Hydra Head

1

AT EXACTLY 8 a.m. Felix Maldonado arrived at the Sanborns on Madero. Years had passed since he had set foot inside the famous House of Tiles. It had gone out of style like all of downtown Mexico City, the historic center Hernán Cortés had ordered built upon the ruins of the Aztec capital after personally drawing up the plans. This was in Felix’s mind as he pushed the wood-and-glass revolving door, made a full turn, and emerged again into the street. He felt guilty about arriving late for an appointment. He was known for his punctuality. He was the most punctual official in the entire Mexican bureaucracy. Easy, some said, no competition. Extremely difficult, Felix’s wife, Ruth, said, easier to let yourself drift with the current in a country governed by the law of least resistance.

This morning Felix could not withstand the temptation to waste a couple of minutes. He paused on the sidewalk across the street and for a long moment admired the magnificence of the blue- and white-tiled façade of the ancient colonial palace, with its wooden balconies and churrigueresque cresting outlining the flat roof. Again he crossed the street, quickly entered Sanborns, hurried through the sales area, and pushed open the beveled glass door leading to the translucent glass-roofed patio restaurant. One of the tables was occupied by Professor Bernstein.

Felix Maldonado attended a political breakfast every morning. A pretext for exchanging impressions, ordering world affairs, plotting intrigue, conspiring, and organizing cabals. Small early-morning fraternities that serve, above all, as a source of information that would otherwise remain unknown. When Felix spied the professor reading a political journal, he said to himself that no one would ever understand the articles and editorials if he was not a devoted regular at the hundreds of political breakfasts celebrated daily in chains of American-style quick-food restaurants — Sanborns, Wimpys, Dennys, Vips.

He greeted the professor. Bernstein half rose and then let his massive body fall again onto the rickety chair. He offered a soft fat hand to Felix and questioned him with a look, as he stuffed the journal in his jacket pocket. Handing an envelope to Felix, he reminded him that the annual National Prizes in the Arts and Sciences would be awarded at the National Palace tomorrow. The President of the Republic himself, so the invitation read, would honor the recipients. Felix congratulated Professor Bernstein for winning the Economics Prize and thanked him for the invitation.

“Please don’t fail to be there, Felix.”

“How could I, Professor? I’d die first.”

“I’m not asking that much.”

“I know. But, besides being your disciple and your friend, I’m a public official. You don’t refuse an invitation from the President. What luck to be able to shake his hand.”

“Have you met him?” asked Bernstein, staring at the water-clear stone sparkling in the ring on his sausage finger.

“A couple of months ago I attended a work session on oil reserves at the Palace. The President came at the end of the meeting to hear our conclusions.”

“Ah, the famous Mexican oil reserves! The great mystery. Why did you leave Petróleos Mexicanos?”

“They transferred me,” Felix responded. “They have some idea that an official gets stale if he stays in one post too long.”

“But you’ve spent your whole career with Pemex, you’re a specialist, what idiocy to waste your experience. You know a lot about the reserves, don’t you?”

Maldonado smiled and remarked how odd it was to find himself in the Sanborns on Madero. Actually, he hoped to change the subject, and he blamed himself for having brought it up, even with someone he respected as much as Bernstein, his old economics professor. Almost no one ever ate here now, he said. Everyone preferred the restaurants in the newer residential areas. The professor looked at him soberly and agreed. He suggested that Felix order, and a girl in a native Indian costume wrote down orange juice, waffles with maple syrup, and American coffee, weak.

“I saw you reading a journal,” said Felix, believing that Professor Bernstein wanted to talk politics.

But Bernstein said nothing.

“Just now, as I came in,” Felix went on, “I was thinking how you can’t understand anything the Mexican press says unless you attend political breakfasts. That’s the only way you can understand all the allusions and veiled attacks and unprintable names hinted at in the newspapers.”

“Neither do they print important news like the sum total of our oil reserves. It’s curious how news about Mexico appears first in foreign newspapers.”

“Right.” Felix’s tone was neutral.

“But that’s how the system works. Anyway, it isn’t classy any more to come to this Sanborns,” the professor replied in the same tone.

“But we come to these breakfasts to be seen by other people, to make it clear that we and our circle know something no one else knows.” Felix smiled.

Professor Bernstein was in the habit of sopping up his eggs-and-hot-sauce with a piece of tortilla and then slurping noisily. Sometimes he even spattered his rimless spectacles, two thick, naked lenses that seemed to float before the professor’s invisible eyes.

“This isn’t a political breakfast,” Bernstein said.

“And that’s why you invited me here?”

“That’s unimportant. What matters is that Sara’s returning today.”

“Sara Klein?”

“Yes. That’s why I asked you to come. She’s returning today. I want to ask you a great favor.”

“Of course, Professor.”

“I don’t want you to see her.”

“You know we haven’t seen each other in twelve years, ever since she went to live in Israel.”

“Precisely. I’m afraid you’ll have a strong desire to see each other after such a long time.”

“Why do you say ‘afraid’? You know very well there was never anything between us. It was a platonic affair.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. That it will cease to be platonic.”

The costumed waitress placed Felix’s breakfast before him. He seized the opportunity to look away, so as not to offend Bernstein. At that moment he disliked the professor intensely for interfering in his private affairs. Furthermore, he suspected that Bernstein had favored him with the invitation to the Palace to blackmail him.

“Look, Professor. Sara was my ideal love. You know that better than anyone. But maybe you still don’t understand. If Sara had a husband, it would be a different story. But she never married. She’s still my ideal, and I’m not about to destroy my own idea of what’s beautiful. Don’t worry.”

“It was a simple warning. Since we’ll all be together for dinner tonight, I preferred to speak to you first.”

“Thanks. You needn’t worry.”

The sunlight beaming through the glass roof was intense. Within a few minutes, the dazzling patio of Sanborns would be an oven. Felix said goodbye to the professor and stepped out onto Madero. He checked the time by the clock in the Latin American Tower. It was too early to go to the Ministry. And it had been years since he’d walked down Madero toward the Plaza de la Constitución. Like the nation, he mused, this city had both developed and underdeveloped areas. Frankly, he didn’t care for the latter. The old center was a special case. If you kept your eyes above the swarming crowds, you didn’t have to focus on all the misery and poverty but could, instead, enjoy the beauty of certain façades and roof lines. The Templo de la Profesa, for example, was very beautiful, as well as the Convento de San Francisco and the Palacio de Iturbide, all of red volcanic stone, with their baroque façades of pale marble. Felix reflected that this was a city designed for gentlemen and slaves, whether Aztec or Spaniard, never for the indecisive muddle of people who’d recently abandoned the peasant’s white shirt and pants and the worker’s blue denim to dress so badly, imitating middle-class styles but, at best, only half successfully. The Indians, so handsome in the lands of their origin, so slim and spotless and secret, in the city became ugly, filthy, and bloated by carbonated drinks.

Madero is a narrow, boxed-in avenue that was originally called the Street of the Silversmiths. When he reached the huge square of the Zócalo, Felix Maldonado recalled this, as he was blinded by a dark, brilliant, harsh sun as remote and cold as silver. The sun in the Zócalo dazzled him. He couldn’t see a thing. He felt the disagreeable sensation of an unexpected and undesired contact; a long tongue pushed up his shirtsleeve and licked his watch. His eyes adjusted rapidly to the glare and he saw that he was surrounded by stray dogs. One was licking him, the others watching. An old woman swaddled in black rags was apologizing, “I’m sorry, señor, they’re just playful, they’re not really bad, no, they’re not.”

2

FELIX MALDONADO hailed a one-peso cab and relaxed, the first client in this collective taxi. In front of the Cathedral, a man dressed in overalls was skimming a long aluminum tube above the paving stones. He was crowned by headphones connected to the tube and to a receiving apparatus strung across his chest and secured by suspenders. He was muttering something. The cab driver laughed and said, Now you’ve seen the Cathedral nut, he’s been searching for Moctezuma’s treasure for years.

Felix did not reply. He had no desire to converse with a taxi driver. All he wanted was to reach his office in the Ministry of Economic Development, wash his hands, and lock himself in his cubicle. He took out his handkerchief and wiped the hand the dog had licked. The driver rolled along the Avenida 5 de Mayo with his hand stuck out the window, index finger raised, announcing that his taxi cost only one peso, and followed a fixed route from the Zócalo to Chapultepec Park. The previous evening Felix had left his own car with the doorman at the Hilton so he wouldn’t have to drive in a Chevrolet for which there was no parking place.

The taxi stopped at every corner to pick up passengers. First, two nuns got in on the corner of Motolinía. He knew they were nuns by the hair severely drawn back into a bun, the absence of makeup, the black dresses, the rosaries and scapulars. Since they were forbidden to go out in the street wearing their habits, they’d found a new uniform. They chose to get in front with the driver. He treated them like old friends, as if he saw them every day. “Hel-lo, Sisters, how’s it going today?” The nuns giggled and blushed, covering their mouths with their hands, and one of them tried to catch Felix’s eye in the rear-view mirror.

When the taxi stopped at Gante, Felix drew back his legs to make room for a girl dressed in white, a nurse. She carried cellophane-wrapped syringes, vials, and ampules. She asked Felix to slide over. He said no, he would be getting out soon. Where? At the Cuauhtémoc traffic circle across from the Hilton. Well, she was getting out before that, in front of the Hotel Reforma. Come on, she was in a hurry, she had to give an injection to a tourist, a gringo tourist dying of typhoid. Moctezuma’s revenge, Felix said. What? Don’t be a creep, move over. Felix said certainly not, a gentleman always gave his place to a lady. He got out of the taxi so the nurse could get in. She looked at him suspiciously while behind the peso cab a long line of taxis were tooting their horns.

“Step on it, they’re about to climb up my ass,” the driver said.

“So who said chivalry’s dead?” The nurse smiled and offered an Adams chiclet to Felix, who took it, not to offend her. And he made no effort to press against the girl. He respected the empty space between them. It wasn’t empty long. In front of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, a dark, fat woman stopped the taxi. To prove to the nurse that he was gallant with ugly as well as pretty women, Felix attempted to get out, but the fat woman was in too much of a hurry. She was carrying a brimming basket, which she lifted into the taxi. She sprawled face-down across Felix’s legs, her head plowing silently into the nurse’s lap. The nuns giggled. The fat woman propped her basket on Felix’s knees and, groaning, struggled to seat herself. Dozens of peeping yellow chicks erupted from the basket, swarming around Felix’s feet and climbing his shoulders. Felix was afraid he was going to crush them.

