Hydra Head

13

HE WAS a long time awakening. He reflected fuzzily, as one does in sleep, that he was dead. Then, that this was an eternal sleep — which was the same thing — and only later he reasoned that he was asleep, alive but in a comatose state. Finally, he realized that the time spent struggling to wake was nothing compared to the time he had been asleep.

His vision was limited by the circumference of two white tunnels. To overcome the length of those tunnels, he had to look straight ahead, more or less follow the imaginary north of the tip of his nose. A normal range of vision was denied him. The slightest movement of his eyes to the right or the left met with black walls. But, even looking straight ahead, he could see only a kind of whitish space, undulating uncertainly.

He saw nothing, but even the nothingness was extremely limited, distant, the bifocal vision of shortsightedness that minimizes everything. Voices came to him from a great distance, diminished, as if they had passed through walls of cotton as white as his sight. As he was getting used to both what he could manage to see and hear, neutral voices and white space, they vanished, and Felix Maldonado was alone.

Again, against his will, he sank into a dreamless sleep, not counting sheep, mulling over the mysterious fact that the Spanish language makes no distinction between the act of sleeping and the act of dreaming; he was arguing against a faceless enemy named Felix Maldonado. In exchange for that seeming poverty of expression, Spanish, with its ser and estar, is the only language with two verbs for to be: to be, the permanent state; and to be, the temporary condition. Spanish makes that distinction, but none between dreaming and sleeping, sleep/dream is unique, sleep/dream is everything, sleep/dream is the image of itself.

He awakened with a start. Now he could see nothing at all, no matter how hard he tried to penetrate the darkness of the tunnels. Weakly, he rolled his eyes in dry sockets. He had the terrible sensation that his orbs of sight were scraping against the bed of nerves and fibers and blood on which they normally rested, shredding themselves like Parmesan cheese on a grater.

He was about to sink again into the heavy and imprisoning sleep that so avidly pursued him. To escape, he asked himself, or rather, he asked Felix Maldonado, did he exist—to be, permanently; or did he exist—to be, temporarily? He wondered whether what was happening to him and to Felix Maldonado was something they were activating or something being inflicted on them. To escape sleep, he took inventory of his physical being. Was he temporarily motionless? Was he permanently stilled?

He tried to raise his arms. His limbs were leaden. He called on his nerves and muscles. Patiently, he invoked a twitch of the fingertips of his right hand, a latent spasm in the pit of his stomach, a tickling in the sole of one foot, a contraction of his sphincter, a sensation of flowing sap in his testicles. He was whole. He was one. And he was lying down.

Much later, he felt he had the strength to sit up. The shadow had yielded not an inch. He groped about him in the darkness. Nothing. He moved his legs until he sensed they were without support.

His feet sought a footing. When he felt some contact, he sat for a moment on something he imagined to be a bed. He resolved to stand up.

His feet were not really a base of support. They were two stone wheels. He felt the floor moving under him, he was falling. He reached out with heavy arms and, still on his feet, but stumbling, fell against a flat surface. He tried to pull himself erect, clawing at that smooth space, and then growled with strange jubilation. The enormous head of mute cotton that had become Felix Maldonado was pressing against a cold, smooth surface, was returning to him a proof of life, moistness, a breath.

His extended arms girded the contours of the object that was holding him upright and breathing with him, upon him, at the same time he breathed. He feared it was something alive, another being embracing him, holding on to him to keep from falling down dead.

Suddenly the lights went on, and Felix saw the reflection of a mummy swathed in bandages, with no apertures but the holes for eyes, nose, and mouth.

14

NOW he was awakened by the clearly defined chink of glass against metal, familiar, unmistakable sounds, liquid being poured from a bottle, a spoon stirring the contents of a glass, rubber-soled shoes, tiny catlike footsteps squeaking on a composition floor.

Then he felt a painful jab on the inside of his forearm, and heard a woman’s voice: “Hold still. Please don’t move. Don’t move your arm. You must have your intravenous solution. You haven’t eaten in forty-eight hours.”

He moved the other arm, and touched his body. A sheet covered him from the stomach down, a shortsleeved gown above. He touched his head and realized it was still wrapped in bandages.

“I asked you to be still. I can’t find the vein. Since you can’t make a fist, it’s really hard.”

Felix Maldonado inhaled deeply, but identified only the aseptic and neutral scent of alcohol-soaked cotton and a lingering scent of chloroform that seemed to cling to the ceiling like a recalcitrant early-morning mist.

Then he smelled the odor of clove.

Desperately, Felix rolled his eyes in their irritated sockets. There was no one in his field of vision.

“Leave us alone, Lichita,” said Simon Ayub.

“His condition isn’t good at all. Don’t let him move his arm.”

“We’ll worry about him. He’s the one who doesn’t know how to take care of himself.” Felix heard a hollow, cutting laugh that was interrupted abruptly, severed like a thread. Felix moved his bandaged head, and through the tunnels of his vision saw the Director General sitting before him.

“Well, please be careful,” said the woman’s voice.

Felix tried to place that voice; he’d heard it somewhere, but the effort exhausted him. It wasn’t important. He supposed the woman was the nurse who’d been attending him during the forty-eight hours she’d alluded to earlier.

It didn’t matter, especially in view of the fact that he knew perfectly well who was in the room: Simon Ayub, outside his range of vision but, by the aroma of clove, certainly present, and the Director General, an unlikely presence in the echoing chamber of this sickroom, a hospital maybe. Tinted lenses could not contend with the glare from white-enameled walls assaulting the eyes of his superior, forcing him once and again to remove the pince-nez between thumb and index finger of his left hand to rub the dry eyes deprived of their protective penumbra.

“Lower the blinds, Ayub,” said the Director General, “and draw the curtains.”

Felix heard the corresponding movements. The Director General replaced the violet-colored glasses on the bridge of his nose and looked inquisitively at Felix. “For the moment, you cannot speak,” he said, when Ayub had darkened the room. “It’s better so. That will prevent you from asking unnecessary questions. I recall your disagreeable buffoonery when you came to my office. You thought you were the cock of the walk. Perhaps now you will listen to reason. I repeat that what we are doing is for your own good.”

Felix attempted to speak, but the sound emerged as a death rattle. Intimidated, he accepted his passive role. Simon Ayub laughed discreetly. Out of the corner of his eye, Felix thought he could see the Director seize Simon Ayub by the necktie. As he tugged him toward him like a marionette, Felix could clearly see the small Lebanese, his mouth grotesquely agape, brought to his knees before his chief.

“Don’t mock our friend,” said the Director General in a serene tone inconsistent with the violence of his action. “He’s been of service to us, and we’re going to prove to him how fond we are of him.”

He released Ayub and again stared intently at Felix. “Yes, you’ve been of service to us, but not in the discreet manner we would have desired. Do you object to my smoking?”

The Director General extracted an English cork-tipped cigarette from an engraved silver case.

“The day you came to my office, I asked to borrow your name. Merely borrow your name. But you felt obliged to intervene personally in a matter that did not concern you. You did only minor harm, and that can be corrected. That’s why you’re here, to correct the harm. Everything was planned, mmh? so that only your name would be guilty. You should have understood what was happening and accepted the arrangement we were offering you. That would have avoided any complications. I told you that in my office. I don’t like annoying details, prolonged negotiations; in sum, red tape. So. I’m going to tell you exactly what happened, n’est-ce pas? No more, no less. The facts. If you attempt to secure more information, you must assume the responsibility, and the risk. I warn you once again, mmh? You are not guilty of anything. But your name is.”

“You’re the guilty one,” Simon Ayub interjected angrily. “You should have prevented him from ever showing up at the ceremony at the Palace.”

“Ah, but the Licenciado, at heart, is overly sentimental.” The Director General smiled. “I agreed with Rossetti that the inevitable contretemps with Bernstein at Rossetti’s house would be sufficient to convince our friend to absent himself, n’est-ce pas? out of decency or pride or simple temper, from the ceremony honoring the professor. But no, by heaven! His gratitude and warm memories as one of Bernstein’s former students prevailed, instead.”

“You’re out of your head!” Ayub laughed. “He went out of pure vanity. He wanted to shake hands with the President.”

“Doubtless,” continued the Director General, overlooking the impertinence, “at this instant our friend is asking himself whether in fact the highest official in our nation recognized him and offered him his hand, n’est-ce pas?”

“What he must be asking is why you always call him ‘our friend’ instead of addressing him by name.” Ayub was being sarcastic.

The Director General exhaled a mouthful of smoke into Felix’s face. It drifted in through the holes in the bandages, and Felix coughed painfully.

“Don’t treat him so rough,” said Ayub in a tone of mock seriousness, smothering his laughter. “Remember what the nurse told us? His condition isn’t good at all.”

“Well, my friend,” the Director General continued. “There wasn’t time. The President never reached you. How shall I explain it? There was an accident. An instant before he reached you, there was a shot. The President’s security agents shielded him with their bodies, forcing him to his knees. A sight never witnessed before that moment, if you’ll allow me to express my amazement, mmh? In the confusion that followed, all eyes were on the President, who rose with dignity, brushing aside his zealous bodyguards, and murmured some obligatory phrase, I die for Mexico, or, They can kill me but they can’t kill the fatherland, something of the sort, n’est-ce pas? I imagine every chief of state has some bon mot prepared for the fatal moment.”

The Director General laughed hollowly, the dry laugh that ended almost as it began. “Can you hear me, my friend? Nod if you do. Does it pain you?”

Felix nodded mechanically, then shook his head, then admitted passively that he was worse than a prisoner; he was a worm they were toying with cruelly, cutting into little pieces, and prodding to see if it still moved.

“He’s alive and he hears us,” said Ayub, waving his perfumed handkerchief before his nose. “This place stinks of chloroform.”

“Such drastic and unnecessary measures!” sighed the Director General. “If only you’d made yourself scarce and allowed us to carry out our plan.”

“I warned you, he’s stubborn, and proud, and always worrying about his dignity.” Simon Ayub sniffed with disdain.

“As if that mattered in cases like this!” The Director General threw up his hands like an Egyptian priest affronted by the presence of a monotheist. He paused dramatically, to emphasize the extent of his outrage, then punctuated his speech with French. “Passons. Bref, the pistol was in your hand, my friend, and the only thing no one could explain is why, having the opportunity to assassinate the President of the Republic at such short range, point blank, as they say, your bullet went astray and passed instead through the shoulder of the honorable Professor Bernstein, a member of our National Academy, a professor of the Universidad Nacional, a recipient of the National Prize in Economics…”

“And a hired agent of the state of Israel.” The diminutive Ayub pretended to wipe tears from his eyes.

“Is there no ashtray?” asked the Director General, stubbing out his cigarette on Simon Ayub’s lapel.

“My best Cardin!” screamed Ayub.

“I don’t know why I put up with such an inept and insolent assistant.” The Director General’s laugh echoed hollowly.

“You know why,” shrieked Ayub. “Because you have me by the balls!”

“Obviously,” the Director General continued, unperturbed, “I must have a warm spot in my heart for you. Imbecile. It’s my own fault. Why did it ever occur to me to send a cockroach like you to dissuade our friend from attending the ceremony? But I prefer dissuasion to violence.”

Felix could see Simon Ayub as he came dangerously close to the Director General, the delicate fist, manicured nails, the rings with the topaz scimitars, raised threateningly. “I’m getting fed up to here,” he cried hysterically. “Yesterday this small-time Romeo called me an overdressed runt and now you call me an imbecile. The day will come when I can’t take any more. One day I’m going to explode…”

“Calm yourself, Simon. Sit down and be quiet. You know you’ll do nothing of the kind. You just said why very graphically.”

“One day…”

“One day you’ll wake up and find yourself an orphan, no?” said the Director General affably, and again turned his attention to Felix. “Let’s get down to brass tacks, Licenciado. Exactly as I informed you during our very pleasant interview, you are not responsible for the attempted assassination of our President. But your name is. And your name, Licenciado, no longer exists.”

“Say his name, say it to him.” Ayub whined like a whipped dog.

The Director General sighed with relief. “At last. Felix Maldonado.”

He laughed, a laugh that broke off at its crest.

“Let me savor the syllables, like a good cognac, better still, a Margaux. Fe-lix Mal-do-na-do. Aaaaaah. Only a name, n’est-ce pas? The man behind the name no longer exists. Quickly, Simon, remember the nurse’s instructions. Don’t try to sit up, my friend. You see, if you make those sudden movements, you will pull the needle from your arm. Please look to see if it’s all right, Simon.”

Gloating, Ayub approached Felix’s recumbent body, and Felix, concentrating all his strength, struck blindly at him. Ayub bore the brunt of the blow in his chest, fell to the floor, rose coughing, and lunged toward Felix, who gritted his teeth at the pain of the loosened needle. The Director General stretched out a foot and tripped Ayub, who fell against the metal bed.

He clambered to his feet, groping for the Liberty print handkerchief drooping from his breast pocket. “I don’t know which of you I despise more,” he said, dabbing at the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.

“It is of absolutely no importance,” said the Director General, “but if it is any comfort to you, that was more painful for our friend than it was for you. En fin. Let him replace the needle, Licenciado. We don’t want you dying of starvation.”

The Lebanese approached Felix’s bed with glee. In Ayub’s hand, the needle resembled one of the scimitars adorning his topaz rings.

“Furthermore,” the Director General continued, “your Calvary is far from over. You must build your strength to prepare for what still awaits you. As we were saying, n’est-ce pas? your presence at the ceremony complicated our plans, but in the end it worked out well. Felix Maldonado, the presumed assassin, attempted to escape night before last from Military Camp Number One, where, given the nature of his crime, he had been incarcerated for greater security. As is the custom in these cases, he was shot while attempting to escape, mmh?”

The Director General removed his purplish eyeglasses and examined his prisoner through half-closed lids.

“Three well-placed bullets in the back, and the private and official life of Felix Maldonado was ended. The burial took place yesterday at ten o’clock in the morning, with the discretion demanded by the occasion. One must not overinflame public opinion, n’est-ce pas? Several theories have been advanced concerning the frustrated attempt to assassinate our President. You know how those things are. The myth that a Mexican President never dies in his bed is international in scope. Actually, Obregón was the last President assassinated in this country, and that was in 1928. On the other hand, in a more civilized country like the United States, mmh? Presidents drop like flies, and their families and followers as well. Myths. Myths.”

Ayub had reinserted the needle in Felix’s vein and the liquid flowed again.

“Hold his arm, Simon. Our patient is very high-strung. What must he be thinking about all this? What a shame he can’t tell us. I’ll try to calm his fears by telling him that the family and friends of Licenciado Felix Maldonado, in small number, attended the burial in the Jardín Cemetery. The wife of the defunct, his widow, Ruth Maldonado, in the place of honor. Very dignified in her grief, n’est-ce pas? And one or two interesting women, the married Mary Benjamin, for one, and the unmarried Sara Klein, recently arrived from Israel, mmh? I believe she also attended the rendezvous with dust. And my own secretary, Mauricio Rossetti, along with Angelica, his wife. They’d forgiven Maldonado’s unfortunate vulgarity at their home. Hebrew rites were observed, naturally.”

