Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

Felix slapped her, interrupting the surly, hysterical gush of words. She stumbled against the marble wall, and sudden tears left a smear of moistness there that reminded Felix of the sheet covering Sara’s body.

“Who does Ayub work for?” Felix continued down the stairs. His grief was temporarily allayed by his outrage at Licha’s presence. He had been deprived of the moment he’d hoped to consecrate to Sara Klein by a vulgar, stupid woman who was trying to worm her way into his life because she thought he had no life, no name — nothing — of his own.

“I don’t know, sweetheart, honest.”

“Where did he get the authority to claim the body? Who delivered the body to him? Why do you say he wanted to draw me here if he had me in his hands at the clinic? Why did we go to all the trouble to rig that elaborate charade of the fire? Why did I have to escape in the first place?”

“I don’t know, I swear on my mother’s grave.” Licha’s voice was shrill. “He said all he wanted was to lay into you till you sat up and begged, that’s what he said…”

“He could have done that in the hospital.”

“Here, let’s have a little respect,” called the monkey-faced concierge as they reached the vestibule. “We respect the dead here.”

Felix stopped, surprised to see the memorable face he’d already forgotten; he turned to gaze at the stone stairway that separated him from the body of Sara Klein. Her face had defined memory, and death. Only then did he realize that he had looked at her from a face that didn’t belong to him, the face of a man taking Felix Maldonado’s place. If Sara had awakened, she wouldn’t have recognized him.

It was early morning. As they emerged into the street, Felix smelled the renewed and familiar burnt-tortilla odor of Mexico City.

Once again, Licha threw her arms around him. “That’s why I came, sweetie, I swear it, to warn you. Hurry, we can go together. I know where we can hide, where they can’t find you. Honest, I don’t know anything more.”

Felix hailed a taxi, opened the door, tossed his suitcase inside, and got in without looking back at the nurse.

“Let’s go together,” she whimpered. “I want you to be my man, don’t you understand, I’ll do anything for you…” Licha removed a stiletto-heeled shoe and hurled it after the taxi fast disappearing down the deserted street.

The watchman with the face of an ancient ape had followed them, and asked Licha if she wouldn’t like to go up and sit awhile with the woman on the second floor. She had no mourners, and that was bad for their image. They would pay her by the hour; they budgeted in a little to hire someone off the street now and then.

“Oh, go off to the zoo and hire your shitass mother, cheetah,” Licha said, glaring with hatred. She recovered her shoe, slipped it on, and clicked off toward Insurgentes.

FELIX CALCULATED, successfully, that at the Suites de Génova they would assign him the room they’d had the greatest difficulty renting. At first, the man at the desk observed with ill-disguised displeasure Felix’s barely healed face and the dark glasses attempting to disguise it, and his initial reaction was to say he was very sorry but they were completely booked. A second clerk whispered something in his ear.

“Well, we do have one suite available,” the first clerk allowed, a thin, dark-skinned young man with oily eyes and hair.

Felix longed to ask him, Where the hell did you come from, you low-class bastard, that you think you can look at me like that? Buckingham Palace, or Skid Row? He wanted to ask them how many people during th s last two days had requested any suite but the one vacated by the woman who’d had her throat slit, with all that publicity in the papers …

“Name, please? Please fill out this card.”

The clerks exchanged congratulatory looks, as if saying to each other, What about this clown! as Felix wrote the name Diego Velázquez. Born: Poza Rica, Veracruz, 18 December 1938. Current Address: 91 Poniente, Puebla, Puebla. I had told him it would be best always to include some element of truth in his lies. He hesitated before signing the name of the artist he no longer resembled, and observed the thin clerk remove the key to 301 from its pigeonhole; it clinked against its twin, and then the clerk escorted Felix to the third floor, where he surrendered the key to him. The bellboy deposited the suitcase on the folding luggage rack. Felix tipped him twenty dollars. The clerk saw the size of the tip, and they bowed and scraped their way from the room.

Once alone, Felix looked around him. If anything had been left in the room to mark Sara’s presence, the police would surely have removed it. He had no evidence that she had died here except his own imagination and will. That was enough. He had returned to the site of Sara’s death to conclude the homage interrupted by Licha. But thinking of the nurse made him remember Simon Ayub, and the thought that the diminutive, perfumed Lebanese had seen and touched Sara’s naked body irked Felix; an awful nausea followed the irritation.

He put all thought aside and yielded to weariness. He took a long bath and then stood before the washbasin and studied his face. The swelling had subsided considerably and the incisions were healing well. He touched the skin of his cheek and jawbones and it felt less tender. Only his eyelids were still purple and puffy, obscuring the ineradicable pinpoint identity of the eyes. He realized that the old resemblance to the Velázquez self-portrait that had been his and Ruth’s private joke was returning with the beginnings of his moustache. He soaped five days’ growth of beard and carefully shaved, a difficult, often painful task. He spared the burgeoning moustache.

He ordered breakfast, but in spite of his hunger, he was unable to eat, and he fell asleep on the wide bed. He lacked the strength to dream, not even of the affront of Ayub’s hands pawing Sara’s body. It was dusk when he awakened, the time the fashionable Zona Rosa comes alive with young Lotharios roving the streets, the horns of convertibles blasting the Marseillaise. He got out of bed to close the window, and drank a cup of cold coffee. He stared indifferently at the furnishings typical of such hotels, modern, low-slung furniture, Mexican fabrics of solid and audacious colors — lots of orange, lots of indigo blue — drapes of rough native cloth. Listlessly, he flicked on the television; nothing but stupid soap operas, unctuous voices resounding in vacuous decors.

He switched off the television and turned to the stereo, a small set much the worse for wear that played only 45’s. In the bookcase he found a few records in worn jackets, and flipped through them without interest. Sinatra, “Strangers in the Night”; Nat “King” Cole, “Our Love Is Here to Stay”; Gilbert Bécaud, “Et Maintenant”; Peggy Lee, several mariachi groups, Armando Manzanero, and Satchmo, the great Louis Armstrong, the ballad of “Mack the Knife,” the song of his twentieth birthday and the Versalles nightclub and Sara in his arms, the bitter and witty ballad of a criminal of Victorian London who asked: Is it worse to found a bank or rob one, “Mack the Knife,” the song of youth and Sara Klein and Felix Maldonado’s love for each other, a song jolted out of the Berlin of the thirties, bridging the horror of those crimes and contemporary ones, the persecution of the child and the murder of the woman, a succession of murderers, Mack the Knife, Himmler the Butcher, Jack the Ripper. This was the only new album. Felix was sure Sara had bought it to play in the room. Meaning for him to hear it, too. He removed the record from its still shiny envelope, pristine in contrast to the worn, ripped, dull jackets of the other records. It bore the sticker of the shop where Sara had bought it, Dalis, Calle de Amberes, Mexico City, D.F. He switched on the stereo and placed the huge mouth of the disk over the beige plastic spindle. The record dropped noiselessly and began to spin; the needle was inserted without pain. Felix awaited Satchmo’s trumpet. Instead, he heard the voice of Sara Klein.