Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

What could he scheme in the time of Napoleon’s nephew that his father-in-law hadn’t schemed in the time of the uncle? Obsolete arms for the Republic in Mexico, and contraband for and bonuses from that heaven-sent French intervention, with its hosts from every corner of Imperial Europe, Zouave battalions, Walloon regiments, bands of Czech musicians, Austrian hussars and Hungarian cooks, dancing masters from Trieste and lesser Polish nobility still reeking of cows, hams, and tile stoves, Prussian calligraphers and zealous young men escaped who knows how from the cold of Petrograd, all flowing together — thirsty, hungry, fevered, primitively libidinous and liberated in the land of El Dorado and of the noble savage with whose image the Old World had lulled itself for a century — on the distressed beach of Veracruz, where three buzzards wheeled above the fort prison of San Juan de Ulúa.

“Can you imagine that he would miss a chance for revenge, Frenchman? Hear me well, you through whose lips I speak, imagine how that devil will take his final revenge against my little girl-grown-old, very old, how he will snatch her from the dovecote where she lived without mirrors above the unreal mirror of the sea of La Guaira, he who already had betrayed and shamed her as a young girl, he who had dried up every drop of her youth and beauty, now in her old age how could he resist using her and shaming her, dragging my muddled baby to Veracruz, where he left her to the mercy of the drunken, jeering, cruel, bone-weary troops far from their homes. Ah, Clemencita, Francisco Luis told me, what a good idea to make your Mamasel’s dancing gown again. For that’s what she’s going to do, she’s going to dance in strange whorehouses filled with Indians and Flemings, peasants in rough white cotton and hussars in embroidered jackets, high-cheeked Hungarians and Jaliscans with lugubrious eyes. The great brothel belt of the Napoleonic invasion of Mexico, M. le Comte, from Guadalajara to Salina Cruz to Tuxpan and Alvarado, where soldiers sowed children with pale eyes and dark skin, who if their fathers had acknowledged them would have been called Dubois and Herzfeld and Nagy and Ballestrini, but instead were named after their mothers, Pérez and León and Gómez and Ramírez — and how will you remember all this, M. le Comte, no one has a memory that long.”

“Ah, my poor little girl, all old and worn,” the cruel proclamation, come one, come all, you see before you the Duchess of Lanché, the very one you read about as boys, here she is, which of you ever saw or touched a real authentic Duchess back in your homeland, a Duchess with a capital D? Don’t pay any attention to her years, mon capitaine, distinction has no age, but if you want to know how to wring the best from our slightly aged Duchess, let me whisper something in your ear and then let you see with your own eyes and feel for yourself, open her mouth, that’s it, run your fingers over her gums, what do you think of her, eh? not a single tooth, just a little marble nub here and there to spice up the broth, like the garlic in bean soup, eh, mon capitaine? No young girl can do that for you, eh, mon capitaine? What do you think of her?”

“Oh, my God, M. le Capitaine, are you all right?”

“Ah, my poor little girl, my little honey bee become a clown princess, far from her dovecote in La Guaira. One night I found her dead, dressed in her high-waisted white gown with the long stole, beneath a mirror in that whorehouse where the terrible tyrant Francisco Luis de Heredia had taken her to squeeze the last pittance from between her lips. He had never forgiven the deceit. Look what she had in her clenched fist: half a gold piece. Her last pay, and even then she was tricked by an officer who gave her only half a coin.”

“My father had never forgiven the deceit, M. le Comte. My mother died in a brothel in Cuernavaca, where the Emperor Maximilian had a butterfly- and peacock-filled pleasure palace. But who knows where they buried her, because the Bishopric had forbidden loose women to be laid to rest in holy ground. Who knows what barranca they threw her into? But he had never forgiven the deceit, and he had published in all the local gazettes a funeral notice announcing the much-lamented demise of the Duchesse de Langeais. They say that the whole French court of Mexico had a good laugh over such a grotesque joke.”

“But at the beginning you told me your mother would make fools of all of you, Heredia. I do not understand…”

“Don’t you think it’s her turn?”

“Perhaps.”

“Do you know the names of every one of the Imperial officers who were stationed in Cuernavaca who visited Heredia’s brothel in the barranca of Acapaltzingo on the night of August 12, 1864, to celebrate the seventieth birthday of the Duchesse de Langeais?”

“No, of course not. Don’t you mock me, Heredia.”

“Very well. Do you think it a coincidence, M. le Comte, when two people have the same name?”

“No. It is merely a matter of chance, of onomastic arithmetic, when names coincide.”

“When they coincide, yes. And when they are sundered?”

Branly shook his head and consciously retrieved the rational tone he had decided to assume in his relations with the French Heredia. “Allow me, if you will, to express my doubts about everything I have heard here tonight.”

Heredia shrugged preposterously. “I am not to be trusted, is that it?”

“No. I must be frank. I am aware that everything you tell me has the effect of distracting me from something you undoubtedly want to hide.”

“Suspect what you want, M. le Comte. But nothing will prevent what once was joined from being joined again.”

Branly tried to see outside, but deep night lay over the woods and parks of the Clos des Renards; he realized that for hours he had been listening to voices as he stared into the nothingness of the night. The painted image of the pitiful woman known as the Duquesa de Lanché had disappeared into shadows far more obscuring than the hands that hid her face. Heredia exclaimed with feigned surprise and begged my friend’s forgiveness for everything: the darkness, the late hour, for keeping Branly awake, for the long-winded obsession with family histories that had neither interest for nor any connection with M. le. Comte, whose most illustrious family had had no association with such ugly realities for centuries, of course not. Perhaps nine centuries, or a thousand years ago, yes, but certainly not a short century before, such a thing couldn’t be. No ancestor of the esteemed Comte de Branly had been present at the whorehouse of Francisco Luis de Heredia one August night in 1864, nor had he been at the burial of the French Mamasel in the barranca of Acapaltzingo, with Clemencita singing in broken French, as a kind of prayer for the dead, a madrigal the Mamasel had adored and always played on her harpsichord, eló eté sibele, laughed Heredia, that’s how it sounded in Clemencita’s broken French, a madrigal transmuted into an Afro-Hispanic chant.

Heredia had been laughing with every word he spoke. Now, with false obsequiousness, he lighted the candles of a silver candelabrum to lead his guest back to his bedroom.

“Follow me, M. le Comte.”

“Please?”

“Is there something you want?”

“Nothing. Only that yesterday, when Victor brought my meal, I asked myself whether you were degrading him, Heredia, as your Francisco Luis degraded his wife.”

“But, M. le Comte. The boy is serving you, not me.”

Branly tried to smile. “Your father did not have such a good excuse. Perhaps he lacked an intermediary in his dispute.”

“Doesn’t it surprise you that he chose her as my mother?” Heredia asked unexpectedly.

“No,” Branly said, adding with deliberation: “You yourself told me that, in your manner of thinking, one is free only if one is born without father or mother. Perhaps this is the intermediate solution, to choose one’s parents.”