Distant Relations

8

He was awakened very early by a persistent humming. When he opened his eyes, he had the sensation that the room was swelling, but it was merely the early-morning breeze, the pungent, far-reaching, ebullient air of the Île de France that lends its flavor to this region — air, a still drowsy Branly told himself, he had been breathing for eighty-three years.

“One of the positive attributes of ancient peoples is that they have learned to respect their old, because in them they see themselves. In their rush, young nations deny their elderly their wisdom and respect — even, finally, life.”

“You may be right,” I interrupted. “Unfortunately, Europe wants today to see itself as young, and, as you say, denies the existence of her old.”

“If for no other reason,” Branly continued, as if he had not heard me, “I deserve to live because I carry a library in my head. Do you know that if tomorrow we awoke to find all the world’s books disappeared, a few elderly men could, among us, re-create them.”

I realized that he hadn’t appreciated my interruption, even less its demurrer. In the moment he was narrating to me, the breeze was billowing the curtains like sails, like Branly’s intelligent, curious eyes, half-open. He vaguely remembered a nocturnal visit from his host, but the empty tray from his haphazard meal was nowhere to be seen. And the window was now standing open. He could hear the morning sounds from the highways, increasingly feverish activity, laborers on their way to work. Branly could see them in his mind’s eye, ruddy-cheeked, flushed by the early-morning chill and their breakfast of cognac, dressed in blue denim and turtleneck sweaters and, sometimes even now, the traditional beret. He heard their joking, their gravelly laughter, heard them humming the melody of the madrigal—à la claire fontaine, m’en allant promener—as they walked by. In the distance, crows flocked above the woods in Enghien; but in the garden that, by pushing aside the curtains, he could admire in the solitude of the white light of a complacent dawn hostile to any who would perturb it, a solitary bird seemed to echo the same tune in its melancholy salute to the end of summer—chante, rossignol, chante, toi qui as le coeur gai. And now symmetrical flocks of southbound wild geese passed overhead, adding to the sense of farewell, blotting out all sound but their own, and in spite of their cacophony as intensely nostalgic as if fulfilling the last lines of a bitter comedy. It was only as their honking faded into a distance gradually reclaimed from the dream of a landscape without space or sound that the mingled voices of the two boys rose from the terrace below, beyond Branly’s view, singing of the laughing heart and the weeping heart—toi tu as le coeur à rire, moi je l’ai à pleurer—and then, still more distant, the voices of the workmen in a wordless melody, as the boys sang, laughing, that final, 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.

“Capital of Bolivia?”

“Sucre.”

“Capital of China?”

“Peiping.”

“Capital of the Belgian Congo?”

“Léopoldville.”

“… French Equatorial Afr—?”

Branly tried to move closer to the window, glowing suddenly with light, not, as I have often said in jest, situated slightly behind his left ear, and lending a translucent luminosity to his entire head, especially the ears with the drooping lobes, a sign of age compensated by the pixieish helices proudly pointing toward the gleaming cranium, but this time within his skull, pulsing there like a throbbing drum. But before he could reach the window he heard the footsteps of the boys on the gravel, their laughter tracing the curve of their flight around the corner of the house. Branly settled himself comfortably in his bed to await the momentary arrival of Heredia with his breakfast tray.

My friend tells me now, with a smile, that it was waiting in bed, more than anything, that forced him to recognize how bizarre his situation was. In vain, he tried to remember a normal morning in his life, not wartime, not dawn in the trenches of the Marne in ’17, not the bombardment and fall of Calais in ’40, both the exception and the justification for a comfortable life, but one single morning in ordinary times when a solicitous servant had not appeared to place a breakfast tray across his lap, the bottom of the tray warm to the touch of fingers anticipating the temptations of steaming hot coffee and croissants warm from the oven.

After an hour of waiting, and fighting a mounting irritation he struggled to suppress for being as unworthy as capricious, he fell asleep, exhausted equally by hunger and by the battle against the stirrings of a tantrum that reminded him of long-ago mornings when a woman with exquisite blue eyes and colorless lips in a colorless face, named, yes, Félicité, had been late bringing his breakfast on the occasions he was taken to visit the castle of his grandfather and his father, the handsome officer whose photograph had always stood on his bedside table. He had been taken by the hand and led up a dangerous stone stairway with no handrail to an enormous cold bedchamber, where every night, as here, he had tried to push the heavy bed close to the window, imagining he was more secure there than in the unprotected center of the room. He had always been afraid on that stairway, and wondered if a rope, a mere semblance of a railing, would have afforded a sense of security.

The boys were far away. They were always so far that they were indistinguishable from the birch trees, and all morning, through the shutters formed by still-green branches, and amid the light and shadows of tree bark disguised as tattered Dominoes, he strove to identify their figures, and movements.

It was precisely that blending of the figures and the beautiful grove — a remarkable emblem of winter jealously guarded through every season, accepting the fleeting celebrations of summer without relinquishing its role as a symbol of winter — that allowed him, to a degree, to become one with Victor and André, to remember what they were perhaps experiencing there in the grove, invisible from the half-open window of the guest room when they stood still, barely distinguishable when they moved.

“Do you recall that moment when each of us discovers what other men have known throughout the centuries? The shadow of a tree, the fragrance of a flower, the veins in a transparent leaf. To know those things is to understand the absurd abyss that separates the eternal reality of things from the knowledge of them that only I — in spite of the realities and the knowledge of them thousands of millions of men have, or have had before me — that only I can acquire for myself, and which, lamentably, I can never transmit to any other being. Victor and André were discovering the world, and from my window I was watching and wondering whether an old man does not inevitably deceive himself when he imagines how it is to be young.”

