Distant Relations

by Carlos Fuentes

  “Do you see, my friend? You, who come from there, should understand when I tell you that the New World was the last opportunity for European universalism; it was also its tomb. Never again, following that century of discoveries and conquests, was it possible to be universal. As it turned out, the New World was too vast, on too great a scale. No one there could paint, as Holbein the Younger here, the exact measure of the human universe as represented by the portraits of More and Erasmus. There we all became Heredias; enervated Creoles. I tell you, too many innocent backs bore the mark of the whiplash of Maldoror’s cruel pen.”

  He stared at me with an inordinate, slightly sinister intensity, an expression that gave him the vaguely comic air of an ancient Roman senator plotting crimes in the baths of Diocletian. I feared this mood, because always when Branly verged on the sublime I was forced to swallow my amusement, along with a dose of ridicule. He lowered his voice suddenly.

  And my inner laughter ceased abruptly as he placed his hand on my arm; I feared the twist my extraordinary friend would give to the things he was saying, feeling, remembering, foreseeing.

  “Now listen carefully. This story was told me that night in the garret by several voices, those of Heredia and his father, the stupid and cruel Francisco Luis, and of his no less stupid, though benign, second wife, by the nana Clemencita, and by the Mamasel Lange. They were not telling me their own stories but the story of a different Heredia. The young one. The boy Victor Heredia. The story they told me was his.”

  My astonishment when I heard Branly’s words was comparable only, I believe, to my feeling of inadequacy as I had listened to the narrative of the Caribbean Heredias, which, in turn, was punishment and compensation for my self-sufficiency when I pointed out to my friend that I understood, perhaps better than he, the real story of the two boys in the Parc Monceau.

  He was prepared now, as we sat in the shadows of the club dining room, to grant the Duchesse de Langeais a place in the scene in the Parc Monceau; in that way he would not burden the shoulders of the young Mexican Victor Heredia with the misery and humiliation of the Heredias of La Guaira. He believed that the French Victor Heredia was the boy of the Avenue Vélasquez. But today he was a boy named André. And the Mexican Victor was André’s prisoner.

  “You exaggerate, Branly,” I ventured, with a nervous start I tried to disguise by idiotically folding and refolding the limp table napkin.

  He looked at me with gratitude and supplication. The first emotion informed me that, as it had him, the exhilaration of the Antillean world was subconsciously beginning to dominate me. The second invited me to cooperate with him, to recover, to make possible, the original temper of our conversation, the priestly and rational tone of French dialogue and, more importantly, its manners. As long ago as the sixteenth century, I exclaimed, Erasmus wrote that the French believe themselves the repositories of courtesy. And I shall not be the one to belie the wise man of Rotterdam. Branly reminded me that in the same paragraph Erasmus accuses the Germans of priding themselves on their knowledge of magic. He realized, at any rate, that explicitly I accepted, though implicitly held reservations about, his cult of politesse. One should not, he said, consider it a national characteristic, as Erasmus had done, or Lope de Vega, who had attributed equal virtue to the residents of Lombardy. It was, simply, his personal religion. In any event, he sighed, considering the historical destinies of France and Germany, was it not preferable to follow the modes of the French? I told myself that the undertaking would not be easy; the intelligent eyes of my friend told me, in exchange, that the story of the Heredias had infected us both. We were speaking like colonials; we were reacting like “enervated Creoles.”

  “But let us speak of Supervielle,” said Branly, as if to break my vicious circle. “Do you remember his marvelous poem ‘La Chambre Voisine’?” he asked, his head curiously tilted to one side.

  “Only because you mentioned it at the beginning of our conversation,” I replied, attempting to avoid any implication of psychic communication, a possibility I found displeasing.

