Distant Relations

by Carlos Fuentes

  I press his hand. As I leave, he asks me to tell the housekeeper that she can go to bed, he will not be needing her. He wants to sleep late. But I really have no desire to speak with the woman whose eyes shine with the glimmer of unshed tears.

  Yet, as I walk along the hallway leading from Branly’s bedchamber to the salon, I notice an open door that had been closed when I came to visit my friend this St. Martin’s eve.

  As I left Branly in his bedroom, I had been thinking of the luminous, warm city, the renewed summer he had promised for the following day. As I pass the open door, I feel attracted as if by the light in my imagination, light that disperses the phenomena of the day, rain or fog, scorching heat or snow. I turn, curious about the source of the light, and watch as one tiny flame after another begins to flicker in the candelabra I had earlier, with surprise and dismay, noticed were missing from the salon.

  I can dimly discern a pale hand in the shadows, moving from candle to candle. I remember how once young Victor in broad daylight, but behind drawn drapes, had lighted these same candelabra in this same house, but now, to my sudden awe, the room is transformed, transported to a different space, its axis equivocal, its symmetry questionable.

  I enter the room. In vain I try to penetrate the ecclesiastic gloom enveloping the figure lighting the candles. Dazed, I retreat to the farthest corner, as far as possible from the candelabra with their bronze ram’s-head bases, the garlands of blindfolded girls whose bodies serve as candle holders, the bronze serpents whose fangs fasten on glass shades, the melted wax on the argentine backs of a pack of hunting hounds.

  The dolorous hands light the last candle. The room is filled with light; a woman kneels before the table by her leather-canopied bed. On the table is the object I had always before seen in the salon, the clock suspended in an arch of gilded bronze, with the figure of a seated woman playing an ornate piano with griffin legs, in a sumptuous mounting of motionless draperies and doors. On the same bedside table is the sepia photograph of Branly’s father.

  The woman is weeping, still on her knees, her hands covering her face.

  In this instant, all the defenses of humor, innocence, and rationality I have placed between myself and Branly’s narrative fall away. It is of little consequence that the woman is dressed in black rather than the high-waisted, décolleté white ball gown with the long stole. Can we call intuition our sudden nakedness beneath the sun of a North African desert or the torrential downpour of an equatorial jungle that, as it strips us of the umbrella of logic we carry through well-lighted streets as we boldly enter shops, routinely step off buses, confidently sign checks, forces us to accept the inevitability of what confronts us? Intuition? Or awareness of something that never happened to us which yet encompasses a truth we did not even want to suspect, much less admit into the orderly compartments of good Socratic reason: someone has lived constantly alongside us, always, not just from the moment of birth, but always, a being fused to our life as the waters of the sea are with the sea. And to our death as our breath is with the air we breathe. During our lifetime, this being accompanies us with never a sign of its own life, as if less than the shadow, a tiptoeing murmur, the sudden, almost inaudible whisper of ancient taffeta against the knob of a half-open door, though this something—I know it in my mind as I pry away the strong hands that not only hide but disfigure the woman’s face—lives, parallel to our own, a completely normal life, taking meals at regular hours, counting its possessions, casting glances we never see, yet in it jealousy and tenderness battle to exhaustion in a neighboring nonpresence: contiguous, bodies and their phantoms; contiguous, the narration and its specter.

  “Lucie,” I say. “Lucie, rest now. Leave him in peace. He has helped you. He did the best he could to return your son to you. Be grateful to him for that; he is a good man.”

  The wife of Hugo Heredia is possessed of an awesome force, a steel mesh woven more of will than of true strength, and I can do nothing but prevent an ever greater calamity. I fear she will claw at her face until it dissolves beneath tears indistinguishable from blood. But I fear even more that the hypotheses born of the intuition that stripped away my defenses as it plunged me suddenly into the horror of an eternal oblivion belonging to another woman like this one, another Lucie, my own, a woman unknown to me who like Branly’s phantom was constantly by my side, would obliterate my friend’s companion before I could see her face. I knew that the key to her secret was on her face and not in all my hypotheses—which were nothing but unanswered questions. Does everyone have an invisible phantom that accompanies him throughout his lifetime? Must we die before our phantom becomes incarnate? Then who is with us in death, the phantom of life, the only being that truly remembers us? What is that phantom’s name? Is this phantom somehow different from what is simultaneously phantom and death during our lifetime: youth?

  The moment I realize that these enigmas, if not their solutions, are written on Lucie’s hidden face, I know that I have missed my opportunity to know this woman; I can know her only by looking at the face of my friend the Comte de Branly, not at her. If anywhere there was to be found the reality of the eternally tentative woman who floated along the magical paths of the Pare Monceau, it is in the waxen face, the pale hands, the intelligent eyes of the man who will be visited by the woman’s spectral presence only if he does not know she is dead. Branly. Is it only through him that all the manifestations of the wife of Hugo Heredia exist? the sweetheart in the park of my friend’s childhood, the French Mamasel, the girl who a hundred eighty years ago was seen by Branly’s specter in the same park at the same hour in the same light?