The fat woman settled into her seat, clutching the empty basket. When she saw that the chicks had gotten out, she flung the basket aside, striking the nuns, grabbed Felix by the neck, and flailing about, tried to collect the chicks. Felix’s face was plastered with feathers like adolescent down.

Ahead, a student with a pile of books under his arm was flagging down the taxi. The driver slowed to pick him up. Felix protested, sneezing through a myriad of feathers, and the nurse seconded him. There wasn’t room. The driver said yes, yes of course there was room. Four could ride in the back. “In the front, too,” one of the nuns giggled. And when the fat woman shrieked, “God help us, the chicks have escaped,” one of the nuns giggled, “Did she say Gold help us, we’re about to be raped?” The driver said he had to make his living any way he could and anyone who didn’t like it could get out and get a taxi all to himself, two and a half pesos before the meter ever started ticking.

The student approached the halted taxi, running lightly in his tennis shoes in spite of his load of books. He ran with both arms crossed over his chest. Maldonado, hissing in protest, noted this curious detail. A girl with a head of tight curls emerged from behind a statue whose pedestal bore the inscription “Malgré tout”—in spite of everything. She grabbed the student’s hand and the two piled into the rear of the taxi. They said excuse me, but inevitably stepped on several chicks. The fat woman shrieked again, struck at the student with her basket, and the girl asked whether this was a taxi or a mobile food-stamp market. Felix dreamily gazed at the receding statue, a marble woman in an abject posture, naked, poised for the outrage of sodomy, “Malgré tout.”

Books spilled to the floor, killing more chicks, as the student perched on the nurse’s knees. She didn’t seem to mind. Felix took his eyes from the statue to glare with scorn and anger at the nurse through the crook of the fat woman’s arm, and pulled the student’s girlfriend toward him, forcing her onto his knees. The girl slapped him and called to the student: “This pig’s trying to feel me up, Emiliano.” The student took advantage of the diversion to turn to the nurse, wink, and stroke the back of her knees. “Are we going to have to get out,” he said to Felix, “and settle things? You’re asking for it, not me.”

The student spoke in a nasal voice, his girl urging him on: “Let him have it, Emiliano”; and Emiliano: “Keep your hands off my baby.” Through the open window, a lottery vendor thrust under Felix’s nose a handful of black and purple sheets still smelling of fresh ink. “Here’s your dream come true, señor. Ending in seven. So you can marry this nice lady.” “What lady?” Felix retorted with assumed innocence. “You’re looking for trouble and you’re going to get it,” growled the student. The nuns giggled and asked to get out. The girlfriend noticed that the student was eyeing the nurse with interest and said, “Let’s get up in front, Emiliano.”

As the nuns were climbing out, the student got out of the left side of the taxi to avoid stumbling over Felix, and the driver said, “Don’t go out on that side, you stupid jerk, I’m the one who’ll get the fine.” The girlfriend with her head like a woolly black sheep pinched Felix’s knee on the way. Only Felix noticed in the midst of the confusion that the giggling nuns had stopped beside one of the many statues of heroes along the Paseo de la Reforma. One of them raised her skirts and whirled her leg as if dancing the cancan. The taxi shot away, leaving the student and his girl scuffling in the middle of the street. Then he remembered his books, shouted, “The books,” and ran after the taxi, but couldn’t catch up.

“They got out without paying,” Felix said to the driver, absurdly inhibited at the idea of interfering in something that was none of his business.

“I didn’t ask them to get in.”

“Are you going to keep the books as payment?” Felix insisted.

“You heard me. I asked them not to get in,” the driver said, as if the matter was settled.

“But that isn’t true.” Felix was scandalized. “You wanted them to get in, this nurse and I were the ones who protested.”

“My name’s Licha and I work at the Hospital de Jesús,” said the nurse, tapping the driver’s shoulder as she got out in front of the Hotel Reforma.

Felix made a mental note, but just then the fat woman hit him again with her basket and yelled, “It’s all your fault, don’t try to look so innocent, why are you making that face, all you had to do was move over a little, but no, you wouldn’t move over, all you had on your mind was feeling all the women’s bottoms as they got in and out, I know your type all right.” She also accused Felix of killing all her chicks, but Felix ignored her. There were dead chicks on the floor and on the seats, and a few crushed against the taxi windows. Books were strewn over the floor of the taxi, open and trampled, black shoeprints obliterating black print.

“I know I’m going to get fined,” said the driver. “It’s just not fair.”

“Take my card,” said Felix, offering it to the driver.

He got out at Insurgentes and watched the taxi drive away with the fat woman’s head and fist sticking out the window, her fist threatening him as the statue of Cuauhtémoc with upraised lance seemed to threaten the conquered city. He reached the door of the Hilton and the doorman greeted him, touching a hand to the visor of his military cap, powder-blue like his uniform. He handed Felix the keys to his Chevrolet, and Felix gave him a fifty-peso bill. The cardboard silhouette of the senior Hilton beckoned from behind glass doors, BE MY GUEST.

3

SEÑORITA MALENA was the only person in the office, and at first she didn’t see Felix Maldonado come in. Señorita Malena was a little over forty, but her particular idiosyncrasy was to pretend that she was still a little girl. Not merely young, but truly childlike. She wore bangs and curls, flowered dolls’ dresses, white stockings, and patent-leather Mary Janes. It was well known in the Ministry that this was how Malena kept her mother happy. Ever since Malena was a little girl, her mother had said, I hope you always stay a little girl, I pray to God you never grow up.

Her prayer was heard, but none of this prevented Malena from being an efficient secretary. She was absorbed in folding a little lace handkerchief on the desk before her, and Maldonado coughed to let her know he was there without startling her. He didn’t succeed. Malena looked up, left her handkerchief, and opened wide doll’s eyes.

“Oh,” she yelped.

“I’m sorry,” Maldonado said. “I know it’s early, but I thought we might get started on several matters.”

“How nice to see you again,” Malena managed to murmur.

“You say that as if I’d been away a long time.” Maldonado laughed, walking toward the door to the cubicle on which were spelled out in black letters: Bureau of Cost Analysis, Chief, Licenciado Felix Maldonado.

Malena straightened up nervously, wringing the handkerchief, stretching out an arm as if she wished to intercept him. The Chief of the Bureau of Cost Analysis noticed the movement. It struck him as curious, but he gave it no thought. As he opened the door, he thought that the secretary seemed almost to swoon. He heard her sigh as if bowing before the inevitable.

Maldonado turned on the fluorescent lights in the windowless cubicle, removed his jacket, hung it on a hanger, and sat down in the leather swivel chair behind his desk. Each of these actions was accompanied by a nervous movement from Malena, as if she hoped to prevent them, but, failing, was forced to blush with shame.

“If you would bring in your pad, please,” said Maldonado, staring with increasing curiosity at Malena, “And your pencil, of course.”

“I’m sorry,” Malena stammered, nervously toying with a corkscrew curl, “but what matters are we going to take up?”

Maldonado was on the verge of snapping, “What business is it of yours?” but he was a courteous man. “The unit program, and the international cost index of raw materials.”

Malena’s face was illuminated with happiness. “The Under-Secretary has that dossier,” she said. Maldonado shrugged his shoulders. “Then bring me the file on paper imports from Canada.” Malena sighed with relief. “That dossier is locked in the file. The fact is,” the secretary concluded, “you’ve arrived a little early, Licenciado. It isn’t even ten yet. The file clerk hasn’t come in and everything’s still locked. Why don’t you go out and get a cup of coffee, Licenciado? Won’t you, please, Licenciado?”

So the sympathetic and childlike Malena was protecting the file clerk, who was late. That explained everything. It was his own fault, Maldonado thought, putting his jacket on again, for being the first one there.

“Please ring my wife, Malena.”

Malena stared at him with horror, petrified on the threshold.

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“I’m sorry, Licenciado, but can you give me the number?”

This time Felix Maldonado could not contain himself. Red with anger, he said, “Señorita, I know your telephone number by heart, how is it possible you don’t know mine? For six months, for exactly one-twelfth of a six-year presidential term, you have been calling my wife for me at least two or three times a day. Do you have a sudden case of amnesia?”

Malena burst into tears. She covered her face with her handkerchief and scurried from Maldonado’s cubicle. The chief sighed, sat down at the telephone, and dialed the number himself.

“Ruth? I got in early from Monterrey. On the first flight. I had to go directly to a political breakfast. Sorry I couldn’t call until now. Are you all right, darling?”

“Fine. When will I see you?”

“I have a lunch at two. Then remember that we’re having dinner at the Rossettis’.”

“Always lunches.”

“I promise I’ll go on a diet next week.”

“You needn’t worry. You’ll never get fat. You’re too nervous.”

“I’ll be home to change about eight. Please try to be ready.”

“I’m not going to dinner, Felix.”

“Why not?”

“Because Sara Klein’s going to be there.”

“Who told you that?”

“Oh, is it a secret? Angelica Rossetti, early this morning when we went swimming at the club.”

“I only found out at breakfast. Anyway, it’s been twelve years since I’ve seen her.”

“It’s up to you. You can stay home with me, or go see the great love of your life.”

“Ruth, Rossetti is the Director General’s private secretary, have you forgotten?”

“Goodbye.”

He was left with a dead receiver in his hand. He pressed a button on the intercom and heard Malena’s voice on the extension.

“… I think I’ve seen him before, that is, I seem to remember having seen him, but the honest truth is I don’t know who he is, Licenciado. If you’d like to come by and see him, he’s asking me for classified dossiers, and acting as if he owned the office, if you could just…”

Maldonado hung up the receiver, walked out to the main office, and stared at the secretary. Malena put a hand to her mouth and hung up the telephone. Maldonado approached her desk, planted his fists on the sheathed typewriter, and said in a very low voice: “Who am I, Malena?”

“The chief, sir…”

“No, I mean, what is my name?”

“Uh … Licenciado…”

“Licenciado who?”

“Uh … just Licenciado … like all the others…”

She burst into uncontrollable sobs, invoking the immediate presence of her mommy, and again hid her face in the lace handkerchief with the little yellow chicks embroidered in a circle around the initial M.