The Director General laced thin fingers across the front of his jacket and allowed himself the luxury of a satisfied smile, without the accustomed laugh. “There will always be doubts, my friend. Did Felix Maldonado mean to avenge himself on Professor Bernstein because he had outstripped him in winning the favors of Sara Klein? Or was it all part of an attempt on the life of the President? We shall suppose, mmh? just suppose, that the government as well as public opinion favors the second hypothesis. I’m telling you all this, Licenciado, so that you can understand just what was at stake. On one side of the scale, place an internal political crisis of international dimensions and on the other, your wretched life as a second-rate bureaucrat and a third-rate Don Juan. You, a converted Jew, unstable, as proved by your recent actions, are a madman who throws his professor’s eyeglasses into the fire, creates scandalous scenes in a fit of jealousy, and without provocation insults everyone in sight. You might easily take your revenge on Bernstein. On the other hand, it’s equally plausible that you were using your irrational behavior to cover a cold and calculated assassination attempt. But even then, n’est-ce pas? doubts persist. No one will ever be absolutely sure whether at the last moment your desire for revenge overrode political purpose, or whether in fact a kind of mild schizophrenia overcame Felix Maldonado and he tried to kill both Bernstein and the President. Mysteries that will never be cleared up, since the possibilities are varied. The fact is, regardless, that Maldonado’s dead and buried.”

The Director General smiled, and studied his fingernails. “Tiens! That was practically a poem. Perhaps we should write a ballad, mmh? The Song of Long-Gone Felix?”

His smile vanished. Unexpectedly, he stood up and peremptorily ordered Ayub to summon the nurse and to stay with her while she removed the patient’s bandages.

“Everything would have worked out as I wished it, beautifully executed, if you hadn’t interfered. What a shame,” said the Director General. “Goodbye forever, Licenciado.”

15

FOR SOME FIFTEEN MINUTES Felix Maldonado knew he was alone in the room with the short Lebanese. What was worse, to lie here impotent, immobilized by his bandages, with no one to look after his needs, or to be attended by a humiliated and vengeful dwarf? One thing he knew, any cruelty of Simon Ayub’s was preferable to what the Director General had forced him to endure.

“I’ll never let this happen again,” Felix Maldonado said to himself. “No one, ever again, is going to make me swallow his words when I can’t get back at him.”

“Did you see what I had to swallow because of you?” Ayub asked insolently, as if reading Felix’s mind. “Well, now we’ll see how you can take it, old asshole buddy. Let’s see what’s beneath those bandages, Licha.”

“It’s too soon, he’ll be scarred,” Felix heard the woman’s voice say.

“Hurry it up, you bitch.” Ayub attempted to imitate the Director General’s authority, but his high-pitched voice was unconvincing.

Felix heard the quick, nervous steps of the woman named Licha, and curtains being violently pulled back. The light forbidden by his photophobic superior flooded the room, and the woman cried, “That’s mean, Simon, I can’t take off his bandages in that glare.”

Ayub replied that the chief was the only one bothered by the light. Anyone else could go fuck himself.

“But it might ruin his eyes,” the woman protested.

“For what he’s going to see, he won’t need good eyes.”

As she sat beside him on the bed to properly insert the needle Ayub had incorrectly replaced, the woman at last moved into Felix’s field of vision. The arm was purple.

If Felix Maldonado had had a kangaroo in his chest, it couldn’t have leaped more wildly than his heart the moment he saw and recognized Licha. She was the girl carrying the cellophane-wrapped syringes and ampules who’d entered his taxi several days ago at the corner of Gante. “My name is Licha and I work at the Hospital de Jesús,” she’d said as she got out in front of the Hotel Reforma on her way to give a shot to a Yankee tourist suffering from typhoid fever.

Perhaps she was able to read Felix’s eyes in the depths of their white tunnels; perhaps she merely noted her patient’s accelerated pulse rate. She raised her eyes from her task and looked at Felix, begging him not to give her away, not in front of Ayub, please.

When she finished, Licha squeezed Felix’s wrist, and told him he was doing fine.

Ayub ground the topaz rings into the open palm of his left hand, like a boxer training for a match. “I owe you one for that dirty punch, I swear, I owe you one. Come on, Lichita, get those bandages off.”

Licha said she wanted to bandage Felix’s swollen arm first, but Ayub pushed her aside and began to tear at the gauze strips binding Maldonado’s head. Felix tried to ball his hands into fists; he felt he was going to faint from the pain.

“Don’t be such a creep,” the nurse cried. “Let me do it, you have to unfasten the clips first.”

Felix closed his eyes. Along with the pain, he tried to block out Ayub’s scent of fresh clove and his acrid perspiration, as well as the sound of his ragged breathing.

“Look what you got yourself into by being such a fuckup,” said Ayub, as Licha carefully unwound the bandages. “Everything was all laid out by the chief. If you hadn’t been there and stuck your nose in, no one would have noticed a thing after the shot except what was happening to Number One. They’d all have thought the criminal got clean away. They wouldn’t have found a trace of a killer or a weapon, and by this time every law-enforcement agency in the country would be looking for a fugitive named Maldonado. We had everything ready for you to make a getaway, all we wanted was your name. It was picture-perfect — passport, tickets, a little bread for you and your wife … perfect. And then you had to butt in. Who put the pistol in your hand? Try to remember that much, at least. See if you can’t make us feel a little sorry for you, you bastard, because now you’ve got nothing, no bread, no passport, no tickets, no wife, no name, nothing…”

Ayub’s brusque movement echoed his frenzied words as he seized an oval hospital mirror with a slightly tarnished chrome frame and held it to Felix’s face.

His name was Felix Maldonado. The face reflected in the mirror belonged to a different name, not Felix Maldonado. No moustache, curly hair cut close to the scalp, shaved in places, an unnatural slickness at the temples, receding hair at the browline, as if his head were a practice field for transplants and grafts. Some of the facial incisions hadn’t healed; in some places the skin was stretched taut, like a false face, held by clamps behind the ears. The swollen eyes looked vaguely Oriental. Invisible stitches paralyzed the mouth.

Felix Maldonado stared with blind fascination at the mask Simon Ayub offered him. He couldn’t hold his eyelids open, and he heard Licha say, “You’ve probably ruined his eyes, you jerk. Come on, will you get out of here?”

“When do you think he’ll be able to talk?”

Licha did not reply. Ayub said, “Let us know as soon as he can,” and left, slamming the door.

16

“DON’T WORRY, honey, you’ll see,” said Licha as she dressed his incisions. “As soon as the swelling goes down, you’re going to look fine, and little by little you’ll get used to your new face. After a while, you’ll recognize yourself, easy…”

She changed the cotton pads on his eyes and said that later that afternoon they could remove the clamps. It was a good job, she added, they hadn’t used one of those butchers, but a first-rate surgeon. “You can’t tell by the first days, honey; you’ll get used to it and forget you ever looked any different. Some things, like the eyes, you can’t change.”

Perched on the side of his bed, she held Felix’s hand. “You don’t mind if I call you honey, do you?”

Felix shook his head, and Licha smiled. He could visualize her, the Playboy Bunny type, small but shapely, everything in the right place, well stacked. She tried to minimize her dark complexion by dying her hair ash blond, but actually achieved the opposite effect; the blond hair made her look darker. She hadn’t been to the beauty shop recently, and the center part showed a half inch of dark roots. Her makeup was discreet, as if in nurse’s training they’d told her that flashy nurses don’t inspire confidence.

She smiled, pleased that Felix hadn’t thought she was too forward. But then she moved away from the bed, anxious, unable to think of anything to say after breaking the ice. She puttered about the room, pretending to be absorbed in little details of his treatment but, in truth, searching for the right words to resume the conversation.

Finally, with her back to Felix, she said surely he must be wondering what had happened to him, he must be thinking she was mixed up in it somehow. Well, she wasn’t. She didn’t know any more about it than what Simon Ayub had told him. Simon had contacted her for this job. She’d asked for a brief leave from the Hospital de Jesús, where she usually worked, and she’d followed Ayub’s instructions to a T.

“There’s something I want you to know right off,” she said, turning to look at Felix, as if inflicting a penance upon herself. “I was Simon’s girl for a while, but that was a long time ago.” She paused, waiting for a sign of some kind from Felix, then realized none was coming.

“Um-hmm. About a year ago,” she went on. “He’s quite a ladies’ man, and he looks like a nice enough guy, all those fancy clothes … You get a little carried away. And he’s good-looking, and well, short, you know. It’s easy to fall for him. It isn’t until afterwards you find out what he’s really like. He talks so sweet at first, but when he knows you better, dirty isn’t the word! Well, anyway, I can’t complain. Like they say, it was an experience, and, you know, honey, I’m still a little fond of him, because, well, he gave me some good times.” She clicked her tongue and grimaced, half asking forgiveness, and half saying, what the hell! She seemed to feel that after getting that off her chest she could go on to more serious matters.

“When he asked me to help him out, it seemed like a good thing. Climb into a taxi and come take care of a man who’d had facial surgery. That’s all Simon told me, and I know as much about it as you do, honey. It looked like an easy way to earn a little quick cash in no time at all. At the hospital where I work, they don’t pay too well, if you know what I mean. But it’s steady work, and I have insurance, and little by little you work up to pretty good overtime, and seniority. It’s not so bad, even if it’s a charity hospital and all you see are poor people, really a lot of beat-down people who go there to die because they don’t have the time or the money to get well. Well, I guess everybody has time for dying, you might say. It’s different here at this clinic. Just a few rooms, all private, with TV and everything. And security! You can’t get in without a special pass. They even have guards downstairs. It must cost an arm and a leg, and an eye as well. Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. You feeling okay?”

Felix nodded, helpless, his questions frustrated on the tip of an immobilized tongue.

“That’s good. Now don’t you worry, honey. I’m going to look after you, I won’t leave you for a minute. The fact is, they wouldn’t let me leave, anyway. The deal was that I’d sleep in as long as you’re sick.”

And now Licha went about her tasks happily, as if she’d justified her familiarity by confessing her affair with Simon Ayub, and then by being so professional in explaining their situation. “Honest, honey, I didn’t know you weren’t in on this deal,” she said as she busied herself rearranging a shelf full of bandages, cotton swabs, and rubbing alcohol. “I supposed you’d ordered the surgery yourself, though I did wonder why at the time. A cute fellow like you.”

She must have thought it was cowardly to say this without looking him straight in the face. She left her bottles and bandages and turned toward Felix. “No kidding, I liked you the minute I saw you in the taxi. I really went for you, the way you carry yourself, the way you look, everything.”

Felix took the opportunity to try to pantomime something with his hands. He held out his arms and Licha took the gesture as an invitation. She approached him with a combination of hesitancy and her version of allure, but stopped, disconcerted, as Felix’s hands imitated the motions of leafing through a newspaper. He repeated the pantomime of the reader unsuccessfully searching for a story, rapidly turning invisible pages, running his eyes up and down columns, and tracing imaginary headlines across the top of a page.

“What is it? What do you want? Didn’t you hear what I just told you?” said Licha, with another of her contradictory attitudes, curiosity now mixed with resentment. “You’re not interested? Hey, are you trying to put me down or something? Oh? You want me to read to you? You want to read something? No, that wouldn’t be good for you. Why don’t I read you something? A magazine?”

Licha giggled and her dark cheekbones flushed with the high color of her distant Indian forebears, the color of apples and cold early mornings in the sierra.

She went to the window to be sure it was closed, tried unsuccessfully to draw the curtains tighter still, and then sat on the bed beside Felix Maldonado. She slid her hands beneath his hips.

“You’re trying to find out something that isn’t going to be in the newspapers. Don’t worry about your face. I tell you it’s going to be okay. And I’m going to take good care of you. Real good care of you. Wouldn’t you like to find out whether you’re still a man?”

17

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Licha removed Felix’s clamps and stitches. She alternated her professional attention with hugs and kisses, and surges of tenderness, cuddling Felix, afraid of hurting him, patting the sound parts of his body, everything except his face, asking, Wasn’t that good? Didn’t you think that was super?

She dozed awhile, lying as close to Felix as she dared. When she awakened, she raised her head and gazed at him with the eyes of a hobbled calf, strangely pleading for a love that would set her free. Felix saw in her Bunny’s gaze: Love me, or I’ll be a slave forever.

“You’ll be able to talk soon,” she told him. “I skipped your novocaine injection. Can’t you move your tongue a little better already? Look, before you can talk, I want you to listen to me a bit. I know you’ll say I was taking advantage of you when you couldn’t talk, but it’s easier for me if you listen and don’t say anything just now. Then later, if you say yes … great. And if you don’t say anything, I’ll understand.”

She hid her face against Felix’s chest, and idly played with one of his nipples. “Did you like me? Honest, wasn’t it pretty good?”

Felix stroked Licha’s bleached hair.

“Yes?” said the girl. “Are you listening? Look, I thought that now you’re a different person, like Simon said … and you don’t have anyone, and aren’t really anyone yourself … I thought that maybe you could love me a little … and live with me even if just a little while, while you get well … and if you like me, maybe…” She raised her head and looked at Felix with fear and desire. “I know I’m being pushy, but God, I’d do anything for you. I’ve never known anyone like you. What makes you tick? Why did you do it that way? Who taught you that?”

Felix moved a furry tongue, seemingly not related to the unhealed lips. “He-elp me-eee.”

“What is it you want?” Licha asked eagerly, pressing her nose to Felix’s neck. “Anything. Anything at all, sweetie.”

In desperation, Felix pushed her from him, seized her shoulders, and shook her. “You know,” he said, thick-tongued. “A newspaper.” Licha got up, unruffled, almost happy that Felix had treated her so familiarly, a little violently, patted her hair in place, and told him she had strict orders not to take anything into or out of Felix’s room. He was in isolation because his was a very special case.

“Look,” Licha said, pushing the button at the head of Felix’s bed. “It’s disconnected. And look here”—mimicking Felix’s violence, ripping aside the curtains and throwing open the windows. “This room is on the third floor. It’s the only one with bars at the windows. They keep it for special cases, for the nuts … oh, I’m sorry, the mentally ill patients.”

Licha removed a chiclet from her uniform pocket and stood for a moment, pensive. “I’ve got it,” she said suddenly. “The women come by at six to clean the rooms. They always leave the rubbish bins in the hall. I’m sure they throw the old newspapers in there.”

Again she lay down beside Felix, repeating over and over, “It was so good, who taught you that, no hands or anything, without touching me, just looking, honest to God, I never knew a man to come before just from seeing me naked, never. Who taught you? It makes me feel really good. I swear it makes me feel like something special.”

“You’re very sweet, and a very pretty girl,” said Felix, clearly enunciating the syllables, and Licha threw her arms around Felix’s neck, curled around him like a snake, and kissed his neck again and again.

About six-thirty she returned with a wrinkled, egg-stained copy of the noon edition of Últimas Noticias. Breathlessly, desperately, Felix scanned the headlines. Not a single reference to what he was looking for. Not a word about an attempt on the life of the President of the Republic, or its aftermath, no editorial comment, and nothing, less than nothing, about the fate of the presumed assassin Felix Maldonado. Nothing. Nothing!

