Distant Relations

7

Branly is an inveterate traveler. It is not unusual to see him one day, as today, in the dining room or swimming pool of the club housed in Gabriel’s magnificent pavillon facing the Place de la Concorde, and then lose sight of him for months. He may wish to see his favorite Velázquezes in the Prado or the magnificent Brueghels in Naples, the diamantine lakes of southern Chile or the endlessly golden dawns over the Bosporus. The wish is father to the deed; wish, not caprice, he explains. Because he had known the innocent world before Sarajevo, he believes it would be absurd in this day of instant communications for men not to claim their right to use transportation to their own advantage, to fulfill their slightest whim, knowing that, like every new conquest, such privilege is also a notification of what we have lost: the visa-less intercommunicating universe he had enjoyed when one traveled to Kabul not in a Caravelle but in a caravan. The witticism attributed to Paul Morand could easily apply to my friend: he so loves to travel that his will stipulates that his skin be made into a suitcase.

So no one among Branly’s friends is surprised by his sudden absence. He might be visiting the Countess at nearby Quercy, or be as far away as the Toltec ruins at Xochicalco. Neither will ever be dislodged from its site, and so, in keeping with a life based on civility and social niceties, my friend willingly goes to the mountains that will not come to him.

And such idiosyncratic habits serve a different end as well. They permit him, in keeping with his desire, to avoid any mention of occasional illness. Nothing irritates him more than the solicitous — sincere or feigned, though almost always hypocritical — attentions given the ailments that beset the elderly. He is no hypochondriac, and he detests the idea that anyone should see him reduced to querulousness or debility. When Branly finds himself in bed against his will, Florencio and José are well trained in informing callers that M. le Comte will be out of town for a few weeks, and if they want to communicate with him they may do so by writing in care of the prefecture of Dordogne, or perhaps by poste restante to the island of Mauritius. M. le Comte will undoubtedly be dropping by one of these days to pick up his mail.

Even those of us who suspect the subterfuge in all this are quite happy to attribute it to the combination of fantasy and reserve which in the Count are good and sufficient proof of his independence. In this way he cautions us to respect his privacy as he respects ours. It is only this afternoon, for instance, that I learn of the several days he spent in bed following the accident he suffered the evening he ran into one of the oak trees lining the avenue to the Clos des Renards. I acknowledge my appreciation of his confidence, though a barely perceptible gleam in his small eyes reveals that if he has told me, it is only because the incident is indispensable to the story, the result of an automobile accident — not uncommon in the life of one who travels so frequently — and not a common cold.

“I am convinced that there are events that occur only because we fear them. If they were not summoned by our fear, you see, they would remain forever latent. Surely it is our imagining them that activates the atoms of probability and awakens them, as it were, from a dream. The dream of our absolute indifference.”

What awakened him was the whistled melody of the madrigal of the clear fountain. He opened his eyes to the shattered windshield of the Citroën and imagined himself a prisoner in a crystal spiderweb before he verified the pain in his leg and his head, before he put his hand to his brow and felt his fingers sticky with blood, before he again felt himself slipping into unconsciousness.

He remembers that when he again awakened he was lying on a canopied bed. Automatically, his hand went to his aching head.

“Don’t worry, M. le Comte,” said the French Heredia, beside him. “You have been well looked after, I can swear to that. I found you as I returned from the hospital. Why did you do such a foolish thing? So many mishaps in a single evening. My son André and your young friend helped me bring you here. The doctor came, you were slightly delirious. He gave you a tetanus injection, just to be sure. Your wounds are only superficial, nothing is broken. Your bad leg is a bit worse for wear, and the doctor put a patch on your head. He wants you to stay in bed for a few days. It’s the shock more than anything, you know. And at your age you can’t be too careful.”

Branly waved away any concerns about his person and inquired about Etienne.

Heredia laughed disagreeably. “Noble to the end, eh? Your vassal is doing well, and is grateful for your concern. He spent the night in the hospital, and will be released today. He wanted to come by here, but I told him no, that you needed to rest. You’re not really up to par, so here I am to carry out your orders. You just say the word.”