4

FOR MORE THAN AN HOUR, a perplexed Felix Maldonado walked about aimlessly. What he most disliked about the Ministry was that it was in such an unattractive part of the city, the section where all the streets were named after doctors. A run-down mass of low buildings dating from the beginnings of the century, and an all-pervading concentration of cooking odors issuing from squalid little lunchrooms. An occasional tall building loomed like an excessively inflated glass tooth in a mouth filled with cavities and badly healed extractions.

He walked as far as Doctor Claudio Bernard, trying to put his thoughts in order. He was unpleasantly distracted by the odors from the shabby eating places opening directly onto the sidewalk. He turned to make his way back to the Ministry. He bumped into a stand where ears of corn were being steamed over boiling kettles. He pushed his way through crowded streets filled with itinerant vendors selling sliced jícamas sprinkled with lime and chili powder and paper cones of scraped ice that like a blotter absorbed red-currant and chocolate syrups.

His strongest impression was one of a faltering will. He inhaled deeply, but was offended by the smells. He set off down Doctor Lucio and, a block before reaching the Ministry, saw a beggar woman with a tiny baby sitting on the sidewalk. It was too late to turn his back to them. He could feel the woman’s black eyes observing him, judging him. These were the dangers of walking through the streets of Mexico City. Beggars and the unemployed, even criminals, everywhere. That’s why you had to have a car, to go directly from a well-protected house to the tall office buildings besieged by the armies of the hungry.

He reflected, and told himself that on any other day he would have done one of two things: walk straight ahead, unperturbed, without even glancing at the woman with the outstretched hand and the tiny baby, or turn his back to them and walk back the way he’d come. But this morning all he dared do was cross to the opposite side of the street. Obviously, the most cowardly and least dignified solution. How could it have hurt him to walk past the pitiful pair and give them twenty centavos?

From the opposite sidewalk, he could see that the girl was an Indian, very young, not more than twelve. Barefoot, dark-skinned, filthy, with the tiny baby wrapped in her long shawl.

Is it hers, Felix Maldonado asked himself. Is it her child or her brother?

Is it hers, he repeated, as if someone had asked him the question, and then answered in a low voice: “No, señor, it isn’t mine.”

The girl continued to stare at him, hand extended. Felix felt an urgent need to rush back to the office to sort things out. He walked faster, until he reached the Avenida Cuauhtémoc. Unable to resist, he turned once again to look at the pair, the child-mother and the son-brother. Two nuns were bending over the two beggars. He realized that they were nuns by their black skirts and the hair pulled back into a bun. One of them looked up, and Felix thought he recognized one of the sisters who had ridden with him in the taxi that morning. The nun turned away, covered her face with a veil, took her companion’s arm, and the two quickly walked away, without looking at him again.

5

FELIX ENTERED the Ministry building and walked to the elevator. If he was lucky, he’d meet some friend going up. And the elevator operator himself would know him, of course. We ask your indulgence. The operator is not on duty. We respectfully request the public to use the self-service elevator to the left. Felix recalled the elevator operator, remembering him in clear detail. A small, ageless man, very dark, with high cheekbones and watery eyes, a sparse moustache, and a gray uniform with copper buttons and the initials MED embroidered on the breast pocket. If he remembered the elevator operator, Felix said to himself as he ascended surrounded by strangers, it was only logical that the elevator operator would remember him.

Ordinarily, Malena cashed his bimonthly paycheck for him at the cashier’s office. All he had to do was sign the payroll. But today he decided to go in person. He got off the elevator and walked toward the cashier’s window. There was a long line. He stood at the end, deciding not to pull rank. The two girls ahead of him were engaged in animated conversation. The elevator operator, his acquaintance, the dark little man, joined the line directly behind him. Felix smiled at him, but the man was absorbed in contemplation of a coin.

“How are you? What are you looking at?” Felix asked.

“This silver peso,” said the elevator operator without looking at Felix. “Can’t you see?”

“Yes, of course,” Felix said, hoping the man would look at him. “But what about it? Haven’t you ever seen a peso coin before?”

“The eagle and the serpent,” the man said. “I’m looking at the eagle and the serpent on the coin.”

Felix shrugged. “It’s the national emblem, man. It’s everywhere. What’s so unusual about it?”

The elevator operator shook his head, never raising his eyes from the tarnished silver coin. “Nothing unusual. It’s just that it’s beautiful. An eagle on a cactus, eating a serpent. I like it better than what it’s worth.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I don’t care what it’s worth. I like the design.”

“Oh. I see. Listen, won’t you look at me?”

The operator finally looked up and observed Felix with watery eyes and a stony smile.

“Every day I go up to my office in your elevator,” Felix blurted impulsively.

“Lots of people go up. If you only knew.”

“But I’m an important official, the chief of…” Exasperated, Felix left the sentence unfinished.

“I’m the only one who doesn’t go anywhere. Everyone looks at me. I don’t look at them,” the operator said, again staring at his coin.

To avoid standing there like an idiot, staring at the elevator operator staring at the eagle and the serpent, Felix turned his attention to what the two secretaries were saying. Now they were near the cashier’s cage.

“If a girl doesn’t have respect for herself, who will?”

“You’re absolutely right. Besides, everyone should get the same treatment, you know?”

“If only we could. But you’d have to be blind not to see she’s his favorite…”

“It’s undemocratic. And I told him so. You know?”

“You did? You told him that?”

“You don’t believe me? Well, I’m fed up to here, dear, you know? I said, you’re giving special treatment to Chayo, you can see it a mile away. That’s what I told him, you know? And I said, on the other hand, did you bother to come to our Christmas party last year? No, you didn’t, did you? Excuse me, but I call that discrimination.”

“You told him that?”

“Well, practically. I sure wanted to tell him. You bet your bottom peso I wanted to, you know?”

“Well, you’ll have to forgive me, but I would’ve said it. Yes. We all have our dignity. I’d’ve said, just because you don’t think we’re quite as high up as you, that’s no reason to insult us, Licenciado.”

“Well, you know how it is, that Chayo thinks she’s the queen bee. I guess it’s not all her fault, and the truth is, the chief, old Maldonado, ’s a pretty good guy…”

They signed the payroll, cashed their checks, and walked away counting the bills in their pay envelopes. Felix was torn between following them and cashing his check. The man at the window looked at him impatiently.

“May I help you?”

“Maldonado,” said Felix. “Cost Analysis.”

“I’m sorry, but I’ve never seen you before. Do you have any identification?”

“No. Look, my secretary usually comes to take care of this for me.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I’ll have to have some identification.”

“All I have with me is my credit card. Here.”

“Is your name American Express? We don’t have anyone with that name on the payroll.”

“Isn’t my signature enough? You can compare it with the ones on the previous checks.”

The cashier shook his head severely and Felix left the window, determined to look for his driver’s license, his passport, his National Party card, even his birth certificate, if necessary. How could Malena cash a check in his name every two weeks without any problem if he, the one the check was made out to, had to have identification? Angry, he walked toward the elevator. Without success, he looked for the two secretaries who’d been talking about him. Was there another Maldonado in the Ministry? Well, why not? It wasn’t an unusual name.

6

ONCE in the self-service elevator, again surrounded by strangers, he told himself that the simplest thing would be to send Malena, as he always did; Malena dear, run down to the cashier’s for me, will you? He got off the elevator on his own floor, still annoyed because he had had no identification with him. He walked down the narrow, crowded hallway and paused to look out at the low flat roofs in the surrounding Colonia de los Doctores, each roof with its own water-storage tank.

His life was so predictable, he thought, so orderly, and he always went only to places where he was known. He was given special treatment in the bars and restaurants where all he had to do was sign with his American Express card. Except for some small change for tips, that was all he ever needed. But an idiot cashier had asked for what no one ever required at the Hilton or the Jacarandas Club, an identifying photo.

“Underdeveloped as hell,” he muttered as he entered his office, “the idiot still isn’t aware of the existence of credit cards. They must pay him with glass beads.”

Malena and the two secretaries who’d stood before him in the line had their heads together by the door to his office. They might have been in a football huddle. He coughed, and Malena trembled. They broke apart, guiltily, and the two girls said offhandedly, “We’ll see you around, Mallie, ask your mother to let you come see the rodeo on Sunday,” and Malena, who could not contain herself, cried: “You bitches! Don’t leave me here all alone.”

She sobbed, and sat down at her ancient Underwood, protected by its bulk.

“Why don’t you wear the typewriter cover for a witch’s hat; you’re certainly acting the part,” Felix said brutally.

Suddenly Malena became calm. She arranged a silken curl, picked up the telephone, dialed a short number, and said, with no trace of tears but with an expression that seemed to Felix one of a vengeful, tattletale child: “He’s here now. He’s back.”

Felix Maldonado entered his private office, turned on the fluorescent lights, and automatically took out his felt-tip pen to sign the stack of daily communiqués and memoranda. Customarily, the efficient Malena had all the papers needing his signature ready a little after one. But today, pen in hand, Felix saw that the folder was not on the desk.

As he reached out to buzz his secretary, a short, blond man entered without knocking. One of those short skinny towheads, thought Felix, who thinks he’s hot stuff and because he’s light-skinned and good-looking can get away with murder. He’s the kind who thinks being short allows him to be aggressive, that being a runt excuses all his excesses and commands everyone’s respect. But this one was even more annoying than usual because of the penetrating odor of clove drifting from the artfully arranged handkerchief in his breast pocket. Felix wanted to say all this to this man who’d intruded so impertinently.

“Yes? What can I do for you?”

“Sorry. May I sit down?”

“I thought you already were.”

“What did you say?”

“Sure. Make yourself comfortable,” Felix said, at last gratified. If he’s asking my permission, that means he knows this is my office.

“My name’s Ayub. Personnel. Simon. Uh … what shall I call you?” He coughed.

“Whatever you want,” said Felix coldly, thinking, Ayub, that’s strange, a blond Lebanese. If he’d heard the name without seeing its owner, he would have imagined a thick moustache and an olive complexion.

“What’s going on … Licenciado … uh?” said Ayub, questioning but discreet. “What’s going on is that we’ve found an abnormality in the personnel time cards.”

“Whatever you say, Ayub. I’m an official. I don’t punch time clocks.”

“But the fact is … Licenciado … the fact is that all morning we’ve been combing the area for a man who … usually … works in this office … uh, unsuccessfully.”

