Distant Relations

by Carlos Fuentes

  It wasn’t a bad thing for his son to believe he was the son of the Mamasel and not of this distinguished, proper, but insipid and affected girl from the provinces stuffing herself with the sticky-sweet pastries of her native Limousin. It might well cause Heredia’s present wife to take stock of the highly precarious situation any woman finds herself in when she is, or ceases to be, the object of the caprice of a fine gentleman like Francisco Luis de Heredia, son of the Spanish enslavement of Indians, descendant of the patriarchs, judges, and jailers of the plains of Apure, with his face pocked and pale as the devil’s shirtsleeve, deep in the ancient jungles of Hibueras, where more than one Andalusian conquistador left his soul and his bones.

  “Don’t you fret,” Clemencita told her young lady. “No real gentleman goes around telling people what a fine man he is.”

  “That doesn’t matter to me at all, Nana. I love him. I want him to come back to me. I am his precious Mamasel, that’s what he called me.”

  “Branly, are you all right?”

  “Look, child: the dress you wanted. Look, my boy: you don’t know how your mother suffered. Look, my new Señora: I’ll go when I choose, because your husband needs me as a living reminder of his remorse. Look, Master: you’re a devil, and I wouldn’t trust you or any of yours. You Heredias would do anything to ruin and shame my little honey bee, who loved me from the moment I was rescued from begging in the steep streets of La Guaira, pure papaya peel and burning stone. But she knew more than any of you, for all your fine ways. She knew the secret of things. For example, how, not looking at herself in any mirror, she went beyond what I’d planned—which was to make her forget how fast she was growing old here alone in this big house on the cliff high above the sea—she went back to another time without mirrors when she was a little girl. She used to say, ‘Clemencita, take me to the park because it’s sunny today and I have a friend in the Park Monsewer or Monzoon,’ I don’t know how to talk that gibberish, young Victor, and she used to describe that beautiful park all filled with windmills and dairy farms and splashing fountains, it was ‘precious’ she said, like your papá called your mamá in the days when he loved her, before he dragged her down to the depths of shame, her first shame, and worse to come. I think her salvation was remembering her childhood games in that Monzoon or Monsewer Park in Paree, and her little playmate, because, she said, sitting there on her balcony overlooking the tile roofs and the still sea of La Guaira, ‘he is my friend and he will never grow old as long as he remembers me and I remember him. He will never grow old if he dreams of me, nor will I, Clemencita.’”

  “Is something wrong, M. le Comte? Remember, it’s only a painting, eh?, not a real woman who remembers you and is waiting for you here, as the boys said. Have you seen a ghost? As old as you are, how do you know what true memory is? Live a hundred years and you will see you have forgotten ninety percent of your memories, those things that happened in the most profound well of the past. What do you think? I will tell you: memory is like an iceberg, it reveals only what it chooses. Do you remember the three buzzards that followed the French merchant everywhere? Don’t lose sight of them. Now they’re circling above El Morro in Havana where Francisco Luis, ruined by the adventure of the Mexican bonds, has taken refuge among the Spanish colonists who when they become Cuban insurgents will also make my father pay for his crimes of smuggling, slavery, and prostitution. Now he must maintain us, his second wife and his son, in the comfort and the cult of appearances of the Second Empire. I say this in his favor. Everything conspired against him to sink him in a morass of poverty, but he would not allow it, his bitterness merely inflamed him. The blame for all this lay in the deceit of the Frenchman and his damned daughter, the Mamasel. But no one can sink Francisco Luis de Heredia, because he is a Señor, an absolute Spanish hidalgo in a land of brainless blacks and indolent Indians.”

  What could he scheme in the time of Napoleon’s nephew that his father-in-law hadn’t schemed in the time of the uncle? Obsolete arms for the Republic in Mexico, and contraband for and bonuses from that heaven-sent French intervention, with its hosts from every corner of Imperial Europe, Zouave battalions, Walloon regiments, bands of Czech musicians, Austrian hussars and Hungarian cooks, dancing masters from Trieste and lesser Polish nobility still reeking of cows, hams, and tile stoves, Prussian calligraphers and zealous young men escaped who knows how from the cold of Petrograd, all flowing together—thirsty, hungry, fevered, primitively libidinous and liberated in the land of El Dorado and of the noble savage with whose image the Old World had lulled itself for a century—on the distressed beach of Veracruz, where three buzzards wheeled above the fort prison of San Juan de Ulúa.

