Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

The Rossettis’ limousine came to a stop before the white elegance of the Warwick Hotel. Felix drove to the nearby parking lot. Suitcase in hand, he entered the refrigerated comfort of the hotel. The Rossettis were registering. Felix waited until a clerk had led them through the lobby and along a row of exclusive boutiques. That meant they’d been given one of the rooms on the large crescent ringing the swimming pool. The sweating chauffeur delivered the Rossettis’ suitcases to the doorman; they still bore the Mexico-Houston luggage tags. As Felix reached the desk, the clerk was instructing the bellboy to carry Señor Rossetti’s suitcases to room number 6. Felix told the clerk that he enjoyed an early swim, and requested a room by the pool.

“It’s nice at night, too,” the Chicano clerk told him in Spanish. “The swimming pool’s open till twelve midnight. And we have facilities for parties in the cabanas.”

“How about 8, is it free?” Felix was betting that rooms facing the pool all had even numbers.

The Chicano said yes, the room was available. The bellboy carried Felix’s suitcase to his room and opened the heavy drapes for the guest to admire his private terrace and view of the swimming pool. He left, after explaining how to regulate the thermostat.

Felix undressed, but even though his body felt as sticky as a sucked caramel, he didn’t dare shower. He stood near the communicating door between his and the Rossettis’ rooms, hoping to overhear something; nothing but the clinking of glasses, muffled footsteps, drawers opening and closing, and once, the strident voice of Angelica, no, not now, not after the way you greeted me, and Rossetti’s inaudible reply.

Then the door of the adjoining room opened and closed. Felix half opened his door and peered down the hall in time to see the tall and elegant figure of Mauricio Rossetti. Felix was paralyzed with indecision. If Rossetti had the stone with him, it wouldn’t be impossible for Felix to recover it, only more difficult. He hurried to the bed and pulled on his swim trunks, preparing to follow Rossetti; after all, he knew where Angelica was, but the private secretary was leaving the hotel. As he leaned over, he saw a reflection in the sliding door to the terrace.

On the neighboring terrace, two hands grasped the light blue railing, unaware of the game of reflections facilitated by the sudden darkness. On the finger of one of those hands shone the ring with the clear stone.

He waited. Maybe Angelica would take a nap, and he would only have to vault the low parapet separating the two terraces. Again the Rossettis’ door opened and closed. Felix watched a white-robed, barefoot Angelica walk toward the pool; after making sure no lights were on in his room, he stepped onto the terrace. Angelica Rossetti was wearing a bikini beneath her robe; she dived into the water. Felix hurriedly donned the white robe hanging in his own bathroom, placed the room key in the pocket, and ran toward the pool.

Angelica emerged from the water and climbed onto the diving board. Again she dived. Felix tossed aside the robe and plunged into the opposite end of the pool.

The water was overly warm, the pool illuminated with submerged lights. In spite of the chlorine, Felix kept his eyes open; he saw Angelica, eyes closed, cleansed forever of the mask of Sara Klein, moving toward him in the water with regular strokes of arms and feet.

Felix rolled slightly and seized Angelica by the neck; she uttered the strangled cry of a wounded shark; the water shattered like crystal around them, a Laocoön-like figure shot toward the surface, though in this case each must have believed the other the serpent.

Felix could only imagine the terror in Angelica’s eyes. He clamped his hand over her mouth and again thrust her beneath the surface, her body yielded, and he was reminded of a woman who for a moment resists an overture for the sake of appearances, then suddenly surrenders. He grappled for Angelica’s hand and tore the ring from her finger. In other circumstances, this strong-minded, athletic woman, who went swimming every day with Ruth at the Chapultepec Sports Club, would have defended herself better; she now seemed incapable of offering resistance, and Felix’s arms again embraced her, this time to lift her from the pool.

The contact with the almost inanimate body excited him; some women are at their most beautiful at rest, and Angelica, normally aggressive and very much the lady, now resembled a goddess rescued from the sea, proud, solitary and sensual, as Felix left her almost lifeless beside the pool.

He dressed hurriedly, left the hotel, and drove off in the Pinto. Once on the superhighway to Galveston, at moments when the lights from a passing car allowed it, he held the stone round as a marble, clear as the waters of the swimming pool, and sparking a thousand lights of its own, between his thumb and index finger to study it, seeking its secret, its flaw. He was driving ninety miles an hour, and had no time to stop.

When he reached Captain Harding’s gray cottage, he tested the stone in the mounting of Bernstein’s ring; it fit perfectly, and he replaced it in its original setting. Even as he did so, he laughed at himself; how many mountings had it enjoyed, this indecipherable object, whose secret, he was sure, would turn out to be as obvious as Poe’s purloined letter.

Harding was waiting for him. He recounted without dramatics how the captain of the Alice and the freckled sailor had been arrested and charged with conspiracy, illegal exercise of authority, fraud, and misrepresentation; they’d thrown the book at them, he said. No lack of charges. And Harding added that he’d even managed to punch Freckles in the mouth when he admitted it was he who, suspended on a painter’s rig somewhere between Coatzacoalcos and Galveston, had changed the white letters on the stern of the ship. The Emmita would sail in the morning at six and within forty-eight hours be in Coatzacoalcos. Could he do anything for Felix?

“Would this ring fit your finger, Captain?”

Harding observed the stone with some reservation and tried it on his finger. “Fits all right, but the boys’ll have a good laugh. I’ll look like a Lolla Palooza sporting a rock like this.”

“Like who?”

“Guess you didn’t read the funny papers? Forget it. Before your time. Don’t worry. To think they insulted me that way, my ship, my name, my reputation, everything. They retire sick old men, you know. My friend, I love the Emmita like a woman. She’s everything I have in the world. It’s like those bastards buggered her. Who do I give the ring to?”

“Do you know The Tempest? ”

“I’ve known ’em all.” The old man laughed.

“A boy and girl will be waiting for you at the dock at Coatzacoalcos. They will ask you if you’ve come on behalf of Prospero, and you’ll tell them yes. They’ll ask you where Prospero is, and you’ll say in his cell. Give them the ring.”

“Prospero,” repeated Harding. “In his cell.”

“The sea has its sadness, doesn’t it, Harding?”

“Like a mother who outlives her children,” the old man replied.

HE HAD NO DIFFICULTY identifying the sounds in the Rossettis’ room. When he returned from Galveston, he left his door ajar and called me in Mexico City to relay the quotes from The Tempest. Before hanging up, he added with the blend of defiance and humor so typical of my friend Felix Maldonado: “Your sister’s drown’d, Laertes.”

“Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,” I replied, first because I wasn’t willing to be outdone by Felix, but also because it was my way of letting him know that, as with him, my personal emotions occasionally became entangled with my professional obligations, and that, like me, Felix must learn to keep the two separate. “And therefore I forbid my tears.”