Distant Relations

10

“Il m’a eu,” my friend thought later. “He put one over on me and I allowed myself to fall into the trap.” Branly knew what his intention had been, to let Heredia know he was aware of the presence of the woman in the house. He wanted to confront him with the evidence, to see how he got around the proof gleaned from the inadvertently overheard conversation of the boys as they played on the terrace under his window, not suspecting Branly was listening.

And too, he confesses now, he had wanted to know whether or not his dream was real, whether that oneiric wakefulness of the past few days could survive something as destructive and commonplace as verification: your dream is true, your dream is true because it is your dream, your dream is not a dream if it truly happened, your dream is a lie.

But no; Heredia had caught him off-guard, had scandalized him with the exaggerated theatricality of the scene with the mirror; Branly himself had given him the opening with his unfortunate reference to vampires. Henceforward, he would be more cautious. He strongly suspected that Heredia was hiding something from him, that the vulgarity so repulsive to the involuntary guest was a sham, an attempt to divert his attention from the truth.

“I realized, you see, that the sentiments I have been describing, all inspired by Victor Heredia’s uncouth behavior, were only my sentiments about the man. It was only fair to admit that I had never seen how he conducted himself in society, nor did I know what others thought of him. I even reproached myself: it was I who was crude, capable of viewing my host only in the light of my own standards, my own values, and — why not say it — my own prejudices.”

But then he thought again of the vanished woman he had loved in a garden where birth and death were simultaneous. He rejected his impartial sympathy for Heredia to tell himself that the vulgar, uncivil, coarse host of the Clos des Renards had in his rasping voice sung him a pretty tune the night before only to distract him from one question: where is the woman the boys had been talking about?

And, as if on cue, their voices rose from the terrace. Branly listened attentively. The whole thrust of their conversation this morning was — in their games, laughter, sudden silences, snatches of the madrigal, intense secrecy — a reaffirmation of their decision that they would do nothing they could not do together, nothing from which one would be excluded. He imagined they were getting to know each other, as he believed he was getting to know them.

“Don’t you like it?”

“No, André.”

“It’s hard for me to change.”

“But I don’t want you to.”

“Then if you don’t like it, Victor, I won’t be like that. I’ll be different.”

Again, in the afternoons of his childhood in the Parc Monceau, a new child appears behind the windows of one of the handsome private houses that enjoy a privileged view of the garden which, though public, is the private domain of the nearby residents. It is difficult to see the boy’s face, to which beveled windowpanes, the blinding light of the late-afternoon sun, and yes, distance, give the strange appearance of a blurred photograph, a lead-gray coin. The young Branly would let many minutes pass by once his companions tired of staring at the solitary child and returned to their games amid the columns, crypts, and pyramids of this garden, this folly the Duc d’Orléans constructed before his renunciation in favor of the Republican cause deprived him of his power of caprice (but, I dare interrupt, is there such a thing as power without caprice?), power which — surely he would know better than anyone, he who by now affected a revolutionary name, a name to enter the new century with — as Philippe Egalité he would soon forever divest himself of.

Branly recalls now, with a smile half-ironic, half-tender, his childhood in this magnificent place where an entire city’s secret aberration flowers and dies, blooms again, and is nourished in unexpected fantasy before becoming frozen in the paralysis of counterfeit ruins. In Monceau, eleven years before the Revolution, there were, oh, any number of follies — a Roman temple, a Chinese pagoda, fake feudal ruins, a Swiss dairy farm, and a Dutch windmill. The bourgeois mansions that flank five of the six sides of the park are like Medusa eyes which petrified that final flash of desperate, dying aristocratic madness.

In one of the houses facing on the Avenue Vélasquez lives the child who never comes out to play with the others. Branly dreams him as he is, his face indistinguishable, but with pale, gleaming eyes fixed on the fake ruins of a century strangely obsessed with reproducing in miniature, to scale, with exquisite delicacy and love of trompe l’oeil, but not without a secret shudder, the whole of nature, as if nature were not sufficient in itself or unto us, but, rather, were guilty of the ineradicable sin of a past, an origin, attributable not to human reason but to divine insanity.

“Marie Antoinette’s rustic hamlets at Versailles are no different from the battles between ranks of radishes and cauliflowers re-created on the lawn of Sterne’s character’s home when he was deprived of participation in the Duke of Marlborough’s campaign, as the metallic gardens of Goethe, dissatisfied with real nature existing outside the realm of his imagination, are no different from the fantasies of Philippe Egalité in Monceau.”

One day the solitary child crossed the frontier between his house and the park. He opened the gate of the small private garden and, dressed in his sailor suit, entered the play area, where the children were singing À la claire fontaine, m’en allant promener. But his physical presence does not make it any easier to see his face, the features condemned to perpetual oblivion, a disfiguring surface of silver-gray mirrors beneath a sailor cap. As Branly, himself a child, looks at the boy, he feels that their relationship lies in the future, like that with the woman he can only love, because he can recognize her, and she him, only in the fatal time of instantaneous denouements, time without enigmas because identification between life and death is total, not in normal time where they do not recognize each other when they meet.

