Distant Relations

by Carlos Fuentes

  He commented that it is less interesting to take scrupulous care to relegate certain features of the present to the past than to celebrate the living presence of things we can recount and hear.

  My friend, as he leaned forward to cut a piece of meat, could see Victor’s eyes as he watched his father. The boy was absorbing a lesson. My friend tried in vain to intercept the half-lidded gaze of Hugo Heredia as he reached for the bottle of wine. Heredia was not speaking to my friend, he was not speaking to Jean, he was lecturing to his son, and they were both aware of it.

  In a way, they lived in a universe of their own. Jean had informed my friend before dinner that Victor’s older brother and his mother had died two years earlier in a plane crash. After Victor was born, Hugo and his wife had decided never to travel together. From that time, each of the parents traveled separately with one of the children, in turn. Jean wondered whether this was not a way to tempt the devil, to offer fate alternatives, forcing it to awaken from its dream and provide the final answer to the underlying question of the Heredias’ game: which would receive the invitation to death?

  “Then Victor could have been the one who died in the accident?” my friend asked his host.

  Jean had nodded, and throughout the meal Branly understood and accepted the warm and private attention the father and son bestowed on one another. But he was also disturbed by the intensity of the relationship that, without being abusive (quite the contrary: father and son shared the ceremonious behavior that is the surest evidence of the Indian presence in Mexico; the Spanish, my friend said, are almost always noisy and rude), seemed to exclude the foreigners.

  Then, as if the slight, but obvious, discomfort of my friend had been revealed in the sudden involuntary silence, the boy laughed and said an angel must have flown overhead. Hugo opened his eyes wide and smiled at my friend, who was dressed in white linen that night, and was illuminated, then as now, by an imaginary candle glowing just behind his left ear.

  It was the last moment of the jungle and the barranca. Turning toward my friend, Hugo Heredia recalled Proust’s words about a painting by Moreau: “venomous flowers interwoven with precious jewels.” He asked my friend whether the night and the jungle, the flickering light and shadow of the barranca, did not remind him of Proust’s words.

  “No,” my friend replied. “That is but one element of the scene, though admittedly the most sensual and immediate. I was thinking of something Madame de La Fayette wrote about the court of Henry II: ‘Une sorte d’agitation sans désordre.’”

  As the tropical rain was unleashed on the roof of the loggia, Jean murmured in Spanish: “A sort of agitation without disorder.” It was not my friend’s intention to contradict Hugo Heredia, but rather to acknowledge the participation he was inviting. He put aside the incidents that had not entirely pleased him—the hasty introduction, the arrogant appropriation of the artifact, the prolonged asides during the meal—to accept the consuming reality of the relationship between father and son, which first confirmed its own intensity, its mutual supportiveness, then incorporated events that being tangential became involved in it, and, finally, once it had been satisfactorily defined on its own terms, opened unhesitatingly to include the host and the host’s friend.

  My friend did not hesitate to extend in return a cordial, slender hand as transparent as porcelain, the same hand now pointing toward the scudding clouds above the cupola of the Palais Bourbon opposite us. He comments that our symmetry of spirits tends to reinforce the recognition of a rational mind in a solid body; the symmetry of Mexican temples is the fearful symmetry of Blake’s tiger in the night.

  He mentioned this to Hugo Heredia that night in Cuernavaca, while Jean lighted the fire in the fireplace and Victor pulled on a blue wool sweater bearing the crest of the Lycée Français, then folded his hands across his chest as he had that morning to shield his newfound treasure from intrusive eyes. My friend conceded a point to Hugo; every time he remembered that brief glimmer he would associate it with the moment before the rain, and the strange flickering light in the fetid barranca.

  The temple, Hugo was saying in reply to my friend, is a place apart, sacred, distinct from nature. But by the very fact that it was created to be separate from nature, it echoes it. However, my friend was no longer listening; the rain had ceased and the odors from the barranca were filtering in with a humid vengeance. The putrid river at the bottom of Jean’s property continued along a mountain washed clean of the sun’s wounds; from between river and mountain flowed a dark distant voice singing a song whose words were distorted by the metallic dissonance of the mountain and the vegetal void of the barranca.

