“Buy?”

“All right, persuade. Pardon my brutality.”

“There is one legislator, pretty stubborn, who wants to pass a law that sanctions lawsuits against fraudulent investments. . ”

“Look, Ruiz, you just worry about inflating the value of those bull-shit shares so that we can sell them and make a profit. That’s our business. Don’t confuse the issue.”

“The company in Mérida is reporting losses, sir.”

“No company of mine reports losses if I don’t want it to. With Mérida, hide them by selling the subsidiary at a high price.”

“Who is going to want to buy it?”

“We will, stupid, the company in Quintana Roo. . ”

“How is that going to happen?”

“With a loan from us. That way we keep it in the family, our companies finance one another, we hide the losses and attract more investors. . ”

“And what happens when we can’t do that anymore?”

“Look, Silva, only when we’ve made ten times our personal holdings, only then will we declare bankruptcy and let the shareholders take the hit. Meanwhile, I need you to make everyone think that we’re doing just terrific, take the idea and stretch it like chewing gum, as far as it’ll go, so that the shareholders keep on investing, so they don’t catch on that we’re about to go bankrupt. Understood?”

“You’re a genius, sir. . ”

“No. My mother was the genius — she was the one who came up with the brilliant idea of giving birth to me!”

“What are we going to do with the executive bonuses this year, sir?”

“Maximize them, Rodríguez. Maximize them with share options and hide the expense so the investors don’t get wind of it. Never record options as expenses. You hold on to your millions.”

“What about the employees?”

“Fuck ’em.”

“I should warn you that Quique, your speechwriter, is getting a little out of line, he’s been going around and saying that he gives you all your ideas, sir.”

“Get rid of that ass-kissing bastard now. Take his things out of the office and put them out on the street.”

“He has been a faithful employee for twelve years. . ”

“There’s always work out there for a good ass-kisser. . ”

“And the investors?”

“They can go to hell.”

“And the prosecutors?”

“Don’t you go worrying about them. Don’t say a word. Nobody’s going to send us to jail. There are too many people out there who depend on us.”

My mother was better. Just like my father, she always wore black.

“I’m in mourning for Mexico. Eternal mourning,” he used to say. And so she imitated him and went even further with that funereal severity by wearing a long black skirt all the time.

Do you think you can picture me as a little girl, sitting at the dinner table between my father and mother, both wearing black from head to toe, eating their meal without exchanging a word?

He stared at her with his wildcat eyes.

She never looked up from her plate.

The servants had learned not to make a noise.

And yet there was more hatred in my mother’s downcast eyes than in my father’s fierce scrutiny.

If there was affection it was there in my father’s yellow eyes as he looked at me — but it was guilty, cagey. Over and over again, I’d hear him rebuking my mother behind closed doors.

“You couldn’t give me an heir. You’re completely useless.”

“You may be everyone’s boss, Barroso Junior, but you can’t give orders to God. It was God’s will that she should be a girl.”

It was as if the Virgin Mary were apologizing to the Holy Spirit for having given birth to a girl.

My father’s resentment, though, ended up working in my favor. He had no male heir. The doctors had advised my mother, Casilda Galván, not to risk a second pregnancy. It made them both bitter. My father decided to educate me as if I were a boy, thinking that one day I would inherit his fortune and run his businesses. That was why I was able to study in Paris, meet you, and fall in love with you, Bernal. I was the rich little Mexican girl who went to study at the University of Paris, all expenses paid, so that I could hang on to all those millions my father would eventually leave me. And you were the government’s young scholarship student, a protégé that Mexico sent to France almost as a compensation for the death of your parents and the injustices you suffered for having the same name as your father.

“Since my name is Bernal Herrera, just like my father, they arrested and tortured me, thinking I was him. Then, finally, the Juárez police chief came in and told them, ‘Don’t be idiots. The father’s dead, and we even buried him.’ ”

There was suffering in your expression, but it was combined with serenity, and I envied that; it was a look inherited from pain and courage and faith. . I don’t know.

You, on the other hand, could see the family bitterness in my eyes, and you reproached me for it.

“Sweetheart, resentment, envy, and self-pity are poison. Turn what you feel into the will to love. Into the freedom to act. Don’t wear yourself out hating your father. Overcome it. Be more than him. Better than him. But be different from him. That’s what will most rankle inside him.” You laughed, my love.

You and I in love, Bernal Herrera. It was love at first sight. A love born in lecture rooms and the books we read, in the cafés on the Boul’Mich, on our walks along the Seine, in the old films on the Rue Champollion, during our hurried meals of croque-monsieur and café au lait, our impassioned readings of the immortal Nouvel Obs and Jean Daniel, our study sessions, our book-hunting expeditions along the Rue Soufflot, our passionate nights in your attic flat on the Rue Saint Jacques, the dawn views of the Panthéon, our protection. It was love at first sight.

