Distant Relations (15 page)

“An eternal and languid contemplation of the moment of death. Do you know Moreau's painting, my friend? Do you know what the not disordered agitation of our spirit is? I will tell you: it is the opposite of the petrified disorder of the new Latin American republics.”

14

THE MAMASEL

Fatigués de porter leurs misères hautaines.

J. M. de H., “Les Trophées”

 

But Branly had renounced, like the situation he evoked, any tone as moderate and conversational as mine. I am not sure whether relating events that are a part of time—a memory, a premonition, or the dream that thrusts itself between the two and is our present—means one must recount it, bring it to life, with the fervor that suddenly had taken possession of my friend. It was as if through this story of another time and a remote place he were fulfilling many of the latent acts that in his conscious life he had let pass unrealized.

The liveliness of Branly's account was in stark contrast to this shadowy hour in which—and only in deference to my friend—we were being permitted to prolong our after-luncheon conversation in such an unusual, not to say scandalous, fashion in the dining room of Gabriel's
pavillon
on the Place de la Concorde.

“Do you feel all right, my friend?”

Branly nodded energetically, as one of the highly attentive club waiters approached, carrying a silver candelabrum. In my friend's eyes I saw a series of questions illuminated and transmitted by intelligence. I prayed that my own eyes would not too flagrantly betray stupidity, and that the flickering candles which—in further deference—the waiter was bringing to us would illumine only Branly's intelligence and not my faltering comprehension of a story he insisted was but another bead on the oneiric rosary of the Clos des Renards.

I reflected on what he had told me. I reminded him (more myself than him, it is true) that this was the hour of the evening when the French Victor Heredia usually appeared to bring dinner to his guest and to talk awhile with him, until Branly fell asleep, and then, the next morning, was awakened by the pleasant chatter of André and Victor on the terrace beneath the sickroom windows. This is, I reminded him, also the hour you dreamed, surely the story you are telling me is part of that dream.

The intelligence in Branly's veiled eyes was not dimmed as amazement sparked there, and a hint of perplexity that reflected my own.

“I do not know yet,” he replied, “because I have not finished telling you the story.”

“But you know what happened,” I insisted, rather inanely, as if still not conceding that this was not one of the ordinary conversations my friend and I habitually enjoyed after luncheon or before swimming in the club pool.

“No,” Branly denied vehemently. “I shall not know until I tell it. That is the truth.”

As he spoke, he held my forearm in a viselike grip, as if my arm were wood, something he could cling to in the vertigo that I could know only vicariously. I tried to imagine how it must have been for him to live—if one may use that word, knowing its insufficiency—what for me became a verbal account only after it had gestated, uncomprehended, in the receptive soul of my friend, who was now illumined in the trembling light of the candelabrum being borne toward us by a servant, and she said to Clemencita, Blow out the candles, don't you see that the light hurts my eyes, and I am dreaming of an earthquake that will toss us into the sea forever and uproot boulders with its force, Clemencita.

The mulatto patted the gray-streaked head of her child-grown-old, and said, Poor little honey bee, I don't know where you want to fly, but you can never go back home, never, you know that your husband with his new wife and his son won't want you near them there in Paree, but she said that none of it mattered, if she could only put on her ball gown and see herself in the mirror she was sure she would reign again as she had at the balls of La Guaira so many years before. And because the mulatto nana loved her very much she did not tell her there was no white dress in the trunks her cruel, sick husband had allowed her to bring with her. The absence of mirrors in the house had been Clemencita's decision, so her mistress would believe she was still young, so she would never feel that she was growing old. And her mistress played her harpsichord to drown out the plaintive call of the toucan in the tall grass.

“Then, do you understand, child, I had to cut corners, I had to pawn two or three things to scrape together the money to go to the port and buy the silks and fine lawns to make your poor mother a white ball gown she might never wear except to her own funeral, do you understand, child?”