  Victor rose and walked onto the loggia; his hands grasped the wet railing as he began to whistle the melody of the song, which grew fainter as Victor joined in the tune. Hugo Heredia, his eyes again half-closed, was talking about men and space. My friend’s eyes never left the boy, and his ears were tuned only to the play of the echoed melody, the solitary voice from the distance, the words indistinguishable, the voice recognizable as young, but not as male or female, and Victor’s whistling, his response to the bird of night.

  As my friend gazed at the boy, he remembered a few months earlier spending an afternoon in the Parc Monceau, watching children at play. As he watched, he wondered if they merely reminded him of the children he used to play with as a boy, or if he, now an old man and forever distanced from them, were actually seeing those children from his past. He says that at that moment he felt very old. Now Victor was offering him a mysterious opportunity to transcend those melancholy alternatives, to become involved in an unplayed childhood game. Who was singing in the barranca? It didn’t matter whether this voice came from the past or the present.

  The song ended, and for a moment, absently, Victor whistled alone. My friend once again became attentive to what Hugo was saying, to the scope of the ideas unfolding like a fan, but his eyes remained on Victor. A boy with light eyes and dark skin, a boy who still hopped and skipped like a child, as now, in response to a summons that only he heard; as only a moment before when he was accepting his father’s teaching; as he would an instant later, returning to his place in the large chair before the fire. Without interrupting the conversation, Hugo will beckon Victor with a wave of his hand and the boy will go to his father and sit on his lap. Hugo will stroke the boy’s hair and Victor will pat his father’s hand.

  During breakfast Jean told my friend that, as he’d seen, the father and son were unusually close; the death of the mother and the brother had undoubtedly cemented that closeness. My friend recalls then, as he does now, that his own father died at thirty, when he himself was a child of four. Beside his bed in the large bedchamber on the Avenue de Saxe is a photograph of his father taken shortly before his death. He, a man of eighty-three, gazes upon the youth of twenty-nine who had been his father.

  Every night before going to sleep, he gazes at the photograph a long while, he tells me this afternoon in the dining room of the Automobile Club de France, as he told Jean that morning in Cuernavaca at breakfast, before their return to Mexico City and before the sun began its impatient race toward midday.

  In vain my friend looked for the trace of a presence in the barranca. A young servant in sandals and white shirt and pants served the delights of the tropical breakfast, flame-red fruits, tortillas, eggs smothered in cream and tomato and chili, and buns and breads as infinitely varied in savor as in name. The Heredias came down a little later, as the Frenchmen were drinking their second cup of coffee. Victor ate hungrily, rapidly, and asked to be excused to play in the garden that stretched to the edge of the barranca. He skipped away as Heredia said how pleased he and his son were to have met my friend; they had enjoyed the conversation and hoped they would soon meet again.

  “I’m traveling to Paris in September for a Unesco conference,” Hugo said. “Victor will come with me.”

  My friend still does not know why, but he almost asked them not to travel together. However, he realized just
in time, he tells me, that since the preceding evening he had been experiencing a kind of vertigo, his mind racing simultaneously in several directions: he remembered the children in the Parc Monceau who no longer remembered him; he remembered a young man who was father to an old man; he tried to imagine Victor’s dead mother and brother; and also the boy or girl who had been singing in the barranca. But most of all he tried to penetrate Victor’s candid gaze, to become a child again and see through his eyes. In this way he might recapture the imperious innocence and the unanswered questions of his own childhood.

  He was blinded by the sun now climbing the sky. Victor was a white, blurred figure in the glaring depths of the garden beside the barranca. As if with a gaudy flag, the Mexican sky proclaimed its intentions: high noon or nothing. My friend was on the verge of adding one more wrinkle to the travel plans designed to outmaneuver death. He was on the point of asking Heredia not to travel with his son; he almost offered to come himself to pick up the boy and take him back to France.

