Distant Relations

by Carlos Fuentes

  It was at that precise instant I looked up and saw the waiter walking across the iron catwalk suspended above the pool. I wouldn’t have noticed him if he hadn’t stopped, his empty tray in his hands, a peculiar expression on his face, instantaneous and indescribable, his eyes narrowed and feline, strangely incongruous with the aureole of curly bronze hair, the similarly golden skin, the smiling moist lips. It was as if parts of his head and body—which, I knew intuitively, was at once tense and relaxed, like the bodies of certain animals whose calm we merely imagine because in the presence of man they adopt a cringing, begging pose—belonged to different creatures.

  Suddenly the water in the pool erupted. For an instant I stood paralyzed by the phenomenon; the tranquil lake was transformed into violent waves, and I saw Branly lift one arm, struggle against the roiling, tumultuous water, and then succumb. I dived after him. I cannot swear that my presence calmed the fury of the pool, but I do know that by the time I reached my friend, cupped his chin in my hand, and swam toward the side of the pool, there was no movement in the water except in our wake. I looked up at the catwalk. There was no one there. Attendants came running to help us; club members turned toward us from the bar; some rushed to see what was happening; someone commented that Branly should be more careful, that he had not been himself these last few weeks.

  With the attendants’ help, I carried my friend to a chaise longue in the dressing room, where he lay back without a word.

  Later I drove him to his home. His housekeeper, a beautiful woman of about forty, met us at the door. I hadn’t seen her before, as she had been hired to take the place of José and Florencio. As I say, I had never seen her, and I was struck by the fact that, although she was smiling and she seemed perfectly natural, her eyes glistened with tears. I know people like that, especially women, who seem always on the verge of weeping, and in fact they are individuals of unusual kindness, restrained emotions, and extreme shyness. What I had yet to learn was that they are also acutely sensitive to the pain of others.

  The photograph of Branly’s father was missing from his bedside table. I noticed its absence as we helped him into bed. He apologized for the accident, smiling, saying that perhaps at his age he should forgo sports.

  He held out his hand. I took it. I was surprised by its warmth.

  I left his room bearing an impression of eyes that were both near and faraway, which is perhaps another way of saying that his eyes saw something I could not see. In any case, I felt vaguely uneasy, as if in leaving I were abandoning my friend in his stubborn, never-ending, and, most of all, unequal, battle with something or someone who had banished from the room the photograph of the young Captain de Branly, born in 1870, and dead in 1900 of a germ that could not have withstood an injection of penicillin.

  Later I walked through the salon. Once again I admired the wedding of bronze, marble, plaster, and silver with amboyna, oak, beech, and gilt, and I compared the incredible luxury of the silver candelabra, the malachite vases, the mirrors crowned with winged figures and butterfly medallions, with Branly’s description of the interior of the Clos des Renards, its suffocating sensation of flayed skin, its smell of leather, and damp whitewash. The comparison led me, unconsciously, to seek, though in vain, the magnificent clock suspended from an arch of gilded bronze, with a seated woman playing an ornate harpsichord with griffin legs, in a sumptuous mounting of motionless draperies and doors. The absence of the clock caused me to remember something else: the tune the clock played as it struck the hours, a timeless madrigal. How did it go? Where, only recently, had I heard it?

  It was perhaps this spirit of inquisitiveness that led me to Branly’s library. I had asked the housekeeper to call my friend’s physician, and I wanted to wait to assure myself that he was all right. With aimless curiosity I ran my finger along the backs of the volumes on shelf after shelf of that small but splendid library. I paused with bitter pleasure as I recognized the titles of certain books that had appeared in the course of this narration: La Duchesse de Langeais, by Honoré de Balzac; the Méditations poétiques of Lamartine; Poésies, by Jules Supervielle; Les Chants de Maldoror, by Isidore Ducasse, known as the Comte de Lautréamont; Les Trophées, by José María de Hérédia; Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune, by Jules Laforgue; and the Mémoires of Alexandre Dumas.

