Distant Relations

20. HUGO HEREDIA

I shall not, M. le Comte, offer unwarranted apologies, nor shall I use your title again. I have not forgotten the lesson you taught me when we were introduced here in Xochicalco last summer. Forgive the social gaucherie of an archaeologist more accustomed to speaking to stones than with men. After all, one who chooses my profession does so because he seriously believes that the stones are alive and that they speak to us.

That night when we dined together in the house of our mutual friend Jean, I told you that ancient peoples refuse to banish the old ways in favor of the new. This is one example of how stones talk to us if we will listen. Yesterday’s wisdom, and today’s, instead of being cast aside in succession, accumulate in a permanent accretion. All things must be living and present, I told you, as among the Imerina peoples of Madagascar, who conceive of history as two flowing currents: the inheritance of the ears and the memory of the lips.

I stress this essential tenet of my vocation, because it is important if you are to understand behavior that otherwise you might consider far from rational. Yes, I appeal to you because I know no person more capable of understanding. I have lived among stones. The taluses of Mitla, the friezes of Chichén-Itzá, the terraces of Uxmal, have been more than the site of my professional activity; they are the throne — please forgive the word, but this is how I feel — of a kind of honor regained. Mexico is a land of upheaval, almost always violent, and, in such cases, endowed with a certain epic grandeur; but more constant and cruel and insidious, I can assure you, have been the periods of peaceful upheaval such as those we have known the last sixty years. As a result, the wounds in my country never heal; we never grow the new skin of an aristocracy; we do not have an elite that can close our wounds. The compulsion for upheaval, either periodic, as in the past, or constant, as today, prevents that healing.

You belong to a society that does not repudiate the virtues of its ancient executioners when they become victims. Your aristocracy has been shot, guillotined, and exiled. But the political, aesthetic, and social culture of France has been zealously guarded. Thus, someone like yourself can enjoy the benefits of a vanished order along with those of the newer republican regime. This is, allow me to say it, not the best of all possible worlds, though it is the better of two possible worlds. There is a difference, though I would be happy if that option existed in my own country. I was thinking about these things when you said the night we dined in Jean’s house in Cuernavaca that Alexandre Dumas tells how Napoleon established an annuity of a hundred thousand écus in the name of the elderly widow of the Duc d’Orléans, whom you remembered, Branly, as the creator of the Parc Monceau. The motivation for his generosity was that in her salon on the Chaussée d’Antin the Duchesse was keeping alive the traditions of an aristocratic society that dated from the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV. Later, Dumas says that the first two hundred and fifty years of a life count only as memory. Would that were so of nations that vaunt their contemporaneity. I thought about your words all through the meal.

We Heredias of Mexico are what we are. Meat for the gallows, freed from the dungeons of Cádiz and Ceuta in exchange for participating in the conquest of the Indies. I shall not weary you with a detailed genealogy. Ten years after the fall of the Great Tenochtitlán, we had Indian wives and mestizo children in large numbers, along with vast expanses of land. Here, where there was so much land to be had and so many laborers to be enslaved, we could be what we had been unable to be in Spain. Hidalgos with a vengeance, immoderately indolent patricians, apathetic parasites. There was no reason to so much as lift a little finger in the New World, Branly. How then were we to demonstrate a power that like all functions atrophies if it is not exercised? Only with the enervation of appearances and the impunity of cruelty. History was to call this process the encomienda, royal grants of Indians, whole Indian villages, to Spanish colonists; the mita minera, forced Indian labor; peonage. Heredia is the name of many patriarchs, judges, and jailers in the new Hispanic world that survived for three centuries because we convinced that multitude of ragged creatures that they owed their very lives to our paternal protection, and to the consolation of our religion.

As a boy, I visited a hacienda that had belonged to one of my ancestors. It had been burned by Zapata’s troops during the Revolution. It was a ruin, a ruin in the image and likeness of those who had inhabited it: ugly, black, and cruel. The huts, jails, and presses scattered about the burned-out shell of the old sugar mill spoke to me of a world without grandeur, a world consumed by injustice at the very moment of its apogee. But is this not the legacy of Hispanic peoples: the coexistence of grandeur and decadence?

I believe that visit shaped my vocation. I grew up and sought the means by which I might assure my place in society. We had fought tenaciously to maintain our position through the capricious regimes of the nineteenth century. The liberal reforms of Juárez dealt us the first blow, cutting us off from our traditional alliance with the Church. But very quickly our situation improved, when, after twenty years spent in inept bumbling in pharmacies, imagine! and legal offices and newspaper editorships, and of adapting badly to something then called “modern life,” the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz created conditions favorable to regaining a portion of our former universe: large landholdings. But a new aristocracy is not forged in thirty years, and when I was born in 1931, my destiny was sealed: find a profession or live by my wits. No other path was open; the Revolution had administered the coup de grâce to the vestiges of the old Mexican oligarchies. From that time forward, Branly, everyone in Mexico, like the impassioned followers of Bonaparte in France, would have a right to everything. Do you not agree that this is the form democratic oppression takes?

I am telling you this, and what will follow, because I want you to understand more than the complexity of my psychic and historical makeup; I also want you, my cordial and hospitable friend, to be interested in me as a person. Yes, I built my throne on the ruins of the Indian world; you must not be surprised by the paradox. It is time that we false hidalgos, we enervated Creoles, and, of course, we resentful mestizos, from what was once New Spain, at last recognize who we are, recognize that the foundations of this land, its most profound achievement, its ineradicable identity, insignia, and nobility, are to be found in our ancient Toltec, Aztec, and Maya stones. In them I, a grudging professional, a great lord without a fiefdom, a tyrant without slaves, I took refuge. I spoke to them, and they spoke to me. You must believe everything I have told you, Branly. You must devote even more thought to the enormity of the paradox I have outlined. I could not accept that my image was to be found in what Aldous Huxley called the “humpbacked” Spanish colonial architecture of Mexico; and in what had been the seat of our power, the hacienda, I found only the horror I have described. Such was the spiritual victory of the vanquished: I, a Creole in search of lost grandeur, could find it only among the monuments of my victims’ past.

