Distant Relations (8 page)

Branly smiled and half-closed his eyes. There was an instant of silence and then the boys laughed again and began a question-and-answer game. He recognized the voice of the Mexican Victor Heredia. His was the voice responding to the questions posed by the second youth, the boy he still could not describe because he had not seen him clearly, only from afar, in the distance where the garden met the grove of birch trees. This André's voice was of an incomparable sweetness, midway between childhood and puberty, but free of the unmusical tones that often accompany this transition. His voice had retained the purity of childhood into adolescence, but at the same time it heralded a virile beauty in which the shyness, selfishness, and egotism of childhood were absent.

“Capital of Argentina.”

“Buenos Aires.”

“Capital of Holland.”

“Amsterdam.”

“Capital of Serbia.”

“Belgrade.”

“Capital of Norway.”

“Oslo.”

“No.”

“Sorry. Christiania.”

“Capital of Mexico.”

“That's silly! Mexico City. That's like my asking you what the capital of France is, André.”

“Enghien!”

Both boys laughed boisterously, as Branly sank back into sleep, lulled by the game that was like counting sheep, and remembering his own childhood, the games amid the columns, the triumphs in mock wars of the Parc Monceau in a time when the children knew him and he was not importuned by his past as he was now. In his childhood he had simply existed, unburdened by the mountain of IOU's that harass a being once content to exist without a conscious—even hostile—awareness of self. He fell asleep thinking that he was going to enjoy these days at the Clos des Renards more than he had imagined. He believed that he had found the real, if slightly painful, reason for his presence there.

When he awakened again, it was night and an early autumnal chill was seeping through the open window. The room was dark; Branly groped for his cane, and, without success, tried to close one of the windows. Another hand was helping him, taking his hand and guiding it toward the window pull. He felt the touch of rough skin guiding his hand toward the copper latch.

The window closed, and the intoxicating odor of leather returned, now mingled with an ancient perfume that Branly, even in his fascinated stupor, struggled to identify with a texture or with an odor half-wood, half-leather, a flexible, fragile wood, or if not quite skin, at least the leather of a glove: sandalwood, tanned hide, perfumed wood.

He awakened with a start. The light was on and Heredia—slightly ill-humored but with no sign of the vulgarity that secretly irritated his guest, now gripped by a strange vertigo—was offering him a tray holding wine, half a French loaf, and cold meats. Branly, still enervated, looked toward the window. It was tightly shut. The head of his cane rested beside the head of his bed.

“I hope you're hungry. You've been sleeping like a baby, M. le Comte.”

“Thank you. Who closed the window?”

“I did. A moment ago. We don't want you to catch pneumonia on top of everything else. At your age…”

“Yes, yes, Heredia, I know. Do you have a servant?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I don't want to trouble you with bringing up my tray three times a day.”

“It's no trouble. There's a dumbwaiter. Anyway, it's a privilege to serve a count. I wouldn't want to pass off that honor to a servant, now would I?”

These last words were spoken with the resentful self-assurance my friend found so annoying, but he made up his mind to contain his irritation. To a degree, Heredia was an open book, with the singular exception that what one read had to be taken in reverse and then subjected to a literal reading that canceled the original interpretation. This course, Branly told himself, was pointless, as pointless as the police inquiries in Poe's “The Purloined Letter.” The searched-for object was always in full view. The “purloined letter” of Victor Heredia, Branly knew in that instant, was his son. He did not need to see the boy to know that the unique voice, the joy, that had moved him so deeply that afternoon belonged to a nature very different from that of the father.

The latter was looking at my friend with the eyes of a whipped pup. “Why are you so contemptuous of me, M. le Comte?”

Branly looked up. He nearly dropped his fork on the tin tray with a great clatter, but instead lifted his eyebrows.

“I said we don't speak Spanish in my house, but you didn't believe me, you told me to speak Spanish to your servants, that they would understand me, you…”

Branly says he was seized by a violent emotion. Contrary to custom, he was tempted to express it.

“But,” as he explains to me this afternoon, “Heredia did not deserve my anger. A man who would bare himself in that way, whining and filled with self-pity, did not deserve my anger. Self-pity is merely a different manifestation of the resentment you and I find so intolerable.”

