Distant Relations (19 page)

My friend was breathing painfully. He managed to avert his pallid face from Heredia's panting, the icy breath of true madness whistling from a winter that was all winters, remote from the sweating armpits, the dark-skinned belly, the pliant waist of that enormous woman's body sensually bedded on the waves between New Orleans and Cartagena de Indias, the Morro Castle and the Fort of San Juan de Ulúa, the blazing towers of Sans Souci and the banana- and melon-laden ships of French Martinique, British Jamaica, and Dutch Curaçao. That world, crouched in ambush, tamed only in appearances, again sprang to claw at us that last morning at the Clos des Renards, this slowly dying afternoon in the Automobile Club, as if in refutation of the prolonged calm of Cartesian reason my friend and I were struggling to save—did we truly believe that?—from the chaotic tropics of the Heredias, that torrid zone that somehow emitted from between Heredia's fleshless lips a breath of icy death, as if the baroque existence so removed from our world proclaimed itself in equal intensity in its antipodes, only there. Branly tells me now that as he felt Heredia's panting breath on his cheeks he imagined an ice-covered Antilles and found nothing abnormal in the vision of white cathedrals, white palm trees, white parrots and owls skimming through a colorless sky above a milky sea.

“You lie.” Through clenched teeth, Branly's voice was strained, stern. “You lie, or you are confused, it makes no difference. My father was not an officer on the Mexican expedition; he was not born until 1870. You are totally confused. Mademoiselle Lange, Heredia's first wife, was then seventy years old. She could not have conceived. And she had no children by Francisco Luis. You are the child of your father's second wife, Heredia. But even this is a muddled lie, because you have decided that she is not your true mother. I attribute that whimsy to a legend concocted between you and the mulatto nurse. I do not see what any of this has to do with an unborn child.”

“It is difficult work to make a child, I agree.” Heredia's smile was particularly lugubrious and offensive. “But true generations have nothing to do with ordinary chronology.”

“What do you mean?”

“Didn't you see him from the waist down? My poor child is not well made. The legs, the groin. Badly made, I tell you. It isn't easy.”

“What?”

“What do you mean, Branly?”

“Wait.” He pressed my hand. “I myself did not understand. As I told you, I shall not understand this story until I have finished telling it.”

“In spite of having lived it?” I persisted.

“In spite of that. What possible relation can there be, tell me, between living something and telling it?”

“Perhaps none, you may be right.”

“Forgive my violence,” said Heredia, as he eased his lethal, crazed hold on Branly. “I am an insecure and fearful man, ha! ha! It takes blue blood like yours if a man is to feel he's sitting on top of the world!”

“You are unmitigatedly vulgar,” said Branly with a twisted smile. “Unmitigatedly … Heredia? Is that your real name?”

The host of the Clos thrust his hands into his pockets and shrugged like a surly urchin.

“I would like, after all this time, to know the name of the boy I did not hold out my hand to seventy years ago in the Pare Monceau. I know it is very late to make amends.” Branly's voice was moved, grave, restrained. He sought, as he spoke, the pale eyes of the French Victor Heredia. His host was silent for a long while, grinding his heel into the whitewashed floor of this suffocating gallery.

“André,” Heredia said finally. “My name is André.”

“Like your son,” said Branly, with one of those polite formulas with which one courteously fills the pauses in social conversation.

“No,” Heredia shook his head. “Like myself.”

“Like you, Heredia? Did I not say that I want to make amends for my indifference—my cruelty, if you prefer? Is that not enough? Must you persist in your low sarcasm?”

“Do you know why I never appear in the daytime? No, don't say anything. I will tell you. True phantoms appear only in daylight, M. le Comte.”

