Distant Relations

  My friend tells me now, with a smile, that it was waiting in bed, more than anything, that forced him to recognize how bizarre his situation was. In vain, he tried to remember a normal morning in his life, not wartime, not dawn in the trenches of the Marne in ’17, not the bombardment and fall of Calais in ’40, both the exception and the justification for a comfortable life, but one single morning in ordinary times when a solicitous servant had not appeared to place a breakfast tray across his lap, the bottom of the tray warm to the touch of fingers anticipating the temptations of steaming hot coffee and croissants warm from the oven.

  After an hour of waiting, and fighting a mounting irritation he struggled to suppress for being as unworthy as capricious, he fell asleep, exhausted equally by hunger and by the battle against the stirrings of a tantrum that reminded him of long-ago mornings when a woman with exquisite blue eyes and colorless lips in a colorless face, named, yes, Félicité, had been late bringing his breakfast on the occasions he was taken to visit the castle of his grandfather and his father, the handsome officer whose photograph had always stood on his bedside table. He had been taken by the hand and led up a dangerous stone stairway with no handrail to an enormous cold bedchamber, where every night, as here, he had tried to push the heavy bed close to the window, imagining he was more secure there than in the unprotected center of the room. He had always been afraid on that stairway, and wondered if a rope, a mere semblance of a railing, would have afforded a sense of security.

  The boys were far away. They were always so far that they were indistinguishable from the birch trees, and all morning, through the shutters formed by still-green branches, and amid the light and shadows of tree bark disguised as tattered Dominoes, he strove to identify their figures, and movements.

  It was precisely that blending of the figures and the beautiful grove—a remarkable emblem of winter jealously guarded through every season, accepting the fleeting celebrations of summer without relinquishing its role as a symbol of winter—that allowed him, to a degree, to become one with Victor and André, to remember what they were perhaps experiencing there in the grove, invisible from the half-open window of the guest room when they stood still, barely distinguishable when they moved.

  “Do you recall that moment when each of us discovers what other men have known throughout the centuries? The shadow of a tree, the fragrance of a flower, the veins in a transparent leaf. To know those things is to understand the absurd abyss that separates the eternal reality of things from the knowledge of them that only I—in spite of the realities and the knowledge of them thousands of millions of men have, or have had before me—that only I can acquire for myself, and which, lamentably, I can never transmit to any other being. Victor and André were discovering the world, and from my window I was watching and wondering whether an old man does not inevitably deceive himself when he imagines how it is to be young.”

  Today, more thoughtfully, he questions whether someday we will find a way to transmit the experience a man has accumulated by the time of his death, in the hope of sparing those still unborn the need to learn it all again, as if no one had ever been born before them. But the mocking response is always a vast Why?

  “I mean, my friend, what right do we have to wrest their experiences from others, only to give a second life to our own? At that moment, I was trying to give credence to an old man’s imaginings both of his childhood and of his old age. Were they false or true?”

  He had awakened to the sharp, insistent pangs of hunger. It was eleven o’clock, and Heredia, his dishonest host, less honorable than the Spanish innkeepers to whom he did not want to be compared, still had not appeared with his breakfast.

  With an effort, Branly struggled to the window. He cried: “Heredia! Victor Heredia!”

  He looked across the clipped, symmetrical French garden to the birch grove where the two young friends were now playing. He extended his arm between the curtains of the open window and called out the name which, he realized, smiling in spite of himself, belonged to two persons in this house.

  He says he is sure that young Victor was there, sometimes as motionless as the victim of a childish game of magic spells, as one of the tree trunks tattered like beggar’s rags, other times, he is sure, as swift as quicksilver, weaving an ephemeral garland from tree to tree, fleeter than the eye could behold.

  “Heredia! Victor Heredia!”

  He waved his hand; the boy did not respond. Perhaps he wasn’t there. But he couldn’t be very far away. The silence exasperated Branly; he could see himself at the window, shouting a name, waving his hand, calling to someone who did not answer, veiled by curtains billowing like sails, and he told himself that if at that moment someone arrived at the Clos des Renards for the first time, as he had two days before, when from the woods of oaks and chestnuts he had seen a figure like his, that person, Branly admitted, would imagine he had seen exactly what Branly had imagined: the silhouette of a figure hovering in the window, fluttering curtains, white gown, all glimpsed fleetingly yet fused in an impression of antiquity.

  They were playing amid the distant birch trees. They were not listening. They were not paying any attention. But something unfathomable was trying to make itself felt to Branly, to reach him. He fell back on the bed, exhausted, overcome by that dark and at the same time diaphanous sensation. He was trying to communicate with the boys, and they didn’t listen. At the same time, something was trying to communicate with him, and he didn’t listen because he felt something evil in that summons. Something evil was calling to him, trying to reach him. Did the boys feel the same when he called them?

  He was wakened by the unexpected heat of midday, a prolongation of the year’s tenacious summer, and by the voices of the boys from the terrace. Like the inverse of his dream, the voices were investing with normality the forms that had progressively dissolved in the repose of his consciousness.

  “He’s all alone.”