As he tells me today, my friend was convinced that Heredia was again anticipating an unyielding silence, a reaction against the ever-increasing impertinence of the person in whose hands he was now virtually captive, and who intended to put to the test the limits of Branly’s innate courtesy, challenging him to maintain his civility from a sickbed, especially now that he was dependent on the services of the man with the pale eyes, straight nose, and white mane of hair, who was caring for him in this bedchamber redolent — like the entire residence, and not just the foyer as he had first thought — of leather. The canopy of his bed was leather, as well as the chairs of this shadowy chamber closed in by heavy velvet curtains that made it impossible to tell whether it was night or day.

Yet, he told himself, it would be immature to refuse this disagreeable man the perverse pleasure of serving his guest, simply because, in serving him, the Frenchman would find further proof of Branly’s feudalism, and a view of a world — which might actually be a relief for Heredia, as it was more Heredia’s desire than Branly’s — populated with serfs.

Unaided, my friend pulled himself to a sitting position against the leather-covered headboard of the castored bed, but he asked Heredia to arrange the pillows to make a more comfortable support for his arms. Then he asked if he might make a telephone call. He had begun to devise a policy of sorts for dealing with his unexpected and unsought host: he was beginning to realize that nothing would be more disconcerting than the continuing evidence of his courtesy, more than a counterpoint to the Frenchman’s crudeness, a cool civility Heredia would find difficult to distinguish from aloof politeness, as in a rosary of identically colored baroque pearls gradations in size may not be readily apparent to the naked eye.

Heredia hesitated a moment, staring at my friend with curiosity. He folded his arms across his dirty white quilted silk dressing gown and finally informed Branly that there were no extensions upstairs, the only telephone being on the first floor. He would help Branly down the stairs, if that’s what he wanted; however, he had noticed that the Count had been limping even before the accident. He didn’t want to be held responsible, in case Branly should decide to file a claim for the second accident. Lucky for him, wasn’t it, that the first had happened outside and that the boy was responsible.

Branly nodded, and asked Heredia to call Hugo, the boy’s father. But, as his host was about to leave the room, my friend said: “No, on second thought, don’t bother Señor Heredia; he might worry about his son, and there is no reason for that. Also, he is quite involved with his conference. If you don’t mind, speak with my servants. They are Spanish, so they will have no difficulty understanding you. Yes, that’s it, that way Señor Heredia will know where his son is, but will not worry about him. Could I trouble you, Heredia, to push my bed to the window? You can’t tell the hour in this gloom. And ask the boy to come up later and visit. I am not at all tired.”

Without a word, Heredia pushed the bed closer to the window. Branly smiled; he commented to his host that he was indeed a sturdy fellow. He took the cane Heredia had propped against the bed and pulled aside the curtain to allow the sun to shine in.

“Ah,” he exclaimed with delight, and with a sincere impulse to share with Heredia his fundamental pleasure in life, the morning, and the sunshine. But the owner of the Clos des Renards had brusquely left the room. So, instead, instinctively seeking the signs of life his spirit had clamored for throughout the night, Branly looked out the window. His eyes took in the rational garden. He shook his head as he saw the spectacular evidence of his automobile’s collision with the oak tree, and only when his quite contented invalid’s eyes wandered toward the woods did he see the two figures standing hand in hand in the chiaroscuro of the birch trees. They stood so quietly they were barely visible; anything stationary in a natural setting succumbs to the universal law of mimesis.

He dozed, thinking that perhaps his host had been right, perhaps he was not yet ready for strong emotion; the world had deceived him through the years by leading him to expect the respect he felt he deserved. A resentment as flagrant and gross as Heredia’s mounted in Branly’s breast, an indication of the existence of a world that he had vaguely known existed but had never known. How long had it been since anyone had had the effrontery to thwart his wishes? How long since anyone in his presence had interrupted the priestly murmur of conversation typical of the French; in fact, of any civilized people?

Dusk was falling before his eyes, and as night approaches, the woods look like the sea. Vast, serene, inexhaustible, renewed in every breath. He felt suddenly suffocated, uncomfortably aware of the smell of tanned leather, and with a movement he then thought natural, but now, telling me, he recalls as violent, even desperate, he reached out with his cane and pushed open one of the casements of the window. As it swung open, he could hear the happy voices of the two boys, who obviously were playing beneath his window on the terrace guarded by lions.

