Distant Relations

17

He opened his eyes. He parted the drapes. It was day. He awakened convinced he had dreamed everything that happened during the night. His encounter with Heredia was a dream. He looked out on the symmetrical garden cleft by the secret wound he had perceived earlier, blasted as if by gunpowder. The Citroën was still there, abandoned on the carpet of dry leaves, beside the oak against which it had collided. The tranquillity of the sunny September morning was allied with the silence of the garden and woods, with the play of the sun’s rays among leaves ravished by a dying summer, and with the only sound, one Branly had not heard before, the long, plaintive, high, far-off cry of a peacock.

He listened in vain for the accustomed voices of the boys. Almost immediately the peacock was silenced by the sound of hurrying footsteps on the gravel. Branly peered out and saw his Spanish servants, the sallow José, looking more than ever like a figure from a Zurbarán painting, and the florid Florencio, with his mien of an exhausted jai-alai player. Both walked rapidly, but in apparent confusion, suitcases in their hands.

Branly recognized the suitcases; they were the ones the young Victor Heredia had brought to the mansion on the Avenue de Saxe. José and Florencio seemed to be weighing the best path to follow. Branly threw back the bedclothes and seized his cane for support. He descended the stairs with a haste, he tells me, that disproved whatever fears his age or his health, or both, might reasonably have engendered. Barefoot and limping, he reached the foot of the stairway, crossed the dark foyer of the Clos des Renards, opened the French doors, and stepped onto the terrace of the stone lions at the very moment his servants were approaching the Citroën, dubious as to whether they should walk on the gravel or the dead leaves. Branly did not falter. He tells me that by that time the heavy veils that had obscured the recesses of his heart had been lifted. He was acutely aware of the denouement of the story, and he was prepared, as in the beginning, to extend the handle of his cane to prevent young Victor from falling into the bottomless crevasse of another’s timeless memory, the memory of a being demanding a new soul as haven for its poisonous pilgrimage.

The servants opened the rear door of the automobile and again seemed to hesitate. Then Florencio, who was the more hardy, picked up one of the suitcases and heaved it into the Citroën, while José nodded and Branly hobbled toward them, spurred by fear, and confident of the wisdom of a different fear — that of crossing the greensward of the garden disfigured by the horrible scar that only he had seen from his window.

At his approach, José and Florencio looked at each other, disconcerted. Branly watched as, like servants in some farce, they ran to hide beyond the boundary of the leaves that my friend, in his agitation and haste, could not believe to be the cause of José’s greater-than-usual pallor, or the apoplectic semblance of his comrade. Branly stepped onto the leaves and opened the car door. He knew the interior of that Citroën; after all, it was his automobile. But this foul-smelling cave, transformed in the course of three days and three nights into a depository for rotting vegetation, swirling temperatures, and detritus, was, he thought at first, simply a monumental bad joke, the awful mischief of the boys who with the universal instinct of magpies look for places to hide their treasures, and themselves.

He saw them. The unbelievably smooth, prepubescent, olive-skinned, secret, and typically small body of the mestizo Victor Heredia lying on the seat, and a naked, white-skinned André crowned with blond curls that contrasted dramatically with the lank black hair of Victor, against whom he was pressing with soft moans, lips parted, from neck to waist as smooth as Donatello’s David, but feet, legs, and groin a hirsute jungle tangled like writhing snakes and spiders.

Branly tried to shield his eyes. More than by the brutal copulation of the adolescents, he was blinded by the brilliance of two objects: André cupped his in the hand he held above Victor’s head; Victor had removed his from the hastily emptied suitcase by his side; the hands holding the brilliant objects joined together, and a guttural groan was torn from my elderly friend. He threw himself into the car, on the naked bodies so vastly different in temperature, and tried to separate their hands even before their bodies: the two glittering halves, one in André’s hand, the other in Victor’s, were joined like a fused metallic mass; the united hands were like the blazing forge that melts and fuses metals. Branly touched that thing, first with the idea of preventing the union of the parts, and then to sunder what had been joined.

He cried out, his fingers seared from the touch of that cold hard thing blazing like a coin, from the ice, flame, and liquid of a stream that but a few hours earlier had been pure cloud. He sucked his burnt fingers. With the other hand he raised the cane, prepared to thrash the buttocks of this monstrous André, whose back, in the male position, was to Branly, though the boy looked over one shoulder to laugh and wink a pale eye. Then, Branly says, he could see nothing but the doleful eyes of young Victor, their unfathomable pleading for compassion and understanding, the terrible and hopeless sadness, the gratitude for a farewell not unlike death, and Branly froze, bewildered by his own sense of compassion. Even much later, he did not know whether he felt pity for the poor youth lying there with opened legs, for the other boy, to whom he had not held out a hand so many years ago when a red rubber ball bounced between them, or for a girl who said she had played with him, though he did not remember.

“But, my friend, today I know that the pity I felt for Victor Heredia I felt on behalf of my two lost playmates.”

In truth, he admits now, the eyes of the young Victor Heredia filled him with terror, because there is something stronger than love, hatred, or desire, and that is the simple will, when one has no will, or is nothing, to exist for another. Branly suspects that this is what the Mexican youth was communicating that morning to him, his cordial French host, pleading that he not interrupt something he could not understand because it came from so far away.

Softly, my elderly friend closed the door of the Citroën and merely repeated the words I had already heard: “My God, I hope they never grow up. Their mystery will be considered ingenuousness, or crime.”

He spoke these words as he repeats them this afternoon with a solemnity befitting the valley of death. Or, what is the same thing, an unattainable love. Standing there motionless on the dead leaves, Branly was aware of his sweaty palms clammy cold, the trembling of exhausted muscles, and the bluish pain of fingernails which on other occasions had foretold the deaths of a lover, a friend, a second wife, of soldiers on the Western Front.

He vacillated; he says he was on the verge of collapse. A distant scream, which he attributed to the stiff-legged and plaintively vain bird, signaled the hasty return of José and Florencio. They grasped Branly by both arms, alternating excuses and chaste interjections: they had been here before him, here on the leaves, that’s why they knew how he felt, he must leave, come, sweet gypsy Jesus, it was horrible, but everything would be all right if they left quickly.

“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.