Distant Relations (20 page)

These reflections on the utter irrationality of their ages, so inconsistent with Branly's rational chronology, faded from his mind the moment he saw from the terrace of the manor the perfect symmetry of the French garden, the clear and intelligent space where nature was tamed by the geometric exactitude of shrubs, greensward, pansies, artichokes, and stone urns. In vain, he looked for a sign of the grayish scar in the grass.

The birch grove, the rosebushes, the beech and willow trees, seemed to exult in their own serenity, as if in homage to the vanished summer, and along the avenue of chestnuts and oaks, autumn had not yet passed, spreading its basket of spoils. The fresh, cool ground was swept clean; there were no dead leaves, only the enchanting play of light and shadow among green branches.

The Citroën was parked on the gravel drive where the avenue ended and the garden began. When Etienne saw them emerge from the house onto the terrace, he left off dusting the ornamental klaxon with his feather duster, touched one hand to the visor of his cap, and climbed into the car. The sturdy chauffeur circled the garden and came to a stop before the entrance stairway; he got out to open the rear door so that Branly, assisted by his servants, might enter. The surprise in the voices of José and Florencio rang hollow, less than convincing. Of this, at least, my friend has a clear recollection.

“Imagine. And to think we'd given him up for dead.”

“Jesus! Sweet gypsy Jesus! The dead has risen!”

“You two get in with M. le Comte, go on, now, take good care of him. I'm going for his things.”

Branly says he sank against the soft, beige, spotlessly clean upholstery and refused to converse with the servants, even to look at them, to concede that he was aware of their disconcerted but conspiratorial glances, their shrugged shoulders, the upturned palms mutely inviting explanations.

It would have been very easy to say to them: Hugo Heredia bought him just as he bought you, except that his price was higher. One Breton peasant is tougher than two Andalusian peasants. It takes a little more effort to make Etienne stop remembering. For you, forgetfulness comes easy. A little more time, a little more money, that was the only difference. No one remembers anything. Nothing happened.

Etienne emerged from the house with a suitcase containing, Branly supposed, the clothing my friend had been wearing the night of the accident. He climbed into the car and started it.

“How is your hand, Etienne?” Branly inquired.

With a sheepish smile, the chauffeur looked at his employer in the rearview mirror and raised his bandaged hand. “I drive very well with only one hand, M. le Comte.”

“Ah.”

Branly turned to look back through the rear window of the Citroën. He read the date inscribed above the doorway: A.D. 1870. Etienne had thought it was the number of the house and that he had made a wrong turn; on that occasion he had muttered curses against a municipal system that would assign two numbers to one house. My friend had known it was a date, because as he glanced toward the upper story from the moving automobile, leaving behind forever the Clos des Renards, he saw hovering in the window a dancing, fading silhouette in diaphanous white, with a tall hairdo resembling towers of cotton candy. The peacock uttered its plaintive cry. But Branly listened in vain for strains of the madrigal,
Chante, rossignol, chante.

19

The elderly sleep very little, Branly repeats now. They feel besieged by the need for vigilance, and in this, old age is wise. Adjustments are made so that it is not physiologically necessary to sleep as much as before, as in the days when one came home worn out after poking into every corner of one's grandfather's castle, or after playing in the Parc Monceau, after making love with Myrtho in a nest of rose-colored eiderdowns, or after nights beneath the sulphurous lightning flashes of the trenches.

At any rate, a drowsy old man is slightly ridiculous, Branly says, as finally we arise from the table in the club dining room and walk slowly through the spacious salon illuminated at this hour only by the streetlamps on the Place de la Concorde. It is just six o'clock, and the lights turned on at the moment we reach the reception hall seem blinding. An army of waiters and assistants, several of them mere boys, swarm in with rolled-up sleeves, tightly cinched aprons, and flushed faces, to prepare the tables, spread clean tablecloths, fold fresh napkins, and replenish the flower vases.

