Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

“Why, then, have you kept the painting?” Branly inquired calmly.

Heredia chortled, executing a strange little dance punctuated by the heels of his knee-high hunting boots; Branly could only ascribe this behavior to a celebration of the gathering darkness in the garret. My friend was so captivated by the figure of the woman in the painting that only now, in hindsight, as is so often the case, was he able to complete the entire scene. His host had been hugging the shadows, avoiding the Ingres light that, to borrow from Quevedo’s great sonnet, lent a tone of enamored dust to the painting of the woman from the First Empire. Heredia shrank from that light; he was dancing a jig because night was falling over the world.

He asked his guest whether he thought anyone, a public or a private buyer, might be interested in a unique painting not really appropriate for hanging in a dining room or a museum, a woman hiding her face with her hands. Why, you would as little consider hanging something like this as hanging a horrifying painting he had once seen in a magazine of a Jesus crowned with thorns, wrists bound, bellowing with laughter, revealing sound teeth that indicated the diet in Palestine left little to be desired.

Branly pointed out to his host that he had not answered his question: why had he kept the painting?

He tells me he was not truly interested, as he was no longer interested in the person of Victor Heredia, in the answer of this Frenchman dressed as if for a big-game hunt in the time of the President-Prince. He asks it, actually, so as not to leave the story unfinished, to assign it to its proper place in the text.

“Every unborn being is one half of a pair, M. le Comte, you wouldn’t deny this, would you? it’s even true of dogs. Can’t you imagine, then, that the opposite is true, that young lovers are joined by the unborn child demanding creation through the souls of the young parents?”

Heredia looked at the painting and said, see, she seems to be pleading, the cold, the disdainful creature, interesting, yes, but disinterested; that was her manner, that was how she plotted to ensnare the ingenuous colonial, the Antillian planter, to capture his fortune by making him believe she didn’t need it.

“By the time he realized, it was too late. She had everything. His revenge was to have her painted like this, shamed in a painting, as she was never shamed in the bedroom, the salon, or the tomb. You see, M. le Comte, I picture my mother as a jeering skull with teeth like castanets, laughing at us night and day.”

“For her, there is nothing but night.” said Branly, again recalling the line from Lamartine.

Heredia laughed and replied that he doubted it. His mother could organize a fandango in the catacombs of death, a dance of skeletons, with long candles and tall candelabra, to continue her mockery — the colonists again deceived, exploited, and mocked by the European vixen who had appeared in La Guaira on the very eve of Independence to dazzle the young men with manners brilliantly adapted to the needs of the colonials, who in Bonapartist opportunism saw the mirror of their own dilemma.

“To fight a revolution in the name of the people, but for their own benefit. A simple matter of take-from-you and give-to-me, throw out the Spaniards and up with the Creoles, and what better model than Bonaparte?” my friend asks me, summing up Heredia’s lament. “The Creole revolutions weren’t fought for liberté, égalité, fraternité, but to acquire a Napoleon. That was and still is the secret desire of the ruling classes of Latin America.” I nod my agreement. “The Bonapartist consecration: my brother in Naples, my cousin the princess.”

The story was too simple and too predictable to explain satisfactorily Heredia’s rancor. But that evening the host of the Clos des Renards had nothing more to say, nor Branly more to imagine. The character, as my friend has already told me, fatigued him, but my friend also tells me that fatigue, paradoxically, was his greatest and most perverse strength. He was bored; the matter was easily forgotten. He forgot the context of the fatiguing apparition and lost interest in tying up loose ends.

That night, a kind of stupor, almost amnesia, prevented Branly from grasping the interrelationship of the diffuse images surrounding Heredia. He asks me now whether I — who have the advantage of hearing only the bare facts of the events, and was not, as he, immersed in the nonselective distractions of living twenty-four hours of every day — have been able to discern the connections he had not seen.

I hesitate before answering him. I know that if I say yes, I shall offend him; in spite of everything, he will take it as a presumption of superiority on my part, though I am his inferior in age and worth. But also, if I tell him no, he will take it as lack of attention or interest on my part.

“Perhaps this time you might have taken the extra step, Branly, the step that you did not take as a child that afternoon in the Parc Monceau.”

As I spoke, my friend aged before my eyes. I am not being ironic; it is not age that makes us appear old, and Branly is a young man of eighty-three. His face openly displayed an emotion that in his words had until then been only the latent expression of the hostile and unknown. But if, while he was speaking, hostility had hovered about him, now, as I spoke, it became a reality.

“Why do you say that?”

I replied that perhaps the boys’ deception had not, as he believed, consisted of trying to make him think that the woman in the painting existed, and remembered him; nor were they really suggesting, cruelly, that he could not remember the women he had loved; they were challenging him to remember the child in the window of the house on the Avenue Velásquez, whom, he himself admitted, he had forgotten.

“Do you remember his face, Branly?”

Sunk in thought, with an almost episcopal gesture of one hand, my friend sighed, “No.” And he placed his fingertips to throbbing temples, and said that this was exactly what he had been thinking that evening with Heredia in the garret of the Clos des Renards, that his host was inviting him to imagine the true motive for an ancient rancor buried in remote places and times. But he, Branly, had seen this as yet another trick by Heredia to divert him from the truth of his involuntary confinement, as well as the true relationships between the boy Victor Heredia, the French Victor Heredia and his son André, and himself, the uninvited guest, the indiscreet and suspicious fourth, whose presence — he felt it now — the other three, once he had accomplished the mission of reuniting them, resented.

“The simplicity of the story Heredia told me in the attic made me believe that his motive was to satisfy my curiosity and send me on my way back to Paris. But that was not the heart of the problem. They all knew I would not return alone. The Mexican boy would go with me. That is what I saw behind those pale, narrowed eyes. I saw hostility, the unknown. Something that did not recognize me but hated me.”

Branly fell silent for a moment, then drew in his breath, as if suppressing a cry, before speaking. “Now you tell me that in fact the equation was reversed. He hated me because I did not recognize him.”

I did not dare ask Branly whether finally he admitted this was true. There was something too sad, too wounded, too anguished about my friend. I did not have to look in his eyes; his slumped figure conveyed his feeling that an opportunity had been lost forever.

The French Heredia remembers with nostalgia that the wild January seas beyond the breakwater in the harbor of Havana — like holding to one’s cheek an icy bottle swept from distant waters and bearing a message of crushed salt and splendid desperation — taste of snow. He remembers, too, the dark, quiet ocean along the sandy shores of Veracruz, where the exhausted Mediterranean flings itself on the beach with a flash of scales, like a suicidal fish. Especially, because it was where she disembarked, he remembers the sunny sea of La Guaira, an unruffled mirror stretching placidly at the feet of mountain and fortress, rocks and pelicans.