Distant Relations (2 page)

“Forgive me,” said Heredia. “I have not introduced my son, Victor, to you.”

He hesitated, embarrassed, and added hurriedly: “Forgive me again, but I did not quite hear when Jean told me your name.”

“Branly,” my friend replied simply.

He forgave the clumsiness of the introduction: Victor, the boy, was absorbed in his discovery; his father, in assuring the boy of his undivided attention. Under such circumstances, introductions are best left for a more propitious moment. But Branly should not expect our standard of courtesy—what the English, in their incomparable way, call “good manners”—to be recognized, much less practiced, everywhere in the world, as he cannot expect the soft twilight of the Île de France—like a recumbent woman stretching out a hand to brush our cheek with her fingertips (that moment is approaching as I dine and listen to my friend speak these words)—to resemble what he calls, and he knows it well, the raised, gauntleted fist, the vertical, visceral, cutting light of eternal noonday, of the mountains of Mexico.

“Where did you find it, Victor?” the father asked.

The boy gestured toward the truncated pyramid, a temple that does not soar, my friend calls it, dominated by a girdle of sculptured fire serpents encircling its four sides, stone serpents devouring one another to make a single snake biting its own tail in the act of swallowing itself. The pyramid is surrounded by dry brush and restless dust.

“There,” the boy pointed.

“May I see it?” asked Heredia.

Victor hugged the object to his chest. “No, later.”

Until that moment the boy had been looking down, his eyes fixed on his treasure. Now, as he said no, he looked up at his father. My friend was surprised that with skin so dark and hair so black and lank he had such light-colored eyes. They seemed blue and dilated in the relentless light, green when his thick eyelashes shadowed them. He couldn't be more than thirteen; perhaps twelve.

Who knows? my friend is saying now, awaiting with me the arrival of twilight over the Place de la Concorde; maybe Mexican children remain small for so many years because the sexual precocity of the tropics requires a compensatory delay in other areas of growth. He had never seen such light eyes against such dark skin. Only then did he look with some attention at the father. Hugo Heredia was a Mexican Creole with ruddy skin, a black mustache, wavy hair, and studious, sad eyes behind tortoise-rimmed spectacles.

“No, later,” said the child.

My friend refrained from asking whether an object found on an archaeological site should not immediately be delivered to competent authorities. After all, the visiting foreigner is warned that the Mexican laws are very strict in that regard; woe to him who attempts to smuggle an Aztec or Tarascan figure, bogus or not, in his flight bag. He wondered whether Heredia enjoyed special privileges.

He found the answer that same evening in Cuernavaca. My friend, and the father and son, were all Jean's guests. They dined on a loggia of pale wood and blue stucco, a portico open to the dual assault of the vegetal breath from the barrancas and the distant storm gathering on the crest of the mountains. My friend says he found the Heredias enchanting. The father had that quality so characteristic of cultured Latin Americans: the passion to know everything, to read everything, to give no quarter, no pretext, to the European, but also to know well what the European does not know and what he considers his own, the Popol Vuh
and
Descartes. And, above all, to demonstrate to the European that there is no excuse not to know other cultures.

We tend to be somewhat uncomfortable with this attitude; we believe that knowing everything does not necessarily mean knowing something. But this was not the case with Hugo Heredia. For him, my friend says, a catholicity of culture was a necessity for him as a professional anthropologist. Simply put, he was a man who did not want to reduce knowledge to a single sphere, acute perhaps, but surely partial and therefore imperfect. Heredia, who often held his spectacles in his hands and mused with half-closed eyes, was unwilling to align himself with God, with man, with history, or with money, but neither did he deny any of them. As he listened, my friend dreamed of a different age and spoke of a library whose one or two shelves would contain all the knowledge worth knowing.

