Distant Relations

5

The search for Victor Heredia, Branly is telling me, was not unlike an exhausting vigil before a mirror. He asked me to imagine such a vigil, yes, he says, as he seeks my reflection in the window closed to the bustle of the Place de la Concorde, simply imagine biding one’s time before a vacant mirror, waiting for it to take on life, to regain its lost image.

“Do you mean,” I ventured, “that, besides having the same name, the Victor Heredia of Enghien-les-Bains was a physical double of the boy?”

My friend shook his shiny bald head emphatically; his brow was unusually severe in refutation. That was not what he meant to imply, not at all. No, he meant precisely what he had said, keeping a vigil before a mirror, laying siege to it, a long and unremitting siege, until it was forced to reveal its image — not the reflection of the person looking in the mirror, did I understand? No, the mirror’s own image, exactly so, its own hidden, illusive, reluctant, one might almost say coquettish, image.

For the second time, no one had responded when he knocked on the French doors at the end of the terrace of lions. It was Wednesday, racing day. Branly and Victor lunched at the casino, watching the passing throngs of elderly men and women who come every week to squander their pensions at the Enghien racetrack, and then, not content with losing on the horses, insist on losing at roulette. Their shuffling gait, their shiny dark-blue suits, their faded straw bonnets, belie — except in an occasional case of exemplary avarice — the success of such pursuits. My friend wondered whether our evasive Victor Heredia might not be found among the dispirited gamblers. Branly, you see, was still convinced that the person who shared the young Mexican’s name was a man of advanced years. He says he had made that judgment when he heard the voice over the telephone. He admits that he rejected, a priori, the idea that the bearer of young Victor’s name could be a physical double. At least, he said, he could find comfort in the fact that he had sensed what he was now trying to communicate to me, the feeling that he was keeping watch before a mirror, hoping it would dare incarnate the figure hiding within. At least, he says, he had that intuition.

“You see, I always believed that even if I found him I would need to continue searching, to wait patiently until he revealed his true face. I did it for the lad, I assure you.”

As dusk approached, the old man and the boy, who had met purely by chance, who under normal circumstances would never have met, because the man should have died before he met the youth, and the boy might easily have been born after the man’s death, strolled together to the lake at Enghien. They enjoyed the promenade and decided that this time they would walk to the Clos des Renards. Branly told Etienne to have a cup of coffee and in a half hour to pick them up at the entrance to the estate. As they walked, Victor kept lagging behind, inspecting and investigating and skipping in the childlike way that had caught Branly’s attention in Cuernavaca. My friend, who walks straight as a ramrod in spite of his wounded leg, now hung his head in thought, wondering whether it was possible that the half-glimpsed figure in the second-story window was the Victor Heredia they were searching for. But as often as he considered this possibility, he rejected it. My friend had no way of knowing if the voice he had heard over the telephone was actually that of the French Victor Heredia. As he walked ahead of Victor, erect, occasionally resting his weight on his cane, he tried to reconstruct the telephone conversation. When he had asked for Heredia, the voice had countered with the question: Who wants him? And when he explained that he had looked up his name in the directory, the man was at first surprised, then insulting; he had never conceded that his name was Victor Heredia.

My friend tells me now, gazing at the goblet of sauterne scarcely less pale than the hand holding it, that as he walked along, followed by young Victor Heredia, and breathing the gasoline fumes, the train smoke, and the first mists from September woods decaying with their fruitless harvests, he wondered whether that voice could be related to the white sail-like silhouette that had passed so swiftly across the window of the Clos des Renards, whether the voice and the image, related or not, might belong to the person called Victor Heredia, or whether they merely served him, looked after him, taught him, tended him, recalled or awaited him. If the voice and the figure were not Victor Heredia’s, my friend insists this afternoon, then Victor Heredia was cared for by a servant, looked after by a guardian, taught by a tutor, tended by a doctor, recalled by a kinsman, or awaited by a lover.

They were approaching the wall surrounding the estate of the Clos des Renards; my friend admits that he was weaving a mystery, and that doing so amused him. He stopped to wait for Victor, who was lagging behind, and saw him standing beside the high moss-covered wall, his head against the mustard-colored stone. Dusk was falling quickly now; Branly called Victor, beckoning to him; the boy left the wall and came running. He had a snail in his hands, which he showed to my friend. Heads together, absorbed in the mollusk, they walked toward the arch that marked the entrance to the woods with its avenue of chestnuts, oaks, and dry leaves that had not fallen from any of the surrounding trees. Branly started. Beneath leaden eyelids, his gaze shifted from the tiny snail to the lane that led into the estate, and he recognized what had been nagging at his mind, what until this instant had been suspended in mid-air, floating like the uncertain mist at the end of the lane over the house without a pool. This was the second revelation of this crepuscular hour: how strange that a house of this size and pretension had no mirror of water, no pond or fountain.

