Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

The Director General didn’t resort to striking Felix. Rather, he leaned close to him; his deeply furrowed, greenish skin, taut over salient bones, was the image of death, if not death itself. The breath expelled from the flaring nostrils and fleshless lips thin as stone knives issued from a cavernous tomb that spoke a threat worse than any beating.

“Listen carefully. The only certainty in this adventure is that you will never know whether you are the true Felix Maldonado or the one who took his place by our orders. You still deny you are the man buried in the Jardín Cemetery? Reflect upon the moment you awakened in the clinic, and ask yourself whether you can be sure you knew who you were. There will always be a before and an after in your life, separated by a chasm you will never be able to span, do you understand that? From this time forward, what you can recall of your past may only be what we, out of the goodness of our hearts, wish to teach you. Can you be sure of the truth?”

“Ruth…” Felix murmured, hypnotized by the deathly voice and eyes and movements of this man as elusive as an oiled serpent.

“I promise you,” continued the Director General, ignoring Felix’s mumbled allusion to his wife, “that every time you think of Felix Maldonado’s past you will be remembering something I taught you while you were unconscious in the hospital. And as you are living Diego Velázquez’s life, you will remember of him only what I tell you. Every choice will lead to its impossible antithesis. If you were the man you were yesterday, can you be sure where your today begins? If you are the man you are today, can you know where your yesterday ended? There’s no way out for you, do what you do, go where you go. Felix Maldonado was a nobody who frustrated my perfect plan. Diego Velázquez will bear the curse of that guilt.”

From the intensity of the words, Felix knew there must be sweat on the Director General’s brow, but like his breath, his brow was mortally cold. The official composed himself, and stood straight, no longer crouching over Felix. “Our poor Maldonado is the ideal man, not because of his debatable virtues, but because he doesn’t exist. He will remain dead so that we may continue to profit from his services. His chief agrees.”

He gestured disdainfully, inviting Felix to stand. “Follow me, Licenciado. I am going to take you for a ride in my automobile.”

Felix got to his feet. He felt dizzy and weak. For an instant, he supported himself by holding on to the back of the chair. The Director General turned away and with deliberation lighted a cigarette, his hand shielding his eyes from the unbearable brilliance of the flame. Felix dropped to his knees, plugged in the light Simon and his cohorts had used to torture him, and the sudden glare — congealed in the room like the breath of the man lighting his cigarette before the lidless eye of the reflector — blinded the Director General. He screamed with anguish and clapped his hands over his eyes. The lighter fell to the cement floor, followed by the cigarette, dropped from his unfeeling fingers and dripping a tiny trail of lava down the Director General’s chest.

“Right behind you,” said Felix, crushing out the cigarette with his heel.

The Director General suppressed the trailing notes of his cry of agony. He stooped down and groped for his lighter, found it, and again rose, his dignity completely recovered.

“Be my guest,” he said to Felix Maldonado.

THE METAL DOOR closed behind them and they walked along a glass-and-iron gallery ventilated by draughts of cold night air smelling of the recent rain.

They descended iron stairs to a garage where an ancient long, low, black Citroen was parked. The Director General opened the door and gestured Felix to enter.

Felix climbed into the luxurious imitation coffin. His host followed and slammed the door. He settled back with a sigh, and took the black mouthpiece hanging from a metal hook.

He gave orders in Arabic, and the funeral carriage drove off. The interior of the Citroen was upholstered in black velour; the windows were covered with black curtains, and two sliding panels of black-painted metal separated the unseen chauffeur from the passengers.

Felix smiled secretly, imagining the conversations that could take place between his host and him in this place and under these circumstances. But the Director General was too occupied to talk, absorbed with the drops that would alleviate the pain of the sudden glare. He replaced the bottle in a case fitted into the back of the divider facing them, and with closed eyes leaned back against the cushioned seat.

He spoke with extreme courtesy, as if nothing had happened during the preceding hour. One might think the two men were on their way to a banquet, or returning from a funeral. In tones of modulated affability, the Director General recalled his life as a student at the Sorbonne. There, he said, he’d formed indestructible bonds of friendship with the elite of the Arab world. Doors had been opened to a sensibility that made the Western world seem crude and impoverished. Without the Arabs, he added, the Western world would not be enjoying its own culture; the Greek and Latin heritages had been destroyed or ignored by the barbarians, preserved only by Islam and disseminated from Toledo throughout medieval Europe. The sons of wealthy Palestinians studied in France; through them, he came to understand that their Diaspora, because it was current and tangible, was worse than that of the Jews begun two thousand years before. The Palestinians were the contemporary victims of colonialism in the Promised Land, and were living a destiny Jews could only recall, a destiny that never would have gone beyond a vague Zionist nostalgia had not Hitler once again martyred them. But, while the Jews were rich bankers, prosperous businessmen, and honored intellectuals in pre-Nazi Germany, the Palestinians were already victims, fugitives exiled from the land they, and only they, had truly inhabited.

“The Middle East is an impassioned geography,” the Director General murmured. “One need only go there to share its passions — including violence. But the violence of the modern Occident is different from all others because it is programmed, not spontaneous. Western colonialism introduced that violence into the Middle East; the Zionist project prolonged it. Palestinian violence is a passion. And passion is consumed in the instant; it is not a project but a living thing, inseparable from religion and all it implies. In contrast, Zionism is a program that must separate itself from religion in order to be compatible with the secular project of the West whose violence it shares. Consider, friend Velázquez. Palestine was a land already inhabited. But, for the Jews of Europe, anything that was not Europe was, as it had been for European colonialism, land to be occupied. That is to say, colonized, mmh? The Jews forced the Arab world to pay the price of the Nazi ovens. The result was fatal: the Palestinians became the Jews of the Middle East, the persecuted of the Holy Land. But Israel’s penance is in its guilt. Little by little the Israelis are becoming Easternized and, like the Arabs, entrenched in a struggle that has become religious as well as secular, passionate and instantaneous. The Easternization of Israel makes a new war inevitable, perhaps many successive wars, since Oriental politics can only conceive of negotiation as a result of, never as an impediment to, war.”

Felix didn’t wish to reply. He was reaching the end of an adventure in which he couldn’t be sure whether he’d been following some plan — either his own or another’s — or whether he’d been the blind instrument of chance, completely divorced from will.

The Director General tapped Felix’s knee. “Bernstein must have given you his arguments. I shall not persist in mine. You, like poor Simon, must believe you’re a Mexican, and what does all this have to do with you? You carry out your assignment, and that’s that, n’est-ce pas? But your friends are right. Mexican oil is becoming a more and more important card to be played in the case of continuing war in the eastern Mediterranean. Hence all our efforts, n’est-ce pas? One cannot isolate oneself, Licenciado. History and its passions sift through the universal chinks of violence. Did you study Max Weber? The decisive means of politics is violence. And as each of us, personally, possesses a more or less controlled measure of violence, the encounter is fatal; history becomes the justification for our hidden violence. You may think I quote Weber only because he expresses my own view. But think about it. At this moment you are exhausted, all you want is to bring this to an end. I understand. But I urge you, ask yourself, don’t you have a reserve of personal violence completely separate from the political violence surrounding you? Don’t you intend to use it to find out the only thing you want to know?”