Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

So we sealed our friendship, and when in September we began our second year at Columbia, we decided to share a room; we rented a small apartment at the Century Apartments on the outmoded west side of Central Park. Felix set one condition: that I limit my monthly allowance to the amount of the fellowship he received from the government. I agreed, and we moved into our furnished apartment, one room, plus bath and kitchenette. We shared the Castro Convertible that was by day a sofa and by night a bed. We worked out an arrangement to entertain girls only in the late afternoon and to hang a sign on the door when we didn’t want to be disturbed. We stole a public-works sign on Sixty-eighth Street that read MEN AT WORK, and used it as a signal.

We talked a lot about Mexico, sitting before the view that was our only luxury: the Hudson at dusk from our window on the twentieth floor. Felix’s father had been one of the few Mexicans employed by the foreign oil companies. He’d worked as a bookkeeper in Poza Rica for the El Aguila Company, a subsidiary of Royal Dutch.

“My father went to the superintendent’s office twice a month. But he never saw his face. Each time my father entered, this Englishman was sitting with his back to him. That was the custom; you received Mexican employees with your back turned, to make them feel they were inferior, like the Hindu employees of the British Raj. My father told me this years later, when his humiliation had been transformed into pride. In 1938, Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated the English, Dutch, and North American oil companies. My father told me that at first they hadn’t known what to do. The companies had taken with them their technicians, their engineers, even the plans of the refineries and wells. They’d said, drink your oil and see how you like the taste! The capitalist countries declared a boycott against Mexico. My father says they’d had to improvise to keep going. But it had been worth it. No more White Guards, the company’s private army, stealing land and cutting off the ears of rural schoolteachers. And most important of all, people looked one another in the face.”

This is all a well-known fact of modern Mexican history. But to Felix it was a personal and moving experience. He insisted heatedly, as I laughed, that he’d been conceived on the eighteenth of March, 1938, the day of the nationalization, and born exactly nine months later. But if he’d been born nine years earlier, he’d have had none of the advantages he’d enjoyed, the schools Cárdenas created in the oil fields, the medical services that hadn’t existed earlier, social security, and pensions. His parents hadn’t dared have children before; but Felix went to school in Poza Rica, and his father was promoted and became Chief Accountant in the main offices of Petróleos Mexicanos in Mexico City. Felix was able to pursue his studies and go to the university. His father retired on a pension, but active men die when they stop working. Felix venerated his father and Cárdenas; they were almost one in his imagination, as if their shared humiliation and dignity and destinies, inherited by Felix, were inextricably linked.

He told this story with great warmth and feeling, more than I can recapture here. I didn’t offer a similar confession. My life had always been easy, and I was embarrassed to admit that my family, too, owed everything to President Cárdenas. My father’s small pharmaceutical factory expanded and diversified following the expropriation, until it became a powerful petrochemical empire. And, along the way, my father cornered a number of concessions; our gasoline stations were strategically located all along the Pan-American Highway between Laredo and Valles, and thanks to all this, I attended not only the university but also the dances at the Jockey Club.

In a way, I envied Felix the vividness of his experiences and emotions; but at the same time I realized they’d marked my friend with a certain eccentricity. I don’t mean our religious differences. Where religion is concerned, I’m the one who might be considered an eccentric in a society where everyone claims to be Catholic but only women and children go to church. Felix was the product of socialist schools. I wasn’t a Catholic simply because of tradition, but by conviction, and my conviction was based on the very reasons because of which Felix rejected the notion of God: that the Creator could not have created evil.

“But evil is necessary only because there is a God,” I argued during one of our discussions. “Imagine all evil accumulated on God’s shoulders and then you can comprehend His existence; only then will you feel, will you know, that God never forgets us. If He is able to bear human evil, it is because we matter to Him.”

When news reached Felix of his mother’s death, he rejected my company and hung out the warning sign on our apartment door. I came home as late as possible, but the sign was still there, so I spent the night in a hotel. By the following morning I was worried, and I ignored the sign and went in.

Felix was in bed with a very pretty girl. “Let me introduce Mary. She’s Jewish and she’s Mexican. Last night she lost her virginity.”

The girl with the violet eyes didn’t seem perturbed. I felt uncomfortable and, I confess, jealous. As long as Felix respected our arrangement and I didn’t see the girls that passed through our bed, it didn’t matter to me. But Mary’s physical presence disturbed me. I rationalized that it was the fault of my good — or bad — training. I would have taken a plane to Mexico City for my mother’s funeral. But secretly I also realized that I regarded Felix as somehow mine, the brother who’d lived the hard life that hadn’t touched me, the platonic lover who lay beside me every night in the convertible sofa-bed recounting extraordinary films that had never been filmed, or rather, ideal films pieced together from bits he particularly loved, a face, a gesture, a situation, a place immortalized by the camera.

“Who’ll pay for the stained sheets and mattress?” I asked grossly, and left them.

I walked to St. Patrick’s; Felix wasn’t going to pray for his mother.

During the last two months of the life we shared in New York, neither of us again hung the sign on the door.

We returned to Mexico together and promised to see each other often; we exchanged telephone numbers, and went our separate ways. All our good intentions to continue our friendship failed. Felix found a job with Petróleos Mexicanos; his family connections and his Master’s from Columbia paved the way. I went back to my old social circle and gradually took over my father’s affairs. I heard that Felix was spending a lot of time with the Jewish colony. Sara Klein had gone to live in Israel, but Felix was going around with Mary. Then she married a rich Jewish businessman and Felix married another Jewish girl, named Ruth.

My business affairs prospered, and when my father died, I expanded them even further, but the rewards seemed empty. Because of my two years at Columbia, my friendship with Felix, my love for English literature, I deplored the world of bourgeois Mexicans, ignorant and proud of it, wasteful, voracious in their appetites for accumulating money without any greater purpose, totally lacking in the least measure of social compassion or civic conscience. I held a similar opinion of the government officials I came in contact with; the majority were struggling to amass enough money in a few years to be able to move into bourgeois circles and live and act and think like them.

These two aspects of my life came together in my sister Angelica’s marriage; she had all the vices of our class, and the man she married, Mauricio Rossetti, an impoverished aristocrat making a career in government service, had all the defects of his. I imagined how it might have been if Felix had rescued my sister from the idiotic life into which she was pouring her half of our inheritance, only to humiliate her husband. At the same time, she was goading him to profit from government corruption and free himself from her humiliation. I’m not sure, but deep inside I may have resented the fact that Felix hadn’t come along, fallen in love with Angelica, and saved her …