Distant Relations

  “Take me to the house.”

  “Of course, M. le Comte, the taxi is waiting.”

  “No, this house, here, take me there.”

  “Please, M. le Comte, come home with us.”

  “But, do you see, I had already told myself that I had not come alone to the Clos des Renards, and I would not return alone to the Avenue de Saxe, where Hugo Heredia would be waiting for me in an Empire bedchamber overlooking a garden whose symmetry is scarcely disturbed by an evergreen sea pine growing in the sand.”

  “I know your house, Branly.”

  “I mean that thinking of Hugo Heredia’s bedroom there forced me to think of Victor Heredia’s bedchamber here. I had never seen it.”

  “Nor the boys’ bedroom.”

  “That was the Citroën.”

  The servants had helped him beyond the perimeter of the leaves.

  “I had never intruded on my uncouth host in the daytime. I had never asked him the reason for, or an accounting of, anything beyond an undeserved surprise, or gross indifference.”

  “This way, M. le Comte.”

  “No. This way.”

  “With my cane I indicated the most logical route between the two points, but also, according to the rules of propriety, the least acceptable. The French garden, perfect in its symmetry, lay between my servants and me and the house.”

  My friend says that not even in the most difficult moments of the Aisne campaign had he been challenged to make a more immediate or more difficult decision. The servants wanted to respect the symbolic space of that formal garden and to use the gravel path to walk around it.

  “Unlike them, I knew that something—I did not and do not now know what—was dependent on my venturing to cross the garden by the route one could not see as one stood beside it, but, as you recall, only from the second story, a slash cutting through the garden like the phosphorescent track of a beast.”

  Trembling, José and Florencio had released their grip on his elbows, offering the excuses, the tentative explanations for their deplorable conduct, that Branly would never request, for, if anything characterizes my old friend—I know now better than ever, after listening to him and attempting to predict the outcome of his adventure with the Heredias—it is that he would never express his intense pride; pride is silent, it does not ask excuses nor offer justifications.

  “M. le Comte, you told us that we should obey the young gentleman at all times.”

  Their voices were growing faint behind him. Barefoot, my friend followed the gash in the garden, seeing about him the infinitely mutable landscape of his dreams, as if the places he had dreamed of in his bedroom had always been here, within view of his windows, where a woman he had loved in the past had appeared.

  “Yes, listen: in the center of the formal garden surrounding me, I saw re-created the most beloved—I realized it then—the most irreplaceable, landscape of my life, the Pare Monceau of my childhood, and in that moment I knew that whatever the end, whatever the meaning, of the life I have lived, I would owe to Victor Heredia, my young Mexican friend, this moment when I recaptured what I had most loved but had nevertheless forgotten. We imagine that the instant belongs to us. The past forces us to understand that there is no true time unless it is shared.”

  He pressed my arm affectionately, a rare gesture from a man of such correct and courteous, although never effusive or sentimental, behavior, and his silence allowed me to stammer that, in the end, whatever travels we have undertaken are nothing more than a search for the one place we already know, a place that embraces all our emotions, all our memory.

  “Yes,” Branly nodded. “Yes. Precisely so. And that is what I owed to the boy whom in the normal course of events I would never have known because he would have been born after my death. Why was that not so? When Victor Heredia was born, I was seventy-one. My father died at the age of thirty.”

  Branly was not looking outside. His back was turned to the windows overlooking the square, and before him there was but one face, my own, obscured by the shadows. This may be why he was speaking in this fashion, he may have felt he was talking to himself. Emboldened, I asked, as one asks oneself: “Do you wish you had never known the Heredias?”

  “I did not know the Heredias,” my friend replied after a pause. “The person I came to know was myself, have you not realized?”

