Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

Branly tells me that at that moment, with all his attention riveted, as Heredia desired, on the undeniable reflection of their faces, and with the impatience of one who hopes for a solution to certain enigmas, so they will cease to be enigmas, and almost expecting to see only one face in the glass, his own, he overlooked the additional possibilities that only later would occur to him, and which, this afternoon, he outlines as follows:

“I could not, you see, distinguish between our two breaths, one perhaps cold, the other warm, or one actual and the other illusory. No, I did not know whose was the life that breathed moisture on the mirror, as I did not know whether, through me, Heredia’s eyes were projecting a profile that was not in the mirror, perhaps not even in the bedchamber, or even whether the opposite was true and I myself was no more than an illusion traced on that oval by a nebulous finger drawing in the ephemeral mist on a mirror. You see, my dear friend, at this point I still did not know that a succession of dreams were merely disguising my ignorance of my own desires.”

“Il m’a eu,” my friend thought later. “He put one over on me and I allowed myself to fall into the trap.” Branly knew what his intention had been, to let Heredia know he was aware of the presence of the woman in the house. He wanted to confront him with the evidence, to see how he got around the proof gleaned from the inadvertently overheard conversation of the boys as they played on the terrace under his window, not suspecting Branly was listening.

And too, he confesses now, he had wanted to know whether or not his dream was real, whether that oneiric wakefulness of the past few days could survive something as destructive and commonplace as verification: your dream is true, your dream is true because it is your dream, your dream is not a dream if it truly happened, your dream is a lie.

But no; Heredia had caught him off-guard, had scandalized him with the exaggerated theatricality of the scene with the mirror; Branly himself had given him the opening with his unfortunate reference to vampires. Henceforward, he would be more cautious. He strongly suspected that Heredia was hiding something from him, that the vulgarity so repulsive to the involuntary guest was a sham, an attempt to divert his attention from the truth.

“I realized, you see, that the sentiments I have been describing, all inspired by Victor Heredia’s uncouth behavior, were only my sentiments about the man. It was only fair to admit that I had never seen how he conducted himself in society, nor did I know what others thought of him. I even reproached myself: it was I who was crude, capable of viewing my host only in the light of my own standards, my own values, and — why not say it — my own prejudices.”

But then he thought again of the vanished woman he had loved in a garden where birth and death were simultaneous. He rejected his impartial sympathy for Heredia to tell himself that the vulgar, uncivil, coarse host of the Clos des Renards had in his rasping voice sung him a pretty tune the night before only to distract him from one question: where is the woman the boys had been talking about?

And, as if on cue, their voices rose from the terrace. Branly listened attentively. The whole thrust of their conversation this morning was — in their games, laughter, sudden silences, snatches of the madrigal, intense secrecy — a reaffirmation of their decision that they would do nothing they could not do together, nothing from which one would be excluded. He imagined they were getting to know each other, as he believed he was getting to know them.

“Don’t you like it?”

“No, André.”

“It’s hard for me to change.”

“But I don’t want you to.”

“Then if you don’t like it, Victor, I won’t be like that. I’ll be different.”

Again, in the afternoons of his childhood in the Parc Monceau, a new child appears behind the windows of one of the handsome private houses that enjoy a privileged view of the garden which, though public, is the private domain of the nearby residents. It is difficult to see the boy’s face, to which beveled windowpanes, the blinding light of the late-afternoon sun, and yes, distance, give the strange appearance of a blurred photograph, a lead-gray coin. The young Branly would let many minutes pass by once his companions tired of staring at the solitary child and returned to their games amid the columns, crypts, and pyramids of this garden, this folly the Duc d’Orléans constructed before his renunciation in favor of the Republican cause deprived him of his power of caprice (but, I dare interrupt, is there such a thing as power without caprice?), power which — surely he would know better than anyone, he who by now affected a revolutionary name, a name to enter the new century with — as Philippe Egalité he would soon forever divest himself of.

Branly recalls now, with a smile half-ironic, half-tender, his childhood in this magnificent place where an entire city’s secret aberration flowers and dies, blooms again, and is nourished in unexpected fantasy before becoming frozen in the paralysis of counterfeit ruins. In Monceau, eleven years before the Revolution, there were, oh, any number of follies — a Roman temple, a Chinese pagoda, fake feudal ruins, a Swiss dairy farm, and a Dutch windmill. The bourgeois mansions that flank five of the six sides of the park are like Medusa eyes which petrified that final flash of desperate, dying aristocratic madness.

In one of the houses facing on the Avenue Vélasquez lives the child who never comes out to play with the others. Branly dreams him as he is, his face indistinguishable, but with pale, gleaming eyes fixed on the fake ruins of a century strangely obsessed with reproducing in miniature, to scale, with exquisite delicacy and love of trompe l’oeil, but not without a secret shudder, the whole of nature, as if nature were not sufficient in itself or unto us, but, rather, were guilty of the ineradicable sin of a past, an origin, attributable not to human reason but to divine insanity.

“Marie Antoinette’s rustic hamlets at Versailles are no different from the battles between ranks of radishes and cauliflowers re-created on the lawn of Sterne’s character’s home when he was deprived of participation in the Duke of Marlborough’s campaign, as the metallic gardens of Goethe, dissatisfied with real nature existing outside the realm of his imagination, are no different from the fantasies of Philippe Egalité in Monceau.”

One day the solitary child crossed the frontier between his house and the park. He opened the gate of the small private garden and, dressed in his sailor suit, entered the play area, where the children were singing À la claire fontaine, m’en allant promener. But his physical presence does not make it any easier to see his face, the features condemned to perpetual oblivion, a disfiguring surface of silver-gray mirrors beneath a sailor cap. As Branly, himself a child, looks at the boy, he feels that their relationship lies in the future, like that with the woman he can only love, because he can recognize her, and she him, only in the fatal time of instantaneous denouements, time without enigmas because identification between life and death is total, not in normal time where they do not recognize each other when they meet.

The other children have gone back to their games; only Branly stands motionless, directing all his attention toward the newcomer. At first, the other children observe him with derisive curiosity, then with indifference, and finally they resume their games, neither curious nor derisive, more as if he were not there. And Branly recalls the instant in which he is ignored by all his playmates, as if he were already the man of eighty-three and not the child of eleven, but their indifference opens the way — he knows it, and a chill runs down his spine — to friendship and recognition with the solitary boy who today for the first time has appeared among them and who gives the impression of not understanding the ways of the world beyond his door. He stumbles clumsily, he shields his eyes with his hands, as if the light were too strong, and Branly does not know how to approach him and share with him a moment he knows is unique, because he does not know if the outsider who looks at him without seeing, through the pale eyes that are the only identifiable features in a blurred face, is by his actions — being there but not being there, open but impenetrable — trying to make his ignorance seem a mystery.