  “No. The lady lives upstairs.”

  “What lady?”

  “I told you. The mother.”

  “Have you ever seen her?”

  “Not very often. She never comes out of her room. She’s always in bed. She prays a lot. She’s very devout, you know.”

  “Is she very old?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “She’d be a good match for him; he’s very old, too, isn’t he?”

  They laughed, and their laughter faded, slowly evaporating either because Branly dozed or because the boys were moving away like the workmen, the geese, and the melody from his own childhood in the Parc Monceau about the clear fountain with waters so beautiful one cannot resist bathing in them.

  He dreamed about a woman he had loved in the past. He did not remember how old they had been, but he remembered the sentiment; it was a time when knowing one was hopelessly in love was enough for happiness. He clung to this sentiment because it was the only reality in a time when everything was moving so swiftly that events seemed to occur simultaneously. He had been born, as he had been told so often by Félicité, in his grandfather’s castle on the eve of a new century. His death had taken place instantaneously, only now did he perceive it, at the very moment of the birth described by the servant with the blue eyes and colorless skin. His anguish arose from the fact that he must distinguish between the two and tell the world, and himself, that he had been born, but had not died. He heard laughter below his window, from the terrace, mocking his truth, reiterating with sarcastic incredulity that every time a birth or a death occurred, they occurred together.

  In the midst of this temporal simultaneity, inseparable from the infinitely mutable landscape which was its twin in space, he had met the woman, and as they stood like statues in the middle of a park in flux, he had tried to tell her that what they were witnessing was not really seen by them but by someone who had the gift of seeing things through eyes that registered a rate of speed which, he thanked God, was not that of men: otherwise, if birth and death were simultaneous, they wo
uld be separated as soon as they had come together. Like statues, they gazed into the distance, but the woman’s eyes were like two windows opening inward toward the interior of her body, her house; once inside, however, it was impossible to look outward through those windows. That was apparently the price of this gift.

  He smelled leather and sandalwood; a woman was approaching with a tray in her hands. Branly did not look at her face. He was so hungry he had eyes only for what was on the tray. By the time he saw what it was, and had sought consolation in the woman’s eyes, she had already placed his tray on his knees and covered her face, now veiled by sumptuously ringed fingers with gilded fingernails. The humors of leather and sandalwood were suffocating. He held out his own hands in supplication to the woman, leaving now, turning her back to him, trailing the white satin shreds of a high-waisted ball gown, the tatters of the stole tied beneath the décolleté neckline and bared shoulder blades. The tower of her hair seemed ready to crumble into ruins of powdered sugar and sticky cotton candy; her worn, flat-heeled slippers scurried like white mice; and my friend was left staring into the soup plate filled with dry leaves moistened by a foul-smelling liquid: his luncheon.

  “Why doesn’t she wear a veil?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “At least a mask, wouldn’t you think?”

  “Yes, it would be more comfortable than going around all day with her hands over her face. Say, have you read the story of the iron mask?”

  “No, who wrote it?”

  “Alexandre Dumas. Do you know him?”

  “Oh, yes. I read The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers in school.”

  “He came from Haiti, just like my papa. We would have invited him to visit this house, but he died the same year.”

  “The same year.”

  9

  The year of his meeting with the Heredias in Mexico was swallowed up by the year of the Countess’s illness and his decision not to travel any more, swallowed by the year of his last voyage to Naples to see the painting of the blind beggar leading the blind beggars, supplanted by the year he took a membership in the Automobile Club of France in order to exercise in the enormous swimming pool with the green and gold mosaics and iron catwalk, preceded by the year of the Second World War and the leg wound received during the debacle of Dunkirk, devoured by the year of his second wife’s death, absorbed by the year of the First World War by the year of his last visit to his grandfather in the castle by the year when he had read The Man in the Iron Mask in his dying mother’s garden with its clear fountains by the year of his father’s death and the year of the inauguration of the Pont Alexandre III and the year of his birth and finally the year that dissolved all the others, and he was again in a house not very different from this, gazing toward a grove of birch trees and an avenue of bare trees whose autumnal leaves rustled beneath the feet of the woman walking toward him. She was again dressed in a First Empire ball gown, although, of course, this could not be the time because he dreamed he was a young man, but flesh and blood, though the causal and persistent logic that in a dream seems so fantastic told him that the only time he could have met the woman now approaching through the trees and clad in a gown from the time of Napoleon was before he had been born. He stretched out a hand to touch her and tell her she would see, she need not worry, that the raging time in which birth and death occurred simultaneously was not their time, the sweet, slow time of all the lovers on this earth, their time did not demand that lovers be separated the moment they met. But the woman from the First Empire stared at him uncomprehendingly, seemingly unhearing. On one bare shoulder rested a white parasol twirled by sumptuously ringed white fingers with gilded fingernails. Abruptly the twirling stopped, and her expression changed to a dawning happiness based on the conviction that she did not remember this man, she owed him nothing, that their encounter was casual and his attitude impertinent.