Mincing like some elderly maiden, Heredia walked to the corner of the room. Branly, as he tells me now, was by this time sufficiently familiar with Heredia's tricks to anticipate, following this mimicry, some new and disconcerting revelation from his host. Accentuated by the newly assumed gestures of an ancient virgin, Heredia said that he feared the daylight phantoms, and his distinguished guest, the Comte de Branly, should fear them, too. Was it his hope to save the boys? Had he ever thought that maybe the boys did not want to be saved? How many things must there be that he never realized? Wrapped in his aristocratic arrogance, so remote from the black and rotting ravines where French mademoiselles in exile in the New World sing madrigals to frighten away the dogs and owls waiting to devour their dead bodies, so secure in his mansions and symmetrical gardens, so unyielding in a land that had never known an earthquake or the cholera morbus or trichinosis or the oil companies' murderous White Guards or the forced labor of Indians or hurricanes bearing dead leaves in a gale that in mid-August can strip an entire jungle of leaves and fruit to scatter afar, beyond the sea, to impregnate with pure tropical pollen austere European wives who then give birth never knowing that seed travels, carried on the air filters into nostrils, ears, mouths, asses, the uncountable orifices of a human body that is more water and pit and puddle than anything else, eh? Oh, there were so many things he didn't know.

“Do you know anything of my desire to give life to everything that could have been but was denied existence?” asked “Heredia,” suddenly pulling himself to his full height and acquiring a dignity Branly would not have believed possible.

“André, then, should have been the … son of Francisco Luis and Mademoiselle Lange?” Branly stammered.

“He is, M. le Comte. You must believe me, he is. That is the only element of truth in this entire farce. Except that this time my little angel is going to be born whole, not as he was before, but whole again.”

“Heredia” again seized my friend's arm, but now with a strength, Branly says, incredible not only in his host but in any man. He twisted Branly's arm behind his back, forcing his head and body in the direction desired by this monster of many guises, whose role at that moment my friend could not define: was he a dangerous clown, a harmless madman, an ineffective mythomaniac, or a wretched, defeated, lonely man deserving of pity?

“You see, you doddering old bastard, you senile old motherfucking asshole, you see, that's what you get for going around sticking your nose where it doesn't belong, trying to separate what was always joined and will be forever, you see, Victor Heredia doesn't belong to your time now but to mine, and at last my son has the companion I never had…”

With one arm locked around Branly's neck, “Heredia” with his free hand raised the door of the dumbwaiter and forced my friend's head toward the empty shaft, as if preparing him for the executioner's ax or the blade of the guillotine. Branly stared into the depths of the space in which the
monte-plats,
converted in English into the more obsequious dumbwaiter, ascended and descended. An icy blast rumpled his hair, tiny daggers of ice needled his skin, forcing him to close his eyes filled with involuntary tears. In that instant he had seen what he had to see.

Branly's hand still clasped mine.

“Have you ever paused, my friend, to think about the appalling concept of infinity, time and space without beginning or end? That is what I saw that morning in the shaft of the dumbwaiter. Infinity was like the flesh of a wet, bland squid, slimy and slobbery, a texture without color or orientation, the pure vertiginous
sensation
of a great white mollusk ignorant of time or space. Something interminable cloaked in perpetual fine snow.”

“What do you plan to do, you pitiful old bastard? Do you think when you leave here you can set your police on me, accuse me, demand that I return Victor? Forget it. Victor and André are no longer here. Victor and André are no longer André and Victor. They are a new and different being. No one could recognize them. Not even I. They could walk past you in a café, or on a street, and you would never recognize them. You would never recognize them. True madness passes without notice.”

“Heredia” again burst out laughing, and Branly, his senses reeling, deprived of any intellectual means by which to deal with this devil who was most satanic because he was incomprehensible, unknowable, and therefore to be feared, did what he had never done in his life, what no one had ever forced him to do.

“That morning—you must believe what I tell you—imprisoned by ‘Heredia' 's arms, with that unutterable vision of infinite emptiness before my eyes, I did something I had not done in all my eighty-three years. I screamed, my friend I screamed the way they used to scream in the Frédérick Lemaître melodramas our great-grandparents attended on the Boulevard du Crime. I screamed, convinced that my voice was my deliverance, my life, my only chance, my only salvation. Bah, of course, on more careful consideration, I believe I must have screamed that way in my cradle.”

And with those words he withdrew his hand from mine, which he had held throughout this portion of his story. He clasped his own hands in that typical, gracious gesture that served in circumstances like these to dissipate any hint of solemnity and to return things to a properly rational level not without humor.

