Distant Relations

9

The year of his meeting with the Heredias in Mexico was swallowed up by the year of the Countess’s illness and his decision not to travel any more, swallowed by the year of his last voyage to Naples to see the painting of the blind beggar leading the blind beggars, supplanted by the year he took a membership in the Automobile Club of France in order to exercise in the enormous swimming pool with the green and gold mosaics and iron catwalk, preceded by the year of the Second World War and the leg wound received during the debacle of Dunkirk, devoured by the year of his second wife’s death, absorbed by the year of the First World War by the year of his last visit to his grandfather in the castle by the year when he had read The Man in the Iron Mask in his dying mother’s garden with its clear fountains by the year of his father’s death and the year of the inauguration of the Pont Alexandre III and the year of his birth and finally the year that dissolved all the others, and he was again in a house not very different from this, gazing toward a grove of birch trees and an avenue of bare trees whose autumnal leaves rustled beneath the feet of the woman walking toward him. She was again dressed in a First Empire ball gown, although, of course, this could not be the time because he dreamed he was a young man, but flesh and blood, though the causal and persistent logic that in a dream seems so fantastic told him that the only time he could have met the woman now approaching through the trees and clad in a gown from the time of Napoleon was before he had been born. He stretched out a hand to touch her and tell her she would see, she need not worry, that the raging time in which birth and death occurred simultaneously was not their time, the sweet, slow time of all the lovers on this earth, their time did not demand that lovers be separated the moment they met. But the woman from the First Empire stared at him uncomprehendingly, seemingly unhearing. On one bare shoulder rested a white parasol twirled by sumptuously ringed white fingers with gilded fingernails. Abruptly the twirling stopped, and her expression changed to a dawning happiness based on the conviction that she did not remember this man, she owed him nothing, that their encounter was casual and his attitude impertinent.

Branly awakened with a cry of desperation lingering on his lips. He must beseech the vanished woman to recognize him soon, before he forgot her in that sweet and sad time when death and birth do not coincide. But more powerful than his cry was the insistent nearby dripping that interrupted the flow of the successive layers of reality being sucked into the infinite vacuum of dream. He was bathed in a sweat of nerves and hunger. With the aid of his cane he struggled to his feet and limped painfully to the small bathroom, very much aware of his inability to walk very far or to negotiate the stairs. The dripping that had been more compelling than his dream, than the name or the face of the woman in his dream, was coming from an ancient shower suspended like a stalactite from a rusty pipe: the perforations in the shower head were crusted with calcareous tumors from the water of the regions near the river Seine. My friend removed his clothing and, with some difficulty, showered. He again donned the nightshirt and bathrobe lent him by Heredia, and, supporting himself on his cane, left the room in search of the dumbwaiter.

The hall was long, and Branly was halt. He did not then know why, but the doors closed on the symmetrically placed bedrooms created a sensation of rising fear. Leather covered everything in this house, but the fact that it was used on hallways, bedrooms, and floors made it less precious, divested it of the uniqueness of skins destined for special purposes — footwear, book, coat, or sofa — a uniqueness only heightened when in our fantasy we imagine ourselves flayed and our own skin serving as coat or shoes for the person who has the indisputable right to strip it from our backs. In this house, however, the concept, the physical sensation, even more the evidence of less-than-perfect quality, turned these skins into little less than stained and sour wineskins torn ruthlessly from the backs of beasts.

The dumbwaiter was housed in a square pillar next to the stairway. Branly opened it and found a cold collation, seasoned this time with mustard that surely Heredia had daubed on the meats early that morning, for it had formed a crust not unreminiscent of the dry hides that covered every inch of the house. My friend managed to pick up the tray, balancing it on one arm against his ribs in order to free the other hand for his cane. He made his way back to his room, almost regretting that Heredia had denied him an opportunity for a mute reproach, would he condemn a guest to starvation? But, think what you will, to suppose that, first thing in the morning, Branly would suppose that cold meat was waiting in the dumbwaiter was to suppose a good deal!

“The image I had of myself at that moment was atrocious: an elderly pauper consigned to an asylum by irresponsible and cruel relatives.”

He did not want to ponder further the subtleties of hospitality as they were understood by his most unusual host. Hunger claimed his attention, and constantly aware, for the first time in a long while, of a sense of humiliation and abandonment, he devoured the roast beef, sausage, and chicken leg as he watched dusk fall over the woods of the Clos des Renards, as once again the voices of the children, now nearing the terrace, rose to his bedchamber.