The servants apologize, bow, step aside impatiently, their servility bordering on hostility. They want us to know that we have delayed their chores, their getting off work, their meetings with children, wives, friends, their entertainment or sleep. My friend and I leave behind us a clattering of glass and silverware like the serenade of a silver fountain. The madrigal of the clear fountain is echoing in my head, as so often happens with those childhood melodies whose classic and insistent simplicity preempts from our memory, to our annoyance, compositions we would prefer to hear, in a kind of permanent and gratuitous high fidelity. For example, above all else, I love two compositions, Haydn's Emperor Quartet and Schubert's Trio No. 2 for piano, violin, and cello. I would have wished that those noble chords had accompanied our descent of the equally noble staircase of Gabriel's
pavillon,
not some childish tune about nightingales, sorrow, and joy beside a fountain.

The evening meal at the Automobile Club de France is being prepared as we, who seemed about to delay the whole process, oblivious of the obligations of others, walk through the ground floor of the green and mahogany library with its memorable engravings of the first French automobiles, and into the modern bar beside the large swimming pool. There are few members present at this hour, and Branly suggests that we might want to take a swim after we have finished our conversation in the solarium adjoining the pool.

I nodded, and he marched off toward the pool as I followed, marveling at how completely he had recovered his military bearing.

“No, it was not difficult to guess that Hugo Heredia had bribed all my servants. In a way, it was the inevitable corollary to this story, and the only act that could tie together all the loose threads. The father, I have stressed this from the beginning, was instructing the son. I hesitate to say this, my dear friend, since you are to a degree from that world, but his lesson was one of a false colonial aristocracy that equates nobility with a power of corruption and cruelty beyond punishment.”

He paused for a moment on the fiber mat bordering the pool.

“Do you admit that?” he asked, tall, stern.

“It's probable,” I replied.

“No. It is true,” he said, and resumed his martial pace. “Think about it and you will realize that this is the point where all the stories come together—that of Hugo Heredia and his son, that of Francisco Luis and Mademoiselle Lange, that of the savage resentment of the master of the Clos des Renards—in a common inclination of spirit, if we may call it that.”

“It is probable,” I repeated, slightly taken aback, adding that I felt more at home
here
than
there.

In the dressing rooms, the attendants called up our numbers and we began to undress as our numbered swimming trunks and towels, along with the obligatory robes and scuffs, descended in the small lift from a collective loft concealed above. We members of the club have no right to take these articles with us but must entrust them to the club until the day, if not of our death, of our unlikely resignation of the privilege of belonging to it. Where else these days does one find such precise and uncommon rituals? We did not speak while the bald or graying muscular attendants in shorts and T-shirts attended us personally, soaping us with loofa sponges, scrupulously avoiding any contact with our private parts, before we proceeded to the showers.

After we had showered, we wrapped ourselves in the terry-cloth robes and went into the humid salon conceived of by the club not as a sauna or a Turkish bath but as a pleasant solarium. Sitting there was like spending a summer morning beneath a cloudy sky.

I maintained a discreet silence, which I believed invited my friend to continue a story that might otherwise have ended at the moment when Branly, barefoot and in pajamas, flanked by his Spanish servants and driven by his Breton chauffeur, left behind him forever the Clos des Renards. I dreaded the probability of Branly's accusation. His stoicism would have been extraordinary if at least once, and what better time than this, in the company of a friend, without witnesses, and with a solemn, if implicit, oath never to repeat a word of our conversation, he had not said what we were both thinking.

At least he could be sure of one thing, he said as he settled into the canvas chair beside mine: Hugo Heredia had returned to Mexico and would never again see or hear from his son Victor. Perhaps, as the terrifying Spaniard of the Clos des Renards had said, Branly, though he could never recognize him, had seen Victor in a café or walking down some street. He could even be one of the waiters who rushed in to prepare for the evening meal at the club; had I realized the number of adolescents who worked as helpers? I said I had, and added that this medieval system disguised as apprenticeship was preferable to turning the boys onto the streets, unemployed. Branly closed his eyes and said that we had not been talking about unemployment. His question was, had I noticed the faces of the young waiters, had I seen among them a face that might belong to the person “Heredia” had referred to: neither André nor Victor, but a new being, André
and
Victor.

