Distant Relations

22

Several days later I visited the Clos des Renards. It was a scene of great activity, a tumult of trucks and laborers. Entering through the great gate, I approached the house along the avenue of oaks and chestnuts. The dead leaves had been swept away. The beautiful grove of birches is still standing. But, inside, the house is being completely renovated. Ornamentation, walls, paint, wax, plaster, ebony fall before my astonished eyes: a huge pile of smoldering skins lies at the end of the terrace of the lions, and carpenters are fitting new frames on doors and windows.

I hear a peculiar sound and I peer through one of the newly refurbished windows. A crew of women dressed in full skirts and heavy denim blouses, their heads wrapped in coarse kerchiefs that hide their hair, are scraping down the floors and walls of the house. They don’t speak; they don’t look at me.

Though the inscription above the door, A.D. 1870, remains untouched, I notice that workmen are attacking the French garden, digging a large pit exactly at its center. Of course. This will be the long-missing pool. Because of the excavation, one can no longer see — if in fact it ever actually existed — the sulphurous, burnt gash Branly said he saw from his bedroom window and, barefoot, walked through that last time the gift of simultaneity was granted him by dream, time, and the physical space of the Clos des Renards.

I ask the workmen the owner’s name; no one knows anything. I feel frustrated. We leave behind that house being stripped of its curses as in medieval times dwellings were purified of the plague.

I return to Paris that afternoon, after a leisurely drive through Enghien, Montmorency, Andilly, Margency, and other places where I have friends and memories. Corot’s autumn has appeared, crowned with silvery mist. I decide to visit my friend Branly, who is suffering from an acute bronchial infection.

“You must get well quickly,” I tell him jokingly. “I don’t want to be the only person who knows the story of the Heredias.”

He looks at me with doleful eyes, and says I mustn’t worry, that memory is a faithless creature and nothing is more easily forgotten than a dead man.

“If you only knew how difficult it is for me to remember the faces of my first wives. Nothing closer in life. Nothing more distant in death.”

“Don’t you have photographs of them?”

A wave of his hand tells me that anything that cannot be remembered spontaneously deserves to be entombed in oblivion.

“On the other hand, how well I remember Félicité, my nurse when I went to my grandfather’s castle for vacations. I remember her. She told me that my grandfather, too, was a military man, first during the July Monarchy, and then during the Second Empire. But he never told me any of this, so I am not sure.”

“Perhaps that’s what Hugo Heredia feared,” I dared suggest.

“What?”

“That he would forget his wife and son in the same way.”

Branly turned to look at me with the concentrated but impotent fury of the elderly, more terrible than a young man’s rage because the absence of physical menace suggests something much worse.

“Have you had news of him?” he asks, his voice congested.

“No,” I reply with surprise. “Should I have?”

“He told me that his life depended on my silence. But I broke that silence; I told you everything. My only hope is that Hugo Heredia is dead.”

Branly speaks these words with some passion; he is overcome by a fit of coughing. As he composes himself, I mention the beauty of the November afternoon, a little cool, but radiant, like the afternoons he always loved on the Île de France when as a child he paused on the bridge over the river and experienced that miraculous moment that disperses the phenomena of the day, rain or fog, scorching heat or snow, to reveal the luminous essence of this favored city.

“Don’t change the subject,” Branly scolds me, his handkerchief in his hand. “The French Heredia told Hugo not to tell anything, because Victor’s life depended on it. But he did, Hugo told me the story.”

“And you told me, Branly. Actually, I wasn’t changing the subject. One morning in this very house, Victor invited you to join him in a game, and you nearly missed the opportunity.”

“That is true. Stupidly. Because of my passion for the order and reason that wear the solemn mask of maturity and veil one’s fear that one may recover one’s lost imagination.”

As I open wide the tall beveled windows of Branly’s bedchamber overlooking the garden with the solitary sea pine, I tell him that I visited the Clos des Renards that morning.

“I went to your bedroom, my friend. The clothes you were wearing the night of the accident were still there, tossed into a corner. What did Etienne carry away the morning he and your Spanish servants came for you? What did Etienne have in his small black suitcase?”

Branly looked at me with terror. His gaze was lost in the distance, as were his thoughts, floundering in a pool of clear water.

“She asked me to dream of her. She said we would never grow old as long as I remember her and she remembers me.”

I feel a sudden sense of remorse. I walk toward the windows to close them, but Branly stops me with a movement of his hand, saying no, I mustn’t worry.

