Distant Relations (25 page)

“Don Hugo, may I offer you something a little more substantial?”

There was something gross about his courtesy.

I said no, I didn't want anything. Not even what he had to offer? A drink? Oh, no. He laughed. My wife. My son, Antonio. No, not for nothing. He, “Heredia,” needed people in exchange. His problem was considerably more complex, if he might put it that way; while I desired the return of persons who had lived, he required the materialization of someone who had never been. Did I understand what he was saying? I had to say that I did not, and something that had been holding me there—all this happened within a few minutes, not more than five or six, I'm sure—was shattered. I thanked “Heredia” for the tea—which had turned out to be
atole.
I told him we had wanted to satisfy my son's curiosity and that now we must leave.

“Come back any time you like,” said “Heredia,” patting Victor's head.

“I don't think so. This was merely a whim of my son's. A game.”

“Ah, but he won't be coming alone. My dealings are with you, Don Hugo. Think over what I said. I will see you tonight at your hotel.”

This time I said nothing. Something prevented me from mocking him in Monterrey, as I had mocked him in Caracas. I nodded, took Victor's hand, and left without further word.

That night, I tucked Victor in and, in spite of myself, went down to the bar. What would you have done, Branly, after such a day, so rich in chaotic impressions? Is there anyone you have forgotten and would like to have back? Then think about the things I pondered during the hours following our meeting with “Heredia”: I am forgetting Lucie and Antonio, that is inevitable; soon they will be a vague memory recalled only with effort, the aid of a photograph, the prod of a sudden scent. On the other hand, Victor is here. I don't have to remember him.

Why doesn't Victor help me remember? I have asked him so often. I felt an overwhelming hatred for my living son.

That was the very question “Heredia” asked me that night. He was sitting near the bar at a table beneath the frosted-glass mirrors from the early years of the century, preserved there by an appreciation of the past rare in Monterrey. The large blades of the ceiling fans failed to ruffle the abundant white mane of this man with the fine features and graceless body, tonight wearing a yellow corduroy suit too heavy for the climate of Monterrey and a ridiculous celluloid collar, with not even a tie to cover flagrantly bared bone buttons, Why, he said, why not let Victor help me remember? Victor is capable of remembering everything. He is living; with the proper complement, Don Hugo, you could see all your theses fully realized: a living past, actual, irrevocable. Victor, and someone else; Victor, united with another. Together they will have that memory; they will
be
that past. Victor will have more life than his dead brother; he will remember Antonio, as if he were still alive. But he will also live his dead brother's life; he will remember what Antonio knows because he is dead. What is needed? A perfect space, Don Hugo, an ancient space where my dead and yours can meet through the living young Victor.

“A new brother for Victor,” said “Heredia” in the Ancira bar. “That is what I am offering.”

He raised his glass, a Veracruz mint julep, in a silent toast. He waited for me to do the same.

“What's on your mind, Don Hugo?” asked “Heredia,” his glass still held high.

“A few months ago, in a fit of rage, Victor broke an artifact we found at some ruins,” I replied despondently. “I was just thinking that what you are offering is to a degree what I wanted then, though I didn't realize it until this minute. And do you know what that was? I wanted the halves of that object to be rejoined; I wanted their wholeness to become a part of art, of history, of the past, of culture, of anything you can name.”

“Does that mean you accept my pact?”

“I mean that, as an act of good faith on your part, I would accept the restoration of the object my son destroyed.”

“Would it be enough if you found half?”

I replied that it would. It would offer renewed hope that the object would be whole again. He said that Victor would find the lost half at Xochicalco; that would be the guarantee the other half would be found later, that the object would be restored.

“And what am I to do when my son finds half of what he destroyed?”

“From that moment on, everything will proceed in a manner I would not want to call fatalistic; no one likes to use that word. Let us say, in an orderly sequence of events, eh? One thing will follow another. You, Don Hugo, will understand what is happening; you will always make the correct choice, I am sure of that.”

