For the same reasons, he decided to stay at the hotel through Wednesday. He bought a return ticket to Mexico City for Thursday afternoon. By then, the Emmita would have reached Coatzacoalcos and Rosita and Emiliano would have received the ring from Harding’s hands. Felix engaged a cabana by the swimming pool, sunned, swam, and had a club sandwich and coffee for lunch. He went in swimming several times, hoping to cleanse his memory of Angelica, but he kept his eyes open underwater, afraid he would find her broken body at the bottom of the pool.
Everything seemed normal in the hotel, and the Rossettis’ room was quietly emptied of their belongings and occupied by another couple. Felix could hear them from the balcony; they spoke English and were talking about their children in Salt Lake City. It was as if Mauricio and Angelica had never been in Houston. Felix faded into the protective coloring of the hotel and took advantage of the dead hours to try to order his thoughts, an undertaking that led nowhere.
Thursday afternoon, he left behind him the burning plains and humid skies of Texas. Soon the sterile earth of northern Mexico dissolved into dry, dark peaks, and these yielded before the truncated volcanoes of the center of the Republic, indistinguishable in form from the ancient pyramids that perhaps lay beneath their petrified lava. At six o’clock in the evening, the Air France jet hurled itself down into the circle of mountains half hidden in the lethargic haze of the Mexican capital.
Felix took a taxi to the Suites de Génova, where they asked whether he wanted the same room. Thanks to his memorable tips, they fawned over him as they led him to the apartment where Sara Klein had been murdered. The thin and oily employee ventured the comment that Felix looked very well after his trip. As he removed the white sombrero he’d bought in the airport at Coatzacoalcos, Felix confirmed in the bathroom mirror that his hair was beginning to grow back thick and curly and his eyelids had lost their puffiness; only the scars from the incisions were still noticeable. Somehow his moustache was obliterating the memory of the operation and returning to him the face that, if not exactly his own, more and more resembled the face of his private joke with Ruth, the Velázquez self-portrait.
Thinking of Ruth, he almost telephoned her. He’d forgotten her all the time he’d been away; he’d had to put her out of his mind; if not, that most intimate and commonplace of all relationships might have diverted him from the mission I’d commended to him. He was also restrained by the fact that to his wife he was a dead man. Ruth had attended the burial in the Jardín Cemetery organized by the Director General and Simon Ayub. The widow Maldonado had not had much time to accustom herself to her new role. As Felix had felt he must reserve a sacred moment with Sara’s body, he felt now he must reserve a special moment for his reunion with Ruth. A disembodied voice over the telephone would be too much for such a domestic woman, a woman who solved all his practical problems, who prepared his breakfasts and pressed his suits.
His feeling for Sara, living or dead, was a different matter, something akin to the sublimation of adventure itself. She was the most fervent, but also the most secretly guarded, motivation for his actions. My instructions had been clear. No personal emotion was to stand in our way. There is no intelligence mission that does not inevitably evoke one’s emotions and weave an invisible but inescapable web between the objective world we set out to control and the subjective world that, whether we wish it or not, controls us. Had Felix realized during this strange week that, no matter how wide-ranging, events never move us far from the place where we are our own hosts, and that no external enemy is greater than the one residing within us?
Later Felix told me that as he was dialing my number after his return from Houston he remembered the joking way he’d announced Angelica’s death before it had occurred: “Your sister’s drown’d, Laertes.” I’d set aside my personal feelings, although at that point Angelica’s role in this intrigue was ambiguous. He felt he didn’t need to say anything more when he telephoned me from the Suites de Génova, didn’t have to find a quote from Shakespeare to tell me that, instead of drowning, Ophelia had died a broken doll upon the steamy pavement of a Texas city.
“When shall we two meet again?”
“When the battle’s lost and won.”
“But tell us, do you hear whether we have had any loss at sea or no?”
“Ships are but boards, sailors but men: there be land-rats and water-rats, land-thieves, and water-thieves.”
“What tell’st thou me of robbing?”
“The boy gives warning. He is a saucy boy. Go to, go to. He is in Venice.”
I hung up. I had noted with uneasiness an impatience and reticence in Felix’s voice. I had the feeling he was hiding something from me, and I feared that. Our organization was very new, it was testing its wings, and no one, not even I, could pride himself on having the tough skin of our Soviet, European, or North American counterparts. That accursed subjectivity was, irrationally, seeping through the cold sieve of the means which should have been identical to the ends. The Golden Rule of espionage is that the means justify the ends. I couldn’t imagine a single individual on the long list of those we emulated, from Fouché to Ashenden, perturbed by any personal emotion; they would brush sentiment aside like a mosquito. But it was also true that no Mexican spy would ever come in from the cold; the suggestion, climatologically speaking, was ludicrous, and I imagined my poor friend Felix Maldonado looking for a refrigerator to crawl into in Galveston or Coatzacoalcos.
I lighted my pipe and, not in the least at random, opened my Oxford edition of the complete works of Shakespeare to the graveyard scene in Hamlet. As I began to read again, I told myself that was the only thing I could do, to begin again where I had left off when Felix telephoned. Laertes is telling the Priest to lay Ophelia in the earth so that from her fair and unpolluted flesh violets might spring. The Priest refuses to say the Requiem for a suicide; the soul of Ophelia will not depart in peace. Laertes rebukes him; Ophelia, he says, shall be a ministering angel when he lies howling. This fearful curse is followed by the equally terrible action of Laertes. He asks the earth, that of the grave, and also that of the world, to hold off a while till he has once more caught his sister in his arms. He leaps into the grave beside the body of Ophelia. Hamlet, in spite of his emotion, watches this scene with strange passivity, the usual passivity of this actor who is the always distanced observer of his own tragedy. The whole of the Renaissance is contained in this scene. Man, in his world, has discovered an excessive energy that he hurls like a challenge into the face of the heavens; at the same time, he has discovered his insignificance within the gigantic cosmos, and knows he is smaller even than Providence had augured. Only an impassive irony like Hamlet’s can reestablish the equilibrium; others judge him mad.
I watched the curling smoke ascend toward my library ceiling. In spite of her name, I could not imagine Angelica dispensing the favors of heaven to man. But, in this story, which of the women whose threads were always broken before they reached my hands deserved divine favors? Of Sara and Mary and Ruth, all Jewish, which would look into the face of God? If Angelica were not Ophelia, which would be our Ariadne? If I were an inglorious Laertes, would my friend Maldonado know to be a Hamlet with method in his madness, or would he lose himself within the labyrinth of modern Minotaurs?