Distant Relations (12 page)

Had young Victor brought the tray this morning? He reproached himself, he had not thanked the boy. But his unfailing courtesy immediately gave way to an unpleasant suspicion, and to the question it inevitably posed. “Why was Victor, a young foreign guest in this house, serving the Frenchman who bore his name?”

Branly tells me that he felt distant eyes upon him. Again he heard the voices from the terrace.

“Where are you from?”

“From Mexico. And you?”

“From where I'm from.”

Once more the voices faded into that strange litany, as soporific as a rosary of poppies, of cities no longer capitals of former nations or forgotten colonies.

“German East Africa?”

“Dar es Salaam?”

“Bosnia and Herzegovina?”

“Sarajevo!”

11

Sarajevo, my friend murmurs, trying to remember where he was on that bitter day, the 28th of June 1914. What was he doing while the Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip did what he did and what was he saying when the Archduke Francis Ferdinand ceased to speak forever? Had he just awakened late one morning following a pleasurable night, the perfume of the woman sleeping beside him filling his nostrils? He was barely eighteen, but he had already assumed his place in the world with all the pleasures and privileges ordained by name, rank, family, duty, and right. It was La Belle Epoque. The summer air, drifting through the windows of a balcony opened above the Boulevard de Courcelles and facing the Parc Monceau of his childhood, bore pollen from the chestnut trees. No one was preparing his coffee; the woman was almost invisible among the pillows; that novelty, the telephone, had not rung; the newspapers with their world-shaking headlines had not yet appeared; she would weep over the death of a morganatic wife that day in Sarajevo; she was sentimental voluptuousness and delicious indifference.

They did not care whether anyone saw them, whether anyone knew they had lain late in bed making love, and then he rose, naked, and, smiling, lightly caressed his lover's ankles. He walked to the balcony, looked out toward the park and the distant houses from which no one would be able to see his naked figure, young, erect, bathed in the sensual pleasure that was very new but fully accepted, no anxiety, no clumsiness. Yet, through the beveled panes of a distant window, he could see the eyes of the hidden, silent child isolated for all time, past and future, who only once had known the possibility of friendship, when it was offered him by an eleven-year-old Branly.

Shivering, he drew the drapes, and from the bed the woman said: Why are you doing that? It's such a beautiful morning. And he told her he had felt cold, and laughed: besides, why should anyone but himself see her like this, he wanted her all to himself, and paraphrasing Lamartine he whispered into her ear: I say to this day, stay your flight. She answered: But you drew the drapes; and he laughed: Then we needn't change the poet's words,
Je dis à cette nuit: “Sois plus lente.”

He read the headline as he left Myrtho's house at dusk. At first he did not understand its significance, because his imagination was still captive to Myrtho's bedroom on the corner of the Boulevard de Courcelles and the Rue de Logelbach, amid a mountain of sheets and pillowcases and eiderdowns and unlaced camisoles and black stockings and close-fitting boots, all the sensual paraphernalia of the clothing of that era, when everything, he tells me, was more delicious for being more challenging. And now he was sitting reading an incomprehensible newspaper in a café on the Boulevard Malesherbes, wondering whether at his age he should apply for an officer's commission or wait to be conscripted. In the window of the café he looked for the beardless reflection of his face, an adolescent disguised as a man.

Before the Great War, he explains, men became adult at a younger age, because the average lifespan for European men was only thirty-eight to forty years (tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, smallpox, syphilis, typhoid, malaria, tumors, silicosis, mercury poisoning from gilding). At eighteen, a man had lived half his life, and was not, as now, just beginning.

“Today everyone tries, at times obscenely, to prolong his youth. Haven't you seen the sexagenarians who insist on disguising themselves as Boy Scouts? Before 1914, one entered adulthood as soon as possible. We let our beards and mustaches grow, we wore pince-nez and bowlers, black suits, high boots, wing collars, and starched shirts. And who went out for a stroll without a cane and spats, except a workman or a beggar? Though there was very little difference between the two, I can assure you.”

