Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

“Come back any time you like,” said “Heredia,” patting Victor’s head.

“I don’t think so. This was merely a whim of my son’s. A game.”

“Ah, but he won’t be coming alone. My dealings are with you, Don Hugo. Think over what I said. I will see you tonight at your hotel.”

This time I said nothing. Something prevented me from mocking him in Monterrey, as I had mocked him in Caracas. I nodded, took Victor’s hand, and left without further word.

That night, I tucked Victor in and, in spite of myself, went down to the bar. What would you have done, Branly, after such a day, so rich in chaotic impressions? Is there anyone you have forgotten and would like to have back? Then think about the things I pondered during the hours following our meeting with “Heredia”: I am forgetting Lucie and Antonio, that is inevitable; soon they will be a vague memory recalled only with effort, the aid of a photograph, the prod of a sudden scent. On the other hand, Victor is here. I don’t have to remember him.

Why doesn’t Victor help me remember? I have asked him so often. I felt an overwhelming hatred for my living son.

That was the very question “Heredia” asked me that night. He was sitting near the bar at a table beneath the frosted-glass mirrors from the early years of the century, preserved there by an appreciation of the past rare in Monterrey. The large blades of the ceiling fans failed to ruffle the abundant white mane of this man with the fine features and graceless body, tonight wearing a yellow corduroy suit too heavy for the climate of Monterrey and a ridiculous celluloid collar, with not even a tie to cover flagrantly bared bone buttons, Why, he said, why not let Victor help me remember? Victor is capable of remembering everything. He is living; with the proper complement, Don Hugo, you could see all your theses fully realized: a living past, actual, irrevocable. Victor, and someone else; Victor, united with another. Together they will have that memory; they will be that past. Victor will have more life than his dead brother; he will remember Antonio, as if he were still alive. But he will also live his dead brother’s life; he will remember what Antonio knows because he is dead. What is needed? A perfect space, Don Hugo, an ancient space where my dead and yours can meet through the living young Victor.

“A new brother for Victor,” said “Heredia” in the Ancira bar. “That is what I am offering.”

He raised his glass, a Veracruz mint julep, in a silent toast. He waited for me to do the same.

“What’s on your mind, Don Hugo?” asked “Heredia,” his glass still held high.

“A few months ago, in a fit of rage, Victor broke an artifact we found at some ruins,” I replied despondently. “I was just thinking that what you are offering is to a degree what I wanted then, though I didn’t realize it until this minute. And do you know what that was? I wanted the halves of that object to be rejoined; I wanted their wholeness to become a part of art, of history, of the past, of culture, of anything you can name.”

“Does that mean you accept my pact?”

“I mean that, as an act of good faith on your part, I would accept the restoration of the object my son destroyed.”

“Would it be enough if you found half?”

I replied that it would. It would offer renewed hope that the object would be whole again. He said that Victor would find the lost half at Xochicalco; that would be the guarantee the other half would be found later, that the object would be restored.

“And what am I to do when my son finds half of what he destroyed?”

“From that moment on, everything will proceed in a manner I would not want to call fatalistic; no one likes to use that word. Let us say, in an orderly sequence of events, eh? One thing will follow another. You, Don Hugo, will understand what is happening; you will always make the correct choice, I am sure of that.”

He rambled on, telling me stories about his family, which had lived in different parts of the Antilles. I became increasingly confused, for there were glaring inconsistencies in his stories, none of the dates coincided, and, finally, I wondered if the man with the stubby fingers and pale eyes wasn’t simply selecting names and dates at random to fabricate the genealogy that best served his purpose. He mentioned a number of names of his family, and of persons I assumed were family friends. I heard, though I really couldn’t follow the thread, stories about a certain Francisco Luis and his two wives, a French merchant named Lange, and a mulatto nurse. I never understood whether this “Heredia” was the son of Francisco Luis’s first wife — a physiological impossibility, for that would mean I was talking with a man who was more than a hundred and sixty years old — or the second: even then, he would have been born sometime between 1850 and 1900, when Heredia’s second wife died — at what age I don’t know. Nevertheless, he insisted on referring to his father’s first wife as “Mother.”

“Did you know Mademoiselle Lange?” I dared ask.

“I spent nine months in her belly,” he smiled disagreeably, “aware of every sip that passed the dear lady’s lips.”

“Where were you born? Where were you christened?” I asked in a neutral voice.

“That’s of no importance,” he said defensively.

“But it is,” I persisted, in a conversational tone. “How were you christened?”

At that moment, Branly, “Heredia” shed all semblance of fraud or grotesqueness. He stared at me with a terrible expression, which I had the sense to recognize as a strange kind of sorrow, totally alien to me. Why alien? I answered my own question. I have lived life. My only regrets are that at times I made the wrong choices; I celebrate the times I chose well; I lament the things that are lost to me, especially my dead wife and son; I can laugh a little at my setbacks, at the passing years themselves; I lament, celebrate, and laugh at my own death, which I accept because I have always known it could not be avoided, and because I have been convinced that to have lived a little, like Toño, or a lot, as I have — don’t you agree, Branly, you who have lived so long and so well? — death is a small price to pay. I thought about my dead wife, our nights together, her words of love.

No. “Heredia” had known none of this, and because I knew what my life had been, I knew that the life of my companion that night in the bar of the Hotel Ancira was defined by the absence of these things. That’s why I think I understood his next words, spoken with disturbing overtones of self-pity shocking in a man in his position and with his intentions.

“Have I been forgotten? You tell me, Don Hugo. Does anyone remember me?”

I didn’t know how to respond to such obvious self-commiseration. “Heredia” himself must have realized he was making a fool of himself, for he added: “ Tant pis, mon ami; so much the worse for the person who forgets. I will see to it that I’m remembered.”

He sucked noisily at the dregs of his rum-and-mint drink, and asked me to lead him to the room where Victor was sleeping. We went up, but as I unlocked the door, this heavily built man pushed past me and slammed the door in my face, and when I began to beat on the door and ring the bell with indignation, I heard “Heredia” ’s voice through the chinks of the polished mahogany door.

“Don’t interrupt me, Don Hugo. Come back in half an hour. I’ll be finished by then. Everything depends on your leaving me alone. Please. Do it for your son. And never tell anyone what happened between us. Do it for your son.”

I stopped pounding at the door, and stepped back. But I did not abandon my vigil in the hotel corridor. I counted the minutes on my watch. I waited five minutes past the thirty minutes. Again I knocked at the door, calling to “Heredia” to come out, as he had promised. The door opened at my touch. I went in and found my son asleep. He was alone. I never saw “Heredia” again.