Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

“I am, Felix. Call me a nationalistic conservative, if you want. I’d like to conserve that, keep the oil ours, and prevent outsiders from playing games with us.”

“Will I be in contact with anyone besides you?”

“No. Only me. I’ll send help when necessary. Money. Friends.”

“There are others involved?”

“Only the bare minimum. They think like us. We’re few, but we’re not alone.”

“What shall I call you?”

“Timon. Timon of Athens.”

“Why not? We saw that play in the open-air theater in Connecticut. A man of enormous wealth who also buys affection. Isn’t that what Shakespeare says, something like that?”

“You’ll have to reread the plays so we can communicate.”

“You know something? I wouldn’t have recognized you on the street.”

“I know, Felix. But don’t forget my voice. All our communications will be by telephone. We won’t see each other until the end. Trust no one.”

“But I have my prejudices. Bernstein was my teacher.”

“Do you know what the Irgun Zvai Leumi was?”

“No.”

“An organization of Jewish terrorists as bent on terrorism as any of the PLO.”

“You mean they were fighting for a homeland against the occupying British. Listen, I saw how the British went about things in Poza Rica.”

“That isn’t true. You hadn’t been born.”

“My father saw it. That’s the same thing.”

“The Palestinians are also fighting for a homeland. The Irgun didn’t limit itself to acts of terrorism against the British; they also exterminated any Arab they found in their path.”

“It all seems very abstract.”

“I’ll give you a concrete example. On the ninth of April of 1948, our Professor Bernstein took part in the slaughter of all the inhabitants of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassim. Two hundred dead, most of them women, children, and old men. This happened three years after the death of Hitler.”

The information had no effect on Felix. It lacked the personal element; he would have to know that Bernstein had achieved what he had never tried to achieve, and never had achieved, become Sara’s lover. He would have to know Sara’s death, the torture of the man called Jamil, Harding’s murder, before he understood my parting words, after we’d agreed on the broad outlines of Operation Guadalupe and he was for the first time on his way to the room in the Hilton. “You will learn that no one has a monopoly on violence in this business.”

He would have to know the extermination of Simon Ayub’s family by Palestinians in Lebanon, and the death of my sister Angelica at the hands of Trevor/Mann and his ally Dolly.

I HAVE WRITTEN Felix’s version of these events. Now I will give my own interpretation, the broad perspective that Felix lived but only partially understood. My task was made more difficult because Felix — though he never said so, but since he supposed I hadn’t left my library at any time during the preceding ten days — thought that, as a participant, he knew more than I. And, once again, he seemed to be the one called upon to play the difficult role, while everything was made easy for me.

More than once during that week in my house, I was afraid that when Felix looked into the mirror and saw his unfamiliar, savaged face his reaction would be anger and self-pity. Knives and fists had played with his very identity, as if it had been modeling clay. I was also afraid that he, recognizing the physical manipulation, would see something even more insulting, moral manipulation. Emiliano and Rosita had told me of Felix’s wounded pride when he learned he wasn’t my only confidant. And, finally, I feared that his underlying resentment might explode or, obscured by the very real affection that unites us, be turned into grief.

Felix Maldonado’s grief takes strange directions, I’d learned following his mother’s death. That night he’d deflowered Mary in our bed. And the night he discovered that Sara was Bernstein’s lover, he’d physically assaulted the professor in Angelica and Mauricio’s home. Grief, followed by the exhaustion of grief, always diverted Felix from his duty, as when he’d made love to Mary, or visited Sara in the mortuary.

I was mulling over these things one evening when we were comfortably settled in my library having a drink, listening to Rubinstein, Szeryng, and Fournier play Schubert’s glorious E-flat trio. Only then did I attempt to draw some conclusions from our experience. Ours, I say; for Felix, it was his alone.

“It has nothing to do with the music,” I had said, “but as I listen, it occurs to me that everything you told me sounds melodramatic, you know? But at the same time I feel there’s an additional element, possibly something tragic, because neither side is exclusively right; both sides are right and both sides are wrong. Do you know what I mean?”

Felix stared at me a few minutes without speaking, a glass of cognac in his hand. Then, as if to dispute what I’d said, he hurled the glass against the painting of the martyred San Sebastian above the fireplace. The glass shattered and liquid trickled down the painting into the fire, as the flames danced.

“Son-of-a-bitch! I’ve been here seven days,” he said, “I’ve told you everything I know, and you’re still sitting there with your goddamned placidity, listening to your Schubert, quoting your Shakespeare, with your glass of cognac getting as empty as your words.” Repeatedly, he thumped his chest with his thumb. “I ran the risk. I stuck out my neck. I have a right to know.”

“Where do you want me to begin?” I replied tranquilly.

Felix smiled, and went to pick up the pieces of broken glass from the hearth. “I’m sorry.”

I shrugged. “For God’s sake, Felix, between you and me…”

“Very well. Begin with the part you like best, those grand generalizations, get that out of your system. I understand that both sides wanted information about the Mexican oil reserves, and I’m sure the ring was connected with that. But the performance in the Palace, what was that all about? What did each side have to win?”

“If you’ll allow me, I’ll try to be systematic. As soon as the record’s finished.”

With the last chords of the allegro moderato, I folded my hands and lowered my head. I didn’t want to look Felix in the eye. “Both sides wanted the information. That’s central. That’s where everything begins. Why did they want it? For obvious reasons. They didn’t know — and thanks to us they still don’t — the extent, the precise location, or the quality of our new fields. In case of a new conflict in the Middle East, several things might happen.”

“Trevor outlined the hypotheses in Houston,” Felix said impatiently. “I know the bottom line: in every case, Mexican oil could be the unexpected ace in the hole. What else?”

“Their specific motivations.”

I got up and walked toward Felix. I leaned down. I knew I couldn’t expect any intimacy from him; perhaps I thought I might instead provoke the discomfort — the incipient fear — that can result from unemotional physical proximity. “The Arabs wanted the information in order to put pressure on Mexico; our coming into OPEC would strengthen that organization but weaken Mexico. We can support OPEC, but shouldn’t join it. We’ve owned our oil since 1938; the Arabs, no. We don’t share earnings with any foreign country; the Arabs do. We’re capable of managing for ourselves all the stages of oil production from exploration to exportation; the Arabs, no. To join OPEC would be to let ourselves in for battles we’ve already fought and won. And, incidentally, we’d lose the benefits of the United States Trade Bill. The Arabs know all this; the gringos as well. Result: the even greater weakness of Mexico. For its part, Israel wants to ensure that Mexico doesn’t commit its oil but continues a policy of massive exportation in competition with OPEC, directly or indirectly assuring supplies to the Jewish state. Hence the Israelis’ and the North Americans’ need to know exactly what reserves the Western world could depend on in case of a new conflict. For it if comes to war, never doubt it, Washington will turn all the screws to make Mexican oil the answer to Arab oil.”