  He says that everything was resolved, however, as is always the case with him, in a ritual of courtesy, because inevitably courtesy is the only reliable, true, honorable, and sincere means my friend the Comte de Branly can summon to impose order on human events, to offer them the refuge of civilization, to calm that orderly agitation, to exorcise the venomous flowers interwoven with precious jewels.

  He invited the Heredias to stay at his home on the Avenue de Saxe while they were in Paris. It was only a few steps from UNESCO headquarters, he said, shielding his eyes against the savage glare of the sun. It would be a pleasure to welcome them, to renew their friendship, to offer his appreciation, he said, as he searched for his dark glasses to penetrate the thick lime-white light, the blurred landscape, of the garden where Victor was playing.

  He returned to Mexico City that evening. The light faded suddenly, impatient now to cede its dominion to the abrupt nightfall of the high tropics. Resting his chin on his fist, my friend stared at the passing scenery sequestered by darkness. In the reflection of the car window he tried to re-create what he had seen that morning through the blinding sun after he had settled his sunglasses on his nose: the boy Victor on the lawn of the garden beside the barranca, beating Jean’s Indian servant, throwing him to the ground and whipping off his belt to lash him; a tiny feudal lord, master of lives and fortunes.

  3

  The Countess, who never leaves their castle near Cahors, suddenly became ill, and Branly hastened to join her. He left instructions with his chauffeur to meet the Heredias at Roissy airport, and with his Spanish servants to look after his guests in his town house on the Avenue de Saxe. He returned as soon as possible; his train arrived in Paris at eleven in the morning. My friend found a taxi and forty minutes later arrived before the eighteenth-century façade of his residence.

  No one answered his ring. Impatiently, he located the correct key on his key ring and opened the heavy door. Highly irritated, he stalked through the beautiful interior courtyard paved in smooth stone and past the service quarters flanking it, to a short flight of steps leading to the main door of the one-story residence constructed according to the dispassionate principles of the French baroque.

  At the top of the steps he whirled with that imperious gesture of his slender, transparent hands that I have seen so often, transforming the overcoat, casually tossed over his ancient but martial shoulders, into something decidedly impressive, half hussar’s jacket, half bullfighter’s cape. He sought, in vain, a sign of life—the chauffeur, the cook, the valet. Though it was almost noon, his automobile was not in the carriage house.

  He clasped the lapels of his greatcoat under his trembling chin on this deceptively sunny September morning in which a knife edge of air signaled the coming of autumn. He opened the glass door onto a foyer decorated, like the rest of the mansion, in the Empire style favored by the Countess, whose family owed its titles to Bonaparte. My friend, amused, shrugged his shoulders. Being newer, his wife’s furniture was in better condition than his. From his ancestors Branly proudly claimed the house itself, the work of Gabriel and Aubert, a twin to the Hôtel Biron designed by those same architects. When my friend recalls, as he inevitably does, that the Biron mansion now houses the museum where the works of Rodin are collected, he quips that it is therefore unnecessary for him to open his doors to the public; he invites the public to visit the Rodin Museum instead. It is the same as coming to the Avenue de Saxe.

  I told him it was not exactly the same. The public would be missing the gleaming ormolu of the superb collection of Empire candelabra and lyre-shaped clocks, the wooden cheval glass mirror crowned with winged figures and butterfly medallions, the Romagnese bas-reliefs and the spectacular malachite vases, the wedding of bronze, marble, plaster, and silver with amboyna, oak, beech, gilt, and mahogany. Their greatest loss would be the sight of the magnificent clock suspended from an arch of gilded bronze, with a seated woman playing an ornate piano with griffin legs, in a sumptuous mounting of motionless draperies and doors.

  “Motionless, but poisonous,” my friend added on the evening he had honored me by inviting me to his peerless table. “That clock is the work of Antoine-André Ravrio. He fashioned several similar pieces for the royal family. Perhaps that is the only way Hortense de Beauharnais had of airing her musical compositions, as the melody of a clock striking the hours.”