  “Can you imagine that he would miss a chance for revenge, Frenchman? Hear me well, you through whose lips I speak, imagine how that devil will take his final revenge against my little girl-grown-old, very old, how he will snatch her from the dovecote where she lived without mirrors above the unreal mirror of the sea of La Guaira, he who already had betrayed and shamed her as a young girl, he who had dried up every drop of her youth and beauty, now in her old age how could he resist using her and shaming her, dragging my muddled baby to Veracruz, where he left her to the mercy of the drunken, jeering, cruel, bone-weary troops far from their homes. Ah, Clemencita, Francisco Luis told me, what a good idea to make your Mamasel’s dancing gown again. For that’s what she’s going to do, she’s going to dance in strange whorehouses filled with Indians and Flemings, peasants in rough white cotton and hussars in embroidered jackets, high-cheeked Hungarians and Jaliscans with lugubrious eyes. The great brothel belt of the Napoleonic invasion of Mexico, M. le Comte, from Guadalajara to Salina Cruz to Tuxpan and Alvarado, where soldiers sowed children with pale eyes and dark skin, who if their fathers had acknowledged them would have been called Dubois and Herzfeld and Nagy and Ballestrini, but instead were named after their mothers, Pérez and León and Gómez and Ramírez—and how will you remember all this, M. le Comte, no one has a memory that long.”

  “Ah, my poor little girl, all old and worn,” the cruel proclamation, come one, come all, you see before you the Duchess of Lanché, the very one you read about as boys, here she is, which of you ever saw or touched a real authentic Duchess back in your homeland, a Duchess with a capital D? Don’t pay any attention to her years, mon capitaine, distinction has no age, but if you want to know how to wring the best from our slightly aged Duchess, let me whisper something in your ear and then let you see with your own eyes and feel for yourself, open her mouth, that’s it, run your fingers over her gums, what do you think of her, eh? not a single tooth, just a little marble nub here and there to spice up the broth, like the garlic in bean soup, eh, mon capitaine? No young girl can do that for you, eh, mon capitaine? What do you think of her?”

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

  “Ah, my poor little girl, my little honey bee become a clown princess, far from her dovecote in La Guaira. One night I found her dead, dressed in her high-waisted white gown with the long stole, beneath a mirror in that whorehouse where the terrible tyrant Francisco Luis de Heredia had taken her to squeeze the last pittance from between her lips. He had never forgiven the deceit. Look what she had in her clenched fist: half a gold piece. Her last pay, and even then she was tricked by an officer who gave her only half a coin.”

  “My father had never forgiven the deceit, M. le Comte. My mother died in a brothel in Cuernavaca, where the Emperor Maximilian had a butterfly- and peacock-filled pleasure palace. But who knows where they buried her, because the Bishopric had forbidden loose women to be laid to rest in holy ground. Who knows what barranca they threw her into? But he had never forgiven the deceit, and he had published in all the local gazettes a funeral notice announcing the much-lamented demise of the Duchesse de Langeais. They say that the whole French court of Mexico had a good laugh over such a grotesque joke.”

  “But at the beginning you told me your mother would make fools of all of you, Heredia. I do not
understand…”

  “Don’t you think it’s her turn?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Do you know the names of every one of the Imperial officers who were stationed in Cuernavaca who visited Heredia’s brothel in the barranca of Acapaltzingo on the night of August 12, 1864, to celebrate the seventieth birthday of the Duchesse de Langeais?”

  “No, of course not. Don’t you mock me, Heredia.”

  “Very well. Do you think it a coincidence, M. le Comte, when two people have the same name?”

  “No. It is merely a matter of chance, of onomastic arithmetic, when names coincide.”

  “When they coincide, yes. And when they are sundered?”

  Branly shook his head and consciously retrieved the rational tone he had decided to assume in his relations with the French Heredia. “Allow me, if you will, to express my doubts about everything I have heard here tonight.”