The other children have gone back to their games; only Branly stands motionless, directing all his attention toward the newcomer. At first, the other children observe him with derisive curiosity, then with indifference, and finally they resume their games, neither curious nor derisive, more as if he were not there. And Branly recalls the instant in which he is ignored by all his playmates, as if he were already the man of eighty-three and not the child of eleven, but their indifference opens the way — he knows it, and a chill runs down his spine — to friendship and recognition with the solitary boy who today for the first time has appeared among them and who gives the impression of not understanding the ways of the world beyond his door. He stumbles clumsily, he shields his eyes with his hands, as if the light were too strong, and Branly does not know how to approach him and share with him a moment he knows is unique, because he does not know if the outsider who looks at him without seeing, through the pale eyes that are the only identifiable features in a blurred face, is by his actions — being there but not being there, open but impenetrable — trying to make his ignorance seem a mystery.

“Even today, dear friend, I do not know whether I was experiencing what I attributed to the stranger; whether it was I, standing there with one hand on my hip and the other clutching a large red ball to my waist, like this, who assumed the air of intrigue, you know, the insolence, of one who though he feels insecure and foolish has at least the doubtful elegance of transforming his defects into mystery.”

There is more to tell today about that long-ago afternoon dreamed on a recent morning and recounted now as my friend and I persist in prolonging a November afternoon that doesn’t yet warrant lighting the round streetlamps on the Place de la Concorde or extinguishing the subdued lights of the dining room in Gabriel’s pavillon, which produce a transfusion of shadows, impalpable, though solid to the eyes of two men deep in conversation, Branly and myself (yes, from time to time I manage to say something, introduce a comment, provide a conversational opening for my friend), who call forth the very light that permits one to call the shadow shadow.

That something more, Branly continues, was the radical newness of the boy he had glimpsed so many times behind the beveled windowpanes that in some ineffable manner he had assimilated him into their group: clearly, the largely conscious transposition of ignorance into mystery practiced by the astute youth of eleven who was my friend Branly was, in the strange boy, something different, something which Branly, even on that long-ago day, recognizes without understanding, a missing segment of his soul that he will spend a lifetime searching for. In every hesitant gesture, in every stumbling step, in every fiber of this newcomer bathed in the sunlight with which he seemed to maintain some strange relationship of fear and benefice — as if the light, Branly repeats, were injurious to him, as if it absorbed from him the very little it bestowed on him — in all the behavior that fortunately, almost charitably, the other children were not observing, Branly recognized, most of all, inexperience, pristine astonishment, withdrawal, and pathetic doubt.

The child Branly wants to laugh. He is in the presence of a fool, an idiotic, maybe blind, feebleminded weakling, and he is grateful that the other children are not observing him observe the imbecile or they would laugh at him, because he, incomprehensibly, is not laughing at this melancholy, helpless, faceless buffoon, this nervous, clumsy dullard shrinking from the sun as if from a beast crouched to spring, says my friend, as if protecting himself against the rain, the air, thunder, fog, everything, because everything, he has always known it but only today can he put it into words, everything, he says, was new to this child. Not ignorance, not mystery, his pathetic gyrations on the edge of the Parc Monceau were those of a star born but two seconds before, hurled from a galaxy expanding for eons toward the moment of explosion that freed this creature confined within its perfect death throes. For this new child the world is new, and because it’s new — the outsider extends a pale, trembling hand toward my friend, and my friend does not know how to accept the offering — nothing is known.

The outsider holds out his hand. My friend drops the red ball and his insolent poise deserts him; he runs to join his playmates. The ball rolls to the feet of the cretinous child, who with clumsy, mechanical movements bends down to pick it up, mewing something incomprehensible, something not even a language, but my friend — today, an old man, he is still proud of it — resists the impulse to run back for the ball, to reclaim his property, to snatch it from the half-wit afflicted by the sun, who looks at the ball and looks at my friend and looks at the trees and looks at the park benches as if everything were not only new but incomprehensible. For him Monceau has no name, no history. It is what his eyes tell him.

“For those eyes were his entire identity, his entire intelligence, captive in a face I cannot remember; everything was incomprehensible, so everything was new and everything was strange.”

From the corner of his eye he looks at the little boy who had slipped from the house on the Avenue Vélasquez. He prays that the other children will not realize he has not run to the newcomer to grab the ball that does not belong to him but to all the playmates who gather here every afternoon after school. The moment he turns his back to the child, he hears the sound of the ball and he stops, turns, and sees the extended hands, the ludicrous, almost-squatting stance, the ever-bewildered gaze, and the red ball bouncing toward him. My friend wonders, then as now, whether the outsider had returned the ball voluntarily or whether it had dropped from his inept hands.

He felt a fervor, a rush of tenderness, for that stranger; even today, he is grateful for that. It was a revelation about himself at eleven that would accompany him always, not a memory but a reality, and then as today, and also in the spiral times of dream, he feels that he was about to take the one step more that would have led him to the strange boy, to a sympathetic embrace, because two creatures who at last recognize each other are the very figure of compassion itself. Forget what separated them, remember what united them, recover something shared, the reason for his fervor.