Professions deform one; archaeology is no exception. I spoke more with the stones than with my wife and my sons, Antonio and Victor. I had to travel constantly and our apartment on Río Garona Street became little more than a pied-à-terre for me. I met my wife Lucie in the French Institute of Latin America, that urban oasis on Río Nazas Street where my entire generation went to learn about film, literature, and, above all, about the civilization we thought it our personal responsibility to sustain during the years France was in eclipse. The first thing Lucie pointed out to me was that everything I told her about my ancestors was marked by that strange love for France which supposedly saves us Latin Americans from our ancient subordination to Spain and our more recent subordination to the Anglo-Saxon world. France seems like a safe and longed-for haven. Lucie was from one of the families of Barcelonnette in the Basses-Alpes who traditionally emigrated to Mexico. Her family made a fortune there in department stores, and now, as so often happens, she was atoning for the commercial sins of her ancestors by studying history and literature at the Institute. It was natural for us to meet, to fall in love, to marry.

I owe her a great deal. Unlike me, she found nothing shameful in business enterprises; she had no such pride or pretensions. She complemented my formation, my culture; French reason is a good antidote to Latin American delirium. It is also its incubator, and Lucie delighted in reminding me that my country had fought a revolution for independence because a few men had read Rousseau and Voltaire, an enlightened counterrevolution because a few others had read Comte, and a new intellectual revolution inspired by Bergson. I leave to you your opinion of the success of these ideological transplants. But I confess to you, Branly, that Lucie’s perception, her discipline, her capacity for work, were the goad to one of my own ambitions, my decision to read everything, to know everything, to find the interrelationships of all I had learned, and not to succumb to our century’s gangrenous absurdity, which in the business world, in the very same trade that enriched my wife’s parents — and, because they were grand hidalgos and never learned how to exercise it, impoverished my own — is today translated into mercilessly divorcing the past from the present, with the proposition that the past must always be something dead and we always something new, something different from that much-to-be-scorned past — new, and consequently thirsting for the latest innovation in art, clothing, entertainment, machines. Novelty has become the blazon of our happiness. So we drug ourselves against the realization that our destiny, too, will be death, the moment the future relegates us to the past.

No, I did not often speak with my family; I communicated to them only the lesson of the stones. I may never have known anything but the stones; this is my guilt, but I have purged it. Lucie applauded the “good lesson” of the stones, as she called it: the sense of the past, the obstinate refusal to sacrifice, to exile the past from a present that is incomprehensible except within the context of the past. This aspect of my work delighted her. But not what she came to call the “bad lesson” of the stones: the conviction that we belonged to a superior caste endowed with innate privileges that entitled us to reclaim the authority usurped from us by a world of parvenus.

Lucie was highly intelligent, and she feared my attitude, she said, because on our continent oppression went to even greater lengths than in Europe. The Europeans exploited peoples of distant lands and were able, without undue effort, to forget about them. We had our victims in our own homes, in ever-increasing numbers. They are the only palpable ghosts I know, my wife used to say: we see them begging in the streets, sleeping on garbage heaps, daggers of glass crystallizing in their resentful gaze.

“One day you will feel that guilt, Hugo,” she used to tell me. “That good European conscience has a great deal to do with the remoteness of its victims. The day will come when the presence of the humbled among us will make it impossible to sleep.”

Antonio was close to his mother and listened to her teachings; Victor was my favorite, and he learned mine. Believe me, Branly, when I say that those were the true and spontaneous motives for the fact that more and more often Victor accompanied me on my constant trips to the work sites. In doing so, he learned more about our country than Antonio, and I cannot deny that I did nothing to extinguish the spark of domination and hatred in his eyes when he saw what he had to see: entire villages of drunken men, women, and children: the men drunk because of the fiesta, the women because of pain, the infants because they suckled alcohol with their milk; the devout humiliation of Mexican churches, the incense haze of indistinguishable misery and faith; the pillage, the cruelty against man that is the watchword of the Mexican countryside. He scorned the people; he admired the stones, and in the latter, the “good lesson,” he coincided with his mother and his brother.

One night I surprised my two sons as they were playing a strange game. Remember, they shared the “good lesson” of a finely developed respect for the past, and, in truth there is no past without the sense of play that keeps it fresh. They were wagering on something. I felt a shiver when I understood on what. They were wagering on our deaths theirs, and ours.

“Who do you think will die first?” asked Toño.

“Most likely it will be Father and me,” said Victor. “You should see the little planes we take in the mountains.”

“I promise that Mother and I will cry a lot,” Toño answered.

“Father and me, too,” said Victor.

I spoke with Lucie about their game. We decided, if decided is the word, to vary our responsibilities. We thought it morbid that the boys should identify their own deaths with that of one of their parents. They were right about one thing, however: the two of us should never travel together and thus expose Victor and Antonio to being orphaned. For my part, I would begin taking Antonio with me on some of the trips to explore the villages in the isolated mountains and barrancas of Mexico. I was an only child. My own parents were dead, and Lucie’s parents, in spite of her efforts to maintain contact and visit them regularly, lived in remote French indifference. We told our friends this was a decision we had made when Victor was born. No one was surprised; some praised our foresight. No one remembered, you see, that occasionally three of us had traveled together — Lucie, one of the children, and I — exposing the other child to being the sole survivor of the family. But if we ourselves forget the logical order of our lives, how can we expect others to remember? In fact, Branly, this is the very essence of my profession: to reverse to some degree that amnesia about ourselves, that oblivion to what we were, to what our parents and our grandparents were, the nothingness that evokes the reluctant phantom that appears to tell us: this is what you were, this is what your people were; you have forgotten. The very mission of a ghost is to rectify the forgetfulness of the living, their injustice toward the dead.

Our decision to travel separately is common among families today, and Victor was right; the planes in which anthropologists hop from Palenque to San Cristobal, penetrate the sierras of Guerrero, or skim the ravines of Nayarit and Morelos, are as reliable as mosquitoes in a hurricane. Because in Mexico, Branly, even when nature is at rest, it seems to tremble threateningly. Bottomless chasms, slabs of solid basalt, treacherous peaks, the crosswinds of this delirious orography, the unexpected deserts, the thousands of pyramids disguised as innocuous hills. You are looking at them now where we find ourselves this evening.