He tells me he recalled the two noblest faces in all painting, those of Erasmus and Thomas More, both by Holbein the Younger; he tried to find in Heredia a resemblance to them. This is a man who belongs to the century in which the New World was founded, he thought; since that time we have not known a universal man. And yet in the veiled eyes of that intelligence there was also a hint of patriarchal authority, a slight but firm warning of the boundaries that must be respected by others as they approach the gates of the domain where the discoverer of new lands is the master of all he surveys, empowered to dispose of lives and fortunes, with no distinction between his public and his private functions. A foreigner may not remove an archaeological artifact. A Mexican may. One cannot steal from one's own patrimony.

The hovering odor of the mangrove thicket was intensified by the approaching nightly storm that first would quench it before giving it even more powerful wings. Heredia was speaking of gods and of time, and his son was listening with something more than ordinary attention. The Mexican was saying that the expulsion of the gods by the modern city has condemned us to an illusory time, a time imposed by human limitations; we perceive, unclearly, only chronological sequence and we believe there is no other time.

“I don't know whether the gods exist; but I know the concept exists of a sacred world where entities are reluctant to be sacrificed. All ancient peoples refuse to abandon the old ways in favor of the new; rather than being cast aside one after the other, some realities accumulate in a permanent accretion. When this happens, all things are living and present, as is true among the peoples of Madagascar, who conceive of history as two flowing currents: the inheritance of the ears and the memory of the lips.”

He commented that it is less interesting to take scrupulous care to relegate certain features of the present to the past than to celebrate the living presence of things we can recount and hear.

My friend, as he leaned forward to cut a piece of meat, could see Victor's eyes as he watched his father. The boy was absorbing a lesson. My friend tried in vain to intercept the half-lidded gaze of Hugo Heredia as he reached for the bottle of wine. Heredia was not speaking to my friend, he was not speaking to Jean, he was lecturing to his son, and they were both aware of it.

In a way, they lived in a universe of their own. Jean had informed my friend before dinner that Victor's older brother and his mother had died two years earlier in a plane crash. After Victor was born, Hugo and his wife had decided never to travel together. From that time, each of the parents traveled separately with one of the children, in turn. Jean wondered whether this was not a way to tempt the devil, to offer fate alternatives, forcing it to awaken from its dream and provide the final answer to the underlying question of the Heredias' game: which would receive the invitation to death?

“Then Victor could have been the one who died in the accident?” my friend asked his host.

Jean had nodded, and throughout the meal Branly understood and accepted the warm and private attention the father and son bestowed on one another. But he was also disturbed by the intensity of the relationship that, without being abusive (quite the contrary: father and son shared the ceremonious behavior that is the surest evidence of the Indian presence in Mexico; the Spanish, my friend said, are almost always noisy and rude), seemed to exclude the foreigners.

Then, as if the slight, but obvious, discomfort of my friend had been revealed in the sudden involuntary silence, the boy laughed and said an angel must have flown overhead. Hugo opened his eyes wide and smiled at my friend, who was dressed in white linen that night, and was illuminated, then as now, by an imaginary candle glowing just behind his left ear.

It was the last moment of the jungle and the barranca. Turning toward my friend, Hugo Heredia recalled Proust's words about a painting by Moreau: “venomous flowers interwoven with precious jewels.” He asked my friend whether the night and the jungle, the flickering light and shadow of the barranca, did not remind him of Proust's words.

“No,” my friend replied. “That is but one element of the scene, though admittedly the most sensual and immediate. I was thinking of something Madame de La Fayette wrote about the court of Henry II:
‘Une sorte d'agitation sans désordre.'
”

As the tropical rain was unleashed on the roof of the loggia, Jean murmured in Spanish: “A sort of agitation without disorder.” It was not my friend's intention to contradict Hugo Heredia, but rather to acknowledge the participation he was inviting. He put aside the incidents that had not entirely pleased him—the hasty introduction, the arrogant appropriation of the artifact, the prolonged asides during the meal—to accept the consuming reality of the relationship between father and son, which first confirmed its own intensity, its mutual supportiveness, then incorporated events that being tangential became involved in it, and, finally, once it had been satisfactorily defined on its own terms, opened unhesitatingly to include the host and the host's friend.

