Distant Relations (23 page)

It was a warm night and the Oteros had decided to hold the party on their incomparable roof garden. As a confirmed traveler, Branly, you know how Caracas hides from its modern ugliness, withdrawing into walled secret gardens, though none, I venture, was as remarkable as theirs, where the play of lights—oblique and direct, soft and intense—seemed to sculpt anew the Henry Moore and Rodin sculptures displayed outdoors in the mild Caracas air.

From behind the statue of Balzac garbed in the monastic attire he wore when writing emerged a priestly figure. A man of average height, stunted by a sturdy, squarish torso, ennobled by a white mane of leonine hair, a man dressed as a parish priest, with the ubiquitous Venezuelan white-corn
arepa
in his hand. I heard the murmurs of amazement: had the man come masked as a priest, or was he a priest? Someone said in indignation that the cloth was not an appropriate costume, but either way, though this most unusual guest was wearing black, only his collar was clerical. He approached me at the precise moment the orchestra began to play; Miguel Otero asked my wife to dance and I found myself holding the stubby-fingered hand of the spurious priest.

“Forgive me.” He spoke in a mellifluous voice. “You were pointed out to me yesterday at the opening meeting. As we have the same name, I wanted to meet you.”

I must have stared at him with an extremely stupid expression, because he was forced to add: “Heredia. My name, too, is Heredia. The same name, you see?”

Though I said I did see, I had eyes only for Lucie. She looked magnificent, an ethereal, bewitched figure more beautiful than ever, her skin warmed by the tropics, her diaphanous gown swirling; and absentmindedly, out of simple courtesy, I asked this Heredia where his family was from; ours had come to New Spain in the sixteenth century. I anticipated his response.

“Ah, no. Our Heredias will be much more recent arrivals in the New World.” Looking at him really for the first time, I saw that, despite my first impression, he could not be called old. “My mother,” he said, “fleeing the Negro rebellion, came from Haiti to La Guaira. Very recent in comparison to your genealogy, of course.”

I tried to recall a “Negro rebellion” in Haiti seventy to ninety years ago, but my memory told me nothing. The other Heredia clasped his hands pontifically, as if he had guessed what I was thinking. “Ah, so your memory does not respond?”

“No, frankly, it does not, Señor Heredia.”

“But, nevertheless, isn't it true we have no memory but what we recall?”

“That seems rather obvious,” I replied with some annoyance. My conversation with this Heredia was becoming grotesque. In fact, I thought I detected a trace of senility in the man's words and actions, and I tried to move away. He caught me by the arm. Extremely irritated now, I tried to free myself, but not before he forced me to listen: “If you ever need me, look me up in the directory.”

“And why would I need you?” My rejoinder was brusque.

“We all need to remember at times,” he replied affably. “I am a specialist in memories.”

“Of course. Now, excuse me.”

“But if you don't know my name, how can you call me?”

“Your name is Heredia, you have already told me.”

“Victor,” he said in the softest of voices. “Victor Heredia. Imagine: the Haitian uprising took place, I believe, in 1791, but that was the time of Toussaint L'Ouverture; the rebellion of Henri Christophe came later. I'm not entirely sure of that: in fact, I'm not completely sure of anything.”

The door between our room and that of the boys was half-open when Lucie and I returned to the hotel. The boys were watching television, but only slightly lower than the sound of a song interspersed with jokes, we could hear clearly Antonio's voice, more serious every day, more indicative of his imminent adulthood.

“No, Victor. I'm backing down on our deal. I choose to die with Mother.”

“C'est pas chic de ta part,”
said Victor, using one of the expressions he had picked up in his years of study at the French Lycée. As Lucie had taught the boys a very literary French, she was always surprised and pleased when she heard such phrases in her house.

“What difference does it make to you?” asked Toño. “You want Father and me to die together so you and Mother will be left to cry all you want.”

“It isn't the same thing,” said Victor. “I tell you it isn't the same. You traitor.”

We could hear Victor punching Antonio, and I rushed in to separate them.