“Express yourself clearly. He works unsuccessfully, or you’re looking for him without success?”

“That’s what I mean, Licenciado, that’s what I mean.”

“What?”

“That we can’t find him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Felix Maldonado.”

“I am Felix Maldonado.”

The blond man stared at Felix with desperation. He swallowed several times before speaking. “Well, that’s not to your advantage, believe me, Licenciado … uh?”

“It’s not to my advantage to be myself?” Felix asked, disguising his discomfort with a blow of his fist that cracked the protective glass covering of the desk.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Ayub said, between coughs. “We’re trying to see this from a global point of view.”

Felix stared with irritation at the green vein of broken glass running like a scar across the photograph of his wife, Ruth.

“You’ll have to pay for the damage to government property,” said Ayub, in an absolutely neutral voice, also looking at the scar on the official’s desk.

Felix considered it beneath his dignity to reply.

“The Director General told me to tell you to see him today at six,” Ayub said abruptly. He stood up, excused himself, and walked out the door, trailing a wake of clove. “So long. Good luck.”

This reminded Felix that he had to be at the Restaurante Arroyo in Tlalpan by lunchtime. With the traffic as it was, it would take him at least an hour. He glanced at his watch: one-thirty. When he went out to the main office, he found that Malena had already left. The typewriter was covered with precision; a single violet exhaled in a crystal bud vase, and a worn teddy bear was ensconced in little Malena’s desk chair.

The rest of the Ministry of Economic Development seemed to be functioning like clockwork, smoothly and silently. The normal time to leave for lunch was between two-thirty and three.

7

IT TOOK a little longer than the predicted hour to drive to Tlalpan. It was Friday and many people were leaving for a long weekend in Cuernavaca. Several times he was stalled in the choked traffic, and once he even fell asleep at the wheel, to be awakened by a concert of furious honking.

From the street, he could hear the mariachis in the Arroyo. As he parked, he tried to recall the reason for the luncheon, and shuddered. He, especially he, could not afford the luxury of forgetting anything, or forgetting anyone.

Aggressive, self-congratulatory, gray sideburns and a black moustache; a coarse, ugly, ruddy face. Felix said hello, and retained a single impression: an ugly man with beautiful hands. And a woman beside him, greeting the guests.

“Hello, Felix.”

“Hello, Mary.”

He freed his hand from Mary’s grasp. His confusion was understandable, he rationalized, walking toward the table of hors d’oeuvres. He had not only touched the hand and looked into the eyes of the woman he most liked to touch and look at in the world. More. She had recognized him. She had said hello Felix, with complete naturalness. Of course — he gulped down the small glass of excellent tequila — the man with the ugly face and beautiful hands was her husband. He would never have recognized him without Mary. Who would ever remember the owner of a chain of supermarkets? He needed Mary in order to identify her husband. That was all. He hadn’t actually forgotten him. Mary’s husband, in spite of his florid appearance and aggressive behavior, was not memorable. That was all, he repeated, as Mary approached and told him that the meal was very informal, everyone was to help himself, everyone was to sit where he pleased and with whom he pleased.

“Besides, the mariachis are an ideal cover for intimate conversation, don’t you agree?” Mary asked, half closing eyes as violet as the solitary flower on Malena’s desk.

Violet eyes flecked with gold, Felix recalled, helping himself to tortilla chips with guacamole, an extraordinarily beautiful Jewish woman with black hair and a preference for décolletage. She oiled the line between her breasts so the cleavage would be more noticeable.

His eyes followed her as mushroom canapés were being passed and the mariachis bleated in the distance, remote but overpowering. Mary was aware that Felix’s eyes never left her. She moved like a panther, black, lustful and pursued, beautiful because she was pursued, and because she knew it. Mary.

Felix glanced at the time. Three-thirty, and still no lunch. Tequila and hors d’oeuvres, nothing more. He was always exasperated by these four- or five-hour Mexican lunches; and the Director General was expecting him at six on the dot. Mary winked at him from across the room as waiters entered carrying clay crocks of mole, boiled rice, nut- and spice-stuffed peppers topped with cream and berries, platters of steaming tortillas, and several kinds of chili, brown chili, tiny piquines, the fieriest of all, serranos, and jalapeños.

He served himself a heaping plate and joined Mary; the woman with the violet eyes smiled at him and offered him a beer. They walked together from the table, balancing their plates and glasses of beer, speaking in voices drowned in the racket of the mariachis, threading their way among the guests.

“What’s the occasion for the party?” Felix asked.

“My tenth wedding anniversary,” laughed Mary.

“So many years?”

“Ten’s not so many.”

“Exactly as many as it’s been since we’ve seen each other. I’d say a lot.”

“But we do see each other from time to time at cocktail parties and weddings and funerals.”

“I mean physically together, Mary, as we used to be.”

“That’s easy to remedy.”

“You know that all I want is the physical part, don’t you?”

“You mean you never loved me? I know that very well. I never loved you.”

“More than that. I never desired you.”

“Oh? That’s something new.”

“I can only touch you when I don’t desire you. Touch you and touch you, kiss you and screw you, but without desire. Do you understand?”

“No, but it’s enough for me. It excites me. I like the way you touch me. Ten years is a long time. Look. Go to the motel just down the street. Leave your car in front of your room, so I can see where they put you. That way I can run my car behind the building where it can’t be seen. Wait for me there.”

“I have a very important appointment at six.”

“That’s all right, I’ll disappear after a while. Abie won’t even notice. Look at him.”

Felix didn’t want to look at a man he would never remember, and he pressed Mary’s arm.

“And listen, Felix,” said Mary, falsely brazen. “Don’t expect me to be the same as before; I’ve had four children.”

Felix said nothing. He moved away as Abie announced with grandiloquent gestures and elaborate passes of an imaginary cape that he was going to fight four yearling bulls at the end of the party. Torero! He’d shaved carelessly; there were several nicks on his chin.

When everyone had moved to the bullring beside the restaurant, Felix left and drove to the neighboring motel. He followed Mary’s directions and took a room, notable for damp sheets and the smell of disinfectant. He must have slept. He was awakened by throbbing and acid indigestion. For a moment he imagined how it would be to be at the shore, away from the altitude of Mexico City, by the sea, digesting his food normally in an unattainable paradise of simple, short meals served at fixed hours.

Through the motel window he could hear the olés! from the small bullring. He imagined a ruddy-faced Abie, aggressively fighting his bull, his beautiful hands hidden beneath the red cape. Surely the first Jewish torero. Few people knew that many refugees from Hitler’s Europe had come to Mexico, where they effortlessly assimilated the customs, even the rituals, of the Mexicans, as if nostalgic for Spain before their expulsion. He laughed. A Jew in a bullring, facing a snorting reddish-brown bull, was the Sephardic revenge against the Catholic Queen Isabella.

He also imagined Mary sitting on one of the narrow tiers of seats, watching the absurd posturing of her husband. He did not desire her. He had to see her before he wanted to touch her. His physical relation with Mary could not tolerate either the time of dream or the space of separation. It could not tolerate desire.

8

THE DOWNPOUR BEGAN as Felix Maldonado, belching painfully, was driving down the Avenida Universidad. It was an early-evening rain typical of the tropics, a phenomenon born of topographical perversion, a cloudburst more appropriate to virgin jungle than to a chilly plateau two thousand meters above sea level.

No temperate climate would ever witness the sheets of water, the dark, steaming rain whipping against the windshield of Felix’s Chevrolet. The wipers refused to function. Felix had to get out of the car in the driving rain to set them in motion. Even as he was getting soaked, he laughed a little, thinking of a washed-out Abie, the rain-soaked tables, the interrupted bullfight, and Mary, motionless beneath the rain, staring at mountains as violet as her eyes.

As he parked the automobile in the basement of the Ministry, Felix nervously consulted his Rolex. Ten minutes after six. Ten minutes late, he repeated as he stepped onto the elevator operated by his little friend, who greeted him amiably, as if he recognized him. No, he greeted everyone that way, it was one of his duties as elevator operator. Outside working hours, it was up to others to recognize him.

Felix got off the elevator and, almost running, still soaked and breathless, reached the Director General’s reception room. The secretary was an extravagant bleached blonde with large breasts and small hips. She tried to disguise the red moles on her face by painting them black.

“Good evening, Licenciado.”

Felix closed his eyes. With a great effort he recalled, this is Chayo, the conceited secretary her two envious colleagues had been discussing that morning at the cashier’s window.

“How’s everything, Chayo?”

He awaited her response. There was none. Impossible to tell whether or not she recognized him.

“I have an appointment with the Director General.”

Chayo nodded. “Please take a seat, it will be just a moment.”

“I get fed up with the Latin vice of never being on time, Chayito,” Maldonado commented as he sat down. “It bothers me much more than it does the people who have to wait for me. You understand what I mean?”

Chayo again nodded, and continued typing to the rhythm of her chewing gum, or vice versa. A buzzer sounded and Chayo stood up, wriggling her bust instead of her nonexistent hips. “If you’ll come with me, please.” Maldonado followed her down a long cedar-paneled corridor decorated with photographs of former Presidents of the Republic beginning with Ávila Camacho.

Three times Chayo pressed a red button beside the door; it lighted, and she pushed open the door. Felix entered the dimly lighted office of the Director General. Chayo disappeared, and the door closed.

Felix had difficulty locating the Director General in the vast, deliberately murky penumbra of the windowless office, where an occasional lamp seemed strategically placed to blind the visitor and protect the Director General, whose photophobia was well known.

Finally, Felix was able to make out the reflection of tinted lenses. Pince-nez had been the trademark of the number-one villain of modern Mexican history, Victoriano Huerta, and only the Director General would dare wear them. But he had the excuse of his extreme sensitivity to light.

His host’s voice guided him; also an additional gleam in the darkness, a gold wedding band. The pale hand beckoned, “Sit down, Licenciado, I beg you; here, please, facing me at the desk.”

Hastily, Felix sought the place indicated by the Director General and, equally hastily, replied, “I hope you’ll forgive me. Being late drives me up the wall. I put myself in the place of the person who’s waiting, and hate myself as much as I hate anyone who makes me wait. The wait-that-exasperates, you know.”

The Director General laughed hollowly, a dry laugh that stopped abruptly at the very crest of the merriment. As usual, he passed without transition from laughter to severity. “We know that you are always punctual, Licenciado Maldonado. You are a man of many virtues. Some say too many virtues.”

