Distant Relations

by Carlos Fuentes

  “You are unmitigatedly vulgar,” said Branly with a twisted smile. “Unmitigatedly … Heredia? Is that your real name?”

  The host of the Clos thrust his hands into his pockets and shrugged like a surly urchin.

  “I would like, after all this time, to know the name of the boy I did not hold out my hand to seventy years ago in the Pare Monceau. I know it is very late to make amends.” Branly’s voice was moved, grave, restrained. He sought, as he spoke, the pale eyes of the French Victor Heredia. His host was silent for a long while, grinding his heel into the whitewashed floor of this suffocating gallery.

  “André,” Heredia said finally. “My name is André.”

  “Like your son,” said Branly, with one of those polite formulas with which one courteously fills the pauses in social conversation.

  “No,” Heredia shook his head. “Like myself.”

  “Like you, Heredia? Did I not say that I want to make amends for my indifference—my cruelty, if you prefer? Is that not enough? Must you persist in your low sarcasm?”

  “Do you know why I never appear in the daytime? No, don’t say anything. I will tell you. True phantoms appear only in daylight, M. le Comte.”

  Mincing like some elderly maiden, Heredia walked to the corner of the room. Branly, as he tells me now, was by this time sufficiently familiar with Heredia’s tricks to anticipate, following this mimicry, some new and disconcerting revelation from his host. Accentuated by the newly assumed gestures of an ancient virgin, Heredia said that he feared the daylight phantoms, and his distinguished guest, the Comte de Branly, should fear them, too. Was it his hope to save the boys? Had he ever thought that maybe the boys did not want to be saved? How many things must there be that he never realized? Wrapped in his aristocratic arrogance, so remote from the black and rotting ravines where French mademoiselles in exile in the New World sing madrigals to frighten away the dogs and owls waiting to devour their dead bodies, so secure in his mansions and symmetrical gardens, so unyielding in a land that had never known an earthquake or the cholera morbus or trichinosis or the oil companies’ murderous White Guards or the forced labor of Indians or hurricanes bearing dead leaves in a gale that in mid-August can strip an entire jungle of leaves and fruit to scatter afar, beyond the sea, to impregnate with pure tropical pollen austere European wives who then give birth never knowing that seed travels, carried on the air filters into nostrils, ears, mouths, asses, the uncountable orifices of a human body that is more water and pit and puddle than anything else, eh? Oh, there were so many things he didn’t know.

  “Do you know anything of my desire to give life to everything that could have been but was denied existence?” asked “Heredia,” suddenly pulling himself to his full height and acquiring a dignity Branly would not have believed possible.

  “André, then, should have been the … son of Francisco Luis and Mademoiselle Lange?” Branly stammered.

  “He is, M. le Comte. You must believe me, he is. That is the only element of truth in this entire farce. Except that this time my little angel is going to be born whole, not as he was before, but whole again.”

  “Heredia” again seized my friend’s arm, but now with a strength, Branly says, incredible not only in his host but in any man. He twisted Branly’s arm behind his back, forcing his head and body in the direction desired by this monster of many guises, whose role at that moment my friend could not define: was he a dangerous clown, a harmless madman, an ineffective mythomaniac, or a wretched, defeated, lonely man deserving of pity?

  “You see, you doddering old bastard, you senile old motherfucking asshole, you see, that’s what you get for going around sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, trying to separate what was always joined and will be forever, you see, Victor Heredia doesn’t belong to your time now but to mine, and at last my son has the companion I never had…”

  With one arm locked around Branly’s neck, “Heredia” with his free hand raised the door of the dumbwaiter and forced my friend’s head toward the empty shaft, as if preparing him for the executioner’s ax or the blade of the guillotine. Branly stared into the depths of the space in which the monte-plats, converted in English into the more obsequious dumbwaiter, ascended and descended. An icy blast rumpled his hair, tiny daggers of ice needled his skin, forcing him to close his eyes filled with involuntary tears. In that instant he had seen what he had to see.

  Branly’s hand still clasped mine.