I told him I had not. The idea seemed so extraordinary that it had never entered my head. Why here?

“To be near,” Branly replied.

“Near you?” I asked quietly.

Branly fingered the heavily embroidered blue initials on his robe.

“Near the recognition I owe them,” he said in a flat voice. “I find it difficult to recover my faith in my own reason, and yet the madness of the Heredias seems overly classic and therefore mysterious; it is a madness cloaked in civility.”

He held out his hand.

I leaned forward to take it.

Almost imperceptibly, without seeming to do so, he withdrew his hand, and said: “First I must tell you, and then I shall not say it again, that I have asked myself over and over whether I could have avoided what happened. What should I have done? I blame myself for many things. I shall mention only one. I allowed, you see? my pride and my scorn for the French ‘Heredia' to divert me from the responsibility of calling Victor's father, Hugo Heredia. You remember that instead I asked ‘Heredia' to telephone my servants to inform them that we were well and would be spending a few days in Enghien. Actually, I should have telephoned Hugo Heredia myself. Why? you ask with a certain amazement. As things turned out, weren't all the Heredias as thick as thieves, as English detectives say? It is true. And yet how can I convince myself—though at the time I did not know—I was not remiss? I should personally have telephoned the boy's father, listened to his lie, to the tone of voice that as it lies reveals the truth of things.”

I thought Branly was exaggerating his role in what transpired and I said that preventing what had happened would have entailed as much risk as any other combination of events. Victor could have died in the plane accident with his mother, instead of his brother Antonio. The possible combinations of chance, I added, were multiple. Hugo and Victor could have died in the accident; or Hugo and Antonio. Could Branly attribute any of the hermetic consequences to human will?

“There is one thing I could have done, something decisive,” my old friend said, suddenly aged as he spoke.

“What, Branly?” I was alarmed by the ominous curtain of age that suddenly descended over habitually taut features.

“I could have let the boy fall from the precipice. All I I had to do was hold out my cane, not hook his arm with its handle. He would have fallen at least fifty meters from the citadel to the pelota court in the ravine of Xochicalco.”

I made no comment. This linkage of deaths in a barranca in the Valley of Morelos seemed excessive, if not offensive: first, Mademoiselle Lange, now Victor Heredia. The same barranca? Always the same dogs and owls? Branly looked at me with a trace of amusement.

“You must remember, if you truly wish to be generous in absolving my guilt, that I was on the point of asking the father and son not to travel together. I might have invoked—it is my right, shall we say, of seniority—an intuition, a sixth sense, a profound respect for the dead: Latins understand this. In addition, I was on the point of asking the father not to travel with his son; I wanted to offer to come for the boy and then accompany him on his return to Mexico, is that not so?”

“That's what you told me, Branly.”

“Why, then, did I immediately invite them to my home, allow them to run the risk of traveling together, of being killed together, like the mother and brother before them?”

As he asked this question, my friend leaned toward me slightly. I repeated my thoughts as I sat beside Branly in my canvas chair. “I was thinking that courtesy is the only reliable means you can summon to impose order on human events, to offer them the refuge of civilization.”

“And…?” he asked avidly.

“There is more. I thought this was how you calmed that not unordered agitation, to use your own words.”

He stared at me as if thirsting for my thought: “And to exorcise the venomous flowers interwoven with precious jewels, is that it?”

“You know better than I where the chance of human destinies ends and the art of literary selection begins.”

Branly offered me a profile sketched with a silver nib. “Can they be separated?” he asked, finally.

He underscored his question with a nervous glance, and this time he pressed my hand.

Then he relaxed, sinking back into his beach chair.

We did not look at each other. Sitting side by side in the canvas chairs of the club solarium, we stared toward an undefined point before us, the tiled floor, the glass between us and the swimming pool and the bar.