Lucie began to travel more with Victor, I with Toño; but, though we never discussed it, the other child remained our true favorite. Toño admired and accepted only the mute beauty of the past, never the voice of its cruel power or its prolongation in the present. One evening in a hotel in Pátzcuaro a young Indian waiter carelessly spilled a glass of tomato juice over the new white guayabera shirt Antonio had put on to dine beside the lake. Imagine what Victor would have said, what he would have done. Toño, on the other hand, laughed, helped the waiter wipe the spilled juice from the floor, and then he himself rinsed the shirt and hung it to dry in the bathroom, giving thanks all the while for the invention of Dacron. In contrast, when Lucie returned from a trip to visit her family in France, she complained about how rude Victor had been to hotel and restaurant employees, especially when he discovered they were — as they so often are — Spanish.

“They were born to serve me,” he would say, with a trace of arrogant humor.

I waited for another occasion to eavesdrop on the boys again. The opportunity came just a year ago, when the four of us went to Caracas for a conference on anthropology and had adjoining rooms in the Tamanaco Hotel. The writer and publisher Miguel Otero Silva had invited us to a masked ball in his home. As the hour approached for us to leave, Victor and Antonio thought we were busy with our costumes. This is what I heard them say.

“You were right,” said Victor. “Father doesn’t like to cry.”

“Then do you want to trade?” his brother asked.

“If that’s all right with you, Toño, why not?”

“It makes no difference to me,” said Antonio, with the aplomb befitting his superior fourteen years.

“Then I choose to die with my father so Mother and you can cry over us, or I choose for you and Father to die together, so Mother and I can cry. The main thing is for Mommy not to die, because she’s the best cryer.”

They laughed, and I asked myself what Lucie had been crying about, what they had seen, what my sons knew that I didn’t know. There was no chance to clear up this mystery. In the taxi on the way to the ball I touched my wife’s hand and asked her if everything was all right. She said yes, today more than ever before; tonight we should not ask foolish questions, we must dance and be happy. Happy, but uncomfortable, I told her, imprisoned in the gold braid-trimmed uniform of General Bolívar from the time of Venezuela’s war for independence. Lucie, on the other hand, floated into the salon a vision of beauty in her high-waisted, diaphanous Empire gown, long stole, and satin slippers, her hair combed into a tower of cotton-candy curls.

It was a warm night and the Oteros had decided to hold the party on their incomparable roof garden. As a confirmed traveler, Branly, you know how Caracas hides from its modern ugliness, withdrawing into walled secret gardens, though none, I venture, was as remarkable as theirs, where the play of lights — oblique and direct, soft and intense — seemed to sculpt anew the Henry Moore and Rodin sculptures displayed outdoors in the mild Caracas air.

From behind the statue of Balzac garbed in the monastic attire he wore when writing emerged a priestly figure. A man of average height, stunted by a sturdy, squarish torso, ennobled by a white mane of leonine hair, a man dressed as a parish priest, with the ubiquitous Venezuelan white-corn arepa in his hand. I heard the murmurs of amazement: had the man come masked as a priest, or was he a priest? Someone said in indignation that the cloth was not an appropriate costume, but either way, though this most unusual guest was wearing black, only his collar was clerical. He approached me at the precise moment the orchestra began to play; Miguel Otero asked my wife to dance and I found myself holding the stubby-fingered hand of the spurious priest.

“Forgive me.” He spoke in a mellifluous voice. “You were pointed out to me yesterday at the opening meeting. As we have the same name, I wanted to meet you.”

I must have stared at him with an extremely stupid expression, because he was forced to add: “Heredia. My name, too, is Heredia. The same name, you see?”

Though I said I did see, I had eyes only for Lucie. She looked magnificent, an ethereal, bewitched figure more beautiful than ever, her skin warmed by the tropics, her diaphanous gown swirling; and absentmindedly, out of simple courtesy, I asked this Heredia where his family was from; ours had come to New Spain in the sixteenth century. I anticipated his response.

“Ah, no. Our Heredias will be much more recent arrivals in the New World.” Looking at him really for the first time, I saw that, despite my first impression, he could not be called old. “My mother,” he said, “fleeing the Negro rebellion, came from Haiti to La Guaira. Very recent in comparison to your genealogy, of course.”

I tried to recall a “Negro rebellion” in Haiti seventy to ninety years ago, but my memory told me nothing. The other Heredia clasped his hands pontifically, as if he had guessed what I was thinking. “Ah, so your memory does not respond?”

“No, frankly, it does not, Señor Heredia.”

“But, nevertheless, isn’t it true we have no memory but what we recall?”

“That seems rather obvious,” I replied with some annoyance. My conversation with this Heredia was becoming grotesque. In fact, I thought I detected a trace of senility in the man’s words and actions, and I tried to move away. He caught me by the arm. Extremely irritated now, I tried to free myself, but not before he forced me to listen: “If you ever need me, look me up in the directory.”

“And why would I need you?” My rejoinder was brusque.

“We all need to remember at times,” he replied affably. “I am a specialist in memories.”

“Of course. Now, excuse me.”

“But if you don’t know my name, how can you call me?”

“Your name is Heredia, you have already told me.”

“Victor,” he said in the softest of voices. “Victor Heredia. Imagine: the Haitian uprising took place, I believe, in 1791, but that was the time of Toussaint L’Ouverture; the rebellion of Henri Christophe came later. I’m not entirely sure of that: in fact, I’m not completely sure of anything.”

The door between our room and that of the boys was half-open when Lucie and I returned to the hotel. The boys were watching television, but only slightly lower than the sound of a song interspersed with jokes, we could hear clearly Antonio’s voice, more serious every day, more indicative of his imminent adulthood.

“No, Victor. I’m backing down on our deal. I choose to die with Mother.”

“C’est pas chic de ta part,” said Victor, using one of the expressions he had picked up in his years of study at the French Lycée. As Lucie had taught the boys a very literary French, she was always surprised and pleased when she heard such phrases in her house.

