Free The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

humane to hasten my journey to the grave,” he said, laughing without laughing—a habit of his, it seems. “I won’t give them that pleasure. I’ll continue to be what some people call ‘a political nuisance.’ ”
    Then, without missing a beat (just as you said he would and just as he knew you would tell me he would), he began spewing out his famous sayings, now so old and universally known that they’re part of our political folklore. But as I said before, the Old Man doesn’t lack a sense of humor, nor is he incapable of deadpan self-criticism.
    “Let’s get through all those sayings attributed to me, so we don’t have to go over them again. . . .”
    “I’m one of the young people who wouldn’t mind that, Mr. President. Everything about you is new to me.”
    “What do you mean, ‘about me’? And don’t call me ‘Mr. President.’ Remember, I’m not president anymore.”
    “It’s my French education, Mr. President. In France, nobody is ex-anything. That would be considered rude.”
    “Another Frenchman in Veracruz!” he exclaimed without smiling. “Those damn Frogs again!”
    “What I was going to say is that I studied at l’École Nationale d’Administration in Paris. . . .”
    “French battleships disembarked here, you know, during the Pastry War.”
    “The what . . . ?” I asked, revealing my scant knowledge of Mexican history.
    “Yes,” he said, sipping his coffee. “A French pastry chef by the name of Remortel in Mexico City complained that during a riot the rabble had destroyed his éclairs and croissants, and so in 1838 the French deployed a fleet to bomb Veracruz and demand payment for the ruined pastries. How about that, then? Haven’t you ever seen the movie with Mapy Cortés?”
    “Mapy . . .”
    “A Puerto Rican beauty, oh, yes. A knockout. Thighs so perfect you could cry. She danced a conga called the
pim-pam-pum,
” he said, and took another sip.
    “Of course,” I replied in an attempt to recover a bit of my bruised credibility, realizing now that Mapy Cortés and her
pim-pam-pum
were more important than l’École Nationale d’Administration. “Of course— the whole world has come to Mexico via Veracruz, ever since Hernán Cortés arrived on these shores in 1519. . . .”
    “And the French came back in 1862 to help defend the empire of Maximilian and Carlota.” Nostalgia brought a momentary sparkle to his hooded eyes. “Just picture the troop of Belgians, Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, men from Prague, Trieste, Marseilles, the Zouaves, Bohemians, Flemish, who landed here with their flags held high, my little friend, and every last flag had an eagle, two-headed eagles, crowned eagles, heraldic eagles, and here we were with one poor little eagle of our own—but what an eagle, my little friend Valdivia, a bloody fine eagle, incomparable, its talons perched atop a nopal and devouring a serpent. Those Europeans weren’t expecting that, now, were they?”
    “I suppose not, sir.”
    “Oh, and the trail of dark-skinned blue-eyed children those imperial troops left behind in Veracruz. Did you ever see the film
Imperial Cavalry
?”
    “No, but I read a marvelous novel,
News from the Empire,
by Fernando del Paso.”
    “Thank goodness,” he said, with a note of pity in his voice. “At least you know something.”
    He looked into the distance toward the sea and the San Juan de Ulúa fortress, an imposing, uninviting gray mass on a forbidding island. The Old Man saw me watching and seemed to know what I was thinking.
    I spoke as if he’d asked me something.
    “Forgive me, Mr. President. . . . It’s just that when I was a child there was a breakwater that connected the castle to the mainland.”
    “I had the breakwater removed. It was a blight on the landscape,” he said, as the waiter, arm raised high above his head, poured steaming coffee with perfect aim straight into our glass coffee cups.
    The Old Man kept talking.
    “That’s why I sit here, looking out at