Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

But the violet eyes were Mary’s, also the deep décolletage and the oil between her breasts to emphasize the cleavage. Especially it was Mary because she moved like a black panther, lustful and pursued, beautiful because she was pursued, and because she knew it. The panther entered the apartment, asking, “You’re the one who says he’s Felix Maldonado? You’ll have to prove it to me; I knew Felix Maldonado and I attended his burial at the Jardín Cemetery on Wednesday the eleventh of August, more than a week ago. Besides, this room is registered to a Diego Velázquez. Is that you?”

She looked around the room, adding that they were all the same, what lack of imagination. Hadn’t Sara Klein died in an apartment like this?

“This is the room where Sara was murdered,” said Felix, speaking for the first time since Mary’s arrival.

She stopped, obviously disturbed, as she recognized Felix’s voice. A motion of her hand accompanied the forward swing of the crow’s-wing hair from neck to cheek, barely revealing a flushed earlobe. Felix realized that, in keeping with Professor Bernstein’s theory, well proved by now, Mary didn’t recognize him because she was looking for him.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, feigning coolness. “This is a hotel for tourists and lovers.”

“And I’m a dead man,” Maldonado replied tonelessly.

“I’d hoped you were a lover.” Mary laughed.

“Do you usually come when a stranger calls on the telephone?”

“Don’t be an idiot, and offer me a drink.”

She walked to the small bar set into one of the walls, opened it, and took out a glass. From that distance, she stared at Felix curiously, waiting for him to pour her drink.

“A vodka tonic,” she said as he approached her.

“I see you do know the place,” said Felix, when he’d located the bottles.

He opened a bottle of quinine water. Mary picked up the vodka and measured a shot into her glass; Felix added tonic until stopped by Mary’s finger, a snake imbued with a life of its own.

“Yes, I’ve been here. On the rocks, please. The refrigerator’s under the bar.”

Felix knelt to open the refrigerator. Pulsating odors from her sex assaulted him, without passing through customs. When he turned his head, he was looking directly at her crotch.

“Yes, you’ve been here before,” Felix repeated, still kneeling, squeezing the ice tray to loosen some ice cubes.

“Mmmh. And many places like it. The motel beside the Arroyo Restaurant, for example. You’re the one who stood me up.”

“I told you. I had an important appointment.”

“I’m the most important appointment, always. But then, you’re a crummy little bureaucrat who has to go wherever his chief orders. I prefer men who are their own bosses.”

“Like your husband.”

“You’ve got it.”

“But he doesn’t satisfy you, and the horns are on your pitiful Abie, not on the yearlings he pretends he’s fighting.”

“I take my pleasure where I want and when I want. Can you hurry up with the ice? I’m thirsty.” A tapping toe underscored her impatience.

“You must think you’re Tarzan’s mate, Mary.”

She thrust the glass under Felix’s nose, demanding ice; her smile could have substituted for it. “I’m my own Technicolor dream, baby, wide-screen and stereophonic sound, and if you don’t believe…”

The sentence was interrupted. Felix thrust his hand up her skirt, stretched the waistband of her tiny bikini, and dropped in two ice cubes that instantly began to melt on her burning pussy.

Mary screamed, and Felix rose and took her in his arms. “I’m like you,” he said into her ear. “I take my pleasure with the woman I want when I want. And, I told you, I want you only when I can have you quickly, nothing must come between my wanting you and your body, Mary.”

With Mary’s body, Felix exhausted all the cat-and-mouse games of the past week, all the pretense, all the chance moves and predetermined events. He’d been prepared to be led and deceived and misled, but at the same time he’d been forced to maintain an impossible rational reserve, to ensure that the chance of his actions coincided with the will of others only when his will triumphed. Even at that, it was not his own, his will belonged to an embryonic organization, to Angelica’s brother, his chief, the captain, Timon of Athens in code, the second knight in the joust, the man who didn’t always acknowledge Felix’s importance, who put his faith in beardless youths, who used quotes from Shakespeare so transparent they were obscure, or vice versa. Felix’s mind whirled, he was thinking at random, thinking of anything he could to keep from coming too soon, hold back, make her come first, with his scarred face buried between the moist thighs of the suddenly docile woman, the new hair on Felix’s head blended with Mary’s soft, foamy curls; he made love to her slowly and brutally, with all the soft force his hungry man’s body could summon, thinking, thinking not to come, to give her pleasure twice, knowing that the woman is loved only when the man knows she has pleasure less often than the man, but always more intensely than the man.

His face was pressed between her legs. Mary came, and on Mary’s body Felix avenged with fury the death of Sara Klein, in Mary’s body, the operation in the Arab clinic and his humiliating impotence before Ayub and the Director General, for Mary’s body he re-created the struggle with the cambujo on the dock at Coatzacoalcos, and with Mary’s body he liberated himself of the desire he had felt for Sara’s dead body and Angelica’s unconscious body beside the swimming pool, in Mary’s body he buried his grief for Harding and Harding’s love for a vanished girl named Emmita; he assaulted her physically as he had wanted to assault Trevor, he kissed her as he had wanted to crush a grapefruit in Dolly’s face, he thrust his finger up her ass to cleanse himself forever of his revulsion for Bernstein, he licked her breasts to erase forever the taste of Lichita, and they came together as he came for the first time and she for the second, and she said, Felix, Felix, Felix, and he said, Sara, Mary, Ruth, Mary, Sara.

“No, stay in a minute, don’t get up, please; please don’t rush to the bathroom like every other Mexican man,” Mary begged.

“When were you here before? Who were you with?”

Mary smiled docilely. “You’ll laugh. I was here with my husband.”

“You don’t have beds big enough in your house?”

“We hadn’t gone to bed together for a long time. He suggested we meet here secretly, like two lovers. He said it would be exciting, the way it used to be.”

“Did it help?”

“Not a bit. Abie disgusts me. It’s worse than physical revulsion. What I can’t take is boredom, and not being jealous. That’s worse than his disgusting face, always nicked and cut because he insists on shaving with an ancient razor that belonged to his grandfather.”

“He isn’t jealous of you.”

“No, I’m not jealous of him. He’s jealous, yes. He makes terrible scenes, but even that bores me. To excite me with jealousy, you have to have a little imagination. He doesn’t even have that. I should have married you, Felix. Ruth is too mousy for you. You’d have got ahead with me, I promise you that. Besides, you had every right. You were my first man.”

“Have you told Abie that?”

“It’s one of my weapons. I torment him with it, and he goes up the wall. He’s a moron, really, rich, but a moron. But he knows I’ll never leave him, because of our four children. And he’s loaded, and since he never does anything about it, I’ve got used to sleeping around wherever I want. What drives him mad, though, is for me to say anything about you. You’re a dreary bureaucrat who doesn’t even have a condominium in Acapulco. I dare him to give me something besides piles of money, but he doesn’t know how to do it. It nearly gives him a stroke.”