  “Have you ever paused, my friend, to think about the appalling concept of infinity, time and space without beginning or end? That is what I saw that morning in the shaft of the dumbwaiter. Infinity was like the flesh of a wet, bland squid, slimy and slobbery, a texture without color or orientation, the pure vertiginous sensation of a great white mollusk ignorant of time or space. Something interminable cloaked in perpetual fine snow.”

  “What do you plan to do, you pitiful old bastard? Do you think when you leave here you can set your police on me, accuse me, demand that I return Victor? Forget it. Victor and André are no longer here. Victor and André are no longer André and Victor. They are a new and different being. No one could recognize them. Not even I. They could walk past you in a café, or on a street, and you would never recognize them. You would never recognize them. True madness passes without notice.”

  “Heredia” again burst out laughing, and Branly, his senses reeling, deprived of any intellectual means by which to deal with this devil who was most satanic because he was incomprehensible, unknowable, and therefore to be feared, did what he had never done in his life, what no one had ever forced him to do.

  “That morning—you must believe what I tell you—imprisoned by ‘Heredia’ ’s arms, with that unutterable vision of infinite emptiness before my eyes, I did something I had not done in all my eighty-three years. I screamed, my friend I screamed the way they used to scream in the Frédérick Lemaître melodramas our great-grandparents attended on the Boulevard du Crime. I screamed, convinced that my voice was my deliverance, my life, my only chance, my only salvation. Bah, of course, on more careful consideration, I believe I must have screamed that way in my cradle.”

  And with those words he withdrew his hand from mine, which he had held throughout this portion of his story. He clasped his own hands in that typical, gracious gesture that served in circumstances like these to dissipate any hint of solemnity and to return things to a properly rational level not without humor.

  “Bah,” he repeated. “The things one must do. I screamed, terrified by that vision and by the sensation of my impending death, I admit it. But as I screamed I turned melodrama into comedy. As I struggled against ‘Heredia,’ the hinges of the door of the suffocating, whitewashed gallery burst open under the weight of Florencio’s shoulder. José rushed in on the heels of his husky companion with the visage of a Basque jai-alai player, and both rushed to free me from ‘Heredia,’ subduing him. I sank to the floor, out of breath, exhausted. In the struggle, ‘Heredia’ was roundly drubbed by Florencio: he staggered, and fell headlong down the shaft of the dumbwaiter. The two servants exchanged rapid comments in Spanish, peering down into empty space.

  “Here now, we’d better go down to the cellar.”

  “But, Florencio, look at all the dead leaves rising up the shaft.”

  “I told them, my throat aflame, not to waste time. We had to leave immediately. Where was the taxi they had spoken of? Come, quickly. I would send Etienne to pick up the Citroën later, another day.”

  “The Citroën, M. le Comte? But Etién came to pick it up day before yesterday, as soon as he got out of the hospital and learned about your accident,” Florencio exclaimed as they helped Branly to his feet.

  “He said he was going to take it to be repaired. But he never came back.”

  “You remember, Florencio, Señor Heredia told us he thought the accident was his fault, because of the young gentleman, and he told Etién he should be careful driving with one hand, and if he wanted, he would go with him to pick up the Citro
ën and see you at the same time, M. le Comte, and young Victor as well.”

  “But you know how stubborn a hardheaded Frenchman can be, with all due respect to yourself, M. le Comte: no Spaniard could tell him anything, and do you think he would want to be indebted to some foreigner, heaven forbid! And that was that. It wasn’t as if he were going by way of Tetuán to bring home monkeys, there being so many around here…”

  “And that was that. He took his own car and drove off forever.”

  “What do you mean, Florencio?”

  “Nothing, except I think Etién must have had an accident in his 2CV when he came here to pick up the Citroën for repair,” said Florencio, as the servants gently led Branly toward the stairway.

  “And I think Florencio is right. I think he was killed. Maybe. Anyway, he never came back.”

  “And Heredia? Hugo Heredia? What does he say?”

  “Your guest left for Mexico this morning, M. le Comte.”

  “I must thank you, at least, for staying with me.”