  I was intrigued by the presence among this special group of books of a volume my friend the Comte de Branly hadn’t mentioned in the course of his account—but then I remembered that the two boys, Victor and André, had spoken of The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and The Man in the Iron Mask. A yellow silk bookmark slit the gold that dusted the page edges. I held the volume in my hand, stroking the creamy leather cover and maroon corner-pieces. The spine cracked as I opened it and scanned a page on which the print stood out as if embossed by reading and by time; the letters in old books seem to want to free themselves from the pages, to take flight like a flock of migrating birds.

  What I read was not actually part of the memoirs of that powerful writer, whom fortunately no one—though Flaubert wished it, ironically—had with a wave of a magic wand transported to the cult of Art. I have always believed that Dumas’s books are like men themselves—intemperate, merry, lavish, generous, limpid but secretly erotic and insatiable. The page before me records that as he was dying, the elder Dumas gave a louis d’or to his son, author of the Dame aux Camélias, saying: You see this coin? Your father may have had the reputation of being a profligate, a spendthrift who threw away a fortune on his castles on the road to Bougival, an unrepentant lover of women who, wiser than he, asked nothing of him but the blossoms of the day; but look at this louis d’or, he’d had it when he arrived in Paris and he’d held on to it until the hour of his death.

  Alongside this page there was another, purple ink on graph paper, carefully glued to the endpaper. “In 1870, shortly before his death, A.D. came in his tilbury to my home in Enghien. In his arms, as promised, he bore a beautiful blond boy child. At my direction, C. went out and handed him the black child. A.D. took the child in his arms, and sent this message by C.: the ancient debts of honor, money, exploitation, and revenge are at long last settled. He added that perhaps this date should be commemorated; each, finally, had his own. I saw no reason to disillusion him. I inscribed his initials and the date over the door. Before he could see them, he died, dreaming, for all we know, of the forests of his childhood in Retz, or, perhaps, of the mountains of his father’s childhood in Haiti. I admire this celebrated writer, but I am not obliged to take in the son of a slave woman from the plantations forfeited by my stupid father-in-law. I do not know what became of the black child. Poor L. She had grown fond of him, and she weeps the day long.”

  Why was it only then that I recalled the last lines of the timeless madrigal: J’ai trouvé l’eau si belle, que je m’y suis noyé. “So beautiful were its waters that in them I did drown.” I will never be able to forget that I heard those lines for the last time at the club pool, that they were being sung by a waiter with a face like a wildcat, whose features seemed strangely at odds with the configuration of his head, and who was standing, tray in hand, on the iron catwalk above the waters cascading into the swimming pool.

  22

  Several days later I visited the Clos des Renards. It was a scene of great activity, a tumult of trucks and laborers. Entering through the great gate, I approached the house along the avenue of oaks and chestnuts. The dead leaves had been swept away. The beautiful grove of birches is still standing. But, inside, the house is being completely renovated. Ornamentation, walls, paint, wax, plaster, ebony fall before my astonished eyes: a huge pile of smoldering skins lies at the end of the terrace of the lions, and carpenters are fitting new frames on doors and windows.

  I hear a peculiar sound and I peer through one of the newly refurbished windows. A crew of women dressed in full skirts and heavy denim blouses, their heads wrapped in coarse kerchiefs that hide their hair, are scraping down the floors and walls of the house. They don
’t speak; they don’t look at me.

  Though the inscription above the door, A.D. 1870, remains untouched, I notice that workmen are attacking the French garden, digging a large pit exactly at its center. Of course. This will be the long-missing pool. Because of the excavation, one can no longer see—if in fact it ever actually existed—the sulphurous, burnt gash Branly said he saw from his bedroom window and, barefoot, walked through that last time the gift of simultaneity was granted him by dream, time, and the physical space of the Clos des Renards.

  I ask the workmen the owner’s name; no one knows anything. I feel frustrated. We leave behind that house being stripped of its curses as in medieval times dwellings were purified of the plague.

  I return to Paris that afternoon, after a leisurely drive through Enghien, Montmorency, Andilly, Margency, and other places where I have friends and memories. Corot’s autumn has appeared, crowned with silvery mist. I decide to visit my friend Branly, who is suffering from an acute bronchial infection.