He rambled on, telling me stories about his family, which had lived in different parts of the Antilles. I became increasingly confused, for there were glaring inconsistencies in his stories, none of the dates coincided, and, finally, I wondered if the man with the stubby fingers and pale eyes wasn't simply selecting names and dates at random to fabricate the genealogy that best served his purpose. He mentioned a number of names of his family, and of persons I assumed were family friends. I heard, though I really couldn't follow the thread, stories about a certain Francisco Luis and his two wives, a French merchant named Lange, and a mulatto nurse. I never understood whether this “Heredia” was the son of Francisco Luis's first wife—a physiological impossibility, for that would mean I was talking with a man who was more than a hundred and sixty years old—or the second: even then, he would have been born sometime between 1850 and 1900, when Heredia's second wife died—at what age I don't know. Nevertheless, he insisted on referring to his father's first wife as “Mother.”

“Did you know Mademoiselle Lange?” I dared ask.

“I spent nine months in her belly,” he smiled disagreeably, “aware of every sip that passed the dear lady's lips.”

“Where were you born? Where were you christened?” I asked in a neutral voice.

“That's of no importance,” he said defensively.

“But it is,” I persisted, in a conversational tone. “How were you christened?”

At that moment, Branly, “Heredia” shed all semblance of fraud or grotesqueness. He stared at me with a terrible expression, which I had the sense to recognize as a strange kind of sorrow, totally alien to me. Why alien? I answered my own question. I have lived life. My only regrets are that at times I made the wrong choices; I celebrate the times I chose well; I lament the things that are lost to me, especially my dead wife and son; I can laugh a little at my setbacks, at the passing years themselves; I lament, celebrate, and laugh at my own death, which I accept because I have always known it could not be avoided, and because I have been convinced that to have lived a little, like Toño, or a lot, as I have—don't you agree, Branly, you who have lived so long and so well?—death is a small price to pay. I thought about my dead wife, our nights together, her words of love.

No. “Heredia” had known none of this, and because I knew what my life had been, I knew that the life of my companion that night in the bar of the Hotel Ancira was defined by the absence of these things. That's why I think I understood his next words, spoken with disturbing overtones of self-pity shocking in a man in his position and with his intentions.

“Have I been forgotten? You tell me, Don Hugo. Does anyone remember me?”

I didn't know how to respond to such obvious self-commiseration. “Heredia” himself must have realized he was making a fool of himself, for he added: “
Tant pis, mon ami;
so much the worse for the person who forgets. I will see to it that I'm remembered.”

He sucked noisily at the dregs of his rum-and-mint drink, and asked me to lead him to the room where Victor was sleeping. We went up, but as I unlocked the door, this heavily built man pushed past me and slammed the door in my face, and when I began to beat on the door and ring the bell with indignation, I heard “Heredia” 's voice through the chinks of the polished mahogany door.

“Don't interrupt me, Don Hugo. Come back in half an hour. I'll be finished by then. Everything depends on your leaving me alone. Please. Do it for your son. And never tell anyone what happened between us. Do it for your son.”

I stopped pounding at the door, and stepped back. But I did not abandon my vigil in the hotel corridor. I counted the minutes on my watch. I waited five minutes past the thirty minutes. Again I knocked at the door, calling to “Heredia” to come out, as he had promised. The door opened at my touch. I went in and found my son asleep. He was alone. I never saw “Heredia” again.

You know the rest of the story, Branly. I told you that in the Ancira bar that night “Heredia” mentioned names of his family and people connected with his family. The names meant nothing to me at the time. But I was startled when Jean introduced you that day in Xochicalco. Your name rang a bell; “Heredia” had spoken of you. I swear I've tried to remember in what context; my impressions are as vague as “Heredia” 's references, Branly: a house of ill repute frequented by the French army in Mexico; a ravine; a woman in a shallow grave; a park in Paris; a window; a boy. Does all this mean anything to you? I haven't been able to make any sense of it.

