Distant Relations

13. CLEMENCITA

The French Heredia remembers with nostalgia that the wild January seas beyond the breakwater in the harbor of Havana — like holding to one’s cheek an icy bottle swept from distant waters and bearing a message of crushed salt and splendid desperation — taste of snow. He remembers, too, the dark, quiet ocean along the sandy shores of Veracruz, where the exhausted Mediterranean flings itself on the beach with a flash of scales, like a suicidal fish. Especially, because it was where she disembarked, he remembers the sunny sea of La Guaira, an unruffled mirror stretching placidly at the feet of mountain and fortress, rocks and pelicans.

It is difficult for Branly to believe that Heredia can evoke even a modicum of tenderness. He prefers to suppose that he has slipped back into his interrupted dream, and that from the heights of San Carlos he is watching a small sailing vessel flying the pale colors of the realm of the bees sail into port. He strains to see the distant figures pacing slowly back and forth on the deck, men with hands clasped behind their backs, women with opened parasols. He wishes he were close enough to see them, and instantly his wish is fulfilled. Now he is on deck, but the ship is adrift, crew and passengers have abandoned her, and the woman, at the estate on the high cliffs, and cloaked in the mists of a La Guaira dawn, is instead wandering through corridors of ochre stucco, through dew-wet patios that open into passageways of salt-air-pocked stone that lead to other patios of lichen and dry grass, vainly seeking a mirror in which to see and remember herself; yet all she knows is what is whispered in her ear.

“Memory may be a lie.”

She likes the feel of coolness against her face. From the heights of the mountain, rain, mud, and stones thunder down toward the port, but also clear streams still untouched by city filth. She dips her hands in the waters, peers into them, searching for her face; there is no reflection, the waters flow too swiftly. They have told her she should not seek her reflection, she might meet a wraith, but she guards her secret. The phantom appears only when at dawn she sits at her harpsichord, her father’s childhood gift. It is her only memory of France, and when at dusk she sits for hours on a balcony overlooking wet red-tiled roofs and far below and in the distance she sees the ocean, she feels the tug of her French homeland, but she tells herself it is futile to think of it, more futile to return. If only she had never left. She cannot return to the country she left behind, after living here. France would not be the same. She should never have come, she sighs to herself, and tells her child-nana, much younger than she, when the little mulatto appears, dancing in a blond wig to amuse her.

“I had a Venezuelan nana,” says Heredia. “She cooked delicious dishes, but one day she said she missed her homeland and wanted to go there to die. Since she was very old, and not a little befuddled, I went along with her, you understand? Oh, she was smug when she left here, that mulatto, wearing a kerchief she hadn’t had on her head for thirty years, and carrying her wicker suitcases. She traveled in a circle from Paris to Cherbourg and from there by ship past Gibraltar to Marseilles, from which she returned to Paris by train, convinced she was back in Caracas. I prepared a room for her here with hammocks and parrots and a small greenhouse with arcades and red tiles to deceive her; but, the truth was, I deceived myself. Do you know what she told me before she died? ‘The boat sailed between a cliff and a green shore, young Victor, where the sea was very narrow. I could see the houses plain as day, and the eyes of the people hiding behind their shutters in mortal fear, watching the passing boats as if they carried the damned. I looked high up in the masts, and they were swarming with howler monkeys smoking cigarettes. Oh, my God, I said to myself, I’ve come home.’”

“Did she never ask what you were doing at her destination when she should have left you far behind?”

“No. I tell you the truth, she was the one who deceived me. She knew the New World had left its impression on Europe for all time. Don’t you agree?”

“The devil always knows what time it is,” Clemencita murmured, “as long as it’s somewhere else.”

La Guaira is like a vine that keeps clawing its way up the face of the mountain to escape the unbearable heat of the coast, to reach the mist of the fort of San Carlos, from there look back toward Cádiz and Palos de Moguer to see whether the return caravels have sailed. At the balls of that long-ago summer she sparkled in her beautiful, diaphanous white gown with the high waist and long stole, the first appearance in these lands of Empire fashion. The salons of La Guaira — do you remember, Clemencita? — were cool, the bricks wetted down, the high ceilings, the high, cool wood, too, great beams, archiepiscopal shutters, unreachable armoires.