  Heredia shrugged preposterously. “I am not to be trusted, is that it?”

  “No. I must be frank. I am aware that everything you tell me has the effect of distracting me from something you undoubtedly want to hide.”

  “Suspect what you want, M. le Comte. But nothing will prevent what once was joined from being joined again.”

  Branly tried to see outside, but deep night lay over the woods and parks of the Clos des Renards; he realized that for hours he had been listening to voices as he stared into the nothingness of the night. The painted image of the pitiful woman known as the Duquesa de Lanché had disappeared into shadows far more obscuring than the hands that hid her face. Heredia exclaimed with feigned surprise and begged my friend’s forgiveness for everything: the darkness, the late hour, for keeping Branly awake, for the long-winded obsession with family histories that had neither interest for nor any connection with M. le. Comte, whose most illustrious family had had no association with such ugly realities for centuries, of course not. Perhaps nine centuries, or a thousand years ago, yes, but certainly not a short century before, such a thing couldn’t be. No ancestor of the esteemed Comte de Branly had been present at the whorehouse of Francisco Luis de Heredia one August night in 1864, nor had he been at the burial of the French Mamasel in the barranca of Acapaltzingo, with Clemencita singing in broken French, as a kind of prayer for the dead, a madrigal the Mamasel had adored and always played on her harpsichord, eló eté sibele, laughed Heredia, that’s how it sounded in Clemencita’s broken French, a madrigal transmuted into an Afro-Hispanic chant.

  Heredia had been laughing with every word he spoke. Now, with false obsequiousness, he lighted the candles of a silver candelabrum to lead his guest back to his bedroom.

  “Follow me, M. le Comte.”

  “Please?”

  “Is there something you want?”

  “Nothing. Only that yesterday, when Victor brought my meal, I asked myself whether you were degrading him, Heredia, as your Francisco Luis degraded his wife.”

  “But, M. le Comte. The boy is serving you, not me.”

  Branly tried to smile. “Your father did not have such a good excuse. Perhaps he lacked an intermediary in his dispute.”

  “Doesn’t it surprise you that he chose her as my mother?” Heredia asked unexpectedly.

  “No,” Branly said, adding with deliberation: “You yourself told me that, in your manner of thinking, one is free only if one is born without father or mother. Perhaps this is the intermediate solution, to choose one’s parents.”

  “You are truly the good, rational, sensual Frenchman, M. le Comte.” And Heredia laughed.

  My friend nearly replied, “But never mediocre,” and then remembered his conversation with Hugo Heredia on the day he met him: the high Indian citadel at Xochicalco, the edge of the precipice, Victor running toward them with his discovery, Branly hooking his arm with his cane, preventing him from falling fifty meters.

  “A rational Frenchman, sensual surely, but never mediocre.”

  “Sensuality is but a chapter of violence.”

  “On the contrary.”

  He remembered, but he did not repeat, those words. Slowly, he followed his host, exhausted, leaning on his cane, and wondering whether the false Duchesse de Langeais of this hot-blooded and baroque story of the Heredias had fled his dream.

  15

  No. She returned punctually. But now she arrived laden with color, envisioned memories, signs and omissions more profound than her initial mystery. Then she had been separate from history, but now, Branly is telling me, it was in fact history that was responsible for making her more vivid but at the same time less real.

  Nevertheless, though this invasion of his pristine dream of a woman eternally poised on the contiguous thresholds of birth and death by the concurrent, roiling tides of wars and passions, revenge and rebellion, the traffic of weapons and bodies, might have destroyed the pure essence of the woman now in addition mottled by a multiplicity of names, it made Branly realize that he was indebted to the Heredias for having interrupted his routine and its accompanying empty hours. This he acknowledged as he fell asleep that night, after he had been subjected to the schedule of his unsleeping host, and had judged a defeat the time spent with him, time that separated him from sunlit hours and the overheard conversations of the boys on the terrace.

  At any rate, the elderly sleep very little; a drowsy old man is slightly ridiculous, my friend is saying now, as he consults the heirloom watch in his vest pocket, attached to an elegant gold chain.

  “It is five o’clock.”

