Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

He smelled leather and sandalwood; a woman was approaching with a tray in her hands. Branly did not look at her face. He was so hungry he had eyes only for what was on the tray. By the time he saw what it was, and had sought consolation in the woman’s eyes, she had already placed his tray on his knees and covered her face, now veiled by sumptuously ringed fingers with gilded fingernails. The humors of leather and sandalwood were suffocating. He held out his own hands in supplication to the woman, leaving now, turning her back to him, trailing the white satin shreds of a high-waisted ball gown, the tatters of the stole tied beneath the décolleté neckline and bared shoulder blades. The tower of her hair seemed ready to crumble into ruins of powdered sugar and sticky cotton candy; her worn, flat-heeled slippers scurried like white mice; and my friend was left staring into the soup plate filled with dry leaves moistened by a foul-smelling liquid: his luncheon.

“Why doesn’t she wear a veil?”

“I don’t know.”

“At least a mask, wouldn’t you think?”

“Yes, it would be more comfortable than going around all day with her hands over her face. Say, have you read the story of the iron mask?”

“No, who wrote it?”

“Alexandre Dumas. Do you know him?”

“Oh, yes. I read The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers in school.”

“He came from Haiti, just like my papa. We would have invited him to visit this house, but he died the same year.”

“The same year.”

The year of his meeting with the Heredias in Mexico was swallowed up by the year of the Countess’s illness and his decision not to travel any more, swallowed by the year of his last voyage to Naples to see the painting of the blind beggar leading the blind beggars, supplanted by the year he took a membership in the Automobile Club of France in order to exercise in the enormous swimming pool with the green and gold mosaics and iron catwalk, preceded by the year of the Second World War and the leg wound received during the debacle of Dunkirk, devoured by the year of his second wife’s death, absorbed by the year of the First World War by the year of his last visit to his grandfather in the castle by the year when he had read The Man in the Iron Mask in his dying mother’s garden with its clear fountains by the year of his father’s death and the year of the inauguration of the Pont Alexandre III and the year of his birth and finally the year that dissolved all the others, and he was again in a house not very different from this, gazing toward a grove of birch trees and an avenue of bare trees whose autumnal leaves rustled beneath the feet of the woman walking toward him. She was again dressed in a First Empire ball gown, although, of course, this could not be the time because he dreamed he was a young man, but flesh and blood, though the causal and persistent logic that in a dream seems so fantastic told him that the only time he could have met the woman now approaching through the trees and clad in a gown from the time of Napoleon was before he had been born. He stretched out a hand to touch her and tell her she would see, she need not worry, that the raging time in which birth and death occurred simultaneously was not their time, the sweet, slow time of all the lovers on this earth, their time did not demand that lovers be separated the moment they met. But the woman from the First Empire stared at him uncomprehendingly, seemingly unhearing. On one bare shoulder rested a white parasol twirled by sumptuously ringed white fingers with gilded fingernails. Abruptly the twirling stopped, and her expression changed to a dawning happiness based on the conviction that she did not remember this man, she owed him nothing, that their encounter was casual and his attitude impertinent.

Branly awakened with a cry of desperation lingering on his lips. He must beseech the vanished woman to recognize him soon, before he forgot her in that sweet and sad time when death and birth do not coincide. But more powerful than his cry was the insistent nearby dripping that interrupted the flow of the successive layers of reality being sucked into the infinite vacuum of dream. He was bathed in a sweat of nerves and hunger. With the aid of his cane he struggled to his feet and limped painfully to the small bathroom, very much aware of his inability to walk very far or to negotiate the stairs. The dripping that had been more compelling than his dream, than the name or the face of the woman in his dream, was coming from an ancient shower suspended like a stalactite from a rusty pipe: the perforations in the shower head were crusted with calcareous tumors from the water of the regions near the river Seine. My friend removed his clothing and, with some difficulty, showered. He again donned the nightshirt and bathrobe lent him by Heredia, and, supporting himself on his cane, left the room in search of the dumbwaiter.

The hall was long, and Branly was halt. He did not then know why, but the doors closed on the symmetrically placed bedrooms created a sensation of rising fear. Leather covered everything in this house, but the fact that it was used on hallways, bedrooms, and floors made it less precious, divested it of the uniqueness of skins destined for special purposes — footwear, book, coat, or sofa — a uniqueness only heightened when in our fantasy we imagine ourselves flayed and our own skin serving as coat or shoes for the person who has the indisputable right to strip it from our backs. In this house, however, the concept, the physical sensation, even more the evidence of less-than-perfect quality, turned these skins into little less than stained and sour wineskins torn ruthlessly from the backs of beasts.

The dumbwaiter was housed in a square pillar next to the stairway. Branly opened it and found a cold collation, seasoned this time with mustard that surely Heredia had daubed on the meats early that morning, for it had formed a crust not unreminiscent of the dry hides that covered every inch of the house. My friend managed to pick up the tray, balancing it on one arm against his ribs in order to free the other hand for his cane. He made his way back to his room, almost regretting that Heredia had denied him an opportunity for a mute reproach, would he condemn a guest to starvation? But, think what you will, to suppose that, first thing in the morning, Branly would suppose that cold meat was waiting in the dumbwaiter was to suppose a good deal!

“The image I had of myself at that moment was atrocious: an elderly pauper consigned to an asylum by irresponsible and cruel relatives.”

He did not want to ponder further the subtleties of hospitality as they were understood by his most unusual host. Hunger claimed his attention, and constantly aware, for the first time in a long while, of a sense of humiliation and abandonment, he devoured the roast beef, sausage, and chicken leg as he watched dusk fall over the woods of the Clos des Renards, as once again the voices of the children, now nearing the terrace, rose to his bedchamber.

“I think I should go up and say hello.”

“No.”

“He must be wondering why I haven’t come.”

“Because you can’t.”

“Why not, André?”

“Just because.”

“That’s no reason.”

“There doesn’t have to be a reason, except that from now on we don’t do anything we can’t do together, do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“You swear?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I forbid you to do anything I can’t do, and I won’t do anything without you, and that’s that!”

My friend says now that in that precise instant the feeling that something unfathomable but threatening was trying to reach him became a reality and the tray with the remains of his lunch fell from his shaking knees. But as soon as he stood and lurched toward the window, another, earlier thought materialized: the question of how accurately or inaccurately an old man can imagine his youth. And as he parted the curtains with trembling hands, that doubt expanded to include everything connected with the youth of the two boys speaking the words that to Branly sounded so cruel, words he had no reason or right to judge. He held himself upright by clinging to the curtain, knowing at last that to flee from danger was to rush to an encounter with something worse, and aware that the strange, parallel compulsion of this moral certainty was causing him to hesitate — as ruinous as the powdered-sugar hair of a woman he might have loved in a different time, a man clinging precariously to an ancient, threadbare damask curtain to keep from reeling and falling from the window to the stone terrace below, where the children were resuming their game.