Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

What, indeed, Branly’s mind leaped to the thought, if not the fact that he had brought him here, that he had served as indispensable guide until the moment Victor had slammed the door on Etienne’s fingers and the other Victor Heredia, the Frenchman, had come down the avenue of dead leaves to offer his spontaneous and generous assistance?

“Yes,” said Victor, “it all depends on how you feel.”

“Much better, as I told you. Thank you for inquiring. What news is there of our Etienne? Why has he not come for the automobile?”

“I don’t know. As soon as you’re better and can walk, you must meet the others.”

“André? Your friend? Of course.”

Victor again nodded, and lowered his head so that his long dark lashes shadowed the flicker of embarrassment in his eyes. “Yes, and her too.”

“Who is she, Victor?”

“She says she wants to see you again.”

“Ah, then she is someone I know?”

“I don’t know. That’s what she says. Ciao!”

He ran from the room, and my friend fell into a curious meditation, the gist of which he is now communicating to me in the deepening shadow of the dining room.

“But of course. He did not come to see me on his own, out of any affection for me; he came because the two boys had plotted to deceive me, don’t you see? — to upset me and mock me with this patent lie about the existence of another person, a woman, an acquaintance of mine, in the house.”

He says that above all he was irritated by the contempt underlying the boys’ ridiculous invention. He laughs as he recalls his thoughts that day: they think me so old and distraught that I can no longer clearly remember the women I have loved; as long as she is old, they think they can pass off any woman as mine; not only can I not remember her, I cannot even, it goes without saying, recognize her.

As he pushed himself upright in the bed, he almost overturned the breakfast tray with coffee pot, cup and saucer, silver, sugar bowl, and rolls. His first reaction, he says, was surprise that he had not smelled the unexpected breakfast he had been prepared to fetch later from the dumbwaiter where Heredia had left it in the dying hours of the night. He was adjusting to the schedule of only two meals a day, but the later the first, the less he suffered awaiting the second.

As he pulled the tray toward him, he realized why his sense of smell had not warned him. Everything was cold, the bread was cold, the coffee was cold, with no hint of the comforting warmth that for so many years had transmitted to palms of hands and fingertips a concern for his person that would never falter, and which, morning after morning, was manifested in this simple proof: a warm breakfast tray respectfully placed across his knees.

Had young Victor brought the tray this morning? He reproached himself, he had not thanked the boy. But his unfailing courtesy immediately gave way to an unpleasant suspicion, and to the question it inevitably posed. “Why was Victor, a young foreign guest in this house, serving the Frenchman who bore his name?”

Branly tells me that he felt distant eyes upon him. Again he heard the voices from the terrace.

“Where are you from?”

“From Mexico. And you?”

“From where I’m from.”

Once more the voices faded into that strange litany, as soporific as a rosary of poppies, of cities no longer capitals of former nations or forgotten colonies.

“German East Africa?”

“Dar es Salaam?”

“Bosnia and Herzegovina?”

“Sarajevo!”

Sarajevo, my friend murmurs, trying to remember where he was on that bitter day, the 28th of June 1914. What was he doing while the Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip did what he did and what was he saying when the Archduke Francis Ferdinand ceased to speak forever? Had he just awakened late one morning following a pleasurable night, the perfume of the woman sleeping beside him filling his nostrils? He was barely eighteen, but he had already assumed his place in the world with all the pleasures and privileges ordained by name, rank, family, duty, and right. It was La Belle Epoque. The summer air, drifting through the windows of a balcony opened above the Boulevard de Courcelles and facing the Parc Monceau of his childhood, bore pollen from the chestnut trees. No one was preparing his coffee; the woman was almost invisible among the pillows; that novelty, the telephone, had not rung; the newspapers with their world-shaking headlines had not yet appeared; she would weep over the death of a morganatic wife that day in Sarajevo; she was sentimental voluptuousness and delicious indifference.

They did not care whether anyone saw them, whether anyone knew they had lain late in bed making love, and then he rose, naked, and, smiling, lightly caressed his lover’s ankles. He walked to the balcony, looked out toward the park and the distant houses from which no one would be able to see his naked figure, young, erect, bathed in the sensual pleasure that was very new but fully accepted, no anxiety, no clumsiness. Yet, through the beveled panes of a distant window, he could see the eyes of the hidden, silent child isolated for all time, past and future, who only once had known the possibility of friendship, when it was offered him by an eleven-year-old Branly.

Shivering, he drew the drapes, and from the bed the woman said: Why are you doing that? It’s such a beautiful morning. And he told her he had felt cold, and laughed: besides, why should anyone but himself see her like this, he wanted her all to himself, and paraphrasing Lamartine he whispered into her ear: I say to this day, stay your flight. She answered: But you drew the drapes; and he laughed: Then we needn’t change the poet’s words, Je dis à cette nuit: “Sois plus lente.”

He read the headline as he left Myrtho’s house at dusk. At first he did not understand its significance, because his imagination was still captive to Myrtho’s bedroom on the corner of the Boulevard de Courcelles and the Rue de Logelbach, amid a mountain of sheets and pillowcases and eiderdowns and unlaced camisoles and black stockings and close-fitting boots, all the sensual paraphernalia of the clothing of that era, when everything, he tells me, was more delicious for being more challenging. And now he was sitting reading an incomprehensible newspaper in a café on the Boulevard Malesherbes, wondering whether at his age he should apply for an officer’s commission or wait to be conscripted. In the window of the café he looked for the beardless reflection of his face, an adolescent disguised as a man.

Before the Great War, he explains, men became adult at a younger age, because the average lifespan for European men was only thirty-eight to forty years (tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, smallpox, syphilis, typhoid, malaria, tumors, silicosis, mercury poisoning from gilding). At eighteen, a man had lived half his life, and was not, as now, just beginning.

“Today everyone tries, at times obscenely, to prolong his youth. Haven’t you seen the sexagenarians who insist on disguising themselves as Boy Scouts? Before 1914, one entered adulthood as soon as possible. We let our beards and mustaches grow, we wore pince-nez and bowlers, black suits, high boots, wing collars, and starched shirts. And who went out for a stroll without a cane and spats, except a workman or a beggar? Though there was very little difference between the two, I can assure you.”

But the numerous, cumbersome, formal garments they wore augmented sexual pleasure, he attests: the prize was not easily won, the surprises were climactic, the anticipation formidable. Nights did pass more slowly; they obeyed, as a horse its rider.

He thought of the author of the Meditations several weeks later when he received the solicited commission; he was sent to the front as he had requested, and fully expected it was his destiny to die in one of the places where he had savored life. So many holiday retreats, his grandfather’s castle near Vervins every Easter and Christmas, excursions to the banks of the Marne and into the heart of the Ardennes forest in summertime. At each instant in which death threatened, he repeated almost mechanically: Et de mourir au lieux où j’ai goûté la vie!