Distant Relations

by Carlos Fuentes

  “For those eyes were his entire identity, his entire intelligence, captive in a face I cannot remember; everything was incomprehensible, so everything was new and everything was strange.”

  From the corner of his eye he looks at the little boy who had slipped from the house on the Avenue Vélasquez. He prays that the other children will not realize he has not run to the newcomer to grab the ball that does not belong to him but to all the playmates who gather here every afternoon after school. The moment he turns his back to the child, he hears the sound of the ball and he stops, turns, and sees the extended hands, the ludicrous, almost-squatting stance, the ever-bewildered gaze, and the red ball bouncing toward him. My friend wonders, then as now, whether the outsider had returned the ball voluntarily or whether it had dropped from his inept hands.

  He felt a fervor, a rush of tenderness, for that stranger; even today, he is grateful for that. It was a revelation about himself at eleven that would accompany him always, not a memory but a reality, and then as today, and also in the spiral times of dream, he feels that he was about to take the one step more that would have led him to the strange boy, to a sympathetic embrace, because two creatures who at last recognize each other are the very figure of compassion itself. Forget what separated them, remember what united them, recover something shared, the reason for his fervor.

  He did not take that step. He did not embrace the boy. Still, the fervor of the experience, the outsider’s gesture in returning the ball to him, his in not grabbing it from him, revealed to Branly that he had “what one calls a soul.”

  The wind swelled the room and again my friend had the sensation that an interior sail was moving this leather-lined house toward a destination far distant from its present location; the walls became gentle waterfalls, and my friend awakened.

  The young Mexican Victor, the youth with the lank dark hair, was observing him intently, sitting at the foot of my old friend’s bed. For a long time they looked at one another, unspeaking. As Branly emerged from the dream of his childhood fervor, he saw nothing in the eyes of the young Heredia to compensate for the categorical loss of the dream.

  “You looked afraid,” the young Heredia said at last.

  Branly wanted to ask: then why did you not wake me? He knew he had not had a nightmare but that the dream from which he had emerged to meet the pale eyes of the boy he scarcely knew had been a pleasing one, the memory of an anointing, the recognition of his own, but shared, spirit.

  “Then my face did not reflect my dream,” he replied.

  He held out a transparent, bony hand to touch Victor. He was aware that the youth represented something he missed terribly, something, in spite of his apparent proximity, as distant as the idiot of his dream. Here, now, sitting on Branly’s bed, he merely accentuated the terrible distance Branly felt when Victor appeared in the birch grove or beneath his window, a disembodied voice accompanied always by another boy, whose face Branly had never seen.

  “Have you spoken with your father?” my friend asked. The Mexican boy hesitated a moment, and then nodded.

  Branly said he was feeling much better and that surely by tomorrow they could return to the house on the Avenue de Saxe. He lightly stroked Victor’s hand, but he did not attempt to tell him how much he appreciated this proof of independence, the fact that he had come to see him in spite of young André’s prohibitions and in spite of having sworn to do nothing that the two had not agreed upon beforehand, this Castor and Pollux from two such distant and distinct, perhaps not hostile but certainly not sister, cities. He hoped that his touch communicated his approval of what implicitly he judged to be Victor’s rebellion against André; to have made his approval explicit would have been an almost irreparable faux pas. Victor surely would have retreated to the friendship with the boy his own age; what could he find interesting about an old man of eighty-three?

  What, indeed, Branly’s mind leaped to the thought, if not the fact that he had brought him here, that he had served as indispensable guide until the moment Victor had slammed the door on Etienne’s fingers and the other Victor Heredia, the Frenchman, had come down the avenue of dead leaves to offer his spontaneous and generous assistance?

  “Yes,” said Victor, “it all depends on how you feel.”

  “Much better, as I told you. Thank you for inquiring. What news is there of our Etienne? Why has he not come for the automobile?”

