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.