“What difference does it make to you?” asked Toño. “You want Father and me to die together so you and Mother will be left to cry all you want.”

“It isn’t the same thing,” said Victor. “I tell you it isn’t the same. You traitor.”

We could hear Victor punching Antonio, and I rushed in to separate them.

Lucie locked herself in the bathroom. I reprimanded the boys and told them that if they didn’t behave themselves they would be on the first plane back to Mexico the next morning. My wife would not open the bathroom door, and when finally she came to our room, the boys had fallen asleep and she was no longer crying. I asked whether she had heard them speak like this before, and she said she had. And it was not just chance, she added. She was convinced that Victor made a point of bringing up the subject any time he knew she could hear. With a resigned sigh, my beautiful wife folded the Empire ball gown into a cardboard box and told me to do the same with my military regalia. The mulatto woman from the agency that rented the costumes had told her she would come by early the next morning to pick them up, the Señora understood, such outfits were rented almost every day; Lucie could leave the boxes outside the door and she would pick them up.

The four of us flew back together. That simple action, I believed, would put an end to the morbid, if playful, inclination of my sons. As the plane lifted off from Maiquetía, La Guaira was a time more than a place, a cliff-rimmed port patiently awaiting the return of ancient ships to furrow the strangely calm and luminous sea. I tried to distinguish hands, faces, handkerchiefs waving goodbye from the large old houses and the Fort of San Carlos on the hill. I saw only the buzzards, which are the true lookouts of all the ports of the Caribbean. I closed my eyes and the hum of the motors blended with the memory of the plaintive whistle of the toucan in the Venezuelan dusk.

The accident occurred that Christmas, when Lucie and her favorite, Antonio, went to Paris to visit her family. The DC-10 plunged into the sea near the Azores. Their bodies were never recovered. No, there was no sign, no warning. Now that you and I know all the things we know, we might be tempted to believe that there was some connection between them and the death of my wife and son. That was not so, and this tragic event had its most grave consequences, as might be expected, in my home, and for reasons that would surprise no one: Victor’s sadness, a sadness that moved me and moved all those who knew us, a sadness that caused our small apartment on Río Garona to become even more desolate, but a sadness my son refused to share with me. Because I had overheard the boys, only I knew the reasons. Victor found himself without a companion in his mourning.

You will understand, Branly, that as soon as I realized the truth, I determined to be a true companion in my son’s mourning. But how could I take the place of his mother, whom he had expected to weep with him over my death and Antonio’s? What did the boy expect of me? What could I offer him? I was not the first widowed father who had to answer such questions. I observed how Victor was changing, deeply affected not so much by his mother’s death as by the absence of his mother as a partner in grief to weep over me and his brother. This sorrow had a different name: cruelty.

What was to be found in this soul that Victor and I shared, so to speak? I have already told you: scorn for men, respect for stones. I decided that because of the circumstances the boy could afford to miss a year of school. The important thing was for him never to be separated from me for a minute, for him to learn my lessons — the good and the bad, as his mother had called them — by accompanying me to the thrones of bygone honor and recovered identity represented in the great ruins of our Mexican past. With me, little by little, he would penetrate into the heart of Mexico: its villages, its churches, its world of dust and cheap alcohol, its cheating, its humiliated Indian, its cunning cacique who controls the stores, the brothels, the pawnshops.

“This is what we Heredias came from. Look closely. This is our clay.”

I instructed him, Branly, to admire authority based on grandeur and dignity, and I pointed out the consistent absence of those qualities; I instructed him to dream of an ideal nation governed by a true aristocracy that would discipline both the masses degraded by vice and exploitation and the vulgar and rapacious exploiters of our nation.

I was not sure how Victor was changing, but I knew he was changing. That part of him about which I knew nothing was growing daily; I felt intuitively that there were things that only my son knew, only my son wanted. He wanted and knew things he was not telling anyone, and only I knew that. He had no true companion in his mourning, and my fear was that he would seek such a companion in danger; that is, in the unknown. That is the reason I kept him so close to me. I became aware of what you already know: the indefensible arrogance of Victor toward his inferiors, especially servants. I was not unduly concerned, in view of the fact that this is an attitude common among all well-to-do youths in the Iberian world; what did disturb me was that my younger son’s behavior was causing me to long for the spontaneous camaraderie of my older son, Antonio.

And so, inadvertently, I began to undermine my own edifice, to compare the moments of coldness, the cruelty, of Victor to the natural joy, the spirit of celebration and playfulness, that had characterized Antonio. Another thing was happening that neither of us realized. Victor was forming me as much as I was forming him: like him, along with him, I sought and lamented my missing companion in death, my comrade in mourning: Antonio.

My perceptions of Victor’s character became increasingly clear. One spring we happened to be in Aguascalientes at the time of the fair of San Marcos. That is a world of taunts, wagers, machismo, and intensified chance, a perpetual all-or-nothing, Branly, a cyclone whose eye is centered in the cockfight. There, everything I have just mentioned reaches a peak of frenzy not unlike that of the most ancient forms of communal games, mysteries, and hazards. I arrived at the ring at the last moment; I heard the shout “Close the doors,” and bets flew thick and fast. The cocks were sprayed with mouthfuls of water and alcohol, released, and set in confrontation for the battle that everyone, even the roosters, knows is to the death. I scanned the eyes, hands, heads, of the crowd transformed by the hysteria of betting into a great undulating serpent. Only Victor, in the middle of an excited crowd, sat totally motionless. He didn’t lift an arm, a finger; his icy gaze never shifted from the center of the ring — which for this single reason, because one person was watching in this manner, ceased to be a ludic circle and was converted into an arena of execution. Do you remember the Hitchcock film in which all the spectators at a tennis match follow the play of the ball except one: the murderer? My son’s unflinching stare told me that for him the death of one or both of the cocks was a matter of total indifference, since from his viewpoint this was the fate to which they were destined. The two cocks had been trained to fight, and armed with razors on their spurs; they were the playthings of their masters, but also masters in their own combat, and, ultimately, it was better to die in the ring than in the poultry market.