  “I don’t know. As soon as you’re better and can walk, you must meet the others.”

  “André? Your friend? Of course.”

  Victor again nodded, and lowered his head so that his long dark lashes shadowed the flicker of embarrassment in his eyes. “Yes, and her too.”

  “Who is she, Victor?”

  “She says she wants to see you again.”

  “Ah, then she is someone I know?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what she says. Ciao!”

  He ran from the room, and my friend fell into a curious meditation, the gist of which he is now communicating to me in the deepening shadow of the dining room.

  “But of course. He did not come to see me on his own, out of any affection for me; he came because the two boys had plotted to deceive me, don’t you see?—to upset me and mock me with this patent lie about the existence of another person, a woman, an acquaintance of mine, in the house.”

  He says that above all he was irritated by the contempt underlying the boys’ ridiculous invention. He laughs as he recalls his thoughts that day: they think me so old and distraught that I can no longer clearly remember the women I have loved; as long as she is old, they think they can pass off any woman as mine; not only can I not remember her, I cannot even, it goes without saying, recognize her.

  As he pushed himself upright in the bed, he almost overturned the breakfast tray with coffee pot, cup and saucer, silver, sugar bowl, and rolls. His first reaction, he says, was surprise that he had not smelled the unexpected breakfast he had been prepared to fetch later from the dumbwaiter where Heredia had left it in the dying hours of the night. He was adjusting to the schedule of only two meals a day, but the later the first, the less he suffered awaiting the second.

  As he pulled the tray toward him, he realized why his sense of smell had not warned him. Everything was cold, the bread was cold, the coffee was cold, with no hint of the comforting warmth that for so many years had transmitted to palms of hands and fingertips a concern for his person that would never falter, and which, morning after morning, was manifested in this simple proof: a warm breakfast tray respectfully placed across his knees.

  Had young Victor brought the tray this morning? He reproached himself, he had not thanked the boy. But his unfailing courtesy immediately gave way to an unpleasant suspicion, and to the question it inevitably posed. “Why was Victor, a young foreign guest in this house, serving the Frenchman who bore his name?”

  Branly tells me that he felt distant eyes upon him. Again he heard the voices from the terrace.

  “Where are you from?”

  “From Mexico. And you?”

  “From where I’m from.”

  Once more the voices faded into that strange litany, as soporific as a rosary of poppies, of cities no longer capitals of former nations or forgotten colonies.

  “German East Africa?”

  “Dar es Salaam?”

  “Bosnia and Herzegovina?”

  “Sarajevo!”

  11

  Sarajevo, my friend murmurs, trying to remember where he was on that bitter day, the 28th of June 1914. What was he doing while the Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip did what he did and what was he saying when the Archduke Francis Ferdinand ceased to speak forever? Had he just awakened late one morning following a pleasurable night, the perfume of the woman sleeping beside him filling his nostrils? He was barely eighteen, but he had already assumed his place in the world with all the pleasures and privileges ordained by name, rank, family, duty, and right. It was La Belle Epoque. The summer air, drifting through the windows of a balc
ony opened above the Boulevard de Courcelles and facing the Parc Monceau of his childhood, bore pollen from the chestnut trees. No one was preparing his coffee; the woman was almost invisible among the pillows; that novelty, the telephone, had not rung; the newspapers with their world-shaking headlines had not yet appeared; she would weep over the death of a morganatic wife that day in Sarajevo; she was sentimental voluptuousness and delicious indifference.

  They did not care whether anyone saw them, whether anyone knew they had lain late in bed making love, and then he rose, naked, and, smiling, lightly caressed his lover’s ankles. He walked to the balcony, looked out toward the park and the distant houses from which no one would be able to see his naked figure, young, erect, bathed in the sensual pleasure that was very new but fully accepted, no anxiety, no clumsiness. Yet, through the beveled panes of a distant window, he could see the eyes of the hidden, silent child isolated for all time, past and future, who only once had known the possibility of friendship, when it was offered him by an eleven-year-old Branly.