Their voices, Branly says, dissipated the asphyxiating odor of hide and filled the room, as if it were a delicate, tall-stemmed goblet, with tremors of the beautiful, melancholy twilight, and also with the ineffable, the quintessential, joy of the boys, who were laughing and singing — now he could hear it — the madrigal of the enraptured nightingale: Chante, rossignol, chante, toi qui as le coeur gai.

Branly smiled and half-closed his eyes. There was an instant of silence and then the boys laughed again and began a question-and-answer game. He recognized the voice of the Mexican Victor Heredia. His was the voice responding to the questions posed by the second youth, the boy he still could not describe because he had not seen him clearly, only from afar, in the distance where the garden met the grove of birch trees. This André’s voice was of an incomparable sweetness, midway between childhood and puberty, but free of the unmusical tones that often accompany this transition. His voice had retained the purity of childhood into adolescence, but at the same time it heralded a virile beauty in which the shyness, selfishness, and egotism of childhood were absent.

“Capital of Argentina.”

“Buenos Aires.”

“Capital of Holland.”

“Amsterdam.”

“Capital of Serbia.”

“Belgrade.”

“Capital of Norway.”

“Oslo.”

“No.”

“Sorry. Christiania.”

“Capital of Mexico.”

“That’s silly! Mexico City. That’s like my asking you what the capital of France is, André.”

“Enghien!”

Both boys laughed boisterously, as Branly sank back into sleep, lulled by the game that was like counting sheep, and remembering his own childhood, the games amid the columns, the triumphs in mock wars of the Parc Monceau in a time when the children knew him and he was not importuned by his past as he was now. In his childhood he had simply existed, unburdened by the mountain of IOU’s that harass a being once content to exist without a conscious — even hostile — awareness of self. He fell asleep thinking that he was going to enjoy these days at the Clos des Renards more than he had imagined. He believed that he had found the real, if slightly painful, reason for his presence there.

When he awakened again, it was night and an early autumnal chill was seeping through the open window. The room was dark; Branly groped for his cane, and, without success, tried to close one of the windows. Another hand was helping him, taking his hand and guiding it toward the window pull. He felt the touch of rough skin guiding his hand toward the copper latch.

The window closed, and the intoxicating odor of leather returned, now mingled with an ancient perfume that Branly, even in his fascinated stupor, struggled to identify with a texture or with an odor half-wood, half-leather, a flexible, fragile wood, or if not quite skin, at least the leather of a glove: sandalwood, tanned hide, perfumed wood.

He awakened with a start. The light was on and Heredia — slightly ill-humored but with no sign of the vulgarity that secretly irritated his guest, now gripped by a strange vertigo — was offering him a tray holding wine, half a French loaf, and cold meats. Branly, still enervated, looked toward the window. It was tightly shut. The head of his cane rested beside the head of his bed.

“I hope you’re hungry. You’ve been sleeping like a baby, M. le Comte.”

“Thank you. Who closed the window?”

“I did. A moment ago. We don’t want you to catch pneumonia on top of everything else. At your age…”

“Yes, yes, Heredia, I know. Do you have a servant?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t want to trouble you with bringing up my tray three times a day.”

“It’s no trouble. There’s a dumbwaiter. Anyway, it’s a privilege to serve a count. I wouldn’t want to pass off that honor to a servant, now would I?”

These last words were spoken with the resentful self-assurance my friend found so annoying, but he made up his mind to contain his irritation. To a degree, Heredia was an open book, with the singular exception that what one read had to be taken in reverse and then subjected to a literal reading that canceled the original interpretation. This course, Branly told himself, was pointless, as pointless as the police inquiries in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” The searched-for object was always in full view. The “purloined letter” of Victor Heredia, Branly knew in that instant, was his son. He did not need to see the boy to know that the unique voice, the joy, that had moved him so deeply that afternoon belonged to a nature very different from that of the father.

The latter was looking at my friend with the eyes of a whipped pup. “Why are you so contemptuous of me, M. le Comte?”

Branly looked up. He nearly dropped his fork on the tin tray with a great clatter, but instead lifted his eyebrows.

“I said we don’t speak Spanish in my house, but you didn’t believe me, you told me to speak Spanish to your servants, that they would understand me, you…”

Branly says he was seized by a violent emotion. Contrary to custom, he was tempted to express it.

“But,” as he explains to me this afternoon, “Heredia did not deserve my anger. A man who would bare himself in that way, whining and filled with self-pity, did not deserve my anger. Self-pity is merely a different manifestation of the resentment you and I find so intolerable.”

