Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

“The boy gives warning. He is a saucy boy. Go to, go to. He is in Venice.”

I hung up. I had noted with uneasiness an impatience and reticence in Felix’s voice. I had the feeling he was hiding something from me, and I feared that. Our organization was very new, it was testing its wings, and no one, not even I, could pride himself on having the tough skin of our Soviet, European, or North American counterparts. That accursed subjectivity was, irrationally, seeping through the cold sieve of the means which should have been identical to the ends. The Golden Rule of espionage is that the means justify the ends. I couldn’t imagine a single individual on the long list of those we emulated, from Fouché to Ashenden, perturbed by any personal emotion; they would brush sentiment aside like a mosquito. But it was also true that no Mexican spy would ever come in from the cold; the suggestion, climatologically speaking, was ludicrous, and I imagined my poor friend Felix Maldonado looking for a refrigerator to crawl into in Galveston or Coatzacoalcos.

I lighted my pipe and, not in the least at random, opened my Oxford edition of the complete works of Shakespeare to the graveyard scene in Hamlet. As I began to read again, I told myself that was the only thing I could do, to begin again where I had left off when Felix telephoned. Laertes is telling the Priest to lay Ophelia in the earth so that from her fair and unpolluted flesh violets might spring. The Priest refuses to say the Requiem for a suicide; the soul of Ophelia will not depart in peace. Laertes rebukes him; Ophelia, he says, shall be a ministering angel when he lies howling. This fearful curse is followed by the equally terrible action of Laertes. He asks the earth, that of the grave, and also that of the world, to hold off a while till he has once more caught his sister in his arms. He leaps into the grave beside the body of Ophelia. Hamlet, in spite of his emotion, watches this scene with strange passivity, the usual passivity of this actor who is the always distanced observer of his own tragedy. The whole of the Renaissance is contained in this scene. Man, in his world, has discovered an excessive energy that he hurls like a challenge into the face of the heavens; at the same time, he has discovered his insignificance within the gigantic cosmos, and knows he is smaller even than Providence had augured. Only an impassive irony like Hamlet’s can reestablish the equilibrium; others judge him mad.

I watched the curling smoke ascend toward my library ceiling. In spite of her name, I could not imagine Angelica dispensing the favors of heaven to man. But, in this story, which of the women whose threads were always broken before they reached my hands deserved divine favors? Of Sara and Mary and Ruth, all Jewish, which would look into the face of God? If Angelica were not Ophelia, which would be our Ariadne? If I were an inglorious Laertes, would my friend Maldonado know to be a Hamlet with method in his madness, or would he lose himself within the labyrinth of modern Minotaurs?

It was one of those moments — and there were many more than I imagined then — in which Felix and I were on a telepathic wavelength. Sara was present, dead or living, mysterious in the persistence of her reality, strangely close in her absence; so, too, Ruth, whom we must not frighten by telephoning, even if she suffered a while longer; when the time came, we would explain things calmly, to the degree that explanation was possible. And Mary, why hadn’t we been thinking of her?

I feared I was falling into the greatest of detective-novel commonplaces, cherchez la femme. I closed my book, and my eyes. There was so little time. I thought about my sister, Angelica.

ON THE OTHER HAND, Felix did not check his second impulse; he dialed Mary Benjamin’s number, and a servant answered. “The señora may be busy, may I say who’s calling?”

Mary was the one woman who could take it: “Felix Maldonado.”

She was listening on the extension; a light click had betrayed her presence on the line, and immediately he heard Mary’s irritated voice. “Whoever you are, I don’t appreciate your sick jokes.”

“Don’t hang up,” said Felix, with an affectionate inflection Mary should recognize. “It’s me.”

“I told you…” Mary’s voice was still irritated, but slightly tinged with doubt and fear.

Felix laughed. “You sound a little shaky; this is the first time I ever heard that from you.”

“There’s always a first time.” Mary was struggling to compose herself. “Felix was very big on black humor, wasn’t he?”

“Prove it.”

“Don’t be stupid, I don’t have a televiewer on my phone yet.”

“Génova Suites. Room 301. Eleven-thirty tonight. Be there. The last time, you stood me up.” Felix hung up.

Italian restaurants abound in the Zona Rosa. The Ostería and Alfredo’s, facing one another across the arcade between Londres, Hamburgo, and Génova, sounded too Roman, and the Focolare on Hamburgo, too generic, so Felix walked toward La Gondola on the corner of Génova and Estrasburgo. He says he was thinking of me. For the first time, he had deliberately betrayed my instructions. He needed a woman, too much adrenaline had been pumping through his body the last few days; he hadn’t had a woman since Licha. It meant coming out in the open, but after ten years without touching her, he wanted to go to bed with Mary Benjamin. Mary Benjamin was exactly what he needed, a hot, passionate bitch, and if he’d consulted me, I would have racked my brain to come up with a quote from Bill Shakesprick to tell him to get himself a call girl in one of the hotels in the Zona Rosa. But Felix had other things in mind.

There weren’t many people in La Góndola that night, but it was filled with penetrating odors of tomato and garlic and basil. Emiliano and Rosita sat facing each other, hands clasped, elbows on the red-and-white-checked tablecloth. Felix sat down beside the “saucy” boy who was bringing him a warning, facing the girl with a head like a woolly black lamb. The young couple’s faces betrayed their uneasiness, they could dispense with the preliminaries.

“Did Harding give you the ring?”

They shook their heads.

“What happened?” asked Felix impatiently. Mary was boiling in his blood, a soft, warm Mary was clasped between his thighs. “Did you forget the code from The Tempest? ”

“We didn’t get a chance,” said Emiliano, dropping Rosita’s hand. “The old man was dead.”

“They killed him, Emiliano, tell him,” said Rosita, playing with some toothpicks, not daring to look at Felix.

“When?” Felix asked, paralyzed within a triangle of stupor, impatience, and disbelief.

“After the tanker docked, this morning,” said Emiliano, helping Rosita in the construction of a toothpick castle.

“How?”

“A machete, in the neck.”

“Where was he?”

“In his cabin, probably getting ready to go ashore.”

“And the ring?” Felix asked carefully; he could hear his voice rising.

“It wasn’t there.”

“How can you be so damn sure, my beardless friend? Did they let you search the old man? Did they let you in the cabin?”

“Hey, Feliciano,” Rosita interrupted. “We’re on the same side, what the hell’s with you?”

Felix ducked his head to acknowledge the rebuke, and Emiliano continued. “We thought the scene was coming down pretty heavy, so we got in touch with the chief. Within a half hour, the cops were swarming all over the Emmita, searching everything. Not a whiff of the ring, man.”

“Tell him, Emiliano, tell him about the girl.”

“The mate thought the cops were looking for something else. He told them Harding kept an old silver locket hanging over his hammock, with a faded snapshot of a girl in it, signed Emmita. He couldn’t believe they’d waste the old guy for such a nothing thing, though sometimes at sea they tell tales of feuds that last to the grave.”