The Eagle’s Throne
by Carlos Fuentes
(Bloomsbury)
Had they been contemporaries, Carlos Fuentes and Ambrose Bierce would have revelled in each other’s company.
Bierce was the satirist nonpareil and ”laughing devil” of the San Francisco newspapers of the late 19th and early 20th century. In 1913, aged 71, he rode down into Mexico to witness — or perhaps even join in — the revolution that was playing out there. Bierce disappeared, but he has not been forgotten.
For one thing, there is Fuentes’s popular novel, The Old Gringo, a myth-making tribute to Bierce. For another, there is Bierce’s great legacy, The Devil’s Dictionary (issued also in amplified form as The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary).
Bierce’s caustic dictionary entry for politics could well serve as the epigraph for Fuentes’s latest novel, The Eagle’s Throne: ”Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”
Fuentes here ploughs new ground, as well as returning to familiar fields.
The Eagle’s Throne revives the epistolary novel while taking as subject the endless, abject manoeuvres and manipulations that characterise the politicking classes. In the Fuentes oeuvre, it is arguably the work most directly engaged with the moral compromises of Mexican politics and society since his first two novels, Where the Air is Clear (1960) and The Good Conscience (1961).
Indeed, it is tempting to view The Eagle’s Throne as the last in a triptych. Fuentes attempted to define national identity in philosophical and psychological terms in Where the Air is Clear, then moved on in The Good Conscience to the painful realities inherent in changing society from agrarian to urban, peasant to middle class. These were reflections of Mexican life; so too is The Eagle’s Throne, but it has another, prospective function: it is, as Fuentes himself has been careful to emphasise, in the manner of a prophecy.
The predictions it carries are ghastly. Accommodations with contending interests have been supplanted by amorality, cynicism and vicious realpolitik. In short, this is Machiavelli for the 21st century 2020 to be precise — and its prince is the young Nicolas Valdivia.
He is praised as a true mestizo beauty by the (female) Pygmalion of the piece, Maria del Rosario Galvan: ”That golden, cinnamon-coloured skin that goes so well with the fine features of the Mexican man: linear profile, thin lips, long-flowing hair.”
Maria — an embodiment of the personal is the political — sees in the handsome, intelligent but politically callow Valdivia a way to ultimate power, the eagle’s throne that is the Mexican presidency. (The Mexican flag has vertical green, white and red bands, with an eagle badge, an ancient Aztec symbol, on the central white stripe.) Together with former lover and longtime co-conspirator, Bernal Herrera, the interior secretary, she plays the young man as bait in the political shark pool.
If this is business as usual, the wider milieu in which it occurs is not quite normal. Mexico has been cut off from the world, its internal and external phone, fax, e-mail and Internet connections severed by an irate United States. The reasons? Incumbent Mexican president Lorenzo Teran has called on the US to withdraw its army of occupation from Columbia and, worse still, banned the export of Mexican oil to the US unless Washington agrees to pay the price set by the global oil cartel.
The communications scenario seems somewhat implausible, but Fuentes explains it with a neat twist. Mexican communications have been outsourced to American companies and the Florida Satellite Centre, but the infrastructure on which they depend is controlled by the Pentagon.
What this allows Fuentes is an exercise in the epistolary novel because, perforce, everyone must communicate in writing. (Or by cassette tapes, a device to which some characters resort.)
There is a thrill of transgression here, as reflected in the first paragraph of the first letter in the novel. ”Yesterday, when I first met you, I told you, when it comes to politics, never put anything in writing. Today, I have no other way of communicating with you,” writes Maria to Nicolas.
For writers and readers, and all those who care about words, that is a pleasing prospect to contemplate. It chimes with the novel’s secondary theme, almost occluded by the welter of politics: the word.
”The word, the word brings us together one minute and then tears us apart the next, the word that, whether friend or enemy, in the end acquires an independent meaning,” writes Nicolas.
In form and style, The Eagle’s Throne has three distinct precursors in the epistolary tradition. Of course, there is Clarissa Harlowe (1747 to 1748) by Samuel Richardson; it is possible to read in Nicolas’s story the inverse of Clarissa’s fate. Then there is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie ou la nouvelle Heloise (1761), whose epigraph resonates here: ”I have seen the morals of my time, and I have published these letters.”
Last, and most eloquently, Fuentes works with Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782). The intrigues, callousness and cynicism of the Vicomte de Valmont and Madame de Merteuil are mirrored here in the grasping schemes of Maria and Bernal — as well as others of the political class. In a delicious subversion of Laclos, however, Fuentes melds Cecile and Danceny into Nicolas, and makes him a far from helpless character.
The Eagle’s Throne is notable in all its guises: epistolary revival, homage to The Prince, prophecy and highbrow political thriller. As far as the last goes, The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary carries a later Bierce definition of politics: ”A means of livelihood affected by the more degraded portion of our criminal classes.” The Eagle’s Throne leaves little doubt of that.
It is both cruel and calculated, however, that Fuentes has one of his credos tumble from the mouth — and hand — of Nicolas, the anti-hero: ”Don’t ever stop talking. Don’t ever say the last word.”