“Since when is virtue a defect?” Felix asked, speaking only to cover his intense desire to kneel before the Director as before the Pope, and to kiss his ring; for the first time in this entire day, a member of the Ministry staff had spoken his name, Maldonado.

The Director General swiveled his chair slightly. Felix’s superior favored a military haircut, and in the light of the desk lamp his round head bristled like a white porcupine. He consulted a blue card before him.

“You also have too many lives, Licenciado. We know you as a distinguished economist with a degree that earned you your title, an efficient and punctual bureaucrat, n’est-ce pas? an individual gifted in his amorous encounters, a man of sudden tempers, isn’t that true? a disciplined member of the National Party, a devotee of political breakfasts, a friend of certain influential people, a convert to Judaism, a husband and…”

“We have no children,” Felix interrupted, fearful of the next assessment his conjugal life might provoke, irritated by the repeated lack of respect for his privacy evidenced throughout the day. “But we hope to have a child soon.”

“As soon as you achieve a more stable economic and social position, isn’t that right?” smiled the Director General.

“Yes,” Felix agreed nervously, “and my wife wouldn’t have married me if I hadn’t converted to…”

“What a varied existence. It reflects your personality well, cold and passionate, adept and excitable.”

“Do you pretend to know me so well, sir?”

“Why not?” The Director General wagged his head and then rested his chin on clasped hands. “You give yourself the luxury of being all things, Machiavelli and Don Juan. A bit of Al Jolson, and a bit more of Othello…”

“Al Jolson? You’re joking.” Felix laughed weakly.

“A Jew disguised as a black, a Mexican disguised as a Jew. Where’s the difference? You’re a well-entertained and entertaining man, Licenciado, a courtier and a politician, at home in the salons of the wealthy and in…”

“We all lead several lives.” Maldonado interrupted again, now with open irritation. “Don’t you?”

“Licenciado,” the man with the crew cut spoke glacially. “It is not I who is being judged.”

“I am?” Felix parried.

“No, you are not being judged. You have already been found guilty.”

The Director General saw Felix’s face and laughed his high, thin, abruptly suspended laugh. “Don’t be irritated. Don’t take it so to heart.”

“How do you want me to take it?” Felix swallowed the thick, bitter knot in his throat.

“Listen carefully. Pay close attention.”

“Only as you merit, sir.”

“Good. Let us suppose that a superior official orders a subordinate official to invite, and if necessary compel, a third official, inferior to the second, to commit a crime.”

“I’ll suppose it if you wish, but I don’t know what you’re getting at. Why beat around the bush?”

“To avoid a series of difficulties.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“We prefer to obtain the desired results without need for extensive proceedings or troublesome, at times even cruel, interrogations, n’est-ce pas?”

“And if the second official fails to persuade the third, or if he cannot force him?”

“Then the second official will be guilty of not having known how to persuade or to force.”

“In that case, is the third official exonerated of blame?”

“He is not.”

“Then there must necessarily be a culprit?”

“No. There must only be a crime. Understand this clearly. We have nothing personal against you.”

“Imagine if you did.”

“Don’t attempt irony. Understand that we wish to help you.”

“To achieve that more solid economic and social position you mentioned a moment ago?”

“Why not? I repeat: understand that we wish to help you. Allow us to … forget you.”

“Sir, I don’t understand a single word of what you’re telling me. It’s as if you were talking to another person.”

“The fact is that you are another person. Don’t complain, man. You have many personalities. Discard one of them and keep the rest. What harm is there in that?”

“I still don’t understand. What makes me uneasy about all this is that you’re talking to me as if I were someone else.”

“Have you forgotten the very purpose of this interview? Is it possible you don’t remember what I’ve been saying to you?”

“That would be serious?”

“Extremely.”

“What do you recommend?”

“Do nothing. Be calm. Situations will present themselves. If you are intelligent, you will recognize them, and will act accordingly.”

The Director General stood up, the upper part of his body disappearing into shadow. The lights illuminated only his lean stomach, one hand resting lightly on the buttons of his jacket.

“And remember this very carefully. We are not interested in you. We are interested only in your name. Your name, not you, will be the criminal. Good evening, Licenciado…”

“My name is Felix Maldonado,” Felix said aggressively.

“Easy, easy.” The hollow voice of the Director General grew more distant in the shadow.

Felix paused with one hand on the bronze doorknob and asked, without turning to look at his superior. “I’m already forgetting. What is the crime the third in the hierarchy is invited or forced to commit?”

“That is for the interested party to ascertain,” replied the Director General, his voice hollow and distant as if on a recording. And almost immediately: “Don’t bother to turn the knob. It’s merely an ornament.”

He pressed a button and the door clicked open electronically.

He didn’t allow me even that freedom. I wasn’t allowed even to open the door. I was manipulated like a damn fool, like a puppet on a string. Felix strode from the office, avoiding the eyes of the sumptuous Chayo.

9

HE WAS EXHAUSTED as he drove from the Ministry to his apartment in the Polanco district. He tried to recall the conversation with the Director General. It was essential that he not forget a single detail, that he reconstruct faithfully every word uttered by his superior. It frightened him that he felt drowsy. He pinched his leg as if to force himself to stay awake, to avoid an accident. He would have to have a cup of coffee before leaving for dinner. He pinched himself a second time. With whom had he just spoken? What had he said to him? He quickly rolled down the car window, welcoming the rush of cold, rainswept air that follows a storm.

He honked his horn three times to announce his arrival to Ruth. It was an affectionate custom of long standing. He parked in front of the twelve-story condominium. He took the elevator to the ninth floor. Sometime he should count the number of times per day he ascended and descended in a elevator. Perhaps what he really needed was a gray wool uniform with copper buttons and the initials MED embroidered across the breast. Maybe in the future that was the only way he would be recognized at the office.

As he entered his apartment, he called several times: Ruth, Ruth. Why did he feel the need to announce his arrival from the street, and again on entering, when he knew perfectly well that his wife would be angry with him, that she would be lying on the bed waiting for him, pretending not to be, leafing through a magazine, the television turned on but the volume down, dressed in a silk nightgown and bed jacket as if she were debating whether to go to bed early, still in her makeup, still not in her night creams, indicating that she was available and could be persuaded to go with him to the Rossettis’.

Before he opened the bedroom door, he studied the life-size reproduction of the Velázquez self-portrait hanging in the hall. It was one of their private jokes. When they’d seen the original in the Prado, they’d laughed in that nervous way one laughs to break the solemnity of museums, but had not dared say that Felix was the painter’s double. “No,” Ruth said, “Velázquez is your double,” and bought the reproduction as they left. He opened the bedroom door. Ruth was watching television. But she hadn’t fixed her hair, and was removing her makeup with Kleenex. This disconcerted Felix. Hello, hello Ruth, he said, but she did not reply. Felix walked directly to the bathroom. He called in a loud voice cloaked by running water and the sound of his electric razor: “It’s eight o’clock, Ruth, the invitation is for nine. You’re not going to be ready.”

The face in the mirror recalled the resemblance to Velázquez, the black almond eyes, the high olive-skinned brow, the short curved nose, Arab but also Jewish, a Spanish son of all the peoples who’d passed across the peninsula — Celts, Greeks, Phoenicians, Romans, Hebrews, Muslims, Goths — Felix Maldonado, a Mediterranean face, high prominent cheekbones, full sensual mouth with deep fissures at the corners, thick black wavy hair, wide-set but heavy eyebrows, and again the black eyes that would have been round, round to the point of obliterating the whites, were it not for their vaguely Oriental elongation, black moustache. But Felix’s face did not have the smile of Velázquez, the satisfaction of those lips that had just tasted plums and oranges.

“You’re not going to be ready,” he repeated. “All I have to do is shave, take a quick shower, and change my clothes. It takes you longer. You know I don’t like to be late.”

Several minutes passed and Ruth still did not answer. Felix turned on the taps and unplugged his electric shaver. Patience and compassion, the rabbi who had married them had exhorted; he remembered the words now, and kept repeating them under the shower. Patience and compassion, as he scrubbed himself vigorously with the towel, sprinkled himself liberally with Royall Lyme, smoothed the Right Guard beneath his arms, hefted the pouch of his testicles, and checked the size of his penis, not looking down at it, because from that vantage it always appeared small, but from the side, in profile before the full-length mirror, as women see it. Sara, Sara Klein.

Consciously naked, he walked into the bedroom, pretending to be drying his ears with the towel, and repeated what he had previously called. “Didn’t you hear me, Ruth?”

“Yes, I heard you. How nice that you bathed and perfumed yourself, Felix. It’s very unpleasant when you go to dinner still smelling of the day’s sweat and office odors and dirty undershorts. Of course, I’m the one who’ll have to pick them up.”

“You know I don’t always have time. I like to be punctual.”

“And you know I’m not going. That’s why you showered and soaked yourself in cologne.”

“Don’t talk nonsense, and hurry it up. We’ll be late.”

Ruth hurled her Vogue at him with fury. Felix stepped aside, remembering the knife-sharp pages of the student’s books in the taxi killing the chicks.

“Late, late! That’s all you ever think about. You know perfectly well that if we arrive on time there won’t be a soul at the Rossettis’. He won’t be home yet from the office, and she’ll just be rolling her hair. Who’re you trying to kid? God, how you irritate me. You know that if they invite us for nine they mean for us to arrive at ten-thirty. Only foreigners who don’t dig our ways arrive on time and embarrass everyone.”

“Who don’t ‘dig’ our ways? Did you pick that up from a Yankee friend, darling?”

“And stop parading around naked, you’d think you wanted to show off that pencil penis,” Ruth screamed.

Felix laughed. “Ah, it was much bigger before you forced me to be circumcised. How about that, circumcised at twenty-eight. Just to please you.”

He was angry now. His patience had run out, and he dressed hurriedly. It was always like that — first, good humor, then suddenly real anger, not feigned like Ruth’s. Just for you, I changed my religion, my diet, my foreskin, and got myself married in a fucking little skullcap.

She watched him. “I was thinking…”

“You?”

“You’re going to pull off those buttons, Felix.”

“Just call me Wimpy.”

“Don’t try to be funny. Come here, sit beside me for a minute. I’ll do your cuff links. You never can manage. I don’t know how you’d get along without me. I’ve been thinking that for months now we’ve been like enemies, and the only reason we’ve stayed together is to convince ourselves we should separate.”

