Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

He rose bathed in sweat and felt his way toward the bathroom. He took a cool shower and dressed quickly in clothing inappropriate to the heat, socks, shoes, city trousers, and shirt. He studied the face in the mirror attentively. The moustache was growing rapidly, the hair more slowly. The eyelids were less puffy, the incisions visible but healed. He called the switchboard and was told the professor had returned. He took the newspaper-wrapped package from his suitcase and walked from his room down a corridor lined with large porcelain glass-incrusted flowerpots to room number 9.

He rapped on the door. It swung open and Bernstein’s nearsighted eyes, swimming in the depths of the thick rimless eyeglasses, regarded him without surprise. One arm was in a sling. With the other he invited him to enter. “Come in, Felix. I’ve been expecting you. Welcome to Marienbad-in-the-Tropics.”

INVOLUNTARILY, Felix put a hand to his face. Bernstein’s watery gaze became unfathomable. His former student shook his head as if to free it of a spider’s web. He entered the professor’s room, on his guard against a trap. Doubtless the pockets of Bernstein’s weightless but bulky mustard-colored jacket held more than parlor tricks.

“Come in, Felix. You seem surprised.”

“You recognize me?” murmured Maldonado.

Bernstein’s smile was one of amazed irony. “Why wouldn’t I recognize you? I’ve known you for twenty years, five at the university, our breakfasts, there’s never been a time I stopped seeing you — or wanted to. Would you like a drink? It doesn’t go to your head in this heat. But come in and sit down, my dear Felix. What a pleasure and what a surprise.”

“Didn’t you just say you’d been expecting me?” asked Felix, taking a seat in a squeaking leather chair.

“I’m always expecting you and always surprised by you.” Bernstein laughed, walking to a table replete with bottles, glasses, and some ice cubes swimming in a soup plate.

He poured a shot of J&B into a glass and added ice and soda from a siphon. “As long as I’ve known you, I’ve always said that boy is extremely intelligent and will go far if he doesn’t get carried away by his excessive imagination, if he will only be more discreet and stop meddling in affairs that don’t concern him…”

“This is something that concerns us both,” said Felix, offering the package to the professor.

Bernstein laughed, shaking like a bowl of custard. Sweating in the tropic heat, he resembled an enormous mass of melting vanilla ice cream.

“So, you haven’t forgiven an old man his ridiculous love for a younger woman. I expected more of your generosity,” he said, carrying Felix’s whiskey toward him.

“Take it,” Felix insisted, still proffering the package.

Again Bernstein laughed. “I have something for you, and you have something for me. What a curious coincidence, as Ionesco and Alice would say.”

Bernstein held the glass of scotch in his slightly trembling good hand, its ring finger adorned by the huge stone so clear it seemed of glass.

Felix said flatly, ignoring the professor’s buffoonery: “These are Sara’s ashes.”

It seemed impossible that Bernstein’s vanilla-ice-cream face could pale. But it did. His trembling increased, spilling whiskey on his jacket. Then he dropped the glass and it shattered on the black-and-white marble floor.

“Forgive me,” said Bernstein, suddenly red, brushing at the whiskey trickling down the bulk of his jacket. Felix wondered if the magician’s tricks in the pockets would be ruined from the sudden dowsing.

“They were given to me by the only person who took responsibility for Sara. He thought I had a right to them because I loved her,” Felix said without emotion. “But I never possessed her. I prefer to give them to someone who’s been her lover. Perhaps you’ll accept this obligation at least?”

With his good hand, Bernstein snatched the package from Felix and clasped it piteously to his breast. He grunted like a wounded animal and threw it on the bed. He stumbled, and almost fell beside the package. Felix checked an impulse to rush to his aid, but the professor regained control of his gelatinous mass and half fell into a rattan chair.

For some seconds, the only sound was the humming of the ceiling fan.

“Do you believe I killed her?” Bernstein’s voice caught in his throat.

“I don’t believe anything. I was told that you were in the hospital when Sara was murdered.”

“That’s true. I never saw her again after the dinner at the Rossettis’. I had a fit of jealousy. I warned you not to see her again.” The professor spoke with his gaze riveted on the tips of his perforated tropical shoes.

“Would her death have been avoided if I hadn’t attended the dinner?”

Bernstein looked up suddenly and stared at Felix with the eyes of an ailing basilisk. “Did you see her before she died?”

“No. But she spoke to me.”

Bernstein rested his weight on the arms of the chair that surrounded him like a throne. “When?”

“Four days after her death.”

“Don’t play games with me, Felix,” said Bernstein, modulating his infinite repertory of tones. “We both loved her. But she loved you more.”

“I never touched her.”

“You’re a man who should never touch what doesn’t concern you. There is suffering that has nothing to do with you. Be thankful for that.”

“I’m still waiting for the whiskey you offered me.”

Bernstein struggled laboriously to his feet, and Felix added: “There is something that does concern me. What happened at the Palace the morning of the prizes?”

“What! Hasn’t anyone told you? But it’s the joke of the breakfast circuit. Where have you been the last week?”

“In a hospital with my face bandaged.”

“You see? Bad company,” said Bernstein, measuring the whiskey with squinting, myopic eyes. “Just as the President reached you, you fainted. You blacked out,” he added, and dropped one, two, three cubes of ice into the glass. “No big deal. A little scene. An incident. You were carried unconscious through the crowd. The President didn’t flick an eyelash; he continued greeting people. The ceremony went ahead normally.”

Bernstein suppressed a trembling, roguish smile. “There was no dearth of jokes. A minor official of the MED fainted just at the sight of the President. What emotion! There’s been nothing like it since Moctezuma.”

“You say you wounded yourself cleaning a pistol?”

Bernstein solemnly offered Felix the glass. “Someone shot me that evening when I was alone at my home. A bad shot.”

“Maybe he didn’t mean to kill you.”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps? It wouldn’t be easy to miss someone your size.”

Bernstein did not reply. He prepared his own drink and raised it as if to propose a toast. “May the devil,” he said, “cut off all noses that find themselves in others’ business.”

He turned away from Felix, a sweat-stain continent on his back. “In your room at the Hilton, you had a dossier on all my activities.”

“Was it you who rifled my files?”

“What difference does it make?” replied Bernstein, his back still to Felix. “I know you know everything about me. But many people have that information. It’s no secret. You can parrot it till doomsday and nothing will happen.”

Recite like a good pupil?” Felix smiled. “But it is important. Leopoldo Bernstein, born 13 November 1915 in Krakow with all the handicaps: Polish, Jew, the son of militant socialist workers; emigrated to Russia with his parents following the October Revolution; given a fellowship by the Soviet government to study economics in Prague, and charged with establishing relations with Czech universities and officials in the Beneš government on the eve of the war; fails in carrying out his charge; instead of seducing, allows himself to be seduced by Zionist circles in Prague; following Munich, and before the imminent conflict, takes refuge in Mexico; author of a pamphlet against the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact; his parents disappear and die in Stalinist camps; the Soviet Union declares him a deserter; a professor in the School of Economics at the University of Mexico, requests leave and travels for the first time to Israel; fights in the Haganah, the secret Jewish army, but finds it too temperate and joins the terrorist Irgun; participates in multiple acts of murder and reprisal bombings of civilian sites; returns to Mexico and obtains his citizenship in ’52; from that time, he is responsible for raising funds in the Jewish communities of Latin America, and following the war of ’73, he helps found Gush Emunim, with the aim of preventing the return of the occupied territories…”