Distant Relations

by Carlos Fuentes

  Besides, I prefer to think of you in terms of the aura of mystery that surrounded you the day you entered my life and precipitated the chain of events. That was the day Victor found half the artifact. I associate you above all with that moment. Something created to last, a piece of art intended for something other than commerce or the bedazzlement of the senses or the celebration of the transient, an object emblematic of that presence of the past that has given meaning to my life, was about to be restored to its pristine beauty and unity. Amends were about to be made—at great cost, but amends, nonetheless—for an angry, stupid, barbaric, capricious act of destruction.

  I don’t know, Branly, what you may have forgotten about yourself, about your past, your family line—obviously, considerably better documented than our own. With better reason, what have we Heredias forgotten? Now I spend entire nights trying to evoke things I no longer know: a desired violation, all the transgressions of the flesh, the ambition, money, power, and caste that shaped and kneaded the lives of people like the Heredias are forgotten, yes, perhaps because we couldn’t live with the constant consciousness of the lives we have sown, the fortunes we have usurped, the misery on which those of us who are anything in the New World have built our being. Lucie will be proved right. A black utopia devoured by a bloody epic; you see what has happened to that dream of a rediscovered Eden, and its noble savage.

  In contrast, an object is never cruel, Branly, it has no passions, it harms no one; rather, it gives testimony to permanence, glimmering with the twin lights of a yesterday and a today indistinguishable in art.

  “Who was just here, who were you talking to?” I asked, brutally shaking my son awake in our bedroom in the Hotel Ancira.

  “André,” my son replied. “André…”

  I don’t care about his name. He was a child with us, and will grow old with us. I hope that, thanks to me, my son will enjoy whatever time he has with that boy he so fervently desired to see, or be, or have, I don’t know which verb to use, as I, thanks to the boy, will enjoy my time with Lucie and Antonio.

  And if I have understood correctly, one day the four of us will be together, because somehow Victor will be with us again. Then we can all be partners in mourning.

  But everything depends on your understanding the words. You had a past, but you do not remember it. Try to recapture it in the little time you have left, or you will lose your future.

  This is the obligation shared by all of us who were actors in this story. I pass it on to you, Branly, hoping you will accept it as proof of my gratitude. It is because I am grateful that I have told you everything I know—no more, no less. I know I am exposing myself to a terrible fate if you betray me by repeating what I have told you. But, between gentlemen, that question doesn’t arise.

  You see, Branly, you and I are bound together by a shared rejection of the death of the past, the present of civilizations. “Heredia” and I were bound by the Pragmatic Sanction, if I may call it that, of the same attitude: our will to serve the dead, so that someday the living will serve us. Through me as intermediary, you and that demon were finally allied in a common goal: the recovery of an angel.

  21

  When Branly finished his long account of the words of Hugo Heredia in Xochicalco during the vigil of All Saints’, its final meaning, like a ball of paper tossed into the sea, was slow to sink to the depths of my consciousness. First, it had to be saturated with water and sun, the vapors of iodine and salt, the agents that allow us to convert what is said into what is known, and what is known into something more: the fate contained in every word, as well as what, prophetically, it announces.

  Consequently, the only question that then occurred to me to ask Branly was whether the boy Victor had told his father anything more at their first meeting after being separated by “Heredia” in the Hotel Ancira. But my friend seemed not to hear me; I sensed from his faraway gaze, his murmuring lips, that he had not completely returned from the mournful celebration in Mexico.

  I dared not interrupt his strange self-absorption. When he did speak, the words did not sound his own, it was as if Hugo Heredia were still speaking through the voice of my friend.

  “Everything depends on your understanding the words. You had a past, but you do not remember it. Try to recapture it in the little time you have left, or you will lose your future.”

  Again his eyes focused on a point near me.

  “Branly.” I spoke with a certain anxiety. “Are you all right? Is something the matter?”

  “It was the eve of All Souls’ Day, the day of the dead,” he said, once more in his own voice.