He swallowed thickly, and desolately folded the newspaper. He remembered his conversation with Bernstein at Sanborns. The real political facts never appear in the Mexican press. But this was too much, absolutely incredible. No one could have such control of the press that they could prevent the printing of news of an attempt against the Chief of State in the Salón del Perdón in the National Palace of Mexico during an official ceremony before scores of witnesses, photographers, and television cameras.

His head was whirling. He could not believe his burning eyes. He wasn’t blind. He wasn’t delirious. Several times he checked the date of the newspaper. The ceremony in the Palace was on the tenth of August. The newspaper was dated the twelfth. No mistake, but there wasn’t the least reference to the events of scarcely three days ago. There had been only two previous attempts, one against Ortiz Rubio, and the other against Ávila Camacho, and those had been known, and reported. It wasn’t possible. Licha was watching him with alarm. She walked toward the bed.

“Now don’t get excited. I told you, it’s not good for you. Don’t try to get up. Wouldn’t it be better if I read something to you? I’ll read you the police reports; that’s always the best part of the paper.”

Felix lay back, exhausted. Licha began to read in a monotonous, halting voice, with a tendency to give an exotic pronunciation to words she didn’t recognize, charging at punctuation like a bull at a red cape, and bucking like a young mare before the obstacle of a diphthong. Fastidiously, she read the accounts of a rape, a burglary in the San Rafael district, an armed robbery at the Masaryk Branch of the Banco de Comercio, and then the details of a particularly gruesome crime: this morning, at daylight, at the Suites de Génova, a woman had been found brutally murdered, her throat cut.

The preceding evening the victim had requested the concierge to wake her at 6 a.m. to catch an early flight. Because of the request, the concierge, uneasy that the victim did not respond to his repeated calls, let himself into the room using his master key, and found the naked body on the bed, throat slit from ear to ear. Suicide was ruled out inasmuch as no sharp instrument was found anywhere near the deceased, although the officers in charge of the investigation do not exclude the possibility that the weapon was removed following a suicide by a person or persons of unknown motivation, to suggest a perfidious crime. The coroner fixed the time of death as sometime between midnight and one o’clock yesterday morning. An additional fact that casts doubt on the possibility of suicide is that the deceased had carefully packed all her clothes and personal belongings, clearly indicating her intent to carry out her announced trip. All that was found in the room occupied by the deceased were a half-used tube of toothpaste, a new box of sanitary napkins, and the furnishings belonging to the hotel, a television, a stereo, and a collection of 45 rpm records which, according to the concierge, are also the property of the management. An inspection of the contents of the suitcases has thrown no new light on the circumstances of death. The only personal documents found in the flight bag were a folder of traveler’s checks, a round-trip air ticket — Tel Aviv-Mexico City-Tel Aviv, the Tel Aviv-Mexico City portion already used, the return flight for today confirmed via Eastern to New York, and via El Al from the City of Steel to Rome and Tel Aviv. The deceased’s passport stated her to be of Israeli nationality; born in Heidelberg, Germany. Name: Sara Klein — although in this regard the Israeli Embassy, in the person of a Second Secretary questioned at an early hour by our reporter, wished to make no comment, and refused to confirm the identity of the victim …

Licha read concergee, Embassy, New Yorr, as Felix thought to himself: Sara wasn’t at my funeral. She was already dead. Everybody’s been lying to me. But he showed no reaction, and suppressed his emotion as well. He told himself he shouldn’t squander his feelings, not now, not for some time to come. He must save his grief for a single instant. When? The time would come. Sara Klein deserved that much. His love for Sara Klein deserved that much. A single, final act should consecrate his emotions at having known her, lost her, and found her again for one night in the home of the Rossettis, before losing her forever.

Neither did he want to conjecture about the reasons for or the circumstances of the death of the Jewish girl he’d taken dancing one night in some nightclub in vogue at the time. Where had they gone? Yes, the Versalles, in the Hotel del Prado. They’d danced in celebration of Felix Maldonado’s twentieth birthday. The orchestra had played “Mack the Knife,” the ballad that Louis Armstrong’s recording had made popular again.

He asked Licha to help him escape from the hospital. She said it would be very difficult. She looked at him suspiciously, as if afraid that Felix already wanted to get rid of her. But she put the idea aside, and again said it would be difficult. “Besides, what about me? Ayub will never forgive me, and he scares me to death.”

“Don’t you think I’m capable of protecting you against that little shrimp?” asked Felix, kissing Licha’s cheek.

“Oh, yes,” she said, and stroked Felix’s hand.

“How can I get out of here, Lichita?”

“There’s no way, I swear. I tell you it’s a real exclusive place. They have guards at all the doors.”

“Where are my clothes?”

“They took them away.”

“Are there elevators?”

“Yes. Two. One holds three people, and there’s a bigger one for stretchers and wheelchairs.”

“Are they self-service?”

“No. They have some pretty tough guys running them.”

“Is there a dumbwaiter?”

“Yes. For all three floors. The kitchen’s on the ground floor.”

“Is there anyone in the kitchen at night?”

“No. After ten, the nurses fix anything that’s needed.”

“Can you get to the street from the kitchen?”

“No. The only way’s through the main entrance. No one comes in or out without being seen. You have to have a pass, and the guards keep a list of every time anyone goes in or out, the staff, the patients, the visitors, messengers, everyone.”

“Where are we?”

“On Tonalá, between Durango and Colima.”

“What kind of patients do they have here?”

“They’re mostly Turks. It’s practically reserved for them, since the clinic’s run by the Arabs.”

“No, I mean, what kind of sick people?”

“Lots of maternity cases on the second floor. The first floor’s for accident cases; up here, the serious cases, heart, cancer, everything…”

“Couldn’t you get me out if I was all bandaged up, and say I was someone else?”

“They know me. They know I’m only to take care of you, nobody else.”

“Doesn’t anyone die? Can’t I go out as a corpse?”

Licha laughed heartily. “You have to have a death certificate. You’re going way too fast. They’d take one look at your face and give you a pinch that’d revive you in a hurry! You must be kidding.”

“Then there’s only one way.”

“Whatever you say.”

“If I can’t escape from here like the Count of Monte Cristo, then we’ll have to make them believe that the Count of Monte Cristo’s no longer here.”

“I’m sorry, honey, but I don’t follow you.”

“Can you steal some trousers and some men’s shoes for me?”

“Well, I’ll see if I can find anyone asleep. I’ll try. What’s your plan, sweetie?”

“Since I can’t leave the building alone, Lichita, I’ll leave accompanied by everyone in the building, patients, nurses, and guards.”

“I guess I’m dumb, but I don’t get what you mean.”

“You just do what I tell you. Please.”

“You know how I feel about you. And besides, I wouldn’t mind shafting that rat Simon a little, especially now that I know what he did to you. Okay. You just tell me what I’m to do. But don’t be so sad, honey. I really meant what I told you, honest. If you want to stay with me afterwards, swell. If not, you haven’t lost anything.”

“Lichita, you’re one hell of a woman. I don’t think I deserve you, word of honor.”

“But you’re so sad, honey, anyone could see that.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s hard for me to leave a woman.”

“Any woman, honey?”

“Yes.” Felix forced a smile. “Sometimes death takes one away from me. But I carry them all with me all my life, dead or alive, the way a snail carries its shell.”

“You’re really something!”

18

LICHA PLAYED her part to perfection. From the sidewalk across the street, Felix Maldonado watched the fire destroy the private clinic on Tonalá. He was invisible among the patients, some lying unconscious on the street, some suffering from shock, a few on stretchers or in wheelchairs, a few on foot; women wept, their wailing newborn infants, hastily wrapped in blankets, in nurses’ arms; one nurse was shouting, This baby will die out of the incubator; one man was moaning about the cardiac pain in his arm; confused and excited nurses held aloft bottles of serum they’d managed to save during the sudden panic; a woman lying on the ground was crying out, her labor inopportunely precipitated by fear; some patients had been almost asphyxiated by the smoke; and one jaundiced man, seemingly near death but smiling and highly diverted, clung to a scrawny tree, the same tree that supported a silent, heavily bandaged Felix Maldonado indistinguishable in the human maelstrom.

Licha wept hysterically. Befuddled, wringing her handkerchief, she was arguing with one of the clinic guards, pointing first to the left and then to the right. “Well, why don’t you go look for him. Don’t be so damned stupid, he can’t have gone very far in the state he’s in, can he?”

“Shut up, you little nitwit. This was a carefully planned operation,” one of the guards said, frothing with rage. “You’ll answer for this, I’ll see to that…”

“I was only in the bathroom for a second. Can’t a girl even take a minute to pee? And since he couldn’t move…”

“Naturally, his accomplices got him out. But how?”

Felix had put on the trousers and shoes, and Licha had led him to the dumbwaiter on the third floor, where he flattened himself into a corner like a sardine, praying that no one would summon it at that hour. Licha had gathered together all the wastepaper, newspapers, and Kleenex she’d found in the wastebaskets and the dispensary, along with dirty sheets, pillowcases, and towels, and piled everything on the mattress in Felix’s room. Then she poured alcohol over everything, set fire to it, and ran down the hall, screaming, Fire, fire. She pressed the button to make the dumbwaiter descend to the ground floor, and as smoke curled from Felix’s room, patients and nurses erupted into the hall. Then Licha had run down the stairs to the ground floor, rushed to the kitchen, opened the door to the dumbwaiter, and run back toward the main door screaming, “The one in 33’s escaped! I went to pee and when I got back he was gone.”

“He didn’t come out here,” one of the guards said.

“He must still be in the building,” a second added. “Come on!” He started to run upstairs to look for Felix, but couldn’t push his way through the nurses running downstairs, yelling fire. The guard tried to halt them: “You irresponsible bitches. Get back up there with your patients.”

“But the elevator’s full of smoke,” one nurse cried.

The guard at the entrance shouted an obscenity and ran to the elevators. His efforts were hampered by ambulatory patients hurrying toward the exit.

Faceless in his bandages, yelling like all the other patients, Felix emerged from the kitchen and joined the stream of fleeing patients, as the guard at the door ran back to telephone the Fire Department.

The fire trucks were very slow in arriving. The guards and nurses continued to evacuate the patients, and Licha spun out her hysterical scene until the guard got fed up with her, called her a dirty bitch, and said it was her fault they were in the mess they were in. “But you’ll pay for your carelessness. You’ll never work in another hospital in this city. Stop that screeching and try to do something useful. Help the patients, at least. This is going to ruin us.”

For a while, Felix stood among the sick, lost amid the confusion. Then little by little he moved away, mingling with the curious who’d come from neighboring houses to watch.

It will be interesting to see whether they keep this out of the newspapers, Felix murmured dryly, and casually started walking down the quiet, dark Colima toward the Plaza Río de Janeiro. He removed his bandages and threw them in a gray receptacle labeled KEEP YOUR CITY CLEAN.

He cut across the deserted plaza toward the corner of Durango. From afar, he could see the brick building that had been constructed at the beginning of the century, the first apartment house in the city, a red monstrosity with slate-roofed, feudal towers pointed like witches’ hats, a four-story castle designed to resist the wintry blasts of the Norman coast.

This architectural anomaly, transplanted onto a tropical plateau, had degenerated until it had reached its present state, a tenement for low-income families. Licha had told him to go here, and had penciled a message in the margin of the Últimas Noticias Felix had kept tightly folded in the back pocket of the trousers stolen from a sleeping patient.

He pushed open the rusted iron gate and entered the dark, dank passageway. The second door on the right, Licha had told him, on the first floor. Felix rapped once with his knuckles. Blinding pain ran up his arm.

In agony, he struck at the door with the folded newspaper, but succeeded in making about as much noise as the scratching of a wounded cat. He felt like a wounded cat. A terrible weariness fell over him and settled permanently at the back of his neck. He beat on the door with his open palm, and a voice from the other side replied, “I’m coming, I’m coming, hold on to your shirt.”

The door opened and a man in undershirt, suspenders dangling to his knees, trousers flapping, asked, “What can I do for you?”

Felix, the cinema buff of Fifty-third Street, thought of Raimu in The Baker’s Wife. It was the driver of the one-peso cab who had taken him from the Zócalo to the Hilton. The man stared at Felix with suspicion, and Felix again remembered Raimu, but also remembered that he recognized the driver but the driver couldn’t recognize him.

“Licha sent me,” Felix said tonelessly, offering the folded newspaper to the driver, who read the message and scratched his bald head.

“That woman of mine is a regular sister of charity,” he grumbled. He turned away from Felix, waving him in. “Come on in. What happened to you? Where’d you get so banged up? No, don’t tell me. My wife thinks this house is a hospital. The dumb-bunny says she has the gift of healing, and that it hurts her to see anyone in pain. She’d do better to clean up this place first. Excuse the mess.”

The room contained a rumpled, unmade bed, an aluminum-leg table, and two oilcloth-covered chairs. Felix looked around the room for a telephone; Licha had assured him there was one. The driver pointed toward an electric hot plate with two burners, and a battered lunchbox. “There’s some beans in the frying pan and tortillas in the lunchbox. They’re cold, but tasty. There’s a little Delaware Punch left there. Help yourself while I look for some clothes for you. Ah, Lichita, baby, if you weren’t so sexy…”

“Could I have the paper back?” Felix asked.

“Here you are.” The driver tossed the paper on the table, and as he wolfed down the beans and tortillas, Felix reread the notice of Sara Klein’s death. Then he turned to the obituary columns, and found what he was looking for.

The taxi driver gave him a clean shirt, socks, and a jacket. He looked curiously at Felix’s eyes as he handed him the clothing.

“Hey, what happened to your eyes? No, don’t tell me. They look like fried eggs. Here, put on these dark glasses. You look to me like even the moon would make you squint.”

Felix put on the clothes and the dark glasses, thinking of the photophobic Director General, and asked if he could use the telephone. “You do have a phone, don’t you?”

“Imagine a taxi driver without a telephone.” He laughed. “It’s cost half my ass to get it and the other half to keep up with the bills. It’s my one luxury.”

He lifted one of the pillows. There was the telephone, nestled like a jealously incubated black duck. Felix felt like a man about to be forced to leap from a burning ship into the sea. He measured the taxi driver carefully. He was heavy, but not very solid, having gone soft from too many hours behind the wheel, too many carbonated drinks and too many beans. Felix made the leap.

“May I use it?”

“Help yourself.”

He dialed a number and got the telephone operator at the Hilton. “Give me the desk, please. Hello. Maldonado speaking, room 906.”

He saw the driver stop, like a toy on a string. Then, just as suddenly, he went on toward the table, and picked up the bottle of Delaware Punch Felix hadn’t tasted.

“Right. How’s it going? Look, I’m in a hurry. I’m at the airport.”

As he spoke, he was trying to weigh which was harder, a soft-drink bottle or the telephone receiver. Which was a better weapon to crack a man’s head? The driver tipped back the bottle and emptied it.

“After a while I’ll be sending someone by the hotel. He’ll bring a note with my instructions, written by me. Let him put the things I want in a suitcase. Of course it’s a serious matter. Wake the manager. Thanks.”

The driver set the empty bottle on the table. He stared at Felix with unassuming irony. Felix hung up.

“Look, who wants to get mixed up with the dead?” the driver asked.

“No. Better leave them in peace.”

