Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

“Even today, dear friend, I do not know whether I was experiencing what I attributed to the stranger; whether it was I, standing there with one hand on my hip and the other clutching a large red ball to my waist, like this, who assumed the air of intrigue, you know, the insolence, of one who though he feels insecure and foolish has at least the doubtful elegance of transforming his defects into mystery.”

There is more to tell today about that long-ago afternoon dreamed on a recent morning and recounted now as my friend and I persist in prolonging a November afternoon that doesn’t yet warrant lighting the round streetlamps on the Place de la Concorde or extinguishing the subdued lights of the dining room in Gabriel’s pavillon, which produce a transfusion of shadows, impalpable, though solid to the eyes of two men deep in conversation, Branly and myself (yes, from time to time I manage to say something, introduce a comment, provide a conversational opening for my friend), who call forth the very light that permits one to call the shadow shadow.

That something more, Branly continues, was the radical newness of the boy he had glimpsed so many times behind the beveled windowpanes that in some ineffable manner he had assimilated him into their group: clearly, the largely conscious transposition of ignorance into mystery practiced by the astute youth of eleven who was my friend Branly was, in the strange boy, something different, something which Branly, even on that long-ago day, recognizes without understanding, a missing segment of his soul that he will spend a lifetime searching for. In every hesitant gesture, in every stumbling step, in every fiber of this newcomer bathed in the sunlight with which he seemed to maintain some strange relationship of fear and benefice — as if the light, Branly repeats, were injurious to him, as if it absorbed from him the very little it bestowed on him — in all the behavior that fortunately, almost charitably, the other children were not observing, Branly recognized, most of all, inexperience, pristine astonishment, withdrawal, and pathetic doubt.

The child Branly wants to laugh. He is in the presence of a fool, an idiotic, maybe blind, feebleminded weakling, and he is grateful that the other children are not observing him observe the imbecile or they would laugh at him, because he, incomprehensibly, is not laughing at this melancholy, helpless, faceless buffoon, this nervous, clumsy dullard shrinking from the sun as if from a beast crouched to spring, says my friend, as if protecting himself against the rain, the air, thunder, fog, everything, because everything, he has always known it but only today can he put it into words, everything, he says, was new to this child. Not ignorance, not mystery, his pathetic gyrations on the edge of the Parc Monceau were those of a star born but two seconds before, hurled from a galaxy expanding for eons toward the moment of explosion that freed this creature confined within its perfect death throes. For this new child the world is new, and because it’s new — the outsider extends a pale, trembling hand toward my friend, and my friend does not know how to accept the offering — nothing is known.

The outsider holds out his hand. My friend drops the red ball and his insolent poise deserts him; he runs to join his playmates. The ball rolls to the feet of the cretinous child, who with clumsy, mechanical movements bends down to pick it up, mewing something incomprehensible, something not even a language, but my friend — today, an old man, he is still proud of it — resists the impulse to run back for the ball, to reclaim his property, to snatch it from the half-wit afflicted by the sun, who looks at the ball and looks at my friend and looks at the trees and looks at the park benches as if everything were not only new but incomprehensible. For him Monceau has no name, no history. It is what his eyes tell him.

“For those eyes were his entire identity, his entire intelligence, captive in a face I cannot remember; everything was incomprehensible, so everything was new and everything was strange.”

From the corner of his eye he looks at the little boy who had slipped from the house on the Avenue Vélasquez. He prays that the other children will not realize he has not run to the newcomer to grab the ball that does not belong to him but to all the playmates who gather here every afternoon after school. The moment he turns his back to the child, he hears the sound of the ball and he stops, turns, and sees the extended hands, the ludicrous, almost-squatting stance, the ever-bewildered gaze, and the red ball bouncing toward him. My friend wonders, then as now, whether the outsider had returned the ball voluntarily or whether it had dropped from his inept hands.

He felt a fervor, a rush of tenderness, for that stranger; even today, he is grateful for that. It was a revelation about himself at eleven that would accompany him always, not a memory but a reality, and then as today, and also in the spiral times of dream, he feels that he was about to take the one step more that would have led him to the strange boy, to a sympathetic embrace, because two creatures who at last recognize each other are the very figure of compassion itself. Forget what separated them, remember what united them, recover something shared, the reason for his fervor.

He did not take that step. He did not embrace the boy. Still, the fervor of the experience, the outsider’s gesture in returning the ball to him, his in not grabbing it from him, revealed to Branly that he had “what one calls a soul.”

The wind swelled the room and again my friend had the sensation that an interior sail was moving this leather-lined house toward a destination far distant from its present location; the walls became gentle waterfalls, and my friend awakened.

The young Mexican Victor, the youth with the lank dark hair, was observing him intently, sitting at the foot of my old friend’s bed. For a long time they looked at one another, unspeaking. As Branly emerged from the dream of his childhood fervor, he saw nothing in the eyes of the young Heredia to compensate for the categorical loss of the dream.

“You looked afraid,” the young Heredia said at last.

Branly wanted to ask: then why did you not wake me? He knew he had not had a nightmare but that the dream from which he had emerged to meet the pale eyes of the boy he scarcely knew had been a pleasing one, the memory of an anointing, the recognition of his own, but shared, spirit.

“Then my face did not reflect my dream,” he replied.

He held out a transparent, bony hand to touch Victor. He was aware that the youth represented something he missed terribly, something, in spite of his apparent proximity, as distant as the idiot of his dream. Here, now, sitting on Branly’s bed, he merely accentuated the terrible distance Branly felt when Victor appeared in the birch grove or beneath his window, a disembodied voice accompanied always by another boy, whose face Branly had never seen.

“Have you spoken with your father?” my friend asked. The Mexican boy hesitated a moment, and then nodded.

Branly said he was feeling much better and that surely by tomorrow they could return to the house on the Avenue de Saxe. He lightly stroked Victor’s hand, but he did not attempt to tell him how much he appreciated this proof of independence, the fact that he had come to see him in spite of young André’s prohibitions and in spite of having sworn to do nothing that the two had not agreed upon beforehand, this Castor and Pollux from two such distant and distinct, perhaps not hostile but certainly not sister, cities. He hoped that his touch communicated his approval of what implicitly he judged to be Victor’s rebellion against André; to have made his approval explicit would have been an almost irreparable faux pas. Victor surely would have retreated to the friendship with the boy his own age; what could he find interesting about an old man of eighty-three?