Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

Lucie began to travel more with Victor, I with Toño; but, though we never discussed it, the other child remained our true favorite. Toño admired and accepted only the mute beauty of the past, never the voice of its cruel power or its prolongation in the present. One evening in a hotel in Pátzcuaro a young Indian waiter carelessly spilled a glass of tomato juice over the new white guayabera shirt Antonio had put on to dine beside the lake. Imagine what Victor would have said, what he would have done. Toño, on the other hand, laughed, helped the waiter wipe the spilled juice from the floor, and then he himself rinsed the shirt and hung it to dry in the bathroom, giving thanks all the while for the invention of Dacron. In contrast, when Lucie returned from a trip to visit her family in France, she complained about how rude Victor had been to hotel and restaurant employees, especially when he discovered they were — as they so often are — Spanish.

“They were born to serve me,” he would say, with a trace of arrogant humor.

I waited for another occasion to eavesdrop on the boys again. The opportunity came just a year ago, when the four of us went to Caracas for a conference on anthropology and had adjoining rooms in the Tamanaco Hotel. The writer and publisher Miguel Otero Silva had invited us to a masked ball in his home. As the hour approached for us to leave, Victor and Antonio thought we were busy with our costumes. This is what I heard them say.

“You were right,” said Victor. “Father doesn’t like to cry.”

“Then do you want to trade?” his brother asked.

“If that’s all right with you, Toño, why not?”

“It makes no difference to me,” said Antonio, with the aplomb befitting his superior fourteen years.

“Then I choose to die with my father so Mother and you can cry over us, or I choose for you and Father to die together, so Mother and I can cry. The main thing is for Mommy not to die, because she’s the best cryer.”

They laughed, and I asked myself what Lucie had been crying about, what they had seen, what my sons knew that I didn’t know. There was no chance to clear up this mystery. In the taxi on the way to the ball I touched my wife’s hand and asked her if everything was all right. She said yes, today more than ever before; tonight we should not ask foolish questions, we must dance and be happy. Happy, but uncomfortable, I told her, imprisoned in the gold braid-trimmed uniform of General Bolívar from the time of Venezuela’s war for independence. Lucie, on the other hand, floated into the salon a vision of beauty in her high-waisted, diaphanous Empire gown, long stole, and satin slippers, her hair combed into a tower of cotton-candy curls.

It was a warm night and the Oteros had decided to hold the party on their incomparable roof garden. As a confirmed traveler, Branly, you know how Caracas hides from its modern ugliness, withdrawing into walled secret gardens, though none, I venture, was as remarkable as theirs, where the play of lights — oblique and direct, soft and intense — seemed to sculpt anew the Henry Moore and Rodin sculptures displayed outdoors in the mild Caracas air.

From behind the statue of Balzac garbed in the monastic attire he wore when writing emerged a priestly figure. A man of average height, stunted by a sturdy, squarish torso, ennobled by a white mane of leonine hair, a man dressed as a parish priest, with the ubiquitous Venezuelan white-corn arepa in his hand. I heard the murmurs of amazement: had the man come masked as a priest, or was he a priest? Someone said in indignation that the cloth was not an appropriate costume, but either way, though this most unusual guest was wearing black, only his collar was clerical. He approached me at the precise moment the orchestra began to play; Miguel Otero asked my wife to dance and I found myself holding the stubby-fingered hand of the spurious priest.

“Forgive me.” He spoke in a mellifluous voice. “You were pointed out to me yesterday at the opening meeting. As we have the same name, I wanted to meet you.”

I must have stared at him with an extremely stupid expression, because he was forced to add: “Heredia. My name, too, is Heredia. The same name, you see?”

Though I said I did see, I had eyes only for Lucie. She looked magnificent, an ethereal, bewitched figure more beautiful than ever, her skin warmed by the tropics, her diaphanous gown swirling; and absentmindedly, out of simple courtesy, I asked this Heredia where his family was from; ours had come to New Spain in the sixteenth century. I anticipated his response.

“Ah, no. Our Heredias will be much more recent arrivals in the New World.” Looking at him really for the first time, I saw that, despite my first impression, he could not be called old. “My mother,” he said, “fleeing the Negro rebellion, came from Haiti to La Guaira. Very recent in comparison to your genealogy, of course.”

I tried to recall a “Negro rebellion” in Haiti seventy to ninety years ago, but my memory told me nothing. The other Heredia clasped his hands pontifically, as if he had guessed what I was thinking. “Ah, so your memory does not respond?”

“No, frankly, it does not, Señor Heredia.”

“But, nevertheless, isn’t it true we have no memory but what we recall?”

“That seems rather obvious,” I replied with some annoyance. My conversation with this Heredia was becoming grotesque. In fact, I thought I detected a trace of senility in the man’s words and actions, and I tried to move away. He caught me by the arm. Extremely irritated now, I tried to free myself, but not before he forced me to listen: “If you ever need me, look me up in the directory.”

“And why would I need you?” My rejoinder was brusque.

“We all need to remember at times,” he replied affably. “I am a specialist in memories.”

“Of course. Now, excuse me.”

“But if you don’t know my name, how can you call me?”

“Your name is Heredia, you have already told me.”

“Victor,” he said in the softest of voices. “Victor Heredia. Imagine: the Haitian uprising took place, I believe, in 1791, but that was the time of Toussaint L’Ouverture; the rebellion of Henri Christophe came later. I’m not entirely sure of that: in fact, I’m not completely sure of anything.”

The door between our room and that of the boys was half-open when Lucie and I returned to the hotel. The boys were watching television, but only slightly lower than the sound of a song interspersed with jokes, we could hear clearly Antonio’s voice, more serious every day, more indicative of his imminent adulthood.

“No, Victor. I’m backing down on our deal. I choose to die with Mother.”

“C’est pas chic de ta part,” said Victor, using one of the expressions he had picked up in his years of study at the French Lycée. As Lucie had taught the boys a very literary French, she was always surprised and pleased when she heard such phrases in her house.

“What difference does it make to you?” asked Toño. “You want Father and me to die together so you and Mother will be left to cry all you want.”

“It isn’t the same thing,” said Victor. “I tell you it isn’t the same. You traitor.”

We could hear Victor punching Antonio, and I rushed in to separate them.

Lucie locked herself in the bathroom. I reprimanded the boys and told them that if they didn’t behave themselves they would be on the first plane back to Mexico the next morning. My wife would not open the bathroom door, and when finally she came to our room, the boys had fallen asleep and she was no longer crying. I asked whether she had heard them speak like this before, and she said she had. And it was not just chance, she added. She was convinced that Victor made a point of bringing up the subject any time he knew she could hear. With a resigned sigh, my beautiful wife folded the Empire ball gown into a cardboard box and told me to do the same with my military regalia. The mulatto woman from the agency that rented the costumes had told her she would come by early the next morning to pick them up, the Señora understood, such outfits were rented almost every day; Lucie could leave the boxes outside the door and she would pick them up.