My friend did not hesitate to extend in return a cordial, slender hand as transparent as porcelain, the same hand now pointing toward the scudding clouds above the cupola of the Palais Bourbon opposite us. He comments that our symmetry of spirits tends to reinforce the recognition of a rational mind in a solid body; the symmetry of Mexican temples is the fearful symmetry of Blake's tiger in the night.

He mentioned this to Hugo Heredia that night in Cuernavaca, while Jean lighted the fire in the fireplace and Victor pulled on a blue wool sweater bearing the crest of the Lycée Français, then folded his hands across his chest as he had that morning to shield his newfound treasure from intrusive eyes. My friend conceded a point to Hugo; every time he remembered that brief glimmer he would associate it with the moment before the rain, and the strange flickering light in the fetid barranca.

The temple, Hugo was saying in reply to my friend, is a place apart, sacred, distinct from nature. But by the very fact that it was created to be separate from nature, it echoes it. However, my friend was no longer listening; the rain had ceased and the odors from the barranca were filtering in with a humid vengeance. The putrid river at the bottom of Jean's property continued along a mountain washed clean of the sun's wounds; from between river and mountain flowed a dark distant voice singing a song whose words were distorted by the metallic dissonance of the mountain and the vegetal void of the barranca.

Victor rose and walked onto the loggia; his hands grasped the wet railing as he began to whistle the melody of the song, which grew fainter as Victor joined in the tune. Hugo Heredia, his eyes again half-closed, was talking about men and space. My friend's eyes never left the boy, and his ears were tuned only to the play of the echoed melody, the solitary voice from the distance, the words indistinguishable, the voice recognizable as young, but not as male or female, and Victor's whistling, his response to the bird of night.

As my friend gazed at the boy, he remembered a few months earlier spending an afternoon in the Parc Monceau, watching children at play. As he watched, he wondered if they merely reminded him of the children he used to play with as a boy, or if he, now an old man and forever distanced from them, were actually seeing those children from his past. He says that at that moment he felt very old. Now Victor was offering him a mysterious opportunity to transcend those melancholy alternatives, to become involved in an unplayed childhood game. Who was singing in the barranca? It didn't matter whether this voice came from the past or the present.

The song ended, and for a moment, absently, Victor whistled alone. My friend once again became attentive to what Hugo was saying, to the scope of the ideas unfolding like a fan, but his eyes remained on Victor. A boy with light eyes and dark skin, a boy who still hopped and skipped like a child, as now, in response to a summons that only he heard; as only a moment before when he was accepting his father's teaching; as he would an instant later, returning to his place in the large chair before the fire. Without interrupting the conversation, Hugo will beckon Victor with a wave of his hand and the boy will go to his father and sit on his lap. Hugo will stroke the boy's hair and Victor will pat his father's hand.

During breakfast Jean told my friend that, as he'd seen, the father and son were unusually close; the death of the mother and the brother had undoubtedly cemented that closeness. My friend recalls then, as he does now, that his own father died at thirty, when he himself was a child of four. Beside his bed in the large bedchamber on the Avenue de Saxe is a photograph of his father taken shortly before his death. He, a man of eighty-three, gazes upon the youth of twenty-nine who had been his father.

Every night before going to sleep, he gazes at the photograph a long while, he tells me this afternoon in the dining room of the Automobile Club de France, as he told Jean that morning in Cuernavaca at breakfast, before their return to Mexico City and before the sun began its impatient race toward midday.

In vain my friend looked for the trace of a presence in the barranca. A young servant in sandals and white shirt and pants served the delights of the tropical breakfast, flame-red fruits, tortillas, eggs smothered in cream and tomato and chili, and buns and breads as infinitely varied in savor as in name. The Heredias came down a little later, as the Frenchmen were drinking their second cup of coffee. Victor ate hungrily, rapidly, and asked to be excused to play in the garden that stretched to the edge of the barranca. He skipped away as Heredia said how pleased he and his son were to have met my friend; they had enjoyed the conversation and hoped they would soon meet again.