“Yes. I remember you, but not very well.”
“I don’t. I don’t know.”
“Speak more softly. Remember, he’s listening.”
“No. He’s asleep.”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, my God, M. le Capitaine. Are you all right?”
“It is nothing, madame, it must be the heat, or perhaps something I ate,” Branly managed to say. To avoid falling, he clung to the frame of one of the beveled glass windows from which eight years earlier a solitary boy had watched him, and from which Branly had not moved, that August afternoon in 1914, during the longest moments of his life.
“So long, my friend, that I decided to forget them. The forgetfulness was hastened by Myrtho when I stopped by to see her that evening. She was in the company of a general. I had to stand at attention. She looked at my medal and asked mockingly if it was chocolate; after all, hadn’t we had to retreat from Charleroi? They decorated you for a defeat—and Myrtho laughed as the general turned his back to me, making embarrassed sounds. When I returned to the street, the Parc Monceau was locked. Disconsolately, I walked back to my house. She was right, I had not been able to defend the cradle of the boy poet.”
12
He tells me that because he disguised his fear as timidity, he never returned to Monceau until after he was eighty, until recently, when he decided to relive the day of his leave in 1914, after the retreat from Charleroi and before following Joffre in the campaign that drove the Germans back to the river Aisne. We know what happened: the children did not even look at the old man, as the children of long ago had not looked at the lonely boy who watched them from behind the beveled windowpanes of the house on the Avenue Vélasquez.
He wished, as it sometimes happens in stories, that the children would gather round him while he told them tales of a time that everyone, with little justification, called the most beautiful and sweet, la Belle Epoque, la douceur de vivre. Instead, Branly leaves his park bench and walks slowly toward the Boulevard de Courcelles. As his eyes seek Myrtho’s balcony, he concedes that the children are right to have forgotten him as well as the atrocious war of the dead and the cruel life of the living.
“Poor Myrtho; she so wanted to save herself from the poverty and sickness that devastated her mother. Before she died, I saw her once, ravaged and tubercular. Was that the sweetness of life?”
He says that, more than anything, it is the memory of those days that stirs him that evening—once the voices of Victor and André are stilled, and the woods of the Clos des Renards, as night falls, begin to look like the sea—to get up out of bed and test his strength. He sighed as he closed the window, and said to himself what he is now telling me: “I hope they never grow up. Their mystery will be considered ingenuousness, or crime.”
He flexed his leg with greater ease, and in the mirror above the washbasin noticed that the swelling on his forehead had gone down—the same mirror the French Heredia had used the previous evening to demonstrate, surely in jest, that he was not the Nosferatu of Enghien-les-Bains. The truth was, of course, my friend already knew, and now remembered as with simple physical movement he emerged from the vast dream of the day that had been a kind of dark epiphany, that Heredia had acted to distract his attention from the mystery the boys—and this, too, Branly had decided—meant to be a second deceit, the reverse of, but complement to, the first. He shook his bald, gray-fringed head. Heredia wanted to trick him into believing there was no woman; the boys, that there was. He remembered the first time they had seen this house. The white phantom in the garret window had caused him to realize that 1870 was not an address but a date: a time, not a place.
His cane helped him master the hallway of symmetrically placed doors. He had become accustomed to the persistent, penetrating smell of leather, but as he approached the narrow stairway that led to the garret, he had an amazing olfactory sensation. We all know that experience, he is saying as the afternoon loses its prestigious light to fade into mousy hues; it is that sudden sharpening of the sense of smell which at a fleeting and unexpected moment recalls through a scent a city, a season, a person. Even, at times, what we call a civilization.
“No, I am not referring to the expected. If I walk through the Carrefour de Buci, I expect to be greeted by that marvelous, both fresh and pungent odor of pepper and pike, goat cheese, and bunches of marjoram. No, I mean when one encounters that sensation elsewhere, when the familiar odor occurs in an unexpected place.”