  “You must get well quickly,” I tell him jokingly. “I don’t want to be the only person who knows the story of the Heredias.”

  He looks at me with doleful eyes, and says I mustn’t worry, that memory is a faithless creature and nothing is more easily forgotten than a dead man.

  “If you only knew how difficult it is for me to remember the faces of my first wives. Nothing closer in life. Nothing more distant in death.”

  “Don’t you have photographs of them?”

  A wave of his hand tells me that anything that cannot be remembered spontaneously deserves to be entombed in oblivion.

  “On the other hand, how well I remember Félicité, my nurse when I went to my grandfather’s castle for vacations. I remember her. She told me that my grandfather, too, was a military man, first during the July Monarchy, and then during the Second Empire. But he never told me any of this, so I am not sure.”

  “Perhaps that’s what Hugo Heredia feared,” I dared suggest.

  “What?”

  “That he would forget his wife and son in the same way.”

  Branly turned to look at me with the concentrated but impotent fury of the elderly, more terrible than a young man’s rage because the absence of physical menace suggests something much worse.

  “Have you had news of him?” he asks, his voice congested.

  “No,” I reply with surprise. “Should I have?”

  “He told me that his life depended on my silence. But I broke that silence; I told you everything. My only hope is that Hugo Heredia is dead.”

  Branly speaks these words with some passion; he is overcome by a fit of coughing. As he composes himself, I mention the beauty of the November afternoon, a little cool, but radiant, like the afternoons he always loved on the Île de France when as a child he paused on the bridge over the river and experienced that miraculous moment that disperses the phenomena of the day, rain or fog, scorching heat or snow, to reveal the luminous essence of this favored city.

  “Don’t change the subject,” Branly scolds me, his handkerchief in his hand. “The French Heredia told Hugo not to tell anything, because Victor’s life depended on it. But he did, Hugo told me the story.”

  “And you told me, Branly. Actually, I wasn’t changing the subject. One morning in this very house, Victor invited you to join him in a game, and you nearly missed the opportunity.”

  “That is true. Stupidly. Because of my passion for the order and reason that wear the solemn mask of maturity and veil one’s fear that one may recover one’s lost imagination.”

  As I open wide the tall beveled windows of Branly’s bedchamber overlooking the garden with the solitary sea pine, I tell him that I visited the Clos des Renards that morning.

  “I went to your bedroom, my friend. The clothes you were wearing the night of the accident were still there, tossed into a corner. What did Etienne carry away the morning he and your Spanish servants came for you? What did Etienne have in his small black suitcase?”

  Branly looked at me with terror. His gaze was lost in the distance, as were his thoughts, floundering in a pool of clear water.

  “She asked me to dream of her. She said we would never grow old as long as I remember her and she remembers me.”

  I feel a sudden sense of remorse. I walk toward the windows to close them, but Branly stops me with a movement of his hand, saying no, I mustn’t worry.

  His voice is choked, but he manages to say: “You see: I always believed that even when I found her I would continue to look for her, to wait patiently for her to reveal her true face to me. I did it for the boy, I swear it. It was through him that I was able to remember my love. I could have died without remembering her. I am eighty-three years old. Do you realize? I came very close to forgetting her forever. I wanted to repay him. Perhaps he, too, thanks to me, will remember the person he forgot. Perhaps it was not in vain.”

  “I hope to God you were not mistaken.”

  “We shall soon know, my friend. What do you think?”

  I look at the sadly illuminated figure of Branly sitting listlessly in his threadbare brocade chair, wrapped in an ancient plush bathrobe, a man without descendants. I am seized by compassion, but refuse to be governed by it; I remember what his heritage is: the Heredias, Mexico, Venezuela, the story of which he is gladly divesting himself to give to me—who do not want it.

  Even so, a kind of contrary compulsion, irreversible and irresistible, forces me to insist that my old friend tell me everything, as if exhausting all the possibilities of the narrative might mean the end of this story I never wanted to hear, and the resulting release from the responsibility of telling it to someone else. This is the only explanation I can offer for my next incredible questions.

