Distant Relations

by Carlos Fuentes

  The crows that are harbingers of night over the Île de France flew high overhead; below, a seething mass of invisible creatures released from the moist sand a sacred perfume that overcame the intolerable novelty of a house encased in hide. That powerful natural effluence, Branly mused, was an implicit rejection of the other anomaly of this lonely, leathery manor house: the dead leaves piled beneath the leafy late-summer bowers of the oak trees.

  Branly thought of his town house on the Avenue de Saxe and of the sand in which his sea pine grew, lending in the very heart of Paris a touch of seascape to his garden. He smiles, remembering the scene from Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou in which the heroine opens her door on the sixth floor of a Parisian apartment house and steps directly onto the beach: Cabourg, sea, sand.

  Now the scent of the moist earth of the Clos des Renards had the same effect, and my friend, a man who eagerly anticipates beauty, imagined the morning to come: the moist grass, the boughs wet with dew and rain, glistening with infinite pearls outside the window he would open when he awakened, and he would breathe deeply, grateful once again to be alive. How many nights had he delivered himself to sleep patiently resigned never to greet the dawn?

  The serenity of the vista was ruined by an all too obvious proof of the indolent neglect of the master of the house. Branly’s Citroën had been left abandoned against the oak that had interrupted his blind and careening flight two—or was it three?—nights ago. He tried to capture the idyll ruthlessly interrupted by an incongruous automobile, not unlike a Kurt Schwitters painting, another depiction of juxtaposed umbrellas and sewing machines set, not on an operating table, but in the middle of a garden designed by the heirs to Le Nôtre, which, as Branly is telling me now, smiling, almost playful in his allusion, is as if the flight to Varennes had been accomplished aboard a helicopter that lifted off from the Petit Trianon.

  No less grating, no less disfiguring for having been hidden, was the last thing to catch his eye as he surveyed the area between the end of the avenue where the Citroën—in a manner of speaking—lay between leafy oak trees and the verge of the avenue of dry leaves, the graveled lane along which Etienne had first driven Branly and the young Heredia to this house, and the garden, properly speaking, with its precise disposition of shrubs, pansies, and greensward among arabesques of artichokes and rosebushes, whose geometry, gradually revealed in this first persistent rain of the coming autumn, was sundered by a long, deep scar, a knife slash through this rational and most perfect of gardens, an eruption of savage forest in a space designed to negate it: from the fallen leaves, across the gravel, through grass and shrubs, the rain revealed, as if in developer solution, an indecent trough, a cruel, oblique swath carved across the face of the garden, a garden disfigured by something resembling the track of a mysterious, lurking, nocturnal beast.

  The color and texture of this scar were those of a match burn on human flesh—black, white, and gray. Branly’s eyes sought the birch trees, the striated silver of their bark, and, among the tree trunks, the figures of the two boys. This time they were not there, unless they were hidden in the mist.

  He shook his head. The crows soared. He massaged his temples. Night fell as he asked himself: How to describe the shadow of a dream? The insistence of the dripping shower drowned out the fine, expiring rain.

  Heredia turned on the light, and Branly clapped his hands over bedazzled eyes. He wondered how long his host had been standing there in the darkness, observing him observe the garden, the rain, and the scar in the garden, revealed by the rain. Not long, he concluded immediately. Peculiar to Heredia—Branly is saying this November afternoon in the empty, darkened dining room of the Automobile Club, where only he and I remain, and we remain thanks to the respect in which my friend is held in this establishment—was his ability immediately to dispel serene contemplation, good humor, spontaneity of sentiments, and to make anyone who shared with him an hour, or a room, feel self-conscious, if not guilty.