  Branly asks which I would prefer, that he continue the story or that we go for a swim in the club pool and then (and here he laughs apologetically, as if this were a benevolent imposition), if I wished, dine together at the Laurent he had known as a youth. No, that would not be possible, the restaurant has been closed for many years, perhaps the Vert Galant on the Quai des Orfèvres: he has friends there, too. Shall he reserve a table for nine o’clock? I was struck by the unconscious associations his words reveal. He knows that one restaurant is still open for business and the other not, but he is not ready to accept the loss of the owners of the place he frequented in 1914; to him they are as real as the restaurateurs he sometimes visits today. At the moment, his second suggestion seemed considerably more attractive, but some irresistible compulsion caused me to say: “No, Branly, I don’t want you to interrupt your story.”

  I did not dare explain that a terrible sense of inconclusiveness was beginning to assail me; I feared that a prolonged interruption would seal, unfinished, the various stories beginning to fuse into a single narrative. He acquiesced, and then told me that the real mystery of that night he had spent in the company of the French Victor Heredia lay in the fact that when he returned to his bedroom he fell into a deep dream, so deep that all that had happened seemed to become a part of it: his ascent into the attic of the Clos, his encounter there with the man with the white eyes and hair, his discovery of the painting of the woman whose face was hidden in her hands, the stories about Francisco Luis and the nana Clemencita. But curiously, he says, within that dream, which was like being immersed in a body of water too deep for him to touch bottom, his head, above water and illumined by the moonlight, was experiencing a kind of extreme and undesired lucidity; drowned in dream, he plotted various detailed schemes for fleeing Heredia’s estate the following day: he would call Etienne; why hadn’t he come to pick up the Citroën? He would call Hugo Heredia; why his astonishing lack of concern for his son? He and young Victor would be back in the house on the Avenue de Saxe in time for luncheon; would his Spanish servants José and Florencio have everything in order?

  “I do not know whether I make myself clear. In the dream, it was the everyday considerations that became fantastic; the rational part of my dream was the sudden and undeniable identification of fantasy with total reality. But you cannot imagine what I thought of to wait out the return of logic. While deeply asleep, within my dream though not reconciled to it, I entertained myself by counting, as if so many sheep, the Frenchmen b
orn in the Hispanic New World.”

  He says that over the fences of his imagination, like figures in a transatlantic ballet, leaped Paul Lafargue, blown by a hurricane to London from his cradle in Santiago de Cuba to wrest a daughter from Marx, and, ever a cyclone, to whirl through the debris of the Commune and unleash socialist storms in Spain, Portugal, and France; Reynaldo Hahn, who came from Caracas with his gloomy songs and beautiful hands to rock the dreams of Bernhardt and Marcel Proust; Jules Laforgue, who had come to France because he had not wanted his flesh to grow old “more slowly than the roses” in Montevideo, and had exchanged the passage of a “sad and insatiable youth” beside the River Plate for the speedier universal illusion called death beside the Seine; and why did Isidore Ducasse emigrate, he too from Uruguay, only to die between an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table in one of the grim hospitals of Paris, when in Montevideo he had already found his Maldoror, his Mald’horror, his male horror, his mald’-aurora, the waters of the River Plate at first light, swollen with distended skins, the hides of slaughtered steers, of mutilated men, of children lost amid baled wool and sheep udders?

  I listen to Branly speaking of my lost cities, and I exclude forever from his narrative that dual monster, the Comte de Lautréamont, that beast of prey whose poems were written with tentacles stained red with ink: “C’est un cauchemar qui tient ma plume”; yes, a nightmare stained his pen. My breath quickens as my friend makes room in his dream for another Frenchman from Montevideo, the lucid and magisterial Jules Supervielle, who was right to emigrate: there, facing the never-ending pampa, his brow would have remained forever naked, a “great empty plaza between two armies.” And, following on his heels, José María de Heredia, the Frenchman from Havana, the disconsolate conquistador who returns to the Old World wearily laden with “the arrogant misery of his trophies, the blooming beast and the animate flower,” the sun beneath the sea and the quivering of gold; drunk with “a heroic and brutal dream,” the dream of the new continent, the nightmare of the old.