  Shivering, he drew the drapes, and from the bed the woman said: Why are you doing that? It’s such a beautiful morning. And he told her he had felt cold, and laughed: besides, why should anyone but himself see her like this, he wanted her all to himself, and paraphrasing Lamartine he whispered into her ear: I say to this day, stay your flight. She answered: But you drew the drapes; and he laughed: Then we needn’t change the poet’s words, Je dis à cette nuit: “Sois plus lente.”

  He read the headline as he left Myrtho’s house at dusk. At first he did not understand its significance, because his imagination was still captive to Myrtho’s bedroom on the corner of the Boulevard de Courcelles and the Rue de Logelbach, amid a mountain of sheets and pillowcases and eiderdowns and unlaced camisoles and black stockings and close-fitting boots, all the sensual paraphernalia of the clothing of that era, when everything, he tells me, was more delicious for being more challenging. And now he was sitting reading an incomprehensible newspaper in a café on the Boulevard Malesherbes, wondering whether at his age he should apply for an officer’s commission or wait to be conscripted. In the window of the café he looked for the beardless reflection of his face, an adolescent disguised as a man.

  Before the Great War, he explains, men became adult at a younger age, because the average lifespan for European men was only thirty-eight to forty years (tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, smallpox, syphilis, typhoid, malaria, tumors, silicosis, mercury poisoning from gilding). At eighteen, a man had lived half his life, and was not, as now, just beginning.

  “Today everyone tries, at times obscenely, to prolong his youth. Haven’t you seen the sexagenarians who insist on disguising themselves as Boy Scouts? Before 1914, one entered adulthood as soon as possible. We let our beards and mustaches grow, we wore pince-nez and bowlers, black suits, high boots, wing collars, and starched shirts. And who went out for a stroll without a cane and spats, except a workman or a beggar? Though there was very little difference between the two, I can assure you.”

  But the numerous, cumbersome, formal garments they wore augmented sexual pleasure, he attests: the prize was not easily won, the surprises were climactic, the anticipation formidable. Nights did pass more slowly; they obeyed, as a horse its rider.

  He thought of the author of the Meditations several weeks later when he received the solicited commission; he was sent to the front as he had requested, and fully expected it was his destiny to die in one of the places where he had savored life. So many holiday retreats, his grandfather’s castle near Vervins every Easter and Christmas, excursions to the banks of the Marne and into the heart of the Ardennes forest in summertime. At each instant in which death threatened, he repeated almost mechanically: Et de mourir au lieux où j’ai goûté la vie!

  During his first leave, he decided to test the constancy of the places where he had enjoyed Parisian life; he hesitated whether to return first to the apartment on the corner of Courcelles and Logelbach or to the garden of his childhood years. Gradually, aimlessly, the lassitude of the uncommitted afternoon following a superb, gratefully savored solitary luncheon at the Laurent on the Champs-Elysées, the slight headiness of the golden cigarette between his lips, the sensation of being himself and at the same time someone different, yes, somehow different in the uniform of an officer decorated following the battle of Charleroi—defender of the cradle of the most vulnerable and violated poet who ever lived—and perhaps the thought of the young and handsome Rimbaud led him to the large house on the Avenue Vélasquez. He found the courage to ring the bell and ask for the child, the boy, that is, the young man, who lived there, who had lived there as a child.

