Distant Relations

by Carlos Fuentes

  20

  HUGO HEREDIA

  Qu’on n’entre plus dans la chamber

  D’où doit sortir un grand chien

  Ayant perdu la mémoire

  Et qui cherchera sur terre

  Comme le long de la mer

  L’homme qu’il laissa derrière

  Immobile …

  J.S., “La Chambre Voisine”

  I shall not, M. le Comte, offer unwarranted apologies, nor shall I use your title again. I have not forgotten the lesson you taught me when we were introduced here in Xochicalco last summer. Forgive the social gaucherie of an archaeologist more accustomed to speaking to stones than with men. After all, one who chooses my profession does so because he seriously believes that the stones are alive and that they speak to us.

  That night when we dined together in the house of our mutual friend Jean, I told you that ancient peoples refuse to banish the old ways in favor of the new. This is one example of how stones talk to us if we will listen. Yesterday’s wisdom, and today’s, instead of being cast aside in succession, accumulate in a permanent accretion. All things must be living and present, I told you, as among the Imerina peoples of Madagascar, who conceive of history as two flowing currents: the inheritance of the ears and the memory of the lips.

  I stress this essential tenet of my vocation, because it is important if you are to understand behavior that otherwise you might consider far from rational. Yes, I appeal to you because I know no person more capable of understanding. I have lived among stones. The taluses of Mitla, the friezes of Chichén-Itzá, the terraces of Uxmal, have been more than the site of my professional activity; they are the throne—please forgive the word, but this is how I feel—of a kind of honor regained. Mexico is a land of upheaval, almost always violent, and, in such cases, endowed with a certain epic grandeur; but more constant and cruel and insidious, I can assure you, have been the periods of peaceful upheaval such as those we have known the last sixty years. As a result, the wounds in my country never heal; we never grow the new skin of an aristocracy; we do not have an elite that can close our wounds. The compulsion for upheaval, either periodic, as in the past, or constant, as today, prevents that healing.

  You belong to a society that does not repudiate the virtues of its ancient executioners when they become victims. Your aristocracy has been shot, guillotined, and exiled. But the political, aesthetic, and social culture of France has been zealously guarded. Thus, someone like yourself can enjoy the benefits of a vanished order along with those of the newer republican regime. This is, allow me to say it, not the best of all possible worlds, though it is the better of two possible worlds. There is a difference, though I would be happy if that option existed in my own country. I was thinking about these things when you said the night we dined in Jean’s house in Cuernavaca that Alexandre Dumas tells how Napoleon established an annuity of a hundred thousand écus in the name of the elderly widow of the Duc d’Orléans, whom you remembered, Branly, as the creator of the Parc Monceau. The motivation for his generosity was that in her salon on the Chaussée d’Antin the Duchesse was keeping alive the traditions of an aristocratic society that dated from the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV. Later, Dumas says that the first two hundred and fifty years of a life count only as memory. Would that were so of nations that vaunt their contemporaneity. I thought about your words all through the meal.

  We Heredias of Mexico are what we are. Meat for the gallows, freed from the dungeons of Cádiz and Ceuta in exchange for participating in the conquest of the Indies. I shall not weary you with a detailed genealogy. Ten years after the fall of the Great Tenochtitlán, we had Indian wives and mestizo children in large numbers, along with vast expanses of land. Here, where there was so much land to be had and so many laborers to be enslaved, we could be what we had been unable to be in Spain. Hidalgos with a vengeance, immoderately indolent patricians, apathetic parasites. There was no reason to so much as lift a little finger in the New World, Branly. How then were we to demonstrate a power that like all functions atrophies if it is not exercised? Only with the enervation of appearances and the impunity of cruelty. History was to call this process the encomienda, royal grants of Indians, whole Indian villages, to Spanish colonists; the mita minera, forced Indian labor; peonage. Heredia is the name of many patriarchs, judges, and jailers in the new Hispanic world that survived for three centuries because we convinced that multitude of ragged creatures that they owed their very lives to our paternal protection, and to the consolation of our religion.