  “M. le Comte is very generous to us, and treats us like human beings,” said José, as the three reached the foot of the stairs.

  “You should just see, M. le Comte, how the Spanish treat their servants. It’s ‘do this’ and ‘do that.’ ‘You peasant bastard!’—begging your pardon, M. le Comte. ‘You idiot anyone can see your mother let you fall out of your cradle, you blithering simpleton, you thickheaded fool…’ And on and on and on!”

  “And the young gentlemen are the worst. They like to humiliate you, to run you in circles. ‘Pick that up, Pepe. Now leave it where you found it, Pepe. Don’t you hear me? Pick it up again, Pepe.’”

  “Well, a pot of beans is a pot of beans no matter where you cook it, because that young Mexican was no better than the young Spanish gentlemen. Look, M. le Comte, what he did to Pepe the minute he arrived. So of course we came running with his suitcases when he called.”

  “And we asked his father, and he said why not, we should bring everything here…”

  “And I laughed and told Pepe, Let’s get out here quick or he’ll be beating you again with his belt. What a one he is! A real little devil.”

  Branly, assisted by Florencio and José, stepped onto the terrace of the lions. He found it difficult to grasp what they were saying, or rather, to reconcile the inconsistencies in their words. He felt dizzy. His servants were playing up to him; they were contradicting one another; they had been there that very morning with suitcases in their hands; they had given them to young Victor in the Citroën. They, like he, had experienced physical fear when they stepped on the dead leaves. They had, finally, rescued him from the satanic fury of “Heredia,” the confused scion of many places rather than any time, this man who, because he had no dates, no origins, carried the burden of unfinished stories: how could he be the son of Francisco Luis and the Mamasel, who had met in La Guaira in 1812 and been parted forever in 1864 in a brothel in Cuernavaca? how, even if he were the son of Francisco Luis and his second wife, the fat, dull, gluttonous girl from Limousin, could he have been Branly’s contemporary in the opening years of this century, when my friend played in the Pare Monceau? How old was “Heredia”? How old was Francisco Luis when he died?

  These reflections on the utter irrationality of their ages, so inconsistent with Branly’s rational chronology, faded from his mind the moment he saw from the terrace of the manor the perfect symmetry of the French garden, the clear and intelligent space where nature was tamed by the geometric exactitude of shrubs, greensward, pansies, artichokes, and stone urns. In vain, he looked for a sign of the grayish scar in the grass.

  The birch grove, the rosebushes, the beech and willow trees, seemed to exult in their own serenity, as if in homage to the vanished summer, and along the avenue of chestnuts and oaks, autumn had not yet passed, spreading its basket of spoils. The fresh, cool ground was swept clean; there were no dead leaves, only the enchanting play of light and shadow among green branches.

  The Citroën was parked on the gravel drive where the avenue ended and the garden began. When Etienne saw them emerge from the house onto the terrace, he left off dusting the ornamental klaxon with his feather duster, touched one hand to the visor of his cap, and climbed into the car. The sturdy chauffeur circled the garden and came to a stop before the entrance stairway; he got out to open the rear door so that Branly, assisted by his servants, might enter. The surprise in the voices of José and Florencio rang hollow, less than convincing. Of this, at least, my friend has a clear recollection.

  “Imagine. And to think we’d given him up for dead.”

  “Jesus! Sweet gypsy Jesus! The dead has risen!”

  “You two get in with M. le Comte, go on, now, take good care of him. I’m going for his things.”

  Branly says he sank against the soft, beige, spotlessly clean upholstery and refused to converse with the servants, even to look at them, to concede that he was aware of their disconcerted but conspiratorial glances, their shrugged shoulders, the upturned palms mutely inviting explanations.

  It would have been very easy to say to them: Hugo Heredia bought him just as he bought you, except that his price was higher. One Breton peasant is tougher than two Andalusian peasants. It takes a little more effort to make Etienne stop remembering. For you, forgetfulness comes easy. A little more time, a little more money, that was the only difference. No one remembers anything. Nothing happened.

