Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

Now this is important, Branly. My son confessed that he felt an irresistible hatred for that perfect object that could owe nothing to him, or to any man. He picked up a sharp stone and struck at the object until he split it in two, divesting it forever of the beauty inherent in its wholeness. In the frenzy of his task, Victor cut his hands. He hurled half the object from him. Holding the other half in his hand, impelled by the force of his shame, he ran to the precipice; he threw even farther the second half, which, he said, was burning into the cuts on his hands. Only then did he cry out, and fall.

I let Victor sleep in my bed that night, but I turned my back to him. I had failed. Victor had learned the uses of arbitrary power, but in the process he had forgotten the memory of the unity of time. This was never my intention, I know you believe me. On the contrary, I had wanted human authority to serve the memory of past civilizations, and the awareness of the present to serve everything that had preceded us.

The reason I am telling you all this, Branly, is that I feel we Heredias owe you a debt. I could read the thoughts that passed through your eyes the night we met. I am sorry to have deceived you. I am not a universal man from the century of discoveries. I am only a slightly resentful Mexican Creole, like all the rest of my compatriots marked by mute rage against their inadequacies. Mine is a selective culture. What can save me from the capitis diminutio that is the curse of being a “Latin American”—which is to say a man who turns everything he touches into melodrama? Tragedy has been denied us; even our deepest sorrows come under the label of the circus of disaster. Listen to our songs, read our love letters, hear our orators.

Several months went by in which communication with Victor was difficult, if not impossible. He resumed his studies at the French Lycée. I observed him closely, and kept repeating that ridiculously obvious phrase I had once heard. “We have no memory but what we recall.” It began to haunt me, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Does what we forget cease to exist, or is it we who are diminished when we forget something? Does what we have forgotten exist whether or not we remember it? These thoughts quite naturally were in my mind during my work at archaeological sites. The vast treasures of Mexican antiquity are no less real because for centuries we had ignored their existence. Perhaps the work of the archaeologist can be reduced to this: to restore, however imperfectly, a past.

I thought about this when I visited the city of the gods, Teotihuacán, the first true city of the Western Hemisphere. Its great avenues and pyramids are like a diagram of the ancient relationship of all things with all things. I remember our meeting here on a different afternoon, in a different space destroyed because Victor was with me, and today I believe that the limitations of my lesson were related to the changes that were taking place in our lives because of Victor. For, Branly, if you want me to summarize the most profound lesson of Mexican antiquity, it is this: all things are related, nothing is isolated; all things are accompanied by the totality of their spatial, temporal, physical, oneiric, visible, and invisible attributes.

“When a child is born,” I told Victor that intensely pale afternoon, “it is accompanied by all its signs; it belongs to a day, a physical object, a direction in space, a color, an instant in time, a sentiment, a temperature. But what is amazing is that these personal signs are related to all other signs, to their opposites, their complements, their prefigurations. Nothing exists in isolation.”

“Give me an example,” Victor said, and I sought his eyes. I felt that our ability to play together was being reestablished, and I explained, as an example, that if your day was that of the eagle Cuautli, it would correspond to the signs of the lofty flight that watches over the earth like a sun, but that this grandeur would find its complement in the sacrifice that must accompany it, in the figure of the god Xipe Tótec, who gives his life for the coming harvest, and who in order to escape from himself sheds his skin like a snake: the grandeur of the eagle’s flight and the painful misery of our flayed lord.

First — yes, how banal — we played dominoes; then cards; increasingly complicated games, as if challenging one another. I resurrected the disturbing game of faro from Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, with its secrets of enormous power, immense riches, but, also, infinite death. Victor responded with tarot cards. I compared the somnambulistic indifference I had witnessed at the cockfight of San Marcos with an enthusiasm of sorts displayed one afternoon when we went to see the bulls. I had explained that the olé! of the bullring comes from the ancient Arabic wallah, an invocation, an address to God. Victor did not shout it out that afternoon, watching the veronicas of El Niño de la Capea; he murmured it like a danger-fraught prayer that would save the matador’s life because only he was repeating it.

We played games with photographs, Branly: Victor remembering his seatmates in grade school; I, mine. We cut up photographs to create unlikely pairings, entire families with faces transported through time and space. We bought old newsreels, projected them, each trying to incorporate himself (one always had to be the spectator) into the ambience of the film: automobile races, wars in Manchuria and Ethiopia, a dirigible disaster, the rallies of Perón’s followers in the Plaza de Mayo.

It was Victor’s idea to look up our names in the telephone directories of the towns we visited. The two Hugo Heredias, the half-dozen Victor Heredias, in the Mexico City phone book created a certain amused excitement, the first I had detected in my son for a long time. The novelty of the game needed no justification but this: pretended surprise, a shared laugh. In Mérida, however, the fact that there was but one Victor Heredia in the directory was a temptation: we called him, he laughed with us, we hung up. In Puebla the game grew more complex; Victor proposed that the loser should give the winner a prize.

“And who will determine the prize?” I asked with a smile.

Victor, unsmiling, replied: “The one who wins, of course.”

In Puebla there was only one Heredia in the directory, a Hugo.

“My prize will be for us to speak normally about your mother and your brother. It’s been more than a year now, and we’ve never mentioned them. Don’t you think it’s important for us to begin remembering them?”

Victor did not reply. We called the Puebla Hugo Heredia. He growled at us in a hoarse voice, and hung up.

“Have you noticed, Father? It’s always old men who answer.”

“Well, we could bet on whether the next Victor will be young and the next Hugo old.”

Victor laughed and said that I wasn’t old; I replied that when one is twelve, anyone over thirty seems as old as the tomb.

“But some people never grow old.”

“Who are these fortunate ones?” I spoke lightly.

“The dead.” My son’s voice was grave. “Antonio will never grow old.”

Jean had spoken of you often, Branly. In UNESCO, many people I respect know you. I have enjoyed your spontaneous, perhaps excessive, hospitality. I have seen the world that surrounds you. I know your interests. I have leafed through the books in your library, read what you have underlined in a few books more affectionately abused than others: Lamartine, Supervielle, Balzac. That is why I know I would offend you if I asked you to be discreet (worse, silent) in this matter. I should say nothing more. A true secret is one that is not told as a secret, but is kept so as not to lose the friendship of the person who told it, whether or not he knows.