  “It is one of my favorites,” said Branly, closing his eyes and joining his hands under his chin in a posture halfway between memory and prayer. “I remember it because I had dreamed of them all, Lautréamont and Heredia and Supervielle, believing I did so consciously, when in truth, don’t you see? I was projecting a partial solution to my enigmas, because the poem by Supervielle that I had begun to repeat in my dreams, Tournez le dos à cet homme mais restez auprès de lui, had anticipated me, it existed before the question, for the purpose of linking together the disparate parts of my dreams at the Clos des Renards and finally leading me to the truth.”

  Softly, my friend began to recite the poem. I smiled as I thought how, with Branly’s recitation of the poem by a French Uruguayan, he was exercising the supreme gift of selection, synthesis, and consecration that France has reserved for herself through the centuries. Supervielle was a vehicle by which we could escape that tropical ennui in which the sublime constantly rubs shoulders with the ridiculous, and feelings of cruel guilt are all too grossly revealed, stripped of the pious veils we Europeans so quickly cast over our crimes against history, to enable us to accept the equally discriminatory and exigent French spirit of reason and good taste, but not to sacrifice the cutting edge of the fantasy, the displacement, the revelatory madness, of the vast, empty lands of the new continent.

  Laissez-le seul sur son lit,

  Le temps le borde et le veille,

  En vue de ces hauts rochers

  Où gémit, toujours caché,

  Le coeur des nuits sans sommeil.

  I tried to remember, to anticipate, the lines Branly was reciting in the darkness, inseparable prayer and memory; but more powerful than the poem was a voice like the sound we hear in the heart of a seashell: there is nothing in its depths, but the ocean is captive in that intangible sound.

  I had first the sensation, then immediately the certainty, that Branly was speaking words I was thinking an instant before he uttered them, the words of Supervielle’s poem. They could only be, I knew then, the words of his last dream at the Clos des Renards. How strange they had all been said before, by the poet, or by his reader, my friend Branly.

  16

  I feel as if black shadows had congealed in my throat. I feel, above all else, that I am the object of a relentless hostility. But, in spite of everything, I refuse to walk away from that boy who is observing me from behind the beveled windowpanes. I do not walk away, although I turn my back. I am not sure whether the barbarity I feel in my eyes is my own or a reflection of his gaze and of his baroque stories in which passion and vengeance are raised on a revolving altar of gold leaf and moon mist. I stand, unspeaking, my back to the boy who is watching me. A woman is approaching along a path in the infinitely mutable landscape of the Parc Monceau; the boy watches us from the window of the house on the Avenue Vélasquez. I do not know what time it is. I look at the boy and the woman, and I realize that for both it is difficult to distinguish night from day. I want to tell them not to worry, that what they are witnessing is not really being seen by them but by someone who has the gift of seeing things through eyes that register a rate of speed that is not, he thanks God, that of human beings, because otherwise we would all be destined, without exception, to be separated as soon as we have come together. But birth and death are not simultaneous for us. The woman does not understand, because she is not looking at me now, she is looking toward the boy in the window, and she tells him not to be troubled about distinguishing farthest skies from the depths of his troubled heart. The woman speaks to the boy as if I were not standing between them. But as she comes closer I smell leather and sandalwood. I hold out my hands in supplication, but she passes by, turning her back to me, trailing the white satin shreds of a high-waisted ball gown, the tatters of the stole tied beneath the décolleté neckline and bare shoulder blades, the tower of her hair about to crumble into ruins of sticky cotton candy. I stretch out a hand to touch her
and tell her, you see, we had no need to worry, the raging time in which birth and death occur simultaneously is not our time. To us belongs the sweet, slow time of all the lovers on the earth and it does not demand that lovers be separated the moment they meet. But the woman stares at me, uncomprehending, seemingly unhearing. Her worn, low-heeled slippers scurry like white mice and she disappears behind the iron fence of the house on the Avenue Vélasquez. I am still in the Parc Monceau, awaiting her return, but now she is inside the house. There she croons to the boy as the mulatto had crooned to her, she protects him, and prevents anyone from coming near him, least of all a usurper like myself, for I am no longer a child and yet I presume to claim the attention and affection she reserves for the boy with whom she used to play, while still a girl, in the Monzoon or Monsewer Park, before leaving to fulfill her destiny among the steep hills of La Guaira and the reverberating barrancas of Cuernavaca. She places a finger to her lips, and tells us to leave the child alone in his bed; time hovers near, keeping watch over him. They had been reunited. They have emerged from graves in rotting barrancas of mangrove and plantain to be reunited on the high rock cliffs where moans forever concealed the heart of insomniac nights. Let no one enter that chamber again, exclaims the woman in the outmoded dress of the First Empire; nothing will leave this refuge, except an enormous dog that has lost all memory of the past and that will search the ends of the earth, land and sea, for the man it left behind, unmoving, in the strong, decisive hands of the new mother and nurse, at last reunited with the son she never had, but who chose her enclosed with him in the chamber where birth and death are indistinguishable, and no evil, no ugliness, no humiliation, no intrusive vulgar demands can penetrate the seamless surface of things that exist in instantaneous simultaneity: this love, this proximity, this perfect awareness that time will not exist between being born, loving, and the act of loving, dying. I shall wait forever outside. Perhaps the dog without memory will bring me the final notice of the moment when my birth coincided with my death. Both solitary. She will never return. She has condemned me to death because I was too impatient to remember the boy; to her, this is a horrifying desertion. A crime. I am alone in the Parc Monceau. They are reunited at last.