That all this should be translated into such absolute moral indifference made me believe that for Victor the cult of aristocratic authority was being converted into a cult of fatalism and blind power, and I asked myself what had been lacking in an education intended to illustrate the unity of time, a time that does not sacrifice the past, which, after all, had been my goal in my relationship with my sons. I soon found out, the first time we went together to Xochicalco — before I met you, Branly. I was working with the team of the Swedish anthropologist Laura Bergquist one afternoon in the area of the pelota court you see below us, when we all heard, from the heights of the citadel above, a terrifying cry that some thought thunder, the thunder that long in advance announces the July late-afternoon rains in the Valley of Morelos. I looked up and saw Victor standing at the edge of the precipice, right here, Branly, where you caught him with the handle of your cane, right here where I am standing now, imitating Victor’s actions for you. His bleeding hands were extended from his body, like this. I ran toward him. Fortunately, Bergquist and two workers followed; Victor fell, but he fell into our arms.

We had cushioned his fall, but that night the boy was delirious. His hands were badly cut, and he kept repeating the words, “I forgot,” “I forgot.” When we returned to Mexico City, he told me what had happened. He had been half-playing, half-exploring around the site of the Toltec temple, when he discovered a chink in the talus at the pediment of the plumed serpents. One of those frogs that seem to hop through the dust, guiding us to hidden mountain rivers, slipped into the opening and Victor tried to catch it. But instead of the rough, palpitating body of the batrachian, he tells me, he touched a surface of incomparable smoothness, something, he said, that felt like hot glass. I can never forget the vivid and perfect image. He removed the object, and when he saw it (as he was telling me, he again became feverish), he gazed upon something indescribable, a unity so perfect, so seamless, like a potent, concave drop of gold, that it needed no added embellishment, carving, or detail. If I understand what Victor was telling me, human hands could add nothing to its perfection, though it was not the work of nature. It had been crafted, he knew, because on the crown shone a relief, surely a sign, that seemed born of the very essence of its substance.

Now this is important, Branly. My son confessed that he felt an irresistible hatred for that perfect object that could owe nothing to him, or to any man. He picked up a sharp stone and struck at the object until he split it in two, divesting it forever of the beauty inherent in its wholeness. In the frenzy of his task, Victor cut his hands. He hurled half the object from him. Holding the other half in his hand, impelled by the force of his shame, he ran to the precipice; he threw even farther the second half, which, he said, was burning into the cuts on his hands. Only then did he cry out, and fall.

I let Victor sleep in my bed that night, but I turned my back to him. I had failed. Victor had learned the uses of arbitrary power, but in the process he had forgotten the memory of the unity of time. This was never my intention, I know you believe me. On the contrary, I had wanted human authority to serve the memory of past civilizations, and the awareness of the present to serve everything that had preceded us.

The reason I am telling you all this, Branly, is that I feel we Heredias owe you a debt. I could read the thoughts that passed through your eyes the night we met. I am sorry to have deceived you. I am not a universal man from the century of discoveries. I am only a slightly resentful Mexican Creole, like all the rest of my compatriots marked by mute rage against their inadequacies. Mine is a selective culture. What can save me from the capitis diminutio that is the curse of being a “Latin American”—which is to say a man who turns everything he touches into melodrama? Tragedy has been denied us; even our deepest sorrows come under the label of the circus of disaster. Listen to our songs, read our love letters, hear our orators.

Several months went by in which communication with Victor was difficult, if not impossible. He resumed his studies at the French Lycée. I observed him closely, and kept repeating that ridiculously obvious phrase I had once heard. “We have no memory but what we recall.” It began to haunt me, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Does what we forget cease to exist, or is it we who are diminished when we forget something? Does what we have forgotten exist whether or not we remember it? These thoughts quite naturally were in my mind during my work at archaeological sites. The vast treasures of Mexican antiquity are no less real because for centuries we had ignored their existence. Perhaps the work of the archaeologist can be reduced to this: to restore, however imperfectly, a past.

I thought about this when I visited the city of the gods, Teotihuacán, the first true city of the Western Hemisphere. Its great avenues and pyramids are like a diagram of the ancient relationship of all things with all things. I remember our meeting here on a different afternoon, in a different space destroyed because Victor was with me, and today I believe that the limitations of my lesson were related to the changes that were taking place in our lives because of Victor. For, Branly, if you want me to summarize the most profound lesson of Mexican antiquity, it is this: all things are related, nothing is isolated; all things are accompanied by the totality of their spatial, temporal, physical, oneiric, visible, and invisible attributes.

“When a child is born,” I told Victor that intensely pale afternoon, “it is accompanied by all its signs; it belongs to a day, a physical object, a direction in space, a color, an instant in time, a sentiment, a temperature. But what is amazing is that these personal signs are related to all other signs, to their opposites, their complements, their prefigurations. Nothing exists in isolation.”

“Give me an example,” Victor said, and I sought his eyes. I felt that our ability to play together was being reestablished, and I explained, as an example, that if your day was that of the eagle Cuautli, it would correspond to the signs of the lofty flight that watches over the earth like a sun, but that this grandeur would find its complement in the sacrifice that must accompany it, in the figure of the god Xipe Tótec, who gives his life for the coming harvest, and who in order to escape from himself sheds his skin like a snake: the grandeur of the eagle’s flight and the painful misery of our flayed lord.

First — yes, how banal — we played dominoes; then cards; increasingly complicated games, as if challenging one another. I resurrected the disturbing game of faro from Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, with its secrets of enormous power, immense riches, but, also, infinite death. Victor responded with tarot cards. I compared the somnambulistic indifference I had witnessed at the cockfight of San Marcos with an enthusiasm of sorts displayed one afternoon when we went to see the bulls. I had explained that the olé! of the bullring comes from the ancient Arabic wallah, an invocation, an address to God. Victor did not shout it out that afternoon, watching the veronicas of El Niño de la Capea; he murmured it like a danger-fraught prayer that would save the matador’s life because only he was repeating it.

We played games with photographs, Branly: Victor remembering his seatmates in grade school; I, mine. We cut up photographs to create unlikely pairings, entire families with faces transported through time and space. We bought old newsreels, projected them, each trying to incorporate himself (one always had to be the spectator) into the ambience of the film: automobile races, wars in Manchuria and Ethiopia, a dirigible disaster, the rallies of Perón’s followers in the Plaza de Mayo.