“You know, if a man was to get paid, that’d be all there was to it, right?”

“You’ll get paid double, I promise.”

Felix left, thanking the driver.

“It’s okay, chief. Just don’t ever get married. If only that Lichita wasn’t so damn sexy.”

19

AT THE HILTON, Felix produced the note he’d written in the clinic on a piece of paper Licha had salvaged from a wastebasket. The night clerk recognized the handwriting. Licenciado Felix Maldonado was an old client. The manager had been advised and would be down in a minute.

The clerk accompanied him to room 906, and Felix packed a light suitcase with several articles of clothing, toilet things, and traveler’s checks. He flipped through the checks: each bore the signature of Felix Maldonado in the upper left-hand corner. Then he dialed a number. As he heard my voice, Felix said:

“When shall we two meet again?”

“When the battle’s lost and won,” I replied.

“I have but little gold of late, brave Timon,” Felix said to me.

“Wherefore art thou?” I asked.

“At my lodging,” he replied.

“All’s well ended if this suit be won,” were my last words before I hung up.

When Felix reached the lobby, the manager was waiting, every silver hair in place, as impeccable as if it were ten o’clock in the morning. He told Felix that they had to be sure, he knew he understood, he was so sorry, his only wish was to protect Licenciado Maldonado’s interests, such a respected client, but the handwriting, carefully examined, seemed unsteady, and the paper was of very strange quality. Could he present additional credentials, he inquired of the ill-dressed, unshaven, battered man wearing dark glasses and carrying Felix Maldonado’s suitcase in one hand.

“You’ll be receiving a telephone call any minute now,” said Felix.

The manager was obviously perturbed when he heard Felix’s voice, but at that moment was advised that he had an urgent telephone call. Ostentatiously, he shot his sleeves, revealing, as was his intention, ruby cuff links. He listened to my instructions attentively.

“But of course, sir. Absolutely. Anything you say, sir,” the manager said to me, and hung up.

Felix walked the short distance separating the Hilton from the Gayosso Mortuary on Calle Sullivan. The suitcase was very light, and he ignored the pain in his arm. Strength of soul, not the strength of a bruised body, was what was required to walk the distance to the mortuary. The sheaf of bills the manager had given him sat warm and comforting in his trousers pocket.

He stood before the main door of a three-story mausoleum of gray stone and black marble that was a way station in the stone geography of this city in which even the parks, like the one stretching between Melchor Ocampo and Ramon Guzman, seemed made of cement. He climbed the stairway of volcanic stone and read the directory: SARA KLEIN, SECOND FLOOR. A gray-uniformed man with the face of a small, friendly monkey sat dozing in the concierge’s office.

The body of a woman lay in the non-denominational chapel. From the next room came the drone of Ave Marías and the pervasive odor of funeral wreaths. The chapel contained no floral offerings from friends, business associates, or family. Only a Menorah with lighted candles. Felix approached the open coffin. A still-damp sheet covered Sara’s face and body. Someone had fulfilled the ritual of washing the body. Who? Felix asked himself as he set down his suitcase beside the gray lead casket.

Only Sara Klein’s feet were visible. Felix knew what he had to do. He touched Sara’s naked toes, pressed them, and knew that for the first and only time he possessed the body that life and death, sisters in their complicity, had forbidden him.

Still clasping Sara’s foot, he asked her forgiveness. It was ritual, but even though ritual is intended more to resolve one’s own personal feelings than to identify the attitudes of others, it meant much more than that to Felix. The clinging sheet was a palimpsest upon which Felix could read every configuration of the woman who had been Sara Klein. He studied the features hidden beneath the white mask. He had never known her body naked. He obeyed an irresistible impulse and removed the sheet.

The face was the face he had known, except that a thick bandage separated it from the body. He recalled that in the clinic he had promised himself to reserve all his emotion in order to experience it in a single instant. This was the moment, the moment he discovered for the first time the mystery of a beloved body. But hers was no different from other bodies. He had looked many times at naked, sleeping women; few things excited him so much as gazing for prolonged periods at a naked and defenseless woman possessed by sleep. Sleep divests a woman of something more than the clothing that is a part of conscious amorous conventions. For Felix, sleep stripped a woman of the habits of her battle against man, the feigned reticence, the modesty, the coy — or brazen — invitation, the negation or the affirmation of her body. An unconscious, sleeping woman became his merely by the contemplation, even as abandoned in sleep she was lost to him and his competitor became sleep itself. If, before, sleep had been the rival of his passion, now his rival was death. Felix started to draw the sheet over Sara’s body. He paused. There was something, after all, an object that set sleep apart from death, the thick bandage separating Sara’s head from her trunk, a necklace of necessity bloody. His Lulu had been murdered by Jack the Ripper.

He studied that face. It did not mirror either sleep or the death that resided there. He saw something more. He was compelled to repeat the words that forced him to enter into the ritual that was no longer a spectacle to be observed but an act in which he must participate. He had realized at the home of the Rossettis that he would love Sara forever, whether she was near or far, pure or sullied. Now he must add: living or dead.

“Living or dead,” he murmured, and saw what it was in Sara’s face that distinguished it from the mortal sleep of other women, living or dead. The motionless face of Sara Klein was the face of memory, a consuming memory unable even in death to find repose in forgetfulness.

Felix had come here to concentrate and to consecrate his love. He had come prepared to offer that love to the woman he had loved so deeply. Instead, it was she who offered him something, the light of a face washed clean of makeup, eyes forever closed, the mystery of a face that in life would have accepted death had it promised forgetfulness, but which in death seemed forever fixed in the rictus of painful memory.

Desolate, he covered Sara’s body. Stop remembering now, he entreated, forget your persecuted and orphaned childhood, your adult remorse, Sara. He heard steps. The candles in the Jewish candelabrum were burning low. Undoubtedly, the person responsible for attending Sara Klein’s body was coming to replace the candles. He turned, expecting a mortuary attendant. Instead, approaching him he saw a Mexican Bunny Licha, tense and somewhat hesitant. Even in his fury, he noted that she had taken the time to change into a black miniskirt and dark, low-cut blouse. She had exchanged her white rubber-soled shoes for abominations of black patent leather with monstrous platforms and clicking heels. A fake-patent-leather handbag was swinging from her arm.

“What are you doing here?” Felix asked in the hushed voice death imposes.

“I was hoping I’d find you here.”

“How did you know? How dare you?” Felix was devastated by the rupture of the unique moment and he detested Licha for profaning it. In addition, he was physically exhausted by the unconcluded transferral of Sara Klein’s memory to his own, a transferral interruptus that like unconsummated coitus wearies beyond words the bodies so sadly unfulfilled.

“I’m sorry, honey. I already told you I’m a big coward.”

“What are you talking about?” Felix asked impatiently, tearing his eyes from Sara Klein’s naked feet.

“I just couldn’t tell you before about poor Memo. I didn’t have the nerve.”

“Who the fuck is poor Memo?”

“My husband, honey, the driver, where I sent you. Better if he finds out for himself, I told myself. If he loves me, he’ll forgive me, and if he doesn’t, well, I already told you, what the hell…? I can tell you’re really mad at me.”

For an arrogant instant, Felix almost smiled. “You think that’s the reason…”

Licha struck the pose of a peevish little girl, pointing her toes together and grinding one heel on the marble floor. “Now don’t say anything. Listen to me. Memo’s a good man, he’s been more like a father to me than a husband. You don’t know, honey. On the street where I lived, nobody comes out a nurse. The only way you get out of there is as a hooker or a servant. Memito protected me and made me feel secure. He gave me the money to go to school, and if I don’t come home for several nights in a row, he says it’s because I’m taking care of patients. He never asks for any explanations. He’s satisfied knowing we’re married in the eyes of the law. That’s enough for him. And I know I owe him everything. You understand?”

“Fine, it doesn’t matter to me,” Felix said.

Licha tripped toward him on the tips of her toes. “Really? Then it’s on?”

Lovingly, she clasped her hands behind Felix’s neck. He pushed her from him and held her at arm’s length to look in her eyes. A look wasn’t enough. You had to phrase questions precisely for this girl, and pry the answers out of her with a shoehorn.

“What are you trying to say?”

“Sweetheart. I’ve never been with a man like you. You’re the only man I’d ever leave Memo for, in spite of everything I owe him.”

Felix had known painful memory in Sara’s forever-closed eyes. In Licha’s wide eyes, he saw smiling menace. He couldn’t laugh at her, or even be angry with her. He turned from her to Sara’s coffin. In some mysterious manner, these two women who could not possibly have had less in common in life were in this house of death finding some common ground, sharing, to some degree, this and other sorrows. Suddenly he saw each of them in a new light, as bearers of secrets, terrible sibyls.

“Who brought this woman here?” Felix decided to confront this new vision of Lichita. “Who put the notice in the newspaper about the death, the mortuary, and the cremation?”

“What if I told you it was the people at the Israeli Embassy, would you believe me?” Licha smiled.

“You’re asking me not to believe you.”

Licha winked a shoe-button eye. “Right you are. One thing you’re not, and that’s stupid.”

“The newspaper said that the Israeli Embassy claimed no knowledge of her. Who, then? Bernstein was wounded. Is he dead, too?” Felix asked of himself as much as Licha. “If they didn’t do it, then who?”

The nurse’s sly silence seemed eternal in the sputtering of the dying candles. Felix hesitated to precipitate what he most dreaded, Licha’s idiotic ideas, the conditions this woman he’d never wanted to see again wanted to impose on him.

“Sweetheart, I tell you there’s only one man in this world who could make me betray my Memo, who’s been so good to me.”

“Simon Ayub, I suppose?” Felix asked brutally.

Licha clung to his lapels. “You, darling, you, only you, only you, like the song says. I’ll give to you what you give to me, true love, darling, true love.”

“No,” said Maldonado, seizing the tail of an intuition that streaked like a comet through his mind. “I was asking you whether Simon Ayub had handled the arrangements.”

A vague wave of his hand included the coffin, the naked feet, and the fading Menorah, but ended beneath Licha’s blouse, caressing her breast, and his eyes signaled yes, everything was fine, anything she wanted.

“You think it was him?” Licha pulled away, wiggling triumphantly, but Felix sensed that for the first time she was surprised. She extracted a stick of gum from her shiny handbag and carefully unwrapped it. Felix grabbed her by the arm and squeezed hard.

“Ayyy! Don’t hurt me.”

“You know,” said Felix, in the voice of violent familiarity that in fact pleased Licha — he remembered she had no defenses against that line of attack. “You know,” he repeated, “all women are alike, you have to put up with them.”

“Not me, honey. I’ll make you love me,” the nurse squealed.

“You just put up with them,” said Felix, without releasing Licha’s arm. “Any woman, a special woman, it’s all the same. No escaping it. Even after you try to get rid of them, you have to put up with them.”

He picked up his suitcase and hurried from the mortuary chamber. Licha, the stick of gum folded in her mouth, unchewed, stood paralyzed for an instant, stunned by Felix’s changes of mood. Then she ran after him. She caught up with him at the stairway. She tugged at his sleeve to stop him, then ran ahead of him and stood in his way.

“Let me by, Licha.”

“All right, you win, don’t be mean to me any more,” she said, with a toss of her head. “Simon handled everything. You’re right. He brought her here. He said you’d follow her anywhere because she had you on a string…”

Felix slapped her, interrupting the surly, hysterical gush of words. She stumbled against the marble wall, and sudden tears left a smear of moistness there that reminded Felix of the sheet covering Sara’s body.

“Who does Ayub work for?” Felix continued down the stairs. His grief was temporarily allayed by his outrage at Licha’s presence. He had been deprived of the moment he’d hoped to consecrate to Sara Klein by a vulgar, stupid woman who was trying to worm her way into his life because she thought he had no life, no name — nothing — of his own.

“I don’t know, sweetheart, honest.”

“Where did he get the authority to claim the body? Who delivered the body to him? Why do you say he wanted to draw me here if he had me in his hands at the clinic? Why did we go to all the trouble to rig that elaborate charade of the fire? Why did I have to escape in the first place?”

“I don’t know, I swear on my mother’s grave.” Licha’s voice was shrill. “He said all he wanted was to lay into you till you sat up and begged, that’s what he said…”

“He could have done that in the hospital.”

“Here, let’s have a little respect,” called the monkey-faced concierge as they reached the vestibule. “We respect the dead here.”

Felix stopped, surprised to see the memorable face he’d already forgotten; he turned to gaze at the stone stairway that separated him from the body of Sara Klein. Her face had defined memory, and death. Only then did he realize that he had looked at her from a face that didn’t belong to him, the face of a man taking Felix Maldonado’s place. If Sara had awakened, she wouldn’t have recognized him.

It was early morning. As they emerged into the street, Felix smelled the renewed and familiar burnt-tortilla odor of Mexico City.

Once again, Licha threw her arms around him. “That’s why I came, sweetie, I swear it, to warn you. Hurry, we can go together. I know where we can hide, where they can’t find you. Honest, I don’t know anything more.”

Felix hailed a taxi, opened the door, tossed his suitcase inside, and got in without looking back at the nurse.

“Let’s go together,” she whimpered. “I want you to be my man, don’t you understand, I’ll do anything for you…” Licha removed a stiletto-heeled shoe and hurled it after the taxi fast disappearing down the deserted street.

The watchman with the face of an ancient ape had followed them, and asked Licha if she wouldn’t like to go up and sit awhile with the woman on the second floor. She had no mourners, and that was bad for their image. They would pay her by the hour; they budgeted in a little to hire someone off the street now and then.

“Oh, go off to the zoo and hire your shitass mother, cheetah,” Licha said, glaring with hatred. She recovered her shoe, slipped it on, and clicked off toward Insurgentes.

20

FELIX CALCULATED, successfully, that at the Suites de Génova they would assign him the room they’d had the greatest difficulty renting. At first, the man at the desk observed with ill-disguised displeasure Felix’s barely healed face and the dark glasses attempting to disguise it, and his initial reaction was to say he was very sorry but they were completely booked. A second clerk whispered something in his ear.

“Well, we do have one suite available,” the first clerk allowed, a thin, dark-skinned young man with oily eyes and hair.

Felix longed to ask him, Where the hell did you come from, you low-class bastard, that you think you can look at me like that? Buckingham Palace, or Skid Row? He wanted to ask them how many people during ths last two days had requested any suite but the one vacated by the woman who’d had her throat slit, with all that publicity in the papers …

“Name, please? Please fill out this card.”

The clerks exchanged congratulatory looks, as if saying to each other, What about this clown! as Felix wrote the name Diego Velázquez. Born: Poza Rica, Veracruz, 18 December 1938. Current Address: 91 Poniente, Puebla, Puebla. I had told him it would be best always to include some element of truth in his lies. He hesitated before signing the name of the artist he no longer resembled, and observed the thin clerk remove the key to 301 from its pigeonhole; it clinked against its twin, and then the clerk escorted Felix to the third floor, where he surrendered the key to him. The bellboy deposited the suitcase on the folding luggage rack. Felix tipped him twenty dollars. The clerk saw the size of the tip, and they bowed and scraped their way from the room.