  Reunited at last.

  17

  He opened his eyes. He parted the drapes. It was day. He awakened convinced he had dreamed everything that happened during the night. His encounter with Heredia was a dream. He looked out on the symmetrical garden cleft by the secret wound he had perceived earlier, blasted as if by gunpowder. The Citroën was still there, abandoned on the carpet of dry leaves, beside the oak against which it had collided. The tranquillity of the sunny September morning was allied with the silence of the garden and woods, with the play of the sun’s rays among leaves ravished by a dying summer, and with the only sound, one Branly had not heard before, the long, plaintive, high, far-off cry of a peacock.

  He listened in vain for the accustomed voices of the boys. Almost immediately the peacock was silenced by the sound of hurrying footsteps on the gravel. Branly peered out and saw his Spanish servants, the sallow José, looking more than ever like a figure from a Zurbarán painting, and the florid Florencio, with his mien of an exhausted jai-alai player. Both walked rapidly, but in apparent confusion, suitcases in their hands.

  Branly recognized the suitcases; they were the ones the young Victor Heredia had brought to the mansion on the Avenue de Saxe. José and Florencio seemed to be weighing the best path to follow. Branly threw back the bedclothes and seized his cane for support. He descended the stairs with a haste, he tells me, that disproved whatever fears his age or his health, or both, might reasonably have engendered. Barefoot and limping, he reached the foot of the stairway, crossed the dark foyer of the Clos des Renards, opened the French doors, and stepped onto the terrace of the stone lions at the very moment his servants were approaching the Citroën, dubious as to whether they should walk on the gravel or the dead leaves. Branly did not falter. He tells me that by that time the heavy veils that had obscured the recesses of his heart had been lifted. He was acutely aware of the denouement of the story, and he was prepared, as in the beginning, to extend the handle of his cane to prevent young Victor from falling into the bottomless crevasse of another’s timeless memory, the memory of a being demanding a new soul as haven for its poisonous pilgrimage.

  The servants opened the rear door of the automobile and again seemed to hesitate. Then Florencio, who was the more hardy, picked up one of the suitcases and heaved it into the Citroën, while José nodded and Branly hobbled toward them, spurred by fear, and confident of the wisdom of a different fear—that of crossing the greensward of the garden disfigured by the horrible scar that only he had seen from his window.