  As soon as I think I have resolved one enigma, the solution itself creates a new mystery. Any explanation that Lucie could offer me is obstinately withheld by the Heredias. Finally, I understand only one thing, that from behind the beveled windows of a house on the Avenue Vélasquez one presence has watched over everything, known everything, eternal, persevering, cruel in its pathetic will to bring it all back to life.

  These thoughts flash through my mind as I struggle to move the hands away from the face of the woman who perhaps at that very instant, spontaneously, freely, with light-hearted yet sinister fatalism, was lowering her hands from her face in the abandoned painting in the attic of the Clos des Renards. I swear that before I forcibly revealed that face I reproached myself for what I was doing. I told myself that my conclusions were too facile, too capricious, born of my need to tie up loose ends, to conform with the laws of symmetry, but that in truth—in truth—I did not have, I would never have, the right or power to interpret or vary the facts, to in any way intrude in the labyrinths of this story so imperiously indifferent to my own.

  I tear Lucie’s hands from her face. I cannot contain a scream of anguish. As I look upon that gaze of vertiginous infinity, I understand what Branly saw at the bottom of the dumbwaiter shaft at the Clos des Renards in the whirlwind of dead leaves and tiny daggers of ice; I know at last why we sell our souls in the pact we make with the devil not to be alone in death.

  It was not in vain that Branly called on certain words to conjure up the true subject of his song: harsh sighs, strange tongues, appalling gibberish, tones of rage, and fields of ashen misery beneath a sky barren of stars.

  This is Lucie’s face.

  The woman, too, screams as I reveal her face. Her first cry is one of fear; the second, of pain.

  This is not a hypothesis: Lucie will live the moment my friend Branly dies. The trembling face I see before me is that of a beast crouched in ambush, lupine, rabid to devour the opportunity offered by death. It is not, this trembling face on which I gaze, that of a living woman. It is the mortal remains of a phantom in the unspeakable transit between yesterday’s body and tomorrow’s specter. I feel I must return to Branly’s bedchamber, ask whether he knows that when he dies he will be, as until now she has been, a phantom. But even though she may cease to be a corpse, she will never be more than a specter.

  My Lucie says, in a fetid
voice as dank as fungus: You are growing old, Carlos. You do not belong here; you will never again belong there. Do you know your phantom? It will take your place at the moment of your death, and you will be the phantom of what in your life was your specter. You must abandon hope. You have not been able to kill it, however much you have tried. You did not leave it behind you in Mexico, or in Buenos Aires, as you thought you had when you were young.

  The empty eye sockets, fountains of blood, mesmerize me with a blend of nausea and agonized fascination. “I can see it. It is standing patiently on the threshold of this bedroom. Go with it. Leave us alone. Do not come back.”

  It is an effort now to free myself from that dankness, from that kneeling woman whose face I could not describe without vertigo. I turn my back to the mother of Victor and Antonio. I could swear that she is clinging to my arm at the same time she is banishing me from her room. But this is merely an illusion, a new illusion, my own. She has no awareness of distance in the way we understand it. Her hand touches my arm, but I know that to her my body is not my body. Her presence does not touch me, it touches my phantom, the one that from this moment, the woman has just told me, waits beside the door of the room illuminated in the flickering of funereal silver.

  She remains on her knees, weeping. Again she covers her face with her hands. She is singing quietly, in a quavering voice: “It is long I have loved you, I shall never forget you.” Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.

  23

  ST. MARTIN’S SUMMER

  I will allow it to guide me through this increasingly warm night. It is as if Paris, heavy with forgotten celebrations and unforgettable stones, were regressing to the eternally warm but equally desolate bosom of its creation.

  Sculpted in this struggle between the righteousness of the calendar and the savagery of the physical world, the profile of the city stands out like a bas-relief of time-become-flesh. I do not know the identity of this being, unborn, or returned from the dead, who accompanies me, but, because of it, I know that on this balcony Musset took the sun as a respite from the paleness of the secluded Princess Belgiojoso, and that an anguished, tormented Gérard de Nerval hurried along this wet alleyway, and that from that bridge, at the very moment Nerval was writing “El desdichado,” Cesar Vallejo was gazing at his reflection in the rushing waters; on the Boulevard La Tour-Maubourg I will hear the voice of Pablo Neruda; on the Rue de Longchamp, that of Octavio Paz; along with my specter I will walk across the footbridge of the Passerelle Debilly across the Seine; dry leaves will hang suspended above the statues in the Galliéra park; the warm night will reverberate along the Avenue Montaigne; a thwarted autumn will seek refuge in the cellars of the Rue Boissy-d’Anglas; as I feared, we come to the Place de la Concorde, the infinite crossroad, the fatal space where one day, one noon in this month of November, I had approached my friend Branly in the dining room of the Automobile Club and suggested we have lunch together.