Once alone, Felix looked around him. If anything had been left in the room to mark Sara’s presence, the police would surely have removed it. He had no evidence that she had died here except his own imagination and will. That was enough. He had returned to the site of Sara’s death to conclude the homage interrupted by Licha. But thinking of the nurse made him remember Simon Ayub, and the thought that the diminutive, perfumed Lebanese had seen and touched Sara’s naked body irked Felix; an awful nausea followed the irritation.

He put all thought aside and yielded to weariness. He took a long bath and then stood before the washbasin and studied his face. The swelling had subsided considerably and the incisions were healing well. He touched the skin of his cheek and jawbones and it felt less tender. Only his eyelids were still purple and puffy, obscuring the ineradicable pinpoint identity of the eyes. He realized that the old resemblance to the Velázquez self-portrait that had been his and Ruth’s private joke was returning with the beginnings of his moustache. He soaped five days’ growth of beard and carefully shaved, a difficult, often painful task. He spared the burgeoning moustache.

He ordered breakfast, but in spite of his hunger, he was unable to eat, and he fell asleep on the wide bed. He lacked the strength to dream, not even of the affront of Ayub’s hands pawing Sara’s body. It was dusk when he awakened, the time the fashionable Zona Rosa comes alive with young Lotharios roving the streets, the horns of convertibles blasting the Marseillaise. He got out of bed to close the window, and drank a cup of cold coffee. He stared indifferently at the furnishings typical of such hotels, modern, low-slung furniture, Mexican fabrics of solid and audacious colors — lots of orange, lots of indigo blue — drapes of rough native cloth. Listlessly, he flicked on the television; nothing but stupid soap operas, unctuous voices resounding in vacuous decors.

He switched off the television and turned to the stereo, a small set much the worse for wear that played only 45’s. In the bookcase he found a few records in worn jackets, and flipped through them without interest. Sinatra, “Strangers in the Night”; Nat “King” Cole, “Our Love Is Here to Stay”; Gilbert Bécaud, “Et Maintenant”; Peggy Lee, several mariachi groups, Armando Manzanero, and Satchmo, the great Louis Armstrong, the ballad of “Mack the Knife,” the song of his twentieth birthday and the Versalles nightclub and Sara in his arms, the bitter and witty ballad of a criminal of Victorian London who asked: Is it worse to found a bank or rob one, “Mack the Knife,” the song of youth and Sara Klein and Felix Maldonado’s love for each other, a song jolted out of the Berlin of the thirties, bridging the horror of those crimes and contemporary ones, the persecution of the child and the murder of the woman, a succession of murderers, Mack the Knife, Himmler the Butcher, Jack the Ripper. This was the only new album. Felix was sure Sara had bought it to play in the room. Meaning for him to hear it, too. He removed the record from its still shiny envelope, pristine in contrast to the worn, ripped, dull jackets of the other records. It bore the sticker of the shop where Sara had bought it, Dalis, Calle de Amberes, Mexico City, D.F. He switched on the stereo and placed the huge mouth of the disk over the beige plastic spindle. The record dropped noiselessly and began to spin; the needle was inserted without pain. Felix awaited Satchmo’s trumpet. Instead, he heard the voice of Sara Klein.

21

“FELIX. I must be brief. I have only five minutes on each side. I loved you when I was young. We thought we would spend our lives together. But I was afraid. You overidealized me. You couldn’t share my sorrow. Bernstein could. He took advantage of our mutual suffering. He convinced me that it was my duty to go to Israel and involve myself in building a homeland for my people. He said it was the only way to respond to the Holocaust. Death and destruction we would counter with life and creation. He was right. I’ve never known such happy, clear-eyed people as the men and women and children who were turning a desert into a prosperous and free land with new roads and schools and cities. I was offered a professorship at the university, but I wanted a humbler job where I would know the very roots of our experience. I became an elementary-school teacher. Sometimes I thought of you, but even as I did, I put the thought aside. I couldn’t allow affection to stand in the way of duty. Only now I realize that as I stopped thinking about you I also stopped thinking about anything else. I buried myself in my work, and I forgot you. The price was forgetting — rather, ceasing to see, which is the same thing — anything that didn’t have a direct bearing on my work.

“Bernstein came over for two months every year. He never mentioned you. I never asked. Everything was clear-cut and defined. My life in Mexico was behind me. Israel was the present. The Arabs threatened us on every side. They were our enemies, they wanted to crush us, just as the Nazis had. All my conversations with Bernstein turned on this, the Arab menace, our survival. Our hope was our conviction. We had to survive this time, or we would disappear from the face of the earth forever. I say ‘we’ because we are talking about an entire culture. Valéry said that civilizations are mortal. That isn’t true. Power passes, not civilizations. My work as a schoolteacher kept my hopes alive. Even if power changed hands, our civilization would be saved, because I was teaching children to know and love it: both the Israeli and the Palestinian children in my class. I tried to teach them that we should live in peace in our new state, respecting one another’s particular cultures to form one common culture.

“Of course, I knew of the existence of the detention camps. But I found a justification for them. We didn’t kill our prisoners from the Six Days’ War, we detained them, and then exchanged them. And the Palestinian prisoners were terrorists, guilty of the murder of innocent persons. And there I closed my file. I had known too much of what happened to us in Europe to be submissive. It was a simple matter of self-defense. Sanity and morality reigned, Felix. What a marvelous way to expiate the guilt of the Holocaust! We were purging ourselves of the sins of others through our own efforts. We had found a place where we could be masters, and not slaves. But more important for me was believing that we’d found a place where we could be masters without slaves.

“The change in me came very slowly, almost imperceptibly. Bernstein was very clumsy in attempting to insinuate his affection. He knew what I believed in. I had left you to follow him. But I had followed him to fulfill a duty he himself had pointed out to me. It was no easy job for him to take your place, to offer himself in your place, to dilute my sense of duty by adding to it a love different from the one I’d sacrificed, your love, Felix. Then he tried to confuse my sense of duty with his desire. He began to boast about what he’d been and all he’d done, from his youthful participation in the secret Jewish army during the British Mandate to his participation in the Irgun; and following that, his fund-raising work outside Israel. It was Bernstein who made me think about the fact that Israel had used violence to establish itself in Palestine. I could accept that necessity, but I was shocked by the boastful tone of his arguments and the pathetic intent behind them; he hoped to possess me by causing me to confuse duty with the heroic personality he was creating for himself. The worst of this ambiguous situation was that it kept us from seeing the obvious counterargument. Neither of us expressed the point of view that perhaps the Palestinians, hoping to reclaim a homeland, had as much right to terror as the Israelis, and that our revolutionary and terrorist organizations — the Haganah, the Irgun, and the Stern Gang — necessarily evoked their historic counterparts, the PLO, the Fedayeen, the Black September group.

“Bernstein’s sexual desires stood between that terrible truth and my awareness. I was living in a vacuum, and one vacuum contained another: your absence. Then came the Yom Kippur War, and my world and its reasons for being shattered into little pieces. Not abruptly; with me, everything happens gradually. One night Bernstein was particularly aggressive sexually; I was cold and distant, and at first he was embarrassed, but then he redoubled his political arguments. He ranted like a madman about the territories occupied in ’73 and how we must never abandon them, not one inch. He spoke of Gush Emunim, and of the town he’d helped build and finance to ensure that we would be irrevocably established in the occupied territories and would erase the last trace of Arab culture. I realized he thought about these lands as he would like to think about me, his occupied territory, and that to him Gush Emunim was tantamount to his virility. Finally I dared speak up to him and say it wasn’t territory we needed, because we already had something more than territory, we had the example of our labor and our dignity, and that was all the self-defense and all the propaganda we needed. But all Bernstein could talk about was security; the territories were indispensable to our security. I recalled Hitler’s first speeches. First the Rhineland, then Austria, then the Sudetenland and the Polish Corridor. Finally, the world. A world, Europe or the Middle East, vital space, the security of frontiers, the superior destiny of one people. Surely you can understand this, you, a Mexican?

“I decided to request a transfer from Tel Aviv to one of the schools in the occupied territories. My request was granted because they believed I would be an efficient advocate of our values.

“Now I must skip over names of people and places in order to avoid reprisals. In the tiny school where I went to teach, I met a young Palestinian, a teacher like myself, younger than I. He lived alone with his mother, a woman a little over forty. I’ll call him Jamil. That he was teaching Arabic to Palestinian children was proof of the good intentions of the occupation, proof that extremists like Bernstein hadn’t succeeded in imposing their points of view. But soon I learned that for Jamil the school was trench warfare. I found him one day using the outlawed texts formerly taught in Arab schools, texts filled with hatred of Israel. I told him he was fomenting hatred. He said that wasn’t true. He’d copied the old texts by hand, yes, but out of a sense of history; he wanted to preserve all the things our authorities had eliminated as they eliminated hatred of Israel: Palestinian identity, and Palestinian culture, the existence of people who like us demanded a homeland. I read the texts Jamil had copied. It was true. Like me, Jamil was working to keep both cultures alive. Until then, I had reserved that virtue for myself, and not granted it to others.

“Jamil was sure I would inform against him, but he told me not to worry. We belonged to different camps, and probably he would do the same were our positions reversed. At that instant, I realized that our peoples had been fighting each other so long, we could no longer recognize one another as individuals. I did not inform against him. Jamil continued to teach from his hand-copied notebooks. We became friends. One evening we walked to a hilltop. There Jamil asked, ‘How many can stand here as we stand and look upon this land and say, This is my country?’ That night, we went to bed together. With Jamil, all the frontiers of my life disappeared. I ceased to be a persecuted little German-Jewish girl who’d been exiled for a while in Mexico and later integrated into the state of Israel. Along with Jamil, I became a citizen of the land we stood upon, with all its contradictions, its battles and dreams, its prodigious harvests, and its bitter fruit. I saw Palestine for what it was, a land that must belong to everyone, never to a few, or to none…”

The record ended, and automatically Felix turned it over and placed the needle on the second side.

22

“ONE DAY, Jamil disappeared. Weeks passed, and neither his mother nor I had any word of him; I understood that woman who clung to her simple, feudal, traditional life. Was it true, I asked myself, that her values represented backwardness, and ours, progress? I traveled to Jerusalem and exhausted all official channels. I don’t know whether I’ve been under suspicion since then; I simply stated that the young man was my colleague and I was worried about his disappearance. No one knew anything. Jamil had vanished. I contacted a Jewish Communist lawyer I’ll call Beata. She was the only person who dared get to the bottom of the matter. What anguishing contradictions, Felix, please try to understand. I am repelled by Communism, but in this case, only a Communist had the courage to expose herself for me and for Jamil in the name of justice. An injustice had been committed against my lover, but in Israel I could count on the means to challenge it through legal channels. Would that have been possible in an Arab country?

“I left everything in Beata’s hands and returned to the village where I taught. Now Jamil’s mother had disappeared. She returned a few days later, beyond tears. I thought Jamil was dead. His mother’s dry eyes expressed greater grief than any tears. She said no. She didn’t want to say more than that. Hours later, Beata informed me that Jamil was a prisoner, accused of being a terrorist. He was imprisoned in a place called Moscobiya in Jerusalem, an ancient inn frequented in olden days by Orthodox Russian pilgrims, and now converted into a military prison. The questions I asked Jamil’s mother remained unanswered; I saw only that the woman no longer knew how to cry. She trembled constantly and fell ill with fever. I brought a doctor; she didn’t want to see him; I insisted. She fought like a tiger to keep him from examining her. Later the doctor told me; a large object, probably a pole, had been forced into her vagina; it was destroyed.

“Two days later, Beata asked me to come to Jerusalem. She took me to a military hospital where Jamil was a patient. His face was that of an old man. I remembered the happy eyes of Israel. Now I saw the sad eyes of Palestine. Those eyes looked at me and did not know me. I wept, and Beata told me Jamil had been sentenced to two years in prison. She showed me a copy of the confession signed in my lover’s hand; he declared himself guilty of acts of terrorism. Beata said she had exhausted all her sources to prove that the confession had been obtained by torture. I went back to our village. After a year, Jamil was freed. He arrived in a Red Cross bus. For the first few days, he didn’t speak. Then, little by little, he told me what had happened.

“He’d been taken prisoner as he returned from school, and blindfolded. He lost all sense of direction. Several hours later, the car stopped near heavy traffic, a city, or a highway. He was led to a place where he was asked to confess. He refused. He was brutally beaten. His captors pulled hair from his head and forced him to eat it. Then they placed a hood with two air holes over his head and transported him to a different place. There they made him kneel in a dog kennel. He could hear the barking, but dogs never attacked him. The following day they returned and again asked for his confession. When he refused, they locked him for several days in a tiny cell in which he could neither stand nor lie down. Occasionally he was released and forced to bend over while pressure was exerted on his testicles from behind. Again he was returned to the cement chamber. Later he was released and his hood was removed. His mother was before him. He determined not to recognize her, not to compromise her. But she burst out weeping and told him not to worry, she was the guilty one, she had aided the terrorists, not he, she had confessed. Then Jamil said no, he was the only guilty party. They beat him in front of his mother, and he was taken to the hospital. When I visited him there, he had decided not to recognize or remember the people he loved. He spent one year of his sentence in the jail at Sarafand. Beata succeeded in getting his sentence reduced, but a guard told him they were letting him go so that he could return to his village and serve as an example to other rebels. Beata said that this was a standard practice in the occupied territories; to make an example of one person and his family so that his experience would demoralize the others.

“Jamil asked me to leave. He feared for my safety. I accepted his need to be alone with his mother. Before anything else, he had to reestablish his relationship with her. I understood that here was something unfathomable to me, and that it had to do with the Palestinian world of honor. From those depths, Jamil would subsequently learn to remember me. I went to Jerusalem and awaited Bernstein’s annual visit. I didn’t tell him what I knew. Understand me, please. I became Bernstein’s lover to learn more, that’s true, to tear down the wall of his pathetic vanity and hear his naked voice. I hinted at the problem of torture. He told me quietly that torture was necessary in a life-and-death struggle like ours. Did I know anything about prisons in Syria or Iraq? I asked him whether we, the victims of Nazism, were capable of repeating the horrors perpetrated by our executioners. He answered that the weakness of the Israeli state could not be compared to the strength of Germany. He didn’t give me the opportunity to reply that neither was the weakness of the Palestinians comparable to the strength of the Israelis. He was too busy explaining to me in detail how costly it would be to prevent the investigation of such accusations; he knew it well because that, precisely, was one of his jobs outside Israel.

