Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

He punctuated his words with strident laughter, and although Branly was not prepared to offer his host the least consideration and would have preferred to have announced succinctly his impending departure in the company of the young Victor Heredia, the spectacle of the older, guffawing Heredia garbed like a parish priest precipitated words that perhaps in other circumstances Branly would not have uttered:

“I have come to say goodbye. But not without informing you that I am aware that I have no reason to be grateful to you. Your duplicity has been unremitting. I shall simply recall to you the first of your tricks; that will be sufficient to disabuse you of any idea that you are still deceiving me. You offered to take care of Etienne if the boy and I returned to Paris. But you knew perfectly well that I would remain, because Etienne is in my employ. Wait, please. I want you to hear one thing. I fully realize that my chauffeur and I have been mere pretexts for getting the boy here. I wanted to tell you this before I left, and to admit that I may have fallen into your snare at the beginning, but today, as I return home, I am undeceived. You, sir, are a charlatan.”

The French Heredia, Branly tells me, looked at him with theatrically exaggerated amazement. “Why the devil are you telling me all this?”

Branly drew himself up, supporting himself on his cane. “I am telling you that I am a man of honor and that you are an unconscionable swine. I regret that my age prevents me from giving you a thrashing, whether public or private. It is all you deserve.”

Branly admits, the glimmer of amusement in his small black eyes piercing the shadow of the dining room, that if he had adopted such tactics it was to get Heredia to lower his guard, so he would go on regarding Branly as a kind of aristocratic mammoth chained in the dark cave of an outmoded ethical code.

“The ethics of a man like Heredia, if one can speak of ethics, originate in the supposition that we have exhausted ourselves under an outworn code; our true superiority consists in the fact that we maintain the code, although we live in the same world as the Heredias; ultimately, they will feel the lack of that ethical and aesthetic protection. Everything is politics in this world, and politics is above all a problem of legitimacy.”

He placed his hand on mine. His obsession in that instant, he tells me, was to rescue the young Victor Heredia, and his words were a means of circumventing the coarse lord of the Clos des Renards, of finding the chink through which he and the youth might escape, and of returning him — yes, his honor demanded it — to Hugo Heredia. The obvious affection between the father and son that he had perceived that night in Jean’s house in Cuernavaca flashed through his mind, Branly tells me now, with the blinding brilliance of a Mexican sky spilling down on a tropical barranca. Now, he thought, his only defense for the young Victor was to exacerbate Heredia’s pride. He clasped his hands as only he knows how: long, pale, translucent fingers — prayer and memory.

“And allow me to add one thing, Heredia. The ‘English vice’ does not horrify me; it is even possibly a necessary part of a young man’s education. But it does make a difference whether the, ah, partner is of one’s own or an inferior class. One pays an inferior.”

He stared at Heredia provocatively, arrogantly. The host, his smile never wavering, removed his hands from his lapels. “How many centuries of human corruption has it taken to produce those delicate, long-fingered hands, M. le Comte?”

“At least from the time St. Remigius converted Clovis to Christianity,” my friend replied with indifference. I was about to laugh at his riposte, but he repeated to me his insult to Heredia: he did not want to leave without paying his debts; how much did he owe André for his sexual services to Victor?

Branly says he heard a sound like that of chains being torn from a cellar wall, and then it was as if the wall itself had fallen on him, scattering heavy, loose bricks over his body, as icy cold and as little to be warded off as the entire universe of this savage and yet strangely-to-be-pitied individual, who with insolent fury and tenderness raged: “He’s an angel, an angel!”

“I realize something now, though because his physical aggression took precedence over any other consideration, I did not realize it when he threw himself on me. I should have suspected: he assaulted me in defense of his son. But there was something more, is that not always the case?”

True madness is neither passionate nor heated, my friend adds. His voice has the chill of winter, and glacially icy was the voice of Heredia when he attacked Branly, ramming him against the whitewashed wall, pinning him there with his stocky, graceless body redeemed only by the classic configuration of head, profile, lips …

What did he say, Branly asks. That Branly can know nothing about such things, that he cannot imagine what it is to know that your mother was thrown into a barranca, her grave so shallow that dogs and buzzards could feed on her body, devour it, scatter her bones to the winds, while a lonely boy waited for his father to return from making a new fortune in Cuba and Mexico, a lonely boy hoping that his mother would return too, but she never returned because she had been a banquet, first for the troops and then for beasts of prey, and he would make Branly pay for it, pay for the tenderness he had never known all those afternoons when ordinary little boys came home from school to play in the Parc Monceau but the boy with no recognized name or family stared from behind the beveled panes of a house on the Avenue Vélasquez, and only once another boy, he, Branly, was on the verge of accepting him, of playing with him, of admitting he existed, but he hadn’t dared, he hadn’t taken the extra step, and he would pay for that too, and how much had the French captain paid the Duchesse de Langeais? the so-appropriately named French Mamasel, for sold she was, in the brothel in Acapaltzingo that was one of the enterprises of Francisco Luis? Who was the inferior there, eh? the Mamasell, the Mamasail, the Mamasucker, or the sucked? Who should have paid whom, Branly, should your father have paid my mother or your mother paid my father? Who did the favor for whom, you bastard? And she? how could she know that things were not what she imagined if Clemencita had removed all the mirrors of the world and the Mamasel believed she was as beautiful and as young when she went to bed with the captain of the French forces in Mexico as when she went to bed with Francisco Luis following the cotillions held a half century before? What did I tell you, you bastard, what did I ask you? I told you that unborn beings are one half of a pair, M. le Comte, you can’t deny that, it’s even true of dogs, but can’t you imagine then that the opposite is also true? that young lovers are joined by an unborn child who demands his own creation through the souls of the young parents? Generations are infinite; we are all fathers of our fathers and sons of our sons.

My friend was breathing painfully. He managed to avert his pallid face from Heredia’s panting, the icy breath of true madness whistling from a winter that was all winters, remote from the sweating armpits, the dark-skinned belly, the pliant waist of that enormous woman’s body sensually bedded on the waves between New Orleans and Cartagena de Indias, the Morro Castle and the Fort of San Juan de Ulúa, the blazing towers of Sans Souci and the banana- and melon-laden ships of French Martinique, British Jamaica, and Dutch Curaçao. That world, crouched in ambush, tamed only in appearances, again sprang to claw at us that last morning at the Clos des Renards, this slowly dying afternoon in the Automobile Club, as if in refutation of the prolonged calm of Cartesian reason my friend and I were struggling to save — did we truly believe that? — from the chaotic tropics of the Heredias, that torrid zone that somehow emitted from between Heredia’s fleshless lips a breath of icy death, as if the baroque existence so removed from our world proclaimed itself in equal intensity in its antipodes, only there. Branly tells me now that as he felt Heredia’s panting breath on his cheeks he imagined an ice-covered Antilles and found nothing abnormal in the vision of white cathedrals, white palm trees, white parrots and owls skimming through a colorless sky above a milky sea.