Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

Now I could look at him calmly. “Felix, what do you plan to do when you leave my house?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. Go to Ruth.”

“Yes. And then?”

“I told you. I have to find out who killed Sara.”

“Why? Sara Klein died twice, once as a girl in Germany and then as a woman in Palestine. Her murder in Mexico was a mere formality.”

“You didn’t love her.”

“Would you compromise our whole operation to rush off on an idiotic chase that has nothing to do with our project? Would you jeopardize everything we’ve achieved just to satisfy your injured vanity, to avenge the death of an Israeli whore who never went to bed with you but cuckolded your platonic love for her with an old Jewish professor and a young Palestinian terrorist?”

Felix pointed the gun directly at my heart. “ You didn’t love her, you son-of-a-bitch.”

“Shoot, Felix. Give one more turn of the screw to the legend. This time Pollux kills Castor. Only one has the right to be immortal, remember? Not both.”

“You didn’t love her, you son-of-a-bitch.”

I approached him and took his hand, this time the hand with the gun. I took it from him; our faces were almost touching. “Ah, passion again rears its fearful Hydra head. Cut off one, and a thousand will grow in its place, isn’t that right? Call it jealousy, dissatisfaction, envy, scorn, fear, repulsion, vanity, terror; probe into the secret motives of any of us who participated in this comedy of errors, Felix, and give to his passion whatever name you will. You will always be wrong, because behind every label there is some unnamable, obscure political or personal reality — makes no difference which — that justly or unjustly — makes no difference which — compels us to disguise as action what is actually passion or hunger or suffering or desire or a love nourished out of hatred or a hatred nourished out of love. You think you’re being subjective? You’re nurturing objectivity. You think you’re being objective? You’re nurturing subjectivity. Just as the words in a novel always end by saying the opposite of what they mean.”

“But Angelica was your sister…”

“And Mary your lover, and Ruth your wife, and Sara, I don’t know, something bigger than you, something you’ll never be able to understand or give a name to. Go. Come back someday and tell me everything. Maybe then I’ll tell you how Angelica died, and why.”

“I know how. Dolly pushed her out the window.”

“But you don’t know why. All the better. Don’t try to explain it. Not that; not anything.”

“Did she know you were Trevor?”

“Of course. When we were children, we used to dress up and pretend to be other people. It was a continuation of our games.”

“But she didn’t know this game would be fatal.”

“No. She thought Rossetti was the one who’d be killed, that we’d get rid of him once and for all. Poor child. Rossetti is harmless, he’s useful because he can be controlled. Not Angelica, she was too impulsive, and she talked too much. It’s your destiny to be used blindly. Don’t complain. Truly bad fortune tends to be monotonous. Passion, without imagination, as you live it, is more entertaining.”

“Imagination, without memory, as you live it, is to be pitied. I feel sorry for you.”

“I’m a Catholic, Felix. I know that when one lacks passion he can be saved by grace. One day when we were young I told you that in my opinion sin and judgment are equally sterile. I prefer to eliminate punishment. The obligation of love is much better than any condemnation. Rossetti didn’t deserve love.”

“Is that how you loved Angelica?”

“I owe you no explanation. Understand. I have no quarrel with you. I love you, too.”

Everything I’d dreaded I saw in Felix’s eyes.

“Of course. I understand. There was one thing that powerful Timon couldn’t buy. A heart. ’Tis deepest winter in Lord Timon’s purse. ”

I hoped that wit would disguise my hurt, and I continued the game. “You’re a dog.”

“Thy mother’s of my generation,” Felix replied. It was the first time someone had called me a son-of-a-bitch by quoting Shakespeare.

My stupefaction was short-lived. I hurled myself on Felix, insulted, angry, wounded by what he was insinuating, robbed of my perfectly phrased, measured, premeditated justifications. He wrested the pistol from my hand, but it didn’t matter. I’d been stripped naked by this man, my brother, my enemy, whom finally I held in an embrace of hatred, a struggle in which the bodies that had never touched in the sofa-bed in New York were now locked together in rage — my impotent rage, invalidated by the sweating, straining, passionate proximity of Felix, his hand jamming the pistol into my armpit, his arm braced against the pressure of my torso, his leg thrust against my testicles the impassioned rejection of a body that didn’t desire mine. He scorned my passions, having discovered the most secret of them all, transforming me into a living but lifeless shell for Felix defended himself against the aggression of my love coldly, the way someone defends himself against a mosquito. Even though my love meant nothing to him, he loved me as he always had, his true friend. His memory had no grief. I wanted him to love me, but I wanted him to fear me more.

I dropped my arms. I’d been defeated, but I saw in his eyes that he didn’t claim the victory. For him, it was a draw. I sat down to get my breath back. Felix, too, was panting, standing beside the fireplace, the.44 in his hand. San Sebastian was dying his eternal death, his gaze vacant, arrows piercing his body and filling the sky.

“Go, Felix. You’ll forget. You’ll recover.”

He smiled, an unwelcome smile. “No. I’m Mexican. I’ll forget, but I won’t recover.”

I didn’t want to see him any longer. “Understand what I did, Felix, so I can understand what you’re going to do.”

“Thirteen years is a long time.” His voice was lifeless. “We don’t know each other any more.”

He was leaving, perhaps forever. No, in spite of everything, I was sure that someday he’d return to tell me what he’d done after he left my house. “Felix.” I raised my voice. “I understand you, and I know what you’ve lost because of me. Tell me, please. Did you gain anything?”

“Yes. I found a father in the dry docks at Galveston.”

I thought he was going to laugh, but if he did, I didn’t hear it. I wouldn’t have liked it. He was gone. Again I savored the cognac on my tongue, and licked my moustache. Felix was still a long way from being a good agent. In his own words, he’d told me that Trevor didn’t have a moustache. Several times he’d described the tight lips clean as knife blades. No moustache grows in four days.

I sighed. I should be compassionate. Felix Maldonado had been living a nightmare. My breath caught in my throat. After thirteen years, we no longer knew each other. But that wasn’t the worst; one thing hurt me even more. I remembered what Bernstein had told Felix. Felix really didn’t see me, because he wasn’t looking for me. He didn’t have the least idea how I looked at forty; he remembered only how I’d looked at twenty. That’s what remained in his mind. I didn’t exist in the present.

I spent the remainder of the evening leafing through my edition of Shakespeare. I reread the plays of murder at the castle of Dunsinane and of the murder of the Prince of Elsinore. Without interrupting my reading, my thoughts kept pace, weaving in and out among the sentences, sometimes obliterated by the words, sometimes drowning them out. Yes, Felix Maldonado was a bad agent. The James Bond of underdevelopment. But I had to build my organization with whatever Mexico had to offer: Felix, Emiliano, Rosita. Ashenden and Richard Hannay had behind them the heritage of Shakespeare, my poor agents had Cantinflas in The Unknown Policeman.