When Heredia's second wife learned that the aged mulatto nurse was going around telling Victor such things, she asked Heredia to send her packing, back to the streets of Puerto Cabello to beg, but the cruel, sick Señor laughed at her and said that nobody, not even she, so distinguished, especially she, so respectable but so insipid, could compare to the beauty of the French Mamasel when she arrived in La Guaira at the time of the ball given by the Liberator, Simón Bolívar, who had just occupied the port and who had nothing but compliments and gallantries for her, thus setting Heredia's cockscomb aquiver with jealousy and ambition.

“And you have not stopped since then, Francisco Luis, but I do not know which has been greater, your ambition or your blindness. Out of ambition you married a French girl without a sou to her name, thinking she was a rich heiress; but of necessity you made a virtue, and following in the footsteps of your detested father-in-law, you replicated his life and fortunes in the shadow of the Independence. Now you again find yourself on the brink of ruin—naïve, fawning, bowing and scraping before the brother of the third Bonaparte, involved in this Due de Morny's financial adventures with the banker Jecker and his Mexican bonds. And do you see what Juárez has decided? I have just read in
La Gazette de France:
those obligations were contracted with the conservative government and are not worth the silk ribbon they're tied with. What are you going to do now, Francisco Luis? How can you support your son and me in the luxury of the court of Napoleon and Eugénie—legitimate or not? How are you going to pay Herr Winterhalter for the portrait I asked you to have him paint of me?”

It wasn't a bad thing for his son to believe he was the son of the Mamasel and not of this distinguished, proper, but insipid and affected girl from the provinces stuffing herself with the sticky-sweet pastries of her native Limousin. It might well cause Heredia's present wife to take stock of the highly precarious situation any woman finds herself in when she is, or ceases to be, the object of the caprice of a fine gentleman like Francisco Luis de Heredia, son of the Spanish enslavement of Indians, descendant of the patriarchs, judges, and jailers of the plains of Apure, with his face pocked and pale as the devil's shirtsleeve, deep in the ancient jungles of Hibueras, where more than one Andalusian conquistador left his soul and his bones.

“Don't you fret,” Clemencita told her young lady. “No real gentleman goes around telling people what a fine man he is.”

“That doesn't matter to me at all, Nana. I love him. I want him to come back to me. I am his precious Mamasel, that's what he called me.”

“Branly, are you all right?”

“Look, child: the dress you wanted. Look, my boy: you don't know how your mother suffered. Look, my new Señora: I'll go when I choose, because your husband needs me as a living reminder of his remorse. Look, Master: you're a devil, and I wouldn't trust you or any of yours. You Heredias would do anything to ruin and shame my little honey bee, who loved me from the moment I was rescued from begging in the steep streets of La Guaira, pure papaya peel and burning stone. But she knew more than any of you, for all your fine ways. She knew the secret of things. For example, how, not looking at herself in any mirror, she went beyond what I'd planned—which was to make her forget how fast she was growing old here alone in this big house on the cliff high above the sea—she went back to another time without mirrors when she was a little girl. She used to say, ‘Clemencita, take me to the park because it's sunny today and I have a friend in the Park Monsewer or Monzoon,' I don't know how to talk that gibberish, young Victor, and she used to describe that beautiful park all filled with windmills and dairy farms and splashing fountains, it was ‘precious' she said, like your papá called your mamá in the days when he loved her, before he dragged her down to the depths of shame, her first shame, and worse to come. I think her salvation was remembering her childhood games in that Monzoon or Monsewer Park in Paree, and her little playmate, because, she said, sitting there on her balcony overlooking the tile roofs and the still sea of La Guaira, ‘he is my friend and he will never grow old as long as he remembers me and I remember him. He will never grow old if he dreams of me, nor will I, Clemencita.'”

