Mexico’s Former Future

La silla del águila (The Eagle’s Chair)
By Carlos Fuentes
412 pages, Mexico, D.F.: Alfaguara, 2003 (in Spanish)

Born in Panama in 1928 the son of a Mexican diplomat, Carlos Fuentes is the father of the modern Mexican novel. Beginning with his 1958 work, La región más transparente (Where the Air is Clear), and through his Terra Nostra in 1975, Fuentes’s novels were integral to the so-called Latin Boom, the creative overflow that garnered global acclaim for Latin American literature during the latter half of the past century. A charismatic writer with an attractive, cosmopolitan personality, Fuentes gave Mexico a literary countenance through his insights on the myths surrounding his nation — mixed blood, chieftainships, and tension between the archaic and the modern — offering his views to the public in novels, short stories, and essays that exhibited all the triumphs of contemporary literature.

However, beginning in the 1970s, a dramatic distance has emerged between Fuentes and the most demanding Mexican readers. While Mexico was profoundly transformed in the years between the pro-democracy student movement of 1968 and the electoral defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRIi) in 2000 after more than 70 years in power, Fuentes remained faithful to a view of Mexican identity that, for those of his generation, had remained static, militantly so, for decades. This view reflects an unchanging set of everyday Mexican archetypes, once ontological and now almost folkloric: unpunctuality and filthiness among citizens, proverbially corrupt politicians, matriarchal rule within families, machismo, and the ancient disdain with which Mexicans supposedly regard their own lives, a disdain that has wrought so much anguish for the nation’s chroniclers.

Convinced, as Honoré de Balzac was, that literature must embody the private history of societies, Fuentes has offered a new novel to exorcise every Mexican demon. Just as Where the Air is Clear and La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz)(1962) were requiems for the petrified legend of the Mexican Revolution, La cabeza de la hidra (The Hydra Head) (1978) was penned as a thriller for Mexico’s oil bonanza of the 1970s, and Cristobal nonato (Christopher Unborn)(1987), Fuentes’s last interesting novel, offered an apocalyptic prophecy of destructive political authoritarianism for Mexico at the end of the century.

In similar fashion, Fuentes’s latest offering, La silla del águila (The Eagle’s Chair), explores politics and highlights the author’s frustration with the exasperatingly slow transition to democracy in Mexico following the defeat of the pri. Fuentes places his novel in 2020, a future where Mexico’s political system would demonstrate its absolute inability to reform itself, despite alternating parties in power. A complete telecommunications collapse strikes the country, engineered by the United States as a political and economic reprisal for Mexico’s reluctance to support a U.S. invasion of Colombia. With no telephones, faxes, or e-mail, Mexican cabinet ministers and other influential figures take up their pens and pencils to write letters to one another, remaking Dangerous Liaisons, Mexico-style.

After a weak president dies in office, the succession controversy gives rise to intrigue within the palace walls, orchestrated from backstage by María del Rosario Galván, an all-powerful and ideologically ambiguous politician. "I am 45 years old," explains Galván in a letter, "and since I was 22, I have organized my life toward a single purpose: To be a politician, to make, dream, and suffer politics. That is my nature, my vocation. Don’t think that I therefore cast aside my feminine tastes, my sexual pleasure, or my desire to sleep with a beautiful young man like you. I simply believe that politics is that public manifestation of private passions, including, above all, the passions of love." Unlike the Dangerous Liaisons manipulator Marquise de Merteuil, on whom she is remotely inspired, Galván imposes her will and installs one of her lovers on the presidential throne.

The Eagle’s Chair is far from a prophetic novel, nor does it explain the present. Fuentes is likely aware that this story could occur in 2004, 1972, 1959, or 1934 — all times of conflict and turbulence in Mexican politics. The author’s message is as inaccurate as it is fatalistic: A country governed by very ancient mythologies, Mexico is congenitally incapable of generating a democratic society, and the uses, abuses, and customs of the 71-year pri regime will forever taint the nation’s future, like an oil spill. As readers can conclude by the end of The Eagle’s Chair, apparently only Mexico’s children are free of the original sin of corruption.

This thesis, more anthropological than literary, is quite old, as old as Fuentes’s works, and would be of literary interest only if The Eagle’s Chair were a reasonable projection of Mexican history. But it is not. On one hand, this book is littered with PRI-era slogans that all adult Mexicans know by heart, such as vivir fuera del presupuesto es vivir en el error (to live beyond your budget is to live in error) or el que no transa no avanza (if you don’t make deals, you won’t get ahead). On the other hand, any newspaper investigations regarding the Mexican scandals of the past decade are more interesting (and more tragic) than the characters in this novel, among whom only one stands out: a pencil-pushing bureaucrat in the archives who secretly preserves written proof of all the crimes committed by the state.

The Eagle’s Chair does not withstand comparisons to Martín Luis Guzmán’s 1929 novel La sombra del caudillo (The Shadow of the Chieftan), that great work of political intrigue concerning the military leaders and politicians of the revolution. Even more alarming, the new novel also pales next to Fuentes’s own Death of Artemio Cruz, the deathbed interior monologue of an erstwhile Mexican revolutionary. Indeed, the interest that Fuentes ignites as a novelist has become very limited in Mexico, as his artistic powers dried out more than 15 years ago. He is, however, a veteran figure of eloquence, a man of another time that exemplifies the love-hate relationship Mexican intellectuals will forever have with the PRI, the powerful Leviathan created by the revolution of 1910. This fickle attitude toward the pri mirrors that of the larger Mexican society; the discredited pri still garnered nearly 40 percent of the vote in the July 2003 legislative election.

Like some of the politicians he describes in The Eagle’s Chair, Fuentes appears to be (paraphrasing his own words) a prehistoric writer for whom public life has become a parade of ghosts — figures whose shadows still inhabit a Mexican era Fuentes once knew, an eternity from which he believes his nation will never awaken.