  Branly awakened with a cry of desperation lingering on his lips. He must beseech the vanished woman to recognize him soon, before he forgot her in that sweet and sad time when death and birth do not coincide. But more powerful than his cry was the insistent nearby dripping that interrupted the flow of the successive layers of reality being sucked into the infinite vacuum of dream. He was bathed in a sweat of nerves and hunger. With the aid of his cane he struggled to his feet and limped painfully to the small bathroom, very much aware of his inability to walk very far or to negotiate the stairs. The dripping that had been more compelling than his dream, than the name or the face of the woman in his dream, was coming from an ancient shower suspended like a stalactite from a rusty pipe: the perforations in the shower head were crusted with calcareous tumors from the water of the regions near the river Seine. My friend removed his clothing and, with some difficulty, showered. He again donned the nightshirt and bathrobe lent him by Heredia, and, supporting himself on his cane, left the room in search of the dumbwaiter.

  The hall was long, and Branly was halt. He did not then know why, but the doors closed on the symmetrically placed bedrooms created a sensation of rising fear. Leather covered everything in this house, but the fact that it was used on hallways, bedrooms, and floors made it less precious, divested it of the uniqueness of skins destined for special purposes—footwear, book, coat, or sofa—a uniqueness only heightened when in our fantasy we imagine ourselves flayed and our own skin serving as coat or shoes for the person who has the indisputable right to strip it from our backs. In this house, however, the concept, the physical sensation, even more the evidence of less-than-perfect quality, turned these skins into little less than stained and sour wineskins torn ruthlessly from the backs of beasts.

  The dumbwaiter was housed in a square pillar next to the stairway. Branly opened it and found a cold collation, seasoned this time with mustard that surely Heredia had daubed on the meats early that morning, for it had formed a crust not unreminiscent of the dry hides that covered every inch of the house. My friend managed to pick up the tray, balancing it on one arm against his ribs in order to free the other hand for his cane. He made his way back to his room, almost regretting that Heredia had denied him an opportunity for a mute reproach, would he condemn a guest to starvation? But, think what you will, to suppose that, first thing in the morning, Branly would suppose that cold meat was waiting in the dumbwaiter was to suppose a good deal!

  “The image I had of myself at that moment was atrocious: an elderly pauper consigned to an asylum by irresponsible and cruel relatives.”

  He did not want to ponder further the subtleties of hospitality as they were understood by his most unusual host. Hunger claimed his attention, and constantly aware, for the first time in a long while, of a sense of humiliation and abandonment, he devoured the roast beef, sausage, and chicken leg as he watched dusk fall over the woods of the Clos des Renards, as once again the voices of the children, now nearing the terrace, rose to his bedchamber.

  “I think I should go up and say hello.”

  “No.”

  “He must be wondering why I haven’t come.”

  “Because you can’t.”

  “Why not, André?”

  “Just because.”

  “That’s no reason.”

  “There doesn’t have to be a reason, except that from now on we don’t do anything we can’t do together, do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “You swear?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I forbid you to do anything I can’t do, and I won’t do anything without you, and that’s that!”

  My friend says now that in that precise instant the feeling that something unfathomable but threatening was trying to reach him became a reality and the tray with the remains of his lunch fell from his shaking knees. But as soon as he stood and lurched toward the window, another, earlier thought materialized: the question of how accurately or inaccurately an old man can imagine his youth. And as he parted the curtains with trembling hands, that doubt expanded to include everything connected wi
th the youth of the two boys speaking the words that to Branly sounded so cruel, words he had no reason or right to judge. He held himself upright by clinging to the curtain, knowing at last that to flee from danger was to rush to an encounter with something worse, and aware that the strange, parallel compulsion of this moral certainty was causing him to hesitate—as ruinous as the powdered-sugar hair of a woman he might have loved in a different time, a man clinging precariously to an ancient, threadbare damask curtain to keep from reeling and falling from the window to the stone terrace below, where the children were resuming their game.

  “Capital of Nigeria?”

  “Lagos.”

  “Capital of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan?”

  “Khartoum, Khartoum.”

  “Let’s pretend that you’re Gordon and I’m the Mahdi.”

  “Evil Mahdi!”

  “Valiant Gordon!”

  The boys laughed and then Branly heard the onomatopoeic sounds with which children imitate an adult epic, their voices simulating cannon fire and the charge of horse brigades. Branly, still grasping the curtain, had a fleeting memory of his own charades in a time when memories of the colonial adventures of General Gordon were fresh in newsprint and conversations. Finally, he peered from the window and saw the dark head of Victor Heredia, but not that of his young French friend, for André was wearing a sailor cap and—all my friend could see from his perspective—a sailor suit as well, a sky-blue suit of heavy linen trimmed in white, with ankle-length trousers.

  With dusk came a fine, steady rain. For several hours Branly sat at his window contemplating the woods. My friend felt that in the same way the moon slowly ascended from the familiar garden, from secret moisture between the oaks and birches rising after a long summer’s absence to celebrate the return of the abundance of autumn when the woods are sovereigns of their moribund bounty, in the same way the real sounds of the landscape he was observing with such mournful and protracted delight were born in him.