  He spoke with a kind of affectionate intensity I found moving, because I know in all sincerity that in that affection were joined all the disparate emotions of his own life, as well as everything my friend felt for those of us, living or dead, who shared in it. This conviction was born of a vision: Branly, in the center of the formal garden of the Clos des Renards, had seen himself (perhaps he was also seen by the two boys, and by the French Heredia from his hiding place) again in the Parc Monceau; behind him walked a girl dressed in white and before him the stubbornly closed beveled windows through which peered a child whose face belonged to oblivion.

  He walked toward the boy, leaving the woman behind. He chose the boy, he needed him, ultimately, more than anything in his life, because to no one had he given less. Now, this time, seventy-one years after he had forgotten him, he would not cheat him, whoever his lost friend might be …

  He continued walking until he came to the crushed gravel bordering the terrace of the lions. Monceau, the house on the Avenue Vélasquez, its residents, all dissolved, and in their place appeared what had been there all the time, the massive, unexceptional, suburban manor house existing in the limbo of an outmoded elegance very much in the style of Louis Philippe, its yellow-painted exterior peeling slightly. He stepped across the threshold with the shield bearing the inscription A.D. 1870, and crossed the dark foyer. He walked through an even darker dining room lined with cordovan leather, a library which instead of books had piles of faded papers on its shelves, a kitchen with few signs of food but a quantity of tree leaves steeping in cold copper cauldrons smelling of rainwater. He passed the antiquated telephone, and the no less old and creaking dumbwaiter.

  The upper story contained the attic. On the second floor was the bedroom he had been occupying. Heredia’s room should be on the same floor. And it could only be, he told himself, mentally reconstructing the floor plan of the house he had just explored for the first time, behind one of the symmetrical, leather-covered doors along the hallway between his bedroom and the dumbwaiter.

  Again he was walking down the hallway, as he had that morning, though now it seemed immeasurably longer, the hall he had first investigated while looking for the breakfast he found in a dumbwaiter in a pillar beside the stairway. As he advanced, he rapped at each of the symmetrically placed doors.

  “They were simply trompe l’oeil, my friend. Like the houses and streets on the backdrop of the Palladium’s Olympic Theater in Vicenza, the doors had been painted on the leather. As I knocked, I heard no hollowness at all, only the dull thud of a sturdy brick wall.” A flayed house, yes, but also, Branly tells me, a walled-in house.

  One door sounded hollow, the one beside the column that housed the dumbwaiter. Branly opened it and, at the end of a vast gallery stripped of furniture or ornamentation, saw his host.

  18

  The French Victor Heredia was clad all in black. Black shoes, trousers, coat, and shirt. The only white article of apparel was a clerical collar as white as the hair, skin, and eyes of this disagreeable man standing in the corner of an enormous room whited like the sepulchers to which Christ compared the Pharisees. There was in the narrowed and satisfied eyes of Victor Heredia, in his ridiculous priestly attire, in the arrangement of the stubby-fingered, greedy hands clasping the lapels of his jacket, something utterly repulsive, which, added to the deathlike radiance of the room, provoked in my friend the biblical associations so uncommon in him and, generally, in the Latin cultures, which believe in Jesus only because he was legitimized by Rome.

  The absence of windows added to the feeling of suffocation; but if my friend was aware of a sense of asphyxia, it was because of H
eredia’s words, welcoming Branly with his infuriating, accustomed vulgarity. “What’s the matter, M. le Comte? Did you lose your slippers? At your age you shouldn’t be wandering around without shoes. Why, you might catch pneumonia, and before you know it, pow! you’d find yourself pushing up daisies; then how could you ever make it barefoot over the coals of hell?”

  He punctuated his words with strident laughter, and although Branly was not prepared to offer his host the least consideration and would have preferred to have announced succinctly his impending departure in the company of the young Victor Heredia, the spectacle of the older, guffawing Heredia garbed like a parish priest precipitated words that perhaps in other circumstances Branly would not have uttered:

  “I have come to say goodbye. But not without informing you that I am aware that I have no reason to be grateful to you. Your duplicity has been unremitting. I shall simply recall to you the first of your tricks; that will be sufficient to disabuse you of any idea that you are still deceiving me. You offered to take care of Etienne if the boy and I returned to Paris. But you knew perfectly well that I would remain, because Etienne is in my employ. Wait, please. I want you to hear one thing. I fully realize that my chauffeur and I have been mere pretexts for getting the boy here. I wanted to tell you this before I left, and to admit that I may have fallen into your snare at the beginning, but today, as I return home, I am undeceived. You, sir, are a charlatan.”

