Distant Relations

by Carlos Fuentes

  It was Victor’s idea to look up our names in the telephone directories of the towns we visited. The two Hugo Heredias, the half-dozen Victor Heredias, in the Mexico City phone book created a certain amused excitement, the first I had detected in my son for a long time. The novelty of the game needed no justification but this: pretended surprise, a shared laugh. In Mérida, however, the fact that there was but one Victor Heredia in the directory was a temptation: we called him, he laughed with us, we hung up. In Puebla the game grew more complex; Victor proposed that the loser should give the winner a prize.

  “And who will determine the prize?” I asked with a smile.

  Victor, unsmiling, replied: “The one who wins, of course.”

  In Puebla there was only one Heredia in the directory, a Hugo.

  “My prize will be for us to speak normally about your mother and your brother. It’s been more than a year now, and we’ve never mentioned them. Don’t you think it’s important for us to begin remembering them?”

  Victor did not reply. We called the Puebla Hugo Heredia. He growled at us in a hoarse voice, and hung up.

  “Have you noticed, Father? It’s always old men who answer.”

  “Well, we could bet on whether the next Victor will be young and the next Hugo old.”

  Victor laughed and said that I wasn’t old; I replied that when one is twelve, anyone over thirty seems as old as the tomb.

  “But some people never grow old.”

  “Who are these fortunate ones?” I spoke lightly.

  “The dead.” My son’s voice was grave. “Antonio will never grow old.”

  Jean had spoken of you often, Branly. In UNESCO, many people I respect know you. I have enjoyed your spontaneous, perhaps excessive, hospitality. I have seen the world that surrounds you. I know your interests. I have leafed through the books in your library, read what you have underlined in a few books more affectionately abused than others: Lamartine, Supervielle, Balzac. That is why I know I would offend you if I asked you to be discreet (worse, silent) in this matter. I should say nothing more. A true secret is one that is not told as a secret, but is kept so as not to lose the friendship of the person who told it, whether or not he knows.

  You could say, with justification, that you didn’t solicit my story. That is true. It is no less true that among gentlemen the things that must be said will not be repeated. You will tell me that I am mistaken to speak, that pride is silent. I will have to ask your forbearance, Branly, and say that I am swallowing my pride to apologize. We have used your name, your house, your automobile, your chauffeur, in carrying out a pact whose consequences, even today, I cannot accurately foresee. This is why I must speak, and also why I must ask you to tell no one what I say. I will explain. In everything I have said until now, it is implicit that it is not necessary to ask you not to repeat it. But what I am going to tell you now demands a silence which if violated would violate an agreement my life depends on. So, you see, I am telling you these things because you deserve an explanation; there is no other reason. If what I have told you previously is accurate, and verifiable, what I am about to add is open to any interpretation. Even I, who lived it, do not understand it. Am I telling you these things to have you share in my amazement, my doubt, my perplexity? Possibly. It is also possible that I would never have spoken a word of this if you had not sought me, exposing yourself to my violence or my betrayal in the same way that in receiving you I exposed myself to yours. I am trying to understand, as I see you here tonight, while evening begins to fade and the candles of the night vigil for the dead begin to flicker; you deserve my words, as I deserve your silence.

  In Monterrey we found one Victor Heredia in the directory. My son called him from our room in the Hotel Ancira. Victor put his hand over the mouthpiece so the man couldn’t hear him, and said: “He says he remembers everything.”

  I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. I took the phone. I told the man who I was. A voice replied that he was glad to have our call, he had been expecting it for some time, and he invited us to come to tea in his apartment across from the Bishopric in the old part of that city shadowed, in the past as today, by a barbaric sun filtering through the dust. Monterrey does not inspire confidence; it is too indifferent to its own ugliness, as if the city existed only temporarily, in order for its grotesque oligarchy to make money and carry it off to heaven. That may be why I didn’t tell my son about Victor Heredia’s invitation. It was Victor, because he was the winner, who asked me to take him to meet his namesake. He asked in a tone that implied that if I denied him this request I would jeopardize the fragile edifice of our games and, consequently, our mutual trust. Our reviving affection, Branly.

