Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

Bernstein was kneeling before the altar. He lighted a candle and, still on his knees, approached a retable covered with hand-painted ex-votos, prayers granted, thank you for saving me when the Flecha Roja bus went into the barranca in Mazatepec, thank you for returning the power of speech to my little sister mute from birth, thank you for the big one in the lottery; covered, too, with offerings to the Virgin, religious medals, Hearts of Jesus in silver and in tin, rings and bracelets and necklaces. As Bernstein reached out to pluck the ring hanging from a hook among the other offerings, Felix seized his soft, flabby arm.

“I didn’t recognize you without your skullcap and Talmud,” said Felix.

Bernstein’s fingers curled as his fingertips brushed against the ring with the stone clear as water. “Welcome to our sacred Beaubourg, Felix,” the professor replied with forced good humor. “Release me, please. We are not alone here.”

“I see that. There must be three thousand people here.”

“And one of them is named Ayub. Release me, Felix. You’re a Jew like me. Don’t betray us to our enemies.”

“My enemy is Harding’s murderer.”

“It was the cambujo. I told him I didn’t want any blood. Stupid idiot.”

“The captain was a good man, Professor.”

“That’s beside the point, Felix. Something more important is at stake.”

“Nothing is more important than a man’s life.”

“Ah, at last you’ve found your father. You’ve been searching for him for years, as long as I’ve known you. First it was I, that’s why you became a Jew; then Cárdenas, that’s why you defend nationalized oil; then whoever happens to be President, that’s why you became a government official…”

“And you found a mother in the Guadalupe, right?”

“Release me…”

Bernstein’s vanilla-ice-cream face was melting down the drain of a false smile. A Carmelite penitent with a black veil over her head and a lighted candle in her hands was approaching the Retable of the Miracles on her knees, crooning and repeatedly crossing herself. She paused just long enough to take the ring, and still murmuring, “Oh, María, madre mía, oh my comfort and my joy,” Rosita buried the ring in the candle wax—“oh, protect me, give me shelter, and conduct me to the Lord’s celestial court”—rose to her feet, and moved away from the altar, head lowered, the candle in her hand.

Bernstein struggled desperately to escape from Felix’s grasp. Felix released him with a shove, and ricocheting like a punctured balloon, Bernstein staggered wildly toward the multitudes approaching the altar from the opposite direction. He crashed against a crystal casket containing a recumbent Christ: the wax face and hands were bathed in blood, the body covered by a gold and velvet mantle.

The stunned amazement of the faithful turned into silent menace. Bernstein was sprawled on the glass coffin shattered by his fall; a streak across the glass seemed an additional wound on the sacred body. A wall of black, bovine, impenetrable eyes glared with hatred into the drowned eyes of Bernstein, as clear as the stone of the ring that was irrevocably disappearing with the Carmelite nun; shawl-draped women, white-shirted men, and children in jeans jostled each other, surging forward to gaze at the benevolent image of the Virgin — but, instead, finding in their path this mountainous, befuddled foreigner who had profaned the altar, the very death, of the Virgin’s son.

Felix observed the instantaneous transformation of the masks of faith and devotion and submissive good will into something resembling the collective face of violence, horror, and solitude. Several hands seized his shoulders and arms. He smelled the perfume of clove, the warm and aromatic breath of Simon Ayub, who whispered into his ear, “I told you, you bastard, I owe you one for the dirty punch.”

A group of Knights of Columbus clad in tailcoats, their plumbed tricorns tucked beneath their arms, intoned in authoritative voices, “We are Christians, we are Mexicans, we will wage war against Lucifer.”

“YOU’RE a real big man now, you fucking midget.” Felix managed to spit out the words before Ayub silenced him with another blow to his already bleeding mouth. Felix was tied to a chair, facing a hooded light that burned into eyes held open by toothpicks broken in half and inserted between the upper and lower eyelids. Two thugs stinking of beer and onions relieved Ayub; they repeatedly beat Felix in the stomach and kicked him in the shins, until the chair tipped over, and then they kicked him in the kidneys and face as he lay on the cold cement of a room stripped bare of any furnishings but the chair, and the hooded light and the men.

The gorillas tired quickly and went back to their beer and sandwiches. Felix could see nothing because he saw too much through propped-open eyelids; his sight was hazy, his mouth was filled with blood, his ears buzzed and he scarcely heard Ayub’s half-whining, half-defiant refrain. Stripped of self-pity and cursing, Ayub’s words were reduced to the fact that he’d been born in Mexico and felt himself to be Mexican, but not his parents. They had had to go back to Lebanon; they wanted to die in the land of their birth. And they’d taken Simon’s little sister with them. The girl had become a militant Phalangist and fallen into the hands of the Lebanese Palestinians. The old people had gone to look for her and all three had ended up in a Muslim village, where they were being held prisoner.

“The Director General said it in the hospital; he has me by the balls. ‘You do what we tell you,’ he says, ‘or we’ll send you the heads of your pappa and your mamma and your sweet little sister.’ Old fools, they should have gone alone, they never should have taken my sister. But how could they leave her here at fourteen? That’s a bad age. You’re a Mexican like me. I just wanted to be a Mexican and live a quiet life. Why do you have to go around sticking your nose in things that aren’t any of your business? Everyone tells you the same thing, the Palestinians and the Jews. ‘This is our land, it belongs to us!’ They’re going to end up killing each other. There won’t be anything left but desert when they stop the bombing, and putting people in concentration camps, and smuggling arms that end up in the hands of their enemies. Don’t you know that, you shitass! Both sides blindly machine-gun old people and children and dogs and you and poor bastards like me and … what the fuck…”

As if from far away, Felix heard the Director General’s voice, accompanied by the slamming of a metal door, and then by hollow footsteps on a cement floor. “That’s enough, Simon. It’s useless. He doesn’t have the ring.”

“But he knows where it is,” panted Ayub.

“And so do I. It’s useless, I say. Pay off your gorillas and turn off that light. Your friends offend me as much as the glare.”

“I wanted to make him talk.”

“You wanted to get even. Untie him. Don’t be afraid. In that condition, he’s not able to strike you.”

The Director General was mistaken. Grumbling, the hired thugs left, carrying their sandwiches. As Ayub untied the ropes binding Felix’s legs to the overturned chair, Maldonado kicked him in the testicles. Ayub screamed and doubled over with pain.

“Don’t touch him,” the Director General ordered, moving like a cat in the shadow. Dexterously, he untied Felix’s hands, and carefully removed the toothpicks from his eyelids.

“Help me,” he ordered Ayub, ignoring his whimpering. “Help me seat our friend correctly.”

“Our friend!” Ayub scoffed, still bent over, offering only one hand to help his chief. It was the hand with the rings; Felix would always remember the metallic taste of the scimitars.