Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

Reunited at last.

He opened his eyes. He parted the drapes. It was day. He awakened convinced he had dreamed everything that happened during the night. His encounter with Heredia was a dream. He looked out on the symmetrical garden cleft by the secret wound he had perceived earlier, blasted as if by gunpowder. The Citroën was still there, abandoned on the carpet of dry leaves, beside the oak against which it had collided. The tranquillity of the sunny September morning was allied with the silence of the garden and woods, with the play of the sun’s rays among leaves ravished by a dying summer, and with the only sound, one Branly had not heard before, the long, plaintive, high, far-off cry of a peacock.

He listened in vain for the accustomed voices of the boys. Almost immediately the peacock was silenced by the sound of hurrying footsteps on the gravel. Branly peered out and saw his Spanish servants, the sallow José, looking more than ever like a figure from a Zurbarán painting, and the florid Florencio, with his mien of an exhausted jai-alai player. Both walked rapidly, but in apparent confusion, suitcases in their hands.

Branly recognized the suitcases; they were the ones the young Victor Heredia had brought to the mansion on the Avenue de Saxe. José and Florencio seemed to be weighing the best path to follow. Branly threw back the bedclothes and seized his cane for support. He descended the stairs with a haste, he tells me, that disproved whatever fears his age or his health, or both, might reasonably have engendered. Barefoot and limping, he reached the foot of the stairway, crossed the dark foyer of the Clos des Renards, opened the French doors, and stepped onto the terrace of the stone lions at the very moment his servants were approaching the Citroën, dubious as to whether they should walk on the gravel or the dead leaves. Branly did not falter. He tells me that by that time the heavy veils that had obscured the recesses of his heart had been lifted. He was acutely aware of the denouement of the story, and he was prepared, as in the beginning, to extend the handle of his cane to prevent young Victor from falling into the bottomless crevasse of another’s timeless memory, the memory of a being demanding a new soul as haven for its poisonous pilgrimage.

The servants opened the rear door of the automobile and again seemed to hesitate. Then Florencio, who was the more hardy, picked up one of the suitcases and heaved it into the Citroën, while José nodded and Branly hobbled toward them, spurred by fear, and confident of the wisdom of a different fear — that of crossing the greensward of the garden disfigured by the horrible scar that only he had seen from his window.

At his approach, José and Florencio looked at each other, disconcerted. Branly watched as, like servants in some farce, they ran to hide beyond the boundary of the leaves that my friend, in his agitation and haste, could not believe to be the cause of José’s greater-than-usual pallor, or the apoplectic semblance of his comrade. Branly stepped onto the leaves and opened the car door. He knew the interior of that Citroën; after all, it was his automobile. But this foul-smelling cave, transformed in the course of three days and three nights into a depository for rotting vegetation, swirling temperatures, and detritus, was, he thought at first, simply a monumental bad joke, the awful mischief of the boys who with the universal instinct of magpies look for places to hide their treasures, and themselves.

He saw them. The unbelievably smooth, prepubescent, olive-skinned, secret, and typically small body of the mestizo Victor Heredia lying on the seat, and a naked, white-skinned André crowned with blond curls that contrasted dramatically with the lank black hair of Victor, against whom he was pressing with soft moans, lips parted, from neck to waist as smooth as Donatello’s David, but feet, legs, and groin a hirsute jungle tangled like writhing snakes and spiders.

Branly tried to shield his eyes. More than by the brutal copulation of the adolescents, he was blinded by the brilliance of two objects: André cupped his in the hand he held above Victor’s head; Victor had removed his from the hastily emptied suitcase by his side; the hands holding the brilliant objects joined together, and a guttural groan was torn from my elderly friend. He threw himself into the car, on the naked bodies so vastly different in temperature, and tried to separate their hands even before their bodies: the two glittering halves, one in André’s hand, the other in Victor’s, were joined like a fused metallic mass; the united hands were like the blazing forge that melts and fuses metals. Branly touched that thing, first with the idea of preventing the union of the parts, and then to sunder what had been joined.

He cried out, his fingers seared from the touch of that cold hard thing blazing like a coin, from the ice, flame, and liquid of a stream that but a few hours earlier had been pure cloud. He sucked his burnt fingers. With the other hand he raised the cane, prepared to thrash the buttocks of this monstrous André, whose back, in the male position, was to Branly, though the boy looked over one shoulder to laugh and wink a pale eye. Then, Branly says, he could see nothing but the doleful eyes of young Victor, their unfathomable pleading for compassion and understanding, the terrible and hopeless sadness, the gratitude for a farewell not unlike death, and Branly froze, bewildered by his own sense of compassion. Even much later, he did not know whether he felt pity for the poor youth lying there with opened legs, for the other boy, to whom he had not held out a hand so many years ago when a red rubber ball bounced between them, or for a girl who said she had played with him, though he did not remember.

“But, my friend, today I know that the pity I felt for Victor Heredia I felt on behalf of my two lost playmates.”

In truth, he admits now, the eyes of the young Victor Heredia filled him with terror, because there is something stronger than love, hatred, or desire, and that is the simple will, when one has no will, or is nothing, to exist for another. Branly suspects that this is what the Mexican youth was communicating that morning to him, his cordial French host, pleading that he not interrupt something he could not understand because it came from so far away.

Softly, my elderly friend closed the door of the Citroën and merely repeated the words I had already heard: “My God, I hope they never grow up. Their mystery will be considered ingenuousness, or crime.”

He spoke these words as he repeats them this afternoon with a solemnity befitting the valley of death. Or, what is the same thing, an unattainable love. Standing there motionless on the dead leaves, Branly was aware of his sweaty palms clammy cold, the trembling of exhausted muscles, and the bluish pain of fingernails which on other occasions had foretold the deaths of a lover, a friend, a second wife, of soldiers on the Western Front.

He vacillated; he says he was on the verge of collapse. A distant scream, which he attributed to the stiff-legged and plaintively vain bird, signaled the hasty return of José and Florencio. They grasped Branly by both arms, alternating excuses and chaste interjections: they had been here before him, here on the leaves, that’s why they knew how he felt, he must leave, come, sweet gypsy Jesus, it was horrible, but everything would be all right if they left quickly.

“Take me to the house.”

“Of course, M. le Comte, the taxi is waiting.”

“No, this house, here, take me there.”

“Please, M. le Comte, come home with us.”

“But, do you see, I had already told myself that I had not come alone to the Clos des Renards, and I would not return alone to the Avenue de Saxe, where Hugo Heredia would be waiting for me in an Empire bedchamber overlooking a garden whose symmetry is scarcely disturbed by an evergreen sea pine growing in the sand.”