  As a boy, I visited a hacienda that had belonged to one of my ancestors. It had been burned by Zapata’s troops during the Revolution. It was a ruin, a ruin in the image and likeness of those who had inhabited it: ugly, black, and cruel. The huts, jails, and presses scattered about the burned-out shell of the old sugar mill spoke to me of a world without grandeur, a world consumed by injustice at the very moment of its apogee. But is this not the legacy of Hispanic peoples: the coexistence of grandeur and decadence?

  I believe that visit shaped my vocation. I grew up and sought the means by which I might assure my place in society. We had fought tenaciously to maintain our position through the capricious regimes of the nineteenth century. The liberal reforms of Juárez dealt us the first blow, cutting us off from our traditional alliance with the Church. But very quickly our situation improved, when, after twenty years spent in inept bumbling in pharmacies, imagine! and legal offices and newspaper editorships, and of adapting badly to something then called “modern life,” the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz created conditions favorable to regaining a portion of our former universe: large landholdings. But a new aristocracy is not forged in thirty years, and when I was born in 1931, my destiny was sealed: find a profession or live by my wits. No other path was open; the Revolution had administered the coup de grâce to the vestiges of the old Mexican oligarchies. From that time forward, Branly, everyone in Mexico, like the impassioned followers of Bonaparte in France, would have a right to everything. Do you not agree that this is the form democratic oppression takes?

  I am telling you this, and what will follow, because I want you to understand more than the complexity of my psychic and historical makeup; I also want you, my cordial and hospitable friend, to be interested in me as a person. Yes, I built my throne on the ruins of the Indian world; you must not be surprised by the paradox. It is time that we false hidalgos, we enervated Creoles, and, of course, we resentful mestizos, from what was once New Spain, at last recognize who we are, recognize that the foundations of this land, its most profound achievement, its ineradicable identity, insignia, and nobility, are to be found in our ancient Toltec, Aztec, and Maya stones. In them I, a grudging professional, a great lord without a fiefdom, a tyrant without slaves, I took refuge. I spoke to them, and they spoke to me. You must believe everything I have told you, Branly. You must devote even more thought to the enormity of the paradox I have outlined. I could not accept that my image was to be found in what Aldous Huxley called the “humpbacked” Spanish colonial architecture of Mexico; and in what had been the seat of our power, the hacienda, I found only the horror I have described. Such was the spiritual victory of the vanquished: I, a Creole in search of lost grandeur, could find it only among the monuments of my victims’ past.

  Professions deform one; archaeology is no exception. I spoke more with the stones than with my wife and my sons, Antonio and Victor. I had to travel constantly and our apartment on Río Garona Street became little more than a pied-à-terre for me. I met my wife Lucie in the French Institute of Latin America, that urban oasis on Río Nazas Street where my entire generation went to learn about film, literature, and, above all, about the civilization we thought it our personal responsibility to sustain during the years France was in eclipse. The first thing Lucie pointed out to me was that everything I told her about my ancestors was marked by that strange love for France which supposedly saves us Latin Americans from our ancient subordination to Spain and our more recent subordination
to the Anglo-Saxon world. France seems like a safe and longed-for haven. Lucie was from one of the families of Barcelonnette in the Basses-Alpes who traditionally emigrated to Mexico. Her family made a fortune there in department stores, and now, as so often happens, she was atoning for the commercial sins of her ancestors by studying history and literature at the Institute. It was natural for us to meet, to fall in love, to marry.

  I owe her a great deal. Unlike me, she found nothing shameful in business enterprises; she had no such pride or pretensions. She complemented my formation, my culture; French reason is a good antidote to Latin American delirium. It is also its incubator, and Lucie delighted in reminding me that my country had fought a revolution for independence because a few men had read Rousseau and Voltaire, an enlightened counterrevolution because a few others had read Comte, and a new intellectual revolution inspired by Bergson. I leave to you your opinion of the success of these ideological transplants. But I confess to you, Branly, that Lucie’s perception, her discipline, her capacity for work, were the goad to one of my own ambitions, my decision to read everything, to know everything, to find the interrelationships of all I had learned, and not to succumb to our century’s gangrenous absurdity, which in the business world, in the very same trade that enriched my wife’s parents—and, because they were grand hidalgos and never learned how to exercise it, impoverished my own—is today translated into mercilessly divorcing the past from the present, with the proposition that the past must always be something dead and we always something new, something different from that much-to-be-scorned past—new, and consequently thirsting for the latest innovation in art, clothing, entertainment, machines. Novelty has become the blazon of our happiness. So we drug ourselves against the realization that our destiny, too, will be death, the moment the future relegates us to the past.