  The concierge told him that the family had moved some time ago, but if the officer wanted to see the apartment, it was empty now, it had a beautiful view of the park, ah, if someday when this was over, the officer should marry and be looking for a place to live, just look at this priceless view, said the talkative little old woman as Branly walked through the white-walled apartment, stroking the silky points of the brilliant mahogany mustache acquired in the campaign against the Huns, smiling, thinking less of this having been the dwelling of that strange child than of the amusing fact that from the windows of this room he could see the balcony of a Myrtho still unaware of the surprise her young lover had in store for that night that would be the slowest of their lives. The woman ten years his elder would open the door without recognizing him: how could they look the same, that young beardless aristocrat with languid, though not yet perverse, manners, so swiftly and satisfactorily ensconced in the center of his world, prepared to dispense and receive its rewards in the circle which, accepting him as its hub, deferred to him, and this young, mustached, tougher man, martial and stiff as a ramrod, who had seen others die and had fully expected to die himself at the Ardennes and at Charleroi.

  “Oh, my God, M. le Capitaine. Are you all right?”

  From the window overlooking a garden of open, blackened wounds, he sees a procession advancing through mountains of dead leaves down an avenue of oaks and chestnut trees green in summer. This time the palanquin is borne by a number of shrunken, white-haired old men in rags and tatters, who, in high shrieking voices almost indistinguishable from the dire cries of the birds in that blighted landscape, are singing the madrigal Chante, rossignol, chante, toi qui as le coeur gai—sing, nightingale, sing, you who have a happy heart—and behind them, flat-footed and ponderous, stumble ten or twelve naked pregnant women whose greedy eyes never leave the litter, shaking their heads like bitches emerging from water, dogging the palanquin that is advancing through mounds of dead leaves, borne on the shoulders of the miserable, filthy, shrunken old men.

  In the litter lies a youth on the threshold of puberty, totally naked, bathed in gold, motionless as a statue, like one of Rodin’s sculptures of young lovers, but without the girl to kiss. The statue is dead, Branly begins to scream, I warned you, gilding with mercury is poisonous, it should never have touched that body.

  The motionless boy does not look toward him, but the shriveled old men do. They hail him, beckoning him to join the procession, inviting him with their shrill laughter, as the awesomely heavy, leaden women ask if he dares invite them to dine.

  “Woman and death are the most sumptuous guests at the world’s feast. Who will dare invite them?”

  “Oh, my God, M. le Capitaine, are you all right?”

  “What is the matter with you, Félicité? You look pale.”

  “A woman killed herself last night in the ravine in the woods, right here near Vervins, M. le Comte. They found the body the next morning, devoured by wolves.”

  “It was only by a miracle that we met. In the normal course of events, I would have died before he was born. It is equally true that he could have died before we met, as his brother did.”

  “Marco Polo relates that twenty thousand persons were executed during the funeral procession of the Mogul Khan, to serve him in death.”

  “The mother of Vict
or and Antonio? Who knew the boys’ mother? Did you know her, Jean?”

  “There are things one loves only because they will never be seen again.”

  “Her name was Lucie.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “From Mexico. And you?”

  “From where I’m going.”

  “Do you remember me?”

  “Not very well. Do you remember me?”

  “No, I don’t remember you. But I remember a terrible storm in August that stripped the leaves from the trees and left them naked; it seemed like November. Don’t you remember it?”

  “No, Victor.”

  “I also remember a country that was ours, our property. It was beautiful there, everything was always changing; nothing was twice the same, not grass or clouds or anything. Don’t you remember it?”

  “No. But I remember you.”

  “I don’t remember you.”

  “You don’t remember when Alexandre Dumas came to visit?”

  “No, not at all. Only the places that changed, whether it was hot or cold, rainy or sunny. Things like that. What was Dumas doing here?”

  “I think he wrote a book. But it was lost.”

  “We can find it, André.”

  “I remember you a little. I especially remember that you were supposed to come back. I remember that. You’ve come a little late.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  “You were late with your gift, Victor.”

  “No. I didn’t forget that. I have it.”

  “You’ve brought it to me? You have it here?”

  “No. It’s in my suitcase.”

  “Get the suitcase. Please.”

  “I will if you want me to. We’ll do everything together, won’t we?”

  “Yes. Now you see I won’t do anything you don’t like.”

  “Have you thought, maybe you were waiting for me?”