Distant Relations
Authors: Carlos Fuentes
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Contents
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For my friend Luis Buñuel, in his eightieth year:
“Ce qui est affreux, c'est ce qu'on
ne peut pas imaginer.ӉM.P.
LA CHAMBRE VOISINE
Tournez le dos à cet homme
Mais restez auprès de lui
(Ecartez votre regard,
Sa confuse barbarie),
Restez debout sans mot dire,
Voyez-vous pas qu'il sépare
Mal le jour d'avec la nuit,
Et les cieux les plus profonds
Du coeur sans fond qui l'agite?
Eteignez tous ces flambeaux
Regardez: ses veines luisent.
Quand il avance la main,
Un souffle de pierreries,
De la circulaire nuit
Jusqu'Ã ses longs doigts parvient.
Laissez-le seul sur son lit,
Le temps le borde et le veille,
En vue de ces hauts rochers
Où gémit, toujours caché,
Le coeur des nuits sans sommeil.
Qu'on n'entre plus dans la chambre
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, entre ses mains
Raides et définitives.
JULES SUPERVIELLE
Â
THE ADJACENT ROOM
Turn your back to that man
But do not leave him
(Avert your gaze,
Its dim barbarity),
Stand without saying a word,
Don't you see how nearly he fails
To distinguish day from night,
And the farthest skies
From the bottomless heart which troubles him?
Extinguish all these torches.
Look: his veins glisten.
When he extends his hand,
A breath of precious stones
From the circular night
To his long fingers flows.
Leave him alone on his bed,
Time tucks him in, watches over him,
Within sight of those high rocks
Where, forever hidden, moans
The heart of sleepless nights.
Let no one enter the room
From which a huge dog will emerge
Having lost its memory
And it will search the earth
And the ocean's breadth
For the man it left behind.
Motionless, between hands
Both hard and decisive.
1
My friend's pallor was not unusual. With the passing of the years his skin had become fused to his facial bones and his gesturing, slender hands had become translucent.
I had seen him shortly after his return from Mexico, which seemed to have somewhat dissipated his resemblance to a civilized phantom. Sun had given him density, fleshly presence. I almost didn't recognize him.
The return of his habitual pallor should have made him look entirely familiar, but there was something different about his manner. When I saw him alone at his table in the club dining room, I walked over to greet him and to suggest we have lunch together.
“Only if you join me here,” he said, glancing toward the other tables, some distance from his.
His eyes were lost in depths far more profound than that of the vast shadowy dining room. The preferred tables, placed beside a large balcony overlooking the Place de la Concorde, escape the gloom. As these are the best in the club, it is only natural that they be allotted to the senior members. I accepted his invitation for what it was, a courtesy to a younger friend.
“I haven't seen you since you returned from your trip,” I said.
He continued studying his menu as if he hadn't heard me. He was leaning forward slightly, his back to the windows. The bluish light of that early afternoon in November illuminated his bald head and fringe of gray hair. Abruptly, he looked up, but not toward me. He turned and stared into the distance beyond the square, toward the bank of the river.
“Order for me,” he asked me as the waiter approached. He spoke with the sense of urgency that now seemed characteristic of all his actions. I wondered if he had always behaved this way, and I had simply not noticed it before. His small, darting eyes measured the square, focusing for a long moment on the tree-lined promenade of the Tuileries.
“Well,” he said finally, after we had been served our wine and his restless eyes had found repose in its depths. “I had made a wager with myself, wondering if anyone would come over to speak to me, if I would find anyone to tell my story to.”
I looked at him, bewildered. “I'm not just
anyone,
Branly. I'd always thought we were friends.”
He touched my hand lightly, apologized, and said that when it was all over he would have to take stock of his life; it had all been very exhausting for a man of his age.
“No,” he added, “I shall not resort to clichés, I will not say that at eighty-three I have become sated. Only those who have never lived say that.”
He threw back his head, laughing, and in the same movement raised his hands, saying it was mere pretense to believe oneself immune to surprise. Perhaps, more than pretense, it was simple stupidity. Only a deep sense of insecurity would force a man to suffer such a foolish loss as that of his innate capacity to be amazed. He said death conquers only those who are not surprised by it; life as well. He blinked repeatedly, as if the light, less pale than the face of my friend, was painful to him.
“Until the time of my trip, I believed that I had achieved a certain equilibrium,” he said, shielding his eyes with his fingers.
Then, with a graceful and lighthearted wave of his hand meant to dispel any hint of solemnity, he smiled. “My God! I have experienced every kind of age, golden or wretched, every kind of decade, roaring or mute, two world wars, a leg wound at Dunkirk, four dogs, three wives, two castles, a dependable library, and a few friends like yourself, equally dependable.”