  The French Heredia, Branly tells me, looked at him with theatrically exaggerated amazement. “Why the devil are you telling me all this?”

  Branly drew himself up, supporting himself on his cane. “I am telling you that I am a man of honor and that you are an unconscionable swine. I regret that my age prevents me from giving you a thrashing, whether public or private. It is all you deserve.”

  Branly admits, the glimmer of amusement in his small black eyes piercing the shadow of the dining room, that if he had adopted such tactics it was to get Heredia to lower his guard, so he would go on regarding Branly as a kind of aristocratic mammoth chained in the dark cave of an outmoded ethical code.

  “The ethics of a man like Heredia, if one can speak of ethics, originate in the supposition that we have exhausted ourselves under an outworn code; our true superiority consists in the fact that we maintain the code, although we live in the same world as the Heredias; ultimately, they will feel the lack of that ethical and aesthetic protection. Everything is politics in this world, and politics is above all a problem of legitimacy.”

  He placed his hand on mine. His obsession in that instant, he tells me, was to rescue the young Victor Heredia, and his words were a means of circumventing the coarse lord of the Clos des Renards, of finding the chink through which he and the youth might escape, and of returning him—yes, his honor demanded it—to Hugo Heredia. The obvious affection between the father and son that he had perceived that night in Jean’s house in Cuernavaca flashed through his mind, Branly tells me now, with the blinding brilliance of a Mexican sky spilling down on a tropical barranca. Now, he thought, his only defense for the young Victor was to exacerbate Heredia’s pride. He clasped his hands as only he knows how: long, pale, translucent fingers—prayer and memory.

  “And allow me to add one thing, Heredia. The ‘English vice’ does not horrify me; it is even possibly a necessary part of a young man’s education. But it does make a difference whether the, ah, partner is of one’s own or an inferior class. One pays an inferior.”

  He stared at Heredia provocatively, arrogantly. The host, his smile never wavering, removed his hands from his lapels. “How many centuries of human corruption has it taken to produce those delicate, long-fingered hands, M. le Comte?”

  “At least from the time St. Remigius converted Clovis to Christianity,” my friend replied with indifference. I was about to laugh at his riposte, but he repeated to me his insult to Heredia: he did not want to leave without paying his debts; how much did he owe André for his sexual services to Victor?

  Branly says he heard a sound like that of chains being torn from a cellar wall, and then it was as if the wall itself had fallen on him, scattering heavy, loose bricks over his body, as icy cold and as little to be warded off as the entire universe of this savage and yet strangely-to-be-pitied individual, who with insolent fury and tenderness raged: “He’s an angel, an angel!”

  “I realize something now, though because his physical aggression took precedence over any other consideration, I did not realize it when he threw himself on me. I should have suspected: he assaulted me in defense of his son. But there was something more, is that not always the case?”

  True madness is neither passionate nor heated, my friend adds. His voice has the chill of winter, and glacially icy was the voice of Heredia when he attacked Branly, ramming him against the whitewashed wall, pinning him there with his stocky, graceless body redeemed only by the classic configuration of head, profile, lips …