“I think I should go up and say hello.”

“No.”

“He must be wondering why I haven’t come.”

“Because you can’t.”

“Why not, André?”

“Just because.”

“That’s no reason.”

“There doesn’t have to be a reason, except that from now on we don’t do anything we can’t do together, do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“You swear?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I forbid you to do anything I can’t do, and I won’t do anything without you, and that’s that!”

My friend says now that in that precise instant the feeling that something unfathomable but threatening was trying to reach him became a reality and the tray with the remains of his lunch fell from his shaking knees. But as soon as he stood and lurched toward the window, another, earlier thought materialized: the question of how accurately or inaccurately an old man can imagine his youth. And as he parted the curtains with trembling hands, that doubt expanded to include everything connected with the youth of the two boys speaking the words that to Branly sounded so cruel, words he had no reason or right to judge. He held himself upright by clinging to the curtain, knowing at last that to flee from danger was to rush to an encounter with something worse, and aware that the strange, parallel compulsion of this moral certainty was causing him to hesitate — as ruinous as the powdered-sugar hair of a woman he might have loved in a different time, a man clinging precariously to an ancient, threadbare damask curtain to keep from reeling and falling from the window to the stone terrace below, where the children were resuming their game.

“Capital of Nigeria?”

“Lagos.”

“Capital of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan?”

“Khartoum, Khartoum.”

“Let’s pretend that you’re Gordon and I’m the Mahdi.”

“Evil Mahdi!”

“Valiant Gordon!”

The boys laughed and then Branly heard the onomatopoeic sounds with which children imitate an adult epic, their voices simulating cannon fire and the charge of horse brigades. Branly, still grasping the curtain, had a fleeting memory of his own charades in a time when memories of the colonial adventures of General Gordon were fresh in newsprint and conversations. Finally, he peered from the window and saw the dark head of Victor Heredia, but not that of his young French friend, for André was wearing a sailor cap and — all my friend could see from his perspective — a sailor suit as well, a sky-blue suit of heavy linen trimmed in white, with ankle-length trousers.

With dusk came a fine, steady rain. For several hours Branly sat at his window contemplating the woods. My friend felt that in the same way the moon slowly ascended from the familiar garden, from secret moisture between the oaks and birches rising after a long summer’s absence to celebrate the return of the abundance of autumn when the woods are sovereigns of their moribund bounty, in the same way the real sounds of the landscape he was observing with such mournful and protracted delight were born in him.

The crows that are harbingers of night over the Île de France flew high overhead; below, a seething mass of invisible creatures released from the moist sand a sacred perfume that overcame the intolerable novelty of a house encased in hide. That powerful natural effluence, Branly mused, was an implicit rejection of the other anomaly of this lonely, leathery manor house: the dead leaves piled beneath the leafy late-summer bowers of the oak trees.

Branly thought of his town house on the Avenue de Saxe and of the sand in which his sea pine grew, lending in the very heart of Paris a touch of seascape to his garden. He smiles, remembering the scene from Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou in which the heroine opens her door on the sixth floor of a Parisian apartment house and steps directly onto the beach: Cabourg, sea, sand.

Now the scent of the moist earth of the Clos des Renards had the same effect, and my friend, a man who eagerly anticipates beauty, imagined the morning to come: the moist grass, the boughs wet with dew and rain, glistening with infinite pearls outside the window he would open when he awakened, and he would breathe deeply, grateful once again to be alive. How many nights had he delivered himself to sleep patiently resigned never to greet the dawn?

The serenity of the vista was ruined by an all too obvious proof of the indolent neglect of the master of the house. Branly’s Citroën had been left abandoned against the oak that had interrupted his blind and careening flight two — or was it three? — nights ago. He tried to capture the idyll ruthlessly interrupted by an incongruous automobile, not unlike a Kurt Schwitters painting, another depiction of juxtaposed umbrellas and sewing machines set, not on an operating table, but in the middle of a garden designed by the heirs to Le Nôtre, which, as Branly is telling me now, smiling, almost playful in his allusion, is as if the flight to Varennes had been accomplished aboard a helicopter that lifted off from the Petit Trianon.

