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 Heredia’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!”
“You are unmitigatedly vulgar,” said Branly with a twisted smile. “Unmitigatedly … Heredia? Is that your real name?”
The host of the Clos thrust his hands into his pockets and shrugged like a surly urchin.
“I would like, after all this time, to know the name of the boy I did not hold out my hand to seventy years ago in the Pare Monceau. I know it is very late to make amends.” Branly’s voice was moved, grave, restrained. He sought, as he spoke, the pale eyes of the French Victor Heredia. His host was silent for a long while, grinding his heel into the whitewashed floor of this suffocating gallery.
“André,” Heredia said finally. “My name is André.”
“Like your son,” said Branly, with one of those polite formulas with which one courteously fills the pauses in social conversation.
“No,” Heredia shook his head. “Like myself.”
“Like you, Heredia? Did I not say that I want to make amends for my indifference — my cruelty, if you prefer? Is that not enough? Must you persist in your low sarcasm?”
“Do you know why I never appear in the daytime? No, don’t say anything. I will tell you. True phantoms appear only in daylight, M. le Comte.”
Mincing like some elderly maiden, Heredia walked to the corner of the room. Branly, as he tells me now, was by this time sufficiently familiar with Heredia’s tricks to anticipate, following this mimicry, some new and disconcerting revelation from his host. Accentuated by the newly assumed gestures of an ancient virgin, Heredia said that he feared the daylight phantoms, and his distinguished guest, the Comte de Branly, should fear them, too. Was it his hope to save the boys? Had he ever thought that maybe the boys did not want to be saved? How many things must there be that he never realized? Wrapped in his aristocratic arrogance, so remote from the black and rotting ravines where French mademoiselles in exile in the New World sing madrigals to frighten away the dogs and owls waiting to devour their dead bodies, so secure in his mansions and symmetrical gardens, so unyielding in a land that had never known an earthquake or the cholera morbus or trichinosis or the oil companies’ murderous White Guards or the forced labor of Indians or hurricanes bearing dead leaves in a gale that in mid-August can strip an entire jungle of leaves and fruit to scatter afar, beyond the sea, to impregnate with pure tropical pollen austere European wives who then give birth never knowing that seed travels, carried on the air filters into nostrils, ears, mouths, asses, the uncountable orifices of a human body that is more water and pit and puddle than anything else, eh? Oh, there were so many things he didn’t know.
“Do you know anything of my desire to give life to everything that could have been but was denied existence?” asked “Heredia,” suddenly pulling himself to his full height and acquiring a dignity Branly would not have believed possible.
“André, then, should have been the … son of Francisco Luis and Mademoiselle Lange?” Branly stammered.
“He is, M. le Comte. You must believe me, he is. That is the only element of truth in this entire farce. Except that this time my little angel is going to be born whole, not as he was before, but whole again.”
“Heredia” again seized my friend’s arm, but now with a strength, Branly says, incredible not only in his host but in any man. He twisted Branly’s arm behind his back, forcing his head and body in the direction desired by this monster of many guises, whose role at that moment my friend could not define: was he a dangerous clown, a harmless madman, an ineffective mythomaniac, or a wretched, defeated, lonely man deserving of pity?
“You see, you doddering old bastard, you senile old motherfucking asshole, you see, that’s what you get for going around sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, trying to separate what was always joined and will be forever, you see, Victor Heredia doesn’t belong to your time now but to mine, and at last my son has the companion I never had…”
With one arm locked around Branly’s neck, “Heredia” with his free hand raised the door of the dumbwaiter and forced my friend’s head toward the empty shaft, as if preparing him for the executioner’s ax or the blade of the guillotine. Branly stared into the depths of the space in which the monte-plats, converted in English into the more obsequious dumbwaiter, ascended and descended. An icy blast rumpled his hair, tiny daggers of ice needled his skin, forcing him to close his eyes filled with involuntary tears. In that instant he had seen what he had to see.
Branly’s hand still clasped mine.
“Have you ever paused, my friend, to think about the appalling concept of infinity, time and space without beginning or end? That is what I saw that morning in the shaft of the dumbwaiter. Infinity was like the flesh of a wet, bland squid, slimy and slobbery, a texture without color or orientation, the pure vertiginous sensation of a great white mollusk ignorant of time or space. Something interminable cloaked in perpetual fine snow.”