It was Victor’s idea to look up our names in the telephone directories of the towns we visited. The two Hugo Heredias, the half-dozen Victor Heredias, in the Mexico City phone book created a certain amused excitement, the first I had detected in my son for a long time. The novelty of the game needed no justification but this: pretended surprise, a shared laugh. In Mérida, however, the fact that there was but one Victor Heredia in the directory was a temptation: we called him, he laughed with us, we hung up. In Puebla the game grew more complex; Victor proposed that the loser should give the winner a prize.

“And who will determine the prize?” I asked with a smile.

Victor, unsmiling, replied: “The one who wins, of course.”

In Puebla there was only one Heredia in the directory, a Hugo.

“My prize will be for us to speak normally about your mother and your brother. It’s been more than a year now, and we’ve never mentioned them. Don’t you think it’s important for us to begin remembering them?”

Victor did not reply. We called the Puebla Hugo Heredia. He growled at us in a hoarse voice, and hung up.

“Have you noticed, Father? It’s always old men who answer.”

“Well, we could bet on whether the next Victor will be young and the next Hugo old.”

Victor laughed and said that I wasn’t old; I replied that when one is twelve, anyone over thirty seems as old as the tomb.

“But some people never grow old.”

“Who are these fortunate ones?” I spoke lightly.

“The dead.” My son’s voice was grave. “Antonio will never grow old.”

Jean had spoken of you often, Branly. In UNESCO, many people I respect know you. I have enjoyed your spontaneous, perhaps excessive, hospitality. I have seen the world that surrounds you. I know your interests. I have leafed through the books in your library, read what you have underlined in a few books more affectionately abused than others: Lamartine, Supervielle, Balzac. That is why I know I would offend you if I asked you to be discreet (worse, silent) in this matter. I should say nothing more. A true secret is one that is not told as a secret, but is kept so as not to lose the friendship of the person who told it, whether or not he knows.

You could say, with justification, that you didn’t solicit my story. That is true. It is no less true that among gentlemen the things that must be said will not be repeated. You will tell me that I am mistaken to speak, that pride is silent. I will have to ask your forbearance, Branly, and say that I am swallowing my pride to apologize. We have used your name, your house, your automobile, your chauffeur, in carrying out a pact whose consequences, even today, I cannot accurately foresee. This is why I must speak, and also why I must ask you to tell no one what I say. I will explain. In everything I have said until now, it is implicit that it is not necessary to ask you not to repeat it. But what I am going to tell you now demands a silence which if violated would violate an agreement my life depends on. So, you see, I am telling you these things because you deserve an explanation; there is no other reason. If what I have told you previously is accurate, and verifiable, what I am about to add is open to any interpretation. Even I, who lived it, do not understand it. Am I telling you these things to have you share in my amazement, my doubt, my perplexity? Possibly. It is also possible that I would never have spoken a word of this if you had not sought me, exposing yourself to my violence or my betrayal in the same way that in receiving you I exposed myself to yours. I am trying to understand, as I see you here tonight, while evening begins to fade and the candles of the night vigil for the dead begin to flicker; you deserve my words, as I deserve your silence.

In Monterrey we found one Victor Heredia in the directory. My son called him from our room in the Hotel Ancira. Victor put his hand over the mouthpiece so the man couldn’t hear him, and said: “He says he remembers everything.”

I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. I took the phone. I told the man who I was. A voice replied that he was glad to have our call, he had been expecting it for some time, and he invited us to come to tea in his apartment across from the Bishopric in the old part of that city shadowed, in the past as today, by a barbaric sun filtering through the dust. Monterrey does not inspire confidence; it is too indifferent to its own ugliness, as if the city existed only temporarily, in order for its grotesque oligarchy to make money and carry it off to heaven. That may be why I didn’t tell my son about Victor Heredia’s invitation. It was Victor, because he was the winner, who asked me to take him to meet his namesake. He asked in a tone that implied that if I denied him this request I would jeopardize the fragile edifice of our games and, consequently, our mutual trust. Our reviving affection, Branly.

I didn’t tell him about the invitation. We arrived without warning, as Victor told you the evening the three of us were having tea in your home on the Avenue de Saxe, do you remember? But there was no surprise on the face of the man who received us that afternoon in a run-down apartment tastelessly adorned with silver paint and shabby furniture from the thirties, the kind one still sees in France in the Galeries Barbès.

I was the one who was surprised. I recognized the man who had appeared from behind Balzac’s statue in a garden in Caracas while my beautiful Lucie danced in her swirling white gown. The surprise Victor detected on Heredia’s face must have been surprise at my surprise. Victor’s agitation that afternoon in your house, Branly, when I denied having gone with him to Heredia’s apartment in Monterrey, was the predictable alarm of one who does not wish to be left alone in a decision which, nevertheless, ultimately excludes the possibility of being shared.

Yes, I recognized the man from the garden that night in Caracas, even though this “Heredia” was not exactly like the other man; he merely reminded me of him. I had sufficient presence of mind to tell myself that this must have been what the man meant when he characterized himself as a specialist in memories. I have described the moment of our arrival at Heredia’s apartment. An instant later, the old man, who received us wearing bedroom slippers and a shabby white quilted bathrobe, and was holding a cup of Mexican corn-gruel atole in his hand, himself pretended great surprise, and asked whether we were the long-lost relatives that always come swarming out of the woodwork like termites when they scent the death of an elderly rich relative.

You will say when you read this that my son Victor was telling the truth, that it was I who lied. No. Please try to understand something very difficult to explain. We were both telling the truth, both Victor and I. Neither of us lied. He went alone, and we went together. “Heredia” was aware of my surprise when he recognized me, but he pretended surprise with that nonsense about poor relatives. And this happened, or, rather, the two things happened, Branly, in the wink of an eye, instantaneously, in that apartment with its splintered floors and silver paint, where, through dirty lace curtains, one could see the squat, gray, crumbling, graceless buildings of Monterrey. A presence was succeeded by a nonpresence, an attitude by its opposite, an affirmation by its negation, I by him. “Heredia”—he looking at me, I looking at him — standing there with his cup of atole in his hand, controlled the conversation, Branly; as he spoke to one of us, he excluded the other, not only from his words but from his very presence. I realized this only later when in the most tentative and uncertain way I asked Victor whether he remembered something “Heredia” had told me that afternoon. Victor said no, staring at me with curiosity.

