Distant Relations

19

The elderly sleep very little, Branly repeats now. They feel besieged by the need for vigilance, and in this, old age is wise. Adjustments are made so that it is not physiologically necessary to sleep as much as before, as in the days when one came home worn out after poking into every corner of one’s grandfather’s castle, or after playing in the Parc Monceau, after making love with Myrtho in a nest of rose-colored eiderdowns, or after nights beneath the sulphurous lightning flashes of the trenches.

At any rate, a drowsy old man is slightly ridiculous, Branly says, as finally we arise from the table in the club dining room and walk slowly through the spacious salon illuminated at this hour only by the streetlamps on the Place de la Concorde. It is just six o’clock, and the lights turned on at the moment we reach the reception hall seem blinding. An army of waiters and assistants, several of them mere boys, swarm in with rolled-up sleeves, tightly cinched aprons, and flushed faces, to prepare the tables, spread clean tablecloths, fold fresh napkins, and replenish the flower vases.

The servants apologize, bow, step aside impatiently, their servility bordering on hostility. They want us to know that we have delayed their chores, their getting off work, their meetings with children, wives, friends, their entertainment or sleep. My friend and I leave behind us a clattering of glass and silverware like the serenade of a silver fountain. The madrigal of the clear fountain is echoing in my head, as so often happens with those childhood melodies whose classic and insistent simplicity preempts from our memory, to our annoyance, compositions we would prefer to hear, in a kind of permanent and gratuitous high fidelity. For example, above all else, I love two compositions, Haydn’s Emperor Quartet and Schubert’s Trio No. 2 for piano, violin, and cello. I would have wished that those noble chords had accompanied our descent of the equally noble staircase of Gabriel’s pavillon, not some childish tune about nightingales, sorrow, and joy beside a fountain.

The evening meal at the Automobile Club de France is being prepared as we, who seemed about to delay the whole process, oblivious of the obligations of others, walk through the ground floor of the green and mahogany library with its memorable engravings of the first French automobiles, and into the modern bar beside the large swimming pool. There are few members present at this hour, and Branly suggests that we might want to take a swim after we have finished our conversation in the solarium adjoining the pool.

I nodded, and he marched off toward the pool as I followed, marveling at how completely he had recovered his military bearing.

“No, it was not difficult to guess that Hugo Heredia had bribed all my servants. In a way, it was the inevitable corollary to this story, and the only act that could tie together all the loose threads. The father, I have stressed this from the beginning, was instructing the son. I hesitate to say this, my dear friend, since you are to a degree from that world, but his lesson was one of a false colonial aristocracy that equates nobility with a power of corruption and cruelty beyond punishment.”

He paused for a moment on the fiber mat bordering the pool.

“Do you admit that?” he asked, tall, stern.

“It’s probable,” I replied.

“No. It is true,” he said, and resumed his martial pace. “Think about it and you will realize that this is the point where all the stories come together — that of Hugo Heredia and his son, that of Francisco Luis and Mademoiselle Lange, that of the savage resentment of the master of the Clos des Renards — in a common inclination of spirit, if we may call it that.”

“It is probable,” I repeated, slightly taken aback, adding that I felt more at home here than there.

In the dressing rooms, the attendants called up our numbers and we began to undress as our numbered swimming trunks and towels, along with the obligatory robes and scuffs, descended in the small lift from a collective loft concealed above. We members of the club have no right to take these articles with us but must entrust them to the club until the day, if not of our death, of our unlikely resignation of the privilege of belonging to it. Where else these days does one find such precise and uncommon rituals? We did not speak while the bald or graying muscular attendants in shorts and T-shirts attended us personally, soaping us with loofa sponges, scrupulously avoiding any contact with our private parts, before we proceeded to the showers.

After we had showered, we wrapped ourselves in the terry-cloth robes and went into the humid salon conceived of by the club not as a sauna or a Turkish bath but as a pleasant solarium. Sitting there was like spending a summer morning beneath a cloudy sky.

I maintained a discreet silence, which I believed invited my friend to continue a story that might otherwise have ended at the moment when Branly, barefoot and in pajamas, flanked by his Spanish servants and driven by his Breton chauffeur, left behind him forever the Clos des Renards. I dreaded the probability of Branly’s accusation. His stoicism would have been extraordinary if at least once, and what better time than this, in the company of a friend, without witnesses, and with a solemn, if implicit, oath never to repeat a word of our conversation, he had not said what we were both thinking.