“Bah,” he repeated. “The things one must do. I screamed, terrified by that vision and by the sensation of my impending death, I admit it. But as I screamed I turned melodrama into comedy. As I struggled against ‘Heredia,' the hinges of the door of the suffocating, whitewashed gallery burst open under the weight of Florencio's shoulder. José rushed in on the heels of his husky companion with the visage of a Basque jai-alai player, and both rushed to free me from ‘Heredia,' subduing him. I sank to the floor, out of breath, exhausted. In the struggle, ‘Heredia' was roundly drubbed by Florencio: he staggered, and fell headlong down the shaft of the dumbwaiter. The two servants exchanged rapid comments in Spanish, peering down into empty space.

“Here now, we'd better go down to the cellar.”

“But, Florencio, look at all the dead leaves rising up the shaft.”

“I told them, my throat aflame, not to waste time. We had to leave immediately. Where was the taxi they had spoken of? Come, quickly. I would send Etienne to pick up the Citroën later, another day.”

“The Citroën, M. le Comte? But Etién came to pick it up day before yesterday, as soon as he got out of the hospital and learned about your accident,” Florencio exclaimed as they helped Branly to his feet.

“He said he was going to take it to be repaired. But he never came back.”

“You remember, Florencio, Señor Heredia told us he thought the accident was his fault, because of the young gentleman, and he told Etién he should be careful driving with one hand, and if he wanted, he would go with him to pick up the Citroën and see you at the same time, M. le Comte, and young Victor as well.”

“But you know how stubborn a hardheaded Frenchman can be, with all due respect to yourself, M. le Comte: no Spaniard could tell him anything, and do you think he would want to be indebted to some foreigner, heaven forbid! And that was that. It wasn't as if he were going by way of Tetuán to bring home monkeys, there being so many around here…”

“And that was that. He took his own car and drove off forever.”

“What do you mean, Florencio?”

“Nothing, except I think Etién must have had an accident in his 2CV when he came here to pick up the Citroën for repair,” said Florencio, as the servants gently led Branly toward the stairway.

“And I think Florencio is right. I think he was killed. Maybe. Anyway, he never came back.”

“And Heredia? Hugo Heredia? What does he say?”

“Your guest left for Mexico this morning, M. le Comte.”

“I must thank you, at least, for staying with me.”

“M. le Comte is very generous to us, and treats us like human beings,” said José, as the three reached the foot of the stairs.

“You should just see, M. le Comte, how the Spanish treat their servants. It's ‘do this' and ‘do that.' ‘You peasant bastard!'—begging your pardon, M. le Comte. ‘You idiot anyone can see your mother let you fall out of your cradle, you blithering simpleton, you thickheaded fool…' And on and on and on!”

“And the young gentlemen are the worst. They like to humiliate you, to run you in circles. ‘Pick that up, Pepe. Now leave it where you found it, Pepe. Don't you hear me? Pick it up again, Pepe.'”

“Well, a pot of beans is a pot of beans no matter where you cook it, because that young Mexican was no better than the young Spanish gentlemen. Look, M. le Comte, what he did to Pepe the minute he arrived. So of course we came running with his suitcases when he called.”

“And we asked his father, and he said why not, we should bring everything here…”

“And I laughed and told Pepe, Let's get out here quick or he'll be beating you again with his belt. What a one he is! A real little devil.”

Branly, assisted by Florencio and José, stepped onto the terrace of the lions. He found it difficult to grasp what they were saying, or rather, to reconcile the inconsistencies in their words. He felt dizzy. His servants were playing up to him; they were contradicting one another; they had been there that very morning with suitcases in their hands; they had given them to young Victor in the Citroën. They, like he, had experienced physical fear when they stepped on the dead leaves. They had, finally, rescued him from the satanic fury of “Heredia,” the confused scion of many places rather than any time, this man who, because he had no dates, no origins, carried the burden of unfinished stories: how could he be the son of Francisco Luis and the Mamasel, who had met in La Guaira in 1812 and been parted forever in 1864 in a brothel in Cuernavaca? how, even if he were the son of Francisco Luis and his second wife, the fat, dull, gluttonous girl from Limousin, could he have been Branly's contemporary in the opening years of this century, when my friend played in the Pare Monceau? How old was “Heredia”? How old was Francisco Luis when he died?