He did not take that step. He did not embrace the boy. Still, the fervor of the experience, the outsider’s gesture in returning the ball to him, his in not grabbing it from him, revealed to Branly that he had “what one calls a soul.”

The wind swelled the room and again my friend had the sensation that an interior sail was moving this leather-lined house toward a destination far distant from its present location; the walls became gentle waterfalls, and my friend awakened.

The young Mexican Victor, the youth with the lank dark hair, was observing him intently, sitting at the foot of my old friend’s bed. For a long time they looked at one another, unspeaking. As Branly emerged from the dream of his childhood fervor, he saw nothing in the eyes of the young Heredia to compensate for the categorical loss of the dream.

“You looked afraid,” the young Heredia said at last.

Branly wanted to ask: then why did you not wake me? He knew he had not had a nightmare but that the dream from which he had emerged to meet the pale eyes of the boy he scarcely knew had been a pleasing one, the memory of an anointing, the recognition of his own, but shared, spirit.

“Then my face did not reflect my dream,” he replied.

He held out a transparent, bony hand to touch Victor. He was aware that the youth represented something he missed terribly, something, in spite of his apparent proximity, as distant as the idiot of his dream. Here, now, sitting on Branly’s bed, he merely accentuated the terrible distance Branly felt when Victor appeared in the birch grove or beneath his window, a disembodied voice accompanied always by another boy, whose face Branly had never seen.

“Have you spoken with your father?” my friend asked. The Mexican boy hesitated a moment, and then nodded.

Branly said he was feeling much better and that surely by tomorrow they could return to the house on the Avenue de Saxe. He lightly stroked Victor’s hand, but he did not attempt to tell him how much he appreciated this proof of independence, the fact that he had come to see him in spite of young André’s prohibitions and in spite of having sworn to do nothing that the two had not agreed upon beforehand, this Castor and Pollux from two such distant and distinct, perhaps not hostile but certainly not sister, cities. He hoped that his touch communicated his approval of what implicitly he judged to be Victor’s rebellion against André; to have made his approval explicit would have been an almost irreparable faux pas. Victor surely would have retreated to the friendship with the boy his own age; what could he find interesting about an old man of eighty-three?

What, indeed, Branly’s mind leaped to the thought, if not the fact that he had brought him here, that he had served as indispensable guide until the moment Victor had slammed the door on Etienne’s fingers and the other Victor Heredia, the Frenchman, had come down the avenue of dead leaves to offer his spontaneous and generous assistance?

“Yes,” said Victor, “it all depends on how you feel.”

“Much better, as I told you. Thank you for inquiring. What news is there of our Etienne? Why has he not come for the automobile?”

“I don’t know. As soon as you’re better and can walk, you must meet the others.”

“André? Your friend? Of course.”

Victor again nodded, and lowered his head so that his long dark lashes shadowed the flicker of embarrassment in his eyes. “Yes, and her too.”

“Who is she, Victor?”

“She says she wants to see you again.”

“Ah, then she is someone I know?”

“I don’t know. That’s what she says. Ciao!”

He ran from the room, and my friend fell into a curious meditation, the gist of which he is now communicating to me in the deepening shadow of the dining room.

“But of course. He did not come to see me on his own, out of any affection for me; he came because the two boys had plotted to deceive me, don’t you see? — to upset me and mock me with this patent lie about the existence of another person, a woman, an acquaintance of mine, in the house.”

He says that above all he was irritated by the contempt underlying the boys’ ridiculous invention. He laughs as he recalls his thoughts that day: they think me so old and distraught that I can no longer clearly remember the women I have loved; as long as she is old, they think they can pass off any woman as mine; not only can I not remember her, I cannot even, it goes without saying, recognize her.

As he pushed himself upright in the bed, he almost overturned the breakfast tray with coffee pot, cup and saucer, silver, sugar bowl, and rolls. His first reaction, he says, was surprise that he had not smelled the unexpected breakfast he had been prepared to fetch later from the dumbwaiter where Heredia had left it in the dying hours of the night. He was adjusting to the schedule of only two meals a day, but the later the first, the less he suffered awaiting the second.

As he pulled the tray toward him, he realized why his sense of smell had not warned him. Everything was cold, the bread was cold, the coffee was cold, with no hint of the comforting warmth that for so many years had transmitted to palms of hands and fingertips a concern for his person that would never falter, and which, morning after morning, was manifested in this simple proof: a warm breakfast tray respectfully placed across his knees.

Had young Victor brought the tray this morning? He reproached himself, he had not thanked the boy. But his unfailing courtesy immediately gave way to an unpleasant suspicion, and to the question it inevitably posed. “Why was Victor, a young foreign guest in this house, serving the Frenchman who bore his name?”

Branly tells me that he felt distant eyes upon him. Again he heard the voices from the terrace.

“Where are you from?”

“From Mexico. And you?”

“From where I’m from.”

Once more the voices faded into that strange litany, as soporific as a rosary of poppies, of cities no longer capitals of former nations or forgotten colonies.

“German East Africa?”

“Dar es Salaam?”

“Bosnia and Herzegovina?”

“Sarajevo!”