Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

“And not at the Palace the morning they awarded the National Prizes? Wasn’t there an attempt on the President’s life?”

Emiliano and Rosita stared at each other, and the boy reached for Felix’s beer and drained it at a gulp. He stared at Felix, baffled. “Sorry, man. Hit me with that again. What attempt?”

“I thought someone tried to kill the President in the Palace,” Felix explained patiently, “and that Bernstein was shot by mistake…”

“Jeez, are you stoned or something?” said Rosita.

“Shut up,” said Emiliano. “No, not true. What made you think that?”

“Because I thought I’d fired the shot.” A cold chill settled in the nape of Felix’s neck.

“We didn’t hear anything about that,” said Emiliano, a flicker of fear in his eyes. “And nothing was in the papers, and the captain didn’t know about it.”

Felix clasped the boy’s hand, and squeezed it.

“What did happen in the Palace, I was there…”

“Cool, brother, keep your cool, those’re the instructions … You were there and you don’t remember what happened?”

“No. Tell the captain what I’ve told you. It’s important for him to know. Tell him that one side knows and tells things the other side doesn’t know, and vice versa.”

“Everyone in this whole affair’s been lying. Cap knows that.”

“All right,” Felix said, more calmly. “Tell him to find out two things for me. I can’t make it if I don’t find out.”

“Don’t get excited. That’s what we’re here for.”

“First. Who was jailed under my name in Military Camp Number One on August 10 and shot that same night while trying to escape? Second. Who’s buried in my name in the Jardín Cemetery? Oh, and the license number of the serenades’ convertible.”

“Okay. The cap says don’t leave any tracks, and keep it cool, and he says most of all that he understands but you shouldn’t let your personal feelings get in the way. That’s what he said.”

“And you remind him he gave me carte blanche to do whatever I think best.”

“I’ll tell him, man, fancy words and all.”

“Tell him not to mistake anything I do for any motives of personal revenge.”

Emiliano smiled, satisfied. “Cap says all roads lead to Rome. You get cultivated, being around him.”

“See you later.”

“Alligator.”

“Take care,” said Rosita, making sheep’s eyes. “Maybe you’ll invite us for another taxi ride. I liked sitting on your lap.”

“I liked fooling around with the nurse,” countered Emiliano.

“How can you be so mean, Emiliano?” whined Rosita.

“I wasn’t being mean, fatass, just reminding you that two can dance that tango.”

“Whew, aren’t we rough tonight?” laughed Rosita, and hummed the first bars of the bolero “Perfidia.”

They didn’t even turn to look at Felix, and as he left the imitation pub, they were still arguing and making barbed jokes, as anonymous as any run-of-the-mill sweethearts. Felix told himself that brave Timon had gathered about him some very strange aides.

He stopped at the Red Cross Clinic on the Avenida Chapultepec to have them take a look at his face. They told him it was healing fine—“Who cut you up like that?”—and that all he needed was some ointment; rub it in and continue the treatment for several days.

He bought the ointment at a pharmacy and returned to the room on Génova. It was almost eleven and the young and oily desk clerks had gone off duty. The doorman opened the door, a somnambulist-faced, ancient Indian in a navy-blue suit shiny from wear.

The windows of the room were opened wide, and the bed was turned down, with a wrapped little chocolate on the pillow. He opened his suitcase. The package containing the ashes was still there, but the record with Satchmo on the jacket had disappeared.

FELIX LANDED at the airport of Coatzacoalcos at four in the afternoon. From the air, he had seen the expanse of the Petróleos Mexicanos refineries in Minatitlán, the stormy Gulf in the background, the industrial citadel inland, a modern fortress of towers and tubing and cupolas glinting like tinfoil toys beneath a storm-sated sun, the busy port with its railroad tracks extending onto the docks, and long, black, sleek-decked tankers.

As he descended from the plane, he breathed the hot humid air laden with the scent of laurel and vanilla. He removed his jacket and hailed a broken-down taxi. Swift glimpses of coconut-palm forests, zebu cattle grazing on brick-colored plains, and the Gulf of Mexico whipping up its early-evening thundershower yielded to a view of a port city with low, ugly buildings, their windows blasted out by hurricanes, and dirty neon signs, unlighted at this hour, a whole consumer society installed in the tropics, supermarkets, television-sale and — repair shops, and in the foreground the everlasting Mexican world of tacos, pigs, flies, and naked children in mute contemplation.

The taxi came to a stop before an open market. To Felix, everything was red, the long bloody sides of beef hanging from giant hooks, bunches of flame-colored bananas, red-leather sling chairs stinking of recently sacrificed cattle, and machetes of blackened metal, bathed in blood and thirsty for blood. The driver carried his suitcase to the entrance of a three-story rococo palace dating from the beginning of the century; the top floor had been destroyed by fire and converted spontaneously into a cooing dovecote.

“Hit by lightning,” the driver said.

High above, buzzards wheeled in great circles.

The neon letters that spelled out Hotel Tropicana protruded like a wounded finger from the façade of sculptured stucco, angels with voluminous buttocks and cornucopias of fruit painted white but turning black from lichen and the incessant labors of the air, sea, and smoke from refinery and port. Felix registered under the name of Diego Silva, and a cambujo —half black, half Indian — servant dressed in a white shirt and shiny black trousers led him through a patio roofed in stained glass that filtered the hot sunlight. Many panes had been broken and not repaired; great blocks of sun were trying to assume precise positions on the chessboard of the black-and-white marble floor.

At his room, the bellboy unlocked the padlock on the door and turned on the wooden ceiling fan that hovered over the room like one more vulture. Felix gave the cambujo ten pesos and he smiled his way from the room, revealing gold teeth. A notice hung above the mosquito-netted brass bed:

SU RECÁMARA VENCE A LA 1 P.M.

YOUR ROOM WINS AT ONE P.M.

VOTRE CHAMBRE EST VAINCU A 13 HRS.

Felix telephoned to ask for the number of Dr. Bernstein’s room. Room number 9, he was told, but the professor was out and wasn’t expected back before sundown. Felix hung up the phone, removed his shoes, and lay back on the creaking bed. Little by little he began to feel drowsy, lulled by the sweet novelty with which the tropics receives its visitors before unsheathing the claws of its petrified desperation. But for the moment he was happy to be free of the burden of Mexico City, increasingly ugly, strangled in Mussolinian gigantism, locked into inhumane options: marble or dust, aseptic confinement or gangrenous incontinence. He hummed several popular songs, and it occurred to him as he drowsed that all the great cities of the world have their special love songs, Rome, Madrid, Berlin, New York, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Rio, Paris. But no love song for Mexico City, he thought, and fell asleep.

He awakened in darkness with a start; his nightmare ended where sleep had begun; mute pain, a howl of rage, that was the song of his city, and no one could sing it. He sat up in terror; he didn’t know where he was, in his bedroom with Ruth, in the hospital with Licha, or in the Suites de Génova with Sara’s ashes. In his delirium he touched the pillow in the lustful night and imagined beside him the naked body of Mary Benjamin, her hardened nipples, her moist mound of Venus, the smell of an unsatisfied and sensual woman; he had forgotten her, and only a nightmare had brought her back, the lovers’ rendezvous in the motel beside the Arroyo Restaurant was never consummated; the bitch had called Ruth.