I said I understood what he meant. As an exile and a wanderer, I sometimes courted that sensation, but it came only when it was unsought. My lost cities of the River Plate, Montevideo and Buenos Aires, to me are the smell of hides, the dark river, cheap benzene, asphalt melted in the summer heat, wharves heaped high with wheat and wool, slaughterhouses and tea shops. I have found components of that odor here and there, in Nice and in Venice, along the Ramblas of Barcelona and on the docks of Genoa. It isn’t the same, only an approximation, like the dry, oppressive air of the high plains of Castile and Mexico.
As he climbs toward the garret room of the Clos des Renards, Branly, the hall behind him, confirms that the olfactory summons was that of hides, of skins of specific origin, each proclaiming its antiquity with a mute call to the nostrils: we are ancient Spanish hides, ancient Arab and Roman hides, we are hides from the tanneries of the Guadalquivir, the Tiber, the Tigris, we embellish desert caravans, the backs of long Christian breviaries, the sheaths of short Roman swords. And yet, to the sensitive nose of Branly—this friend so persevering and methodical in his passions and obsessions, whom I pictured sniffing like an old hound through the nooks and crannies of that villa hidden in the suburbs of Paris, a dusty oasis surrounded by commercial blight, discount stores, arcs of neon light—the farther he ascended the narrow staircase, the more that whirlwind of olfactory sensations was concentrated in a single superficially curious image, as if all the aromas of lost times and places ultimately had coalesced into an enormous painting of war trophies, a canvas with a David theme painted by a less harsh and less “disabused” Delacroix; a forgotten Imperial feast, decaying and decadent, Napoleonic splendor after the Maréchaux of the Grande Armée had looted the farthest corners of Europe and the Mediterranean to replenish the museums of France. He opened the door to the garret, the last gleam of daylight was a frozen star of dust, a milky winding-sheet, the perfect phantasmal crown for these trophies stripped from butchered beasts, cows, cats, camels, lions, sheep, monkeys, from the armies of the Carthaginians, the Ommiads, the Visigoths, all entwined in an absolute absence of historical connotation, vague rumors, crushed blossoms, a slough of names destined to be woven together in the scene that met his eyes as he opened the door, everything imagined or said or referred to resolved finally into a figure around which the hides, the skins stripped from the beasts of ancient armies, the trophies Masséna had plundered for France, were entwined like venomous flowers around precious jewels.
The woman beside the window was the very essence of an agitation not without order. Her Empire gown, white and diaphanous, high-waisted and with a long stole, was illuminated by the close, intense light of Ingres’s female portraits, and like them, this was a Neoclassic figure on the edge of Romanticism, observed but at the point of observing herself, rational but on the brink of madness, alert but on the edge of oblivion.
Her hands covered her face, and her rings, as well as her poisonous fingernails, were gilded with mercury. She was Ingres become Moreau, and Branly reeled before the image, steadied himself with his cane and leaned against the terminal, supporting pillar of the narrow stairway to the garret. The curtains of the window beside the woman’s figure were fine white muslin; they fluttered around her, animating her meaninglessly.
The French Victor Heredia closed the window and, with a circumspection Branly thought worthy of an old-fashioned chatelaine, rearranged the white curtains. The portrait of the woman in white illuminated by white lights and shadowed by the mask of her gold-tipped interlaced f
ingers rested against the vaulted wall of the attic.
“Ah, M. le Comte! I see we’re on our feet and ready to crow! I won’t ask you to help me with my ‘Madame Mère’ here, isn’t that what you say, ‘Madame Mère’? Bah, I don’t know, it’s so impersonal, the business of ‘Madame Mère.’ Every woman who doesn’t have a title like Duchesse de Langeais or Princesse de Lamballe, say, should have a short, catchy nickname like La Périchole or M’selle Nitouche, don’t you agree? But I won’t ask you to help me find a place for my mamá; to each his own, eh? and as the saying goes, we have only one mother.”
He laughed in his peculiarly irritating way, standing with arms akimbo, his hands hooked in the belt of a bizarre hunting outfit the likes of which Branly last remembered seeing in the second act of La Traviata.