“What do you plan to do, you pitiful old bastard? Do you think when you leave here you can set your police on me, accuse me, demand that I return Victor? Forget it. Victor and André are no longer here. Victor and André are no longer André and Victor. They are a new and different being. No one could recognize them. Not even I. They could walk past you in a café, or on a street, and you would never recognize them. You would never recognize them. True madness passes without notice.”
“Heredia” again burst out laughing, and Branly, his senses reeling, deprived of any intellectual means by which to deal with this devil who was most satanic because he was incomprehensible, unknowable, and therefore to be feared, did what he had never done in his life, what no one had ever forced him to do.
“That morning — you must believe what I tell you — imprisoned by ‘Heredia’ ’s arms, with that unutterable vision of infinite emptiness before my eyes, I did something I had not done in all my eighty-three years. I screamed, my friend I screamed the way they used to scream in the Frédérick Lemaître melodramas our great-grandparents attended on the Boulevard du Crime. I screamed, convinced that my voice was my deliverance, my life, my only chance, my only salvation. Bah, of course, on more careful consideration, I believe I must have screamed that way in my cradle.”
And with those words he withdrew his hand from mine, which he had held throughout this portion of his story. He clasped his own hands in that typical, gracious gesture that served in circumstances like these to dissipate any hint of solemnity and to return things to a properly rational level not without humor.
“Bah,” he repeated. “The things one must do. I screamed, terrified by that vision and by the sensation of my impending death, I admit it. But as I screamed I turned melodrama into comedy. As I struggled against ‘Heredia,’ the hinges of the door of the suffocating, whitewashed gallery burst open under the weight of Florencio’s shoulder. José rushed in on the heels of his husky companion with the visage of a Basque jai-alai player, and both rushed to free me from ‘Heredia,’ subduing him. I sank to the floor, out of breath, exhausted. In the struggle, ‘Heredia’ was roundly drubbed by Florencio: he staggered, and fell headlong down the shaft of the dumbwaiter. The two servants exchanged rapid comments in Spanish, peering down into empty space.
“Here now, we’d better go down to the cellar.”
“But, Florencio, look at all the dead leaves rising up the shaft.”
“I told them, my throat aflame, not to waste time. We had to leave immediately. Where was the taxi they had spoken of? Come, quickly. I would send Etienne to pick up the Citroën later, another day.”
“The Citroën, M. le Comte? But Etién came to pick it up day before yesterday, as soon as he got out of the hospital and learned about your accident,” Florencio exclaimed as they helped Branly to his feet.
“He said he was going to take it to be repaired. But he never came back.”
“You remember, Florencio, Señor Heredia told us he thought the accident was his fault, because of the young gentleman, and he told Etién he should be careful driving with one hand, and if he wanted, he would go with him to pick up the Citroën and see you at the same time, M. le Comte, and young Victor as well.”
“But you know how stubborn a hardheaded Frenchman can be, with all due respect to yourself, M. le Comte: no Spaniard could tell him anything, and do you think he would want to be indebted to some foreigner, heaven forbid! And that was that. It wasn’t as if he were going by way of Tetuán to bring home monkeys, there being so many around here…”
“And that was that. He took his own car and drove off forever.”
“What do you mean, Florencio?”
“Nothing, except I think Etién must have had an accident in his 2CV when he came here to pick up the Citroën for repair,” said Florencio, as the servants gently led Branly toward the stairway.
“And I think Florencio is right. I think he was killed. Maybe. Anyway, he never came back.”
“And Heredia? Hugo Heredia? What does he say?”
“Your guest left for Mexico this morning, M. le Comte.”
“I must thank you, at least, for staying with me.”
“M. le Comte is very generous to us, and treats us like human beings,” said José, as the three reached the foot of the stairs.
“You should just see, M. le Comte, how the Spanish treat their servants. It’s ‘do this’ and ‘do that.’ ‘You peasant bastard!’—begging your pardon, M. le Comte. ‘You idiot anyone can see your mother let you fall out of your cradle, you blithering simpleton, you thickheaded fool…’ And on and on and on!”
“And the young gentlemen are the worst. They like to humiliate you, to run you in circles. ‘Pick that up, Pepe. Now leave it where you found it, Pepe. Don’t you hear me? Pick it up again, Pepe.’”