  “Isn’t there anything more, Branly? Are you sure you aren’t forgetting something? I must know everything before…”

  As my elderly friend hears these words his eyes clear. He looks at me with a profound, almost mordant irony worthy, I say to myself, of his greatest moments of pleasure, intuition, presence, and power. This is how I imagine him looking that last time at Hugo Heredia, through the dusk of a solitary, sacred barranca where the gods of the New World lie slumbering.

  “Before I die? Ah, my friend. Not quite yet. For a number of reasons.”

  He sighs; he drums his fingers on the shabby brocade chair arm. I realize now that my questions were counter to my best interests: as the gods will one day rise from the rotting mangrove thickets where long ago they were murdered, so my questions sprang from my irrational desire to know. I must know everything before Branly dies and can no longer tell me, cannot bequeath me his story, condemning me to wander like a blind beggar pleading for the few verbal coins I must have to finish the story I inherited. If he died before I knew the conclusion, I would never be free. I had to know everything before I could transmit the story in its totality to another. But Branly was not aware of the chaos of my thoughts; he was enumerating the reasons he would live a while longer.

  “No, I shall not die as long as I remember her and she remembers me. That is the first reason. The second, and more important, is that my death will not be borne on tonight’s wind; I sense the warmth of a St. Martin’s summer. Autumn will be detained a little longer, my friend. You remember that St. Martin was sainted because of his generosity. Did he not share his cloak with a beggar?”

  Now he stares at me with disquieting discernment.

  “Tomorrow is November 11th, Fuentes. Your birthday. You see, I am not yet senile, I remember the birth dates, the dates of the deaths of my friends. No, you must not worry. You and I are living but one of the infinite possibilities of a life and of a story. You are afraid to be the narrator of this novel about the Heredias because you fear the vile demon who may take revenge against the last man to know the story. But you are forgetting something I have tried to tell you more than once. Every novel is in a way incomplete, but, as well, contiguous with another story. Take your own life. In 1945, Fuentes, you decided to live i
n Buenos Aires, near Montevideo; you did not return to your native Mexico; you became a citizen of the River Plate region, and then in 1955 you came to live in France. You became less of a River Plate man, and more French than anything else. Isn’t that so?”

  I said yes, he knew that as well as I, though at times I questioned the degree of my assimilation into the French world. He touched my hand with affection.

  “Imagine; what would have happened if you had returned to Mexico after the war and put down roots in the land of your parents? Imagine; you publish your first book of stories when you are twenty-five, your first novel four years later. You write about Mexico, about Mexicans, the wounds of a body, the persistence of a few dreams, the masks of progress. You remain forever identified with that country and its people.”

  “But it was not like that, Branly.” I spoke uncertainly. “I don’t know whether for good or ill, but I am not that person.”

  With a strange smile, he asks me to pour him a drink from the bottle of Château d’Yquem beside his bed. Shouldn’t he, I ask, go back to bed? Yes, he will; later, when he decides it is time. Would I like a glass of that late wine, the fruit of the autumn grapes?

  I join him in a toast.

  “To your other life, Fuentes, to your contiguous life. Think who you might have been, and celebrate with me your birthday and the coming St. Martin’s summer days with a wine that postpones death and offers us a second vintage. St. Martin has again divided his cloak to shelter us from the winter. Think how the same thing happens with every novel. There is a second, a contiguous, parallel, invisible narration for every work we think unique. Who has written the novel about the Heredias? Hugo Heredia amid the ruins of Xochicalco, or the boorish owner of the Clos des Renards? I, who have told you the story? You, who someday will tell what I have told you? Or someone else, someone unknown? Here is another possibility: the novel was already written. It is an unpublished ghost story; it lies in a coffer buried under a garden urn, or under loose bricks at the bottom of a dumbwaiter shaft. Its author, need I say it? is Alexandre Dumas. Have no fear, my friend. I know how to survive terror.”