“But I’m lying, Felix. I went to bed with Bernstein to fulfill the cycle of my own penance, to purge in my own body the perverted reason for our revenge against Nazism; our suffering, imposed now on beings weaker than we. We sought a place where we might be masters, not slaves. But one is master of himself only when he has no slaves. We did not know how to be masters without new slaves, so we ended by being executioners in order not to be victims. We found victims to escape being victims. With Bernstein, I sank into eternal suffering. What unites Jews and Palestinians is sorrow, not violence. Each of us looks at the other and sees only his own suffering in the eyes of the enemy. To reject the other’s suffering, inevitably a mirror image of our own, our only recourse is violence. I am not lying, Felix. I went to bed with Bernstein so you would hate him as much as I do. Jamil and I are allies of a civilization that will never die; Bernstein is merely an agent of transitory power. And because power knows itself to be temporary, it is always cruel. Bernstein knows that this is the revenge against civilization anticipated by power. He has forced me to add new names to the geography of terror. Say Dachau, Treblinka, and Bergen-Belsen only if you add Moscobiya, Ramallah, and Sarafand. You can question the history of our entire century, but never the universality of its terror. No one escapes the stigma, not the French in Algeria, not the North Americans in Vietnam, not the Mexicans at Tlatelolco, not the Chileans at Dawson, not the Soviets in their immense Gulag. No one. So why would we Jews be any different? The passport of modern history accepts only one visa, that of terror. It doesn’t matter. I am returning to my true homeland to fight, along with Jamil, against the injustices one people impose upon another. This is why I went to Israel twelve years ago. Only in this way can I be faithful to the death of my parents in Auschwitz.

“I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye to you. I will mail this record to you from the airport.”

23

THE RECORD continued spinning after Sara Klein’s last words. When the needle reached the end of the groove, it retracted abruptly, screeching across the record like a knife across a metal pot. Felix rescued Sara’s message and replaced it in the shiny jacket from which Satchmo’s blackberry eyes twinkled merrily.

For a long moment he held the record in his hands, poised delicately as if it were a crown without a head to rest on. Then he put it in his suitcase. He mustn’t leave a single trace; the less evidence, the better. He walked to the telephone — dial o for an outside line, 1 if you need the assistance of the operator — practicing the phrases he would use. One of them he applied to himself: “My memory has some rights,” and he recalled with a painful start that Sara Klein had been cremated that morning. It had been his obligation, professional perhaps, but certainly personal, to be there. But he couldn’t help it, he’d been too exhausted, and had slept through it in the room on Génova Street. He wanted to forget; he renounced his right to memory; and besides, no one could be held to an accounting now but Felix Maldonado.

When he heard that the phone had been picked up and that I was waiting silent on the line, he said: “When shall we two meet again?”

“When the battle’s lost and won,” I replied. “Good news?”

“Good news!” Felix said in a broken voice.

“Ha, ha!” I laughed. “Where?”

“In Genoa,” murmured Felix. “I pray you, which is the way to Master Jew’s?”

“He hath a third in Mexico, and other ventures he hath.”

“Why doth the Jew pause?” asked Felix, looking toward the suitcase containing Sara Klein’s message.

“Hurt with the same weapons, healed by the same means,” I responded.

Felix paused, and I asked: “What has been done with the dead body?”

“Compounded it with dust, whereto ’tis kin.” There was violence in Felix’s words, but immediately he relaxed and asked in the neutral tone we’d agreed upon, “What news? I have some rights of memory.”

“Go merrily to London,” I counseled him. “Within hours they will be at your aid.”

Felix stared at his reflection in the opaque windows overlooking the bustle of Génova Street. “Lord, I am much changed.”

“A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap. To Aleppo gone, master o’ the Tiger,” I said, and hung up.

For a moment Felix listened to the dead buzz in the receiver, and then he, too, hung up. He heard a ring, but didn’t know whether it was the telephone or the doorbell. He picked up the receiver and heard repeated the distant flight of the bumblebee. As he hung up for a second time, he again heard the sound of muted and insistent ringing. He went to the door and, lowering his eyes, saw Simon Ayub standing there with a newspaper-wrapped package under his arm and a hotel key in his hand.

“Cool it, man,” Ayub said quickly. “I come in peace. The proof: I have the key to your room in my hand, but I rang the bell.”

“I see your mentor is teaching you a few manners.”

“Tell them to be more careful at the desk. Anyone can get in here. You ask for the key and they give it to you.”

“It’s a hotel for clandestine lovers and shitty tourists, didn’t you know?”

“At any rate, they should be more strict. This isn’t even any fun.”

Ayub tried to look over Felix’s shoulder, sniffing at the air he was tainting with his accent of clove. “May I come in?”

Felix stepped aside, and Simon Ayub entered with the blond-conquistador swagger that had so annoyed Felix ever since the Lebanese had first come to his office in the Ministry of Economic Development.

“For once, I’ll save you any unnecessary questions,” said Ayub, rocking back on the Cuban heels that increased his stature. He avoided looking at Felix. “Three to one, you would come here, and nine out of ten, you’d be in this apartment. Correct?”

“Correct,” said Felix. “But those weren’t my questions.”

“Oh, is that right?” said Ayub indifferently, scrutinizing the four walls of the apartment.

“Why didn’t anything about the attempt on the President’s life appear in the newspapers? What really happened? Who died in my name, and with my name? Why was it necessary to kill anyone? Why didn’t they capture me and kill me? Why did we have to go through the charade of my escaping from the hospital if that’s what you wanted? Who do you and your chief work for?”

“This is a nice place,” smiled Ayub, ignoring Felix’s questions. “The things that go on here!”

“Now,” said Felix, approaching Ayub like a cat. “Who killed Sara Klein?”

“No one comes here but tourists, or lovers.” Ayub continued to smile, allowing himself the excesses permitted those who are small, light-skinned, and good-looking.

“What are you doing here?”

“This isn’t the first time I’ve been here.” Ayub was unbearably cocksure. Felix grabbed his lapel.

Ayub patted Felix’s hand. “Are we feeling better now, friend? Do you want to go back and let Lichita take care of you?”

“Remember, I knocked you down with one hand, dwarf,” said Felix, still grasping Ayub’s lapel.

“I’m not forgetting anything.” Ayub’s eyes suddenly clouded with rancor. “But I prefer to bring that up on another occasion. Not now.”

Smoothly, Ayub removed Felix’s hand, as his self-congratulatory smile returned. “That’s two lapels ruined; the Director General got one with his cigarette the other day, and now you, twisting and pulling. If things go on like this, I won’t be earning enough to pay my tailor’s bills.”

“Who’s your tailor? Lockheed?” Felix stared at Ayub’s bright Braniff-colored suit.

“Classy, mmh?” Ayub smiled, stroking a lapel. “But what a way to greet a friend. Especially a friend who’s bringing you a present.”

He offered Felix the newspaper-wrapped package, which Felix accepted with marked reluctance. “Okay, I’ve had enough of this clowning around. What do you want, Ayub? If you’re thinking of beating me up, you’ll have a hard time of it unless you’ve brought a gang of gorillas with you. I’ll kick the shit out of you.”

“Aren’t you going to open my present?” Ayub smiled as if secretly he thought there was no greater gift than his presence. “It isn’t a bomb, I give you my word.” He laughed almost hysterically.

“What is it, then?”

“Open it with care, friend. It’s Sara Klein’s ashes. Don’t want to let them fly away.”

Felix checked his impulse to punch Ayub, because the eyes of the little man who smelled of clove and dressed like a DC-7 had lost any trace of mockery or aggression or complacency. His cocky attitude refuted it, but his eyes shone with a tenderness that reflected a kind of pain, a kind of shame.

“You accepted the responsibility for Sara Klein’s body?” asked Felix, the package in his hands.

“The Embassy claimed to have no knowledge of her.”

“She was a citizen of the state of Israel.”

“They said she had no relatives there and that she’d lived in Mexico longer than in Israel.”

“But you aren’t a relative.”

“All I had to do to get them to release her body to me was say that I was her friend and would take care of the details. It was easy to see she was a hot potato in the Israelis’ hands. They snapped at the chance.”

“Bernstein was her lover. It should have been up to him.”

“The good professor is, how shall I say it … incapacitated.”

“Did Bernstein kill Sara Klein?”

“What do you think?”

They stared at each other in a pointless duel; each fought with the same, mutually invalidating, weapons: disbelief and certainty.

“Just remember,” said Ayub, “that the professor has more important aims in this life than chasing after a woman, even if she is a good piece.” He took three steps back, upturned palms extended. “Just keep your cool, my friend. Things are as they are. Careful, don’t drop the package. If you break the urn, we’ll both have to sweep up.”

“You dirty bastard son-of-a-bitch,” said Felix, clutching the package. “You saw her naked, you touched her with your filthy little manicured pig’s hands.”

Ayub stood silent for a second, rejecting the insult, studying his hand with its topaz rings and carved scimitars.

“Sara Klein was the lover of my cousin, a schoolteacher in the occupied territories,” Ayub said simply, his usual braggadocio stripped away. “I don’t know whether she told you that story. Maybe she didn’t have time. I know you loved her, too. That’s why I brought you her ashes.”

He turned his back to Felix and walked to the door, again the strutting conquistador. As he opened the door, he turned to look at Felix. “Take care, my friend. When we meet again, there’ll be blood in our eyes, I promise you that. Don’t think I’ve forgotten that low punch you landed. I want to even the score, I give you my word. Now more than ever.”

He left, closing the door after him.

24

AT EIGHT O’CLOCK that evening, Felix entered a café on the Calle Londres. Leather banquettes and a bar of polished wood were intended to suggest an English pub, but the image was distorted by the strong fluorescent lights, and the beveled mirrors repeated only sparks of a dead star.

Felix walked to the copper-rimmed bar and asked for a beer. He looked around the room and was grateful, after all, for the horrid glare that permitted him to see the patrons. That may have been why the lights had been installed, so the bar wouldn’t become a haunt for hot lovers.

It didn’t take long to spot them. The boy in bell-bottom blue-jeans and a blue-and-white-striped jersey with a big anchor across the chest. The girl with hair like a curly black lamb he recognized immediately. The question was whether they would recognize him. He walked over to them with a glass of beer in his hand. The girl was carefully shelling chestnuts in her miniskirted lap; discarded hulls clung to her laddered stockings. She was feeding the nutmeats to the boy.

“August isn’t the season for chestnuts,” said Felix.

“My sailor friend brought them to me from a long way away,” the girl said, not looking up, absorbed in shelling the nuts.

“May I?” asked Felix, as he sat down.

“Scoot over, Emiliano,” said the girl. “These seats aren’t very wide.”

“Your seat’s too wide, baby,” the boy replied, mouth filled with chestnuts. “I don’t know why they say those English women are so jolly, they must be thin in the butt.”

“You should know,” said Felix. “A girl in every port.”

“No,” purred the girl, caressing her companion’s neck. “He’s not much, but he’s all mine.”

“We fit fine,” said Felix. “Better than in the taxi. Did you get your books back, Emiliano?”

“No, man. You know the truth of it? I’m a professional student. Right, Rosita?”

The curly-headed girl smiled, and nodded. “Want a chestnut?”

“What I want is to know where you got them.”

“I told you, Emiliano brought them to me.”

“Where did they come from?” Felix insisted.

“From far away.” Emiliano raised his eyebrows. “What I need to know is what boat they came on, and who was at the helm.”

“They came on a ship called the Tiger, and Timon was the captain’s name.”

“Umm,” Emiliano mumbled. “The captain told me to tell you to keep your cool, and that the chestnuts came from a place called Aleppo.”

“Haven’t the three of us traveled together before?”

“That’s right, man,” said Emiliano.

“Who was aboard our ship?” Felix asked.

“Umm, it was jammed. A driver, two nuns, a nurse, Rosita here, and me, a fat woman with a basketful of chickens, and a man who looked like a government type. End of report.”

Rosita shook the chestnut hulls from her lap, and the three studied one another. Then, avoiding their eyes, Felix asked, “Who killed Sara Klein?”

“The fuzz haven’t picked up the trail,” Emiliano replied, scarcely lowering his voice.

“The crime took place between midnight and one in the morning. At that hour, it’s easy to check who came in and went out of a place like the Suites de Génova.

“Tell him, Emiliano, can’t you see he loved her?” said Rosita, eyes brimming.

“Rosita, take care of your chestnuts and listen, but keep your mouth shut.”

“Whatever you say, gorgeous,” Rosita grinned, and simpered to Felix, “He’s my man. We’re crazy about each other. That’s why I can understand how you feel. The woman they killed led you down the dark alley of grief, didn’t she?”

Emiliano pinched Rosita’s exposed thigh.

“Owww!”

“And pick the shells out of your stockings; it’ll be like getting in bed with a cactus. There’s always something caught in your bloody stockings.”

“Then why do you ask me to leave them on when we go to bed?” mooed Rosita.

Felix was insistent. “What did you start to tell me?”

“The doorman swears no one suspicious went in or came out, only registered guests.”

“Can you trust him?”

“He’s been a doorman all his life. He’s not too bright, but he’s worked there nine years and no complaints.”

“Years at his job, and old, he can be bought. Look into it.”

“Right. He told me no one asked for Señorita Klein and no one sent her any messages or packages. Nothing.”

“What was going on outside?”

“What’s always going on in the Zona Rosa? Some kids in a convertible, pretty stoned, stopped in front of the hotel with some mariachis. A serenade, they said, for some lady tourist who didn’t want to leave Mexico without being serenaded. The cops moved them right along. And a nun who asked the doorman if he’d donate something to some charity. That’s the only thing out of the ordinary, a nun out alone at midnight. He didn’t give her anything, and she left.”

“How did he know she was a nun?”

“You know, the hair pulled back in a bun, zero makeup, all in black down to her ankles, a rosary in her hands. The usual bit.”

“Were the serenaders and the nun there at the same time?”

“Umm, that I don’t know.”

“Find out, and report to the captain.”

“Okay, Batman.”

“Are you sure that Bernstein didn’t enter the hotel sometime, or wasn’t registered in advance?”

“The maestro? No way. He’s been in the hospital with a gunshot wound in the shoulder. That night he was in the English Hospital, and never budged from there.”

“Where is he now?”

“That we do know. In Coatzacoalcos, Hotel Tropicana.”

“Why did he go there?”

“What I was just saying, to recover from the shot.”

“Why didn’t it come out?”

“What, man?”

“Anything about Bernstein’s wound.”

“Why would anything come out, and where?”

“In the newspapers. He was shot at the Palace.”

“No, no. It was an accident, in his home. No reason for it to be in the newspapers. He said he shot himself accidentally, cleaning a pistol. That’s what the hospital admission record shows, too.”

“And not at the Palace the morning they awarded the National Prizes? Wasn’t there an attempt on the President’s life?”

Emiliano and Rosita stared at each other, and the boy reached for Felix’s beer and drained it at a gulp. He stared at Felix, baffled. “Sorry, man. Hit me with that again. What attempt?”

“I thought someone tried to kill the President in the Palace,” Felix explained patiently, “and that Bernstein was shot by mistake…”

“Jeez, are you stoned or something?” said Rosita.

“Shut up,” said Emiliano. “No, not true. What made you think that?”

“Because I thought I’d fired the shot.” A cold chill settled in the nape of Felix’s neck.

“We didn’t hear anything about that,” said Emiliano, a flicker of fear in his eyes. “And nothing was in the papers, and the captain didn’t know about it.”

Felix clasped the boy’s hand, and squeezed it.

“What did happen in the Palace, I was there…”

“Cool, brother, keep your cool, those’re the instructions … You were there and you don’t remember what happened?”

“No. Tell the captain what I’ve told you. It’s important for him to know. Tell him that one side knows and tells things the other side doesn’t know, and vice versa.”

“Everyone in this whole affair’s been lying. Cap knows that.”

“All right,” Felix said, more calmly. “Tell him to find out two things for me. I can’t make it if I don’t find out.”

