Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

“I’ll never let this happen again,” Felix Maldonado said to himself. “No one, ever again, is going to make me swallow his words when I can’t get back at him.”

“Did you see what I had to swallow because of you?” Ayub asked insolently, as if reading Felix’s mind. “Well, now we’ll see how you can take it, old asshole buddy. Let’s see what’s beneath those bandages, Licha.”

“It’s too soon, he’ll be scarred,” Felix heard the woman’s voice say.

“Hurry it up, you bitch.” Ayub attempted to imitate the Director General’s authority, but his high-pitched voice was unconvincing.

Felix heard the quick, nervous steps of the woman named Licha, and curtains being violently pulled back. The light forbidden by his photophobic superior flooded the room, and the woman cried, “That’s mean, Simon, I can’t take off his bandages in that glare.”

Ayub replied that the chief was the only one bothered by the light. Anyone else could go fuck himself.

“But it might ruin his eyes,” the woman protested.

“For what he’s going to see, he won’t need good eyes.”

As she sat beside him on the bed to properly insert the needle Ayub had incorrectly replaced, the woman at last moved into Felix’s field of vision. The arm was purple.

If Felix Maldonado had had a kangaroo in his chest, it couldn’t have leaped more wildly than his heart the moment he saw and recognized Licha. She was the girl carrying the cellophane-wrapped syringes and ampules who’d entered his taxi several days ago at the corner of Gante. “My name is Licha and I work at the Hospital de Jesús,” she’d said as she got out in front of the Hotel Reforma on her way to give a shot to a Yankee tourist suffering from typhoid fever.

Perhaps she was able to read Felix’s eyes in the depths of their white tunnels; perhaps she merely noted her patient’s accelerated pulse rate. She raised her eyes from her task and looked at Felix, begging him not to give her away, not in front of Ayub, please.

When she finished, Licha squeezed Felix’s wrist, and told him he was doing fine.

Ayub ground the topaz rings into the open palm of his left hand, like a boxer training for a match. “I owe you one for that dirty punch, I swear, I owe you one. Come on, Lichita, get those bandages off.”

Licha said she wanted to bandage Felix’s swollen arm first, but Ayub pushed her aside and began to tear at the gauze strips binding Maldonado’s head. Felix tried to ball his hands into fists; he felt he was going to faint from the pain.

“Don’t be such a creep,” the nurse cried. “Let me do it, you have to unfasten the clips first.”

Felix closed his eyes. Along with the pain, he tried to block out Ayub’s scent of fresh clove and his acrid perspiration, as well as the sound of his ragged breathing.

“Look what you got yourself into by being such a fuckup,” said Ayub, as Licha carefully unwound the bandages. “Everything was all laid out by the chief. If you hadn’t been there and stuck your nose in, no one would have noticed a thing after the shot except what was happening to Number One. They’d all have thought the criminal got clean away. They wouldn’t have found a trace of a killer or a weapon, and by this time every law-enforcement agency in the country would be looking for a fugitive named Maldonado. We had everything ready for you to make a getaway, all we wanted was your name. It was picture-perfect — passport, tickets, a little bread for you and your wife … perfect. And then you had to butt in. Who put the pistol in your hand? Try to remember that much, at least. See if you can’t make us feel a little sorry for you, you bastard, because now you’ve got nothing, no bread, no passport, no tickets, no wife, no name, nothing…”

Ayub’s brusque movement echoed his frenzied words as he seized an oval hospital mirror with a slightly tarnished chrome frame and held it to Felix’s face.

His name was Felix Maldonado. The face reflected in the mirror belonged to a different name, not Felix Maldonado. No moustache, curly hair cut close to the scalp, shaved in places, an unnatural slickness at the temples, receding hair at the browline, as if his head were a practice field for transplants and grafts. Some of the facial incisions hadn’t healed; in some places the skin was stretched taut, like a false face, held by clamps behind the ears. The swollen eyes looked vaguely Oriental. Invisible stitches paralyzed the mouth.

Felix Maldonado stared with blind fascination at the mask Simon Ayub offered him. He couldn’t hold his eyelids open, and he heard Licha say, “You’ve probably ruined his eyes, you jerk. Come on, will you get out of here?”

“When do you think he’ll be able to talk?”

Licha did not reply. Ayub said, “Let us know as soon as he can,” and left, slamming the door.

“DON’T WORRY, honey, you’ll see,” said Licha as she dressed his incisions. “As soon as the swelling goes down, you’re going to look fine, and little by little you’ll get used to your new face. After a while, you’ll recognize yourself, easy…”

She changed the cotton pads on his eyes and said that later that afternoon they could remove the clamps. It was a good job, she added, they hadn’t used one of those butchers, but a first-rate surgeon. “You can’t tell by the first days, honey; you’ll get used to it and forget you ever looked any different. Some things, like the eyes, you can’t change.”

Perched on the side of his bed, she held Felix’s hand. “You don’t mind if I call you honey, do you?”

Felix shook his head, and Licha smiled. He could visualize her, the Playboy Bunny type, small but shapely, everything in the right place, well stacked. She tried to minimize her dark complexion by dying her hair ash blond, but actually achieved the opposite effect; the blond hair made her look darker. She hadn’t been to the beauty shop recently, and the center part showed a half inch of dark roots. Her makeup was discreet, as if in nurse’s training they’d told her that flashy nurses don’t inspire confidence.

She smiled, pleased that Felix hadn’t thought she was too forward. But then she moved away from the bed, anxious, unable to think of anything to say after breaking the ice. She puttered about the room, pretending to be absorbed in little details of his treatment but, in truth, searching for the right words to resume the conversation.

Finally, with her back to Felix, she said surely he must be wondering what had happened to him, he must be thinking she was mixed up in it somehow. Well, she wasn’t. She didn’t know any more about it than what Simon Ayub had told him. Simon had contacted her for this job. She’d asked for a brief leave from the Hospital de Jesús, where she usually worked, and she’d followed Ayub’s instructions to a T.

“There’s something I want you to know right off,” she said, turning to look at Felix, as if inflicting a penance upon herself. “I was Simon’s girl for a while, but that was a long time ago.” She paused, waiting for a sign of some kind from Felix, then realized none was coming.

“Um-hmm. About a year ago,” she went on. “He’s quite a ladies’ man, and he looks like a nice enough guy, all those fancy clothes … You get a little carried away. And he’s good-looking, and well, short, you know. It’s easy to fall for him. It isn’t until afterwards you find out what he’s really like. He talks so sweet at first, but when he knows you better, dirty isn’t the word! Well, anyway, I can’t complain. Like they say, it was an experience, and, you know, honey, I’m still a little fond of him, because, well, he gave me some good times.” She clicked her tongue and grimaced, half asking forgiveness, and half saying, what the hell! She seemed to feel that after getting that off her chest she could go on to more serious matters.