Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

“What you mean is that you intended to kill the President and hang the death on me.”

“You will forgive me, n’est-ce pas? if I fail to answer such an irrelevant question?”

“You asked for difficult questions. I’m asking them.”

“Very well, but you won’t refuse me the elegance of an ellipsis, mmh? I showed the President the.44 Maldonado was carrying in his pocket. It’s an effective weapon, easy to conceal.”

“Which appeared like magic; Rossetti slipped it in Maldonado’s pocket after he had fainted and been carried from the room.” Felix hoped his logic was both unexpected and on the mark, but the effect was spoiled by the quaver in his voice as he referred to himself in the third person.

His apprehension did not escape the Director General’s attention. “If you say so. Something had to be rescued from the disaster, n’est-ce pas? We remarked to the President that Felix Maldonado was a converted Jew, and that converts feel a compulsion to demonstrate their zeal in order to be clasped to the bosom of the new family. I cited the reverse instance, recalling the conduct of the Spanish Jew Torquemada after his conversion to Catholicism.”

“What did you gain with that gambit?”

“You ask me that seriously?”

“Yes, because I doubt very much that the President would have swallowed that kind of crap.”

“It was not our primary intent. But Maldonado had wrecked Plan A.”

“To assassinate the President.”

“ Passons. We immediately applied Plan B, which was to sow a simple suspicion in the President’s mind. Had Israel actually paid an agent to eliminate the President of Mexico?”

“Why would they? Generally, a tourist boycott by the North American Jews is sufficient when they want to tighten the screws.”

“You’re at liberty to imagine all probable scenarios.”

“But, in all of them, Felix Maldonado appeared to be the ideal sacrificial lamb.”

“I repeat; only the name, not the man. But, en fin. You know as well as I that in Mexico there are no checks and balances to absolute Presidential power. To exercise that power without regrettable excess requires great equanimity. But how does the poor man know what actually is happening? He lives in isolation, his only information that furnished by the sycophants who surround him. Presidents who listen to the people are very rare. The general rule is that, little by little, the court isolates the President, and gradually and inexorably, n’est-ce pas? the President becomes accustomed to hearing only what he wants to hear. From there, it’s only a step to totally capricious rule.”

The Director General sighed, as if he were delivering a lecture to an exceedingly slow student. “The first rule in a political system as baroque as that of Mexico is this: Why do things the easy way if they can be made complicated? Thence, the second rule: Why do things well if they can be done badly? And third, the perfect corollary: Why win if we can lose?”

Deliberately, he removed the pince-nez and, with them, the resemblance to Victoriano Huerta. However, the effect was opposite to what had happened with Bernstein; without his glasses, the Director General’s gaze did not diminish; if anything, the greenish slits of his eyes gained in intensity.

“The North Americans follow Thoreau’s counsel: simplify, simplify; as well as its corollary that nothing succeeds like success. For good or evil, their political system is transparent, a mode accepted by men as disparate as the stupid, well-meaning Eisenhower and the perverse, satanic Dulles. But he who seeks to imitate Machiavelli finds himself drowning in Watergate, n’est-ce pas? In contrast, no Mexican politician is disposed to believe that simple things are simple; he suspects something fishy. We Mexicans are, understandably, defensive. Mexico, to continue our ichthyological metaphor, is a fish that has too often taken the bait. One must suspect everything and everybody, and that means that everything and everybody is complicated, hélas! ”

“Was it the President’s orders that I be jailed, shot while trying to ‘escape,’ and buried?”

“That wasn’t necessary. A cabinet member who was present at the ceremony requested an investigation of Felix Maldonado. That caused an Under-Secretary to run to the hot line and order the Chief of the Secret Police to detain Maldonado. We, oh so happily, handed over an unconscious man to their agents, and they, with a small assist from us interpreted the President’s intentions in their own manner. In view of the enormity of the crime, they tossed the hot potato to the authorities at the Military Camp, saying those were orders direct from the ‘Orifice’ of the President — if you’ll forgive the pun. Of course, I was the, shall we say, source, n’est-ce pas? That night I went to Military Camp Number One and spoke to the officer of the guard, a mere commandant, and told him — I have sufficient credentials — I had come on behalf of the President of the Republic to speak with the prisoner. We went to the cell where Maldonado was resting.”

He interrupted his account to emphasize the verb. “I choose my words carefully when I say resting. The poor man was dead, wrapped in a coarse blanket scarcely worthy of a recruit. Imagine the confusion of a minor officer who finds he has the corpse of a presumed Presidential assassin on his hands. I suggested that in such instances one must make a virtue of necessity, and that he might distinguish himself if he shot the corpse in the back and said he had been trying to escape. Naturally, he interpreted my suggestion as an order from above. En passant, the fact that the prisoner had been shot while attempting to escape relieved me of any responsibility in Maldonado’s death; that was transferred directly to the officer of the guard and, thus, to the entire National Army, ah, well … The death was a public secret, but everything was clarified and accepted in the higher spheres: a discreet burial the following day, after advising the next of kin of a sudden heart attack, et cetera, et cetera. Finis, Felix Maldonado. Malicious tongues will always say he was struck dead by the emotion of seeing the President at such close range. And that is the felicitous journey that takes us from a simple suspicion voiced in the President’s presence and picked up by one of his cabinet, to the brutal decision of a minor army officer — before we are elevated to the plane of appropriate grief at the ceremony at the Jardín Cemetery, mmh?”

“What is the name of the poor devil all this happened to?”

“Felix Maldonado. Felix he wasn’t, if you remember your Latin. He was a miserable mediocrity. A mediocre economist, a mediocre bureaucrat, a mediocre Don Juan. Yes, a miserable fellow.”

The Director General stared at Felix with judicious ferocity. “Velázquez, place on one side of the scales that miserable, insignificant Maldonado, and on the other an internal crisis with international repercussions. You will see we have no reason to weep over such a man.” He replaced his tinted pince-nez. “On the other hand, we must concern ourselves with Licenciado Diego Velázquez. Felix Maldonado did not accept our offer and you have seen what happened to him. A whole world awaits Diego Velázquez: a position with a considerable increase in salary, juicy commissions, trips abroad with generous per diems, everything he could desire.”

Felix felt as if his facial muscles were tied in knots. “But I have a wife, remember?”

He could only guess that the Director General’s invisible eyes were intrigued. “But of course. And now you can have all the little ones God chooses to send, n’est-ce pas?”

“Right. A litter of fucking little sons of bitches, all named Maldonado!”