Etienne abruptly braked the car near the entrance to the private avenue and blew the horn; he explained that it was rapidly growing dark and he was worried about the count’s health. Besides, for the first time, the chauffeur kept repeating, he had noticed a slight chill in the air. He was standing on the pavement beside the car, facing Branly and Victor and deferentially holding the door, waiting for his gentleman and the boy to climb into the automobile, where he had arranged lap robes for them. My friend says he is still trying to follow Victor’s quick, nervous movements: the boy’s hesitation, barely perceptible but real as a bolt of lightning, as he tried to decide whether to run down the avenue covered with dead leaves or climb into the car or do what he did — summing up his options in a kind of terrible desperation, slamming the door of the Citroën on the chauffeur’s hand. Etienne himself, stifling a scream of pain, managed to open the door as Branly cast aside his cane to grasp the servant’s arm. Branly hesitated, as Victor had just done. Should he help Etienne or stop Victor, now running toward the avenue of dry leaves beneath the leafy trees.

Actually, he says, he was saved the necessity of a choice when a figure hurrying toward them bumped into the boy and interrupted his flight. The man grasped Victor firmly by the shoulders and led him back to the scene of the accident, inquiring what had happened. At that moment, Branly had no way of knowing whether the man was a casual passerby or had come from the avenue leading to the Clos des Renards. The new arrival immediately dispelled any doubt. “Please. Come along to my house, I can help your man there.”

Branly responded that Etienne couldn’t manage the distance from the road to the house, and he invited the obliging stranger to get into the car with them. He cast a quizzical glance at Victor and climbed in behind the wheel. He started the Citroën and turned into the avenue of the woods. A hunched-over Etienne sat beside him, moaning between clenched teeth, wrapping a handkerchief around his bleeding hand. Victor and the stranger sat in the back seat, and from time to time my friend stole a glance in the rearview mirror through flashes of a sun setting at the very hour of the Île de France that he and I were now awaiting in the heart of Paris. On that day, it arrived just as he was driving the injured Etienne and glancing into the rearview mirror to observe a man wearing a wool-tweed hat whose brim did not obscure pale eyes above a singularly straight nose with no noticeable bridge and a thin-lipped mouth as straight as the nose — the mouth partly hidden behind the turned-up lapels of an overcoat, like the hat, of greenish Scottish wool.

As their glances met in the mirror, the stranger smiled and said, “Forgive me. My name is Victor Heredia. I deeply regret this accident at the very doors of my home. We will do whatever we can to help your chauffeur, Monsieur…?”

“Branly,” my friend said dryly.

Today he acknowledges an emotion that was either cowardice or prudence, or pure and simple fear, neither cowardly nor prudent: he did not introduce Victor Heredia to Victor Heredia.

Neither could he see in the mirror the boy’s reaction when the man, whose age my friend still could not determine, as he could not absolutely identify his voice as the voice on the telephone, introduced himself. My friend stopped the car at the terrace. The French Heredia quickly got out, and between them they helped Etienne up the steps of the terrace and to the French doors. Heredia softly pushed them open and the three stepped into a cavern of dark wood marked by a strong smell of leather, apparently the foyer of the residence.

The owner, still in hat and overcoat, hurried up the stairs while Branly examined Etienne’s injured hand. It was only after the master of the house had returned, removed his hat to reveal a white mane of hair, and begun amateurishly to swab the chauffeur’s hand with iodine and to apply a simple bandage, that my friend realized that his host, although possessing a youngish face, was not young. And it was only after Heredia said they had better call an ambulance, and went to the telephone to make the call, that my friend looked about for the other Victor Heredia, and glancing through the French doors, spied the boy on the terrace, standing with legs wide apart, one arm akimbo, the other resting on the back of the crouching stone lion, the boy as motionless as a second statue, and, like a statue’s, his gaze lost in the far distance.

My friend tried to follow the direction of that gaze. Heredia was telephoning for the ambulance; Etienne was gritting his teeth, cradling the injured, iodine-swabbed, bandaged hand. Branly moved toward the glass panes to observe the motionless boy, who was staring at the grove of birches suspended between the soothing mist of dream and the fading light of dusk that outlined the boy’s slim whiteness seemingly born of the germinal mist. The sleek silvery trunks were the perfect recapitulation of the mist and the light of the setting sun — the sun, satisfied; the mist, indecisive. At that hour the woods were a misty curtain of light, wispy as the tree trunks, white as chiffon, against which one could barely see — interrupting the vertical symmetry of the trunks and as vague as the horizontal mist that veiled it and the oblique light that revealed it — the silhouette of a motionless figure observed by the motionless boy observed by my motionless friend from behind the half-opened French doors.

The spell was broken. The figure in the woods moved toward the house, whistling. The Mexican youth dropped his arm and then covered his face with both hands, as if trying to hide it. His back was turned to Branly, but my friend clearly recognized that gesture, as he heard on the lips of the figure moving toward them from the woods the tune of the timeless madrigal of the clear fountain and the beautiful waters.