  Do I have a right to the answers to the enigma that has pursued me during my nocturnal walk from the Avenue de Saxe to the Place de la Concorde? How had Lucie recognized me? Was it because she knew that her husband Hugo Heredia, a man my own age, had waited for me in vain in front of the baroque façade of the Escuela de Mascarones? waited to walk with me to the French Book Shop on the Paseo de la Reforma, to have a cup of coffee with Huguette Balzola in the manager’s office on the mezzanine, to leave with the most recent issue of France Observateur or Mauriac’s latest novel, to walk toward the French Institute on Nazas Street through the restless dust of a Mexican twilight, to see an old Renoir or Buñuel film, to talk for hours, to compare notes on exile and belonging, on possessions and dispossession, on fatalism and freedom, on beings and non-beings, on tenderness and cruelty, on accord and discord: on resentment rescued by recognition? Because I chose to live in Argentina, did Hugo Heredia never have the friend he needed? Was he the friend I never knew in the lonely crowds of my youth beside the River Plate?

  As I cross the square toward Gabriel’s pavillon, the night grows measurably warmer. I don’t know whether to trust what my eyes tell me. I hurry forward, and a breath of air from the Tuileries gardens carries the scent of magnolias in bloom. I see windows in the Hôtel Crillon being thrown open in the suffocating heat, guests peering with disbelief into the night of this St. Martin’s summer.

  Normally, the club concierge would not have admitted me at this hour. Tonight, however, I find him in his shirtsleeves, lounging against the black iron grating of the unlocked vestibule door. He has the look of a prisoner who can’t decide whether to escape or choose the security of what he knows.

  He recognizes me, and, panting from the heat, allows me to enter. He sniffs something uncommon on the air, and I, at least, am a known factor. He feels he must say the obvious: “What a scorcher! Not your ordinary night, eh?”

  I tell him that I had carelessly left some important papers in the pool dressing room. I can find the way. He had better tend to the door. Indeed, this is not an ordinary night.

  I know my destination, know where I am being propelled by my invisible companion. I can smell freshly cut pineapple slices, black-splotched ripe plantains, the buttery red flesh of the mamey. My mouth waters with forgotten, anticipated flavors melting on my burning tongue.

  I think I hear the faint sound of singing. I expect to hear the madrigal of the clear fountain, but instead there is only the melancholy Mexican ballad sung to the llorona, the weeping woman who wanders the night like a soul in pain, ay llorona, how cruel the years have been, ay de mí, llorona, llorona de ayer y hoy, ayer era maravilla, llorona, y ahora ni sombra soy, today less than a shadow am I.

  I walk through the bar to the swimming pool. The pool itself is obscured in a tangle of lush plants, ivy-covered trees with fragrant bark, climbing vines curling from the green mosaic pillars up to the great dome of iron and glass blinded by matted foliage. There is an overpowering aroma of venomous, ravenous flowers. Gunpowder trees: I had forgotten them, and now the scent reminds me that their bark was used to make the munitions of the Indies.

  I make my way down a few steps toward the pool concealed behind the profuse greenery. I seem to be dislodging nests of tiny hummingbirds. I startle parrots into flight, and suddenly find myself face to face with a monkey whose visage is an exact replica of my own. He mirrors my movements, and then scampers off through the branches. I tread on the moulting body of a huge snake swollen with the mass of its own eggs. My feet sink into the moist earth, the yellow mud of the edge of the swimming pool of the Automobile Club de France. Suddenly there is no sound but the chatter of howler monkeys deep in the jungle.

  Quickly I climb to the catwalk above the pool, where a young servant with a feral face had watched a rehearsal of Branly’s death.

  A hush descends over the deathlike stillness of the water. A film, which could be the fumes of the jungle, covers the verdant pool. In the middle of that sperm-colored scum float two bodies, embraced, two fetuses curled upon themselves like Siamese twins, joined by their umbilicus, floating with a placidity that repudiates all past, all history, all repentance.

  The faces are ancient. I stare at them from the iron catwalk. These are preternaturally old fetuses, as if they had swum nine centuries in their mother’s womb. I strain to see the wrinkled features, and if in the fleeing simian I had seen my own reflection, I see now, with photographic clarity, the faces of two boys become old men in the floating fetuses.

  I had never known them. But the voice beside me whispers into my ear not who they are but who I am.

  “Heredia. You are Heredia.”

  Heavy of heart, I retreat, never turning my back, as if bidding a last farewell to an imprisoned hero, to a god interred in life, to drowned angels. The voice of my phantom pursues me to the iron door of the vestibule and to the square where autumn is beginning to recover its fleetingly usurped rights.

  The St. Martin’s summer is dying. No one remembers the whole story.

  Books By Car
los Fuentes

  Where the Air Is Clear

  The Good Conscience

  Aura

  The Death of Artemio Cruz

  A Change of Skin

  Terra Nostra

  The Hydra Head

  Burnt Water

  Distant Relations

  Myself with Others

  Translation copyright © 1982 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in Spanish under the title

  Una familia lejana, copyright © 1980 by Ediciones Era, S.A., Mexico

  Library of Congress catalog card number: 81-9904

  Published in Canada by Collins Publishers, Toronto

  First edition, 1982

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux paperback edition, 1983

  eISBN 9781466840119

  First eBook edition: February 2013