Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

I was intrigued by the presence among this special group of books of a volume my friend the Comte de Branly hadn’t mentioned in the course of his account — but then I remembered that the two boys, Victor and André, had spoken of The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and The Man in the Iron Mask. A yellow silk bookmark slit the gold that dusted the page edges. I held the volume in my hand, stroking the creamy leather cover and maroon corner-pieces. The spine cracked as I opened it and scanned a page on which the print stood out as if embossed by reading and by time; the letters in old books seem to want to free themselves from the pages, to take flight like a flock of migrating birds.

What I read was not actually part of the memoirs of that powerful writer, whom fortunately no one — though Flaubert wished it, ironically — had with a wave of a magic wand transported to the cult of Art. I have always believed that Dumas’s books are like men themselves — intemperate, merry, lavish, generous, limpid but secretly erotic and insatiable. The page before me records that as he was dying, the elder Dumas gave a louis d’or to his son, author of the Dame aux Camélias, saying: You see this coin? Your father may have had the reputation of being a profligate, a spendthrift who threw away a fortune on his castles on the road to Bougival, an unrepentant lover of women who, wiser than he, asked nothing of him but the blossoms of the day; but look at this louis d’or, he’d had it when he arrived in Paris and he’d held on to it until the hour of his death.

Alongside this page there was another, purple ink on graph paper, carefully glued to the endpaper. “In 1870, shortly before his death, A.D. came in his tilbury to my home in Enghien. In his arms, as promised, he bore a beautiful blond boy child. At my direction, C. went out and handed him the black child. A.D. took the child in his arms, and sent this message by C.: the ancient debts of honor, money, exploitation, and revenge are at long last settled. He added that perhaps this date should be commemorated; each, finally, had his own. I saw no reason to disillusion him. I inscribed his initials and the date over the door. Before he could see them, he died, dreaming, for all we know, of the forests of his childhood in Retz, or, perhaps, of the mountains of his father’s childhood in Haiti. I admire this celebrated writer, but I am not obliged to take in the son of a slave woman from the plantations forfeited by my stupid father-in-law. I do not know what became of the black child. Poor L. She had grown fond of him, and she weeps the day long.”

Why was it only then that I recalled the last lines of the timeless madrigal: J’ai trouvé l’eau si belle, que je m’y suis noyé. “So beautiful were its waters that in them I did drown.” I will never be able to forget that I heard those lines for the last time at the club pool, that they were being sung by a waiter with a face like a wildcat, whose features seemed strangely at odds with the configuration of his head, and who was standing, tray in hand, on the iron catwalk above the waters cascading into the swimming pool.

Several days later I visited the Clos des Renards. It was a scene of great activity, a tumult of trucks and laborers. Entering through the great gate, I approached the house along the avenue of oaks and chestnuts. The dead leaves had been swept away. The beautiful grove of birches is still standing. But, inside, the house is being completely renovated. Ornamentation, walls, paint, wax, plaster, ebony fall before my astonished eyes: a huge pile of smoldering skins lies at the end of the terrace of the lions, and carpenters are fitting new frames on doors and windows.

I hear a peculiar sound and I peer through one of the newly refurbished windows. A crew of women dressed in full skirts and heavy denim blouses, their heads wrapped in coarse kerchiefs that hide their hair, are scraping down the floors and walls of the house. They don’t speak; they don’t look at me.

Though the inscription above the door, A.D. 1870, remains untouched, I notice that workmen are attacking the French garden, digging a large pit exactly at its center. Of course. This will be the long-missing pool. Because of the excavation, one can no longer see — if in fact it ever actually existed — the sulphurous, burnt gash Branly said he saw from his bedroom window and, barefoot, walked through that last time the gift of simultaneity was granted him by dream, time, and the physical space of the Clos des Renards.

I ask the workmen the owner’s name; no one knows anything. I feel frustrated. We leave behind that house being stripped of its curses as in medieval times dwellings were purified of the plague.

I return to Paris that afternoon, after a leisurely drive through Enghien, Montmorency, Andilly, Margency, and other places where I have friends and memories. Corot’s autumn has appeared, crowned with silvery mist. I decide to visit my friend Branly, who is suffering from an acute bronchial infection.

“You must get well quickly,” I tell him jokingly. “I don’t want to be the only person who knows the story of the Heredias.”

He looks at me with doleful eyes, and says I mustn’t worry, that memory is a faithless creature and nothing is more easily forgotten than a dead man.

“If you only knew how difficult it is for me to remember the faces of my first wives. Nothing closer in life. Nothing more distant in death.”

“Don’t you have photographs of them?”

A wave of his hand tells me that anything that cannot be remembered spontaneously deserves to be entombed in oblivion.

“On the other hand, how well I remember Félicité, my nurse when I went to my grandfather’s castle for vacations. I remember her. She told me that my grandfather, too, was a military man, first during the July Monarchy, and then during the Second Empire. But he never told me any of this, so I am not sure.”

“Perhaps that’s what Hugo Heredia feared,” I dared suggest.

“What?”

“That he would forget his wife and son in the same way.”

Branly turned to look at me with the concentrated but impotent fury of the elderly, more terrible than a young man’s rage because the absence of physical menace suggests something much worse.

“Have you had news of him?” he asks, his voice congested.

“No,” I reply with surprise. “Should I have?”

“He told me that his life depended on my silence. But I broke that silence; I told you everything. My only hope is that Hugo Heredia is dead.”

Branly speaks these words with some passion; he is overcome by a fit of coughing. As he composes himself, I mention the beauty of the November afternoon, a little cool, but radiant, like the afternoons he always loved on the Île de France when as a child he paused on the bridge over the river and experienced that miraculous moment that disperses the phenomena of the day, rain or fog, scorching heat or snow, to reveal the luminous essence of this favored city.

“Don’t change the subject,” Branly scolds me, his handkerchief in his hand. “The French Heredia told Hugo not to tell anything, because Victor’s life depended on it. But he did, Hugo told me the story.”

“And you told me, Branly. Actually, I wasn’t changing the subject. One morning in this very house, Victor invited you to join him in a game, and you nearly missed the opportunity.”

“That is true. Stupidly. Because of my passion for the order and reason that wear the solemn mask of maturity and veil one’s fear that one may recover one’s lost imagination.”

As I open wide the tall beveled windows of Branly’s bedchamber overlooking the garden with the solitary sea pine, I tell him that I visited the Clos des Renards that morning.