The Eagle's Throne Read Online Free PDF Page B

as inconvenient as they often are). Palafox is good at working closely with the gringos, but he’s especially good at making them see that Mexico is also a democracy and must pay attention to its own public opinion. Sometimes, he tells them, we can’t go against public opinion, just as the U.S. can’t, either. Unfortunately, however, they tend to stick to that principle at all costs. The U.S. always operates according to polls, congressional opposition, or opinions in the national press, and the executive branch only gets its own way insofar as its ideas jibe with all these factors.
    We, on the other hand, pay a high price for our independent decisions—this has been proved in the case of Colombia. We found ourselves forced to support the new president, Juan Manuel Santos, and call for the withdrawal of the gringos from the country. It wasn’t enough that we caved in on trade agreements, antiterrorism measures, votes of support in a number of international organizations, and the protection of Mexicans unjustly imprisoned and even sentenced to death in the U.S. All it took were two panic buttons—Colombia and oil—to elicit this cruel, draconian response from Washington: cutting us off from all communications, leaving us in the globalized world’s equivalent of a desert.
    Nevertheless, you won’t see the slightest concern on Secretary Palafox’s face. He comes from a very old family that has lived through three centuries of turbulent Mexican history. Nothing ruffles him. He has nerves of steel. He is every bit a professional, even though there are always a few spiteful people around who say things like, “Secretary Palafox’s unassailable serenity is not the result of his blue blood, but of his hard-earned reputation as a poker player.”
    It seems that Palafox’s training grounds were not the halls of Versailles but rather the gambling halls, those rooms full of cigarette smoke, dim lights, and card tables. The kingdom of chance, so to speak. And tell me, my lovely protégé, how does one reconcile necessity with chance? That’s the great unanswered question of all time, says my dear friend Xavier Zaragoza, misleadingly nicknamed Seneca—I, for one, have learned more from him than I ever learned from studying political science. If you want to know more, have a look at yesterday’s paper: There is a marvelous article by don Federico Reyes Heroles, his reflections on turning sixty-five.
    From now on things start to go downhill, my darling disciple Nicolás Valdivia. Now, the comptroller general, don Domingo de la Rosa, is known to many as “the Flamingo” because he never knows which leg to stand on, the left or the right. Since our current president’s government is one of so-called national unity, sometimes it has to appease the conservatives, sometimes the liberals. The trouble is that both sides are honest only when they’re the opposition. The minute they take over the government, they soon learn the saying coined by that very colorful character from our country’s extravagant past, César Garizurieta, aka “the Possum”: “He who does not live off the public purse lives in error.”
    But I can tell you now that the man who, like him, tries to be everyone’s friend by granting concessions left, right, and center will never have enough money. And if the comptroller doesn’t have enough money, how can the republic?
    You’re right, my darling Nicolás. Education Secretary Ulises Barragán is a perfect disaster. They say he lies more than a dentist and that his perpetual and endless monologue has but one virtue: It has the power to turn practically any audience catatonic, which is useful when it comes to dealing with the Educational Workers’ Union and its two million frightful members when they all gather in the Elba Esther Gordillo Auditorium. The bad thing about Secretary Barragán is that his speeches are so boring that he doesn’t just put his audiences to sleep, he puts himself to sleep, too!