Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

Felix and the Director General took each other’s measure in silence; Maldonado knew that his own gaze was empty, opaque, uncommunicative; in contrast, the two lenses of the Director General’s pince-nez glittered like black stars in the black bosom of the ancient Citroën.

“Well.” The Director General smiled. “I believe we are almost there. Forgive my chatter. The fact is, I had only one thing to say. Cruelty is always preferable to scorn.”

He drew back one of the window coverings and Felix saw that they were approaching the stone bridge of Chimalistac. The Director General again laughed, and said the Spanish had learned from the Arabs that architecture should never be in conflict with the climate, the landscape, or the soul. Such a shame, he added, that modern Mexicans had forgotten that lesson.

“All Mexico City should look like Coyoacán, in the same way that all Paris, in a certain sense, is like the Place Vendôme, n’est-ce pas? One must multiply the beautiful, not isolate it, or destroy it, as unfortunately we do.”

The auto stopped, and the Director General’s voice again became hollow and dry. “Rest. Relax. When you feel well, return to our office. We will be waiting for you. The same office. Malenita is waiting eagerly. Poor thing. She’s like a child, she needs someone who will be a father to her. She will cash your checks punctually, and you won’t have to go out of your way or stand in lines. And every month, come by to see my secretary Chayito. Special perquisites aren’t processed through the Ministry’s public accounting office.”

He opened the door and waved his hand. “Please get out, Licenciado Velázquez.”

“There’s one thing you haven’t explained. Why did you tell me in the clinic that Sara Klein had attended my funeral?”

For an instant, the Director General’s eyes were as vacant as sand. Then he sighed. “Recall my words. I said that Sara Klein, too, had attended the rendezvous with dust. In this carnival of lies, Licenciado, allow a small metaphorical truth, mmh?”

A wedding ring glittered on the finger of this man with an unimaginable private life. It occurred to Felix that the eight wives of Bluebeard, including Claudette Colbert, had no reason to envy the wife of the Director General.

“Get out, Licenciado Velázquez. I’m going on. And tell our friend Timon of Athens to reflect upon the words of Corneille, with the necessary geographical adjustments. ‘Rome, to my ruin, is a monstrous Hydra head; it will, when severed, grow a thousand in its stead.’ You see, I, too, know my classics.”

Felix got out without offering his hand. But, once outside the car, he turned and thrust both hands inside, the palms with their signs of life, fortune, and love almost touching the Director General’s tinted lenses. He said with rage: “See. You’ve forgotten one thing. My hands. I have my fingerprints. I can prove who I am.”

For once, the Director General did not laugh. “No. We thought of that. We decided not to slice off the tips of your fingers this time, Licenciado. One must always have an ace up his sleeve. And cruelty must be gradual. But I’m sure you won’t want to expose yourself a second time to our surgery, n’est-ce pas?”

He closed the door and the Citroen pulled away. Felix was standing before the door to my house in Coyoacán.

I HAVE WRITTEN the most accurate report possible of everything Felix Maldonado told me during the week he spent recuperating in my home. I have imposed a certain order, for he told his story the way memory works, in disjointed fragments. Felix’s memory, as he had already told me over the telephone, had certain rights. And mine as well.

I have transcribed with complete fidelity his feelings of the moment, his descriptions of people and places, events and conversations, as well as the occasional reflections evoked by these events. Some — perhaps too many — peripheral comments are exclusively mine.

I realize as Rosita types my notes that I have accumulated over two hundred pages. The girl with the head like a woolly lamb is an excellent typist, though she doesn’t enjoy her secretarial tasks; she feels they are beneath her dignity as a budding Mata Hari. Her Emiliano is much more docile, eager to learn. He is reading with intense interest the pages Rosita transcribes.

The case we, and the triple agent Trevor/Mann, call Operation Guadalupe richly deserves his curiosity. It was the first operation of our embryonic intelligence organization. The lessons we learned from this pilot experience will be of the greatest usefulness in the future.

I came to know Felix Maldonado well some fifteen years ago when we were both postgraduate students at Columbia University in New York. Although we were of the same generation, we hadn’t been friends while we were enrolled in the School of Economics at the University of Mexico. Our poorly labeled “maximum house of study” favors neither study nor friendship. The absence of discipline and any entrance standards prevents the former; an indiscriminate mass of two hundred thousand students makes the latter difficult, at best.

Besides, social differences separate the wealthy students from the poor. I came to the university in my own car; Felix, on the bus. Wealthy students like me didn’t want to fraternize with poor students like Felix, nor they with us. It created too many problems, we all knew that. They were embarrassed to invite us to their homes; we were uncomfortable at their uneasiness in ours. We spent our weekends in our houses in Acapulco; they, if they were lucky, might get as far as the public bathing beach at Agua Hedionda in Puebla. We had our dances at the Jockey Club; theirs were held in the Clair de Lune Ballroom.

There was also the problem of girls. We didn’t want our sisters and cousins to fall in love with them; and they, even if their parents were of a different mind, didn’t want theirs swept off their feet by our money.

Felix’s case was somewhat different. Everyone knew of his loyalty to the professor who taught economic theory, Leopoldo Bernstein, and of his love for one of our classmates, a Jewish girl named Sara Klein. And this was an additional barrier. Toward the end of the fifties, Jewish families in Mexico still hadn’t been accepted in “good” society; the parents spoke with thick German or Slavic accents, it was suspected that their daughters were too emancipated, and, above all, the families weren’t Catholic.

Distance spontaneously breached all these barriers. The privileges I enjoyed at home impressed no one in New York; on the other hand, Felix accepted them naturally, but he saw no reason why two young Mexicans living in the United States should perpetuate social divisions; it made more sense to become friends, to share jokes and memories and language.

Felix was overwhelmed by the film series at the Museum of Modern Art, and became infatuated with the art and history of the medium. Several times he invited me to go with him in his explorations of Griffith and Stroheim and Buñuel. I never told him I’d seen them all in Mexico at the Instituto Francés on Nazas, where twice a week we sat in religious silence before the fluid undulations of Swanson and the iron control of Potemkin, and then listened as a svelte young Spanish poet with prematurely gray hair gave some three hundred of us lucid lectures on cinematic culture.

As for me, I discovered the theater, and Felix’s passion for the movies was equaled only by mine for Shakespeare. I devoted an entire summer to the Ontario Shakespeare Festival and what was called the straw-hat circuit in summer theaters along the New England coast. I invited Felix to go with me, and overcame his reluctance by suggesting that he be my guest at the theater, and I his at the movies.