No less grating, no less disfiguring for having been hidden, was the last thing to catch his eye as he surveyed the area between the end of the avenue where the Citroën — in a manner of speaking — lay between leafy oak trees and the verge of the avenue of dry leaves, the graveled lane along which Etienne had first driven Branly and the young Heredia to this house, and the garden, properly speaking, with its precise disposition of shrubs, pansies, and greensward among arabesques of artichokes and rosebushes, whose geometry, gradually revealed in this first persistent rain of the coming autumn, was sundered by a long, deep scar, a knife slash through this rational and most perfect of gardens, an eruption of savage forest in a space designed to negate it: from the fallen leaves, across the gravel, through grass and shrubs, the rain revealed, as if in developer solution, an indecent trough, a cruel, oblique swath carved across the face of the garden, a garden disfigured by something resembling the track of a mysterious, lurking, nocturnal beast.

The color and texture of this scar were those of a match burn on human flesh — black, white, and gray. Branly’s eyes sought the birch trees, the striated silver of their bark, and, among the tree trunks, the figures of the two boys. This time they were not there, unless they were hidden in the mist.

He shook his head. The crows soared. He massaged his temples. Night fell as he asked himself: How to describe the shadow of a dream? The insistence of the dripping shower drowned out the fine, expiring rain.

Heredia turned on the light, and Branly clapped his hands over bedazzled eyes. He wondered how long his host had been standing there in the darkness, observing him observe the garden, the rain, and the scar in the garden, revealed by the rain. Not long, he concluded immediately. Peculiar to Heredia — Branly is saying this November afternoon in the empty, darkened dining room of the Automobile Club, where only he and I remain, and we remain thanks to the respect in which my friend is held in this establishment — was his ability immediately to dispel serene contemplation, good humor, spontaneity of sentiments, and to make anyone who shared with him an hour, or a room, feel self-conscious, if not guilty.

After his host turned on the light, he picked up the tray he had set on a chair. He said, as he put it down, this time on my friend’s lap, that his guest would not complain today, he’d see, a delicious cassoulet, no leftovers from some earlier meal, eh? don’t you believe it. Branly did not reply at once. Though his eyes never wavered from Heredia’s, pale as the bark of the white birch trees, he settled himself in the bed before affirming that of course the hot meal must be the work of Madame; he was happy to know that she had returned and would take charge of the kitchen. Heredia must permit him to state with some frankness — Branly figuratively wiped his lips before beginning to eat — that the food today had not been, how should one say, umh, up to the standards of a Spanish innkeeper, or even of a thatched hut in the Antilles, not even … But surely Heredia would understand what he was trying to say: how could he suppose that his guest, during a day in which, astonishingly, his host did not once appear — how could he suppose that his guest would guess there was a plate of cold cuts for him in a dumbwaiter.

“Didn’t you get enough?” Heredia asked.

“I have eaten less under other circumstances,” was Branly’s reply, as once again he ignored Heredia’s impertinence. “That is not the point,” he continued. “It was the lack of any warning. Had I known last evening … You might have informed me.”

“Well, the fact is, you found the food. You’ll know where to find it from now on.”

Branly savored with pleasure a portion of sauce-soaked goose before adding: “Does that mean I may not expect to see you during the day, M. Heredia?”

“I told you. I get up late. I go to bed late.”

“Are you a vampire?” asked Branly with his best worldly smile, not looking at Heredia, but concentrating on carefully spearing with his fork the green beans swimming in the deep dish of the cassoulet.

Heredia glanced at my friend from the corner of his eye and then did an extraordinary thing: he walked to the washbasin, took down the oval mirror, and carried it back to Branly’s bed. There he bent over, holding the mirror in both hands so that its oval reflected both the host and the guest.

Branly tells me that at that moment, with all his attention riveted, as Heredia desired, on the undeniable reflection of their faces, and with the impatience of one who hopes for a solution to certain enigmas, so they will cease to be enigmas, and almost expecting to see only one face in the glass, his own, he overlooked the additional possibilities that only later would occur to him, and which, this afternoon, he outlines as follows:

“I could not, you see, distinguish between our two breaths, one perhaps cold, the other warm, or one actual and the other illusory. No, I did not know whose was the life that breathed moisture on the mirror, as I did not know whether, through me, Heredia’s eyes were projecting a profile that was not in the mirror, perhaps not even in the bedchamber, or even whether the opposite was true and I myself was no more than an illusion traced on that oval by a nebulous finger drawing in the ephemeral mist on a mirror. You see, my dear friend, at this point I still did not know that a succession of dreams were merely disguising my ignorance of my own desires.”