“You see, fortunes are like ships. They seek a safe port in a storm, and at times the instinct of money, that is, the urge to find that safe berth, blinds one, and confuses distance with safety. Laugh if you will, thinking how a French merchant in the Antilles — made rich by the wide-scale smuggling that accompanied the decline of Spanish rule and the instability of the Napoleonic wars, but based in the black colony of Haiti, where planters were hanged from their own palm trees and armies of mosquitoes routed the French armies as later the snow and mud of Russia were to do — knew better than any politician that what is up today will be down tomorrow, and that the greater the pride, the greater the humiliation. It seemed grotesque to him to have to abase himself before the French Bourbons, masters of the meager lives and fortunes of his homeland, but not so before the Spanish Bourbons, with whom, in his unhinged mind, he had a clean ledger. Napoleon was unable to subjugate Spain, because the Spain of the Napoleonic era was not to be found on the mainland but in her colonies — which is where the French Revolution was to continue once it had been interred in Europe by dynasties alert to the fact that their true alliance lay with the third estate of dry-goods clerks and sawbones and pen pushers, and always against the common people, who will always be downtrodden even in the reign of freedom because they haven’t the will to be anything but slaves, eh?”

Monsieur Lange rented a small boat in Santiago de Cuba, where he had taken refuge after the uprising in Haiti, and set sail for La Guaira with his dream of a liberal revolution without blacks, but — thanks to the good offices of a customs inspector whom he had taught to count — with stocks of their cotton and tobacco and rum, the harpsichord from which his precious sixteen-year-old daughter would not be parted, the daughter, and the three turkey buzzards that followed him through all the ports of the New World. He laughed: Caribbean buzzards, it seemed, were given to the sport of leaping from island to island, like Jesus in the famous account of crossing … was it the Jordan or the Dead Sea? Monsieur Lange knew very little about these things, but in La Guaira everyone became embroiled in a fierce rivalry over the beautiful French girl, even the Liberator, Simón Bolívar, who blew into town with gale force at the end of July, occupied the port, jailed the encyclopedist Miranda, who had been the lover of Catherine the Great, and then evacuated the port, and through it all, the royalists went on with their great balls, and Monsieur Lange went on showing off his damsel — why else had he brought her? — she was bait, a hook to revitalize the wealth being drained away with the end of the Napoleonic epic and on the verge, inevitably, of vanishing altogether in the confusion of colonialist and wartime smuggling. A man of the storm-tossed sea, the Frenchman, with his daughter, disembarked in a colony in revolt, where the young men of La Guaira, the same as he, sought a port in the storm, an easy road to what was left of Spanish dominion in the Antilles — San Juan, Havana, or back to Caracas, whatever looked most promising, but always an elegant flight, picking one’s way between insurrection here and repression there.

“But you see how things work out,” said old Clemencita. “They pulled the wool over each other’s eyes, and when the biggest know-it-all, the sweetest talker of all the fine gentlemen in La Guaira married the beautiful French Mamasel, she found out that the parents of her ‘young gentleman’ had cut him off because of his rebel doings; as for his rebel friends, he couldn’t count on them for so much as a mass in Lent.”

And where was our young rebel while an exiled Bolívar made his way through Curaçao and Cartagena and risked his hide in Puerto Cabello and Cúcuta? Well, he was discovering that after the news of the winter of 1812 no one would give the time of day for the vouchers and IOU’s of an Empire that was going to end up with salt water on all four sides, young Victor, on St. Helena, an island without snow or birds or monkeys or anything, I swear it.

Among the vultures circling above La Guaira, she tried to make out the three that to the day of his death followed her poor father, so skillful in day-to-day accounts and shady dealings but so stupid when it came to what made the year’s balance come out in the black. There is no one more dangerous than an idealistic merchant, and the logical man to succeed him was the one who hated him most: Francisco Luis de Heredia, who had married Mademoiselle Lange believing she was an heiress, as Lange thought Heredia was an heir. How can Branly believe that this undying rancor that dares to become incarnate in dreams that aren’t its own is anything but a sordid tale of money?