“Don’t get excited. That’s what we’re here for.”

“First. Who was jailed under my name in Military Camp Number One on August 10 and shot that same night while trying to escape? Second. Who’s buried in my name in the Jardín Cemetery? Oh, and the license number of the serenades’ convertible.”

“Okay. The cap says don’t leave any tracks, and keep it cool, and he says most of all that he understands but you shouldn’t let your personal feelings get in the way. That’s what he said.”

“And you remind him he gave me carte blanche to do whatever I think best.”

“I’ll tell him, man, fancy words and all.”

“Tell him not to mistake anything I do for any motives of personal revenge.”

Emiliano smiled, satisfied. “Cap says all roads lead to Rome. You get cultivated, being around him.”

“See you later.”

“Alligator.”

“Take care,” said Rosita, making sheep’s eyes. “Maybe you’ll invite us for another taxi ride. I liked sitting on your lap.”

“I liked fooling around with the nurse,” countered Emiliano.

“How can you be so mean, Emiliano?” whined Rosita.

“I wasn’t being mean, fatass, just reminding you that two can dance that tango.”

“Whew, aren’t we rough tonight?” laughed Rosita, and hummed the first bars of the bolero “Perfidia.”

They didn’t even turn to look at Felix, and as he left the imitation pub, they were still arguing and making barbed jokes, as anonymous as any run-of-the-mill sweethearts. Felix told himself that brave Timon had gathered about him some very strange aides.

He stopped at the Red Cross Clinic on the Avenida Chapultepec to have them take a look at his face. They told him it was healing fine—“Who cut you up like that?”—and that all he needed was some ointment; rub it in and continue the treatment for several days.

He bought the ointment at a pharmacy and returned to the room on Génova. It was almost eleven and the young and oily desk clerks had gone off duty. The doorman opened the door, a somnambulist-faced, ancient Indian in a navy-blue suit shiny from wear.

The windows of the room were opened wide, and the bed was turned down, with a wrapped little chocolate on the pillow. He opened his suitcase. The package containing the ashes was still there, but the record with Satchmo on the jacket had disappeared.

25

FELIX LANDED at the airport of Coatzacoalcos at four in the afternoon. From the air, he had seen the expanse of the Petróleos Mexicanos refineries in Minatitlán, the stormy Gulf in the background, the industrial citadel inland, a modern fortress of towers and tubing and cupolas glinting like tinfoil toys beneath a storm-sated sun, the busy port with its railroad tracks extending onto the docks, and long, black, sleek-decked tankers.

As he descended from the plane, he breathed the hot humid air laden with the scent of laurel and vanilla. He removed his jacket and hailed a broken-down taxi. Swift glimpses of coconut-palm forests, zebu cattle grazing on brick-colored plains, and the Gulf of Mexico whipping up its early-evening thundershower yielded to a view of a port city with low, ugly buildings, their windows blasted out by hurricanes, and dirty neon signs, unlighted at this hour, a whole consumer society installed in the tropics, supermarkets, television-sale and — repair shops, and in the foreground the everlasting Mexican world of tacos, pigs, flies, and naked children in mute contemplation.

The taxi came to a stop before an open market. To Felix, everything was red, the long bloody sides of beef hanging from giant hooks, bunches of flame-colored bananas, red-leather sling chairs stinking of recently sacrificed cattle, and machetes of blackened metal, bathed in blood and thirsty for blood. The driver carried his suitcase to the entrance of a three-story rococo palace dating from the beginning of the century; the top floor had been destroyed by fire and converted spontaneously into a cooing dovecote.

“Hit by lightning,” the driver said.

High above, buzzards wheeled in great circles.

The neon letters that spelled out Hotel Tropicana protruded like a wounded finger from the façade of sculptured stucco, angels with voluminous buttocks and cornucopias of fruit painted white but turning black from lichen and the incessant labors of the air, sea, and smoke from refinery and port. Felix registered under the name of Diego Silva, and a cambujo—half black, half Indian — servant dressed in a white shirt and shiny black trousers led him through a patio roofed in stained glass that filtered the hot sunlight. Many panes had been broken and not repaired; great blocks of sun were trying to assume precise positions on the chessboard of the black-and-white marble floor.

At his room, the bellboy unlocked the padlock on the door and turned on the wooden ceiling fan that hovered over the room like one more vulture. Felix gave the cambujo ten pesos and he smiled his way from the room, revealing gold teeth. A notice hung above the mosquito-netted brass bed:

SU RECÁMARA VENCE A LA 1 P.M.

YOUR ROOM WINS AT ONE P.M.

VOTRE CHAMBRE EST VAINCU A 13 HRS.

Felix telephoned to ask for the number of Dr. Bernstein’s room. Room number 9, he was told, but the professor was out and wasn’t expected back before sundown. Felix hung up the phone, removed his shoes, and lay back on the creaking bed. Little by little he began to feel drowsy, lulled by the sweet novelty with which the tropics receives its visitors before unsheathing the claws of its petrified desperation. But for the moment he was happy to be free of the burden of Mexico City, increasingly ugly, strangled in Mussolinian gigantism, locked into inhumane options: marble or dust, aseptic confinement or gangrenous incontinence. He hummed several popular songs, and it occurred to him as he drowsed that all the great cities of the world have their special love songs, Rome, Madrid, Berlin, New York, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Rio, Paris. But no love song for Mexico City, he thought, and fell asleep.

He awakened in darkness with a start; his nightmare ended where sleep had begun; mute pain, a howl of rage, that was the song of his city, and no one could sing it. He sat up in terror; he didn’t know where he was, in his bedroom with Ruth, in the hospital with Licha, or in the Suites de Génova with Sara’s ashes. In his delirium he touched the pillow in the lustful night and imagined beside him the naked body of Mary Benjamin, her hardened nipples, her moist mound of Venus, the smell of an unsatisfied and sensual woman; he had forgotten her, and only a nightmare had brought her back, the lovers’ rendezvous in the motel beside the Arroyo Restaurant was never consummated; the bitch had called Ruth.

He rose bathed in sweat and felt his way toward the bathroom. He took a cool shower and dressed quickly in clothing inappropriate to the heat, socks, shoes, city trousers, and shirt. He studied the face in the mirror attentively. The moustache was growing rapidly, the hair more slowly. The eyelids were less puffy, the incisions visible but healed. He called the switchboard and was told the professor had returned. He took the newspaper-wrapped package from his suitcase and walked from his room down a corridor lined with large porcelain glass-incrusted flowerpots to room number 9.

He rapped on the door. It swung open and Bernstein’s nearsighted eyes, swimming in the depths of the thick rimless eyeglasses, regarded him without surprise. One arm was in a sling. With the other he invited him to enter. “Come in, Felix. I’ve been expecting you. Welcome to Marienbad-in-the-Tropics.”

26

INVOLUNTARILY, Felix put a hand to his face. Bernstein’s watery gaze became unfathomable. His former student shook his head as if to free it of a spider’s web. He entered the professor’s room, on his guard against a trap. Doubtless the pockets of Bernstein’s weightless but bulky mustard-colored jacket held more than parlor tricks.

“Come in, Felix. You seem surprised.”

“You recognize me?” murmured Maldonado.

Bernstein’s smile was one of amazed irony. “Why wouldn’t I recognize you? I’ve known you for twenty years, five at the university, our breakfasts, there’s never been a time I stopped seeing you — or wanted to. Would you like a drink? It doesn’t go to your head in this heat. But come in and sit down, my dear Felix. What a pleasure and what a surprise.”

“Didn’t you just say you’d been expecting me?” asked Felix, taking a seat in a squeaking leather chair.

“I’m always expecting you and always surprised by you.” Bernstein laughed, walking to a table replete with bottles, glasses, and some ice cubes swimming in a soup plate.

He poured a shot of J&B into a glass and added ice and soda from a siphon. “As long as I’ve known you, I’ve always said that boy is extremely intelligent and will go far if he doesn’t get carried away by his excessive imagination, if he will only be more discreet and stop meddling in affairs that don’t concern him…”

“This is something that concerns us both,” said Felix, offering the package to the professor.

Bernstein laughed, shaking like a bowl of custard. Sweating in the tropic heat, he resembled an enormous mass of melting vanilla ice cream.

“So, you haven’t forgiven an old man his ridiculous love for a younger woman. I expected more of your generosity,” he said, carrying Felix’s whiskey toward him.

“Take it,” Felix insisted, still proffering the package.

Again Bernstein laughed. “I have something for you, and you have something for me. What a curious coincidence, as Ionesco and Alice would say.”

Bernstein held the glass of scotch in his slightly trembling good hand, its ring finger adorned by the huge stone so clear it seemed of glass.

Felix said flatly, ignoring the professor’s buffoonery: “These are Sara’s ashes.”

It seemed impossible that Bernstein’s vanilla-ice-cream face could pale. But it did. His trembling increased, spilling whiskey on his jacket. Then he dropped the glass and it shattered on the black-and-white marble floor.

“Forgive me,” said Bernstein, suddenly red, brushing at the whiskey trickling down the bulk of his jacket. Felix wondered if the magician’s tricks in the pockets would be ruined from the sudden dowsing.

“They were given to me by the only person who took responsibility for Sara. He thought I had a right to them because I loved her,” Felix said without emotion. “But I never possessed her. I prefer to give them to someone who’s been her lover. Perhaps you’ll accept this obligation at least?”

With his good hand, Bernstein snatched the package from Felix and clasped it piteously to his breast. He grunted like a wounded animal and threw it on the bed. He stumbled, and almost fell beside the package. Felix checked an impulse to rush to his aid, but the professor regained control of his gelatinous mass and half fell into a rattan chair.

For some seconds, the only sound was the humming of the ceiling fan.

“Do you believe I killed her?” Bernstein’s voice caught in his throat.

“I don’t believe anything. I was told that you were in the hospital when Sara was murdered.”

“That’s true. I never saw her again after the dinner at the Rossettis’. I had a fit of jealousy. I warned you not to see her again.” The professor spoke with his gaze riveted on the tips of his perforated tropical shoes.

“Would her death have been avoided if I hadn’t attended the dinner?”

Bernstein looked up suddenly and stared at Felix with the eyes of an ailing basilisk. “Did you see her before she died?”

“No. But she spoke to me.”

Bernstein rested his weight on the arms of the chair that surrounded him like a throne. “When?”

“Four days after her death.”

“Don’t play games with me, Felix,” said Bernstein, modulating his infinite repertory of tones. “We both loved her. But she loved you more.”

“I never touched her.”

“You’re a man who should never touch what doesn’t concern you. There is suffering that has nothing to do with you. Be thankful for that.”

“I’m still waiting for the whiskey you offered me.”

Bernstein struggled laboriously to his feet, and Felix added: “There is something that does concern me. What happened at the Palace the morning of the prizes?”

“What! Hasn’t anyone told you? But it’s the joke of the breakfast circuit. Where have you been the last week?”

“In a hospital with my face bandaged.”

“You see? Bad company,” said Bernstein, measuring the whiskey with squinting, myopic eyes. “Just as the President reached you, you fainted. You blacked out,” he added, and dropped one, two, three cubes of ice into the glass. “No big deal. A little scene. An incident. You were carried unconscious through the crowd. The President didn’t flick an eyelash; he continued greeting people. The ceremony went ahead normally.”

Bernstein suppressed a trembling, roguish smile. “There was no dearth of jokes. A minor official of the MED fainted just at the sight of the President. What emotion! There’s been nothing like it since Moctezuma.”

“You say you wounded yourself cleaning a pistol?”

Bernstein solemnly offered Felix the glass. “Someone shot me that evening when I was alone at my home. A bad shot.”

“Maybe he didn’t mean to kill you.”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps? It wouldn’t be easy to miss someone your size.”

Bernstein did not reply. He prepared his own drink and raised it as if to propose a toast. “May the devil,” he said, “cut off all noses that find themselves in others’ business.”

He turned away from Felix, a sweat-stain continent on his back. “In your room at the Hilton, you had a dossier on all my activities.”

“Was it you who rifled my files?”

“What difference does it make?” replied Bernstein, his back still to Felix. “I know you know everything about me. But many people have that information. It’s no secret. You can parrot it till doomsday and nothing will happen.”

Recite like a good pupil?” Felix smiled. “But it is important. Leopoldo Bernstein, born 13 November 1915 in Krakow with all the handicaps: Polish, Jew, the son of militant socialist workers; emigrated to Russia with his parents following the October Revolution; given a fellowship by the Soviet government to study economics in Prague, and charged with establishing relations with Czech universities and officials in the Beneš government on the eve of the war; fails in carrying out his charge; instead of seducing, allows himself to be seduced by Zionist circles in Prague; following Munich, and before the imminent conflict, takes refuge in Mexico; author of a pamphlet against the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact; his parents disappear and die in Stalinist camps; the Soviet Union declares him a deserter; a professor in the School of Economics at the University of Mexico, requests leave and travels for the first time to Israel; fights in the Haganah, the secret Jewish army, but finds it too temperate and joins the terrorist Irgun; participates in multiple acts of murder and reprisal bombings of civilian sites; returns to Mexico and obtains his citizenship in ’52; from that time, he is responsible for raising funds in the Jewish communities of Latin America, and following the war of ’73, he helps found Gush Emunim, with the aim of preventing the return of the occupied territories…”

“Publish it in the newspapers if you want,” interrupted Bernstein, again installed in his rattan throne.

“Shall I also publish the fact that out of jealousy you ordered a Palestinian teacher jailed and tortured, ordered his mother to be tortured, her sexual parts destroyed, ordered the teacher, stripped of his will, sent back to Sara, all out of revenge?”

“I don’t know how Sara spoke to you following her death, but I see she did,” said Bernstein, with celluloid eyes.

“Who killed Sara?”

“I don’t know. But as you seem to know, she, too, moved in bad company.”

“The Israeli Embassy refused responsibility for her body.”

“She’d gone over to the enemy. That was no reason to kill her, but, simply stated, we were no longer responsible for her.”

“But the other side had even less motive to kill her.”

“Can you be sure? The internal conflicts of the Palestinians are no tennis game. If you ingratiate yourself with one group, you immediately alienate another.”

“You should know. The Jewish terrorists of the forties also had their disagreements.”

Bernstein shrugged. “Sara was very prone to leaving messages. And you to swallowing them.”

“Isn’t what I’ve said true?” Felix asked tranquilly.

“In context, yes. Outside it, no. The boy was a terrorist.”

“As you were in the Irgun. And with the same motives.”

Bernstein laboriously crossed fat legs. “Do you remember your classes in law? Palestine, ever since it was taken from us, has been a no-man’s-land, res nullius, through which all armies and all peoples have passed. Everyone has claimed it, Romans, Crusaders, Muslims, European imperialists, but only we have the original right to it. We have waited two thousand years. Ours is the real claim to Palestine. Our patience.”

“At the price of the sorrow of the people who’ve been living there for centuries, with the right or without it? You suffer from the sickness of a lost Paradise.”

Bernstein again shrugged his shoulders impatiently. “Do you want to return the island of Manhattan to the Algonquins? Shall we throw ourselves into what the French call an eternal Café du Commerce debate?”