He sighed; he pushed aside his wineglass and then did something extraordinary. He turned his back to me, swung his chair around and stared out toward the Place de la Concorde, as if he were speaking to it. I chose to think that in this rather bizarre fashion he was addressing me, wishing to emphasize the unusual nature of our meeting as well as of the story he had alluded to. Finally (for the sake of my own peace of mind), I decided that my friend actually meant to speak to us both, to the square and to me, to the world and to that plural
you
I represented at that moment, which, ironic and hostile, lurks in the
we
of the Romance languages,
nos/otros,
we and others, I and the rest.
Paris and I, Branly between the two of us. Only this interpretation could assuage my dignity, somewhat ruffled by my friend's strange behavior.
“The century is a brother to me,” he said finally. “We have lived the same times. It is also my child; I preceded it by four years, and my first memoryâimagine!âis of its birth, dominated by one special, I scarcely need add, unforgettable, image: the opening of the Pont Alexandre III. I remember it as an arch of acanthus stretching across the Seine for my benefit, so that I, a child, might learn to know and love this city.”
I watched him finger the wide blue necktie and adjust the pearl stickpin that adorned it. Branly was staring into the distance, toward the Quai d'Orsay. I followed his gaze, as he explained how that image had been born within himâand now, hearing him, in meâthe expectation that every evening, as on that distant evening when for the first time he admired the bridge over the river, for one miraculous moment the phenomena of the dayârain or fog, scorching heat or snowâwould disperse and reveal, as in a Corot landscape, the luminous essence of the Ãle de France.
This is the equilibrium he refers to. He knows that each and every patient evening harbors that privileged instant. That hour has never disappointed him, and, thanks to him, I understand that neither has it disappointed me.
He smiles, thinking that the only exceptions occur, fortunately, when one is away on a trip, far from Paris.
2
He met the Heredias in Mexico, only last summer. They were together on an excursion to Xochicalco organized by a mutual French friend, Jean, a longtime resident of Mexico City. My friend happily seized the opportunity to visit the Toltec ruins in the Valley of Morelos, especially in the company of Hugo Heredia, one of the outstanding archaeologists of Latin America. My friend's appetite for ruins has never been sated, and when he saw Xochimilco he commented to Jean that, in spite of what Valéry had said, civilizations do not die completely; they endure, but only when they do not progress.
As they contemplated the view of the valley from the high Indian citadel, he repeated his comment in halting Spanish to Hugo Heredia, and added that things that do not progress do not grow old: they alone survive.
“Nothing more logical,” he concluded.
Heredia limited himself to a comment in French that Xochicalco was a ceremonial center, not a sacrificial site, as if he anticipated that question and wanted to make clear to the foreigners that violence is not an exclusively Mexican privilege for which he need apologize, but rather one of the few constants in the infinite variety of human nature.
My friend uttered a delighted aaah! in appreciation of Heredia's excellent French, but thought to himself, shrugging, that the archaeologist's remarks were intended to calm the sensibility of a rational Frenchman, sensual surely, but never mediocre.
He repeated this later, laughing, to Heredia, who replied that sensuality is but a chapter of violence.
“On the contrary,” my friend responded.
The shapes in the valley that spreads out before the ruins of Xochicalco seem to approach or recede according to the caprice of the light and the speed of the drifting clouds. One has the illusion that he might touch the bottom of the ravine, as if it were rising from a prolonged geological dream; the dormant volcanoes seem forever beyond reach, longing for the return of their reign of fire.
My friend tells his hosts that only the swoon of the god whose breath is the wind, or the fury of the goddess that invades a cloud, was needed to invert that relationship of proximity or distance and make the volcano loom near and the precipice seem as abysmal as the lonely entrance to Mexico's paradise. “As far as I know, this is the only Eden imagined to be underground, there where Orpheus, Dante, and Sartre each reserved a site for hell.”
“Look, Papa, look what I found.”
Heredia's son had come running, out of breath, to the brink of the precipice; my friend reached out with the curved handle of his cane and hooked the boy's arm. He is convinced that he saved him from an accident; from the flat platform of the citadel to the surface of the pelota court below would be a fall of some fifty meters. The boy was highly excited, intent on capturing his father's complete attention, and the father granted that attention with an intensity my friend considered untoward. In brown hands cupped like an earthen vessel, as if fearful a drop might escape from between the chinks of his fingers, the boy held an object, a glimmer of fleeting brilliance.