Besides, I prefer to think of you in terms of the aura of mystery that surrounded you the day you entered my life and precipitated the chain of events. That was the day Victor found half the artifact. I associate you above all with that moment. Something created to last, a piece of art intended for something other than commerce or the bedazzlement of the senses or the celebration of the transient, an object emblematic of that presence of the past that has given meaning to my life, was about to be restored to its pristine beauty and unity. Amends were about to be made—at great cost, but amends, nonetheless—for an angry, stupid, barbaric, capricious act of destruction.

I don't know, Branly, what you may have forgotten about yourself, about your past, your family line—obviously, considerably better documented than our own. With better reason, what have we Heredias forgotten? Now I spend entire nights trying to evoke things I no longer know: a desired violation, all the transgressions of the flesh, the ambition, money, power, and caste that shaped and kneaded the lives of people like the Heredias are forgotten, yes, perhaps because we couldn't live with the constant consciousness of the lives we have sown, the fortunes we have usurped, the misery on which those of us who are anything in the New World have built our being. Lucie will be proved right. A black utopia devoured by a bloody epic; you see what has happened to that dream of a rediscovered Eden, and its noble savage.

In contrast, an object is never cruel, Branly, it has no passions, it harms no one; rather, it gives testimony to permanence, glimmering with the twin lights of a yesterday and a today indistinguishable in art.

“Who was just here, who were you talking to?” I asked, brutally shaking my son awake in our bedroom in the Hotel Ancira.

“André,” my son replied. “André…”

I don't care about his name. He was a child with us, and will grow old with us. I hope that, thanks to me, my son will enjoy whatever time he has with that boy he so fervently desired to see, or be, or have, I don't know which verb to use, as I, thanks to the boy, will enjoy my time with Lucie and Antonio.

And if I have understood correctly, one day the four of us will be together, because somehow Victor will be with us again. Then we can all be partners in mourning.

But everything depends on your understanding the words. You had a past, but you do not remember it. Try to recapture it in the little time you have left, or you will lose your future.

This is the obligation shared by all of us who were actors in this story. I pass it on to you, Branly, hoping you will accept it as proof of my gratitude. It is because I am grateful that I have told you everything I know—no more, no less. I know I am exposing myself to a terrible fate if you betray me by repeating what I have told you. But, between gentlemen, that question doesn't arise.

You see, Branly, you and I are bound together by a shared rejection of the death of the past, the present of civilizations. “Heredia” and I were bound by the Pragmatic Sanction, if I may call it that, of the same attitude: our will to serve the dead, so that someday the living will serve us. Through me as intermediary, you and that demon were finally allied in a common goal: the recovery of an angel.

21

When Branly finished his long account of the words of Hugo Heredia in Xochicalco during the vigil of All Saints', its final meaning, like a ball of paper tossed into the sea, was slow to sink to the depths of my consciousness. First, it had to be saturated with water and sun, the vapors of iodine and salt, the agents that allow us to convert what is said into what is known, and what is known into something more: the fate contained in every word, as well as what, prophetically, it announces.

Consequently, the only question that then occurred to me to ask Branly was whether the boy Victor had told his father anything more at their first meeting after being separated by “Heredia” in the Hotel Ancira. But my friend seemed not to hear me; I sensed from his faraway gaze, his murmuring lips, that he had not completely returned from the mournful celebration in Mexico.

I dared not interrupt his strange self-absorption. When he did speak, the words did not sound his own, it was as if Hugo Heredia were still speaking through the voice of my friend.

“Everything depends on your understanding the words. You had a past, but you do not remember it. Try to recapture it in the little time you have left, or you will lose your future.”

Again his eyes focused on a point near me.

“Branly.” I spoke with a certain anxiety. “Are you all right? Is something the matter?”

“It was the eve of All Souls' Day, the day of the dead,” he said, once more in his own voice.