Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

And my inner laughter ceased abruptly as he placed his hand on my arm; I feared the twist my extraordinary friend would give to the things he was saying, feeling, remembering, foreseeing.

“Now listen carefully. This story was told me that night in the garret by several voices, those of Heredia and his father, the stupid and cruel Francisco Luis, and of his no less stupid, though benign, second wife, by the nana Clemencita, and by the Mamasel Lange. They were not telling me their own stories but the story of a different Heredia. The young one. The boy Victor Heredia. The story they told me was his.”

My astonishment when I heard Branly’s words was comparable only, I believe, to my feeling of inadequacy as I had listened to the narrative of the Caribbean Heredias, which, in turn, was punishment and compensation for my self-sufficiency when I pointed out to my friend that I understood, perhaps better than he, the real story of the two boys in the Parc Monceau.

He was prepared now, as we sat in the shadows of the club dining room, to grant the Duchesse de Langeais a place in the scene in the Parc Monceau; in that way he would not burden the shoulders of the young Mexican Victor Heredia with the misery and humiliation of the Heredias of La Guaira. He believed that the French Victor Heredia was the boy of the Avenue Vélasquez. But today he was a boy named André. And the Mexican Victor was André’s prisoner.

“You exaggerate, Branly,” I ventured, with a nervous start I tried to disguise by idiotically folding and refolding the limp table napkin.

He looked at me with gratitude and supplication. The first emotion informed me that, as it had him, the exhilaration of the Antillean world was subconsciously beginning to dominate me. The second invited me to cooperate with him, to recover, to make possible, the original temper of our conversation, the priestly and rational tone of French dialogue and, more importantly, its manners. As long ago as the sixteenth century, I exclaimed, Erasmus wrote that the French believe themselves the repositories of courtesy. And I shall not be the one to belie the wise man of Rotterdam. Branly reminded me that in the same paragraph Erasmus accuses the Germans of priding themselves on their knowledge of magic. He realized, at any rate, that explicitly I accepted, though implicitly held reservations about, his cult of politesse. One should not, he said, consider it a national characteristic, as Erasmus had done, or Lope de Vega, who had attributed equal virtue to the residents of Lombardy. It was, simply, his personal religion. In any event, he sighed, considering the historical destinies of France and Germany, was it not preferable to follow the modes of the French? I told myself that the undertaking would not be easy; the intelligent eyes of my friend told me, in exchange, that the story of the Heredias had infected us both. We were speaking like colonials; we were reacting like “enervated Creoles.”

“But let us speak of Supervielle,” said Branly, as if to break my vicious circle. “Do you remember his marvelous poem ‘La Chambre Voisine’? ” he asked, his head curiously tilted to one side.

“Only because you mentioned it at the beginning of our conversation,” I replied, attempting to avoid any implication of psychic communication, a possibility I found displeasing.

“It is one of my favorites,” said Branly, closing his eyes and joining his hands under his chin in a posture halfway between memory and prayer. “I remember it because I had dreamed of them all, Lautréamont and Heredia and Supervielle, believing I did so consciously, when in truth, don’t you see? I was projecting a partial solution to my enigmas, because the poem by Supervielle that I had begun to repeat in my dreams, Tournez le dos à cet homme mais restez auprès de lui, had anticipated me, it existed before the question, for the purpose of linking together the disparate parts of my dreams at the Clos des Renards and finally leading me to the truth.”

Softly, my friend began to recite the poem. I smiled as I thought how, with Branly’s recitation of the poem by a French Uruguayan, he was exercising the supreme gift of selection, synthesis, and consecration that France has reserved for herself through the centuries. Supervielle was a vehicle by which we could escape that tropical ennui in which the sublime constantly rubs shoulders with the ridiculous, and feelings of cruel guilt are all too grossly revealed, stripped of the pious veils we Europeans so quickly cast over our crimes against history, to enable us to accept the equally discriminatory and exigent French spirit of reason and good taste, but not to sacrifice the cutting edge of the fantasy, the displacement, the revelatory madness, of the vast, empty lands of the new continent.

Laissez-le seul sur son lit,

Le temps le borde et le veille,

En vue de ces hauts rochers

Où gémit, toujours caché,

Le coeur des nuits sans sommeil.

