Distant Relations (24 page)

I let Victor sleep in my bed that night, but I turned my back to him. I had failed. Victor had learned the uses of arbitrary power, but in the process he had forgotten the memory of the unity of time. This was never my intention, I know you believe me. On the contrary, I had wanted human authority to serve the memory of past civilizations, and the awareness of the present to serve everything that had preceded us.

The reason I am telling you all this, Branly, is that I feel we Heredias owe you a debt. I could read the thoughts that passed through your eyes the night we met. I am sorry to have deceived you. I am not a universal man from the century of discoveries. I am only a slightly resentful Mexican Creole, like all the rest of my compatriots marked by mute rage against their inadequacies. Mine is a selective culture. What can save me from the
capitis diminutio
that is the curse of being a “Latin American”—which is to say a man who turns everything he touches into melodrama? Tragedy has been denied us; even our deepest sorrows come under the label of the circus of disaster. Listen to our songs, read our love letters, hear our orators.

Several months went by in which communication with Victor was difficult, if not impossible. He resumed his studies at the French Lycée. I observed him closely, and kept repeating that ridiculously obvious phrase I had once heard. “We have no memory but what we recall.” It began to haunt me, I couldn't get it out of my mind. Does what we forget cease to exist, or is it we who are diminished when we forget something? Does what we have forgotten exist whether or not we remember it? These thoughts quite naturally were in my mind during my work at archaeological sites. The vast treasures of Mexican antiquity are no less real because for centuries we had ignored their existence. Perhaps the work of the archaeologist can be reduced to this: to restore, however imperfectly, a past.

I thought about this when I visited the city of the gods, Teotihuacán, the first true city of the Western Hemisphere. Its great avenues and pyramids are like a diagram of the ancient relationship of all things with all things. I remember our meeting here on a different afternoon, in a different space destroyed because Victor was with me, and today I believe that the limitations of my lesson were related to the changes that were taking place in our lives because of Victor. For, Branly, if you want me to summarize the most profound lesson of Mexican antiquity, it is this: all things are related, nothing is isolated; all things are accompanied by the totality of their spatial, temporal, physical, oneiric, visible, and invisible attributes.

“When a child is born,” I told Victor that intensely pale afternoon, “it is accompanied by all its signs; it belongs to a day, a physical object, a direction in space, a color, an instant in time, a sentiment, a temperature. But what is amazing is that these personal signs are related to all other signs, to their opposites, their complements, their prefigurations. Nothing exists in isolation.”

“Give me an example,” Victor said, and I sought his eyes. I felt that our ability to play together was being reestablished, and I explained, as an example, that if your day was that of the eagle Cuautli, it would correspond to the signs of the lofty flight that watches over the earth like a sun, but that this grandeur would find its complement in the sacrifice that must accompany it, in the figure of the god Xipe Tótec, who gives his life for the coming harvest, and who in order to escape from himself sheds his skin like a snake: the grandeur of the eagle's flight and the painful misery of our flayed lord.

First—yes, how banal—we played dominoes; then cards; increasingly complicated games, as if challenging one another. I resurrected the disturbing game of faro from Pushkin's
Queen of Spades,
with its secrets of enormous power, immense riches, but, also, infinite death. Victor responded with tarot cards. I compared the somnambulistic indifference I had witnessed at the cockfight of San Marcos with an enthusiasm of sorts displayed one afternoon when we went to see the bulls. I had explained that the
olé!
of the bullring comes from the ancient Arabic
wallah,
an invocation, an address to God. Victor did not shout it out that afternoon, watching the veronicas of El Niño de la Capea; he murmured it like a danger-fraught prayer that would save the matador's life because only he was repeating it.

We played games with photographs, Branly: Victor remembering his seatmates in grade school; I, mine. We cut up photographs to create unlikely pairings, entire families with faces transported through time and space. We bought old newsreels, projected them, each trying to incorporate himself (one always had to be the spectator) into the ambience of the film: automobile races, wars in Manchuria and Ethiopia, a dirigible disaster, the rallies of Perón's followers in the Plaza de Mayo.