  No, I did not often speak with my family; I communicated to them only the lesson of the stones. I may never have known anything but the stones; this is my guilt, but I have purged it. Lucie applauded the “good lesson” of the stones, as she called it: the sense of the past, the obstinate refusal to sacrifice, to exile the past from a present that is incomprehensible except within the context of the past. This aspect of my work delighted her. But not what she came to call the “bad lesson” of the stones: the conviction that we belonged to a superior caste endowed with innate privileges that entitled us to reclaim the authority usurped from us by a world of parvenus.

  Lucie was highly intelligent, and she feared my attitude, she said, because on our continent oppression went to even greater lengths than in Europe. The Europeans exploited peoples of distant lands and were able, without undue effort, to forget about them. We had our victims in our own homes, in ever-increasing numbers. They are the only palpable ghosts I know, my wife used to say: we see them begging in the streets, sleeping on garbage heaps, daggers of glass crystallizing in their resentful gaze.

  “One day you will feel that guilt, Hugo,” she used to tell me. “That good European conscience has a great deal to do with the remoteness of its victims. The day will come when the presence of the humbled among us will make it impossible to sleep.”

  Antonio was close to his mother and listened to her teachings; Victor was my favorite, and he learned mine. Believe me, Branly, when I say that those were the true and spontaneous motives for the fact that more and more often Victor accompanied me on my constant trips to the work sites. In doing so, he learned more about our country than Antonio, and I cannot deny that I did nothing to extinguish the spark of domination and hatred in his eyes when he saw what he had to see: entire villages of drunken men, women, and children: the men drunk because of the fiesta, the women because of pain, the infants because they suckled alcohol with their milk; the devout humiliation of Mexican churches, the incense haze of indistinguishable misery and faith; the pillage, the cruelty against man that is the watchword of the Mexican countryside. He scorned the people; he admired the stones, and in the latter, the “good lesson,” he coincided with his mother and his brother.

  One night I surprised my two sons as they were playing a strange game. Remember, they shared the “good lesson” of a finely developed respect for the past, and, in truth there is no past without the sense of play that keeps it fresh. They were wagering on something. I felt a shiver when I understood on what. They were wagering on our deaths theirs, and ours.

  “Who do you think will die first?” asked Toño.

  “Most likely it will be Father and me,” said Victor. “You should see the little planes we take in the mountains.”

  “I promise that Mother and I will cry a lot,” Toño answered.

  “Father and me, too,” said Victor.

  I spoke with Lucie about their game. We decided, if decided is the word, to vary our responsibilities. We thought it morbid that the boys should identify their own deaths with that of one of their parents. They were right about one thing, however: the two of us should never travel together and thus expose Victor and Antonio to being orphaned. For my part, I would begin taking Antonio with me on some of the trips to explore the villages in the isolated mountains and barrancas of Mexico. I was an only child. My own parents were dead, and Lucie’s parents, in spite of her efforts to maintain contact and visit them regularly, lived in remote French indifference. We told our friends this was a decision we had made when Victor was born. No one was surprised; some praised our foresight. No one remembered, you see, that occasionally three of us had traveled together—Lucie, one of the children, and I—exposing the other child to being the sole survivor of the family. But if we ourselves forget the logical order of our lives, how can we expect others to remember? In fact, Branly, this is the very essence of my profession: to reverse to some degree that amnesia about ourselves, that oblivion to what we were, to what our parents and our grandparents were, the nothingness that evokes the reluctant phantom that appears to tell us: this is what you were, this is what your people were; you have forgotten. The very mission of a ghost is to rectify the forgetfulness of the living, their injustice toward the dead.

