Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

And where was our young rebel while an exiled Bolívar made his way through Curaçao and Cartagena and risked his hide in Puerto Cabello and Cúcuta? Well, he was discovering that after the news of the winter of 1812 no one would give the time of day for the vouchers and IOU’s of an Empire that was going to end up with salt water on all four sides, young Victor, on St. Helena, an island without snow or birds or monkeys or anything, I swear it.

Among the vultures circling above La Guaira, she tried to make out the three that to the day of his death followed her poor father, so skillful in day-to-day accounts and shady dealings but so stupid when it came to what made the year’s balance come out in the black. There is no one more dangerous than an idealistic merchant, and the logical man to succeed him was the one who hated him most: Francisco Luis de Heredia, who had married Mademoiselle Lange believing she was an heiress, as Lange thought Heredia was an heir. How can Branly believe that this undying rancor that dares to become incarnate in dreams that aren’t its own is anything but a sordid tale of money?

Heredia laughs disagreeably. Doesn’t the Count agree that money can be the source of bitterness, tragedy, and evil; and loving money more than a human being — isn’t that motive for enduring hatred? This courtly young man, handsome like a shiny green olive shedding brine as roses shed dew, said that what revolutions had enabled the father-in-law to do over there, revolutions would enable him to do over here, and he began to ply between Venezuela and Cuba, Haiti and Mexico, sailing contraband up and down the coasts, bringing in and taking out what Spain sent to and demanded from Havana, what arrived in Haiti from Europe for the squabbling, newly emancipated republics of New Spain and New Granada, and what the British purposely let seep through Jamaica.

“British colonies enrich British subjects,” M. Lange would say during his lifetime, “but Spanish colonies enrich only the Spanish crown. Spain isn’t growing rich, only the coffers of her rulers. You will see, it will be the same story with the rulers of these new republics.”

She did not understand any of the things her father said. She played old madrigals on her harpsichord, and she went on playing them after her marriage to Francisco Luis. She never realized, and had she realized would not have understood, that her husband, heir to her dead father, was trafficking first in inanimate luxuries, silver and dyes for English cloth, then, though they say no, the animate luxury of a few souls, slaves in fact if not in deed, workers in short supply here but needed there, blacks from Gran Colombia, Indians from the Yucatan, octoroons from Cuba, aborigines from Tabasco, again for English cloth, always for English cloth, because in this part of the world where everyone dealt in gold and silver no one seemed capable of setting up decent looms or selling a good piece of cloth — what didn’t Francisco Luis de Heredia traffic in, eh? lord of gibbet and blade, cruel and growing older, the older the crueler, thanks to the cheap rum of the cantinas of Río Hacha and Santo Domingo, the crueler the sicker, thanks to the dark evils of the brothels of Maracaibo and Cap-Haïtien, what didn’t he sell to cement his friendship with an indispensable signer of exequaturs here, a repulsive pockmarked notary there, the loutish Señor Coronel, chief officer of the garrison at Puerto Bello, a customs officer in Greytown who never seemed to dip a toe in dirty water but stood with one foot in Nicaragua and one in Costa Rica, and sometimes a Señor Ministro who might be fingering white flesh for the first time, what didn’t he sell?

“When she was no longer of any use to him, he sent her off to the high cliffs overlooking La Guaira; that would be his final gift to her, she loved La Guaira so much: ‘I’ll let you stay right here so you can fill your eyes the livelong day,’ cruel Señor, master of lives and fortunes,” Clemencita recalled. But he was as pocked as the notaries who close their deals in whorehouses and then celebrate with women who wreak their own revenge on any man who celebrates with their wretchedness: you’ll see. Now he was a livid olive, wrinkled and rotten. But what did he care if he had lost his looks; he would go on the way he always had. It had been a long time since anyone came to him because he was handsome, now they came because he was cruel, a swindler, and a good man for pulling chestnuts out of the fire, and here it all came down to getting chestnuts in and out of the fire, and the first thing he learned was that a pot of beans is a pot of beans no matter where you cook it, and in his sphere of influence, Mexico, the Antilles, and the new republics of Terra Firma, someone was always cooking up something, and that’s the God’s truth.

Not she; no, used up, solitary, she wasn’t good for anything. Let her talk to herself, play her harpsichord, sing her madrigals, and stare the livelong day at the sea of La Guaira, where she had arrived as a young girl with her papá, the model of her husband, who never forgave the fraud of a dowry-less marriage, vile French deceit, décolletage and stole and diaphanous ball gowns.

“A white dress, that’s best in this heat. I must wear it again. I must search through my trunks. It must be there somewhere. When I find my white gown, something extraordinary will happen, I know it here in my heart, Mamita Clemencita. Help me.”

Her nana, but younger than she, only thirteen, the little mulatto come from Puerto Cabello to beg in the streets of La Guaira when the militia of the unstable republic of the cruel Creoles was killing people, including her father and mother; and she listened to her all those years, and hummed the madrigals she was forever playing on a harpsichord more tinny and out of tune with every passing day, and dressed up in a blond wig to distract her, and with her she pawed through the large trunks of fetid clothing wasted by heat and humidity, the tyrannical leprosy of the tropics that disheartens, lulls, and corrupts as it slowly kills.

“An eternal and languid contemplation of the moment of death. Do you know Moreau’s painting, my friend? Do you know what the not disordered agitation of our spirit is? I will tell you: it is the opposite of the petrified disorder of the new Latin American republics.”

But Branly had renounced, like the situation he evoked, any tone as moderate and conversational as mine. I am not sure whether relating events that are a part of time — a memory, a premonition, or the dream that thrusts itself between the two and is our present — means one must recount it, bring it to life, with the fervor that suddenly had taken possession of my friend. It was as if through this story of another time and a remote place he were fulfilling many of the latent acts that in his conscious life he had let pass unrealized.

The liveliness of Branly’s account was in stark contrast to this shadowy hour in which — and only in deference to my friend — we were being permitted to prolong our after-luncheon conversation in such an unusual, not to say scandalous, fashion in the dining room of Gabriel’s pavillon on the Place de la Concorde.

“Do you feel all right, my friend?”

Branly nodded energetically, as one of the highly attentive club waiters approached, carrying a silver candelabrum. In my friend’s eyes I saw a series of questions illuminated and transmitted by intelligence. I prayed that my own eyes would not too flagrantly betray stupidity, and that the flickering candles which — in further deference — the waiter was bringing to us would illumine only Branly’s intelligence and not my faltering comprehension of a story he insisted was but another bead on the oneiric rosary of the Clos des Renards.