Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

“You are truly the good, rational, sensual Frenchman, M. le Comte.” And Heredia laughed.

My friend nearly replied, “But never mediocre,” and then remembered his conversation with Hugo Heredia on the day he met him: the high Indian citadel at Xochicalco, the edge of the precipice, Victor running toward them with his discovery, Branly hooking his arm with his cane, preventing him from falling fifty meters.

“A rational Frenchman, sensual surely, but never mediocre.”

“Sensuality is but a chapter of violence.”

“On the contrary.”

He remembered, but he did not repeat, those words. Slowly, he followed his host, exhausted, leaning on his cane, and wondering whether the false Duchesse de Langeais of this hot-blooded and baroque story of the Heredias had fled his dream.

No. She returned punctually. But now she arrived laden with color, envisioned memories, signs and omissions more profound than her initial mystery. Then she had been separate from history, but now, Branly is telling me, it was in fact history that was responsible for making her more vivid but at the same time less real.

Nevertheless, though this invasion of his pristine dream of a woman eternally poised on the contiguous thresholds of birth and death by the concurrent, roiling tides of wars and passions, revenge and rebellion, the traffic of weapons and bodies, might have destroyed the pure essence of the woman now in addition mottled by a multiplicity of names, it made Branly realize that he was indebted to the Heredias for having interrupted his routine and its accompanying empty hours. This he acknowledged as he fell asleep that night, after he had been subjected to the schedule of his unsleeping host, and had judged a defeat the time spent with him, time that separated him from sunlit hours and the overheard conversations of the boys on the terrace.

At any rate, the elderly sleep very little; a drowsy old man is slightly ridiculous, my friend is saying now, as he consults the heirloom watch in his vest pocket, attached to an elegant gold chain.

“It is five o’clock.”

Branly asks which I would prefer, that he continue the story or that we go for a swim in the club pool and then (and here he laughs apologetically, as if this were a benevolent imposition), if I wished, dine together at the Laurent he had known as a youth. No, that would not be possible, the restaurant has been closed for many years, perhaps the Vert Galant on the Quai des Orfèvres: he has friends there, too. Shall he reserve a table for nine o’clock? I was struck by the unconscious associations his words reveal. He knows that one restaurant is still open for business and the other not, but he is not ready to accept the loss of the owners of the place he frequented in 1914; to him they are as real as the restaurateurs he sometimes visits today. At the moment, his second suggestion seemed considerably more attractive, but some irresistible compulsion caused me to say: “No, Branly, I don’t want you to interrupt your story.”

I did not dare explain that a terrible sense of inconclusiveness was beginning to assail me; I feared that a prolonged interruption would seal, unfinished, the various stories beginning to fuse into a single narrative. He acquiesced, and then told me that the real mystery of that night he had spent in the company of the French Victor Heredia lay in the fact that when he returned to his bedroom he fell into a deep dream, so deep that all that had happened seemed to become a part of it: his ascent into the attic of the Clos, his encounter there with the man with the white eyes and hair, his discovery of the painting of the woman whose face was hidden in her hands, the stories about Francisco Luis and the nana Clemencita. But curiously, he says, within that dream, which was like being immersed in a body of water too deep for him to touch bottom, his head, above water and illumined by the moonlight, was experiencing a kind of extreme and undesired lucidity; drowned in dream, he plotted various detailed schemes for fleeing Heredia’s estate the following day: he would call Etienne; why hadn’t he come to pick up the Citroën? He would call Hugo Heredia; why his astonishing lack of concern for his son? He and young Victor would be back in the house on the Avenue de Saxe in time for luncheon; would his Spanish servants José and Florencio have everything in order?

“I do not know whether I make myself clear. In the dream, it was the everyday considerations that became fantastic; the rational part of my dream was the sudden and undeniable identification of fantasy with total reality. But you cannot imagine what I thought of to wait out the return of logic. While deeply asleep, within my dream though not reconciled to it, I entertained myself by counting, as if so many sheep, the Frenchmen born in the Hispanic New World.”

He says that over the fences of his imagination, like figures in a transatlantic ballet, leaped Paul Lafargue, blown by a hurricane to London from his cradle in Santiago de Cuba to wrest a daughter from Marx, and, ever a cyclone, to whirl through the debris of the Commune and unleash socialist storms in Spain, Portugal, and France; Reynaldo Hahn, who came from Caracas with his gloomy songs and beautiful hands to rock the dreams of Bernhardt and Marcel Proust; Jules Laforgue, who had come to France because he had not wanted his flesh to grow old “more slowly than the roses” in Montevideo, and had exchanged the passage of a “sad and insatiable youth” beside the River Plate for the speedier universal illusion called death beside the Seine; and why did Isidore Ducasse emigrate, he too from Uruguay, only to die between an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table in one of the grim hospitals of Paris, when in Montevideo he had already found his Maldoror, his Mald’horror, his male horror, his mald’-aurora, the waters of the River Plate at first light, swollen with distended skins, the hides of slaughtered steers, of mutilated men, of children lost amid baled wool and sheep udders?

I listen to Branly speaking of my lost cities, and I exclude forever from his narrative that dual monster, the Comte de Lautréamont, that beast of prey whose poems were written with tentacles stained red with ink: “C’est un cauchemar qui tient ma plume” ; yes, a nightmare stained his pen. My breath quickens as my friend makes room in his dream for another Frenchman from Montevideo, the lucid and magisterial Jules Supervielle, who was right to emigrate: there, facing the never-ending pampa, his brow would have remained forever naked, a “great empty plaza between two armies.” And, following on his heels, José María de Heredia, the Frenchman from Havana, the disconsolate conquistador who returns to the Old World wearily laden with “the arrogant misery of his trophies, the blooming beast and the animate flower,” the sun beneath the sea and the quivering of gold; drunk with “a heroic and brutal dream,” the dream of the new continent, the nightmare of the old.

“Do you see, my friend? You, who come from there, should understand when I tell you that the New World was the last opportunity for European universalism; it was also its tomb. Never again, following that century of discoveries and conquests, was it possible to be universal. As it turned out, the New World was too vast, on too great a scale. No one there could paint, as Holbein the Younger here, the exact measure of the human universe as represented by the portraits of More and Erasmus. There we all became Heredias; enervated Creoles. I tell you, too many innocent backs bore the mark of the whiplash of Maldoror’s cruel pen.”

He stared at me with an inordinate, slightly sinister intensity, an expression that gave him the vaguely comic air of an ancient Roman senator plotting crimes in the baths of Diocletian. I feared this mood, because always when Branly verged on the sublime I was forced to swallow my amusement, along with a dose of ridicule. He lowered his voice suddenly.