“Why not? I listened to Sara’s reasons. I can listen to yours.”

“I fear I may bore you, my dear Felix. A Jew is as ancient as his religion, a Mexican as young as his history. That’s why you constantly renew your history, each time imitating a new model that quickly becomes obsolete. Then you repeat the whole process, losing everything. In the end, you do maintain the illusion of perpetual youth … We have persisted for two thousand years. Our only error has been always to wait for the enemy that hated us to leave us in peace, peace in Berlin and Warsaw and Kiev. For the first time, we have decided to win our peace, instead of waiting for it to be conceded to us. Is it only in suffering that people who, like you, have nothing to lose respect us?”

“You might choose less fragile enemies.”

“Who? The Arabs, a thousand times better armed and more powerful than we?”

“You might have demanded a fatherland in the very places where you suffered, instead of imposing one upon other peoples.”

“Ah, Sara taught you well. Bah! No one loves the Palestinians, the Arabs least of all. They’re the albatross around their necks. They use them as an arm of propaganda and negotiation, but in their own countries they impound them in concentration camps. So much for the farce of Arab socialism.” Bernstein narrowed his eyes and leaned forward over his gross belly. “You must understand, Felix. The only intimate ties the Palestinians have are to us Jews. To no one else. They must live with us or be the pariahs of the Arab world. With us, they have what they have never had: work, good salaries, schools, tractors, refrigerators, television, radios. I hate to think what it would be with the Arabs…”

“The Yankees would give us the same if we became less independent.”

“And why don’t you?” snorted Bernstein, amused. “It’s what Marx recommended. Anyway, you’re not independent, you simply lack the advantages of total integration with the North American world. Compare California to Coahuila. The whole American Southwest would still be a flea-bitten wasteland in the hands of Mexico.”

“Sara said in her message that she believed in civilizations that endure, not in transitory powers.”

“And for believing the same as she, we were persecuted and murdered for centuries. A civilization without power is already archaeology, whether it knows it or not.” He removed his eyeglasses to emphasize his lack of defenses. “A destiny that one suffers deserves compassion, but a destiny one controls is detestable. We will not be detained by this paradox. We worked hard. Nothing was ever given to us. Have you ever asked yourself why, with fewer arms and fewer men, we always defeated the Arabs? I’ll tell you why. When Dayan founded the 101st Commando, he established one ironclad rule: no wounded soldier would ever be abandoned on the field of battle and left to the mercy of the enemy. All our soldiers know that. Behind them stands a hard-working, democratic, and informed society that will never abandon them. Our weapon is called solidarity, and it is serious, not second-hand rhetoric as it is in Mexico. Do you understand?”

“I fear a society that feels itself absolved of all guilt, Professor.”

“Apparently, our only guilt is that of controlling our destiny. And when destiny is controlled, you’re right, it is called power. For the first time, we have it. We have assumed its responsibilities. And its inevitable pitfalls. Would you go so far as to claim that Hitler was right? After all, his final solution would have avoided today’s conflicts. Think about it: only total extermination in Nazi ovens would have prevented the creation of Israel. Men create conflicts. But conflicts also create men. During the Mandate, the British had concentration camps for Jews and Arabs in Tel Aviv and Gaza. What right did they have to judge the Germans at Nuremberg for identical crimes?” He replaced his spectacles, his eyes focused, the fish ceased to swim. “Throughout history, there have been only executioners and victims. It’s a banal observation. It is less banal to stop being victims, even at the cost of becoming executioners. The other option is to be eternal victims. There is no power without responsibility, including responsibility for crimes. I prefer that to the consolation of being a victim, even to the applause of posterity and the compassion of good souls.”

Bernstein rose from his chair and walked to the window and opened it. The sounds of Coatzacoalcos were accompanied by a dizzying rush of elemental odors, fruit, sugarcane, excrement, mixed with the artificial odors from the refinery.

“Look.” Bernstein leaned from the window and waved his good hand toward the market. “They’re slaughtering cattle. An esthete might say it recalls a painting by Soutine. On the other hand, through the eyes of an animal lover or a vegetarian…”

He closed the window and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his jacket sleeve. Felix sat motionless, empty glass in hand.

“Professor,” he said, finally. “Your power depends on others. Arms and money. You recruit both. That’s all right. But every day they will be more difficult to obtain. You know it. Jewish families in Mexico, in Argentina, in the United States, everywhere, are becoming more Mexican, more Argentinian, more North American, they’re drifting away from Israel, and in a few years no one will give you anything. Why don’t you give a little before it’s too late and you find yourself alone once again? Alone and hated and persecuted.”

Bernstein wagged his head and a strange resignation appeared in his eyes. “Sara accused me of being a hawk. You know, the third floor of this hotel was destroyed by lightning. Doves took over the ruins. And as no one ever repairs anything here … Vultures fly high overhead, especially here, around the market slaughterhouse. Every day, they kill a vulture or two trying to feed on the dead flesh of the cattle. Dead meat is what the buzzards like, they don’t bother the doves. It’s true. Someday we’ll be forced to abandon the occupied territories. Oil weighs more heavily than reason. But we shall have left behind cities and citizens, schools and a democratic political system. When the Arabs return, there will be peace only if they respect our new pilgrims, those who remain there. That will be your famous meeting of civilizations. That will be the acid test of peace. If not, everything will begin all over again.”

Again Bernstein approached the window. He peered in vain through the sheer curtains. A sudden tropical downpour had been unleashed.

Bernstein whirled to face Felix. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m remembering the conviction with which you used to expound economic theories at the university. From your lips, every theory was convincing, from Quesnay to Keynes. It was why we loved your classes. It was why we followed and respected you. You never pretended to be objective, but your subjective passions had the effect of being entirely objective. Professor, you didn’t come here to recover from a wound inflicted by a mysterious bullet. Much less to convince me of the rights and motives of Israel. Enough talk. I’m going to ask you to hand over what I came here to get…”

It wasn’t caramels in the bulging pockets of Bernstein’s wrinkled, sweat-stained jacket. Felix leaped from his chair and grasped the professor’s fat neck; he twisted the injured arm, pulling it from the protective sling, and Bernstein howled with pain, his free arm upraised, a tiny Yves-Grant.32 clutched in his hand. He let the pistol fall on the chessboard floor. Felix released his grip on Bernstein and picked up the automatic. He leveled it at the professor’s trembling belly.

His aim never wavering, he emptied Bernstein’s suitcase, tossing aside all its contents. He ordered Bernstein to precede him to the bathroom, where he opened the leather kit of personal toilet articles; he squeezed out the toothpaste, he tore open capsules of medicine, he removed the straightedge razor and ripped out the lining of the kit bag. With Bernstein before him, he returned to the bedroom and slit open the lining of the suitcase. He searched the closet and, for good measure, shredded the blue-striped seersucker hanging there. He repeated the process with pillows and mattress. He tore down the mosquito netting to examine its yellowed canopy. Throughout, Bernstein, seated on his precarious rattan throne, watched, unmoving, the grimace of pain yielding to an insulting smile.

“Take off your clothes,” Felix ordered.

He searched the clothing. Naked, Bernstein resembled a gluttonous child who’d turned into the mountains of cotton candy he’d consumed.

“Open your mouth. Remove your bridge.”

Only one orifice remained. Felix knelt. He pressed the barrel of the pistol against Bernstein’s kidney and inserted a finger up his rectum. He felt only the convulsions of the old man’s uncontrollable laughter.

“Nothing there, Felix. You’re too late.”

Pistol in hand, Maldonado rose to his feet and cleaned his finger across Bernstein’s lips. Even the professor’s gesture of revulsion could not check his amused chortles. “Nothing, Felix. You find yourself with empty, if slightly filthy, hands.”

Felix’s eyes were clouded with sweat, but the pistol never wavered. There could be no better target than the massive bulk of his former mentor. “Tell me just one thing, Professor, so I don’t go away empty-handed. After all, I brought you that…” He waved the pistol toward the newspaper-wrapped package.

Bernstein made a slight nervous movement. The Yves-Grant again pointed at Bernstein’s navel.

Felix asked, “How did you recognize me?”

Now Bernstein’s laughter was gargantuan. He bellowed like a Santa Claus on holiday, naked in the tropics, far removed from his icy workshop. “Such imagination. I told you! Ever since you were in college…”

“Answer me. I don’t need an excuse to shoot.”

“I don’t have the background, my dear Felix. I don’t understand why you think I shouldn’t recognize you.”

“This, and this, and this,” said Felix, with the rage of futility and fatigue. One by one, the pistol barrel pointed out the scars on his face. “And this, and this. I have a new face, can’t you see?”

Bernstein’s laughter was explosive. When it subsided, he settled his naked bulk in the only chair capable of sustaining him. “They made you believe that?”

“I can see myself in the mirror.”

“A touch here, a slight modification there?” Bernstein smiled. “Your hair cut short, a new moustache?” He crossed fat hands across his belly, but did not achieve the desired resemblance to a benign Buddha.

“Yes,” replied Felix, willing to be convinced. He felt that only by abandoning all strength could he recover his capacity for it. And there was something more, the dark little seed of an idea beginning to sprout in his guts, working its way toward his chest.

“The only surgery performed on you was that of suggestion.” Bernstein smiled, but immediately erased the smile. “It’s enough to know that a man is being sought. After that, everyone sees him differently. Even the man himself. I know what I’m talking about. Have a drink. It’s too late. Relax.”

Bernstein indicated the table cluttered with bottles, glasses, and ice, repeating the earlier wave of his hand through the open window toward the teeming market. The ring with the clear stone was no longer on the professor’s finger.

The seed exploded in Felix’s intestines, branched through his chest, and blossomed like a sunburst in his head.

As he ran from Bernstein’s room, still carrying the pistol, he could hear the professor’s steely cry, strong at first, then dissipated by street noises, then once again erupting from the open window: “It’s too late! Be careful! Watch out!”

27

THE CAMBUJO from the Hotel Tropicana was standing beneath Bernstein’s window, facing the market. He was ready, fists clenched, legs planted sturdily, and smiling; Felix could read the caution signal flashing from his gold teeth.

He stuck the pistol in a pocket and limbered his leg muscles. He meant to take a running jump with both feet on the servant’s belly, but the cambujo broke into a run toward the market, swinging the beef carcasses aside, turning over crates, scattering straw in his wake. Blood from the sides of beef stained Felix’s shoulders, and huge clusters of bananas struck him in the face; the machetes glittered more by night than by day. Felix grabbed one at random as he ran by. Better that no shots be heard that night in Coatzacoalcos.

The cambujo continued his flight through the market, zigzagging back and forth and sowing obstacles in Felix’s path. A mix of Olmec Indian and black, he was short in stature but fast, and Felix was unable to overtake him. They emerged at the far end of the market onto the railroad tracks, and Felix saw the mestizo bounding along the rails like a rabbit, following the tracks toward the port outlined in the distance by scattered yellow lights. Felix followed his dark hare, who had an obvious advantage; he’d played there as a child.

Maldonado tripped over a spike and fell, but he never lost sight of his prey; the cambujo seemed not to want to be lost from view; as Felix fell for the second time, he stopped and waited for Felix to get to his feet before he went on running.

The rainstorm had ended with the same abruptness with which it had begun, magnifying to an even greater degree the pungent odors of the tropical port. A moist lacquerlike film shone on the long expanse of dock, the moribund rails, the asphalt, and the distant hulks of oil tankers. The cambujo ran along the length of the dock like a swift Veracruz Zatopek, with Felix some twenty meters behind him, harboring the burning conviction that this was not a normal chase; the cambujo was a false hare, and he a false turtle.

The pursued slowed his pace and the distance between them narrowed dangerously; Felix clasped his machete more tightly in his hand; at any moment the cambujo might turn with a pistol in his hand, his pursuer now within sure range. He stopped beside a black rain-washed tanker sweating gray drops of water and oil; Felix dropped the machete and threw himself upon the dark little man.

The tanker whistled one long blast. Felix and the cambujo fell to the ground and rolled along the dock, the mestizo offering no resistance. Felix straddled the heaving chest of his oddly passive adversary and planted his knees on the outspread arms. The prisoner twisted his wrists, teasing Felix with balled fists. For an instant they stared in panting silence, Greek masks. Felix’s face was the grimace of pain, the mulatto’s the mask of comedy, black, sweating, gold teeth shining. Felix felt beneath his weight that the wiry little man had yielded completely, with the exception of those clenched fists.

Felix seized one fist and tried to pry it open. Worse than the iron gauntlet of a medieval warrior, it was the claw of a beast with its own secret reasons for not ceding. The tanker sounded a second blast, more guttural than the first. The cambujo opened the hand, grinning like the little laughing heads of La Venta artifacts. There was nothing in the pink-palmed hand crisscrossed with lines promising eternal life and good fortune for the cambujo.

His captive turned round eyes toward the ship as Felix struggled to open his other fist. The ship’s gangplank began to rise from the dock toward the portside rail of the tanker. Felix reached for the abandoned machete and held the edge to the cambujo’s throat.

“Open that fist or I’ll cut off your head, and then your hand.”

The fist opened. Bernstein’s ring lay there. But not the stone as transparent as glass. Felix leaped to his feet, grabbed the neck of the cambujo’s shirt, jerked him to his feet, and roughly ran his hands over his body, felt the shirt, the trousers. He released him, as the ship cast off its lines.

Freed, the cambujo trotted back toward Coatzacoalcos, but Felix had no further interest in him. A cameo of light on the dark tanker had captured his attention, a circle of light on the poop deck, doubly bright, illuminated by brightness as strong as if from a reflector and by a face as brilliant as the moon, framed in the oval of a porthole, an unforgettable and unmistakable face, with bangs and crow’s-wing hair emphasizing the luminous whiteness of the skin, the icy diamonds in the gaze, the aquiline profile, as the woman turned her head.

The gangplank was halfway between the dock and the port rail. Felix thrust the ring into his trousers pocket and, still clutching the machete, ran desperately along the ship and lunged for the gangplank, managing only to brush the ends of the thick ropes dangling from the treads.

A freckled gringo, about forty, with a face marked by thin lips and a flattened nose, shouted from the rail: “Hey, are you nuts?”

“Let me on. Let me on!” shouted Felix.

The gringo laughed. “You drunk or somethin’?”

“The woman. I must see the woman you have on board.”

“Shove off, buddy, dames don’t travel on tankers.”

“Goddammit, I just saw her…”

“Okay, greaser, go back to your tequila.”

“Fuck you, gringo.”

The man laughed and his freckles danced. “Meet me in Galveston and I’ll kick the shit out of you. So long, greaser.” He secured the gangplank and thrust an obscene finger toward Felix.

Felix threw himself against the side of the tanker still bumping against the dock, and, swinging his machete, an unlikely Quijote, attempted to pierce the body of the slowly moving giant. As the ship eased away from the dock, the cutting edge of the machete scratched fresh paint, leaving a long shining scar along the hull.

The tanker churned the dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The night of rotted mangoes and sweet nicotiana evaporated like the puddles following the shower. Felix read the name on the tanker’s stern, S.S. Emmita, Panama, and saw the flag of four fields and two stars floating limply in the heavy air.

The face of Sara Klein, a paper moon suspended in a circle of light, had disappeared.