Lucie locked herself in the bathroom. I reprimanded the boys and told them that if they didn't behave themselves they would be on the first plane back to Mexico the next morning. My wife would not open the bathroom door, and when finally she came to our room, the boys had fallen asleep and she was no longer crying. I asked whether she had heard them speak like this before, and she said she had. And it was not just chance, she added. She was convinced that Victor made a point of bringing up the subject any time he knew she could hear. With a resigned sigh, my beautiful wife folded the Empire ball gown into a cardboard box and told me to do the same with my military regalia. The mulatto woman from the agency that rented the costumes had told her she would come by early the next morning to pick them up, the Señora understood, such outfits were rented almost every day; Lucie could leave the boxes outside the door and she would pick them up.

The four of us flew back together. That simple action, I believed, would put an end to the morbid, if playful, inclination of my sons. As the plane lifted off from Maiquetía, La Guaira was a time more than a place, a cliff-rimmed port patiently awaiting the return of ancient ships to furrow the strangely calm and luminous sea. I tried to distinguish hands, faces, handkerchiefs waving goodbye from the large old houses and the Fort of San Carlos on the hill. I saw only the buzzards, which are the true lookouts of all the ports of the Caribbean. I closed my eyes and the hum of the motors blended with the memory of the plaintive whistle of the toucan in the Venezuelan dusk.

The accident occurred that Christmas, when Lucie and her favorite, Antonio, went to Paris to visit her family. The DC-10 plunged into the sea near the Azores. Their bodies were never recovered. No, there was no sign, no warning. Now that you and I know all the things we know, we might be tempted to believe that there was some connection between them and the death of my wife and son. That was not so, and this tragic event had its most grave consequences, as might be expected, in my home, and for reasons that would surprise no one: Victor's sadness, a sadness that moved me and moved all those who knew us, a sadness that caused our small apartment on Río Garona to become even more desolate, but a sadness my son refused to share with me. Because I had overheard the boys, only I knew the reasons. Victor found himself without a companion in his mourning.

You will understand, Branly, that as soon as I realized the truth, I determined to be a true companion in my son's mourning. But how could I take the place of his mother, whom he had expected to weep with him over my death and Antonio's? What did the boy expect of me? What could I offer him? I was not the first widowed father who had to answer such questions. I observed how Victor was changing, deeply affected not so much by his mother's death as by the absence of his mother as a partner in grief to weep over me and his brother. This sorrow had a different name: cruelty.

What was to be found in this soul that Victor and I shared, so to speak? I have already told you: scorn for men, respect for stones. I decided that because of the circumstances the boy could afford to miss a year of school. The important thing was for him never to be separated from me for a minute, for him to learn my lessons—the good and the bad, as his mother had called them—by accompanying me to the thrones of bygone honor and recovered identity represented in the great ruins of our Mexican past. With me, little by little, he would penetrate into the heart of Mexico: its villages, its churches, its world of dust and cheap alcohol, its cheating, its humiliated Indian, its cunning cacique who controls the stores, the brothels, the pawnshops.

“This is what we Heredias came from. Look closely. This is our clay.”

I instructed him, Branly, to admire authority based on grandeur and dignity, and I pointed out the consistent absence of those qualities; I instructed him to dream of an ideal nation governed by a true aristocracy that would discipline both the masses degraded by vice and exploitation and the vulgar and rapacious exploiters of our nation.

I was not sure how Victor was changing, but I knew he was changing. That part of him about which I knew nothing was growing daily; I felt intuitively that there were things that only my son knew, only my son wanted. He wanted and knew things he was not telling anyone, and only I knew
that.
He had no true companion in his mourning, and my fear was that he would seek such a companion in danger; that is, in the unknown. That is the reason I kept him so close to me. I became aware of what you already know: the indefensible arrogance of Victor toward his inferiors, especially servants. I was not unduly concerned, in view of the fact that this is an attitude common among all well-to-do youths in the Iberian world; what did disturb me was that my younger son's behavior was causing me to long for the spontaneous camaraderie of my older son, Antonio.