It was Victor's idea to look up our names in the telephone directories of the towns we visited. The two Hugo Heredias, the half-dozen Victor Heredias, in the Mexico City phone book created a certain amused excitement, the first I had detected in my son for a long time. The novelty of the game needed no justification but this: pretended surprise, a shared laugh. In Mérida, however, the fact that there was but one Victor Heredia in the directory was a temptation: we called him, he laughed with us, we hung up. In Puebla the game grew more complex; Victor proposed that the loser should give the winner a prize.

“And who will determine the prize?” I asked with a smile.

Victor, unsmiling, replied: “The one who wins, of course.”

In Puebla there was only one Heredia in the directory, a Hugo.

“My prize will be for us to speak normally about your mother and your brother. It's been more than a year now, and we've never mentioned them. Don't you think it's important for us to begin remembering them?”

Victor did not reply. We called the Puebla Hugo Heredia. He growled at us in a hoarse voice, and hung up.

“Have you noticed, Father? It's always old men who answer.”

“Well, we could bet on whether the next Victor will be young and the next Hugo old.”

Victor laughed and said that I wasn't old; I replied that when one is twelve, anyone over thirty seems as old as the tomb.

“But some people never grow old.”

“Who are these fortunate ones?” I spoke lightly.

“The dead.” My son's voice was grave. “Antonio will never grow old.”

Jean had spoken of you often, Branly. In UNESCO, many people I respect know you. I have enjoyed your spontaneous, perhaps excessive, hospitality. I have seen the world that surrounds you. I know your interests. I have leafed through the books in your library, read what you have underlined in a few books more affectionately abused than others: Lamartine, Supervielle, Balzac. That is why I know I would offend you if I asked you to be discreet (worse, silent) in this matter. I should say nothing more. A true secret is one that is not told as a secret, but is kept so as not to lose the friendship of the person who told it, whether or not he knows.

You could say, with justification, that you didn't solicit my story. That is true. It is no less true that among gentlemen the things that must be said will not be repeated. You will tell me that I am mistaken to speak, that pride is silent. I will have to ask your forbearance, Branly, and say that I am swallowing my pride to apologize. We have used your name, your house, your automobile, your chauffeur, in carrying out a pact whose consequences, even today, I cannot accurately foresee. This is why I must speak, and also why I must ask you to tell no one what I say. I will explain. In everything I have said until now, it is implicit that it is not necessary to ask you not to repeat it. But what I am going to tell you now demands a silence which if violated would violate an agreement my life depends on. So, you see, I am telling you these things because you deserve an explanation; there is no other reason. If what I have told you previously is accurate, and verifiable, what I am about to add is open to any interpretation. Even I, who lived it, do not understand it. Am I telling you these things to have you share in my amazement, my doubt, my perplexity? Possibly. It is also possible that I would never have spoken a word of this if you had not sought me, exposing yourself to my violence or my betrayal in the same way that in receiving you I exposed myself to yours. I am trying to understand, as I see you here tonight, while evening begins to fade and the candles of the night vigil for the dead begin to flicker; you deserve my words, as I deserve your silence.

In Monterrey we found one Victor Heredia in the directory. My son called him from our room in the Hotel Ancira. Victor put his hand over the mouthpiece so the man couldn't hear him, and said: “He says he remembers everything.”

I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. I took the phone. I told the man who I was. A voice replied that he was glad to have our call, he had been expecting it for some time, and he invited us to come to tea in his apartment across from the Bishopric in the old part of that city shadowed, in the past as today, by a barbaric sun filtering through the dust. Monterrey does not inspire confidence; it is too indifferent to its own ugliness, as if the city existed only temporarily, in order for its grotesque oligarchy to make money and carry it off to heaven. That may be why I didn't tell my son about Victor Heredia's invitation. It was Victor, because he was the winner, who asked me to take him to meet his namesake. He asked in a tone that implied that if I denied him this request I would jeopardize the fragile edifice of our games and, consequently, our mutual trust. Our reviving affection, Branly.