  I didn’t tell him about the invitation. We arrived without warning, as Victor told you the evening the three of us were having tea in your home on the Avenue de Saxe, do you remember? But there was no surprise on the face of the man who received us that afternoon in a run-down apartment tastelessly adorned with silver paint and shabby furniture from the thirties, the kind one still sees in France in the Galeries Barbès.

  I was the one who was surprised. I recognized the man who had appeared from behind Balzac’s statue in a garden in Caracas while my beautiful Lucie danced in her swirling white gown. The surprise Victor detected on Heredia’s face must have been surprise at my surprise. Victor’s agitation that afternoon in your house, Branly, when I denied having gone with him to Heredia’s apartment in Monterrey, was the predictable alarm of one who does not wish to be left alone in a decision which, nevertheless, ultimately excludes the possibility of being shared.

  Yes, I recognized the man from the garden that night in Caracas, even though this “Heredia” was not exactly like the other man; he merely reminded me of him. I had sufficient presence of mind to tell myself that this must have been what the man meant when he characterized himself as a specialist in memories. I have described the moment of our arrival at Heredia’s apartment. An instant later, the old man, who received us wearing bedroom slippers and a shabby white quilted bathrobe, and was holding a cup of Mexican corn-gruel atole in his hand, himself pretended great surprise, and asked whether we were the long-lost relatives that always come swarming out of the woodwork like termites when they scent the death of an elderly rich relative.

  You will say when you read this that my son Victor was telling the truth, that it was I who lied. No. Please try to understand something very difficult to explain. We were both telling the truth, both Victor and I. Neither of us lied. He went alone, and we went together. “Heredia” was aware of my surprise when he recognized me, but he pretended surprise with that nonsense about poor relatives. And this happened, or, rather, the two things happened, Branly, in the wink of an eye, instantaneously, in that apartment with its splintered floors and silver paint, where, through dirty lace curtains, one could see the squat, gray, crumbling, graceless buildings of Monterrey. A presence was succeeded by a nonpresence, an attitude by its opposite, an affirmation by its negation, I by him. “Heredia”—he looking at me, I looking at him—standing there with his cup of atole in his hand, controlled the conversation, Branly; as he spoke to one of us, he excluded the other, not only from his words but from his very presence. I realized this only later when in the most tentative and uncertain way I asked Victor whether he remembered something “Heredia” had told me that afternoon. Victor said no, staring at me with curiosity.

  I didn’t ask any more. I knew, too, that I hadn’t heard what “Heredia” told Victor. Again I felt the chill this man had brought to my life; I imagined, Branly, a force of infinite distance. The name “Heredia” was the name of a chaotic isolation that merged, and separated, all things. While “Heredia” was talking to me, I saw in my son’s eyes the same cruel nonpresence that had frightened me at the cockfight of San Marcos; I was sure Victor was somewhere else, and that my eyes, when “Heredia” was speaking to Victor, condemning me to my own solitude, were not very different. What did Victor and “Victor Heredia” say
to one another that I couldn’t hear? What pact did they seal, Branly? We will never know with any certainty, because you can never know more than I am telling you. But my intuition tells me that in those moments Victor ceased to be mine; he passed into the hands of “Heredia,” and because I loved my poor son, I had to follow him wherever that devil led.

  What did “Heredia” say to me? He used fewer words than I will need, Branly, to repeat his terrible offer. We had something in common: the secret desire to resurrect our dead, We cannot forget them. The living must serve the dead; there are certain things the dead cannot do. But as we serve them, we must be sure that we ourselves will be served at our deaths. You and I spoke of imperfectly restoring a past; those were my words, but “Heredia” spoke them that afternoon as he offered my son a choice of atoles, chocolate or strawberry, accompanied by powdered-sugar-sprinkled crullers.

  “Don Hugo, may I offer you something a little more substantial?”

