Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

My action was motivated by sudden terror. I didn’t want to be the one who knew, the last to know, the one who receives the devil’s gift and then cannot rid himself of it. I didn’t want to be the one who receives and then must spend the rest of his life seeking another victim to whom to give the gift, the knowing. I did not want to be the narrator.

The watery paleness disappeared from Branly’s eyes. He hadn’t even noticed my violence. I felt ashamed. I removed my hands from his shoulders, but I did not avert my eyes.

“Branly, do you hear me?”

“Perfectly, my friend.” And he nodded with absolute composure.

“Then tell me. Tell me the truth. I’ve listened very carefully. Now I must know what you knew before you talked with Hugo Heredia. I want to know what you knew but haven’t told me. I asked whether all the small coincidences, the implicit analogies, had escaped your attention.”

My friend started to rise from his chair, then sank back.

“Yes, the portrait of my father beside my bed; the clock made by Antoine-André Ravrio, in whose workshop several men died from contact with the mercury used in gilding; the Empire-robed woman playing the harpsichord … I nearly destroyed both, my friend. I, too, suspected that in some mysterious way the photo and the clock with its gilded bronze figure linked my destiny, much against my will, with the story of the Heredias.”

“Why didn’t you, Branly?”

Before replying, my friend shrugged. “I did, it is true, finally see the relationships among certain objects. What I still do not know is why those relationships exist. You see, I too, have lost the power of analogy, of seeing that correspondence among all things that for Hugo Heredia was the most meaningful symbol of our early cultures. Perhaps one of my ancestors in the fourteenth century, with no difficulty, understood the homologous relationship among God, a hart with burgeoning antlers, and the hunter’s moon. By the sixteenth century, another ancestor would not have known this; he could not see the correspondence among these things. Art, you see, and especially the art of narration, is a desperate attempt to reestablish analogy without sacrificing differentiation. This is what Cervantes, Balzac, Dostoevsky accomplished. Proust was no different. Surely no novel can escape that terrible urgency.”

Branly added that the essence of every work of art is that the solution of its enigma creates a new enigma, and he quoted the poet René Char saying that the time is approaching when the only questions left to ask are those that must remain unanswered.

Again I noticed Branly’s urge to get up from his chair. But I was not disposed to be silenced by a few literary flourishes from my friend. “Since we’re speaking of Cervantes, I should tell you that you have always reminded me of that paradigm of courtesy, the gentleman in green, Don Diego de Miranda, who offered hospitality to Don Quijote when everyone else denied it. But didn’t you outdo yourself with the Heredias? Understand, Branly, I am not reproaching you.”

“A reproach is the last thing I need.” My friend laced his fingers beneath his thin, amicable lips.

“I agree. But you did receive them with more than ordinary hospitality…”

“I do not regret that,” Branly interrupted, without looking at me.

“Why?” My question was impertinent.

Branly did not shift his position, he merely let his hands fall to his lap. He told me he was indebted to the Heredias for three things. He had dreamed about a woman he had loved in the past, and though he could not identify her, he had experienced emotions from a time when being hopelessly in love was enough to make one happy. And he had recaptured the imperious innocence, the unanswered questions, of his childhood. “Do you remember my fear when I realized how near I had come to refusing young Victor’s invitation the time he turned my salon into a sumptuous cavern of blazing candles, silver, and bronze? I swore then I would never refuse any of Victor’s requests, for they were the same as those of my own childhood. And, you see, I was right.”

“And your third debt?” I asked, hoping to hasten the conclusion of Branly’s story.

He looked at me strangely, saying that, after all, it was I who had guessed and expressed that debt with precision. Many years ago, he should have taken that extra step in the Pare Monceau. Seventy years was a long time, but finally he had held out his hand, he had returned the ball to the melancholy child who watched from behind the beveled windows of the house on the Avenue Vélasquez.

“I do not know why I feel that the sins in this story, if sins they are, are those of omission, of absence, more than action and presence. Francisco Luis de Heredia may have been the one person who acted, even though he deceived himself, believing his efforts could wound, humiliate, avenge, decide the course of events. None of the others, no; things happened because no actions were taken. I believe, my dear friend, that I have atoned for my childhood sin of omission. If the boy to whom I did not offer my hand in the Pare Monceau was named André, that child now, thanks to me, through my mediation — because I invited the Heredias to my home in Paris, because I played the game of names in the telephone book, because I drove Victor to the Clos des Renards, and because in the final act I did not interrupt the confluence of events — that boy, I say, will never be alone.”

I made no comment, but Branly could see my expression. He turned away, his gaze fixed on the distant horizon beyond the glass walls of the solarium, the robed and slippered club members drinking in the bar, attended by young waiters.

“Do not believe that because I am grateful my conscience is entirely clear,” he said, avoiding my eyes.

“No,” I replied. “Of course not. But I am surprised that though you feel you owe so much to the Heredias you have violated the obligation you accepted so solemnly.”

“Obligation?” said Branly, turning to look at me, and laughing dryly. “You jest, my friend.”

I did not allow myself to be annoyed by my friend’s cool, haughty tone. I held his eyes, in fact offering him my silence if he preferred it, letting him know my curiosity was not as strong as my respect for him and what he considered his secret. But as his eyes met mine, pride blazed even more brightly. I had not expected this.

“After listening to you, I am certain of one thing,” I persisted. “This story should never have been known by any except those who lived it. Why have you told me? You promised not to tell it to anyone. You have broken that promise. Why? If seventy years ago you erred in denying friendship to a lonely boy, you have atoned for it today by erring anew. Will you have time to atone for this new sin, Branly?”

With this, Branly sprang to his feet. “What right do you have to speak to me in that tone?” he asked.

“The right that comes from being the guardian of the Heredias’ story, and, because of it, committed to the pact of silence you have violated this afternoon.”

“Do not delude yourself,” he replied with icy pride. “There is something you have not understood, my friend, which is that the real story of the Heredias is not finished.”

“Do you mean that what you have told me isn’t true?” I asked, my exasperation mounting.

“The events may be true.” Branly sighed quietly. “But the essential truth is hidden, the hatred of Hugo Heredia for his son Victor. Victor hoped his father and his brother would die, so he would be left to weep with his mother. And, too, Victor hated the stones; he injured the past Hugo venerated, and, at least according to Hugo, capriciously destroyed the perfect object he found at the ruins of Xochicalco. Hugo Heredia despised his son when he realized that Victor had not learned his lesson. He scorned men, but he did not love the stones. He did not deserve to be the heir of the Heredias.”