But the numerous, cumbersome, formal garments they wore augmented sexual pleasure, he attests: the prize was not easily won, the surprises were climactic, the anticipation formidable. Nights did pass more slowly; they obeyed, as a horse its rider.

He thought of the author of the
Meditations
several weeks later when he received the solicited commission; he was sent to the front as he had requested, and fully expected it was his destiny to die in one of the places where he had savored life. So many holiday retreats, his grandfather's castle near Vervins every Easter and Christmas, excursions to the banks of the Marne and into the heart of the Ardennes forest in summertime. At each instant in which death threatened, he repeated almost mechanically:
Et de mourir au lieux où j'ai goûté la vie!

During his first leave, he decided to test the constancy of the places where he had enjoyed Parisian life; he hesitated whether to return first to the apartment on the corner of Courcelles and Logelbach or to the garden of his childhood years. Gradually, aimlessly, the lassitude of the uncommitted afternoon following a superb, gratefully savored solitary luncheon at the Laurent on the Champs-Elysées, the slight headiness of the golden cigarette between his lips, the sensation of being himself and at the same time someone different, yes, somehow different in the uniform of an officer decorated following the battle of Charleroi—defender of the cradle of the most vulnerable and violated poet who ever lived—and perhaps the thought of the young and handsome Rimbaud led him to the large house on the Avenue Vélasquez. He found the courage to ring the bell and ask for the child, the boy, that is, the young man, who lived there, who had lived there as a child.

The concierge told him that the family had moved some time ago, but if the officer wanted to see the apartment, it was empty now, it had a beautiful view of the park, ah, if someday when this was over, the officer should marry and be looking for a place to live, just look at this priceless view, said the talkative little old woman as Branly walked through the white-walled apartment, stroking the silky points of the brilliant mahogany mustache acquired in the campaign against the Huns, smiling, thinking less of this having been the dwelling of that strange child than of the amusing fact that from the windows of this room he could see the balcony of a Myrtho still unaware of the surprise her young lover had in store for that night that would be the slowest of their lives. The woman ten years his elder would open the door without recognizing him: how could they look the same, that young beardless aristocrat with languid, though not yet perverse, manners, so swiftly and satisfactorily ensconced in the center of his world, prepared to dispense and receive its rewards in the circle which, accepting him as its hub, deferred to him, and this young, mustached, tougher man, martial and stiff as a ramrod, who had seen others die and had fully expected to die himself at the Ardennes and at Charleroi.

“Oh, my God, M. le Capitaine. Are you all right?”

From the window overlooking a garden of open, blackened wounds, he sees a procession advancing through mountains of dead leaves down an avenue of oaks and chestnut trees green in summer. This time the palanquin is borne by a number of shrunken, white-haired old men in rags and tatters, who, in high shrieking voices almost indistinguishable from the dire cries of the birds in that blighted landscape, are singing the madrigal
Chante, rossignol, chante, toi qui as le coeur gai
—sing, nightingale, sing, you who have a happy heart—and behind them, flat-footed and ponderous, stumble ten or twelve naked pregnant women whose greedy eyes never leave the litter, shaking their heads like bitches emerging from water, dogging the palanquin that is advancing through mounds of dead leaves, borne on the shoulders of the miserable, filthy, shrunken old men.

In the litter lies a youth on the threshold of puberty, totally naked, bathed in gold, motionless as a statue, like one of Rodin's sculptures of young lovers, but without the girl to kiss. The statue is dead, Branly begins to scream, I warned you, gilding with mercury is poisonous, it should never have touched that body.

The motionless boy does not look toward him, but the shriveled old men do. They hail him, beckoning him to join the procession, inviting him with their shrill laughter, as the awesomely heavy, leaden women ask if he dares invite them to dine.

“Woman and death are the most sumptuous guests at the world's feast. Who will dare invite them?”

“Oh, my God, M. le Capitaine, are you all right?”

“What is the matter with you, Félicité? You look pale.”

“A woman killed herself last night in the ravine in the woods, right here near Vervins, M. le Comte. They found the body the next morning, devoured by wolves.”