“We’re in Paris. Nothing changes here. The city’s always the same. That’s why lovers in Paris will always be lovers!”

Tra-la-la.

There were two reasons why I had to rush back to Mexico.

First, because I found out that my father had cheated my mother out of her money. Once they were married, they combined their assets. My mother had inherited a large beer consortium and it was understood that my parents’ common assets didn’t include my mother’s involvement with the company, only her personal estate.

One fine day, the executive board of the company summoned my mother and informed her that my father had not only driven her personal fortune into the ground through a series of fraudulent financial operations but that he had also forged the signature of Casilda Galván de Barroso, taken control of the company stock, and cheated everyone out of their money.

I returned to Mexico in the middle of this melodrama. I only made it worse. That was when I announced to my father that I was in love with you and that I intended to marry you.

“A Communist! And dirt poor, no less! The son of my archenemies, those trade-union ringleaders in the north! You’ve gone mad!” my father shouted, as he threw his bowl of scalding soup at me, got up from the table, and started hitting me while I cried, “Stop it! Hit me but don’t hit my child!”

Bernal, my love. Melodrama is inevitable in private life. There’s no family without its soap opera. And what is melodrama, but comedy without the humor?

“I don’t want sons-in-law!” my father exploded.

The furies that had always tormented him were unleashed on the accumulated disgrace: the “lost daughter,” the wife who had “ruined him.” Even though he had, in fact, been the one to ruin everything for us with the rage that was too much even for him. It was a storm, a tempest on open ground, the rustling of dry trees and sterile plains and raging skies, Bernal, a raw fury like a resurrection of all the dead seasons of his life — silent springs, long, hot summers, black autumns, discontented winters. Yes, Bernal, my father’s rage was let loose, as if poisoning himself weren’t enough — he had to poison the rest of the world as well.

“My daughter! Some communist’s whore!” he howled like an animal. “My daughter, the lover of a man who harassed the Barroso family and tried to ruin all of us! My grandson, a child with poisoned blood!

“Whore, swine, you belong in a pigsty,” he shouted, and he hit me, tearing the tablecloth off the table, destroying all the glasses and plates, staining the rugs, all of it in front of my mother, motionless, cold, dressed in black, reproaching my father with a deadly look. Then, suddenly she stood up and took a gun from her bag, observing the fleeting shock that crossed his face. At that, my father took out his own gun and they faced each other, like in a Posada etching or a Tarantino film, pointing their guns at each other and me in the middle, battered, terrified, wanting to separate them but defeated by my womb, by the instinct to save my child, our child. .

I moved away from the dark, obscene figures of my parents. I backed out of the dining room. I saw them looking at each other with hatred, dollar bills and bile in their eyes. Standing opposite each other, both armed, pointing their guns, waiting. Who would shoot first? The duel was a long time coming.

Outside the dining room, I began to scream, covering my ears so that I wouldn’t have to hear the shots, trembling, clutching my belly, not daring to go back into the dining room.

They were dead.

My father was on the table, his face half-buried in a plate of strawberries and cream.

My mother was under the table, her black skirt pushed up high above her sex. For the first time I saw the milky whiteness of her legs. She wore ankle socks, I said to myself.

They were both dead.

I inherited both fortunes. I liquidated all my father’s debts. I saved my mother’s shares. The beer company was very understanding, even generous with me. But bad luck prevailed. Or rather, bad luck came along with the good luck, as is often the case.

“Oh, how small my fortune is — when will I see it grow?” as the late general Arruza used to say.

You came back to Mexico. You asked me to marry you. Now there was nothing in our way. My father was dead. But the little boy was born.

What is a chromosome? It’s the messenger of heredity. It communicates genetic information. Every human somatic cell has a nucleus that contains twenty-three chromosomes, organized in pairs. One half is paternal and the other maternal. Each chromosome can duplicate: It is its own twin. But when an intrusive chromosome — a “third man”— suddenly appears, the total number of chromosomes is raised to forty-seven, and this abnormality results in a strange creature: a flattened face, mongol eyes, deformed ears, flecked irises, broad hands and stumpy fingers, weak muscles, and the forewarning of arrested mental development. Down syndrome.

What were you and I to do?

Keep the child with us, treat him as our son, which is what he was— is? Dedicate ourselves to him? Look after him, me the devoted mother, freeing you to pursue your career?

Kill him, Bernal, relieve ourselves of the unwanted burden?

