Distant Relations

6

The French Heredia said they must take Etienne to the hospital on the Boulevard d’Ormesson; he was afraid the fingers were broken. That wasn’t the greatest thing that could happen to a chauffeur, he added. As Branly heard him say this, he avoided the eyes of the young Mexican, who at that moment was entering the house for the first time. My friend did not want to think the French Heredia was reprimanding the youth who bore his name; even less did he want the boy to think he was a partner in what was at the very least a premature accusation.

Similarly incapable of expressing overt disapproval, however, Branly glanced at his new host, and then said quietly: “Don’t worry, Etienne. It isn’t anything that won’t respond to treatment.”

“I suggest that you follow us in your car,” said Heredia.

Branly again checked the irritation provoked by such freely offered advice. There was a peremptory tone in the Frenchman’s voice, as if in counseling Branly to follow he were ironically acknowledging in the master a concern for his servant that he, Heredia, would never be so weak as to feel, certainly not to reveal. But the behavior my friend was beginning to perceive, as evidence of a common upbringing, was not so much worthy of disapproval as something to be overlooked; it seemed, even before such rationalization, undeserving of any comment. His attention was absorbed by a more serious reality. The young Heredia, like a character in a silent movie, had paused as he crossed the threshold, enveloped in silence, framed in a shimmering light that changed him into a trembling flame. If his eyes were not closed, they were nearly so. He was breathing deeply, and seemed tense, but content. It was the contentment that impressed Branly.

As the boy breathed in that aroma of leather pervading the entrance to the manor house, his breathing became more and more agitated. My friend felt that he could take the boy’s agitation as the delayed reaction to the terrible act he had committed against the chauffeur, and he was about to point this out to the master of the Clos des Renards as courteous proof of the boy’s repentance, but something stopped him, something intimately linked to his growing perceptions about the man with Victor’s name. He shook his head, he tells me, with the certainty that the less one knew about what was happening, the better. Once more, the same feeling prevented him from introducing the two Heredias. With any luck, Branly told himself, the boy’s natural curiosity, particularly in view of recent events, would be satisfied simply with seeing Heredia. After all, it was Victor’s actions that had shifted attention from names, however closely related, to the injured chauffeur, whom the French Heredia, ignoring the Mexican youth’s presence, was urging they take to a hospital. He would go with Etienne in the ambulance, the Frenchman repeated, adding on second thought that he could look after the chauffeur himself and the others could drive back to Paris. He would inform them in the morning of the poor fellow’s condition.

“Not at all. Etienne is my employee, and any responsibility for looking after him is mine,” said my friend, following a brief pause which at the time seemed natural to him but which in retrospect he considered deceitful. He still had not fathomed the French Heredia’s intentions, and he had stumbled over an obstacle lying in the path of his inherent sense of propriety: the French Victor Heredia talked like a tradesman; his speech was in marked contrast to the nobility of his classic features, a contrast greater even than the physical contrast between the handsome leonine head and the squat body with its sturdy, squarish torso and the common, stubby-fingered hands.

As if to dispel any doubt about the extent of the responsibilities he was prepared to assume, my friend said he would accompany Etienne in the ambulance. But Heredia insisted. He knew the doctors on duty and that would facilitate the process. Branly did not want to tell anyone what he now admits to me, that he was trying to avoid having to drive at night on the always dangerous highways that by dawn are like battlefields, no less horrible for their repetitiousness; he is blinded by the aggressive headlights of drivers who view themselves as combatants in a modern joust. Visions of overturned trucks, little 2CV’s flattened like the tin from which they are assembled, stretchers, ambulance sirens, and the flashing lights of patrol cars in the bloody gray dawn of the highways were suddenly fused into the single ululating tone of the ambulance coming to a stop behind the Citroën parked beside the terrace of the lions.

There was no time, Branly tells me, for discussion; it was as if everything had been planned, choreographed like a ballet. The boy would be all right, Heredia said. His own son would be arriving soon and the boys could keep each other company until the men returned from taking the unfortunate Etienne to the hospital.

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Heredia. “I insist on it. You must spend the night here with my son and me. Tomorrow, M. Branly, you can drop by the hospital to see how this fellow is getting along; believe me, it’s no bother; I’m a very late riser. You can just make yourself at home, my son André will look after you. Don’t worry, the larder is well stocked, my friend; this isn’t your common Spanish inn, eh?”

As they helped Etienne into the ambulance, he said: “I wouldn’t want M. le Comte to put himself out on my account.”

“Don’t worry, Etienne,” said Branly. “I repeat, everything will be all right.”

Branly and Heredia followed the ambulance, my friend driving the Citroën very gingerly, and during the brief ride to the hospital he had an opportunity to clarify the reason for their visit and to explain the coincidence of the names. The Frenchman laughed, and begged my friend to forgive him for the language he had used over the phone. He hadn’t known that such a distinguished person, a count no less, was calling; he’d thought it was some clown, it was almost an everyday thing these days to get that kind of call at any hour of the night or day, and when he’d answered that particular call — that is, the Count’s — he was still half asleep. He’d already told him he slept late. Would M. le Comte de Branly forgive him? He wanted to apologize for that, too. He hadn’t known he was a count or he would have used “de,” de Branly.

