Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

He wished, as it sometimes happens in stories, that the children would gather round him while he told them tales of a time that everyone, with little justification, called the most beautiful and sweet, la Belle Epoque, la douceur de vivre. Instead, Branly leaves his park bench and walks slowly toward the Boulevard de Courcelles. As his eyes seek Myrtho’s balcony, he concedes that the children are right to have forgotten him as well as the atrocious war of the dead and the cruel life of the living.

“Poor Myrtho; she so wanted to save herself from the poverty and sickness that devastated her mother. Before she died, I saw her once, ravaged and tubercular. Was that the sweetness of life?”

He says that, more than anything, it is the memory of those days that stirs him that evening — once the voices of Victor and André are stilled, and the woods of the Clos des Renards, as night falls, begin to look like the sea — to get up out of bed and test his strength. He sighed as he closed the window, and said to himself what he is now telling me: “I hope they never grow up. Their mystery will be considered ingenuousness, or crime.”

He flexed his leg with greater ease, and in the mirror above the washbasin noticed that the swelling on his forehead had gone down — the same mirror the French Heredia had used the previous evening to demonstrate, surely in jest, that he was not the Nosferatu of Enghien-les-Bains. The truth was, of course, my friend already knew, and now remembered as with simple physical movement he emerged from the vast dream of the day that had been a kind of dark epiphany, that Heredia had acted to distract his attention from the mystery the boys — and this, too, Branly had decided — meant to be a second deceit, the reverse of, but complement to, the first. He shook his bald, gray-fringed head. Heredia wanted to trick him into believing there was no woman; the boys, that there was. He remembered the first time they had seen this house. The white phantom in the garret window had caused him to realize that 1870 was not an address but a date: a time, not a place.

His cane helped him master the hallway of symmetrically placed doors. He had become accustomed to the persistent, penetrating smell of leather, but as he approached the narrow stairway that led to the garret, he had an amazing olfactory sensation. We all know that experience, he is saying as the afternoon loses its prestigious light to fade into mousy hues; it is that sudden sharpening of the sense of smell which at a fleeting and unexpected moment recalls through a scent a city, a season, a person. Even, at times, what we call a civilization.

“No, I am not referring to the expected. If I walk through the Carrefour de Buci, I expect to be greeted by that marvelous, both fresh and pungent odor of pepper and pike, goat cheese, and bunches of marjoram. No, I mean when one encounters that sensation elsewhere, when the familiar odor occurs in an unexpected place.”

I said I understood what he meant. As an exile and a wanderer, I sometimes courted that sensation, but it came only when it was unsought. My lost cities of the River Plate, Montevideo and Buenos Aires, to me are the smell of hides, the dark river, cheap benzene, asphalt melted in the summer heat, wharves heaped high with wheat and wool, slaughterhouses and tea shops. I have found components of that odor here and there, in Nice and in Venice, along the Ramblas of Barcelona and on the docks of Genoa. It isn’t the same, only an approximation, like the dry, oppressive air of the high plains of Castile and Mexico.

As he climbs toward the garret room of the Clos des Renards, Branly, the hall behind him, confirms that the olfactory summons was that of hides, of skins of specific origin, each proclaiming its antiquity with a mute call to the nostrils: we are ancient Spanish hides, ancient Arab and Roman hides, we are hides from the tanneries of the Guadalquivir, the Tiber, the Tigris, we embellish desert caravans, the backs of long Christian breviaries, the sheaths of short Roman swords. And yet, to the sensitive nose of Branly — this friend so persevering and methodical in his passions and obsessions, whom I pictured sniffing like an old hound through the nooks and crannies of that villa hidden in the suburbs of Paris, a dusty oasis surrounded by commercial blight, discount stores, arcs of neon light — the farther he ascended the narrow staircase, the more that whirlwind of olfactory sensations was concentrated in a single superficially curious image, as if all the aromas of lost times and places ultimately had coalesced into an enormous painting of war trophies, a canvas with a David theme painted by a less harsh and less “disabused” Delacroix; a forgotten Imperial feast, decaying and decadent, Napoleonic splendor after the Maréchaux of the Grande Armée had looted the farthest corners of Europe and the Mediterranean to replenish the museums of France. He opened the door to the garret, the last gleam of daylight was a frozen star of dust, a milky winding-sheet, the perfect phantasmal crown for these trophies stripped from butchered beasts, cows, cats, camels, lions, sheep, monkeys, from the armies of the Carthaginians, the Ommiads, the Visigoths, all entwined in an absolute absence of historical connotation, vague rumors, crushed blossoms, a slough of names destined to be woven together in the scene that met his eyes as he opened the door, everything imagined or said or referred to resolved finally into a figure around which the hides, the skins stripped from the beasts of ancient armies, the trophies Masséna had plundered for France, were entwined like venomous flowers around precious jewels.

The woman beside the window was the very essence of an agitation not without order. Her Empire gown, white and diaphanous, high-waisted and with a long stole, was illuminated by the close, intense light of Ingres’s female portraits, and like them, this was a Neoclassic figure on the edge of Romanticism, observed but at the point of observing herself, rational but on the brink of madness, alert but on the edge of oblivion.

Her hands covered her face, and her rings, as well as her poisonous fingernails, were gilded with mercury. She was Ingres become Moreau, and Branly reeled before the image, steadied himself with his cane and leaned against the terminal, supporting pillar of the narrow stairway to the garret. The curtains of the window beside the woman’s figure were fine white muslin; they fluttered around her, animating her meaninglessly.

The French Victor Heredia closed the window and, with a circumspection Branly thought worthy of an old-fashioned chatelaine, rearranged the white curtains. The portrait of the woman in white illuminated by white lights and shadowed by the mask of her gold-tipped interlaced fingers rested against the vaulted wall of the attic.

“Ah, M. le Comte! I see we’re on our feet and ready to crow! I won’t ask you to help me with my ‘Madame Mère’ here, isn’t that what you say, ‘Madame Mère’? Bah, I don’t know, it’s so impersonal, the business of ‘Madame Mère.’ Every woman who doesn’t have a title like Duchesse de Langeais or Princesse de Lamballe, say, should have a short, catchy nickname like La Périchole or M’selle Nitouche, don’t you agree? But I won’t ask you to help me find a place for my mamá; to each his own, eh? and as the saying goes, we have only one mother.”

He laughed in his peculiarly irritating way, standing with arms akimbo, his hands hooked in the belt of a bizarre hunting outfit the likes of which Branly last remembered seeing in the second act of La Traviata.

“You know, M. le Comte? The ultimate freedom would be to have been born without a mother or a father. You wouldn’t understand this, yourself, being a man who prides himself on his ancestors, but, if you will forgive my frankness, one who wouldn’t have got very far without them. Ha! Don’t deny it! Who would you be if you’d had the opportunities of a paid laborer or a washerwoman’s daughter, eh? But when it comes to common, ordinary mortals like myself, who want to be responsible only to ourselves, we resent, believe me, that the debt we owe to those who give us life may be the very thing that allows them to take it back.”