Love him, Bernal, peer into his odd little eyes and see the spark of divinity, that creature’s desire to love and be loved?

Together we decided that fighting for power was less painful than fighting for a child.

How cold, how clever we were, Bernal. What did we want, you and I? The same thing. To be active players in politics. To carry out the things we learned at the university in France. To build a better country on top of the ruins of a Mexico cyclically devastated by a combination of excess and shortage: poverty and corruption equally rooted, evil people who were far too competent and good people who were far too incompetent; affectation and pretension at the top and grim resignation down below; lost opportunities; governments blaming everything on the people and their civic passivity, and the people blaming the government’s ineptitude; a general belief in signs, as if instead of federal law, our constitution was the Popol Vuh of Mayan antiquity. .

You and I were going to change all that. We had immense confidence in our talent and our education in a country of amateur politicians. We wanted to act legally, but we were also willing to be flexible.

“Politics is the art of the possible.”

“No. Politics is the art of the impossible.”

Who said what? You first, then me, or was it the other way around, as our unforgettable agriculture secretary would put it? The fact is, Bernal, we stopped being parents to one little boy because we thought we would become godparents to a whole country.

The boy was deposited in an institution. We visited him from time to time. Less and less, after a while, discouraged by the physical distance, the mental wall.

We didn’t listen to the voices that told us, “Get closer to him. These children are more intelligent than they seem. They have a different kind of intelligence.”

“And what kind is that, doctor?”

“The intelligence of a world unto itself.”

“Impenetrable?”

“Yes, possibly. We still don’t know. But real. Whose job is it to try?”

“To try what. .?”

“Whose job is it? Yours, as his parents, or his?”

We didn’t explore these enigmas. We distanced ourselves from these options. We did what we had to do without the burden of an idiot, yes, I don’t mind going to the root of the word. Idio, what is ours, idios, what is loved, idiosyncratic, what belongs to one person. . Do you remember Emilio Lledó’s extraordinary lecture at the Collège de France about Plato’s Phaedrus, about that speech that is the seed of language? The language that when “unjustly condemned needs the help of a father, since it is not able to defend itself.” For that reason, Lledó taught us, all language must be interpreted so that it can be “submerged” in “the language of which we are comprised, the language that we are.”

We’ve spent nearly twenty years, you and I, speaking the conventional language of politics. Wouldn’t we have been capable of speaking the creative language of a child? Perhaps a poetic language?

What was the price, Bernal? Accept it. Not only did we distance ourselves from the boy that was ours, our own. After a while, deeply involved in our respective political careers, we distanced ourselves from each other. We never stopped loving each other, seeing each other, talking to each other, conspiring together. . but we were no longer idiots, we were no longer ours, we no longer lived together — sometimes we’d go out to a bar and sometimes, even, we went to bed together. But it didn’t work. There was no passion. We preferred to abstain so as not to sour our great friendship.

You are a good man, and that’s why we couldn’t live together. Without you, I could freely exercise the dark part of my soul, the part I inherited from my father, without hurting you.

I’ve always told you about my love affairs before the poisonous gossip reached your ears. I know that in politics skill, not truth, is what wins arguments. I’ve told you before, “A liar falls sooner than a one-legged man.” Being a good liar is a full-time job. You have to devote yourself to it entirely. And that’s precisely what politics allows you to do.

Long ago, the liar was often sent to purge his guilt in a monastery. But Mexico is neither a convent nor a monastery. It’s a whorehouse. And you’ve been the austere monk of the whorehouse of Mexican politics. That’s always been your strength. Morality. Contrast. You’ve cultivated them in the name of what used to be called “moral renewal.” You’ve been tough and pragmatic when necessary, fair and legalistic when appropriate.

You never told me anything about your private life and sometimes I think you had no private life at all. Or, as my father, Leonardo Barroso, Jr., once said, very cynically, “We all have the right to a private life. As long as we have the wherewithal to pay for it.”

I’ve worked with you unconditionally. I knew Lorenzo Terán was terminally ill since the day he became president, in fact. He wasn’t the first ill man to take office. François Mitterrand became president of France knowing he’d die in the Elysée Palace. Roosevelt knew it, too, when he allowed himself to be elected for the fourth time. Perhaps that knowledge gave them the will to survive with the energy we remember them for. And the will to keep their secrets, just as Terán kept his. He trusted me completely. His illness was the reason I began to prepare an inexperienced young man, someone who’d barely started to shave, someone I could mold. He’d take over the presidency if Terán died— he’d be interim president if Terán died during his first two years in office, and acting president if he died in the last four years. But he was only meant to be passing through; Nicolás Valdivia would only be passing through, until your own presidency, Bernal, once your adversary Tácito was eliminated.

