Distant Relations (16 page)

“My father had never forgiven the deceit, M. le Comte. My mother died in a brothel in Cuernavaca, where the Emperor Maximilian had a butterfly- and peacock-filled pleasure palace. But who knows where they buried her, because the Bishopric had forbidden loose women to be laid to rest in holy ground. Who knows what barranca they threw her into? But he had never forgiven the deceit, and he had published in all the local gazettes a funeral notice announcing the much-lamented demise of the Duchesse de Langeais. They say that the whole French court of Mexico had a good laugh over such a grotesque joke.”

“But at the beginning you told me your mother would make fools of all of you, Heredia. I do not understand…”

“Don't you think it's her turn?”

“Perhaps.”

“Do you know the names of every one of the Imperial officers who were stationed in Cuernavaca who visited Heredia's brothel in the barranca of Acapaltzingo on the night of August 12, 1864, to celebrate the seventieth birthday of the Duchesse de Langeais?”

“No, of course not. Don't you mock
me,
Heredia.”

“Very well. Do you think it a coincidence, M. le Comte, when two people have the same name?”

“No. It is merely a matter of chance, of onomastic arithmetic, when names coincide.”

“When they coincide, yes. And when they are sundered?”

Branly shook his head and consciously retrieved the rational tone he had decided to assume in his relations with the French Heredia. “Allow me, if you will, to express my doubts about everything I have heard here tonight.”

Heredia shrugged preposterously. “I am not to be trusted, is that it?”

“No. I must be frank. I am aware that everything you tell me has the effect of distracting me from something you undoubtedly want to hide.”

“Suspect what you want, M. le Comte. But nothing will prevent what once was joined from being joined again.”

Branly tried to see outside, but deep night lay over the woods and parks of the Clos des Renards; he realized that for hours he had been listening to voices as he stared into the nothingness of the night. The painted image of the pitiful woman known as the Duquesa de Lanché had disappeared into shadows far more obscuring than the hands that hid her face. Heredia exclaimed with feigned surprise and begged my friend's forgiveness for everything: the darkness, the late hour, for keeping Branly awake, for the long-winded obsession with family histories that had neither interest for nor any connection with M. le. Comte, whose most illustrious family had had no association with such ugly realities for centuries, of course not. Perhaps nine centuries, or a thousand years ago, yes, but certainly not a short century before, such a thing couldn't be. No ancestor of the esteemed Comte de Branly had been present at the whorehouse of Francisco Luis de Heredia one August night in 1864, nor had he been at the burial of the French Mamasel in the barranca of Acapaltzingo, with Clemencita singing in broken French, as a kind of prayer for the dead, a madrigal the Mamasel had adored and always played on her harpsichord,
eló eté sibele,
laughed Heredia, that's how it sounded in Clemencita's broken French, a madrigal transmuted into an Afro-Hispanic chant.

Heredia had been laughing with every word he spoke. Now, with false obsequiousness, he lighted the candles of a silver candelabrum to lead his guest back to his bedroom.

“Follow me, M. le Comte.”

“Please?”

“Is there something you want?”

“Nothing. Only that yesterday, when Victor brought my meal, I asked myself whether you were degrading him, Heredia, as your Francisco Luis degraded his wife.”

“But, M. le Comte. The boy is serving you, not me.”

Branly tried to smile. “Your father did not have such a good excuse. Perhaps he lacked an intermediary in his dispute.”

“Doesn't it surprise you that he chose her as my mother?” Heredia asked unexpectedly.

“No,” Branly said, adding with deliberation: “You yourself told me that, in your manner of thinking, one is free only if one is born without father or mother. Perhaps this is the intermediate solution, to choose one's parents.”

“You are truly the good, rational, sensual Frenchman, M. le Comte.” And Heredia laughed.

My friend nearly replied, “But never mediocre,” and then remembered his conversation with Hugo Heredia on the day he met him: the high Indian citadel at Xochicalco, the edge of the precipice, Victor running toward them with his discovery, Branly hooking his arm with his cane, preventing him from falling fifty meters.

“A rational Frenchman, sensual surely, but never mediocre.”

“Sensuality is but a chapter of violence.”

“On the contrary.”

He remembered, but he did not repeat, those words. Slowly, he followed his host, exhausted, leaning on his cane, and wondering whether the false Duchesse de Langeais of this hot-blooded and baroque story of the Heredias had fled his dream.