“You know, M. le Comte? The ultimate freedom would be to have been born without a mother or a father. You wouldn’t understand this, yourself, being a man who prides himself on his ancestors, but, if you will forgive my frankness, one who wouldn’t have got very far without them. Ha! Don’t deny it! Who would you be if you’d had the opportunities of a paid laborer or a washerwoman’s daughter, eh? But when it comes to common, ordinary mortals like myself, who want to be responsible only to ourselves, we resent, believe me, that the debt we owe to those who give us life may be the very thing that allows them to take it back.”
“Why, then, have you kept the painting?” Branly inquired calmly.
Heredia chortled, executing a strange little dance punctuated by the heels of his knee-high hunting boots; Branly could only ascribe this behavior to a celebration of the gathering darkness in the garret. My friend was so captivated by the figure of the woman in the painting that only now, in hindsight, as is so often the case, was he able to complete the entire scene. His host had been hugging the shadows, avoiding the Ingres light that, to borrow from Quevedo’s great sonnet, lent a tone of enamored dust to the painting of the woman from the First Empire. Heredia shrank from that light; he was dancing a jig because night was falling over the world.
He asked his guest whether he thought anyone, a public or a private buyer, might be interested in a unique painting not really appropriate for hanging in a dining room or a museum, a woman hiding her face with her hands. Why, you would as little consider hanging something like this as hanging a horrifying painting he had once seen in a magazine of a Jesus crowned with thorns, wrists bound, bellowing with laughter, revealing sound teeth that indicated the diet in Palestine left little to be desired.
Branly pointed out to his host that he had not answered his question: why had he kept the painting?
He tells me he was not truly interested, as he was no longer interested in the person of Victor Heredia, in the answer of this Frenchman dressed as if for a big-game hunt in the time of the President-Prince. He asks it, actually, so as not to leave the story unfinished, to assign it to its proper place in the text.
“Every unborn being is one half of a pair, M. le Comte, you wouldn’t deny this, would you? it’s even true of dogs. Can’t you imagine, then, that the opposite is true, that young lovers are joined by the unborn child demanding creation through the souls of the young parents?”
Heredia looked at the painting and said, see, she seems to be pleading, the cold, the disdainful creature, interesting, yes, but disinterested; that was her manner, that was how she plotted to ensnare the ingenuous colonial, the Antillian planter, to capture his fortune by making him believe she didn’t need it.
“By the time he realized, it was too late. She had everything. His revenge was to have her painted like this, shamed in a painting, as she was never shamed in the bedroom, the salon, or the tomb. You see, M. le Comte, I picture my mother as a jeering skull with teeth like castanets, laughing at us night and day.”
“For her, there is nothing but night.” said Branly, again recalling the line from Lamartine.
Heredia laughed and replied that he doubted it. His mother could organize a fandango in the catacombs of death, a dance of skeletons, with long candles and tall candelabra, to continue her mockery—the colonists again deceived, exploited, and mocked by the European vixen who had appeared in La Guaira on the very eve of Independence to dazzle the young men with manners brilliantly adapted to the needs of the colonials, who in Bonapartist opportunism saw the mirror of their own dilemma.
“To fight a revolution in the name of the people, but for their own benefit. A simple matter of take-from-you and give-to-me, throw out the Spaniards and up with the Creoles, and what better model than Bonaparte?” my friend asks me, summing up Heredia’s lament. “The Creole revolutions weren’t fought for liberté, égalité, fraternité, but to acquire a Napoleon. That was and still is the secret desire of the ruling classes of Latin America.” I nod my agreement. “The Bonapartist consecration: my brother in Naples, my cousin the princess.”
The story was too simple and too predictable to explain satisfactorily Heredia’s rancor. But that evening the host of the Clos des Renards had nothing more to say, nor Branly more to imagine. The character, as my friend has already told me, fatigued him, but my friend also tells me that fatigue, paradoxically, was his greatest and most perverse strength. He was bored; the matter was easily forgotten. He forgot the context of the fatiguing apparition and lost interest in tying up loose ends.
That night, a kind of stupor, almost amnesia, prevented Branly from grasping the interrelationship of the diffuse images surrounding Heredia. He asks me now whether I—who have the advantage of hearing only the bare facts of the events, and was not, as he, immersed in the nonselective distractions of living twenty-four hours of every day—have been able to discern the connections he had not seen.