At least he could be sure of one thing, he said as he settled into the canvas chair beside mine: Hugo Heredia had returned to Mexico and would never again see or hear from his son Victor. Perhaps, as the terrifying Spaniard of the Clos des Renards had said, Branly, though he could never recognize him, had seen Victor in a café or walking down some street. He could even be one of the waiters who rushed in to prepare for the evening meal at the club; had I realized the number of adolescents who worked as helpers? I said I had, and added that this medieval system disguised as apprenticeship was preferable to turning the boys onto the streets, unemployed. Branly closed his eyes and said that we had not been talking about unemployment. His question was, had I noticed the faces of the young waiters, had I seen among them a face that might belong to the person “Heredia” had referred to: neither André nor Victor, but a new being, André and Victor.

I told him I had not. The idea seemed so extraordinary that it had never entered my head. Why here?

“To be near,” Branly replied.

“Near you?” I asked quietly.

Branly fingered the heavily embroidered blue initials on his robe.

“Near the recognition I owe them,” he said in a flat voice. “I find it difficult to recover my faith in my own reason, and yet the madness of the Heredias seems overly classic and therefore mysterious; it is a madness cloaked in civility.”

He held out his hand.

I leaned forward to take it.

Almost imperceptibly, without seeming to do so, he withdrew his hand, and said: “First I must tell you, and then I shall not say it again, that I have asked myself over and over whether I could have avoided what happened. What should I have done? I blame myself for many things. I shall mention only one. I allowed, you see? my pride and my scorn for the French ‘Heredia’ to divert me from the responsibility of calling Victor’s father, Hugo Heredia. You remember that instead I asked ‘Heredia’ to telephone my servants to inform them that we were well and would be spending a few days in Enghien. Actually, I should have telephoned Hugo Heredia myself. Why? you ask with a certain amazement. As things turned out, weren’t all the Heredias as thick as thieves, as English detectives say? It is true. And yet how can I convince myself — though at the time I did not know — I was not remiss? I should personally have telephoned the boy’s father, listened to his lie, to the tone of voice that as it lies reveals the truth of things.”

I thought Branly was exaggerating his role in what transpired and I said that preventing what had happened would have entailed as much risk as any other combination of events. Victor could have died in the plane accident with his mother, instead of his brother Antonio. The possible combinations of chance, I added, were multiple. Hugo and Victor could have died in the accident; or Hugo and Antonio. Could Branly attribute any of the hermetic consequences to human will?

“There is one thing I could have done, something decisive,” my old friend said, suddenly aged as he spoke.

“What, Branly?” I was alarmed by the ominous curtain of age that suddenly descended over habitually taut features.

“I could have let the boy fall from the precipice. All I I had to do was hold out my cane, not hook his arm with its handle. He would have fallen at least fifty meters from the citadel to the pelota court in the ravine of Xochicalco.”

I made no comment. This linkage of deaths in a barranca in the Valley of Morelos seemed excessive, if not offensive: first, Mademoiselle Lange, now Victor Heredia. The same barranca? Always the same dogs and owls? Branly looked at me with a trace of amusement.

“You must remember, if you truly wish to be generous in absolving my guilt, that I was on the point of asking the father and son not to travel together. I might have invoked — it is my right, shall we say, of seniority — an intuition, a sixth sense, a profound respect for the dead: Latins understand this. In addition, I was on the point of asking the father not to travel with his son; I wanted to offer to come for the boy and then accompany him on his return to Mexico, is that not so?”

“That’s what you told me, Branly.”

“Why, then, did I immediately invite them to my home, allow them to run the risk of traveling together, of being killed together, like the mother and brother before them?”

As he asked this question, my friend leaned toward me slightly. I repeated my thoughts as I sat beside Branly in my canvas chair. “I was thinking that courtesy is the only reliable means you can summon to impose order on human events, to offer them the refuge of civilization.”

“And…?” he asked avidly.

“There is more. I thought this was how you calmed that not unordered agitation, to use your own words.”

He stared at me as if thirsting for my thought: “And to exorcise the venomous flowers interwoven with precious jewels, is that it?”

“You know better than I where the chance of human destinies ends and the art of literary selection begins.”

Branly offered me a profile sketched with a silver nib. “Can they be separated?” he asked, finally.

He underscored his question with a nervous glance, and this time he pressed my hand.

Then he relaxed, sinking back into his beach chair.

We did not look at each other. Sitting side by side in the canvas chairs of the club solarium, we stared toward an undefined point before us, the tiled floor, the glass between us and the swimming pool and the bar.

Finally I interrupted this shared reverie by asking my friend whether he had subsequently had any news of the Heredias. My question, which Branly did not answer, included, I admit, another. What did you do when you returned to your house on the Avenue de Saxe? I framed it aloud, and Branly replied with precision.