I didn't tell him about the invitation. We arrived without warning, as Victor told you the evening the three of us were having tea in your home on the Avenue de Saxe, do you remember? But there was no surprise on the face of the man who received us that afternoon in a run-down apartment tastelessly adorned with silver paint and shabby furniture from the thirties, the kind one still sees in France in the Galeries Barbès.

I was the one who was surprised. I recognized the man who had appeared from behind Balzac's statue in a garden in Caracas while my beautiful Lucie danced in her swirling white gown. The surprise Victor detected on Heredia's face must have been surprise at my surprise. Victor's agitation that afternoon in your house, Branly, when I denied having gone with him to Heredia's apartment in Monterrey, was the predictable alarm of one who does not wish to be left alone in a decision which, nevertheless, ultimately excludes the possibility of being shared.

Yes, I recognized the man from the garden that night in Caracas, even though this “Heredia” was not exactly like the other man; he merely reminded me of him. I had sufficient presence of mind to tell myself that this must have been what the man meant when he characterized himself as a specialist in memories. I have described the moment of our arrival at Heredia's apartment. An instant later, the old man, who received us wearing bedroom slippers and a shabby white quilted bathrobe, and was holding a cup of Mexican corn-gruel
atole
in his hand, himself pretended great surprise, and asked whether we were the long-lost relatives that always come swarming out of the woodwork like termites when they scent the death of an elderly rich relative.

You will say when you read this that my son Victor was telling the truth, that it was I who lied. No. Please try to understand something very difficult to explain. We were both telling the truth, both Victor and I. Neither of us lied. He went alone, and we went together. “Heredia” was aware of my surprise when he recognized me, but he pretended surprise with that nonsense about poor relatives. And this happened, or, rather, the two things happened, Branly, in the wink of an eye, instantaneously, in that apartment with its splintered floors and silver paint, where, through dirty lace curtains, one could see the squat, gray, crumbling, graceless buildings of Monterrey. A presence was succeeded by a nonpresence, an attitude by its opposite, an affirmation by its negation, I by him. “Heredia”—he looking at me, I looking at him—standing there with his cup of
atole
in his hand, controlled the conversation, Branly; as he spoke to one of us, he excluded the other, not only from his words but from his very presence. I realized this only later when in the most tentative and uncertain way I asked Victor whether he remembered something “Heredia” had told me that afternoon. Victor said no, staring at me with curiosity.

I didn't ask any more. I knew, too, that I hadn't heard what “Heredia” told Victor. Again I felt the chill this man had brought to my life; I imagined, Branly, a force of infinite distance. The name “Heredia” was the name of a chaotic isolation that merged, and separated, all things. While “Heredia” was talking to me, I saw in my son's eyes the same cruel nonpresence that had frightened me at the cockfight of San Marcos; I was sure Victor was somewhere else, and that my eyes, when “Heredia” was speaking to Victor, condemning me to my own solitude, were not very different. What did Victor and “Victor Heredia” say to one another that I couldn't hear? What pact did they seal, Branly? We will never know with any certainty, because you can never know more than I am telling you. But my intuition tells me that in those moments Victor ceased to be mine; he passed into the hands of “Heredia,” and because I loved my poor son, I had to follow him wherever that devil led.

What did “Heredia” say to me? He used fewer words than I will need, Branly, to repeat his terrible offer. We had something in common: the secret desire to resurrect our dead, We cannot forget them. The living must serve the dead; there are certain things the dead cannot do. But as we serve them, we must be sure that we ourselves will be served at our deaths. You and I spoke of imperfectly restoring a past; those were my words, but “Heredia” spoke them that afternoon as he offered my son a choice of
atoles,
chocolate or strawberry, accompanied by powdered-sugar-sprinkled crullers.