“Had you set that trap for him deliberately?” I dare ask.

He insists that, in a manner of speaking, he had acted in self-defense. For one thing, Heredia had woven a web of deceptions, expecting that his discreet and courteous guest would not call attention to them. Second, his deception could be countered only with similar, tacit, deceptions—for instance, asking him to speak Spanish to Branly's servants. Branly had decided to dupe Heredia in whatever manner possible.

“I am amazed, M. Heredia, that in the house of a man of Caribbean extraction there is no image of the patron saints of that area, a Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, a Mexican Guadalupe, a Virgen de Coromoto…”

He pronounced the names with a heavy French accent, the Vir-guen de la Ca-rhee-dad del Co-brhay, the
Ga
-da-loupe, the Vir-guen de Co-rho-mo-
to.
He was willing, he explains, to wager that the French Heredia was lying about his ancestors, and if so, he was lying about other matters. But he did not accuse him that night.

“What is important is that through my servants you relayed my message to Don Hugo Heredia.”

He started to ask, “You did give them the message?” but refrained, not wanting to offer Heredia the opportunity, an opportunity silently solicited by the Spaniard of the Clos des Renards, to do as he did, to turn his back on Branly without answering, to pause on the threshold, and only then to speak, with a kind of hangdog rage. “Caridad, not Ca-rhee-dad, Gua-da-
lu
-pe, not
Ga
daloupe, Virhen, not Vir-guen, Co-ro-
mo
-to, not Corhomo
to.
This is not a whorehouse, M. le Comte.”

He swept from the chamber wrapped in a dignity even more doleful than his initial self-pity. My friend smiled; Heredia had not dared refuse what Branly had asked as a favor, and because it was accompanied by a rebuff, Heredia had understood it to be an order.

As he was eating his solitary meal, my friend pondered the relationship between the other father and son, Hugo Heredia and his son, Victor. As he tells me now in our conversation in the dining room abandoned by everyone except the two of us, he realized that between the two Mexicans there was a kind of understanding, an interpenetration, inconceivable between the French father and son. As far as he had been able to tell, the young Heredia of the Clos des Renards could not be less like his father. He did not have to see the boy; one had only to hear that voice to recognize the delicacy, the sweetness, the moderation of the youth, whose very being repudiated the crude insolence, the excesses, of the father. Yes, from that first evening beside the barranca he had accepted without question the unspoken understanding between Victor and Hugo Heredia. He was sure that, because of their mutual confidence, the call from his unpleasant host had been sufficient to allay the anthropologist's uneasiness about his son's absence. Their understanding, Branly murmured in his temporary bed, and now to me at his customary table in the Automobile Club, was somehow connected with the boy's brutal treatment of the servant in Jean's house, and of his own Spanish servants on the Avenue de Saxe. Undoubtedly, he murmurs as he gazes penetratingly at me, and murmured then as he was again falling asleep, that feudal impunity of Latin Americans, as anachronistic, as picturesque, as delicious, as suicidal … Fermina Márquez in Paris, Doña Bárbara on the plains of Apure …

In a sterile landscape—but one that he dreamed was perfectly normal, even desired for its absolute absence of forms, colors, weather, or space, as if other landscapes, the accustomed ones, were the aberration and the names of its objects, forgotten and disgusting, were a perverse invention contrived to cloak the perfect whiteness of a self-sufficient cosmos, without need of trees, stones, flumes, blumes, and snew—captured in its own ineffectual, exhausted progression, advanced, without advancing, the sumptuous train of palanquins and trumpets, pages and palfreniers, prancing steeds and ragged beggars. And among the beggars he beheld the king adorned in all his robes and regalia, but icily ignored by all who surrounded him, soldiers and mendicants, as if he were but one of them, himself deceived, and on the litter of the king, borne on the backs of the palfreniers, traveled, in place of the king, a blond young beggar with black eyes, still a child, dressed in rags, with no crown but his golden curls, reclining languidly, unsure whether this was but another, innocent sport, neither cruel nor kind, but one the youth was inclined first to accept, and then renounce or accept according to his whim, as long as no one contested his place, and the king, whom everyone ignored except the dreamer who was listening from a different world, told how he had found the boy in an abandoned house, how to love him and care for him was to love or care for a little beggar.