  After his host turned on the light, he picked up the tray he had set on a chair. He said, as he put it down, this time on my friend’s lap, that his guest would not complain today, he’d see, a delicious cassoulet, no leftovers from some earlier meal, eh? don’t you believe it. Branly did not reply at once. Though his eyes never wavered from Heredia’s, pale as the bark of the white birch trees, he settled himself in the bed before affirming that of course the hot meal must be the work of Madame; he was happy to know that she had returned and would take charge of the kitchen. Heredia must permit him to state with some frankness—Branly figuratively wiped his lips before beginning to eat—that the food today had not been, how should one say, umh, up to the standards of a Spanish innkeeper, or even of a thatched hut in the Antilles, not even … But surely Heredia would understand what he was trying to say: how could he suppose that his guest, during a day in which, astonishingly, his host did not once appear—how could he suppose that his guest would guess there was a plate of cold cuts for him in a dumbwaiter.

  “Didn’t you get enough?” Heredia asked.

  “I have eaten less under other circumstances,” was Branly’s reply, as once again he ignored Heredia’s impertinence. “That is not the point,” he continued. “It was the lack of any warning. Had I known last evening … You might have informed me.”

  “Well, the fact is, you found the food. You’ll know where to find it from now on.”

  Branly savored with pleasure a portion of sauce-soaked goose before adding: “Does that mean I may not expect to see you during the day, M. Heredia?”

  “I told you. I get up late. I go to bed late.”

  “Are you a vampire?” asked Branly with his best worldly smile, not looking at Heredia, but concentrating on carefully spearing with his fork the green beans swimming in the deep dish of the cassoulet.

  Heredia glanced at my friend from the corner of his eye and then did an extraordinary thing: he walked to the washbasin, took down the oval mirror, and carried it back to Branly’s bed. There he bent over, holding the mirror in both hands so that its oval reflected both the host and the guest.

  Branly tells me that at that moment, with all his attention riveted, as Heredia desired, on the undeniable reflection of their faces, and with the impatience of one who hopes for a solution to certain enigmas, so they will cease to be enigmas, and almost expecting to see only one face in the glass, his own, he overlooked the additional possibilities that only later would occur to him, and which, this afternoon, he outlines as follows:

  “I could not, you see, distinguish between our two breaths, one perhaps cold, the other warm, or one actual and the other illusory. No, I did not know whose was the life that breathed moisture on the mirror, as I did not know whether, through me, Heredia’s eyes were projecting a profile that was not in the mirror, perhaps not even in the bedchamber, or even whether the opposite was true and I myself was no more than an illusion traced on that oval by a nebulous finger drawing in the ephemeral mist on a mirror. You see, my dear friend, at this point I still did not know that a succession of dreams were merely disguising my ignorance of my own desires.”

  10

  “Il m’a eu,” my friend thought later. “He put one over on me and I allowed myself to fall into the trap.” Branly knew what his intention had been, to let Heredia know he was aware of the presence of the woman in the house. He wanted to confront him with the evidence, to see how he got around the proof gleaned from the inadvertently overheard conversation of the boys as they played on the terrace under his window, not suspecting Branly was listening.

  And too, he confesses now, he had wanted to know whether or not his dream was real, whether that oneiric wakefulness of the past few days could survive something as destructive and commonplace as verification: your dream is true, your dream is true because it is your dream, your dream is not a dream if it truly happened, your dream is a lie.

  But no; Heredia had caught him off-guard, had scandalized him with the exaggerated theatricality of the scene with the mirror; Bran
ly himself had given him the opening with his unfortunate reference to vampires. Henceforward, he would be more cautious. He strongly suspected that Heredia was hiding something from him, that the vulgarity so repulsive to the involuntary guest was a sham, an attempt to divert his attention from the truth.

  “I realized, you see, that the sentiments I have been describing, all inspired by Victor Heredia’s uncouth behavior, were only my sentiments about the man. It was only fair to admit that I had never seen how he conducted himself in society, nor did I know what others thought of him. I even reproached myself: it was I who was crude, capable of viewing my host only in the light of my own standards, my own values, and—why not say it—my own prejudices.”

