Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

He dozed, thinking that perhaps his host had been right, perhaps he was not yet ready for strong emotion; the world had deceived him through the years by leading him to expect the respect he felt he deserved. A resentment as flagrant and gross as Heredia’s mounted in Branly’s breast, an indication of the existence of a world that he had vaguely known existed but had never known. How long had it been since anyone had had the effrontery to thwart his wishes? How long since anyone in his presence had interrupted the priestly murmur of conversation typical of the French; in fact, of any civilized people?

Dusk was falling before his eyes, and as night approaches, the woods look like the sea. Vast, serene, inexhaustible, renewed in every breath. He felt suddenly suffocated, uncomfortably aware of the smell of tanned leather, and with a movement he then thought natural, but now, telling me, he recalls as violent, even desperate, he reached out with his cane and pushed open one of the casements of the window. As it swung open, he could hear the happy voices of the two boys, who obviously were playing beneath his window on the terrace guarded by lions.

Their voices, Branly says, dissipated the asphyxiating odor of hide and filled the room, as if it were a delicate, tall-stemmed goblet, with tremors of the beautiful, melancholy twilight, and also with the ineffable, the quintessential, joy of the boys, who were laughing and singing — now he could hear it — the madrigal of the enraptured nightingale: Chante, rossignol, chante, toi qui as le coeur gai.

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.”