  “A clock may bore,” I said to him, “but surely not kill. I don’t believe in fatal tedium, in spite of the persistent efforts of several of our acquaintances to the contrary.”

  “No,” my friend replied. “In his will, Ravrio bequeathed a sizable sum of money to anyone who could discover a means of protecting his workers against the deadly danger of poisoning resulting from gilding with mercury.”

  “You prove me right. Your home should be open to the public. Rodin can offer no such mysteries.”

  He laughed and said there was more mystery in the gesture of a statue than in the caprice of a queen. That morning my friend heard the metallic melody as he entered the large hall of his mansion. Stroking the gilded bronze, Victor Heredia stood before the figure of the woman seated at the piano.

  “Careful,” my friend said.

  Startled, Victor dropped the key with which he had been winding the clock, and turned to look at my friend. He recovered his aplomb as they shook hands. My friend says he asked the boy about his father and the boy said he would arrive that afternoon.

  “Then you didn’t make the flight together?”

  “No,” Victor replied. “After what happened to my mother and Toño, my father thinks it’s safer for us to travel separately.”

  “Your brother?”

  With clear eyes and an imperceptible smile, Victor nodded and stared at my friend. “I’ve already told Etienne to pick him up at four tomorrow. How elegant! A Citroën with all the extras, and a uniformed chauffeur. That’s class!”

  He laughed, and my friend attempted to smile in response, but for some reason the smile seemed a bit forced.

  “Where are Florencio and José? Didn’t they prepare your breakfast?”

  The boy looked at my friend inquisitively. “Oh yes, yesterday,” he responded with a composure that was beginning to set Branly’s nerves on edge.

  “No, no, no. This morning. Where are they? Why didn’t they come to the door? Where is everyone?”

  Only then, as he turned to look for his servants, did he realize that his entire magnificent collection of candelabra was ablaze, candle after candle, all the bronze ram’s-head bases, the garlands of blindfolded girls whose bodies served as candleholders, the bronze serpents whose fangs fastened on glass shades, the spirit lamp on a side table, the wall sconces in the form of bearded masks, the silver-winged Victories, the innocuous wax on the argentine backs of a pack of hunting hounds.

  “They must be sleeping,” said Victor, quite seriously.

  “At twelve noon!” exclaimed my friend, incredulous in this familiar refuge now transformed by his young visitor
into a forbidden, alien, distant space darkly funereal compared to the September sun outdoors, to the commotion of returning vacationers at the Gare d’Austerlitz, to the sharp contrast between the autumnal breath of an approaching St. Francis’ Day and the St. Martin’s Day hope of a late summer.

  He pulled back the drapes, moved by an annoyance that contrasted sharply with the ostentatious calm of his young guest. As the sun poured in, its rays quelled the brief luminescence of the blazing candles, silver, and bronze.

  Victor smothered a laugh as my friend caught a glimpse of his Spanish servants passing through the entry hall laden with shopping bags overflowing with the clamoring evidence of celery, carrots, tomatoes, and onions. My friend confesses that he, too, smiled. He had envisioned the ashen José and the florid Florencio bound to the foot of the bed, unable to free themselves to tend the wounds of bodies scourged by the feudal Mexican youth, master of lives and fortunes, young lord of gibbet and blade, eager to wreak vengeance on the brutal Spaniards who with blood and fire had conquered the lands of the Indian.

  “Good morning, M. le Comte,” murmured José, looking more and more like a figure from a Zurbarán painting.

  “We’re a little late,” added Florencio, who looked like an exhausted jai-alai player. “There was a power failure this morning before you arrived.”

  Branly nodded with severity, and a little later, lunching with his young friend, said to himself, as now he says to me, that the soundest intelligence is that of one who has survived the tribulations of the prolonged adolescence we call maturity, with its seriousness and its obligations, to regain the authority of childhood.

  “And the proof,” he says, “is that as children we shape our worlds; as adults, the world shapes us. Adolescence is that wretched proving period when we must accept or reject the laws of adults.”