Today, more thoughtfully, he questions whether someday we will find a way to transmit the experience a man has accumulated by the time of his death, in the hope of sparing those still unborn the need to learn it all again, as if no one had ever been born before them. But the mocking response is always a vast Why?

“I mean, my friend, what right do we have to wrest their experiences from others, only to give a second life to our own? At that moment, I was trying to give credence to an old man’s imaginings both of his childhood and of his old age. Were they false or true?”

He had awakened to the sharp, insistent pangs of hunger. It was eleven o’clock, and Heredia, his dishonest host, less honorable than the Spanish innkeepers to whom he did not want to be compared, still had not appeared with his breakfast.

With an effort, Branly struggled to the window. He cried: “Heredia! Victor Heredia!”

He looked across the clipped, symmetrical French garden to the birch grove where the two young friends were now playing. He extended his arm between the curtains of the open window and called out the name which, he realized, smiling in spite of himself, belonged to two persons in this house.

He says he is sure that young Victor was there, sometimes as motionless as the victim of a childish game of magic spells, as one of the tree trunks tattered like beggar’s rags, other times, he is sure, as swift as quicksilver, weaving an ephemeral garland from tree to tree, fleeter than the eye could behold.

“Heredia! Victor Heredia!”

He waved his hand; the boy did not respond. Perhaps he wasn’t there. But he couldn’t be very far away. The silence exasperated Branly; he could see himself at the window, shouting a name, waving his hand, calling to someone who did not answer, veiled by curtains billowing like sails, and he told himself that if at that moment someone arrived at the Clos des Renards for the first time, as he had two days before, when from the woods of oaks and chestnuts he had seen a figure like his, that person, Branly admitted, would imagine he had seen exactly what Branly had imagined: the silhouette of a figure hovering in the window, fluttering curtains, white gown, all glimpsed fleetingly yet fused in an impression of antiquity.

They were playing amid the distant birch trees. They were not listening. They were not paying any attention. But something unfathomable was trying to make itself felt to Branly, to reach him. He fell back on the bed, exhausted, overcome by that dark and at the same time diaphanous sensation. He was trying to communicate with the boys, and they didn’t listen. At the same time, something was trying to communicate with him, and he didn’t listen because he felt something evil in that summons. Something evil was calling to him, trying to reach him. Did the boys feel the same when he called them?

He was wakened by the unexpected heat of midday, a prolongation of the year’s tenacious summer, and by the voices of the boys from the terrace. Like the inverse of his dream, the voices were investing with normality the forms that had progressively dissolved in the repose of his consciousness.

“He’s all alone.”

“No. The lady lives upstairs.”

“What lady?”

“I told you. The mother.”

“Have you ever seen her?”

“Not very often. She never comes out of her room. She’s always in bed. She prays a lot. She’s very devout, you know.”

“Is she very old?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“She’d be a good match for him; he’s very old, too, isn’t he?”

They laughed, and their laughter faded, slowly evaporating either because Branly dozed or because the boys were moving away like the workmen, the geese, and the melody from his own childhood in the Parc Monceau about the clear fountain with waters so beautiful one cannot resist bathing in them.

He dreamed about a woman he had loved in the past. He did not remember how old they had been, but he remembered the sentiment; it was a time when knowing one was hopelessly in love was enough for happiness. He clung to this sentiment because it was the only reality in a time when everything was moving so swiftly that events seemed to occur simultaneously. He had been born, as he had been told so often by Félicité, in his grandfather’s castle on the eve of a new century. His death had taken place instantaneously, only now did he perceive it, at the very moment of the birth described by the servant with the blue eyes and colorless skin. His anguish arose from the fact that he must distinguish between the two and tell the world, and himself, that he had been born, but had not died. He heard laughter below his window, from the terrace, mocking his truth, reiterating with sarcastic incredulity that every time a birth or a death occurred, they occurred together.

In the midst of this temporal simultaneity, inseparable from the infinitely mutable landscape which was its twin in space, he had met the woman, and as they stood like statues in the middle of a park in flux, he had tried to tell her that what they were witnessing was not really seen by them but by someone who had the gift of seeing things through eyes that registered a rate of speed which, he thanked God, was not that of men: otherwise, if birth and death were simultaneous, they would be separated as soon as they had come together. Like statues, they gazed into the distance, but the woman’s eyes were like two windows opening inward toward the interior of her body, her house; once inside, however, it was impossible to look outward through those windows. That was apparently the price of this gift.

He smelled leather and sandalwood; a woman was approaching with a tray in her hands. Branly did not look at her face. He was so hungry he had eyes only for what was on the tray. By the time he saw what it was, and had sought consolation in the woman’s eyes, she had already placed his tray on his knees and covered her face, now veiled by sumptuously ringed fingers with gilded fingernails. The humors of leather and sandalwood were suffocating. He held out his own hands in supplication to the woman, leaving now, turning her back to him, trailing the white satin shreds of a high-waisted ball gown, the tatters of the stole tied beneath the décolleté neckline and bared shoulder blades. The tower of her hair seemed ready to crumble into ruins of powdered sugar and sticky cotton candy; her worn, flat-heeled slippers scurried like white mice; and my friend was left staring into the soup plate filled with dry leaves moistened by a foul-smelling liquid: his luncheon.

“Why doesn’t she wear a veil?”

“I don’t know.”

“At least a mask, wouldn’t you think?”

“Yes, it would be more comfortable than going around all day with her hands over her face. Say, have you read the story of the iron mask?”

“No, who wrote it?”

“Alexandre Dumas. Do you know him?”

“Oh, yes. I read The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers in school.”

“He came from Haiti, just like my papa. We would have invited him to visit this house, but he died the same year.”

“The same year.”