15

No. She returned punctually. But now she arrived laden with color, envisioned memories, signs and omissions more profound than her initial mystery. Then she had been separate from history, but now, Branly is telling me, it was in fact history that was responsible for making her more vivid but at the same time less real.

Nevertheless, though this invasion of his pristine dream of a woman eternally poised on the contiguous thresholds of birth and death by the concurrent, roiling tides of wars and passions, revenge and rebellion, the traffic of weapons and bodies, might have destroyed the pure essence of the woman now in addition mottled by a multiplicity of names, it made Branly realize that he was indebted to the Heredias for having interrupted his routine and its accompanying empty hours. This he acknowledged as he fell asleep that night, after he had been subjected to the schedule of his unsleeping host, and had judged a defeat the time spent with him, time that separated him from sunlit hours and the overheard conversations of the boys on the terrace.

At any rate, the elderly sleep very little; a drowsy old man is slightly ridiculous, my friend is saying now, as he consults the heirloom watch in his vest pocket, attached to an elegant gold chain.

“It is five o'clock.”

Branly asks which I would prefer, that he continue the story or that we go for a swim in the club pool and then (and here he laughs apologetically, as if this were a benevolent imposition), if I wished, dine together at the Laurent he had known as a youth. No, that would not be possible, the restaurant has been closed for many years, perhaps the Vert Galant on the Quai des Orfèvres: he has friends there, too. Shall he reserve a table for nine o'clock? I was struck by the unconscious associations his words reveal. He knows that one restaurant is still open for business and the other not, but he is not ready to accept the loss of the owners of the place he frequented in 1914; to him they are as real as the restaurateurs he sometimes visits today. At the moment, his second suggestion seemed considerably more attractive, but some irresistible compulsion caused me to say: “No, Branly, I don't want you to interrupt your story.”

I did not dare explain that a terrible sense of inconclusiveness was beginning to assail me; I feared that a prolonged interruption would seal, unfinished, the various stories beginning to fuse into a single narrative. He acquiesced, and then told me that the real mystery of that night he had spent in the company of the French Victor Heredia lay in the fact that when he returned to his bedroom he fell into a deep dream, so deep that all that had happened seemed to become a part of it: his ascent into the attic of the Clos, his encounter there with the man with the white eyes and hair, his discovery of the painting of the woman whose face was hidden in her hands, the stories about Francisco Luis and the nana Clemencita. But curiously, he says, within that dream, which was like being immersed in a body of water too deep for him to touch bottom, his head, above water and illumined by the moonlight, was experiencing a kind of extreme and undesired lucidity; drowned in dream, he plotted various detailed schemes for fleeing Heredia's estate the following day: he would call Etienne; why hadn't he come to pick up the Citroën? He would call Hugo Heredia; why his astonishing lack of concern for his son? He and young Victor would be back in the house on the Avenue de Saxe in time for luncheon; would his Spanish servants José and Florencio have everything in order?

“I do not know whether I make myself clear. In the dream, it was the everyday considerations that became fantastic; the rational part of my dream was the sudden and undeniable identification of fantasy with total reality. But you cannot imagine what I thought of to wait out the return of logic. While deeply asleep, within my dream though not reconciled to it, I entertained myself by counting, as if so many sheep, the Frenchmen born in the Hispanic New World.”

He says that over the fences of his imagination, like figures in a transatlantic ballet, leaped Paul Lafargue, blown by a hurricane to London from his cradle in Santiago de Cuba to wrest a daughter from Marx, and, ever a cyclone, to whirl through the debris of the Commune and unleash socialist storms in Spain, Portugal, and France; Reynaldo Hahn, who came from Caracas with his gloomy songs and beautiful hands to rock the dreams of Bernhardt and Marcel Proust; Jules Laforgue, who had come to France because he had not wanted his flesh to grow old “more slowly than the roses” in Montevideo, and had exchanged the passage of a “sad and insatiable youth” beside the River Plate for the speedier universal illusion called death beside the Seine; and why did Isidore Ducasse emigrate, he too from Uruguay, only to die between an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table in one of the grim hospitals of Paris, when in Montevideo he had already found his Maldoror, his Mald'horror, his male horror, his mald'-aurora, the waters of the River Plate at first light, swollen with distended skins, the hides of slaughtered steers, of mutilated men, of children lost amid baled wool and sheep udders?