  But then he thought again of the vanished woman he had loved in a garden where birth and death were simultaneous. He rejected his impartial sympathy for Heredia to tell himself that the vulgar, uncivil, coarse host of the Clos des Renards had in his rasping voice sung him a pretty tune the night before only to distract him from one question: where is the woman the boys had been talking about?

  And, as if on cue, their voices rose from the terrace. Branly listened attentively. The whole thrust of their conversation this morning was—in their games, laughter, sudden silences, snatches of the madrigal, intense secrecy—a reaffirmation of their decision that they would do nothing they could not do together, nothing from which one would be excluded. He imagined they were getting to know each other, as he believed he was getting to know them.

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “No, André.”

  “It’s hard for me to change.”

  “But I don’t want you to.”

  “Then if you don’t like it, Victor, I won’t be like that. I’ll be different.”

  Again, in the afternoons of his childhood in the Parc Monceau, a new child appears behind the windows of one of the handsome private houses that enjoy a privileged view of the garden which, though public, is the private domain of the nearby residents. It is difficult to see the boy’s face, to which beveled windowpanes, the blinding light of the late-afternoon sun, and yes, distance, give the strange appearance of a blurred photograph, a lead-gray coin. The young Branly would let many minutes pass by once his companions tired of staring at the solitary child and returned to their games amid the columns, crypts, and pyramids of this garden, this folly the Duc d’Orléans constructed before his renunciation in favor of the Republican cause deprived him of his power of caprice (but, I dare interrupt, is there such a thing as power without caprice?), power which—surely he would know better than anyone, he who by now affected a revolutionary name, a name to enter the new century with—as Philippe Egalité he would soon forever divest himself of.

  Branly recalls now, with a smile half-ironic, half-tender, his childhood in this magnificent place where an entire city’s secret aberration flowers and dies, blooms again, and is nourished in unexpected fantasy before becoming frozen in the paralysis of counterfeit ruins. In Monceau, eleven years before the Revolution, there were, oh, any number of follies—a Roman temple, a Chinese pagoda, fake feudal ruins, a Swiss dairy farm, and a Dutch windmill. The bourgeois mansions that flank five of the six sides of the park are like Medusa eyes which petrified that final flash of desperate, dying aristocratic madness.

  In one of the houses facing on the Avenue Vélasquez lives the child who never comes out to play with the others. Branly dreams him as he is, his face indistinguishable, but with pale, gleaming eyes fixed on the fake ruins of a century strangely obsessed with reproducing in miniature, to scale, with exquisite delicacy and love of trompe l’oeil, but not without a secret shudder, the whole of nature, as if nature were not sufficient in itself or unto us, but, rather, were guilty of the ineradicable sin of a past, an origin, attributable not to human reason but to divine insanity.

  “Marie Antoinette’s rustic hamlets at Versailles are no different from the battles between ranks of radishes and cauliflowers re-created on the lawn of Sterne’s character’s home when he was deprived of participation in the Duke of Marlborough’s campaign, as the metallic gardens of Goethe, dissatisfied with real nature existing outside the realm of his imagination, are no different from the fantasies of Philippe Egalité in Monceau.”

  One day the solitary child crossed the frontier between his house and the park. He opened the gate of the small private garden and, dressed in his sailor suit, entered the play area, where the children were singing À la claire fontaine, m’en allant promener. But his physical presence does not make it any easier to see his face, the features condemned to perpetual oblivion, a disfiguring surface of silver-gray mirrors beneath a sailor cap. As Branly, himself a child, looks at the boy, he feels that their relationship lies in the future, like that with the woman he can only love, because he can recognize her, and she him, only in the fatal time of instantaneous denouements, time without enigmas because identification between life and death is total, not in normal time where they do not recognize each other when they meet.