His voice is choked, but he manages to say: “You see: I always believed that even when I found her I would continue to look for her, to wait patiently for her to reveal her true face to me. I did it for the boy, I swear it. It was through him that I was able to remember my love. I could have died without remembering her. I am eighty-three years old. Do you realize? I came very close to forgetting her forever. I wanted to repay him. Perhaps he, too, thanks to me, will remember the person he forgot. Perhaps it was not in vain.”

“I hope to God you were not mistaken.”

“We shall soon know, my friend. What do you think?”

I look at the sadly illuminated figure of Branly sitting listlessly in his threadbare brocade chair, wrapped in an ancient plush bathrobe, a man without descendants. I am seized by compassion, but refuse to be governed by it; I remember what his heritage is: the Heredias, Mexico, Venezuela, the story of which he is gladly divesting himself to give to me — who do not want it.

Even so, a kind of contrary compulsion, irreversible and irresistible, forces me to insist that my old friend tell me everything, as if exhausting all the possibilities of the narrative might mean the end of this story I never wanted to hear, and the resulting release from the responsibility of telling it to someone else. This is the only explanation I can offer for my next incredible questions.

“Isn’t there anything more, Branly? Are you sure you aren’t forgetting something? I must know everything before…”

As my elderly friend hears these words his eyes clear. He looks at me with a profound, almost mordant irony worthy, I say to myself, of his greatest moments of pleasure, intuition, presence, and power. This is how I imagine him looking that last time at Hugo Heredia, through the dusk of a solitary, sacred barranca where the gods of the New World lie slumbering.

“Before I die? Ah, my friend. Not quite yet. For a number of reasons.”

He sighs; he drums his fingers on the shabby brocade chair arm. I realize now that my questions were counter to my best interests: as the gods will one day rise from the rotting mangrove thickets where long ago they were murdered, so my questions sprang from my irrational desire to know. I must know everything before Branly dies and can no longer tell me, cannot bequeath me his story, condemning me to wander like a blind beggar pleading for the few verbal coins I must have to finish the story I inherited. If he died before I knew the conclusion, I would never be free. I had to know everything before I could transmit the story in its totality to another. But Branly was not aware of the chaos of my thoughts; he was enumerating the reasons he would live a while longer.

“No, I shall not die as long as I remember her and she remembers me. That is the first reason. The second, and more important, is that my death will not be borne on tonight’s wind; I sense the warmth of a St. Martin’s summer. Autumn will be detained a little longer, my friend. You remember that St. Martin was sainted because of his generosity. Did he not share his cloak with a beggar?”

Now he stares at me with disquieting discernment.

“Tomorrow is November 11th, Fuentes. Your birthday. You see, I am not yet senile, I remember the birth dates, the dates of the deaths of my friends. No, you must not worry. You and I are living but one of the infinite possibilities of a life and of a story. You are afraid to be the narrator of this novel about the Heredias because you fear the vile demon who may take revenge against the last man to know the story. But you are forgetting something I have tried to tell you more than once. Every novel is in a way incomplete, but, as well, contiguous with another story. Take your own life. In 1945, Fuentes, you decided to live in Buenos Aires, near Montevideo; you did not return to your native Mexico; you became a citizen of the River Plate region, and then in 1955 you came to live in France. You became less of a River Plate man, and more French than anything else. Isn’t that so?”

I said yes, he knew that as well as I, though at times I questioned the degree of my assimilation into the French world. He touched my hand with affection.

“Imagine; what would have happened if you had returned to Mexico after the war and put down roots in the land of your parents? Imagine; you publish your first book of stories when you are twenty-five, your first novel four years later. You write about Mexico, about Mexicans, the wounds of a body, the persistence of a few dreams, the masks of progress. You remain forever identified with that country and its people.”

“But it was not like that, Branly.” I spoke uncertainly. “I don’t know whether for good or ill, but I am not that person.”

With a strange smile, he asks me to pour him a drink from the bottle of Château d’Yquem beside his bed. Shouldn’t he, I ask, go back to bed? Yes, he will; later, when he decides it is time. Would I like a glass of that late wine, the fruit of the autumn grapes?

I join him in a toast.