“Had you set that trap for him deliberately?” I dare ask.

He insists that, in a manner of speaking, he had acted in self-defense. For one thing, Heredia had woven a web of deceptions, expecting that his discreet and courteous guest would not call attention to them. Second, his deception could be countered only with similar, tacit, deceptions — for instance, asking him to speak Spanish to Branly’s servants. Branly had decided to dupe Heredia in whatever manner possible.

“I am amazed, M. Heredia, that in the house of a man of Caribbean extraction there is no image of the patron saints of that area, a Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, a Mexican Guadalupe, a Virgen de Coromoto…”

He pronounced the names with a heavy French accent, the Vir-guen de la Ca-rhee-dad del Co-brhay, the Ga-da-loupe, the Vir-guen de Co-rho-mo-to. He was willing, he explains, to wager that the French Heredia was lying about his ancestors, and if so, he was lying about other matters. But he did not accuse him that night.

“What is important is that through my servants you relayed my message to Don Hugo Heredia.”

He started to ask, “You did give them the message?” but refrained, not wanting to offer Heredia the opportunity, an opportunity silently solicited by the Spaniard of the Clos des Renards, to do as he did, to turn his back on Branly without answering, to pause on the threshold, and only then to speak, with a kind of hangdog rage. “Caridad, not Ca-rhee-dad, Gua-da-lu-pe, not Gadaloupe, Virhen, not Vir-guen, Co-ro-mo-to, not Corhomoto. This is not a whorehouse, M. le Comte.”

He swept from the chamber wrapped in a dignity even more doleful than his initial self-pity. My friend smiled; Heredia had not dared refuse what Branly had asked as a favor, and because it was accompanied by a rebuff, Heredia had understood it to be an order.

As he was eating his solitary meal, my friend pondered the relationship between the other father and son, Hugo Heredia and his son, Victor. As he tells me now in our conversation in the dining room abandoned by everyone except the two of us, he realized that between the two Mexicans there was a kind of understanding, an interpenetration, inconceivable between the French father and son. As far as he had been able to tell, the young Heredia of the Clos des Renards could not be less like his father. He did not have to see the boy; one had only to hear that voice to recognize the delicacy, the sweetness, the moderation of the youth, whose very being repudiated the crude insolence, the excesses, of the father. Yes, from that first evening beside the barranca he had accepted without question the unspoken understanding between Victor and Hugo Heredia. He was sure that, because of their mutual confidence, the call from his unpleasant host had been sufficient to allay the anthropologist’s uneasiness about his son’s absence. Their understanding, Branly murmured in his temporary bed, and now to me at his customary table in the Automobile Club, was somehow connected with the boy’s brutal treatment of the servant in Jean’s house, and of his own Spanish servants on the Avenue de Saxe. Undoubtedly, he murmurs as he gazes penetratingly at me, and murmured then as he was again falling asleep, that feudal impunity of Latin Americans, as anachronistic, as picturesque, as delicious, as suicidal … Fermina Márquez in Paris, Doña Bárbara on the plains of Apure …

In a sterile landscape — but one that he dreamed was perfectly normal, even desired for its absolute absence of forms, colors, weather, or space, as if other landscapes, the accustomed ones, were the aberration and the names of its objects, forgotten and disgusting, were a perverse invention contrived to cloak the perfect whiteness of a self-sufficient cosmos, without need of trees, stones, flumes, blumes, and snew — captured in its own ineffectual, exhausted progression, advanced, without advancing, the sumptuous train of palanquins and trumpets, pages and palfreniers, prancing steeds and ragged beggars. And among the beggars he beheld the king adorned in all his robes and regalia, but icily ignored by all who surrounded him, soldiers and mendicants, as if he were but one of them, himself deceived, and on the litter of the king, borne on the backs of the palfreniers, traveled, in place of the king, a blond young beggar with black eyes, still a child, dressed in rags, with no crown but his golden curls, reclining languidly, unsure whether this was but another, innocent sport, neither cruel nor kind, but one the youth was inclined first to accept, and then renounce or accept according to his whim, as long as no one contested his place, and the king, whom everyone ignored except the dreamer who was listening from a different world, told how he had found the boy in an abandoned house, how to love him and care for him was to love or care for a little beggar.