  At his approach, José and Florencio looked at each other, disconcerted. Branly watched as, like servants in some farce, they ran to hide beyond the boundary of the leaves that my friend, in his agitation and haste, could not believe to be the cause of José’s greater-than-usual pallor, or the apoplectic semblance of his comrade. Branly stepped onto the leaves and opened the car door. He knew the interior of that Citroën; after all, it was his automobile. But this foul-smelling cave, transformed in the course of three days and three nights into a depository for rotting vegetation, swirling temperatures, and detritus, was, he thought at first, simply a monumental bad joke, the awful mischief of the boys who with the universal instinct of magpies look for places to hide their treasures, and themselves.

  He saw them. The unbelievably smooth, prepubescent, olive-skinned, secret, and typically small body of the mestizo Victor Heredia lying on the seat, and a naked, white-skinned André crowned with blond curls that contrasted dramatically with the lank black hair of Victor, against whom he was pressing with soft moans, lips parted, from neck to waist as smooth as Donatello’s David, but feet, legs, and groin a hirsute jungle tangled like writhing snakes and spiders.

  Branly tried to shield his eyes. More than by the brutal copulation of the adolescents, he was blinded by the brilliance of two objects: André cupped his in the hand he held above Victor’s head; Victor had removed his from the hastily emptied suitcase by his side; the hands holding the brilliant objects joined together, and a guttural groan was torn from my elderly friend. He threw himself into the car, on the naked bodies so vastly different in temperature, and tried to separate their hands even before their bodies: the two glittering halves, one in André’s hand, the other in Victor’s, were joined like a fused metallic mass; the united hands were like the blazing forge that melts and fuses metals. Branly touched that thing, first with the idea of preventing the union of the parts, and then to sunder what had been joined.

  He cried out, his fingers seared from the touch of that cold hard thing blazing like a coin, from the ice, flame, and liquid of a stream that but a few hours earlier had been pure cloud. He sucked his burnt fingers. With the other hand he raised the cane, prepared to thrash the buttocks of this monstrous André, whose back, in the male position, was to Branly, though the boy looked over one shoulder to laugh and wink a pale eye. Then, Branly says, he could see nothing but the doleful eyes of young Victor, their unfathomable pleading for compassion and understanding, the terrible and hopeless sadness, the gratitude for a farewell not unlike death, and Branly froze, bewildered by his own sense of compassion. Even much later, he did not know whether he felt pity for the poor youth lying there with opened legs, for the other boy, to whom he had not held out a hand so many years ago when a red rubber ball bounced between them, or for a girl who said she had played with him, though he did not remember.

  “But, my friend, today I know that the pity I felt for Victor Heredia I felt on behalf of my two lost playmates.”

  In truth, he admits now, the eyes of the young Victor Heredia filled him with terror, because there is something stronger than love, hatred, or desire, and that is the simple will, when one has no will, or is nothing, to exist for another. Branly suspects that this is what the Mexican youth was com
municating that morning to him, his cordial French host, pleading that he not interrupt something he could not understand because it came from so far away.

  Softly, my elderly friend closed the door of the Citroën and merely repeated the words I had already heard: “My God, I hope they never grow up. Their mystery will be considered ingenuousness, or crime.”

  He spoke these words as he repeats them this afternoon with a solemnity befitting the valley of death. Or, what is the same thing, an unattainable love. Standing there motionless on the dead leaves, Branly was aware of his sweaty palms clammy cold, the trembling of exhausted muscles, and the bluish pain of fingernails which on other occasions had foretold the deaths of a lover, a friend, a second wife, of soldiers on the Western Front.

  He vacillated; he says he was on the verge of collapse. A distant scream, which he attributed to the stiff-legged and plaintively vain bird, signaled the hasty return of José and Florencio. They grasped Branly by both arms, alternating excuses and chaste interjections: they had been here before him, here on the leaves, that’s why they knew how he felt, he must leave, come, sweet gypsy Jesus, it was horrible, but everything would be all right if they left quickly.