Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

“Lichita, you’re one hell of a woman. I don’t think I deserve you, word of honor.”

“But you’re so sad, honey, anyone could see that.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s hard for me to leave a woman.”

“Any woman, honey?”

“Yes.” Felix forced a smile. “Sometimes death takes one away from me. But I carry them all with me all my life, dead or alive, the way a snail carries its shell.”

“You’re really something!”

LICHA PLAYED her part to perfection. From the sidewalk across the street, Felix Maldonado watched the fire destroy the private clinic on Tonalá. He was invisible among the patients, some lying unconscious on the street, some suffering from shock, a few on stretchers or in wheelchairs, a few on foot; women wept, their wailing newborn infants, hastily wrapped in blankets, in nurses’ arms; one nurse was shouting, This baby will die out of the incubator; one man was moaning about the cardiac pain in his arm; confused and excited nurses held aloft bottles of serum they’d managed to save during the sudden panic; a woman lying on the ground was crying out, her labor inopportunely precipitated by fear; some patients had been almost asphyxiated by the smoke; and one jaundiced man, seemingly near death but smiling and highly diverted, clung to a scrawny tree, the same tree that supported a silent, heavily bandaged Felix Maldonado indistinguishable in the human maelstrom.

Licha wept hysterically. Befuddled, wringing her handkerchief, she was arguing with one of the clinic guards, pointing first to the left and then to the right. “Well, why don’t you go look for him. Don’t be so damned stupid, he can’t have gone very far in the state he’s in, can he?”

“Shut up, you little nitwit. This was a carefully planned operation,” one of the guards said, frothing with rage. “You’ll answer for this, I’ll see to that…”

“I was only in the bathroom for a second. Can’t a girl even take a minute to pee? And since he couldn’t move…”

“Naturally, his accomplices got him out. But how?”

Felix had put on the trousers and shoes, and Licha had led him to the dumbwaiter on the third floor, where he flattened himself into a corner like a sardine, praying that no one would summon it at that hour. Licha had gathered together all the wastepaper, newspapers, and Kleenex she’d found in the wastebaskets and the dispensary, along with dirty sheets, pillowcases, and towels, and piled everything on the mattress in Felix’s room. Then she poured alcohol over everything, set fire to it, and ran down the hall, screaming, Fire, fire. She pressed the button to make the dumbwaiter descend to the ground floor, and as smoke curled from Felix’s room, patients and nurses erupted into the hall. Then Licha had run down the stairs to the ground floor, rushed to the kitchen, opened the door to the dumbwaiter, and run back toward the main door screaming, “The one in 33’s escaped! I went to pee and when I got back he was gone.”

“He didn’t come out here,” one of the guards said.

“He must still be in the building,” a second added. “Come on!” He started to run upstairs to look for Felix, but couldn’t push his way through the nurses running downstairs, yelling fire. The guard tried to halt them: “You irresponsible bitches. Get back up there with your patients.”

“But the elevator’s full of smoke,” one nurse cried.

The guard at the entrance shouted an obscenity and ran to the elevators. His efforts were hampered by ambulatory patients hurrying toward the exit.

Faceless in his bandages, yelling like all the other patients, Felix emerged from the kitchen and joined the stream of fleeing patients, as the guard at the door ran back to telephone the Fire Department.

The fire trucks were very slow in arriving. The guards and nurses continued to evacuate the patients, and Licha spun out her hysterical scene until the guard got fed up with her, called her a dirty bitch, and said it was her fault they were in the mess they were in. “But you’ll pay for your carelessness. You’ll never work in another hospital in this city. Stop that screeching and try to do something useful. Help the patients, at least. This is going to ruin us.”

For a while, Felix stood among the sick, lost amid the confusion. Then little by little he moved away, mingling with the curious who’d come from neighboring houses to watch.

It will be interesting to see whether they keep this out of the newspapers, Felix murmured dryly, and casually started walking down the quiet, dark Colima toward the Plaza Río de Janeiro. He removed his bandages and threw them in a gray receptacle labeled KEEP YOUR CITY CLEAN.

He cut across the deserted plaza toward the corner of Durango. From afar, he could see the brick building that had been constructed at the beginning of the century, the first apartment house in the city, a red monstrosity with slate-roofed, feudal towers pointed like witches’ hats, a four-story castle designed to resist the wintry blasts of the Norman coast.

This architectural anomaly, transplanted onto a tropical plateau, had degenerated until it had reached its present state, a tenement for low-income families. Licha had told him to go here, and had penciled a message in the margin of the Últimas Noticias Felix had kept tightly folded in the back pocket of the trousers stolen from a sleeping patient.

He pushed open the rusted iron gate and entered the dark, dank passageway. The second door on the right, Licha had told him, on the first floor. Felix rapped once with his knuckles. Blinding pain ran up his arm.

In agony, he struck at the door with the folded newspaper, but succeeded in making about as much noise as the scratching of a wounded cat. He felt like a wounded cat. A terrible weariness fell over him and settled permanently at the back of his neck. He beat on the door with his open palm, and a voice from the other side replied, “I’m coming, I’m coming, hold on to your shirt.”

The door opened and a man in undershirt, suspenders dangling to his knees, trousers flapping, asked, “What can I do for you?”

Felix, the cinema buff of Fifty-third Street, thought of Raimu in The Baker’s Wife. It was the driver of the one-peso cab who had taken him from the Zócalo to the Hilton. The man stared at Felix with suspicion, and Felix again remembered Raimu, but also remembered that he recognized the driver but the driver couldn’t recognize him.

“Licha sent me,” Felix said tonelessly, offering the folded newspaper to the driver, who read the message and scratched his bald head.

“That woman of mine is a regular sister of charity,” he grumbled. He turned away from Felix, waving him in. “Come on in. What happened to you? Where’d you get so banged up? No, don’t tell me. My wife thinks this house is a hospital. The dumb-bunny says she has the gift of healing, and that it hurts her to see anyone in pain. She’d do better to clean up this place first. Excuse the mess.”

The room contained a rumpled, unmade bed, an aluminum-leg table, and two oilcloth-covered chairs. Felix looked around the room for a telephone; Licha had assured him there was one. The driver pointed toward an electric hot plate with two burners, and a battered lunchbox. “There’s some beans in the frying pan and tortillas in the lunchbox. They’re cold, but tasty. There’s a little Delaware Punch left there. Help yourself while I look for some clothes for you. Ah, Lichita, baby, if you weren’t so sexy…”

“Could I have the paper back?” Felix asked.

“Here you are.” The driver tossed the paper on the table, and as he wolfed down the beans and tortillas, Felix reread the notice of Sara Klein’s death. Then he turned to the obituary columns, and found what he was looking for.