Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

The rainstorm had ended with the same abruptness with which it had begun, magnifying to an even greater degree the pungent odors of the tropical port. A moist lacquerlike film shone on the long expanse of dock, the moribund rails, the asphalt, and the distant hulks of oil tankers. The cambujo ran along the length of the dock like a swift Veracruz Zatopek, with Felix some twenty meters behind him, harboring the burning conviction that this was not a normal chase; the cambujo was a false hare, and he a false turtle.

The pursued slowed his pace and the distance between them narrowed dangerously; Felix clasped his machete more tightly in his hand; at any moment the cambujo might turn with a pistol in his hand, his pursuer now within sure range. He stopped beside a black rain-washed tanker sweating gray drops of water and oil; Felix dropped the machete and threw himself upon the dark little man.

The tanker whistled one long blast. Felix and the cambujo fell to the ground and rolled along the dock, the mestizo offering no resistance. Felix straddled the heaving chest of his oddly passive adversary and planted his knees on the outspread arms. The prisoner twisted his wrists, teasing Felix with balled fists. For an instant they stared in panting silence, Greek masks. Felix’s face was the grimace of pain, the mulatto’s the mask of comedy, black, sweating, gold teeth shining. Felix felt beneath his weight that the wiry little man had yielded completely, with the exception of those clenched fists.

Felix seized one fist and tried to pry it open. Worse than the iron gauntlet of a medieval warrior, it was the claw of a beast with its own secret reasons for not ceding. The tanker sounded a second blast, more guttural than the first. The cambujo opened the hand, grinning like the little laughing heads of La Venta artifacts. There was nothing in the pink-palmed hand crisscrossed with lines promising eternal life and good fortune for the cambujo.

His captive turned round eyes toward the ship as Felix struggled to open his other fist. The ship’s gangplank began to rise from the dock toward the portside rail of the tanker. Felix reached for the abandoned machete and held the edge to the cambujo’s throat.

“Open that fist or I’ll cut off your head, and then your hand.”

The fist opened. Bernstein’s ring lay there. But not the stone as transparent as glass. Felix leaped to his feet, grabbed the neck of the cambujo’s shirt, jerked him to his feet, and roughly ran his hands over his body, felt the shirt, the trousers. He released him, as the ship cast off its lines.

Freed, the cambujo trotted back toward Coatzacoalcos, but Felix had no further interest in him. A cameo of light on the dark tanker had captured his attention, a circle of light on the poop deck, doubly bright, illuminated by brightness as strong as if from a reflector and by a face as brilliant as the moon, framed in the oval of a porthole, an unforgettable and unmistakable face, with bangs and crow’s-wing hair emphasizing the luminous whiteness of the skin, the icy diamonds in the gaze, the aquiline profile, as the woman turned her head.

The gangplank was halfway between the dock and the port rail. Felix thrust the ring into his trousers pocket and, still clutching the machete, ran desperately along the ship and lunged for the gangplank, managing only to brush the ends of the thick ropes dangling from the treads.

A freckled gringo, about forty, with a face marked by thin lips and a flattened nose, shouted from the rail: “Hey, are you nuts?”

“Let me on. Let me on!” shouted Felix.

The gringo laughed. “You drunk or somethin’?”

“The woman. I must see the woman you have on board.”

“Shove off, buddy, dames don’t travel on tankers.”

“Goddammit, I just saw her…”

“Okay, greaser, go back to your tequila.”

“Fuck you, gringo.”

The man laughed and his freckles danced. “Meet me in Galveston and I’ll kick the shit out of you. So long, greaser.” He secured the gangplank and thrust an obscene finger toward Felix.

Felix threw himself against the side of the tanker still bumping against the dock, and, swinging his machete, an unlikely Quijote, attempted to pierce the body of the slowly moving giant. As the ship eased away from the dock, the cutting edge of the machete scratched fresh paint, leaving a long shining scar along the hull.

The tanker churned the dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The night of rotted mangoes and sweet nicotiana evaporated like the puddles following the shower. Felix read the name on the tanker’s stern, S.S. Emmita, Panama, and saw the flag of four fields and two stars floating limply in the heavy air.

The face of Sara Klein, a paper moon suspended in a circle of light, had disappeared.

FELIX BOUGHT a white fiber hat at the Coatzacoalcos airport and took the first Mexicana flight. In Mexico City he caught a Pan-American Airlines flight to Houston. He had a visa for multiple entries into the United States, and the immigration officials saw no discrepancy between the photograph on the passport and the moustached face of the man wearing a white hat and black sunglasses. Bernstein was right; these men weren’t looking for him.

In Houston he rented a Ford Pinto at the airport Hertz desk and got on the highway to Galveston. He had a day to kill; the Port Authority at Coatzacoalcos had told him that the Emmita made no ports before Galveston; she was carrying a cargo of natural gas from Mexico to Texas, and in Texas she was taking on refined products destined for the East Coast of the United States. It was her normal trading route, and she called in at Coatzacoalcos every two weeks except in the winter, when the northers held her up a little. Her captain was named H. L. Harding, but he hadn’t made this run because of illness. And no one had seen a woman go aboard.

The August heat on the barren plain between Houston and Galveston is unrelieved by hills or woods or aromas — except that of gasoline. Felix was grateful for the long, straight highway that allowed him to drive without major distractions and see before him, instead of the dirty Texas sun, the opaque moon of the face he’d glimpsed in the porthole of the Emmita, a face he’d always compared to Louise Brooks’s in Pandora’s Box; the more he thought about it, the more the cinema buff in him substituted a second, the stark white face of Machiko Kyo in Ugetsu Monagatari, the flesh consciously artificial in its mortuary whiteness, the false eyebrows tracing an arc of conjecture over the real, shaved-off brows; the phantom gaze merging into the vigilant sleep of Japanese eyes, the painted mouth a rosebud of blood.

Felix was dizzied by the contrast between the daylight scene of the reverberating Texas plain and the nocturnal vision of Japan, a misty moon following a rain, a night of ancient spirits and sorceresses who take possession of the bodies of virgins in order to effect a festering revenge, visions echoed in the night he’d spent in Coatzacoalcos, the bloody beef carcasses, the vultures, and dovecotes installed in the ruins of a fire, the silvery cupolas of the refinery, Bernstein’s room, the rococo hotel, the cambujo … and the white profile of Sara Klein glimpsed against the darkness of the S.S. Emmita.

The vision was so confused and so powerful that he felt ill and had to stop the car; he crossed his arms over the steering wheel and rested his head; he closed his eyes and repeated wordlessly that from the beginning of this adventure he’d sworn to be wholly accessible, ready to respond to any situation, to be led by any suggestion, to be open to all alternatives, and — and this was the most difficult of all — to keep his mind razor-sharp, assessing the deliberate or the chance accidents others created for him, to be aware of them, but never to prevent or avoid them.