“It was only by a miracle that we met. In the normal course of events, I would have died before he was born. It is equally true that he could have died before we met, as his brother did.”

“Marco Polo relates that twenty thousand persons were executed during the funeral procession of the Mogul Khan, to serve him in death.”

“The mother of Victor and Antonio? Who knew the boys' mother? Did you know her, Jean?”

“There are things one loves only because they will never be seen again.”

“Her name was Lucie.”

“Where are you from?”

“From Mexico. And you?”

“From where I'm going.”

“Do you remember me?”

“Not very well. Do you remember me?”

“No, I don't remember you. But I remember a terrible storm in August that stripped the leaves from the trees and left them naked; it seemed like November. Don't you remember it?”

“No, Victor.”

“I also remember a country that was ours, our property. It was beautiful there, everything was always changing; nothing was twice the same, not grass or clouds or anything. Don't you remember it?”

“No. But I remember you.”

“I don't remember you.”

“You don't remember when Alexandre Dumas came to visit?”

“No, not at all. Only the places that changed, whether it was hot or cold, rainy or sunny. Things like that. What was Dumas doing here?”

“I think he wrote a book. But it was lost.”

“We can find it, André.”

“I remember you a little. I especially remember that you were supposed to come back. I remember that. You've come a little late.”

“I don't know. I don't remember.”

“You were late with your gift, Victor.”

“No. I didn't forget that. I have it.”

“You've brought it to me? You have it here?”

“No. It's in my suitcase.”

“Get the suitcase. Please.”

“I will if you want me to. We'll do everything together, won't we?”

“Yes. Now you see I won't do anything you don't like.”

“Have you thought, maybe you were waiting for me?”

“Yes. I remember you, but not very well.”

“I don't. I don't know.”

“Speak more softly. Remember, he's listening.”

“No. He's asleep.”

“I don't know.”

“Oh, my God, M. le Capitaine. Are you all right?”

“It is nothing, madame, it must be the heat, or perhaps something I ate,” Branly managed to say. To avoid falling, he clung to the frame of one of the beveled glass windows from which eight years earlier a solitary boy had watched him, and from which Branly had not moved, that August afternoon in 1914, during the longest moments of his life.

“So long, my friend, that I decided to forget them. The forgetfulness was hastened by Myrtho when I stopped by to see her that evening. She was in the company of a general. I had to stand at attention. She looked at my medal and asked mockingly if it was chocolate; after all, hadn't we had to retreat from Charleroi? They decorated you for a defeat—and Myrtho laughed as the general turned his back to me, making embarrassed sounds. When I returned to the street, the Parc Monceau was locked. Disconsolately, I walked back to my house. She was right, I had not been able to defend the cradle of the boy poet.”

12

He tells me that because he disguised his fear as timidity, he never returned to Monceau until after he was eighty, until recently, when he decided to relive the day of his leave in 1914, after the retreat from Charleroi and before following Joffre in the campaign that drove the Germans back to the river Aisne. We know what happened: the children did not even look at the old man, as the children of long ago had not looked at the lonely boy who watched them from behind the beveled windowpanes of the house on the Avenue Vélasquez.

He wished, as it sometimes happens in stories, that the children would gather round him while he told them tales of a time that everyone, with little justification, called the most beautiful and sweet, la Belle Epoque,
la douceur de vivre.
Instead, Branly leaves his park bench and walks slowly toward the Boulevard de Courcelles. As his eyes seek Myrtho's balcony, he concedes that the children are right to have forgotten him as well as the atrocious war of the dead and the cruel life of the living.

“Poor Myrtho; she so wanted to save herself from the poverty and sickness that devastated her mother. Before she died, I saw her once, ravaged and tubercular. Was that the sweetness of life?”

He says that, more than anything, it is the memory of those days that stirs him that evening—once the voices of Victor and André are stilled, and the woods of the Clos des Renards, as night falls, begin to look like the sea—to get up out of bed and test his strength. He sighed as he closed the window, and said to himself what he is now telling me: “I hope they never grow up. Their mystery will be considered ingenuousness, or crime.”