He fell exhausted upon the king-size bed, called room service, and asked for breakfast to be sent to him precisely at 8:00. He slept without removing his clothes or turning off the light.
12
HE DRANK his orange juice and two cups of coffee, and by 8:30 he was in the elevator in a clean, pressed suit, one of several hanging in the closet of his room. He left orders for the valet service to dry-clean the suit he’d worn to dinner at the Rossettis’; the cuffs were caked with mud.
He waited at the hotel entrance for the doorman to deliver the Chevrolet. The doorman handed him the keys. “You won’t be taking a taxi this morning, Licenciado? The traffic’s fierce, it always is at this hour.”
“No, I’ll be needing the car later, thanks.” He tipped the doorman.
He progressed slowly down Reforma and the Avenida Juárez, even more slowly down Madero, and turned into Palma to leave his car in a five-story parking garage. From there he walked down Tacuba toward the National Pawn Shop on the Plaza de la Constitución.
There he walked faster. The immense plaza stirring in the early morning, the naked space, the ancient memories of Indian empires and Spanish viceregencies, the treasures lost forever in the depths of a vanished lake, evoked scenes of rebellions and crimes, fiestas, deceit and mourning. In front of the Cathedral, an old woman was throwing dry tortillas to a pack of hungry dogs. At one of the Palace gates, Felix showed his invitation to the soldiers of the guard, olive-colored uniforms and olive-colored skin, and then to an usher, who directed him to the Salón del Perdón, where the ceremony was to be held.
Many people were milling around the great brocade-and-walnut Salón dominated by the historic painting of the rebel Nicolás Bravo pardoning his Spanish prisoners. Felix quickly located the faces that most interested him. The small, blond Simon Ayub, strolling unaccompanied. Felix didn’t have to get any closer, the odor of clove spanned the distance like an indecent love letter addressed only to him. Farther away, the taller, nearsighted Bernstein, one of those to be honored. Felix strained to see whether Sara Klein was with him, but was distracted by the sight of the Director General in violet eyeglasses, visibly suffering in the bright daylight, the flashes of the press photographers, and the television lights. Beside the Director General, whispering into his ear, Mauricio Rossetti, looking slightly hung-over and staring straight at Felix. There was a moment of heightened whispering, followed by an impressive silence.
The President of the Republic entered the Salón. He advanced among the guests, greeting them affably, probably making jokes, pressing certain arms, avoiding others, effusively offering his hand to some, coldly to others, recognizing one man, ignoring the next, illuminated in the steady, biting television lights, intermittently divested of shadows by the flashes. Recognizing. Ignoring.
He was approaching Felix.
Felix prepared his smile, his hand, adjusted the knot of his necktie.
If the President of the Republic spoke to him this morning, it would prove once and for all that he was indeed Felix Maldonado. The President of the Republic did not speak to persons who were not who they said they were. That would teach a lesson to the people trying to wrest his identity from him, even if only the identity of his name. Yesterday’s nightmare would vanish forever. He was attending the ceremony in which the National Prizes in the Arts and Sciences were being awarded, and every person who doubted his identity, or was asking him to renounce it, was present. Not the President, no. He would speak to him. He would recognize him. He would say, How are you, Maldonado? What’s the latest on those costs? Maldonado could reply with a light joke, Costly, Señor Presidente, only up, Señor Presidente. But he wouldn’t; he’d limit himself to a slight nod in recognition of the honor bestowed. At your service, Señor Presidente, thank you for recognizing me.
Felix tried to fix in his mind the President’s physical appearance, to recall his face. He couldn’t. Impossible. And not just because of the dazzling white glare of reflectors and flashes. The President suffered the same malady as Felix Maldonado. He had no face. He was nothing but a name, a title. He was Presidential pomp and ceremony, an aura of power. He was without a face or a name of his own; he was a protecting, all-dispensing, all-recognizing hand. Maldonado glanced at the cluster of Presidential assistants. Unsuccessfully, he searched for familiar faces dispersed throughout the mob, obliterated in the white darkness surrounding the President. He couldn’t see Bernstein, Ayub, Rossetti, or the Director General.
The President was within a few steps of Felix Maldonado.
PART TWO. THE MEXICAN AGENT
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.