  Our decision to travel separately is common among families today, and Victor was right; the planes in which anthropologists hop from Palenque to San Cristobal, penetrate the sierras of Guerrero, or skim the ravines of Nayarit and Morelos, are as reliable as mosquitoes in a hurricane. Because in Mexico, Branly, even when nature is at rest, it seems to tremble threateningly. Bottomless chasms, slabs of solid basalt, treacherous peaks, the crosswinds of this delirious orography, the unexpected deserts, the thousands of pyramids disguised as innocuous hills. You are looking at them now where we find ourselves this evening.

  Lucie began to travel more with Victor, I with Toño; but, though we never discussed it, the other child remained our true favorite. Toño admired and accepted only the mute beauty of the past, never the voice of its cruel power or its prolongation in the present. One evening in a hotel in Pátzcuaro a young Indian waiter carelessly spilled a glass of tomato juice over the new white guayabera shirt Antonio had put on to dine beside the lake. Imagine what Victor would have said, what he would have done. Toño, on the other hand, laughed, helped the waiter wipe the spilled juice from the floor, and then he himself rinsed the shirt and hung it to dry in the bathroom, giving thanks all the while for the invention of Dacron. In contrast, when Lucie returned from a trip to visit her family in France, she complained about how rude Victor had been to hotel and restaurant employees, especially when he discovered they were—as they so often are—Spanish.

  “They were born to serve me,” he would say, with a trace of arrogant humor.

  I waited for another occasion to eavesdrop on the boys again. The opportunity came just a year ago, when the four of us went to Caracas for a conference on anthropology and had adjoining rooms in the Tamanaco Hotel. The writer and publisher Miguel Otero Silva had invited us to a masked ball in his home. As the hour approached for us to leave, Victor and Antonio thought we were busy with our costumes. This is what I heard them say.<
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  “You were right,” said Victor. “Father doesn’t like to cry.”

  “Then do you want to trade?” his brother asked.

  “If that’s all right with you, Toño, why not?”

  “It makes no difference to me,” said Antonio, with the aplomb befitting his superior fourteen years.

  “Then I choose to die with my father so Mother and you can cry over us, or I choose for you and Father to die together, so Mother and I can cry. The main thing is for Mommy not to die, because she’s the best cryer.”

  They laughed, and I asked myself what Lucie had been crying about, what they had seen, what my sons knew that I didn’t know. There was no chance to clear up this mystery. In the taxi on the way to the ball I touched my wife’s hand and asked her if everything was all right. She said yes, today more than ever before; tonight we should not ask foolish questions, we must dance and be happy. Happy, but uncomfortable, I told her, imprisoned in the gold braid-trimmed uniform of General Bolívar from the time of Venezuela’s war for independence. Lucie, on the other hand, floated into the salon a vision of beauty in her high-waisted, diaphanous Empire gown, long stole, and satin slippers, her hair combed into a tower of cotton-candy curls.

  It was a warm night and the Oteros had decided to hold the party on their incomparable roof garden. As a confirmed traveler, Branly, you know how Caracas hides from its modern ugliness, withdrawing into walled secret gardens, though none, I venture, was as remarkable as theirs, where the play of lights—oblique and direct, soft and intense—seemed to sculpt anew the Henry Moore and Rodin sculptures displayed outdoors in the mild Caracas air.

  From behind the statue of Balzac garbed in the monastic attire he wore when writing emerged a priestly figure. A man of average height, stunted by a sturdy, squarish torso, ennobled by a white mane of leonine hair, a man dressed as a parish priest, with the ubiquitous Venezuelan white-corn arepa in his hand. I heard the murmurs of amazement: had the man come masked as a priest, or was he a priest? Someone said in indignation that the cloth was not an appropriate costume, but either way, though this most unusual guest was wearing black, only his collar was clerical. He approached me at the precise moment the orchestra began to play; Miguel Otero asked my wife to dance and I found myself holding the stubby-fingered hand of the spurious priest.