  The other children have gone back to their games; only Branly stands motionless, directing all his attention toward the newcomer. At first, the other children observe him with derisive curiosity, then with indifference, and finally they resume their games, neither curious nor derisive, more as if he were not there. And Branly recalls the instant in which he is ignored by all his playmates, as if he were already the man of eighty-three and not the child of eleven, but their indifference opens the way—he knows it, and a chill runs down his spine—to friendship and recognition with the solitary boy who today for the first time has appeared among them and who gives the impression of not understanding the ways of the world beyond his door. He stumbles clumsily, he shields his eyes with his hands, as if the light were too strong, and Branly does not know how to approach him and share with him a moment he knows is unique, because he does not know if the outsider who looks at him without seeing, through the pale eyes that are the only identifiable features in a blurred face, is by his actions—being there but not being there, open but impenetrable—trying to make his ignorance seem a mystery.

  “Even today, dear friend, I do not know whether I was experiencing what I attributed to the stranger; whether it was I, standing there with one hand on my hip and the other clutching a large red ball to my waist, like this, who assumed the air of intrigue, you know, the insolence, of one who though he feels insecure and foolish has at least the doubtful elegance of transforming his defects into mystery.”

  There is more to tell today about that long-ago afternoon dreamed on a recent morning and recounted now as my friend and I persist in prolonging a November afternoon that doesn’t yet warrant lighting the round streetlamps on the Place de la Concorde or extinguishing the subdued lights of the dining room in Gabriel’s pavillon, which produce a transfusion of shadows, impalpable, though solid to the eyes of two men deep in conversation, Branly and myself (yes, from time to time I manage to say something, introduce a comment, provide a conversational opening for my friend), who call forth the very light that permits one to call the shadow shadow.

  That something more, Branly continues, was the radical newness of the boy he had glimpsed so many times behind the beveled windowpanes that in some ineffable manner he had assimilated him into their group: clearly, the largely conscious transposition of ignorance into mystery practiced by the astute youth of eleven who was my friend Branly was, in the strange boy, something different, something which Branly, even on that long-ago day, recognizes without understanding, a missing segment of his soul that he will spend a lifetime searching for. In every hesitant gesture, in every stumbling step, in every fiber of this newcomer bathed in the sunlight with which he seemed to maintain some strange relationship of fear and benefice—as if the light, Branly repeats, were injurious to him, as if it absorbed from him the very little it bestowed on him—in all the behavior that fortunately, almost charitably, the other children were not observing, Branly recognized, most of all, inexperience, pristine astonishment,
withdrawal, and pathetic doubt.

  The child Branly wants to laugh. He is in the presence of a fool, an idiotic, maybe blind, feebleminded weakling, and he is grateful that the other children are not observing him observe the imbecile or they would laugh at him, because he, incomprehensibly, is not laughing at this melancholy, helpless, faceless buffoon, this nervous, clumsy dullard shrinking from the sun as if from a beast crouched to spring, says my friend, as if protecting himself against the rain, the air, thunder, fog, everything, because everything, he has always known it but only today can he put it into words, everything, he says, was new to this child. Not ignorance, not mystery, his pathetic gyrations on the edge of the Parc Monceau were those of a star born but two seconds before, hurled from a galaxy expanding for eons toward the moment of explosion that freed this creature confined within its perfect death throes. For this new child the world is new, and because it’s new—the outsider extends a pale, trembling hand toward my friend, and my friend does not know how to accept the offering—nothing is known.

  The outsider holds out his hand. My friend drops the red ball and his insolent poise deserts him; he runs to join his playmates. The ball rolls to the feet of the cretinous child, who with clumsy, mechanical movements bends down to pick it up, mewing something incomprehensible, something not even a language, but my friend—today, an old man, he is still proud of it—resists the impulse to run back for the ball, to reclaim his property, to snatch it from the half-wit afflicted by the sun, who looks at the ball and looks at my friend and looks at the trees and looks at the park benches as if everything were not only new but incomprehensible. For him Monceau has no name, no history. It is what his eyes tell him.