Valdivia complied very conscientiously with all I told him to do. But he always believed that when I said, “You will be president,” I meant a full six-year term. He never suspected that I only considered him feasible as acting president because President Terán was ill. A new Emilio Portes Gil. He was obedient and loyal. There were certain things that he — and nobody else — could control. The Old Man Under the Arches. The simpering passion of that soap opera queen Dulce, whatever her name is. The impenetrable mystery of Ulúa. The Moro affair that you and I wanted to make invisible by eliminating it from public discourse, as if it didn’t exist at all, a secret sealed up forever at the bottom of the sea. .

But then again, Valdivia was useful for spoiling the ex-president’s little schemes, not to mention the heinous general Arruza’s plot — we never imagined Nicolás would overtake us and get in with General von Bertrab to find out what Arruza was up to, to say nothing of what he found out about the idiotic pretensions of Almazán, that Yucatecan whore, and Andino, her bottomless pit of economic science and political mediocrity.

All of it under control and all of it in your favor, Bernal. Fate smiled on you. The coast was clear. Onésimo Canabal, the president of Congress, plays the fool, but he’s craftier than a pirate, and he knows which way the wind blows. All of us have our secret vendettas. And Canabal’s vendetta was that of avenging the humiliations heaped on him by the terrible ex, César León (no adversary should ever be underestimated). Eliminating César León has been Onésimo Canabal’s obsession. Andino made him laugh, but not Pepa, because he knew about the Mexican Madame Pompadour’s secret affairs with Tácito and Arruza. Onésimo, sneaky son of a bitch that he is, calculated that these deceitful affairs would end up like the liar and the one-legged man — flat on their faces. Onésimo also knew how to take advantage of our balkanized Congress, so that he could divide and conquer.

What neither you nor I calculated, Bernal Herrera, was that Onésimo, more astute than we gave him credit for, would co-opt a secret agent, an unglamorous old woman, more changeable than a chameleon, a woman who could blend into anything from the Chihuahua desert to the jungles of Tabasco, Paulina Tardegarda, who has the air of a nun, a virgin, a martyr. Not only was she a bottomless pit of information for Onésimo, but she was something far worse, something that, quite frankly, makes me seethe, Bernal.

I promised Nicolás Valdivia: “You will be president of Mexico.”

Subtext: “I will make you president of Mexico.”

It wasn’t like that. The person who made Valdivia president was that convent escapee Paulina Tardegarda. Valdivia can thank Paulina and Onésimo, not you and me, for making it to the Eagle’s Throne.

I’m seething, Bernal, I admit it, and I’m frightened.

Nicolás Valdivia was going to be the don Tancredo, the sitting duck in our monumental bullfight, the immobile buffoon in charge of diverting the bull as it entered the ring, so that the matador could shine. Well, well. Now it turns out that you and I have been the Tancredos and that Nicolás Valdivia owes his position to Onésimo and Paulina, not you and me.

However, you are who you are, my old sweetheart, and your candidacy has the most promise and the best chance to win the 2024 elections. But “life brings us surprises,” as the Panamanian bard Rubén Blades said. Life brings us surprises. Other candidates may appear on the scene. That’s to be expected. In fact, I think we should encourage other candidacies. When I survey the political horizon, I don’t see a candidate stronger than you. In any case, you can breathe easy. Article 82 of the constitution states that any citizen who has served as president of the republic — whether elected, interim, acting, provisional — may not serve in that position again. Under no circumstances, the law says. That was why César León was trying so hard to intimidate Onésimo Canabal into starting that complicated constitutional reform process — because he wanted to scrap Article 82 and become president again. Blessed re-election, Bernal. Nobody has the right to screw us twice.

Except Nicolás Valdivia perhaps?

My creation.

My anointed one, à la mode démocratique.

The docile puppet who was going to deliver us to the presidency without a problem.

Well, look what happened. The maid turned out to have a mind of her own.

No, I don’t think that you’ll be defeated in free, democratic elections. Your victory is assured. But what I am afraid of, Bernal, is that Valdivia will find some way to stay on the Eagle’s Throne. Do you think he’s going to be satisfied with a mere three years? Do you think he isn’t already plotting with that Paulina to see how he can hang on to the throne?

Maybe not. But better to be safe than sorry. Remember always that under no circumstances should we forgive Nicolás Valdivia for deceiving us. But you leave that to me. If you forgive the person who did you wrong, your enemies will take note and screw you over twice as badly.

I’m telling you this, my good Bernal, because you’re the one who always goes around saying, “I can’t be unjust with my enemy.”

You’re wrong. Be unjust. Because your enemy will be unjust with you.