“To your other life, Fuentes, to your contiguous life. Think who you might have been, and celebrate with me your birthday and the coming St. Martin’s summer days with a wine that postpones death and offers us a second vintage. St. Martin has again divided his cloak to shelter us from the winter. Think how the same thing happens with every novel. There is a second, a contiguous, parallel, invisible narration for every work we think unique. Who has written the novel about the Heredias? Hugo Heredia amid the ruins of Xochicalco, or the boorish owner of the Clos des Renards? I, who have told you the story? You, who someday will tell what I have told you? Or someone else, someone unknown? Here is another possibility: the novel was already written. It is an unpublished ghost story; it lies in a coffer buried under a garden urn, or under loose bricks at the bottom of a dumbwaiter shaft. Its author, need I say it? is Alexandre Dumas. Have no fear, my friend. I know how to survive terror.”

I press his hand. As I leave, he asks me to tell the housekeeper that she can go to bed, he will not be needing her. He wants to sleep late. But I really have no desire to speak with the woman whose eyes shine with the glimmer of unshed tears.

Yet, as I walk along the hallway leading from Branly’s bedchamber to the salon, I notice an open door that had been closed when I came to visit my friend this St. Martin’s eve.

As I left Branly in his bedroom, I had been thinking of the luminous, warm city, the renewed summer he had promised for the following day. As I pass the open door, I feel attracted as if by the light in my imagination, light that disperses the phenomena of the day, rain or fog, scorching heat or snow. I turn, curious about the source of the light, and watch as one tiny flame after another begins to flicker in the candelabra I had earlier, with surprise and dismay, noticed were missing from the salon.

I can dimly discern a pale hand in the shadows, moving from candle to candle. I remember how once young Victor in broad daylight, but behind drawn drapes, had lighted these same candelabra in this same house, but now, to my sudden awe, the room is transformed, transported to a different space, its axis equivocal, its symmetry questionable.

I enter the room. In vain I try to penetrate the ecclesiastic gloom enveloping the figure lighting the candles. Dazed, I retreat to the farthest corner, as far as possible from the candelabra with their bronze ram’s-head bases, the garlands of blindfolded girls whose bodies serve as candle holders, the bronze serpents whose fangs fasten on glass shades, the melted wax on the argentine backs of a pack of hunting hounds.

The dolorous hands light the last candle. The room is filled with light; a woman kneels before the table by her leather-canopied bed. On the table is the object I had always before seen in the salon, the clock suspended in an arch of gilded bronze, with the figure of a seated woman playing an ornate piano with griffin legs, in a sumptuous mounting of motionless draperies and doors. On the same bedside table is the sepia photograph of Branly’s father.

The woman is weeping, still on her knees, her hands covering her face.

In this instant, all the defenses of humor, innocence, and rationality I have placed between myself and Branly’s narrative fall away. It is of little consequence that the woman is dressed in black rather than the high-waisted, décolleté white ball gown with the long stole. Can we call intuition our sudden nakedness beneath the sun of a North African desert or the torrential downpour of an equatorial jungle that, as it strips us of the umbrella of logic we carry through well-lighted streets as we boldly enter shops, routinely step off buses, confidently sign checks, forces us to accept the inevitability of what confronts us? Intuition? Or awareness of something that never happened to us which yet encompasses a truth we did not even want to suspect, much less admit into the orderly compartments of good Socratic reason: someone has lived constantly alongside us, always, not just from the moment of birth, but always, a being fused to our life as the waters of the sea are with the sea. And to our death as our breath is with the air we breathe. During our lifetime, this being accompanies us with never a sign of its own life, as if less than the shadow, a tiptoeing murmur, the sudden, almost inaudible whisper of ancient taffeta against the knob of a half-open door, though this something — I know it in my mind as I pry away the strong hands that not only hide but disfigure the woman’s face — lives, parallel to our own, a completely normal life, taking meals at regular hours, counting its possessions, casting glances we never see, yet in it jealousy and tenderness battle to exhaustion in a neighboring nonpresence: contiguous, bodies and their phantoms; contiguous, the narration and its specter.

“Lucie,” I say. “Lucie, rest now. Leave him in peace. He has helped you. He did the best he could to return your son to you. Be grateful to him for that; he is a good man.”

The wife of Hugo Heredia is possessed of an awesome force, a steel mesh woven more of will than of true strength, and I can do nothing but prevent an ever greater calamity. I fear she will claw at her face until it dissolves beneath tears indistinguishable from blood. But I fear even more that the hypotheses born of the intuition that stripped away my defenses as it plunged me suddenly into the horror of an eternal oblivion belonging to another woman like this one, another Lucie, my own, a woman unknown to me who like Branly’s phantom was constantly by my side, would obliterate my friend’s companion before I could see her face. I knew that the key to her secret was on her face and not in all my hypotheses — which were nothing but unanswered questions. Does everyone have an invisible phantom that accompanies him throughout his lifetime? Must we die before our phantom becomes incarnate? Then who is with us in death, the phantom of life, the only being that truly remembers us? What is that phantom’s name? Is this phantom somehow different from what is simultaneously phantom and death during our lifetime: youth?

