Carlos Fuentes - Distant Relations

I enter the room. In vain I try to penetrate the ecclesiastic gloom enveloping the figure lighting the candles. Dazed, I retreat to the farthest corner, as far as possible from the candelabra with their bronze ram’s-head bases, the garlands of blindfolded girls whose bodies serve as candle holders, the bronze serpents whose fangs fasten on glass shades, the melted wax on the argentine backs of a pack of hunting hounds.

The dolorous hands light the last candle. The room is filled with light; a woman kneels before the table by her leather-canopied bed. On the table is the object I had always before seen in the salon, the clock suspended in an arch of gilded bronze, with the figure of a seated woman playing an ornate piano with griffin legs, in a sumptuous mounting of motionless draperies and doors. On the same bedside table is the sepia photograph of Branly’s father.

The woman is weeping, still on her knees, her hands covering her face.

In this instant, all the defenses of humor, innocence, and rationality I have placed between myself and Branly’s narrative fall away. It is of little consequence that the woman is dressed in black rather than the high-waisted, décolleté white ball gown with the long stole. Can we call intuition our sudden nakedness beneath the sun of a North African desert or the torrential downpour of an equatorial jungle that, as it strips us of the umbrella of logic we carry through well-lighted streets as we boldly enter shops, routinely step off buses, confidently sign checks, forces us to accept the inevitability of what confronts us? Intuition? Or awareness of something that never happened to us which yet encompasses a truth we did not even want to suspect, much less admit into the orderly compartments of good Socratic reason: someone has lived constantly alongside us, always, not just from the moment of birth, but always, a being fused to our life as the waters of the sea are with the sea. And to our death as our breath is with the air we breathe. During our lifetime, this being accompanies us with never a sign of its own life, as if less than the shadow, a tiptoeing murmur, the sudden, almost inaudible whisper of ancient taffeta against the knob of a half-open door, though this something — I know it in my mind as I pry away the strong hands that not only hide but disfigure the woman’s face — lives, parallel to our own, a completely normal life, taking meals at regular hours, counting its possessions, casting glances we never see, yet in it jealousy and tenderness battle to exhaustion in a neighboring nonpresence: contiguous, bodies and their phantoms; contiguous, the narration and its specter.

“Lucie,” I say. “Lucie, rest now. Leave him in peace. He has helped you. He did the best he could to return your son to you. Be grateful to him for that; he is a good man.”

The wife of Hugo Heredia is possessed of an awesome force, a steel mesh woven more of will than of true strength, and I can do nothing but prevent an ever greater calamity. I fear she will claw at her face until it dissolves beneath tears indistinguishable from blood. But I fear even more that the hypotheses born of the intuition that stripped away my defenses as it plunged me suddenly into the horror of an eternal oblivion belonging to another woman like this one, another Lucie, my own, a woman unknown to me who like Branly’s phantom was constantly by my side, would obliterate my friend’s companion before I could see her face. I knew that the key to her secret was on her face and not in all my hypotheses — which were nothing but unanswered questions. Does everyone have an invisible phantom that accompanies him throughout his lifetime? Must we die before our phantom becomes incarnate? Then who is with us in death, the phantom of life, the only being that truly remembers us? What is that phantom’s name? Is this phantom somehow different from what is simultaneously phantom and death during our lifetime: youth?

The moment I realize that these enigmas, if not their solutions, are written on Lucie’s hidden face, I know that I have missed my opportunity to know this woman; I can know her only by looking at the face of my friend the Comte de Branly, not at her. If anywhere there was to be found the reality of the eternally tentative woman who floated along the magical paths of the Pare Monceau, it is in the waxen face, the pale hands, the intelligent eyes of the man who will be visited by the woman’s spectral presence only if he does not know she is dead. Branly. Is it only through him that all the manifestations of the wife of Hugo Heredia exist? the sweetheart in the park of my friend’s childhood, the French Mamasel, the girl who a hundred eighty years ago was seen by Branly’s specter in the same park at the same hour in the same light?

As soon as I think I have resolved one enigma, the solution itself creates a new mystery. Any explanation that Lucie could offer me is obstinately withheld by the Heredias. Finally, I understand only one thing, that from behind the beveled windows of a house on the Avenue Vélasquez one presence has watched over everything, known everything, eternal, persevering, cruel in its pathetic will to bring it all back to life.

These thoughts flash through my mind as I struggle to move the hands away from the face of the woman who perhaps at that very instant, spontaneously, freely, with light-hearted yet sinister fatalism, was lowering her hands from her face in the abandoned painting in the attic of the Clos des Renards. I swear that before I forcibly revealed that face I reproached myself for what I was doing. I told myself that my conclusions were too facile, too capricious, born of my need to tie up loose ends, to conform with the laws of symmetry, but that in truth— in truth —I did not have, I would never have, the right or power to interpret or vary the facts, to in any way intrude in the labyrinths of this story so imperiously indifferent to my own.

I tear Lucie’s hands from her face. I cannot contain a scream of anguish. As I look upon that gaze of vertiginous infinity, I understand what Branly saw at the bottom of the dumbwaiter shaft at the Clos des Renards in the whirlwind of dead leaves and tiny daggers of ice; I know at last why we sell our souls in the pact we make with the devil not to be alone in death.

It was not in vain that Branly called on certain words to conjure up the true subject of his song: harsh sighs, strange tongues, appalling gibberish, tones of rage, and fields of ashen misery beneath a sky barren of stars.

This is Lucie’s face.

The woman, too, screams as I reveal her face. Her first cry is one of fear; the second, of pain.

This is not a hypothesis: Lucie will live the moment my friend Branly dies. The trembling face I see before me is that of a beast crouched in ambush, lupine, rabid to devour the opportunity offered by death. It is not, this trembling face on which I gaze, that of a living woman. It is the mortal remains of a phantom in the unspeakable transit between yesterday’s body and tomorrow’s specter. I feel I must return to Branly’s bedchamber, ask whether he knows that when he dies he will be, as until now she has been, a phantom. But even though she may cease to be a corpse, she will never be more than a specter.

My Lucie says, in a fetid voice as dank as fungus: You are growing old, Carlos. You do not belong here; you will never again belong there. Do you know your phantom? It will take your place at the moment of your death, and you will be the phantom of what in your life was your specter. You must abandon hope. You have not been able to kill it, however much you have tried. You did not leave it behind you in Mexico, or in Buenos Aires, as you thought you had when you were young.

The empty eye sockets, fountains of blood, mesmerize me with a blend of nausea and agonized fascination. “I can see it. It is standing patiently on the threshold of this bedroom. Go with it. Leave us alone. Do not come back.”