  “I know. You told me.”

  He had told Hugo Heredia that eve of the departed, in Xochicalco, that he had come to hear the truth from his lips because he had greatly admired him when they met, and he could not believe that a man of Heredia’s intellectual caliber was a barbarian.

  “I had to face him, and force him to face me. I had to know his reasons for acting as he did, for participating in the trickery of that savage “Heredia,” for bribing my servants and deceiving the authorities of my country with his report of the drowning of his son on the Normandy coast. He could, my dear friend, tell me nothing I did not already know about the vulgarity of that man you have glimpsed on a carnival night in Caracas, in a tasteless silver-painted apartment, a hotel in Monterrey, and, finally, his own domain, the Clos des Renards.”

  Branly’s eyes clouded at the mention of Enghien-les-Bains. He spoke somewhat incoherently, as if to another person, of the circles, the mute laments, the gray wounds of that tormented city “Heredia” seemed to carry with him, opening the chasms that are the scars of this story, in order to give voice to an intolerable universe of harsh sighs, strange tongues, appalling gibberish, tones of rage, and fields of ashen misery beneath a sky barren of stars.

  I knew that my friend was still quoting, reproducing the voices and murmurs associated with the spiritual journey of the night spent amid murmurs and voices on a hill alight with blind lights. What more had Hugo Heredia said, I pressed him. Finish the story, Branly. What did he say?

  My friend looked at me as if he scarcely recognized me.

  “Hugo Heredia? Hugo Heredia told me that he was passing on the story to me, asking me to accept it as proof of his gratitude. ‘I know I am exposing myself to a terrible fate if you betray me by repeating what I have told you. But, between gentlemen, that question doesn’t arise,’ he said that night.”

  At last Branly’s words settled into the depths of my consciousness. I did what I had never done before because of my affection, my respect, for this eighty-three-year-old man. I seized him by the shoulders, I shook him violently, I told him to tell me the truth. Were those the words Hugo Heredia spoke to Branly when he told him the story, or were they words Branly meant for me today, here in the solarium of the Automobile Club pool?

  My action was motivated by sudden terror. I didn’t want to be the one who knew, the last to know, the one who receives the devil’s gift and then cannot rid himself of it. I didn’t want to be the one who receives and then must spend the rest of his life seeking another victim to whom to give the gift, the knowing. I did not want to be the narrator.

  The watery paleness disappeared from Branly’s eyes. He hadn’t even noticed my violence. I felt ashamed. I removed my hands from his shoulders, but I did not avert my eyes.

  “Branly, do you hear me?”

  “Perfectly, my friend.” And he nodded with absolute composure.

  “Then tell me. Tell me the truth. I’ve listened very carefully. Now I must know what you knew before you talked with Hugo Heredia. I want to know what you knew but haven’t told me. I asked whether all the small coincidences, the implicit analogies, had escaped your attention.”

  My friend started to rise from his chair, then sank back.

  “Yes, the portrait of my father beside my bed; the clock made by Antoine-André Ravrio, in whose workshop several men died from contact with the mercury used in gildi
ng; the Empire-robed woman playing the harpsichord … I nearly destroyed both, my friend. I, too, suspected that in some mysterious way the photo and the clock with its gilded bronze figure linked my destiny, much against my will, with the story of the Heredias.”

  “Why didn’t you, Branly?”

  Before replying, my friend shrugged. “I did, it is true, finally see the relationships among certain objects. What I still do not know is why those relationships exist. You see, I too, have lost the power of analogy, of seeing that correspondence among all things that for Hugo Heredia was the most meaningful symbol of our early cultures. Perhaps one of my ancestors in the fourteenth century, with no difficulty, understood the homologous relationship among God, a hart with burgeoning antlers, and the hunter’s moon. By the sixteenth century, another ancestor would not have known this; he could not see the correspondence among these things. Art, you see, and especially the art of narration, is a desperate attempt to reestablish analogy without sacrificing differentiation. This is what Cervantes, Balzac, Dostoevsky accomplished. Proust was no different. Surely no novel can escape that terrible urgency.”

