Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

I cultivated the few exceptions I found, the few lawyers, economists, officials, and scientists who were intelligent, honorable, and, above all, concerned about the future of a country that was needlessly condemned to poverty, corruption, and nonsense. I bought a large old house in Coyoacán. I filled it with my books, the paintings I’d begun to acquire, the music that meant more and more to me as I became resigned to bachelorhood. Almost out of inertia, my business thrived, and I came to be considered a nationalistic entrepreneur.

But always, just beneath the surface, lay those conversations held in a small apartment with a view overlooking the Hudson, when a young student of economics told me what had happened on the day he was conceived.

That day, Mexicans had looked one another in the face.

Following the political and economic crisis of October 1973, my constant recollections of Felix became a real need to see him again. The Yom Kippur War and the Arab oil embargo coincided with the discovery, at a depth of some 4,500 meters beneath the soil of Tabasco and Chiapas, of a large quadrant containing a potential two billion barrels of oil.

It wasn’t difficult for the owner of a large petrochemical empire to perceive the warning signals, to measure the greed aroused by the discovery of such enormous oil deposits, as well as the role those reserves might play in an international crisis. I became aware of some things that on the surface seemed quite innocent: the comings and goings of our former professor Bernstein, who claimed to be raising funds for Israel, the contacts he established, the questions he asked; the relation of the Director General of the Ministry of Economic Development with the diplomats and hierarchs of Arab countries. My sister Angelica’s indiscretions were incalculable, but I didn’t really need them to experience the full pressure exerted upon my own empire to associate with transnational companies and become a part of enterprises that would in the end divest us of our control over our own resources.

I imagined the day when we Mexicans might cease to look one another in the face.

I GOT IN TOUCH WITH Felix and made an appointment to see him one evening at my house in Coyoacán. We compared appearances, after thirteen years of not seeing each other. He was unchanged, Moorish, virile, the image of the Velázquez self-portrait, and tall for a Mexican. I, on the other hand, had changed considerably. Relatively short, with a head too large for my small, slim body, I had begun to go bald, and that only emphasized my stature, I attempted to compensate with a thick black moustache.

Without going into great detail, I sketched out what I had in mind. I didn’t want Felix to form too many preconceptions. I knew that Felix was motivated solely by personal emotions, not abstract political arguments. Oil was his father’s life, not an ideology. He reminded me that he wasn’t orthodox but he’d converted to the Jewish faith to please his wife. He asked me whether I’d ever married, he’d completely lost track of me. No, I was a thirty-eight-year-old bachelor. Maybe someday.

We set up a simple code, quotations from Shakespeare. I rented a room in the Hilton to serve as a kind of honeycomb to attract bees of all breeds, and there we carefully planted false documents that had every appearance of authenticity.

Felix objected. “You’ve given me very little to go on. I may make mistakes.”

“It’s better this way. No one but you can carry out this mission. When something surprises you, you always react with imagination. When you’re not surprised, you act routinely. I know you.”

“Then I consider myself free to do whatever I think best.”

“Agreed. Our premise is that we have neither information nor plans to forestall the ambitions of those who are a threat to us. We will act alone, our only principals those who deserve our confidence; our only resources, my own personal fortune.”

Felix looked at me oddly; at times, memory disdains its true name and becomes clouded with emotions that are nothing more than vague recollections. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Yes, Felix. Very good.”

“We were good friends, real friends, weren’t we?”

“More than that. At Columbia, they called us Castor and Pollux.”

I used the moment to attempt an intimate, personal overture. I placed my arm around his shoulders, hoping some tremor would betray his emotion.

“I’m prejudiced,” he said to me. “I’m married. To a Jewish girl. I have many connections in that area.”

I removed my arm. “I know that. I also know that the English superintendent at Poza Rica turned his back on your father.”

“That can never happen again.”

I gazed at him gravely, sadly, intentionally mixing personal and professional relations. “You’re mistaken.”

“But you know I’d do anything to keep it from happening again, don’t you?”

I answered his question indirectly. The sentimental blackmail I was subjecting him to had to be implicit. “Listen to this.”

I ran my fingers over the keys of the recorder I always carry in an inside jacket pocket; I pressed one key and my voice emerged. Felix didn’t seem to be any more amazed than if I’d been a nightclub ventriloquist, until the moment another voice with a heavy North American accent responded to mine: “… in Tabasco and Chiapas. The United States requires six million barrels per day of imported oil for internal consumption. Alaska and Venezuela assure us of only two-thirds of this supply. Mexico will have to send us the missing third.”

“Whether or not we want to?”

“Well, it would be better if you did, wouldn’t it?”

“Do you think a new war will break out?”

“Not between the great powers, no, because the nuclear arsenal threatens us with either the terror of extinction or a new balance of terror. But the small countries will be the arenas of limited wars using conventional arms.”

“And also limited skirmishes using equally conventional economic weapons.”

“I was referring to the weapons we used in Vietnam; they’re all tied to your profession, you know that; limited and conventional wars mean a boom for the petrochemical industry, you know that, too, napalm, phosphorus, defoliation chemicals…”

“And I was referring to even more conventional weapons, blackmail, threats, pressure…”

“That’s the way it is. Mexico is highly vulnerable because she’s dependent on the three valves we can close at our whim: imports, financing, and the sale of replacement parts.”

“We’ll drink our oil, then, and see how it tastes…”

“Ugh. Better to adapt to the future, my friend. Dow Chemical is eager to associate itself with you. That means guaranteed expansion and earnings for your empire, I promise that. In the eighties, Mexico can count on a reserve of 100,000 million barrels, the largest in the Western Hemisphere, second only to Saudi Arabia in the world. You can’t sit on it forever like the proverbial Indian sleeping on a mountain of gold…”

I stopped the tape. It amused me to wag my index finger under Felix’s nose, like the gringo when he visited me in my offices.

“We’re on the razor’s edge,” I said to Felix. “We may wake up some fine day to find all our oil installations occupied by the United States military.”

“They’d have to occupy the entire country, not just the wells and refineries,” Felix replied, pensively. He looked as if he’d just heard a ghostly dialogue between his father and the English superintendent of Poza Rica.

“You’re right.”

“I understand why you came to me, you know my sentimental weakness, my father’s story,” he said without a trace of cynicism. “But you? Why are you doing all this? You should be a conservative.”