I didn’t ask any more. I knew, too, that I hadn’t heard what “Heredia” told Victor. Again I felt the chill this man had brought to my life; I imagined, Branly, a force of infinite distance. The name “Heredia” was the name of a chaotic isolation that merged, and separated, all things. While “Heredia” was talking to me, I saw in my son’s eyes the same cruel nonpresence that had frightened me at the cockfight of San Marcos; I was sure Victor was somewhere else, and that my eyes, when “Heredia” was speaking to Victor, condemning me to my own solitude, were not very different. What did Victor and “Victor Heredia” say to one another that I couldn’t hear? What pact did they seal, Branly? We will never know with any certainty, because you can never know more than I am telling you. But my intuition tells me that in those moments Victor ceased to be mine; he passed into the hands of “Heredia,” and because I loved my poor son, I had to follow him wherever that devil led.

What did “Heredia” say to me? He used fewer words than I will need, Branly, to repeat his terrible offer. We had something in common: the secret desire to resurrect our dead, We cannot forget them. The living must serve the dead; there are certain things the dead cannot do. But as we serve them, we must be sure that we ourselves will be served at our deaths. You and I spoke of imperfectly restoring a past; those were my words, but “Heredia” spoke them that afternoon as he offered my son a choice of atoles, chocolate or strawberry, accompanied by powdered-sugar-sprinkled crullers.

“Don Hugo, may I offer you something a little more substantial?”

There was something gross about his courtesy.

I said no, I didn’t want anything. Not even what he had to offer? A drink? Oh, no. He laughed. My wife. My son, Antonio. No, not for nothing. He, “Heredia,” needed people in exchange. His problem was considerably more complex, if he might put it that way; while I desired the return of persons who had lived, he required the materialization of someone who had never been. Did I understand what he was saying? I had to say that I did not, and something that had been holding me there — all this happened within a few minutes, not more than five or six, I’m sure — was shattered. I thanked “Heredia” for the tea — which had turned out to be atole. I told him we had wanted to satisfy my son’s curiosity and that now we must leave.

“Come back any time you like,” said “Heredia,” patting Victor’s head.

“I don’t think so. This was merely a whim of my son’s. A game.”

“Ah, but he won’t be coming alone. My dealings are with you, Don Hugo. Think over what I said. I will see you tonight at your hotel.”

This time I said nothing. Something prevented me from mocking him in Monterrey, as I had mocked him in Caracas. I nodded, took Victor’s hand, and left without further word.

That night, I tucked Victor in and, in spite of myself, went down to the bar. What would you have done, Branly, after such a day, so rich in chaotic impressions? Is there anyone you have forgotten and would like to have back? Then think about the things I pondered during the hours following our meeting with “Heredia”: I am forgetting Lucie and Antonio, that is inevitable; soon they will be a vague memory recalled only with effort, the aid of a photograph, the prod of a sudden scent. On the other hand, Victor is here. I don’t have to remember him.

Why doesn’t Victor help me remember? I have asked him so often. I felt an overwhelming hatred for my living son.

That was the very question “Heredia” asked me that night. He was sitting near the bar at a table beneath the frosted-glass mirrors from the early years of the century, preserved there by an appreciation of the past rare in Monterrey. The large blades of the ceiling fans failed to ruffle the abundant white mane of this man with the fine features and graceless body, tonight wearing a yellow corduroy suit too heavy for the climate of Monterrey and a ridiculous celluloid collar, with not even a tie to cover flagrantly bared bone buttons, Why, he said, why not let Victor help me remember? Victor is capable of remembering everything. He is living; with the proper complement, Don Hugo, you could see all your theses fully realized: a living past, actual, irrevocable. Victor, and someone else; Victor, united with another. Together they will have that memory; they will be that past. Victor will have more life than his dead brother; he will remember Antonio, as if he were still alive. But he will also live his dead brother’s life; he will remember what Antonio knows because he is dead. What is needed? A perfect space, Don Hugo, an ancient space where my dead and yours can meet through the living young Victor.

“A new brother for Victor,” said “Heredia” in the Ancira bar. “That is what I am offering.”

He raised his glass, a Veracruz mint julep, in a silent toast. He waited for me to do the same.

“What’s on your mind, Don Hugo?” asked “Heredia,” his glass still held high.

“A few months ago, in a fit of rage, Victor broke an artifact we found at some ruins,” I replied despondently. “I was just thinking that what you are offering is to a degree what I wanted then, though I didn’t realize it until this minute. And do you know what that was? I wanted the halves of that object to be rejoined; I wanted their wholeness to become a part of art, of history, of the past, of culture, of anything you can name.”

“Does that mean you accept my pact?”

“I mean that, as an act of good faith on your part, I would accept the restoration of the object my son destroyed.”

“Would it be enough if you found half?”

I replied that it would. It would offer renewed hope that the object would be whole again. He said that Victor would find the lost half at Xochicalco; that would be the guarantee the other half would be found later, that the object would be restored.

“And what am I to do when my son finds half of what he destroyed?”

“From that moment on, everything will proceed in a manner I would not want to call fatalistic; no one likes to use that word. Let us say, in an orderly sequence of events, eh? One thing will follow another. You, Don Hugo, will understand what is happening; you will always make the correct choice, I am sure of that.”

He rambled on, telling me stories about his family, which had lived in different parts of the Antilles. I became increasingly confused, for there were glaring inconsistencies in his stories, none of the dates coincided, and, finally, I wondered if the man with the stubby fingers and pale eyes wasn’t simply selecting names and dates at random to fabricate the genealogy that best served his purpose. He mentioned a number of names of his family, and of persons I assumed were family friends. I heard, though I really couldn’t follow the thread, stories about a certain Francisco Luis and his two wives, a French merchant named Lange, and a mulatto nurse. I never understood whether this “Heredia” was the son of Francisco Luis’s first wife — a physiological impossibility, for that would mean I was talking with a man who was more than a hundred and sixty years old — or the second: even then, he would have been born sometime between 1850 and 1900, when Heredia’s second wife died — at what age I don’t know. Nevertheless, he insisted on referring to his father’s first wife as “Mother.”