The moment I realize that these enigmas, if not their solutions, are written on Lucie’s hidden face, I know that I have missed my opportunity to know this woman; I can know her only by looking at the face of my friend the Comte de Branly, not at her. If anywhere there was to be found the reality of the eternally tentative woman who floated along the magical paths of the Pare Monceau, it is in the waxen face, the pale hands, the intelligent eyes of the man who will be visited by the woman’s spectral presence only if he does not know she is dead. Branly. Is it only through him that all the manifestations of the wife of Hugo Heredia exist? the sweetheart in the park of my friend’s childhood, the French Mamasel, the girl who a hundred eighty years ago was seen by Branly’s specter in the same park at the same hour in the same light?

As soon as I think I have resolved one enigma, the solution itself creates a new mystery. Any explanation that Lucie could offer me is obstinately withheld by the Heredias. Finally, I understand only one thing, that from behind the beveled windows of a house on the Avenue Vélasquez one presence has watched over everything, known everything, eternal, persevering, cruel in its pathetic will to bring it all back to life.

These thoughts flash through my mind as I struggle to move the hands away from the face of the woman who perhaps at that very instant, spontaneously, freely, with light-hearted yet sinister fatalism, was lowering her hands from her face in the abandoned painting in the attic of the Clos des Renards. I swear that before I forcibly revealed that face I reproached myself for what I was doing. I told myself that my conclusions were too facile, too capricious, born of my need to tie up loose ends, to conform with the laws of symmetry, but that in truth—in truth—I did not have, I would never have, the right or power to interpret or vary the facts, to in any way intrude in the labyrinths of this story so imperiously indifferent to my own.

I tear Lucie’s hands from her face. I cannot contain a scream of anguish. As I look upon that gaze of vertiginous infinity, I understand what Branly saw at the bottom of the dumbwaiter shaft at the Clos des Renards in the whirlwind of dead leaves and tiny daggers of ice; I know at last why we sell our souls in the pact we make with the devil not to be alone in death.

It was not in vain that Branly called on certain words to conjure up the true subject of his song: harsh sighs, strange tongues, appalling gibberish, tones of rage, and fields of ashen misery beneath a sky barren of stars.

This is Lucie’s face.

The woman, too, screams as I reveal her face. Her first cry is one of fear; the second, of pain.

This is not a hypothesis: Lucie will live the moment my friend Branly dies. The trembling face I see before me is that of a beast crouched in ambush, lupine, rabid to devour the opportunity offered by death. It is not, this trembling face on which I gaze, that of a living woman. It is the mortal remains of a phantom in the unspeakable transit between yesterday’s body and tomorrow’s specter. I feel I must return to Branly’s bedchamber, ask whether he knows that when he dies he will be, as until now she has been, a phantom. But even though she may cease to be a corpse, she will never be more than a specter.

My Lucie says, in a fetid voice as dank as fungus: You are growing old, Carlos. You do not belong here; you will never again belong there. Do you know your phantom? It will take your place at the moment of your death, and you will be the phantom of what in your life was your specter. You must abandon hope. You have not been able to kill it, however much you have tried. You did not leave it behind you in Mexico, or in Buenos Aires, as you thought you had when you were young.

The empty eye sockets, fountains of blood, mesmerize me with a blend of nausea and agonized fascination. “I can see it. It is standing patiently on the threshold of this bedroom. Go with it. Leave us alone. Do not come back.”

It is an effort now to free myself from that dankness, from that kneeling woman whose face I could not describe without vertigo. I turn my back to the mother of Victor and Antonio. I could swear that she is clinging to my arm at the same time she is banishing me from her room. But this is merely an illusion, a new illusion, my own. She has no awareness of distance in the way we understand it. Her hand touches my arm, but I know that to her my body is not my body. Her presence does not touch me, it touches my phantom, the one that from this moment, the woman has just told me, waits beside the door of the room illuminated in the flickering of funereal silver.

She remains on her knees, weeping. Again she covers her face with her hands. She is singing quietly, in a quavering voice: “It is long I have loved you, I shall never forget you.” Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.