“I discharged Etienne and my Spanish servants. The last time a servant in our house allowed himself to be bribed was during the time of the Huguenots. Imagine! Only Protestants and Latin Americans have dared.”

“Or, if you will, a Hugo and a Huguenot,” I said, with a weak attempt at humor, as if hoping to hasten a return to normality between us, knowing that the situation was not normal, and that my words were purely a reflex action.

“No wonder that in the court of Carlos III a bribe was referred to as ‘Mexican pomade.’” My friend smiled.

His words were accompanied by the customary gracious movement of his hands, but now I saw in these gestures, in his banter, something more than an attempt to disavow the overly solemn mood of the occasion. Branly’s hands moved as if performing the final rite of an exorcism: dissolving, blessing, dispatching forever.

“But, Branly, none of the small coincidences, the implicit analogies, escaped your attention.”

I spoke in spite of myself; it was not my place to comment on what I had learned, since it was Branly who had told me, and his word was to be trusted. My friend started to get up, but then sank back into the canvas chair.

He closed his eyes. He clasped his long fingers under his chin and, instead of replying, recited a few lines from his favorite poem, which for me was becoming the mysterious leitmotif of this story that so often, I realized now, I had expected to be identical to the person who was telling it, yet, at the same time, independent of the teller.

My friend asked whether I remembered the title of the poem. Certainly, I replied, “La Chambre Voisine,” by Jules Supervielle, and again I said that I felt its lines had been with us throughout this long November afternoon.

“The eve of the Feast of St. Martin.” Branly’s eyes were still closed.

“What?” I struggled to follow the train of my friend’s thoughts.

“We were speaking earlier this afternoon of that privileged moment in Paris when the phenomena of the day are dispersed and the day is crowned in glory. A luminous moment, as you know, in spite of rain, fog, or snow.”

“Yes?”

“A true St. Martin’s Day is the jewel in the crown, a summer day in mid-autumn, an unexpected gift for those of us resigned to numb survival in the glacial burrows of a primeval world, the hostile world of wolf against wolf, my friend.”

A response seemed to be called for, so I commented that he was right, that in only a few days it would be the Feast of St. Martin, the eleventh of November, the Armistice Day of Branly’s Great War. My friend opened one slightly self-deprecatory eye, as if that epic warranted nothing more than an ironic memory. He had mentioned burrows. Now he was telling me that summer could be even more savage than winter; the trenches along the Marne were a hive of insects, and all of them, officers and men alike, grew accustomed to awakening with faces covered with the flies that cling to a soldier’s sweat, beard, and dreams. Flies make no distinctions.

“A St. Martin’s summer’s day is like a gift time grants to itself. It makes those of us who are older believe it is possible to prolong the sweetness of our days. Like the sauterne we drank at luncheon, you know. The golden sweetness of that wine is the result of November grapes, of fruit harvested after other wines are already in the casks. Only the ripest fruit, grapes dried almost to raisins, shriveled from exposure to sun and the dying earth, give us the incomparable sweetness of a good sauterne.”

“That may be so,” I replied, “but it is impossible to distinguish the line between that golden maturity and the corruption that hastens, even precipitates it. A dark, repulsive fungus, Branly, call it noble decay if you will. And that’s true of the sauterne.”

“As I have told you, I could not anticipate the events of this narrative, even though I have lived it, because it was one thing to live it and another to tell it.”

“But now the story is finished, and even though I didn’t seek it, you have made me the new narrator of everything you have told me.”

My friend seemed indifferent to my words, as if they were the accepted corollary to his story. I did not fully understand the nature of his disillusionment when, turning his heavy head to look at me, he replied that only part of what I said was true. I had become a probable narrator of his story, but the story was not concluded. No, it is the nature of narrative to be incomplete, to be contiguous with another story.

He answered my questioning look by wrapping himself more tightly in his white terry robe and asking with nervous severity, cold but inviting the heat the acceptance of his words would incur, what do you think a man like myself would do, a man in whom duty and pleasure have learned to live side by side, but only as long as they were justified and unified in the present, not in nostalgia, my friend, or hope, but in a sense of the present, the here and now, embodying the obligations as well as the potential of time; what is the meaning of being who I am and as I am, tell me, if I refuse to accept that sense of the present that others call responsibility, yes, but the ultimate responsibility that excludes, now listen carefully, any pretext of the now—“not this, it has already happened, or this, because it is still to come”—unless it encompasses a concept of being. Nothing dies completely unless we ourselves are guilty of condemning it to death by forgetting it. Oblivion is the only death; the presence of the past in the present is the only life; and this is what I came to understand after I returned to my house and reviewed my adventure with the Heredias. It is also what finally bound me to Hugo Heredia, in spite of everything that stood between us.