  There was something gross about his courtesy.

  I said no, I didn’t want anything. Not even what he had to offer? A drink? Oh, no. He laughed. My wife. My son, Antonio. No, not for nothing. He, “Heredia,” needed people in exchange. His problem was considerably more complex, if he might put it that way; while I desired the return of persons who had lived, he required the materialization of someone who had never been. Did I understand what he was saying? I had to say that I did not, and something that had been holding me there—all this happened within a few minutes, not more than five or six, I’m sure—was shattered. I thanked “Heredia” for the tea—which had turned out to be atole. I told him we had wanted to satisfy my son’s curiosity and that now we must leave.

  “Come back any time you like,” said “Heredia,” patting Victor’s head.

  “I don’t think so. This was merely a whim of my son’s. A game.”

  “Ah, but he won’t be coming alone. My dealings are with you, Don Hugo. Think over what I said. I will see you tonight at your hotel.”

  This time I said nothing. Something prevented me from mocking him in Monterrey, as I had mocked him in Caracas. I nodded, took Victor’s hand, and left without further word.

  That night, I tucked Victor in and, in spite of myself, went down to the bar. What would you have done, Branly, after such a day, so rich in chaotic impressions? Is there anyone you have forgotten and would like to have back? Then think about the things I pondered during the hours following our meeting with “Heredia”: I am forgetting Lucie and Antonio, that is inevitable; soon they will be a vague memory recalled only with effort, the aid of a photograph, the prod of a sudden scent. On the other hand, Victor is here. I don’t have to remember him.

  Why doesn’t Victor help me remember? I have asked him so often. I felt an overwhelming hatred for my living son.

  That was the very question “Heredia” asked me that night. He was sitting near the bar at a table beneath the frosted-glass mirrors from the early years of the century, preserved there by an appreciation of the past rare in Monterrey. The large blades of the ceiling fans failed to ruffle the abundant white mane of this man with the fine features and graceless body, tonight wearing a yellow corduroy suit too heavy for the climate of Monterrey and a ridiculous celluloid collar, with not even a tie to cover flagrantly bared bone buttons, Why, he said, why not let Victor help me remember? Victor is capable of remembering everything. He is living; with the proper complement, Don Hugo, you could see all your theses fully realized: a living past, actual, irrevocable. Victor, and someone else; Victor, united with another. Together they will have that memory; they will be that past. Victor will have more life than his dead brother; he will remember Antonio, as if he were still alive. But he will also live his dead brother’s life; he will remember what Antonio knows because he is dead. What is needed? A perfect space, Don Hugo, an ancient space where my dead and yours can meet through the living young Victor.

  “A new brother for Victor,” said “Heredia” in the Ancira bar. “That is what I am offering.”

  He raised his glass, a Veracruz mint julep, in a silent toast. He waited for me to do the same.

  “What’s on your mind, Don Hugo?” asked “Heredia,” his glass still held high.

  “A few months ago, in a fit of rage, Victor broke an artifact we found at some ruins,” I replied despondently. “I was just thinking that what you are offering is to a degree what I wanted then, though I didn’t realize it until this minute. And do you know what that was? I wanted the halves of that object to be rejoined; I wanted their wholeness to become a part of art, of history, of the past, of culture, of anything you can name.”

  “Does that mean you accept my pact?”

  “I mean that, as an act of good faith on your part, I would accept the restoration of the object my son destroyed.”

  “Would it be enough if you found half?”

  I replied that it would. It would offer renewed hope that the object would be whole again. He said that Victor would find the lost half at Xochicalco; that would be the guarantee the other half would be found later, that the object would be restored.

  “And what am I to do when my son finds half of what he destroyed?”

  “From that moment on, everything will proceed in a manner I would not want to call fatalistic; no one likes to use that word. Let us say, in an orderly sequence of events, eh? One thing will follow another. You, Don Hugo, will understand what is happening; you will always make the correct choice, I am sure of that.”

