Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

Felix held the receiver to the open door so I could hear the movement of doctors and nurses and resuscitation equipment; apparently, he even expected the odors of antiseptic and medication to flow through the telephone lines from Houston to Mexico City. It was I who hung up.

Felix slept peacefully; he had sufficient evidence that Angelica was the dominant one and that Rossetti wouldn’t make a move until his wife had recovered. A drowning person either dies instantly or is instantly saved. Death by water admits no twilight zone; it is black, immediate night, or day as luminous as the one Felix discovered when he opened the drapes. A wind from the north was sweeping the heavy gray clouds toward the sea, washing clean the urban profile of Houston. I, on the other hand, dreamed uneasily of my dead sister, Angelica, floating in a river like a sylvan siren adorned with fantastic garlands.

About three in the afternoon, the Rossettis left their room, Angelica leaning heavily on her husband’s arm, and entered the Cadillac waiting at the hotel entrance. Felix again followed in the Pinto. The limousine stopped before a building soaring toward the sky like an arrow of copper-colored crystal. The couple got out, and Felix double-parked, so as not to lose sight of them, and hurried into the building, just as the Rossettis were getting into the elevator.

He watched to see where the elevator stopped and then consulted the building directory to match the stops with the names of the offices on those floors. His job was facilitated by the fact that the Rossettis had taken the express elevator that served only the floors above the fifteenth. But he couldn’t complain of lack of variety: investment brokers, import-export companies, architectural firms, the private offices of lawyers and insurance underwriters, businesses serving the shipping and port industries, petroleum technologists, and public-relations firms.

The elevator had stopped on the top floor, the thirtieth, and Felix considered that the Rossettis’ mission might be important enough to have taken them to the penthouse executive suites. But that was the simplest deduction, and surely those two had thought of that. Felix read the names of the offices on the twenty-ninth floor. Again, lawyers’ names in lengthy lists strung together by chains of hierarchical snakes, & & & Berkeley Building Associates; Connally Interests; Wonderland Enterprises, Inc.

“Is there a communicating stairway between the thirtieth and twenty-ninth floors?” he asked the Chicano doorman.

“Right. There’s an inside stairway that serves the whole building. With fire-retardant paint and everything. This is a safe building with all the latest. It’s only been open about six months.”

“Thanks.”

“For nothin’, paisá. ”

Felix took the elevator to the twenty-ninth floor and walked to an opaque glass door with the painted sign WONDERLAND ENTERPRISES, INC. He was struck by the old-fashioned glass door in such modern surroundings; all the other offices discreetly announced their functions with tiny copper plates on doors of fine wood. He entered an ultra-air-conditioned reception room furnished with light leather couches and dwarf palms in terra-cotta pots. Presiding over all this from behind a half-moon desk was a blonde with the face of a newborn kitten, a kitten precariously teetering on the brink of forty. She was reading a copy of Viva, and she looked Felix over as if he were the centerfold in living color.

More than her question, her look invited him. “Hello, handsome. What’s on your mind?”

Felix looked in vain for a mirror, to confirm the receptionist’s compliment. “I have something to sell.”

“I like things free,” said the secretary, grinning like the Cheshire cat, and Felix took as a good sign the blonde’s unconscious literary allusions.

“I’d like to see your boss.”

The feline blonde pouted. “Oh. You’re really on business, are you? Whom shall I say is calling?”

“The White Knight.” Felix smiled.

The secretary stared at him suspiciously and automatically slid one hand beneath the desk; her magazine fell open to a nude man sitting in a swing. “Bossman busy right now. Take a seat,” the blonde said coldly, hastily closing her magazine.

“Tell him I’d like to join the tea party,” said Felix, approaching the receptionist’s desk.

“You get away from me, you dirty Mex, I know your kind, all glitter and no gold. You ain’t foolin’ this little girl.”

With his best James Cagney grimace, and wishing he had a grapefruit in his hand, Felix Cinema-buff flat-handed the dish face of the jittery blonde, now more humiliated than Mae Clarke; he pressed the button she was trying to conceal beneath a freckled hand that revealed both her age and her intention, and the leather-covered door swung open. The secretary shrieked an obscenity, and Felix entered an office even colder than the reception room.

“Good afternoon, Señor Maldonado. We were expecting you. Please close the door,” said a man with a head too large for his medium stature, a leonine head with a lock of gray hair falling over a high brow. Fine, arched, playful eyebrows lent an air of irony to icy gray eyes, brilliant behind the thickest eyelids Felix had ever seen outside the cage of a hippopotamus. The body was strikingly slim for a man of some sixty years, and the blue pin-striped suit was expensive and elegant.

“Please forgive Dolly,” he added courteously. “She’s stupid, but lovable.”

“Everyone seems to be expecting me,” said Felix, looking toward Rossetti, still in white, perched on the arm of Angelica’s light leather chair. She was disguised in black sunglasses, her hair hidden beneath a silk kerchief.

“How did you…?” said Angelica in alarm, her voice harsh from having swallowed so much chlorine.

“We were very careful, Trevor,” Rossetti said, hoping to divest himself of any blame.

“Now you know my name, thanks to our friend’s indiscretion.” The man with the thin lips and the curved nose of a Roman senator spoke with edgy affability. Yes, that’s what he reminds me of, Felix thought. Agrippa Septimus & Severus fortuitously dressed by Hart, Schaffner & Marx.

“I thought you were the Mad Hatter,” said Felix in English, in response to Trevor’s unidentifiable, too-perfect Spanish, as neutral as the speech of a Colombian oligarch.

Trevor laughed and said in an impeccable, British public-school accent, “That would make him the Dormouse and his spouse a slightly drowned Alice. Drowned in a teacup, of course. And you, my friend, would have to assume the role of the March Hare.”

His smile was replaced by a tight, unpleasant grimace that transformed his face into a mask of tragedy. “March Hares are easily captured,” he continued in Spanish. “The poor things are trapped between two fatal dates, the Ides of March and April first, the day of fools and dupes.”

“As long as we stay in Wonderland, I don’t give a sombrilla what the dates are.”

Trevor laughed again, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his pin-striped suit. “I adore your Mexican sayings. It’s true, of course. An umbrella is of very little value in a tropical country, unless one fears sunstroke. On the other hand, in countries where it rains constantly…”

“You certainly should know; the English even sign their peace treaties with umbrellas.”

“And then win the war and save civilization,” replied Trevor, his eyes invisible behind thickened eyelids. “But let’s not mix our metaphors. Welcome to Wonderland. I congratulate you. Where were you trained?”

“In Disneyland.”

“Very good. I like your sense of humor. Very like ours. Which undoubtedly explains why we chose such similar codes: we, Lewis Carroll, and you, William Shakespeare. On the other hand”—he stared scornfully at the Rossettis—“can you imagine these two trying to communicate via D’Annunzio? Out of the question.”