Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

He swept from the chamber wrapped in a dignity even more doleful than his initial self-pity. My friend smiled; Heredia had not dared refuse what Branly had asked as a favor, and because it was accompanied by a rebuff, Heredia had understood it to be an order.

As he was eating his solitary meal, my friend pondered the relationship between the other father and son, Hugo Heredia and his son, Victor. As he tells me now in our conversation in the dining room abandoned by everyone except the two of us, he realized that between the two Mexicans there was a kind of understanding, an interpenetration, inconceivable between the French father and son. As far as he had been able to tell, the young Heredia of the Clos des Renards could not be less like his father. He did not have to see the boy; one had only to hear that voice to recognize the delicacy, the sweetness, the moderation of the youth, whose very being repudiated the crude insolence, the excesses, of the father. Yes, from that first evening beside the barranca he had accepted without question the unspoken understanding between Victor and Hugo Heredia. He was sure that, because of their mutual confidence, the call from his unpleasant host had been sufficient to allay the anthropologist’s uneasiness about his son’s absence. Their understanding, Branly murmured in his temporary bed, and now to me at his customary table in the Automobile Club, was somehow connected with the boy’s brutal treatment of the servant in Jean’s house, and of his own Spanish servants on the Avenue de Saxe. Undoubtedly, he murmurs as he gazes penetratingly at me, and murmured then as he was again falling asleep, that feudal impunity of Latin Americans, as anachronistic, as picturesque, as delicious, as suicidal … Fermina Márquez in Paris, Doña Bárbara on the plains of Apure …

In a sterile landscape — but one that he dreamed was perfectly normal, even desired for its absolute absence of forms, colors, weather, or space, as if other landscapes, the accustomed ones, were the aberration and the names of its objects, forgotten and disgusting, were a perverse invention contrived to cloak the perfect whiteness of a self-sufficient cosmos, without need of trees, stones, flumes, blumes, and snew — captured in its own ineffectual, exhausted progression, advanced, without advancing, the sumptuous train of palanquins and trumpets, pages and palfreniers, prancing steeds and ragged beggars. And among the beggars he beheld the king adorned in all his robes and regalia, but icily ignored by all who surrounded him, soldiers and mendicants, as if he were but one of them, himself deceived, and on the litter of the king, borne on the backs of the palfreniers, traveled, in place of the king, a blond young beggar with black eyes, still a child, dressed in rags, with no crown but his golden curls, reclining languidly, unsure whether this was but another, innocent sport, neither cruel nor kind, but one the youth was inclined first to accept, and then renounce or accept according to his whim, as long as no one contested his place, and the king, whom everyone ignored except the dreamer who was listening from a different world, told how he had found the boy in an abandoned house, how to love him and care for him was to love or care for a little beggar.

He was awakened very early by a persistent humming. When he opened his eyes, he had the sensation that the room was swelling, but it was merely the early-morning breeze, the pungent, far-reaching, ebullient air of the Île de France that lends its flavor to this region — air, a still drowsy Branly told himself, he had been breathing for eighty-three years.

“One of the positive attributes of ancient peoples is that they have learned to respect their old, because in them they see themselves. In their rush, young nations deny their elderly their wisdom and respect — even, finally, life.”

“You may be right,” I interrupted. “Unfortunately, Europe wants today to see itself as young, and, as you say, denies the existence of her old.”

“If for no other reason,” Branly continued, as if he had not heard me, “I deserve to live because I carry a library in my head. Do you know that if tomorrow we awoke to find all the world’s books disappeared, a few elderly men could, among us, re-create them.”

I realized that he hadn’t appreciated my interruption, even less its demurrer. In the moment he was narrating to me, the breeze was billowing the curtains like sails, like Branly’s intelligent, curious eyes, half-open. He vaguely remembered a nocturnal visit from his host, but the empty tray from his haphazard meal was nowhere to be seen. And the window was now standing open. He could hear the morning sounds from the highways, increasingly feverish activity, laborers on their way to work. Branly could see them in his mind’s eye, ruddy-cheeked, flushed by the early-morning chill and their breakfast of cognac, dressed in blue denim and turtleneck sweaters and, sometimes even now, the traditional beret. He heard their joking, their gravelly laughter, heard them humming the melody of the madrigal— à la claire fontaine, m’en allant promener —as they walked by. In the distance, crows flocked above the woods in Enghien; but in the garden that, by pushing aside the curtains, he could admire in the solitude of the white light of a complacent dawn hostile to any who would perturb it, a solitary bird seemed to echo the same tune in its melancholy salute to the end of summer— chante, rossignol, chante, toi qui as le coeur gai. And now symmetrical flocks of southbound wild geese passed overhead, adding to the sense of farewell, blotting out all sound but their own, and in spite of their cacophony as intensely nostalgic as if fulfilling the last lines of a bitter comedy. It was only as their honking faded into a distance gradually reclaimed from the dream of a landscape without space or sound that the mingled voices of the two boys rose from the terrace below, beyond Branly’s view, singing of the laughing heart and the weeping heart— toi tu as le coeur à rire, moi je l’ai à pleurer —and then, still more distant, the voices of the workmen in a wordless melody, as the boys sang, laughing, that final, it is long I have loved you, I shall never forget you, il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.

“Capital of Bolivia?”

“Sucre.”

“Capital of China?”

“Peiping.”

“Capital of the Belgian Congo?”

“Léopoldville.”

“… French Equatorial Afr—?”

Branly tried to move closer to the window, glowing suddenly with light, not, as I have often said in jest, situated slightly behind his left ear, and lending a translucent luminosity to his entire head, especially the ears with the drooping lobes, a sign of age compensated by the pixieish helices proudly pointing toward the gleaming cranium, but this time within his skull, pulsing there like a throbbing drum. But before he could reach the window he heard the footsteps of the boys on the gravel, their laughter tracing the curve of their flight around the corner of the house. Branly settled himself comfortably in his bed to await the momentary arrival of Heredia with his breakfast tray.

My friend tells me now, with a smile, that it was waiting in bed, more than anything, that forced him to recognize how bizarre his situation was. In vain, he tried to remember a normal morning in his life, not wartime, not dawn in the trenches of the Marne in ’17, not the bombardment and fall of Calais in ’40, both the exception and the justification for a comfortable life, but one single morning in ordinary times when a solicitous servant had not appeared to place a breakfast tray across his lap, the bottom of the tray warm to the touch of fingers anticipating the temptations of steaming hot coffee and croissants warm from the oven.