I hesitate before answering him. I know that if I say yes, I shall offend him; in spite of everything, he will take it as a presumption of superiority on my part, though I am his inferior in age and worth. But also, if I tell him no, he will take it as lack of attention or interest on my part.
“Perhaps this time you might have taken the extra step, Branly, the step that you did not take as a child that afternoon in the Parc Monceau.”
As I spoke, my friend aged before my eyes. I am not being ironic; it is not age that makes us appear old, and Branly is a young man of eighty-three. His face openly displayed an emotion that in his words had until then been only the latent expression of the hostile and unknown. But if, while he was speaking, hostility had hovered about him, now, as I spoke, it became a reality.
“Why do you say that?”
I replied that perhaps the boys’ deception had not, as he believed, consisted of trying to make him think that the woman in the painting existed, and remembered him; nor were they really suggesting, cruelly, that he could not remember the women he had loved; they were challenging him to remember the child in the window of the house on the Avenue Velásquez, whom, he himself admitted, he had forgotten.
“Do you remember his face, Branly?”
Sunk in thought, with an almost episcopal gesture of one hand, my friend sighed, “No.” And he placed his fingertips to throbbing temples, and said that this was exactly what he had been thinking that evening with Heredia in the garret of the Clos des Renards, that his host was inviting him to imagine the true motive for an ancient rancor buried in remote places and times. But he, Branly, had seen this as yet another trick by Heredia to divert him from the truth of his involuntary confinement, as well as the true relationships between the boy Victor Heredia, the French Victor Heredia and his son André, and himself, the uninvited guest, the indiscreet and suspicious fourth, whose presence—he felt it now—the other three, once he had accomplished the mission of reuniting them, resented.
“The simplicity of the story Heredia told me in the attic made me believe that his motive was to satisfy my curiosity and send me on my way back to Paris. But that was not the heart of the problem. They all knew I would not return alone. The Mexican boy would go with me. That is what I saw behind those pale, narrowed eyes. I saw host
ility, the unknown. Something that did not recognize me but hated me.”
Branly fell silent for a moment, then drew in his breath, as if suppressing a cry, before speaking. “Now you tell me that in fact the equation was reversed. He hated me because I did not recognize him.”
I did not dare ask Branly whether finally he admitted this was true. There was something too sad, too wounded, too anguished about my friend. I did not have to look in his eyes; his slumped figure conveyed his feeling that an opportunity had been lost forever.
13
CLEMENCITA
La bête épanouie et la vivante flore.
J. M. de H., “Les Trophées”
The French Heredia remembers with nostalgia that the wild January seas beyond the breakwater in the harbor of Havana—like holding to one’s cheek an icy bottle swept from distant waters and bearing a message of crushed salt and splendid desperation—taste of snow. He remembers, too, the dark, quiet ocean along the sandy shores of Veracruz, where the exhausted Mediterranean flings itself on the beach with a flash of scales, like a suicidal fish. Especially, because it was where she disembarked, he remembers the sunny sea of La Guaira, an unruffled mirror stretching placidly at the feet of mountain and fortress, rocks and pelicans.
It is difficult for Branly to believe that Heredia can evoke even a modicum of tenderness. He prefers to suppose that he has slipped back into his interrupted dream, and that from the heights of San Carlos he is watching a small sailing vessel flying the pale colors of the realm of the bees sail into port. He strains to see the distant figures pacing slowly back and forth on the deck, men with hands clasped behind their backs, women with opened parasols. He wishes he were close enough to see them, and instantly his wish is fulfilled. Now he is on deck, but the ship is adrift, crew and passengers have abandoned her, and the woman, at the estate on the high cliffs, and cloaked in the mists of a La Guaira dawn, is instead wandering through corridors of ochre stucco, through dew-wet patios that open into passageways of salt-air-pocked stone that lead to other patios of lichen and dry grass, vainly seeking a mirror in which to see and remember herself; yet all she knows is what is whispered in her ear.
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