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 Entertainment | Books | February 2006 
Fuentes Fills Book With Mexican Machiavellis, Political Orgasms
 Hephzibah Anderson - Bloomberg
| | "The Eagle's Throne," Bloomsbury, 310 pages, 15.99 pounds; Random House, $26.95 |
The year is 2020. The setting is a Mexico bubbling with corruption, injustice and social unrest. President Lorenzo Teran has just demanded that the U.S. pay more for Mexican oil and withdraw its troops from Colombia.
So begins Carlos Fuentes's novel, "The Eagle's Throne."
The day after Teran's tirade, the "gringos," now led by a woman president, retaliate by sabotaging a satellite system that controls Mexico's communications, robbing the country of phone calls, e-mail and faxes, and driving it back to pen and paper.
The politicians fear to put anything on record. Yet communication is essential if they are to exploit a wave of protests, including a student sit-in, a strike and a march by peasants. The novel consists of letters among the president's friends and foes. We hear from the finance minister, two creepy generals and a shady former president known as "The Old Man."
Fuentes, 77, handles this material with a skill born of experience. In addition to being Mexico's leading man of letters, he once served his country as a diplomat.
Politics and Orgasms
First published in Spanish in 2002, "The Eagle's Throne" is soaked in caustic cynicism, yet registers at the lighter end of the author's spectrum. Fuentes injects the book with uproariously lethal intrigue and enough sex to make a Washington blogger blush.
Political fortune is "one very long orgasm," says Maria del Rosario Galvan, a glamorous political operator who opens the novel with a note to her bisexual protege, Nicolas Valdivia.
Maria is as ruthless as a mistress in a bygone royal court of Europe. She vows to sleep with Nicolas if he digs up enough dirt on her enemy, Tacito de la Canal, the president's chief of staff. Each character is as wily and corrupt as the next, though Maria is a hard act to match. She is in league with presidential hopeful Bernal Herrera, her sometime-lover and the father of her son, a sad secret locked away in an asylum.
As plots thicken and paranoia intensifies, letters are left unsigned and delivered only by trusted - if anyone can be trusted - couriers. Later, they are replaced by cassette tapes, to be destroyed after they're heard.
`My Adorable Tortilla'
Fuentes hams up the epistolary genre's voyeuristic appeal, making the reader privy to secret schemes and passions, and mixing billets-doux in with official memorandums. The thuggish Tacito, it turns out, is having an affair with the treasury secretary's wife; she calls him "my adorable tortilla."
Fuentes marshals a large cast of characters without losing focus. Just when the book begins to feel confusingly populous, he recaps via a vindictive letter from Maria to Nicolas. The missive is riddled with character assassinations worthy of Machiavelli.
Nothing in this story is as corrupt as language itself. "Democracy," "patriotism," and "moral renewal" become mere catchwords. In Mexican politics, true intent is communicated through wordless gestures, The Old Man tells Nicolas - a vocabulary of grimaces, squints, a finger drawn across the throat. Yet it's Fuentes's verbal dynamism that makes the machinations of these knavish characters so compelling.
Fuentes's long career is splotched with controversy. His opposition to U.S. foreign policy in Latin America once led the U.S. government to classify him as "undesirable" and deny him a visa. That political leaders can be steeped in corruption is hardly a controversial notion. What gives this astute satire bite is the way Fuentes forces his politicians to face the consequences of their actions.
To contact the reporter on this story: Hephzibah Anderson at hephzibah_anderson@hotmail.com. |
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