Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

“I’m happy I can be of some use to you, Mary.”

“Well, it’s just my way of turning forty without losing my mind. What the hell. I like the way you screw. I enjoyed the roll in the hay. Technicolor and wide-screen.”

“We can roll it again. Doesn’t cost a thing.”

“No. The price is too high, and tonight we both paid.”

It was she who left the bed and walked toward the bathroom. “The other day at my anniversary party you told me you like touching me but never desired me. Tonight I think you did. And I didn’t like it, because that means the show wasn’t free the way it used to be. I’d rather you screwed me without wanting me, not like tonight, because you did want something and I was just the way to get it.”

Felix sat on the edge of the bed. “I paid for it, too. Desire doesn’t come cheap.”

“Or bitterness either, Felix. I only came here to insult your other women. You said their names as you came. And you don’t even realize you hurt me. That’s the only reason I came here. To humiliate that miserable little Ruth and to tell your marvelous Sara that she’s dead while I’m fucking with you.” She closed the bathroom door.

It was almost two when Felix walked her to the entrance of the Suites de Génova. The concierge opened the door for them. Mary said her car was in a parking lot on Liverpool and she’d rather walk alone, she didn’t want to be seen with Felix at that hour. Felix replied that young drunks in convertibles often wandered around the Zona Rosa, and sometimes they had mariachi bands to serenade American women at the hotels, but Mary made no comment.

They embraced, indifferent to the ancient Indian wrapped in his gray sarape, shivering in the cold, who held the glass door for them.

“Ten years is a long time, Felix,” Mary said affectionately. “What a shame we’ll have to wait another ten, until we get all the poison out of our systems. By that time, we’ll be over the hill.”

“Do you know anything about my death?” Felix asked with a twisted smile, his hands on Mary’s shoulders, turning her so the concierge could see her clearly.

“You saw that I didn’t ask you anything.”

“You recognized me.”

“Did I? No, Señor Velázquez. That’s what I enjoyed about our adventure. I don’t know whether I went to bed with an impostor or a ghost. The other possibilities don’t interest me. Ciao.”

She walked down the street like a black pantheress, lustful and pursued.

“Is she the nun?” Felix asked the concierge.

“No, the sister had a different face.”

“But you’ve seen this woman before?”

“Oh, yes.”

“When?”

“She spent the night here about a week ago.”

“Alone?”

“No.”

“Who was she with?”

“A man with sideburns and a moustache and a face like a ripe tomato.”

“Do you remember the date?”

“Of course, señor. It was the same night the lady was killed in 301. How could I forget?”

IT WAS EXACTLY ten o’clock. As Rosita entered the Café Kineret, Felix, with an expression of excessive religious zeal, was biting into a bagel with cream cheese and lox.

He had no time to speculate about the absence of Emiliano or about the girl’s extraordinary attire. Rosita didn’t seem to realize — or perhaps intentionally ignored — that her perennial miniskirts and laddered stockings gave her a slightly dated look, but styles always arrive late in Mexico City. By the time they’re accepted in Lomas de Chapultepec and bubbling on the back burner prior to being accepted in the Colonia Guerrero, light-years have passed and Ungaro is showing his new Siberian or Manchurian line. Today, however, the girl with the head like a woolly black lamb was dressed in the coarse, long, flowing habits of a Carmelite penitent, with a scapular flowing over breasts hidden for the first time.

She had washed her face and was carrying a black veil and a white breviary and rosary. She didn’t give Felix time to speak. “Hit it, Feliciano. The taxi’s waiting.”

He left a hundred-peso bill on the table and followed Rosita to the corner of Génova and Hamburgo. As they entered the taxi, Felix peered into the rear-view mirror to see if he recognized the driver. It was not Memo, of recent happy memory.

“The maestro didn’t take the plane,” said Rosita as the taxi pulled away.

“Where is he?”

“Don’t worry. Emiliano’s been following him ever since he left his house.”

“When did he leave?”

“Very late. He’d never have made his plane.”

“Where are we going?”

“Ask the driver. Where would you go, Felix?” Rosita’s smile was gloomy.

“To the Shrine of Guadalupe,” Felix directed the driver.

“But, yes, señor,” the driver replied. “The sister already told me, the Sanctuary of Our Dark Lady. I can’t go any faster.”

Rosita didn’t preen herself in her triumph. She pretended to read her breviary, as Felix caught a glimpse of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, enclosed in a glass oval, swinging back and forth over the taxi driver’s head. He burst out laughing.

“You know something, Rosie? The first time I met you two, I said to myself the chief’s picked himself some strange assistants.”

“Right-o, Feliciano,” said Rosita. She kept her eyes glued to the pages of her breviary and thrust her rosary under his nose. “See how well-strung the beads are? No loose ends.”

They pushed their way through the throngs that came daily from all parts of Mexico to the place that, along with the National Palace (and perhaps even more than that seat of more or less transitory political power), is the fixed center of a country fascinated with its own navel, perhaps because its very name means “navel of the moon,” a nation anguished by the fear that its center, and the pinnacles of that center, the Virgin and the President, might be displaced and, angered like the Plumed Serpent, might flee, leaving us bereft of the protection only that Mother and that Father can provide.

They walked among the slowly advancing penitents, many of them on their knees, their arms spread wide in a cross. Little boys hoping to earn a few centavos kept ahead of them, placing newspapers and magazines under their knees to protect them from the rough pavement. Some wore crowns of thorns and cactus leaves upon their breasts; many were simply there for the sights, and because you had to visit the Virgin, whether or not she’d answered your prayer made back there in Alcámbaro, Acaponeta, or Zacatecas. Sweethearts were drinking Pepsis, and families were having their pictures taken before canvases painted with the image of the Virgin and the humble Indian to whom she’d appeared. Native dancers attired in plumed headdresses and sandals with Goodrich-tire soles were playing Indian flutes; hawkers were selling holy cards, medals, rosaries, books of devotions, votive candles. Rosita purchased a yellowish, short-wicked votive light, and Felix preceded her into the flying saucer anchored in the center of the plaza, the new glass-and-cement basilica that had supplanted the small, slowly sinking, red volcanic-stone church with baroque towers that stood to one side like a poor relation.

Emiliano saw them enter. He jerked his head toward the altar with the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe miraculously imprinted on the coarse fiber cape of a credulous Aztec gardener whose faith was rekindled at the sight of a handful of roses blooming in mid-December; and suddenly the millions of pagans subjected by the Spanish Conquest were converted to Christianity, hungering more for a mother than for gods: Madre pura, Madre purísima, Purest of Mothers, intoned by the thousands, the humble, as faithful as the first believer in the Dark Virgin, Juan Diego, the secret model of all Mexicans. Be submissive, or pretend to be, and the Virgin will shelter you beneath her mantle; you will never know hunger or cold, nor will you be a son of Cortés’s whore Malinche, but a son of the immaculate Guadalupe.