“Did you know Mademoiselle Lange?” I dared ask.

“I spent nine months in her belly,” he smiled disagreeably, “aware of every sip that passed the dear lady’s lips.”

“Where were you born? Where were you christened?” I asked in a neutral voice.

“That’s of no importance,” he said defensively.

“But it is,” I persisted, in a conversational tone. “How were you christened?”

At that moment, Branly, “Heredia” shed all semblance of fraud or grotesqueness. He stared at me with a terrible expression, which I had the sense to recognize as a strange kind of sorrow, totally alien to me. Why alien? I answered my own question. I have lived life. My only regrets are that at times I made the wrong choices; I celebrate the times I chose well; I lament the things that are lost to me, especially my dead wife and son; I can laugh a little at my setbacks, at the passing years themselves; I lament, celebrate, and laugh at my own death, which I accept because I have always known it could not be avoided, and because I have been convinced that to have lived a little, like Toño, or a lot, as I have — don’t you agree, Branly, you who have lived so long and so well? — death is a small price to pay. I thought about my dead wife, our nights together, her words of love.

No. “Heredia” had known none of this, and because I knew what my life had been, I knew that the life of my companion that night in the bar of the Hotel Ancira was defined by the absence of these things. That’s why I think I understood his next words, spoken with disturbing overtones of self-pity shocking in a man in his position and with his intentions.

“Have I been forgotten? You tell me, Don Hugo. Does anyone remember me?”

I didn’t know how to respond to such obvious self-commiseration. “Heredia” himself must have realized he was making a fool of himself, for he added: “Tant pis, mon ami; so much the worse for the person who forgets. I will see to it that I’m remembered.”

He sucked noisily at the dregs of his rum-and-mint drink, and asked me to lead him to the room where Victor was sleeping. We went up, but as I unlocked the door, this heavily built man pushed past me and slammed the door in my face, and when I began to beat on the door and ring the bell with indignation, I heard “Heredia” ’s voice through the chinks of the polished mahogany door.

“Don’t interrupt me, Don Hugo. Come back in half an hour. I’ll be finished by then. Everything depends on your leaving me alone. Please. Do it for your son. And never tell anyone what happened between us. Do it for your son.”

I stopped pounding at the door, and stepped back. But I did not abandon my vigil in the hotel corridor. I counted the minutes on my watch. I waited five minutes past the thirty minutes. Again I knocked at the door, calling to “Heredia” to come out, as he had promised. The door opened at my touch. I went in and found my son asleep. He was alone. I never saw “Heredia” again.

You know the rest of the story, Branly. I told you that in the Ancira bar that night “Heredia” mentioned names of his family and people connected with his family. The names meant nothing to me at the time. But I was startled when Jean introduced you that day in Xochicalco. Your name rang a bell; “Heredia” had spoken of you. I swear I’ve tried to remember in what context; my impressions are as vague as “Heredia” ’s references, Branly: a house of ill repute frequented by the French army in Mexico; a ravine; a woman in a shallow grave; a park in Paris; a window; a boy. Does all this mean anything to you? I haven’t been able to make any sense of it.

Besides, I prefer to think of you in terms of the aura of mystery that surrounded you the day you entered my life and precipitated the chain of events. That was the day Victor found half the artifact. I associate you above all with that moment. Something created to last, a piece of art intended for something other than commerce or the bedazzlement of the senses or the celebration of the transient, an object emblematic of that presence of the past that has given meaning to my life, was about to be restored to its pristine beauty and unity. Amends were about to be made — at great cost, but amends, nonetheless — for an angry, stupid, barbaric, capricious act of destruction.

I don’t know, Branly, what you may have forgotten about yourself, about your past, your family line — obviously, considerably better documented than our own. With better reason, what have we Heredias forgotten? Now I spend entire nights trying to evoke things I no longer know: a desired violation, all the transgressions of the flesh, the ambition, money, power, and caste that shaped and kneaded the lives of people like the Heredias are forgotten, yes, perhaps because we couldn’t live with the constant consciousness of the lives we have sown, the fortunes we have usurped, the misery on which those of us who are anything in the New World have built our being. Lucie will be proved right. A black utopia devoured by a bloody epic; you see what has happened to that dream of a rediscovered Eden, and its noble savage.

In contrast, an object is never cruel, Branly, it has no passions, it harms no one; rather, it gives testimony to permanence, glimmering with the twin lights of a yesterday and a today indistinguishable in art.

“Who was just here, who were you talking to?” I asked, brutally shaking my son awake in our bedroom in the Hotel Ancira.

“André,” my son replied. “André…”

I don’t care about his name. He was a child with us, and will grow old with us. I hope that, thanks to me, my son will enjoy whatever time he has with that boy he so fervently desired to see, or be, or have, I don’t know which verb to use, as I, thanks to the boy, will enjoy my time with Lucie and Antonio.

And if I have understood correctly, one day the four of us will be together, because somehow Victor will be with us again. Then we can all be partners in mourning.

But everything depends on your understanding the words. You had a past, but you do not remember it. Try to recapture it in the little time you have left, or you will lose your future.

This is the obligation shared by all of us who were actors in this story. I pass it on to you, Branly, hoping you will accept it as proof of my gratitude. It is because I am grateful that I have told you everything I know — no more, no less. I know I am exposing myself to a terrible fate if you betray me by repeating what I have told you. But, between gentlemen, that question doesn’t arise.

You see, Branly, you and I are bound together by a shared rejection of the death of the past, the present of civilizations. “Heredia” and I were bound by the Pragmatic Sanction, if I may call it that, of the same attitude: our will to serve the dead, so that someday the living will serve us. Through me as intermediary, you and that demon were finally allied in a common goal: the recovery of an angel.