  Branly added that the essence of every work of art is that the solution of its enigma creates a new enigma, and he quoted the poet René Char saying that the time is approaching when the only questions left to ask are those that must remain unanswered.

  Again I noticed Branly’s urge to get up from his chair. But I was not disposed to be silenced by a few literary flourishes from my friend. “Since we’re speaking of Cervantes, I should tell you that you have always reminded me of that paradigm of courtesy, the gentleman in green, Don Diego de Miranda, who offered hospitality to Don Quijote when everyone else denied it. But didn’t you outdo yourself with the Heredias? Understand, Branly, I am not reproaching you.”

  “A reproach is the last thing I need.” My friend laced his fingers beneath his thin, amicable lips.

  “I agree. But you did receive them with more than ordinary hospitality…”

  “I do not regret that,” Branly interrupted, without looking at me.

  “Why?” My question was impertinent.

  Branly did not shift his position, he merely let his hands fall to his lap. He told me he was indebted to the Heredias for three things. He had dreamed about a woman he had loved in the past, and though he could not identify her, he had experienced emotions from a time when being hopelessly in love was enough to make one happy. And he had recaptured the imperious innocence, the unanswered questions, of his childhood. “Do you remember my fear when I realized how near I had come to refusing young Victor’s invitation the time he turned my salon into a sumptuous cavern of blazing candles, silver, and bronze? I swore then I would never refuse any of Victor’s requests, for they were the same as those of my own childhood. And, you see, I was right.”

  “And your third debt?” I asked, hoping to hasten the conclusion of Branly’s story.

  He looked at me strangely, saying that, after all, it was I who had guessed and expressed that debt with precision. Many years ago, he should have taken that extra step in the Pare Monceau. Seventy years was a long time, but finally he had held out his hand, he had returned the ball to the melancholy child who watched from behind the beveled windows of the house on the Avenue Vélasquez.

  “I do not know why I feel that the sins in this story, if sins they are, are those of omission, of absence, more than action and presence. Francisco Luis de Heredia may have been the one person who acted, even though he deceived himself, believing his efforts could wound, humiliate, avenge, decide the course of events. None of the others, no; things happened because no actions were taken. I believe, my dear friend, that I have atoned for my childhood sin of omission. If the boy to whom I did not offer my hand in the Pare Monceau was named André, that child now, thanks to me, through my mediation—because I invited the Heredias to my home in Paris, because I played the game of names in the telephone book, because I drove Victor to the Clos des Renards, and because in the final act I did not interrupt the confluence of events—that boy, I say, will never be alone.”

  I made no comment, but Branly could see my expression. He turned away, his gaze fixed on the distant horizon beyond the glass walls of the solarium, the robed and slippered club members drinking in the bar, attended by young waiters.

  “Do not believe that because I am grateful my conscience is entirely clear,” he said, avoiding my eyes.

  “No,” I replied. “Of course not. But I am surprised that though you feel you owe so much to the Heredias you have violated the obligation you accepted so solemnly.”

  “Obligation?” said Branly, turning to look at me, and laughing dryly. “You jest, my friend.”

  I did not allow myself to be annoyed by my friend’s cool, haughty tone. I held his eyes, in fact offering him my silence if he preferred it, letting him know my curiosity was not as strong as my respect for him and what he considered his secret. But as his eyes met mine, pride blazed even more brightly. I had not expected this.

  “After listening to you, I am certain of one thing,” I persisted. “This story should never have been known by any except those who lived it. Why have you told me? You promised not to tell it to anyone. You have broken that promise. Why? If seventy years ago you erred in denying friendship to a lonely boy, you have atoned for it today by erring anew. Will you have time to atone for this new sin, Branly?”

  With this, Branly sprang to his feet. “What right do you have to speak to me in that tone?” he asked.

  “The right that comes from being the guardian of the Heredias’ story, and, because of it, committed to the pact of silence you have violated this afternoon.”