8

He was awakened very early by a persistent humming. When he opened his eyes, he had the sensation that the room was swelling, but it was merely the early-morning breeze, the pungent, far-reaching, ebullient air of the Île de France that lends its flavor to this region—air, a still drowsy Branly told himself, he had been breathing for eighty-three years.

“One of the positive attributes of ancient peoples is that they have learned to respect their old, because in them they see themselves. In their rush, young nations deny their elderly their wisdom and respect—even, finally, life.”

“You may be right,” I interrupted. “Unfortunately, Europe wants today to see itself as young, and, as you say, denies the existence of her old.”

“If for no other reason,” Branly continued, as if he had not heard me, “I deserve to live because I carry a library in my head. Do you know that if tomorrow we awoke to find all the world's books disappeared, a few elderly men could, among us, re-create them.”

I realized that he hadn't appreciated my interruption, even less its demurrer. In the moment he was narrating to me, the breeze was billowing the curtains like sails, like Branly's intelligent, curious eyes, half-open. He vaguely remembered a nocturnal visit from his host, but the empty tray from his haphazard meal was nowhere to be seen. And the window was now standing open. He could hear the morning sounds from the highways, increasingly feverish activity, laborers on their way to work. Branly could see them in his mind's eye, ruddy-cheeked, flushed by the early-morning chill and their breakfast of cognac, dressed in blue denim and turtleneck sweaters and, sometimes even now, the traditional beret. He heard their joking, their gravelly laughter, heard them humming the melody of the madrigal—
à la claire fontaine, m'en allant promener
—as they walked by. In the distance, crows flocked above the woods in Enghien; but in the garden that, by pushing aside the curtains, he could admire in the solitude of the white light of a complacent dawn hostile to any who would perturb it, a solitary bird seemed to echo the same tune in its melancholy salute to the end of summer—
chante, rossignol, chante, toi qui as le coeur gai.
And now symmetrical flocks of southbound wild geese passed overhead, adding to the sense of farewell, blotting out all sound but their own, and in spite of their cacophony as intensely nostalgic as if fulfilling the last lines of a bitter comedy. It was only as their honking faded into a distance gradually reclaimed from the dream of a landscape without space or sound that the mingled voices of the two boys rose from the terrace below, beyond Branly's view, singing of the laughing heart and the weeping heart—
toi tu as le coeur à rire, moi je l'ai à pleurer
—and then, still more distant, the voices of the workmen in a wordless melody, as the boys sang, laughing, that final, it is long I have loved you, I shall never forget you,
il y a longtemps que je t'aime, jamais je ne t'oublierai.

“Capital of Bolivia?”

“Sucre.”

“Capital of China?”

“Peiping.”

“Capital of the Belgian Congo?”

“Léopoldville.”

“… French Equatorial Afr—?”

Branly tried to move closer to the window, glowing suddenly with light, not, as I have often said in jest, situated slightly behind his left ear, and lending a translucent luminosity to his entire head, especially the ears with the drooping lobes, a sign of age compensated by the pixieish helices proudly pointing toward the gleaming cranium, but this time within his skull, pulsing there like a throbbing drum. But before he could reach the window he heard the footsteps of the boys on the gravel, their laughter tracing the curve of their flight around the corner of the house. Branly settled himself comfortably in his bed to await the momentary arrival of Heredia with his breakfast tray.

My friend tells me now, with a smile, that it was waiting in bed, more than anything, that forced him to recognize how bizarre his situation was. In vain, he tried to remember a normal morning in his life, not wartime, not dawn in the trenches of the Marne in '17, not the bombardment and fall of Calais in '40, both the exception and the justification for a comfortable life, but one single morning in ordinary times when a solicitous servant had not appeared to place a breakfast tray across his lap, the bottom of the tray warm to the touch of fingers anticipating the temptations of steaming hot coffee and croissants warm from the oven.