“You may be right. The kind of life we lead is certainly a good argument for separation.”

“You’re away so much. What can I believe?”

“It’s my work. You ought to respect it.”

“I’m sorry, Felix. It’s just that I’m afraid.”

Ruth put her arms around him, and Felix’s heart turned over. He was about to ask her, do you know something, do you understand what’s going on. But she spoke first, to dispel the doubt. “Felix, I know what role I’ve played in your life.”

“I love you, Ruth. You must know that.”

“Wait. Please. I mean why you chose me over Sara and Mary.”

“You sound as if you think they were better than you.”

“The truth is, they were. I’m not as intelligent as Sara or as good-looking as Mary. I’ve spent the day thinking about it. You always put Sara on a pedestal. You went to bed with Mary. But for you either a pure, even intellectual, love or pure sex without love doesn’t work. You need a woman like me to solve your practical problems, to handle the details of your career and your social life, and as long as our everyday affairs go smoothly, you happily love and screw the same woman, one woman, me. I’m your untouchable ideal at times, and sometimes your whore, but always the woman who has your breakfast ready and your suits pressed and your bags packed — everything, the dinners for your bosses, everything. Am I right?”

“It’s all too complicated. But I’ve been listening all day to things about myself that seem to refer to someone I don’t know.”

“No, Felix. It’s perfectly simple. I was never your pure ideal, like Sara, or your piece of ass, like Mary. I’m both of them but only half of each. That’s the problem, don’t you see?”

“Ruth, it’s not important that Sara Klein will be at the Rossettis’. I haven’t seen her for centuries. What is important is to go there with you, for them to see us together, and happy, Ruth.”

“In me you have what Sara Klein and Mary Benjamin each gave you.”

“Of course, of course, that’s why I preferred you. Don’t keep harping on it.”

“You love me ideally, like your Sara, and physically, like Mary.”

“Do you have any complaints? What’s bad about that?”

“Nothing, except that now you’re idealizing both of them, both are becoming what Sara Klein once was; you’re idolizing them from afar, the equilibrium is about to be broken. My intuition tells me, Felix, if you see Sara tonight you won’t be able to resist the temptation. She’ll be back on her pedestal. And you’ll take my place from me.”

“Which place, Ruth, your ideal or your sexual security? Please explain, since you seem to know more about it than I do.”

“I don’t know. It depends. Did you go to bed with Mary today?”

“Ruth, I haven’t seen Mary today.”

“She called me herself to ask if I was ill, why I didn’t come with you to their anniversary party at the Arroyo.”

“What time did she call you?”

“About six this evening.”

“But you were angry when I first called you this morning.”

“Because of Sara Klein. I’d forgotten about Mary. Mary made me remember them both. But I’m not angry now. I feel as if you’d split me down the middle, Felix. What I wanted to give you in me, united in me, you’d rather have from two women. It’s as if you wanted to go back, to be young again.”

“That fucking Mary,” Felix muttered.

Ruth looked at her husband, and frowned. “Don’t do it, Felix. You’re still young.”

“Do you know you’re talking to me the way a Jewish mother talks to her son?”

“Don’t make fun of me. Just believe that we can live together and grow old together and die together.”

Felix grabbed Ruth by the arms and shook her. “Don’t play the Jewish mother with me, I can’t stand it. I can’t take your wise Jewish mamma warnings. I’m going to the Rossettis’ because Mauricio is the Director General’s private secretary, and that’s that. Sara Klein has nothing to do with it. I think your theories are totally idiotic.”

“Please don’t go, Felix. Stay here with me. I’m not playing games now, I’m asking you sincerely. Please stay. Don’t jeopardize yourself.”

10

RUTH’S FACE haunted him all the way from Polanco, along the throughway, and out to San Angel. She’d never before looked at him just that way, her eyes filled with tears and tenderness, slowly shaking her head, her brows knit, warning him, as if this one time she knew the truth but didn’t want to offend him by speaking it. As he drove, he wondered whether her words masked the truth, whether she was lying to let him know, without hurting his feelings, that she suspected the gravity of everything that had happened during the day.

Felix had never played off Sara and Mary against Ruth. Ruth realized that the mere fact of her presence gave her the advantage over any aspect of Felix’s past, Felix said to himself, accustoming himself to speak of himself in the third person; Ruth is Felix’s wife, he thought as he searched for a parking place near the narrow Callejón del Santísimo. Ruth has freckles she tries to cover with makeup, the way Chayo tries to disguise her red moles. When Ruth perspires, the sweat gathers on the tip of her nose. Maldonado’s wife is a pretty Jewish girl, charming, active, a Hebraic geisha, Madame Butterfly with the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai cradled in her arms instead of a son, Madame Cio-Cio-Stein, an empty basket in the bulrushes. Ridiculing her, he worked himself up to detesting her as he entered the Rossettis’ white colonial house. It’s true, Ruth does keep my shirts ironed, she does put my cuff links in for me.

Standing in the exact center of a white rug, a glass in her hand, Sara Klein seemed to be waiting for him. The light of the open fire formed a halo around her; an enormous painting by Ricardo Martínez served as a backdrop. After twelve years, Sara Klein was suspended within a luminous drop in the center of his world.

He feared to burst the golden bubble. He closed his eyes and reviewed faces from the past.

When he was studying economics at Columbia University, he’d seen all the films at the Museum of Modern Art. He had escaped at lunchtime, sometimes going without eating in order to see the old films on Fifty-third Street. For Felix Maldonado, the cinema became the counterpoint and nemesis of economics. Economics is an abstract science, sadly and finally innocuous when its true nature is revealed: the science of economics is personal opinion converted into dogma, the only opinion that makes use of numbers to justify itself. Film is a concrete art, happily and ultimately deceptive when it proves itself to be everything except art: a simple catalogue of faces and gestures: uniquely individual, never generic.

He concentrated on these memories as if trying to prolong coitus, trying not to come too soon. Not yet. He denied himself the pleasure of looking again at Sara; as yet, he didn’t want to go to her. Ruth had implored him, don’t go to that party. Like Mary Astor in the final scene of The Maltese Falcon, incredulous, prepared to transform the lie of her love into the truth of her life if Humphrey Bogart would save her from the electric chair. Except that poor Ruth hadn’t been pleading for her own life but, in some obscure way, for his. And now, and here, Sara before him, as enigmatic as Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box. So like her, her hair black as a raven’s wing, worn in bangs and a pageboy, icy diamonds in her gaze, fatal availability in her body. But as interpreted by Louise Brooks, Lulu was a clear warning — a warning with no possibility of misunderstanding — of all the misery that lies in store for a man who loves a promiscuous woman. Sara Klein was Felix’s ideal, his untouched woman.

He opened his eyes and saw an unchanged Sara. Young Napoleon at the Bridge of Arcole, a picture postcard from the Louvre, Sara Klein, her hair combed like Bonaparte’s, the same profile, the same military-style suits and overcoats. Sara Klein, aquiline and dark-skinned—aguileña y trigueña—the description was practically a theme song. She was entranced by the Spanish Ñ.

“Mexico is an X,” Felix had told Sara when they were both still very young. “España is an Ñ. You will never understand the countries if you don’t understand the letters that characterize them.”

Sara, the young Jew, the only one of them who had not spent her childhood in Mexico, had learned Spanish as a young adult. She had grown up in Europe, unlike Ruth and Mary, who had been born in Mexico and were second-generation Mexican Jews. He wondered whether Mary was looking at him. And he recognized that something incomprehensible had happened. The rhythm, not only of the day, but of his life as well, had been broken the instant he entered the Rossettis’ house and saw Sara Klein standing motionless on a white rug.

At that moment, something changed in Felix Maldonado. He thought differently. He recalled forgotten associations, references to films, to history, to the present, everything that had to do with Sara Klein, the quintessential woman, untouched and untouchable, but at the same time the one most deeply wounded by history, the European girl who had known suffering Ruth and Mary could not even imagine. Auschwitz had real meaning for Sara. That was why he’d never been able to touch her. He’d been afraid he would add pain to her pain, that he might hurt her in some way.

“It wasn’t what they did to us individually. It was what they did to us as a whole. What happens to one person is important to everyone. Mass extermination ceases to be important, it becomes a question of statistics. They knew that, and that’s why they hid the individual suffering and glorified collective suffering. In the end, the most important victim is Anne Frank, because we know her life, her home, her family. They couldn’t reduce Anne Frank to a simple number. She is the most terrible witness of the Holocaust, Felix. A young girl speaks for everyone. A pit with fifty corpses has no voice. Forgive me for what I’m going to say. I envy Anne Frank. I was only a number at Auschwitz, one more nameless Jewish child. I survived. My parents died.”

The bubble burst as the tall, obese figure of Professor Bernstein approached Sara.

Mauricio and Angelica Rossetti, his hosts, came to speak to Felix, concealing their surprise that their guest hadn’t greeted them.

“Will we be seeing you tomorrow at the Palace for Professor Bernstein’s prize?” Rossetti asked in his deep-throated voice, but Felix had eyes only for Sara Klein.

The Rossettis introduced him to Sara: “You already know Professor Bernstein. What a shame Ruth isn’t feeling well.”

They introduced him to Sara Klein, and he wanted to laugh. He wrinkled his nose as if to pronounce “n-yeh,” and she remembered, and understood, the joke of their youth, araña, mañana, reseña, enseña, nuño, niño, ñoño, ñaña, ñandú, they laughed together, moño, coño, retoño.

Felix took Sara’s hand and said how fortunate it was that they had the whole evening before them. She hadn’t forgotten the terrible Mexican hours? And she replied in her husky voice, “I remember that everything is very late, very exciting, not like the States. What time is it?”

“Barely ten-thirty. We won’t eat before twelve. First, everyone has to drink a lot of whiskey to build up pressure. If not, the party’s a flop.”

“And then?” Sara smiled.

“We have to stay till five in the morning for the party to be considered a success. I’ve heard about hosts who swallow the key so no one can leave.” Felix stepped aside to include Bernstein in the circle. “Isn’t that right, Professor?”

“I guess so,” said Bernstein, watching the pair attentively, his eyes narrowing behind the thick lenses. “We Mexicans have a temperament for fiestas, music, and color. On the other hand, we are completely lacking in talent in the two most essential professions in the world today: film and journalism. What you said this morning as we were breakfasting together was right, Felix. You can’t understand what a Mexican newspaper says if you don’t have access to confidential information.”