  What did he say, Branly asks. That Branly can know nothing about such things, that he cannot imagine what it is to know that your mother was thrown into a barranca, her grave so shallow that dogs and buzzards could feed on her body, devour it, scatter her bones to the winds, while a lonely boy waited for his father to return from making a new fortune in Cuba and Mexico, a lonely boy hoping that his mother would return too, but she never returned because she had been a banquet, first for the troops and then for beasts of prey, and he would make Branly pay for it, pay for the tenderness he had never known all those afternoons when ordinary little boys came home from school to play in the Parc Monceau but the boy with no recognized name or family stared from behind the beveled panes of a house on the Avenue Vélasquez, and only once another boy, he, Branly, was on the verge of accepting him, of playing with him, of admitting he existed, but he hadn’t dared, he hadn’t taken the extra step, and he would pay for that too, and how much had the French captain paid the Duchesse de Langeais? the so-appropriately named French Mamasel, for sold she was, in the brothel in Acapaltzingo that was one of the enterprises of Francisco Luis? Who was the inferior there, eh? the Mamasell, the Mamasail, the Mamasucker, or the sucked? Who should have paid whom, Branly, should your father have paid my mother or your mother paid my father? Who did the favor for whom, you bastard? And she? how could she know that things were not what she imagined if Clemencita had removed all the mirrors of the world and the Mamasel believed she was as beautiful and as young when she went to bed with the captain of the French forces in Mexico as when she went to bed with Francisco Luis following the cotillions held a half century before? What did I tell you, you bastard, what did I ask you? I told you that unborn beings are one half of a pair, M. le Comte, you can’t deny that, it’s even true of dogs, but can’t you imagine then that the opposite is also true? that young lovers are joined by an unborn child who demands his own creation through the souls of the young parents? Generations are infinite; we are all fathers of our fathers and sons of our sons.

  My friend was breathing painfully. He managed to avert his pallid face from Heredia’s panting, the icy breath of true madness whistling from a winter that was all winters, remote from the sweating armpits, the dark-skinned belly, the pliant waist of that enormous woman’s body sensually bedded on the waves between New Orleans and Cartagena de Indias, the Morro Castle and the Fort of San Juan de Ulúa, the blazing towers of Sans Souci and the banana- and melon-laden ships of French Martinique, British Jamaica, and Dutch Curaçao. That world, crouched in ambush, tamed only in appearances, again sprang to claw at us that last morning at the Clos des Renards, this slowly dying afternoon in the Automobile Club, as if in refutation of the prolonged calm of Cartesian reason my friend and I were struggling to save—did we truly believe that?—from the chaotic tropics of the Heredias, that torrid zone that somehow emitted from between Heredia’s fleshless lips a breath of icy death, as if the baroque existence so removed from our world proclaimed itself in equal intensity in its antipodes, only there. Branly tells me now that as he felt Heredia’
s panting breath on his cheeks he imagined an ice-covered Antilles and found nothing abnormal in the vision of white cathedrals, white palm trees, white parrots and owls skimming through a colorless sky above a milky sea.

  “You lie.” Through clenched teeth, Branly’s voice was strained, stern. “You lie, or you are confused, it makes no difference. My father was not an officer on the Mexican expedition; he was not born until 1870. You are totally confused. Mademoiselle Lange, Heredia’s first wife, was then seventy years old. She could not have conceived. And she had no children by Francisco Luis. You are the child of your father’s second wife, Heredia. But even this is a muddled lie, because you have decided that she is not your true mother. I attribute that whimsy to a legend concocted between you and the mulatto nurse. I do not see what any of this has to do with an unborn child.”

  “It is difficult work to make a child, I agree.” Heredia’s smile was particularly lugubrious and offensive. “But true generations have nothing to do with ordinary chronology.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Didn’t you see him from the waist down? My poor child is not well made. The legs, the groin. Badly made, I tell you. It isn’t easy.”

  “What?”

  “What do you mean, Branly?”

  “Wait.” He pressed my hand. “I myself did not understand. As I told you, I shall not understand this story until I have finished telling it.”

  “In spite of having lived it?” I persisted.

  “In spite of that. What possible relation can there be, tell me, between living something and telling it?”

  “Perhaps none, you may be right.”

  “Forgive my violence,” said Heredia, as he eased his lethal, crazed hold on Branly. “I am an insecure and fearful man, ha! ha! It takes blue blood like yours if a man is to feel he’s sitting on top of the world!”