Heredia laughs disagreeably. Doesn’t the Count agree that money can be the source of bitterness, tragedy, and evil; and loving money more than a human being — isn’t that motive for enduring hatred? This courtly young man, handsome like a shiny green olive shedding brine as roses shed dew, said that what revolutions had enabled the father-in-law to do over there, revolutions would enable him to do over here, and he began to ply between Venezuela and Cuba, Haiti and Mexico, sailing contraband up and down the coasts, bringing in and taking out what Spain sent to and demanded from Havana, what arrived in Haiti from Europe for the squabbling, newly emancipated republics of New Spain and New Granada, and what the British purposely let seep through Jamaica.

“British colonies enrich British subjects,” M. Lange would say during his lifetime, “but Spanish colonies enrich only the Spanish crown. Spain isn’t growing rich, only the coffers of her rulers. You will see, it will be the same story with the rulers of these new republics.”

She did not understand any of the things her father said. She played old madrigals on her harpsichord, and she went on playing them after her marriage to Francisco Luis. She never realized, and had she realized would not have understood, that her husband, heir to her dead father, was trafficking first in inanimate luxuries, silver and dyes for English cloth, then, though they say no, the animate luxury of a few souls, slaves in fact if not in deed, workers in short supply here but needed there, blacks from Gran Colombia, Indians from the Yucatan, octoroons from Cuba, aborigines from Tabasco, again for English cloth, always for English cloth, because in this part of the world where everyone dealt in gold and silver no one seemed capable of setting up decent looms or selling a good piece of cloth — what didn’t Francisco Luis de Heredia traffic in, eh? lord of gibbet and blade, cruel and growing older, the older the crueler, thanks to the cheap rum of the cantinas of Río Hacha and Santo Domingo, the crueler the sicker, thanks to the dark evils of the brothels of Maracaibo and Cap-Haïtien, what didn’t he sell to cement his friendship with an indispensable signer of exequaturs here, a repulsive pockmarked notary there, the loutish Señor Coronel, chief officer of the garrison at Puerto Bello, a customs officer in Greytown who never seemed to dip a toe in dirty water but stood with one foot in Nicaragua and one in Costa Rica, and sometimes a Señor Ministro who might be fingering white flesh for the first time, what didn’t he sell?

“When she was no longer of any use to him, he sent her off to the high cliffs overlooking La Guaira; that would be his final gift to her, she loved La Guaira so much: ‘I’ll let you stay right here so you can fill your eyes the livelong day,’ cruel Señor, master of lives and fortunes,” Clemencita recalled. But he was as pocked as the notaries who close their deals in whorehouses and then celebrate with women who wreak their own revenge on any man who celebrates with their wretchedness: you’ll see. Now he was a livid olive, wrinkled and rotten. But what did he care if he had lost his looks; he would go on the way he always had. It had been a long time since anyone came to him because he was handsome, now they came because he was cruel, a swindler, and a good man for pulling chestnuts out of the fire, and here it all came down to getting chestnuts in and out of the fire, and the first thing he learned was that a pot of beans is a pot of beans no matter where you cook it, and in his sphere of influence, Mexico, the Antilles, and the new republics of Terra Firma, someone was always cooking up something, and that’s the God’s truth.

Not she; no, used up, solitary, she wasn’t good for anything. Let her talk to herself, play her harpsichord, sing her madrigals, and stare the livelong day at the sea of La Guaira, where she had arrived as a young girl with her papá, the model of her husband, who never forgave the fraud of a dowry-less marriage, vile French deceit, décolletage and stole and diaphanous ball gowns.

“A white dress, that’s best in this heat. I must wear it again. I must search through my trunks. It must be there somewhere. When I find my white gown, something extraordinary will happen, I know it here in my heart, Mamita Clemencita. Help me.”

Her nana, but younger than she, only thirteen, the little mulatto come from Puerto Cabello to beg in the streets of La Guaira when the militia of the unstable republic of the cruel Creoles was killing people, including her father and mother; and she listened to her all those years, and hummed the madrigals she was forever playing on a harpsichord more tinny and out of tune with every passing day, and dressed up in a blond wig to distract her, and with her she pawed through the large trunks of fetid clothing wasted by heat and humidity, the tyrannical leprosy of the tropics that disheartens, lulls, and corrupts as it slowly kills.

“An eternal and languid contemplation of the moment of death. Do you know Moreau’s painting, my friend? Do you know what the not disordered agitation of our spirit is? I will tell you: it is the opposite of the petrified disorder of the new Latin American republics.”