“What do you think a man like myself would do?” Branly repeated after an imperceptible pause.

“You went to Mexico to look for Hugo Heredia.”

Again he closed his eyes, and said that he would tell me word for word what Heredia had told him late one October afternoon after Branly had located him in Xochicalco working in the excavations of the ancient Toltec ceremonial center beside the deep barranca that plummets from the altar to the floor of the Valley of Morelos and its profusion of extinct volcanoes.

“Every story is contiguous with another,” my friend repeated. “I want to be as faithful as possible to the story of Hugo Heredia. Later you will understand why.”

He asked that for the moment I limit myself to considering whether he and I were capable of re-creating with total fidelity the events of the afternoon from the moment I entered the club dining room and he saw me and suggested we lunch together. Could I see myself as I saw him? Could he see himself as I saw him? Could we both, through a supreme joint effort, re-create with verisimilitude the sonorous space about us, the tinkling glass, the heavy resonance of silver service plates, the murmur of voices nearby as well as distant? Could we remember, without error, the words of the waiter who served us? his face? his hands? “Listen then, through my voice, to Heredia’s voice on that recent October afternoon in Xochicalco. We are talking about a figure created by narrative imagination, and as only imagination can reproduce a verbal account, it will be incomplete, it will be an approximation. In any case, that incomplete approximation will be the only possible truth.”

He asked whether I accepted these conditions, and I said of course; I had never read or listened to a story without entering into the pact my friend, at this vibrant if perilous peak of our emotional and intellectual relationship, was proposing. But was the same accord possible between two friends in one another’s presence as between an inevitably distanced reader and author?

“If you require the reader’s proviso,” Branly replied, “I shall introduce Hugo Heredia as a second author of this narrative, a second river in the hydrograph we have been tracing for the past few hours, you and I. Yes, you as well, you know it; you cannot turn back now. You, too, have become a river in this watershed whose true source we still do not know, as we do not know the multiplicity of its tributaries or the final destiny toward which it flows.”

He courteously inquired whether I needed further information if I was to accept the reality of a narrative which, because it was narrative, must reside in the realm of the virtual. When did Branly travel to Mexico? On October 29, the eve of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, the day of the dead. He smiled. If he hadn’t found Hugo Heredia, he would, in any case, have had a good pretext to witness those famous celebrations in a country that has never resigned itself to banishing death from the realm of life. Where did he stay? In the apartment of Jean, the mutual friend who had introduced him to the Heredias that same summer. He owned a penthouse with a broad vista of the exhausted smog, cement ruins, and shimmering dust of the Mexican capital. How had he located Heredia? Also through Jean, who had consulted the Ministry of Public Education to find out where the eminent archaeologist was. Had Heredia returned alone or with his son? Alone. How had he explained in Mexico City the disappearance of young Victor Heredia? As an accidental death. How? By drowning. Where, in Mexico or in France? In Normandy, on the beach of Dives-sur-Mer, at the foot of a high cliff where Romanesque stones tumble into an inlet of the cold turbulent sea. Were there witnesses? No; Hugo saw his son swim out to sea; he never returned. Did he report the death to the authorities? Yes; the boy’s body had never been found. When did this happen? While Branly was recovering from his accident at the Clos des Renards and every day listening to the conversations of Victor and André, and being visited in his bedroom by the young Mexican. Had Heredia returned to Mexico at the time Branly’s servants reported? Yes. No one in Mexico was surprised that he returned alone? Of course not. Heredia had already lost his other son and his wife; the death of Victor merely confirmed the family’s fatalism, and fatalism surprises no one in Mexico. When did Branly reach Xochicalco? On the eve of the nocturnal vigil for the dead.

The narrator must imagine Heredia walking back and forth on the edge of the precipice of Xochicalco, sometimes interrupting his pacing to sit in a folding chair, and talking with Branly, who alternately accompanies him as he walks, or joins him as he sits down, while the sky darkens and one by one the candles of the funeral ceremony are lighted, as if each represented two souls, the soul of the one who lights the candle and that of the one being remembered. He must see the unmoving sculptured stone of the sacred serpents of the Indian world, and behind the hills of flickering candles, barely perceptible faces, as expressionless as the voices whispering night prayers, birdlike voices, birdcalls identical to the sorrowful remoteness of the rebozo-veiled dark faces, the hands with broken fingernails, the feet caked with dried mud, the bloody knees, the invisible eyes of the ancient peoples of Mexico, the contiguous memory, the image vanquished by the besieged mirror of our words, the conjugations of being born, loving, and of dying, loving, the names of the Heredias, all their presentiments, all their ancestors, reduced to one voice in this night of the dead: you are Heredia.