  “Do not delude yourself,” he replied with icy pride. “There is something you have not understood, my friend, which is that the real story of the Heredias is not finished.”

  “Do you mean that what you have told me isn’t true?” I asked, my exasperation mounting.

  “The events may be true.” Branly sighed quietly. “But the essential truth is hidden, the hatred of Hugo Heredia for his son Victor. Victor hoped his father and his brother would die, so he would be left to weep with his mother. And, too, Victor hated the stones; he injured the past Hugo venerated, and, at least according to Hugo, capriciously destroyed the perfect object he found at the ruins of Xochicalco. Hugo Heredia despised his son when he realized that Victor had not learned his lesson. He scorned men, but he did not love the stones. He did not deserve to be the heir of the Heredias.”

  Branly paused a moment, and looked at me with something akin to compassion.

  “Allow me to continue,” he said. “I have been disloyal, if that is how you want to define it, to a cruel man motivated by hatred and scorn for mankind, a hatred redeemed in his own mind by his love for the past. On the other hand, I have been faithful to the two boys who were reunited for reasons that escape my logic and his. I offered them my hand. I can know no more. Hugo Heredia wanted to condemn his son to the past. By telling you the story that should have remained untold, I have taken the responsibility for damning Hugo Heredia. He himself said it: his life depended on my silence. You and I do not matter; what is important is to destroy Hugo Heredia and save the boys. I told him that as we said goodbye, before Jean’s driver took me from Xochicalco to Cuernavaca. I am at peace. The last time I saw Hugo Heredia, he was barely visible in the dying glow of the candles of that yellow night. You see, my friend, I could not help but notice among the shadows certain faces that brought me nearer to the fulfillment of my desire, the faces of young and old gathered on that candlelit, flower-covered hill, men and women and children gazing at Hugo Heredia with secret, long-buried hatred. Patient crimes, my friend.”

  “And the other Heredia, the old man?”

  “He had no reason to hate me. I recognized him. He got what he wanted.”

  “Forgive my stupidity; what did he want?”

  “The child was born, don’t you see?”

  He removed his bathrobe and to
ssed it on the chair. His body was firm, his pale flesh revealed few signs of age except the vivid tracery of blue veins. I watched my friend Branly, clad in blue bathing trunks, walk toward the pool, and something in me argued that I owed him an apology; but the fact that I had learned the story of the Heredias gnawed at me like a strange malady, a tumor in my imagination. I did not want to be the last to know the story, and even though my imagination was racing with fear, I did not know why the knowing burned me like the reunited halves of that object Branly had touched in the Citroën as Victor and André made it whole.

  Branly walked toward the pool, and I followed, admiring how completely he had recovered his military bearing. He reached, before me, the fiber matting that rings the enormous, olympic-sized pool notable for a beauty both palatial and bucolic. The pool of the Automobile Club de France should not be reserved for its members—wealthy financiers, government officials, businessmen—but for nymphs and satyrs. Its green mosaic walls suggest a sylvan glen, the golden rim a Roman bath. The cascade of crystalline waters spilling from a seashell-shaped fountain would transport us to ancient times were it not for the strange construction that shatters this heraldic enchantment like the broad stroke of a fountain pen on medieval papyrus: an iron catwalk that spans the pool some nine or ten meters above its surface, near the dome of the skylight that in the daytime illuminates this extraordinary pool sunk in the heart of Paris between the Place de la Concorde and the Rue St.-Honoré, the Hôtel de la Marine and the Hôtel Crillon.

  I watched Branly dive into the pool and begin to swim with measured strokes. He was alone in the pool and the water welcomed him with unusual concentration; only he broke its stillness, but, in turn, only he offered himself to the water, delivered himself to its tranquillity. Like the pool and its bridge, water and steel, my friend, I knew by now, was living in a dual state of receptivity and hermeticism that accentuated both his generosity toward others and the exacerbated ritual of his idiosyncrasies.