Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

“For a few weeks, you’ll be living in a kind of voluntary hypnosis,” I’d told him as I explained what he might encounter. “If not, our operation may fail.”

“I don’t like the word hypnosis,” Felix had said, smiling his Moorish smile, so like that of Velázquez. “I’d rather call it fascination. I’ll allow myself to be fascinated by everything that happens to me. Maybe that’s the fulcrum between the exercise of will you’re asking of me, and fate.”

“No parking on the expressway.” Someone was tapping Felix on the shoulder.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t feel well,” said Felix, raising his head from the wheel to see the beefy arm of a State Policeman.

“You a dago or a spick? You people shouldn’t be allowed to drive. I don’t know what this country’s coming to. Ain’t no real Americans left. All right, get going,” said the patrolman with the broad, red Irish face.

Felix drove on. A half hour later he was in Galveston, and drove directly to the offices of the Port Authority. He asked for the date and the hour of the arrival of the S.S. Emmita, en route from Coatzacoalcos under the Panamanian flag.

The shortsleeved clerk told him, first, to close the door or the air conditioning wouldn’t do any good, and second, that the Emmita wasn’t going to arrive anywhere, for the simple reason that she’d been undergoing repairs in dry dock. Why didn’t he speak with Captain Harding who was supervising the work.

There is no more insolent sun than one struggling through a veil of clouds, and the thermometer was hovering around 98 degrees when Felix located a bare-chested old man standing beside the disabled hull of the S.S. Emmita, Panama. A frayed cap with a worn leather visor protected him against the burning sun. Felix asked if he was Harding. The man nodded yes.

“Do you speak Spanish?”

Again the old man nodded. “I’ve been in and out of the ports along the Gulf and the Caribbean for thirty years.”

“And you never get sick?”

“I’m too old to get the clap and too tough for anything else,” Harding replied good-humoredly.

“I saw the Emmita weigh anchor last night in Coatzacoalcos, Captain.”

“The sun’s pretty strong,” Harding replied kindly.

“It’s the truth.”

“Dammit, my tanker isn’t the Flying Dutchman. Look at ’er, no wings.”

“Well, I have wings. I flew here today from Coatzacoalcos. Your tanker left the dock at midnight and should reach Galveston tomorrow afternoon about four.”

“Who spun you that fairy tale?”

“The Port Authority, and a freckled sailor who promised to kick the shit out of me here.”

“You’re sick, mister. You better get in out of the sun. Come along with me and we’ll have a beer.”

“When will your ship be repaired?”

“We sail day after tomorrow.”

“For Coatzacoalcos?”

The old man nodded, scratching the white horsehair mattress on his chest.

“They said you weren’t aboard because you were sick.”

“The bastards said that?”

“If what I’m telling you is true, can I count on your help?”

The old man’s eyes flickered like tiny stars in a sky of wrinkles. “If some bastard’s knocking around the Gulf using the name of my ship, you wait and see, I’ll be the one who’ll knock the shit out of the whole kit and caboodle, damn pirates! Maybe they fooled the Mexican authorities and they’re headed for another port.”

“I don’t think Freckles was lying. He said Galveston all right. He saw my machete and thought I was a drunken Indian.”

Felix accepted Captain Harding’s hospitality and spent the rest of the afternoon asleep on the sofa in his little gray wooden house by the slick, oily waters of the Gulf. Harding left him, and returned about ten that night. He’d hurried the repairs along, and had brought beer, sandwiches, and a list of all the tankers due to dock the next morning in the port of Galveston. They read it together, but the names told them nothing. Harding said they were all names of legitimate ships, but if those buccaneering pigs were changing names in every port, there was no way they could find out.

“Do you have any way of recognizing her if you see ’er, fella?”

Felix shook his head. “Only if I see the man with the freckles. Or the woman on board.”

“Never had a woman on my tanker.”

“That’s what they tell me. There was one on this one.”

“It’s hard to tell one tanker from another. We don’t get rigged up for a carnival like the cruise ships and all those fag outriggers on the Caribbean. All a tanker has to do is change her name.” Again he read the list aloud: the Graham, the Evelyn, the Corfu, the Culebra Cut, the Alice …

Felix slapped the captain’s strong, age-spotted hand. “The Alice! ” He laughed.

“Yessir, and the Royal and the Darien … You always so tickled at the names of ships?” Harding, slightly annoyed, interrupted his reading.

“Bernstein’s lapse.” Felix laughed, striking his knees with his fists. “‘What a curious coincidence, as Ionesco and Alice would say.’ Really. Curiouser and curiouser…”

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” said Harding, again afraid that Felix was either crazy or sunstruck.

“What time does the Alice dock tomorrow, Captain?”

AT FOUR O’CLOCK on the afternoon of the following day, the S.S. Alice docked beneath low-hanging clouds in Galveston. The Stars and Stripes drooped above a bow proclaiming Mobile as the tanker’s port of origin. Harding had situated Felix in the best place to see without being seen. The freckled sailor was freeing the chain to drop the gangplank, calling to the stevedores on the dock.

Leaning against the steel side of a warehouse and hidden behind a latticework of similar columns, Felix watched a tall, elegant man in white walk the length of the dock toward the gangplank: Mauricio Rossetti, the Director General’s private secretary. He stopped and waited for the completion of the docking maneuvers.

Aided by the freckled sailor, the false Sara Klein descended. She saw Rossetti and ran happily toward him. She started to kiss him, but he discreetly declined, took her arm firmly, and led her toward the exit gate. The woman was closer now and Felix could see that the imitation, if an imitation had indeed been intended, was crude, and appropriate only for deceiving fools like him hopelessly in love with women unattainable either in life or in death. But there was no mistaking the intent: the Louise Brooks haircut, the powder-whitened Machiko Kyo face, the slate-blue tailored suit.

Angelica Rossetti had studied Sara closely during the dinner party the previous week in the San Angel home filled with paintings by Ricardo Martínez. But everything about her was false; the only truth was the clear stone ring sparkling on her finger, an inter-stellar combat of luminous pinpoints in the dusk. The mounting was new. Felix rubbed the stoneless ring in his pocket.

He followed the couple from a distance. As he passed the tanker, his fingertips brushed the flagrant scar inflicted by his machete. Felix, never taking his eyes off the Rossettis, raised his arm, and Harding, who had been awaiting the signal, rushed the ship with three port policemen. The freckled sailor watching from the rail dropped his rope and disappeared into the ship. Harding and the police went aboard. Our stubby friend Freckles won’t have an ounce of shit left in his body, Felix thought.

Angelica’s only luggage was the dressing case she was carrying. She and her husband got into a Cadillac limousine driven by a chauffeur sweating beneath his gray cap. Felix climbed into the Pinto and followed them as they headed directly for the expressway to Houston.