“Who knows? That’s a Jew’s point of view, not a Mexican’s,” Felix said rudely. Why didn’t Bernstein go away? Why didn’t he leave him alone with Sara? Was he going to spend the whole evening hovering over them?

“You should know,” Bernstein replied. “You’re married to one Jew and in love with another.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Felix Maldonado reached out and yanked off the rimless eyeglasses, the two thick, naked lenses that seemed to float before the professor’s invisible eyes.

“I can’t believe it,” said Felix, examining the lenses. “The tomato sauce from breakfast is still here.”

Bernstein’s naked, astounded eyes swam in the depths of a personal ocean and then leapt nervously on deck like gasping fish. Contemptuously, Maldonado hurled the eyeglasses into the fire. Sara cried out, and Mauricio Rossetti rushed to the fireplace to rescue the glasses. Several guests, amused and alarmed, gathered around as Mauricio fished the eyeglasses from the fire with the fire tongs, and Sara stared at Felix with her cold diamond eyes and all the contradictions of her complicity. Felix looked at Sara, first to decipher and then to attempt to distinguish among attraction and repulsion, scorn, homage, and an urge to laugh. Pure perversity, Felix said to himself, gazing at Sara, as Mauricio rescued Bernstein’s damned eyeglasses from the flames that purified all things — conjunctivitis, secretions, and the morning’s tomato sauce.

Felix leaned close to whisper in Sara’s ear. “Darling, we must risk a change in our relationship.”

“It wouldn’t last,” Sara replied, hiding her ear beneath the crow’s wing of her hair. “I have already given you something I couldn’t give if our relationship changed. Let things be as they’ve always been. Please.”

“Are you trying to tell me that what we had is no different from what you’ve felt for other men?” Felix, nibbling the tip of Sara’s ear, enunciated this badly.

Laughing gravely, Sara moved her head away. That laugh was her hallmark.

“Our relation is unique. Do you expect me to be the same to all people if I’m to be totally different with you? Do you realize what you’re asking?”

Mauricio sent a servant to the kitchen to cool Professor Bernstein’s eyeglasses, then officiously stepped between Sara and Felix. “I must ask you to leave, Maldonado. Your bad manners know no bounds. You are in my home now, not your own.”

“What do you mean?” Felix caricatured surprise. “Don’t you always say ‘my house is your house’?”

I cannot understand your conduct,” Mauricio said coldly. “Perhaps the Director General will be able to explain it in the morning when I report to him what happened here.”

Felix laughed in Rossetti’s face. “Why, you fucking little gondolier. Are you trying to threaten me?”

“I beg you to reflect on your behavior, and conduct yourself in a proper manner, Licenciado.”

“Ass-kisser.”

“Who will help me evict this … creature?” Rossetti inquired of the amazed and obviously stunned guests.

The professor intervened between Maldonado and Rossetti. How different he looked without his glasses; his surprise evaporated, his normally suspicious and tense face acquired a kind of Yuletide good nature. Bernstein-without-glasses resembled a lovable old woodworker who’d lost his eyesight carving toys for good little boys and girls. The professor told his host that he’d been the one insulted, and begged him to forget the incident. Rossetti insisted. Maldonado had offended all his guests. “This upstart must be taught a lesson, Professor.”

“I beg you. For me. Please.”

Rossetti yielded with a disdainful shrug of his shoulders. “This is the last time you will set foot in my house, Maldonado.”

“I’m aware of that. It’s fine with me. Sorry.”

The servant returned Bernstein’s glasses to him, and with them, the professor’s lost face. Bernstein patted Felix’s shoulder paternally. From the professor’s fat finger, the water-clear stone in his ring sparked pinpoints of light.

“Our host is very Italian, even though four generations of his family have lived in Mexico. The Italians understand nothing of the old or the new, only the eternal. They find the accidents of history inconsequential, even laughable. Rossetti doesn’t understand that we Jews are parricides, while all Mexicans are filicides. In Christ we tried to kill the Father, terrified that we might find the Messiah incarnate in a usurper. This makes sense, especially if you consider that each time a Redeemer appears, our destruction hangs in the balance. On the other hand, Mexicans wish only to kill their sons. What tortures you is the idea of offspring. Any form of continuation serves as proof of your degeneration and bastardy. No, Mauricio doesn’t know these things. There are many things Mauricio doesn’t know. My image is too paternal for you to want to kill me, isn’t that right, Sara?”

“You are my lover,” Sara spoke in a sterile tone. “What do you want me to say?”

Bernstein looked straight at Felix, neither smiling nor in triumph.

“You would never kill your father, Felix, that’s what our poor little Mauricio cannot understand. You would kill only your sons. Am I wrong?”

A devastated Felix glanced toward Sara, but then, to avoid her eyes, studied the painting by Ricardo Martínez over the fireplace. Massive forms, Indians squatting in the middle of a cold and windswept plain with swirling mists nibbling at the outline of human contours.

Finally he spoke. “Then I deserve to get what everyone else is getting.”

“Poor Felix,” said Sara. “You were never vulgar as a young man.”

Bernstein interrupted his protective patting and, still smiling, pressed his face dangerously close to Sara’s.

“I warned you not to come,” said the fat man with the ring as watery as his eyes.

“Poor Felix,” Sara repeated, and touched the hand of the man who loved her. “Now you know that I am like all your women. Poor Felix.”

“That’s a laugh.” Abruptly, Felix burst out laughing. He laughed till he was doubled over, and finally had to support himself by grasping the edge of the mantelpiece decorated with reproductions of tiny sixth-century Jaina figurines. “What a joke! Mary turns out to be the only woman I haven’t laid a hand on in at least ten years. A lifetime, right? Mary, Miss Mary Hotpants, will have to be my ideal woman from now on. I give you my word never to go to bed with Mary.”

“He’s crazy.” Sara’s composure had vanished. “Bernstein, do something. Remind this imbecile that he never touched me, and he never shall. He’s going to go around telling everyone that Mary’s the only woman he hasn’t had in the last ten years.”

“I just spent five minutes mentally fornicating with you,” Felix told Sara. “Why, Sara? And why Bernstein, of all people?”

“May I tell him, Bernstein?” Sara glanced toward the professor to ask his permission. The professor nodded, but the exchange infuriated Felix, and once again he was on the point of yanking off his former professor’s eyeglasses.

“Don’t treat me as if I were a fool,” Felix said to the two. He would have to get used to them as a couple. How disgusting. How ridiculous. To think that he’d tried to demean his poor Ruth, so loyal, so noble …

“Like the newspapers…” the professor tried to interject.

“Oh, sure,” Felix cut him off. “We’ve been going to political breakfasts for ten years, Professor. Before that, you were my instructor in the history of economic theories at the university. Sure I know.”

“The truth isn’t found in the texts of Charles Gide and Charles Rist,” Bernstein joked weakly.

“I like to tie up loose ends. I know you’ve served the cause of those who track down war criminals. I know that. Men who flush the Nazis from their burrows in Paraguay and then place them in glass cages for judgment. And Sara went to live in Israel twelve years ago. You go to Israel twice a year. Right? It fits together perfectly. Where’s the mystery?”

“The word ‘mystery,’ my dear Felix, has many synonyms,” Bernstein replied with perfect equanimity.

A long, long moment of silence passed. Felix took note of Sara’s grimace and Bernstein’s silent plea: let’s drop it here, let Maldonado believe this, let him believe whatever he wants, what importance does Felix Maldonado have, anyway? Sara tugged at Bernstein’s sleeve, but the professor removed her hand affectionately. Angelica Rossetti decided to speed things along, and invited the guests to come in to dinner. She glared with undisguised displeasure at Felix, as she would at a cockroach unworthy of eating the cannelloni set out on the buffet table.

“Won’t you come in, Sara?”

Bernstein escorted the mistress of the house into the colonial dining room, and Sara Klein, arms crossed, leaned against the mantelpiece. Maldonado realized it was the first time since he’d entered the room that she’d changed position. An oppressive dankness rose from the living-room floor in spite of the fire. Homage to the cold stone floor, the proximity of the garden attempting to penetrate the house through the French doors, the mud after the rain, the waterlogged desert plants, a monstrous dampness.

Sara Klein stroked the hand of her old friend, and Felix felt warmth and life returning to him. He dared not look at her, but he knew once again that he truly loved her, and would always love her, whether she was near or far, pure or sullied. Now he understood. As long as he had known her, he had falsified his feeling about Sara Klein. The truth lay in admitting that he loved her, and that he didn’t care who possessed her. It was no longer Felix or no one.

Sara saw what was passing through his eyes. “Felix, do you remember the time we celebrated your twentieth birthday together?”

Felix nodded. Sara stroked his cheeks and cradled in her hands Felix’s curl-ringed, dark-skinned, slim, virile, moustached, Moorish face.

Sara had said that all celebrations are sad. She remembered very few that had really been celebrations, and many that could not be held because the dates were there but the people were not any longer.

“You were sad on that birthday. We went dancing. It was fourteen years after the war. You set yourself the task of teaching me everything I’d missed. Films and books. Songs and styles. Dances and automobiles. I’d missed all that as a child in Germany. Then the orchestra began to play Kurt Weill, the theme song from the Dreigroschenoper. Louis Armstrong had made it popular again, you remember? And something very strange happened. The twenty years of your life, my childhood in Germany, that song united us magically, as nothing had before.”

“‘Mack the Knife,’ I remember.”

“You were telling me about a song in vogue in 1956, and I remembered that it was one my parents used to hum. They had a version recorded by Lotte Lenya before the war, before the persecution. A poor, scratched record. Everything joined together to make your melancholy authentic. We were infected by sadness that night. You told me something, do you remember?”

“How could I forget, Sara? That one’s death begins with his twentieth birthday.”

“And I told you it was a very romantic phrase, but completely false for me, because for me death had never begun, and would never end. I told you that for me death had nothing to do with age. Felix, we knew that night why we could never marry. You were a young and melancholy Mexican. I was a sad, ageless German Jew. We suffered much. That is true. It had nothing to do with sex or our countries or our age.”

“I know. That’s why I love you, and don’t want to cause you more sorrow.”