  Etienne emerged from the house with a suitcase containing, Branly supposed, the clothing my friend had been wearing the night of the accident. He climbed into the car and started it.

  “How is your hand, Etienne?” Branly inquired.

  With a sheepish smile, the chauffeur looked at his employer in the rearview mirror and raised his bandaged hand. “I drive very well with only one hand, M. le Comte.”

  “Ah.”

  Branly turned to look back through the rear window of the Citroën. He read the date inscribed above the doorway: A.D. 1870. Etienne had thought it was the number of the house and that he had made a wrong turn; on that occasion he had muttered curses against a municipal system that would assign two numbers to one house. My friend had known it was a date, because as he glanced toward the upper story from the moving automobile, leaving behind forever the Clos des Renards, he saw hovering in the window a dancing, fading silhouette in diaphanous white, with a tall hairdo resembling towers of cotton candy. The peacock uttered its plaintive cry. But Branly listened in vain for strains of the madrigal, Chante, rossignol, chante.

  19

  The elderly sleep very little, Branly repeats now. They feel besieged by the need for vigilance, and in this, old age is wise. Adjustments are made so that it is not physiologically necessary to sleep as much as before, as in the days when one came home worn out after poking into every corner of one’s grandfather’s castle, or after playing in the Parc Monceau, after making love with Myrtho in a nest of rose-colored eiderdowns, or after nights beneath the sulphurous lightning flashes of the trenches.

  At any rate, a drowsy old man is slightly ridiculous, Branly says, as finally we arise from the table in the club dining room and walk slowly through the spacious salon illuminated at this hour only by the streetlamps on the Place de la Concorde. It is just six o’clock, and the lights turned on at the moment we reach the reception hall seem blinding. An army of waiters and assistants, several of them mere boys, swarm in with rolled-up sleeves, tightly cinched aprons, and flushed faces, to prepare the tables, spread clean tablecloths, fold fresh napkins, and replenish the flower vases.

  The servants apologize, bow, step aside impatiently, their servility bordering on hostility. They want us to know that we have delayed their chores, their getting off work, their meetings with children, wives, friends, their entertainment or sleep. My friend and I leave behind us a clattering of glass and silverware like the serenade of a silver fountain. The madrigal of the clear fountain is echoing in my head, as so often happens with those childhood melodies whose classic and insi
stent simplicity preempts from our memory, to our annoyance, compositions we would prefer to hear, in a kind of permanent and gratuitous high fidelity. For example, above all else, I love two compositions, Haydn’s Emperor Quartet and Schubert’s Trio No. 2 for piano, violin, and cello. I would have wished that those noble chords had accompanied our descent of the equally noble staircase of Gabriel’s pavillon, not some childish tune about nightingales, sorrow, and joy beside a fountain.

  The evening meal at the Automobile Club de France is being prepared as we, who seemed about to delay the whole process, oblivious of the obligations of others, walk through the ground floor of the green and mahogany library with its memorable engravings of the first French automobiles, and into the modern bar beside the large swimming pool. There are few members present at this hour, and Branly suggests that we might want to take a swim after we have finished our conversation in the solarium adjoining the pool.

  I nodded, and he marched off toward the pool as I followed, marveling at how completely he had recovered his military bearing.

  “No, it was not difficult to guess that Hugo Heredia had bribed all my servants. In a way, it was the inevitable corollary to this story, and the only act that could tie together all the loose threads. The father, I have stressed this from the beginning, was instructing the son. I hesitate to say this, my dear friend, since you are to a degree from that world, but his lesson was one of a false colonial aristocracy that equates nobility with a power of corruption and cruelty beyond punishment.”

  He paused for a moment on the fiber mat bordering the pool.

  “Do you admit that?” he asked, tall, stern.

  “It’s probable,” I replied.

  “No. It is true,” he said, and resumed his martial pace. “Think about it and you will realize that this is the point where all the stories come together—that of Hugo Heredia and his son, that of Francisco Luis and Mademoiselle Lange, that of the savage resentment of the master of the Clos des Renards—in a common inclination of spirit, if we may call it that.”