I tried to remember, to anticipate, the lines Branly was reciting in the darkness, inseparable prayer and memory; but more powerful than the poem was a voice like the sound we hear in the heart of a seashell: there is nothing in its depths, but the ocean is captive in that intangible sound.

I had first the sensation, then immediately the certainty, that Branly was speaking words I was thinking an instant before he uttered them, the words of Supervielle’s poem. They could only be, I knew then, the words of his last dream at the Clos des Renards. How strange they had all been said before, by the poet, or by his reader, my friend Branly.

I feel as if black shadows had congealed in my throat. I feel, above all else, that I am the object of a relentless hostility. But, in spite of everything, I refuse to walk away from that boy who is observing me from behind the beveled windowpanes. I do not walk away, although I turn my back. I am not sure whether the barbarity I feel in my eyes is my own or a reflection of his gaze and of his baroque stories in which passion and vengeance are raised on a revolving altar of gold leaf and moon mist. I stand, unspeaking, my back to the boy who is watching me. A woman is approaching along a path in the infinitely mutable landscape of the Parc Monceau; the boy watches us from the window of the house on the Avenue Vélasquez. I do not know what time it is. I look at the boy and the woman, and I realize that for both it is difficult to distinguish night from day. I want to tell them not to worry, that what they are witnessing is not really being seen by them but by someone who has the gift of seeing things through eyes that register a rate of speed that is not, he thanks God, that of human beings, because otherwise we would all be destined, without exception, to be separated as soon as we have come together. But birth and death are not simultaneous for us. The woman does not understand, because she is not looking at me now, she is looking toward the boy in the window, and she tells him not to be troubled about distinguishing farthest skies from the depths of his troubled heart. The woman speaks to the boy as if I were not standing between them. But as she comes closer I smell leather and sandalwood. I hold out my hands in supplication, but she passes by, turning her back to me, trailing the white satin shreds of a high-waisted ball gown, the tatters of the stole tied beneath the décolleté neckline and bare shoulder blades, the tower of her hair about to crumble into ruins of sticky cotton candy. I stretch out a hand to touch her and tell her, you see, we had no need to worry, the raging time in which birth and death occur simultaneously is not our time. To us belongs the sweet, slow time of all the lovers on the earth and it does not demand that lovers be separated the moment they meet. But the woman stares at me, uncomprehending, seemingly unhearing. Her worn, low-heeled slippers scurry like white mice and she disappears behind the iron fence of the house on the Avenue Vélasquez. I am still in the Parc Monceau, awaiting her return, but now she is inside the house. There she croons to the boy as the mulatto had crooned to her, she protects him, and prevents anyone from coming near him, least of all a usurper like myself, for I am no longer a child and yet I presume to claim the attention and affection she reserves for the boy with whom she used to play, while still a girl, in the Monzoon or Monsewer Park, before leaving to fulfill her destiny among the steep hills of La Guaira and the reverberating barrancas of Cuernavaca. She places a finger to her lips, and tells us to leave the child alone in his bed; time hovers near, keeping watch over him. They had been reunited. They have emerged from graves in rotting barrancas of mangrove and plantain to be reunited on the high rock cliffs where moans forever concealed the heart of insomniac nights. Let no one enter that chamber again, exclaims the woman in the outmoded dress of the First Empire; nothing will leave this refuge, except an enormous dog that has lost all memory of the past and that will search the ends of the earth, land and sea, for the man it left behind, unmoving, in the strong, decisive hands of the new mother and nurse, at last reunited with the son she never had, but who chose her enclosed with him in the chamber where birth and death are indistinguishable, and no evil, no ugliness, no humiliation, no intrusive vulgar demands can penetrate the seamless surface of things that exist in instantaneous simultaneity: this love, this proximity, this perfect awareness that time will not exist between being born, loving, and the act of loving, dying. I shall wait forever outside. Perhaps the dog without memory will bring me the final notice of the moment when my birth coincided with my death. Both solitary. She will never return. She has condemned me to death because I was too impatient to remember the boy; to her, this is a horrifying desertion. A crime. I am alone in the Parc Monceau. They are reunited at last.