Branly refrained from saying that he hadn’t used it himself, but the irrepressible Heredia had already launched into a tale about a Cuban family that had emigrated to Haiti during the uprising against the Spanish at the end of the century, first assimilated into the French language in the heat- and salt-pocked marble salons of Port-au-Prince, and then, become rich in imports and exports, absorbed into the France of the First World War, riding the crest of a savory and aromatic mountain of bananas, tobacco, rum, and vanilla. Relatives of the poet? What poet? And of course, he concluded with an ostentatious air of ennui, they had forbidden the use of Spanish, which for them carried only memories of restlessness, barbarism, and revolution.

“French is like my garden, elegant,” said Heredia. “Spanish is like my woods, indomitable.”

My friend can’t remember his response to the French Heredia; it doesn’t matter. Branly, who instinctively is courteous and hospitable to everyone, found something insufferable in the tone of this man with the pale eyes, straight nose, and white mane of hair. Heredia made a display of being courteous and hospitable, but this was precisely what bothered my friend. He suspected that Heredia’s affability was a maneuver masking some overweening sense of physical or moral supremacy not immediately apparent to Branly but which Heredia hoped to minimize by lavishing attention on his guest. My friend was particularly repelled by the obsequious and at the same time ironic humility typical of the bourgeois parvenu who, terrified at the possibility of again becoming a servant, attempts to subjugate those persons he fears and admires.

My friend knows the world well enough to be able to identify those times when another person feels a superiority he does not want to show, but by that very fact, and by acting more than usually cordial, calls attention to what he wants to hide. He says he was on the verge of letting Heredia know by his actions that the opposite was more accurate, but the contrast between a French family of ancient lineage and a colonial transplant was so obvious that Branly felt embarrassed even for having considered snubbing Heredia. Undoubtedly, Heredia had too often suffered from French superiority and pedantry — which often go hand in hand — not to recognize the differences between them. He knew how to play on those differences and, in the case of those less cautious or less secure than Branly, how to ensnare the unwary.

In contrast to Heredia, my friend decided to practice an impeccable courtesy based less on conscious will than on custom, running the risk that Heredia, in turn, would recognize my friend’s stratagem.

That is why he is sure, he says, that he had done nothing to provoke the comment Heredia made as they parked in front of the hospital, facing the ambulance; and if the words were spoken, it was perhaps because they were, though for different reasons, in the minds of both men.

“You have no cause to look down your nose at a man who has worked for his wealth instead of inheriting it through no effort of his own.”

Such an unexpected sally, especially one so close to the mark in regard to what really was passing through my friend’s mind, evoked a swift response: “Everything one owns has either been bought, inherited, or stolen. Have no fear. We are not as different as you seem to believe.”

But whatever Heredia’s intentions — and Branly began to suspect that Heredia hoped to distract him, to involve him in a banal conversation, to challenge his honor, to provoke a long but courteous silence like the one that must have motivated the bizarre words Heredia had tried to thrust like banderillas into the neck of his guest — Branly freed his mind of the implications of this new and unexpected development, realizing with lucid clarity that a man like Heredia would not ordinarily worry about a chauffeur. Normally, he would not lift a finger for him, or go out of his way to offer him aid. Heredia had made up his mind, had acted, telephoned the hospital, before he knew who Branly was. His attentiveness toward Etienne did not spring out of compassion for the servant or adulation of the master, but from some other motive that Heredia had deceitfully hoped to obscure by proudly exhibiting the most repulsive emotion my friend and I know: resentment.

Branly did not hesitate for a moment. The instant Heredia got out of the Citroën, my friend slammed the door and threw the car into reverse. The lights of the ambulance blinded him, but they also blocked out the astounded Heredia standing on the sidewalk with one hand to his eyes, protecting himself from the luminous lances of the ambulance and the Citroën crossed in blinding white combat that terrified my friend, until, still in reverse, he found space in which to turn the car, and, shifting into high gear, followed the signs that would lead him away from the hospital, away from Heredia and Etienne — standing like statues, watching his desperate struggle to reverse the car and drive off in the direction of the Clos des Renards. He knew now that Heredia had wanted him away from there — why? He had wanted to lure him away and keep him away, but he would not succeed. The dazzle of the headlights did not prevent him from seeing a truth spawned in darkness, untouched by any light except a psychic certainty: if the French Victor Heredia was not interested in him or his chauffeur, then he could be interested only in the person who bore his name, the Mexican Victor Heredia.

My friend says he felt as if black shadows had congealed in his throat. The signs led him from the center of Enghien toward the highways that were the source of his night terrors, and in the prison of glass and lights surrounding him, the vision of his fatal accident and that of a park filled with children who no longer recognized him blended together like two crystalline rivers that for years had flowed side by side, finally to be silently joined that night. Victor needed him, he was in danger. That is why Heredia had lured him from the Clos des Renards, Branly tells me now, and adds that was all he knew — rather, all he needed to know — at this incredible moment in his life. He drove blindly, recklessly, certain that he was racing toward an encounter with his recurrent nightmare of death on a night highway. But, above all else, he felt that he was the object of an implacable hostility.

He could not identify its source. He did not want to consider Heredia capable of transmitting such sovereign hatred. Besides, he had left the Frenchman standing on the sidewalk of the hospital on the Boulevard d’Ormesson just now, blinded by actual lights. The blast of malice directed against Branly, Branly’s vital juices informed him, his viscera, the shadowy taste in his mouth, sprang from a different place and a different time, a faraway time and place as distant in origin as the dead leaves swirling in the wake of the automobile racing along the avenue of the Clos des Renards — leaves my friend feverishly knew were alien to that place; they had not fallen from any tree in these woods, and who could say who or what had carried them here, or when or where they had actually fallen, in what dense forest.