I listen to Branly speaking of my lost cities, and I exclude forever from his narrative that dual monster, the Comte de Lautréamont, that beast of prey whose poems were written with tentacles stained red with ink:
“C'est un cauchemar qui tient
ma
plume”
; yes, a nightmare stained his pen. My breath quickens as my friend makes room in his dream for another Frenchman from Montevideo, the lucid and magisterial Jules Supervielle, who was right to emigrate: there, facing the never-ending pampa, his brow would have remained forever naked, a “great empty plaza between two armies.” And, following on his heels, José María de Heredia, the Frenchman from Havana, the disconsolate conquistador who returns to the Old World wearily laden with “the arrogant misery of his trophies, the blooming beast and the animate flower,” the sun beneath the sea and the quivering of gold; drunk with “a heroic and brutal dream,” the dream of the new continent, the nightmare of the old.

“Do you see, my friend? You, who come from there, should understand when I tell you that the New World was the last opportunity for European universalism; it was also its tomb. Never again, following that century of discoveries and conquests, was it possible to be universal. As it turned out, the New World was too vast, on too great a scale. No one there could paint, as Holbein the Younger here, the exact measure of the human universe as represented by the portraits of More and Erasmus. There we all became Heredias; enervated Creoles. I tell you, too many innocent backs bore the mark of the whiplash of Maldoror's cruel pen.”

He stared at me with an inordinate, slightly sinister intensity, an expression that gave him the vaguely comic air of an ancient Roman senator plotting crimes in the baths of Diocletian. I feared this mood, because always when Branly verged on the sublime I was forced to swallow my amusement, along with a dose of ridicule. He lowered his voice suddenly.

And my inner laughter ceased abruptly as he placed his hand on my arm; I feared the twist my extraordinary friend would give to the things he was saying, feeling, remembering, foreseeing.

“Now listen carefully. This story was told me that night in the garret by several voices, those of Heredia and his father, the stupid and cruel Francisco Luis, and of his no less stupid, though benign, second wife, by the nana Clemencita, and by the Mamasel Lange. They were not telling me their own stories but the story of a different Heredia. The young one. The boy Victor Heredia. The story they told me was his.”

My astonishment when I heard Branly's words was comparable only, I believe, to my feeling of inadequacy as I had listened to the narrative of the Caribbean Heredias, which, in turn, was punishment and compensation for my self-sufficiency when I pointed out to my friend that I understood, perhaps better than he, the real story of the two boys in the Parc Monceau.

He was prepared now, as we sat in the shadows of the club dining room, to grant the Duchesse de Langeais a place in the scene in the Parc Monceau; in that way he would not burden the shoulders of the young Mexican Victor Heredia with the misery and humiliation of the Heredias of La Guaira. He believed that the French Victor Heredia was the boy of the Avenue Vélasquez. But today he was a boy named André. And the Mexican Victor was André's prisoner.

“You exaggerate, Branly,” I ventured, with a nervous start I tried to disguise by idiotically folding and refolding the limp table napkin.

He looked at me with gratitude and supplication. The first emotion informed me that, as it had him, the exhilaration of the Antillean world was subconsciously beginning to dominate me. The second invited me to cooperate with him, to recover, to make possible, the original temper of our conversation, the priestly and rational tone of French dialogue and, more importantly, its manners. As long ago as the sixteenth century, I exclaimed, Erasmus wrote that the French believe themselves the repositories of courtesy. And I shall not be the one to belie the wise man of Rotterdam. Branly reminded me that in the same paragraph Erasmus accuses the Germans of priding themselves on their knowledge of magic. He realized, at any rate, that explicitly I accepted, though implicitly held reservations about, his cult of
politesse.
One should not, he said, consider it a national characteristic, as Erasmus had done, or Lope de Vega, who had attributed equal virtue to the residents of Lombardy. It was, simply, his personal religion. In any event, he sighed, considering the historical destinies of France and Germany, was it not preferable to follow the modes of the French? I told myself that the undertaking would not be easy; the intelligent eyes of my friend told me, in exchange, that the story of the Heredias had infected us both. We were speaking like colonials; we were reacting like “enervated Creoles.”