And so, inadvertently, I began to undermine my own edifice, to compare the moments of coldness, the cruelty, of Victor to the natural joy, the spirit of celebration and playfulness, that had characterized Antonio. Another thing was happening that neither of us realized. Victor was forming me as much as I was forming him: like him, along with him, I sought and lamented my missing companion in death, my comrade in mourning: Antonio.

My perceptions of Victor's character became increasingly clear. One spring we happened to be in Aguascalientes at the time of the fair of San Marcos. That is a world of taunts, wagers, machismo, and intensified chance, a perpetual
all-or-nothing,
Branly, a cyclone whose eye is centered in the cockfight. There, everything I have just mentioned reaches a peak of frenzy not unlike that of the most ancient forms of communal games, mysteries, and hazards. I arrived at the ring at the last moment; I heard the shout “Close the doors,” and bets flew thick and fast. The cocks were sprayed with mouthfuls of water and alcohol, released, and set in confrontation for the battle that everyone, even the roosters, knows is to the death. I scanned the eyes, hands, heads, of the crowd transformed by the hysteria of betting into a great undulating serpent. Only Victor, in the middle of an excited crowd, sat totally motionless. He didn't lift an arm, a finger; his icy gaze never shifted from the center of the ring—which for this single reason, because one person was watching in this manner, ceased to be a ludic circle and was converted into an arena of execution. Do you remember the Hitchcock film in which all the spectators at a tennis match follow the play of the ball except one: the murderer? My son's unflinching stare told me that for him the death of one or both of the cocks was a matter of total indifference, since from his viewpoint this was the fate to which they were destined. The two cocks had been trained to fight, and armed with razors on their spurs; they were the playthings of their masters, but also masters in their own combat, and, ultimately, it was better to die in the ring than in the poultry market.

That all this should be translated into such absolute moral indifference made me believe that for Victor the cult of aristocratic authority was being converted into a cult of fatalism and blind power, and I asked myself what had been lacking in an education intended to illustrate the unity of time, a time that does not sacrifice the past, which, after all, had been my goal in my relationship with my sons. I soon found out, the first time we went together to Xochicalco—before I met you, Branly. I was working with the team of the Swedish anthropologist Laura Bergquist one afternoon in the area of the pelota court you see below us, when we all heard, from the heights of the citadel above, a terrifying cry that some thought thunder, the thunder that long in advance announces the July late-afternoon rains in the Valley of Morelos. I looked up and saw Victor standing at the edge of the precipice, right here, Branly, where you caught him with the handle of your cane, right here where I am standing now, imitating Victor's actions for you. His bleeding hands were extended from his body, like this. I ran toward him. Fortunately, Bergquist and two workers followed; Victor fell, but he fell into our arms.

We had cushioned his fall, but that night the boy was delirious. His hands were badly cut, and he kept repeating the words, “I forgot,” “I forgot.” When we returned to Mexico City, he told me what had happened. He had been half-playing, half-exploring around the site of the Toltec temple, when he discovered a chink in the talus at the pediment of the plumed serpents. One of those frogs that seem to hop through the dust, guiding us to hidden mountain rivers, slipped into the opening and Victor tried to catch it. But instead of the rough, palpitating body of the batrachian, he tells me, he touched a surface of incomparable smoothness, something, he said, that felt like hot glass. I can never forget the vivid and perfect image. He removed the object, and when he saw it (as he was telling me, he again became feverish), he gazed upon something indescribable, a unity so perfect, so seamless, like a potent, concave drop of gold, that it needed no added embellishment, carving, or detail. If I understand what Victor was telling me, human hands could add nothing to its perfection, though it was not the work of nature. It had been crafted, he knew, because on the crown shone a relief, surely a sign, that seemed born of the very essence of its substance.

Now this is important, Branly. My son confessed that he felt an irresistible hatred for that perfect object that could owe nothing to him, or to any man. He picked up a sharp stone and struck at the object until he split it in two, divesting it forever of the beauty inherent in its wholeness. In the frenzy of his task, Victor cut his hands. He hurled half the object from him. Holding the other half in his hand, impelled by the force of his shame, he ran to the precipice; he threw even farther the second half, which, he said, was burning into the cuts on his hands. Only then did he cry out, and fall.