“Well, a pot of beans is a pot of beans no matter where you cook it, because that young Mexican was no better than the young Spanish gentlemen. Look, M. le Comte, what he did to Pepe the minute he arrived. So of course we came running with his suitcases when he called.”
“And we asked his father, and he said why not, we should bring everything here…”
“And I laughed and told Pepe, Let’s get out here quick or he’ll be beating you again with his belt. What a one he is! A real little devil.”
Branly, assisted by Florencio and José, stepped onto the terrace of the lions. He found it difficult to grasp what they were saying, or rather, to reconcile the inconsistencies in their words. He felt dizzy. His servants were playing up to him; they were contradicting one another; they had been there that very morning with suitcases in their hands; they had given them to young Victor in the Citroën. They, like he, had experienced physical fear when they stepped on the dead leaves. They had, finally, rescued him from the satanic fury of “Heredia,” the confused scion of many places rather than any time, this man who, because he had no dates, no origins, carried the burden of unfinished stories: how could he be the son of Francisco Luis and the Mamasel, who had met in La Guaira in 1812 and been parted forever in 1864 in a brothel in Cuernavaca? how, even if he were the son of Francisco Luis and his second wife, the fat, dull, gluttonous girl from Limousin, could he have been Branly’s contemporary in the opening years of this century, when my friend played in the Pare Monceau? How old was “Heredia”? How old was Francisco Luis when he died?
These reflections on the utter irrationality of their ages, so inconsistent with Branly’s rational chronology, faded from his mind the moment he saw from the terrace of the manor the perfect symmetry of the French garden, the clear and intelligent space where nature was tamed by the geometric exactitude of shrubs, greensward, pansies, artichokes, and stone urns. In vain, he looked for a sign of the grayish scar in the grass.
The birch grove, the rosebushes, the beech and willow trees, seemed to exult in their own serenity, as if in homage to the vanished summer, and along the avenue of chestnuts and oaks, autumn had not yet passed, spreading its basket of spoils. The fresh, cool ground was swept clean; there were no dead leaves, only the enchanting play of light and shadow among green branches.
The Citroën was parked on the gravel drive where the avenue ended and the garden began. When Etienne saw them emerge from the house onto the terrace, he left off dusting the ornamental klaxon with his feather duster, touched one hand to the visor of his cap, and climbed into the car. The sturdy chauffeur circled the garden and came to a stop before the entrance stairway; he got out to open the rear door so that Branly, assisted by his servants, might enter. The surprise in the voices of José and Florencio rang hollow, less than convincing. Of this, at least, my friend has a clear recollection.
“Imagine. And to think we’d given him up for dead.”
“Jesus! Sweet gypsy Jesus! The dead has risen!”
“You two get in with M. le Comte, go on, now, take good care of him. I’m going for his things.”
Branly says he sank against the soft, beige, spotlessly clean upholstery and refused to converse with the servants, even to look at them, to concede that he was aware of their disconcerted but conspiratorial glances, their shrugged shoulders, the upturned palms mutely inviting explanations.
It would have been very easy to say to them: Hugo Heredia bought him just as he bought you, except that his price was higher. One Breton peasant is tougher than two Andalusian peasants. It takes a little more effort to make Etienne stop remembering. For you, forgetfulness comes easy. A little more time, a little more money, that was the only difference. No one remembers anything. Nothing happened.
Etienne emerged from the house with a suitcase containing, Branly supposed, the clothing my friend had been wearing the night of the accident. He climbed into the car and started it.
“How is your hand, Etienne?” Branly inquired.
With a sheepish smile, the chauffeur looked at his employer in the rearview mirror and raised his bandaged hand. “I drive very well with only one hand, M. le Comte.”
“Ah.”
Branly turned to look back through the rear window of the Citroën. He read the date inscribed above the doorway: A.D. 1870. Etienne had thought it was the number of the house and that he had made a wrong turn; on that occasion he had muttered curses against a municipal system that would assign two numbers to one house. My friend had known it was a date, because as he glanced toward the upper story from the moving automobile, leaving behind forever the Clos des Renards, he saw hovering in the window a dancing, fading silhouette in diaphanous white, with a tall hairdo resembling towers of cotton candy. The peacock uttered its plaintive cry. But Branly listened in vain for strains of the madrigal, Chante, rossignol, chante.