“Is something wrong, M. le Comte? Remember, it's only a painting, eh?, not a real woman who remembers you and is waiting for you here, as the boys said. Have you seen a ghost? As old as you are, how do you know what true memory is? Live a hundred years and you will see you have forgotten ninety percent of your memories, those things that happened in the most profound well of the past. What do you think? I will tell you: memory is like an iceberg, it reveals only what it chooses. Do you remember the three buzzards that followed the French merchant everywhere? Don't lose sight of them. Now they're circling above El Morro in Havana where Francisco Luis, ruined by the adventure of the Mexican bonds, has taken refuge among the Spanish colonists who when they become Cuban insurgents will also make my father pay for his crimes of smuggling, slavery, and prostitution. Now he must maintain us, his second wife and his son, in the comfort and the cult of appearances of the Second Empire. I say this in his favor. Everything conspired against him to sink him in a morass of poverty, but he would not allow it, his bitterness merely inflamed him. The blame for all this lay in the deceit of the Frenchman and his damned daughter, the Mamasel. But no one can sink Francisco Luis de Heredia, because he is a Señor, an absolute Spanish hidalgo in a land of brainless blacks and indolent Indians.”

What could he scheme in the time of Napoleon's nephew that his father-in-law hadn't schemed in the time of the uncle? Obsolete arms for the Republic in Mexico, and contraband for and bonuses from that heaven-sent French intervention, with its hosts from every corner of Imperial Europe, Zouave battalions, Walloon regiments, bands of Czech musicians, Austrian hussars and Hungarian cooks, dancing masters from Trieste and lesser Polish nobility still reeking of cows, hams, and tile stoves, Prussian calligraphers and zealous young men escaped who knows how from the cold of Petrograd, all flowing together—thirsty, hungry, fevered, primitively libidinous and liberated in the land of El Dorado and of the noble savage with whose image the Old World had lulled itself for a century—on the distressed beach of Veracruz, where three buzzards wheeled above the fort prison of San Juan de Ulúa.

“Can you imagine that he would miss a chance for revenge, Frenchman? Hear me well, you through whose lips I speak, imagine how that devil will take his final revenge against my little girl-grown-old, very old, how he will snatch her from the dovecote where she lived without mirrors above the unreal mirror of the sea of La Guaira, he who already had betrayed and shamed her as a young girl, he who had dried up every drop of her youth and beauty, now in her old age how could he resist using her and shaming her, dragging my muddled baby to Veracruz, where he left her to the mercy of the drunken, jeering, cruel, bone-weary troops far from their homes. Ah, Clemencita, Francisco Luis told me, what a good idea to make your Mamasel's dancing gown again. For that's what she's going to do, she's going to dance in strange whorehouses filled with Indians and Flemings, peasants in rough white cotton and hussars in embroidered jackets, high-cheeked Hungarians and Jaliscans with lugubrious eyes. The great brothel belt of the Napoleonic invasion of Mexico, M. le Comte, from Guadalajara to Salina Cruz to Tuxpan and Alvarado, where soldiers sowed children with pale eyes and dark skin, who if their fathers had acknowledged them would have been called Dubois and Herzfeld and Nagy and Ballestrini, but instead were named after their mothers, Pérez and León and Gómez and Ramírez—and how will you remember all this, M. le Comte, no one has a memory that long.”

“Ah, my poor little girl, all old and worn,” the cruel proclamation, come one, come all, you see before you the Duchess of Lanché, the very one you read about as boys, here she is, which of you ever saw or touched a real authentic Duchess back in your homeland, a Duchess with a capital
D?
Don't pay any attention to her years, mon capitaine, distinction has no age, but if you want to know how to wring the best from our slightly aged Duchess, let me whisper something in your ear and then let you see with your own eyes and feel for yourself, open her mouth, that's it, run your fingers over her gums, what do you think of her, eh? not a single tooth, just a little marble nub here and there to spice up the broth, like the garlic in bean soup, eh, mon capitaine? No young girl can do that for you, eh, mon capitaine? What do you think of her?”

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

“Ah, my poor little girl, my little honey bee become a clown princess, far from her dovecote in La Guaira. One night I found her dead, dressed in her high-waisted white gown with the long stole, beneath a mirror in that whorehouse where the terrible tyrant Francisco Luis de Heredia had taken her to squeeze the last pittance from between her lips. He had never forgiven the deceit. Look what she had in her clenched fist: half a gold piece. Her last pay, and even then she was tricked by an officer who gave her only half a coin.”