Sara kissed Felix Maldonado. She moved away, and her eyes were no longer icy diamonds. Now they were the turbid waters of a shallow, artificial lake, uselessly and violently roiled. She withdrew until only their hands, their fingertips, were touching.

“If you truly wish not to hurt me, stop loving me, Felix.”

“That’s difficult. You see, I know that you’re Bernstein’s lover, and still I love you.”

The tense face, the dark brilliance of her eyes, were those of Bonaparte at Arcole.

“I’m not asking you to love me.”

“But how can I stop, Sara?”

“By helping me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes. You must help me justify what I’m doing.”

“What you and Bernstein are doing?”

“Yes. The thing that truly unites us, not sex.”

“Don’t you go to bed with him either?”

“Yes. Sometimes.”

“That’s a relief. It would be too much if you were Bernstein’s virgin.”

“I’m not. Help me justify the fact that yesterday’s victims are today’s executioners.”

Maldonado tried to step closer to the woman who was suddenly changing before his eyes. Sara Klein was shedding the image he remembered and emerging in a new, stark, candid light.

“There’s no virtue in revenge,” said Felix, “but it’s understandable.”

“Tell me how to disguise the truth, Felix.”

“The truth is clear. The former victims are now the executioners of their former victimizers. I understand that. I accept it. There’s the truth. Why do you want to disguise it? But going to bed with Bernstein seems to me a very high price for truth and revenge.”

“No, Felix,” Sara answered abruptly, as she had when they were students together, Bernstein’s disciples arguing over an economics theory they’d read in Gide or Rist. “No, Felix.”

Maldonado dropped her hand.

“No, Felix. That’s all over. We’ve found and judged all our executioners. Now we’re executing new victims.”

“Which is what your executioners wanted,” Felix said flatly.

“I believe they did,” Sara replied.

“You’re an intelligent woman. You know they did.”

“How painful, Felix.”

“Yes. It means that your executioners have triumphed over you from the grave. It’s what they wanted,” said Felix, and turned away.

Felix left the Rossettis’ house and walked the length of the Callejón del Santísimo, choked with parked automobiles, to where the cobblestones ended and the mud of the streets of San Angel began, the mud of many streets of Mexico City following a rain, as if they were country roads.

From the midnight mists emerged motionless figures huddled in the mud, like the figures in the painting by Ricardo Martínez. Felix wondered whether those shapes were actually Indians, human beings squatting in the middle of the night, wrapped in their dusk-colored sarapes, rent by the fangs of blue fog.

He didn’t know, because he had never seen anything like it before. He would never know, because he did not dare approach those figures of misery, compassion, and horror.

11

PATIENCE AND COMPASSION, patience and compassion, the rabbi who’d married them had exhorted. Felix drove rapidly along the throughway to the Petróleos fountain and there emerged as if from a cement whirlpool in the direction of a National Auditorium rising gigantic against a sleepy sky. He continued along Reforma, fresh, rain-washed, perfumed by humid eucalyptus trees, inventing meaningless sentences, dreams of reason, Sara, Sara Klein. When we were young, we thought that purity would save us from evil. We didn’t know that an evil of purity can be fed by the purity of evil. That was the complicity between Felix and Sara.

He stopped in front of the Hilton, and handed the keys of his Chevrolet to the doorman. The doorman knew what to do. Felix entered the lobby, asked for his key, and the desk clerk handed him a card, his own card, Felix Maldonado, Chief, Bureau of Cost Analysis, Ministry of Economic Development. Felix regarded the desk clerk questioningly.

“A woman left it, Señor Maldonado.”

“Mary…? Sara…? Ruth…?” first incredulous, then alarmed.

“I beg your pardon? A heavy lady carrying a large basket.”

“What did she say?” Felix was relieved.

“She said flat out she wasn’t going to make any trouble for you because it was easy to see you were a big wheel, that’s what she said.”

“She said that? How did she know I have a room here?”

“She asked. She said she saw you get out of a taxi and come in here.”

Felix Maldonado nodded, and tucked the card in his pocket.

He walked through the lime-green lobby to the elevator.

A small man sitting on one of the lobby sofas dropped the newspaper he’d been reading. Felix could smell the penetrating odor of clove.

Ever polite, Simon Ayub rose to greet Felix. “Good evening. What a pleasure. Can I buy you a drink?”

“Thank you, no. I’m too tired.”

“If you like, I can drive you home,” Ayub offered tranquilly.

“No, thank you,” Felix replied dryly. “I have some business here in the hotel.”

“Of course, Licenciado, I understand.” Always the slightly superior tone.

“You don’t understand shit.” Felix spoke through clenched teeth, but immediately he repented. He was going to end up fighting everyone he saw. “Sorry. Think whatever you want.”

“Will we be seeing each other tomorrow morning, Licenciado?” Ayub inquired cautiously.

“Ah, yes. Where?”

“The President is awarding the National Prizes at the Palace. Have you forgotten?”

“Of course I haven’t forgotten. Good night.”

Felix started to turn away, but Ayub committed the unpardonable sin, he grasped Felix’s arm. Felix looked with astonishment and anger at the well-cared-for hand, the manicured fingernails, the topaz rings with incised scimitars. The repugnant aroma of clove assailed his nostrils.

“What the fuck?” Felix flushed beet-red.

“Don’t go to the ceremony.” Ayub’s voice dripped honey. His eyelids drooped in a very Arab, very Mexican manner, veiling any intent of threat. “I’m telling you this for your own good.”

In Felix’s laugh, scorn triumphed over anger. “I swear to God this has really been my day. All I needed was for you to tell me what to do, you overdressed little runt.”

Felix jerked free of Ayub’s delicate hand.

In the elevator, the figure of the senior Hilton invited, BE MY GUEST. Felix Maldonado clutched his room key in a hand that reeked of clove, following his contact with Ayub. There are people who can be their own hosts only, never the guests of others, he responded silently to Mr. Hilton. Only a man fed up with too many hosts can finally purge himself of them all, along with all the resentments, the nostalgias, the ambitions, the cowardly acts, all the ragtags of his life, the baggage of his soul, fuck them all, anyway.

He entered his room. He didn’t have to turn on the lights: the fluorescent light above the dressing table illuminated the shambles. He started to call the desk to protest. Again he smelled the odor of clove. The locks of the drawers he had converted into filing cabinets had been forced open and ransacked. Papers were strewn across the carpet.

He fell exhausted upon the king-size bed, called room service, and asked for breakfast to be sent to him precisely at 8:00. He slept without removing his clothes or turning off the light.

12

HE DRANK his orange juice and two cups of coffee, and by 8:30 he was in the elevator in a clean, pressed suit, one of several hanging in the closet of his room. He left orders for the valet service to dry-clean the suit he’d worn to dinner at the Rossettis’; the cuffs were caked with mud.

He waited at the hotel entrance for the doorman to deliver the Chevrolet. The doorman handed him the keys. “You won’t be taking a taxi this morning, Licenciado? The traffic’s fierce, it always is at this hour.”

“No, I’ll be needing the car later, thanks.” He tipped the doorman.

He progressed slowly down Reforma and the Avenida Juárez, even more slowly down Madero, and turned into Palma to leave his car in a five-story parking garage. From there he walked down Tacuba toward the National Pawn Shop on the Plaza de la Constitución.

There he walked faster. The immense plaza stirring in the early morning, the naked space, the ancient memories of Indian empires and Spanish viceregencies, the treasures lost forever in the depths of a vanished lake, evoked scenes of rebellions and crimes, fiestas, deceit and mourning. In front of the Cathedral, an old woman was throwing dry tortillas to a pack of hungry dogs. At one of the Palace gates, Felix showed his invitation to the soldiers of the guard, olive-colored uniforms and olive-colored skin, and then to an usher, who directed him to the Salón del Perdón, where the ceremony was to be held.

Many people were milling around the great brocade-and-walnut Salón dominated by the historic painting of the rebel Nicolás Bravo pardoning his Spanish prisoners. Felix quickly located the faces that most interested him. The small, blond Simon Ayub, strolling unaccompanied. Felix didn’t have to get any closer, the odor of clove spanned the distance like an indecent love letter addressed only to him. Farther away, the taller, nearsighted Bernstein, one of those to be honored. Felix strained to see whether Sara Klein was with him, but was distracted by the sight of the Director General in violet eyeglasses, visibly suffering in the bright daylight, the flashes of the press photographers, and the television lights. Beside the Director General, whispering into his ear, Mauricio Rossetti, looking slightly hung-over and staring straight at Felix. There was a moment of heightened whispering, followed by an impressive silence.

The President of the Republic entered the Salón. He advanced among the guests, greeting them affably, probably making jokes, pressing certain arms, avoiding others, effusively offering his hand to some, coldly to others, recognizing one man, ignoring the next, illuminated in the steady, biting television lights, intermittently divested of shadows by the flashes. Recognizing. Ignoring.

He was approaching Felix.

Felix prepared his smile, his hand, adjusted the knot of his necktie.

If the President of the Republic spoke to him this morning, it would prove once and for all that he was indeed Felix Maldonado. The President of the Republic did not speak to persons who were not who they said they were. That would teach a lesson to the people trying to wrest his identity from him, even if only the identity of his name. Yesterday’s nightmare would vanish forever. He was attending the ceremony in which the National Prizes in the Arts and Sciences were being awarded, and every person who doubted his identity, or was asking him to renounce it, was present. Not the President, no. He would speak to him. He would recognize him. He would say, How are you, Maldonado? What’s the latest on those costs? Maldonado could reply with a light joke, Costly, Señor Presidente, only up, Señor Presidente. But he wouldn’t; he’d limit himself to a slight nod in recognition of the honor bestowed. At your service, Señor Presidente, thank you for recognizing me.

Felix tried to fix in his mind the President’s physical appearance, to recall his face. He couldn’t. Impossible. And not just because of the dazzling white glare of reflectors and flashes. The President suffered the same malady as Felix Maldonado. He had no face. He was nothing but a name, a title. He was Presidential pomp and ceremony, an aura of power. He was without a face or a name of his own; he was a protecting, all-dispensing, all-recognizing hand. Maldonado glanced at the cluster of Presidential assistants. Unsuccessfully, he searched for familiar faces dispersed throughout the mob, obliterated in the white darkness surrounding the President. He couldn’t see Bernstein, Ayub, Rossetti, or the Director General.

The President was within a few steps of Felix Maldonado.