  He rambled on, telling me stories about his family, which had lived in different parts of the Antilles. I became increasingly confused, for there were glaring inconsistencies in his stories, none of the dates coincided, and, finally, I wondered if the man with the stubby fingers and pale eyes wasn’t simply selecting names and dates at random to fabricate the genealogy that best served his purpose. He mentioned a number of names of his family, and of persons I assumed were family friends. I heard, though I really couldn’t follow the thread, stories about a certain Francisco Luis and his two wives, a French merchant named Lange, and a mulatto nurse. I never understood whether this “Heredia” was the son of Francisco Luis’s first wife—a physiological impossibility, for that would mean I was talking with a man who was more than a hundred and sixty years old—or the second: even then, he would have been born sometime between 1850 and 1900, when Heredia’s second wife died—at what age I don’t know. Nevertheless, he insisted on referring to his father’s first wife as “Mother.”

  “Did you know Mademoiselle Lange?” I dared ask.

  “I spent nine months in her belly,” he smiled disagreeably, “aware of every sip that passed the dear lady’s lips.”

  “Where were you born? Where were you christened?” I asked in a neutral voice.

  “That’s of no importance,” he said defensively.

  “But it is,” I persisted, in a conversational tone. “How were you christened?”

  At that moment, Branly, “Heredia” shed all semblance of fraud or grotesqueness. He stared at me with a terrible expression, which I had the sense to recognize as a strange kind of sorrow, totally alien to me. Why alien? I answered my own question. I have lived life. My only regrets are that at times I made the wrong choices; I celebrate the times I chose well; I lament the things that are lost to me, especially my dead wife and son; I can laugh a little at my setbacks, at the passing years themselves; I lament, celebrate, and laugh at my own death, which I accept because I have always known it could not be avoided, and because I have been convinced that to have lived a little, like Toño, or a lot, as I have—don’t you agree, Branly, you who have lived so long and so well?—death is a small price to pay. I thought about my dead wife, our nights together, her words of love.

  No. “Heredia” had known none of this, and because I knew what my life had been, I knew that the life of my companion that night in the bar of the Hotel Ancira was defined by the absence of these things. That’s why I think I understood his next words, spoken with disturbing ove
rtones of self-pity shocking in a man in his position and with his intentions.

  “Have I been forgotten? You tell me, Don Hugo. Does anyone remember me?”

  I didn’t know how to respond to such obvious self-commiseration. “Heredia” himself must have realized he was making a fool of himself, for he added: “Tant pis, mon ami; so much the worse for the person who forgets. I will see to it that I’m remembered.”

  He sucked noisily at the dregs of his rum-and-mint drink, and asked me to lead him to the room where Victor was sleeping. We went up, but as I unlocked the door, this heavily built man pushed past me and slammed the door in my face, and when I began to beat on the door and ring the bell with indignation, I heard “Heredia” ’s voice through the chinks of the polished mahogany door.

  “Don’t interrupt me, Don Hugo. Come back in half an hour. I’ll be finished by then. Everything depends on your leaving me alone. Please. Do it for your son. And never tell anyone what happened between us. Do it for your son.”

  I stopped pounding at the door, and stepped back. But I did not abandon my vigil in the hotel corridor. I counted the minutes on my watch. I waited five minutes past the thirty minutes. Again I knocked at the door, calling to “Heredia” to come out, as he had promised. The door opened at my touch. I went in and found my son asleep. He was alone. I never saw “Heredia” again.

  You know the rest of the story, Branly. I told you that in the Ancira bar that night “Heredia” mentioned names of his family and people connected with his family. The names meant nothing to me at the time. But I was startled when Jean introduced you that day in Xochicalco. Your name rang a bell; “Heredia” had spoken of you. I swear I’ve tried to remember in what context; my impressions are as vague as “Heredia” ’s references, Branly: a house of ill repute frequented by the French army in Mexico; a ravine; a woman in a shallow grave; a park in Paris; a window; a boy. Does all this mean anything to you? I haven’t been able to make any sense of it.