Distant Relations (3 page)

“I'm traveling to Paris in September for a Unesco conference,” Hugo said. “Victor will come with me.”

My friend still does not know why, but he almost asked them not to travel together. However, he realized just in time, he tells me, that since the preceding evening he had been experiencing a kind of vertigo, his mind racing simultaneously in several directions: he remembered the children in the Parc Monceau who no longer remembered him; he remembered a young man who was father to an old man; he tried to imagine Victor's dead mother and brother; and also the boy or girl who had been singing in the barranca. But most of all he tried to penetrate Victor's candid gaze, to become a child again and see through his eyes. In this way he might recapture the imperious innocence and the unanswered questions of his own childhood.

He was blinded by the sun now climbing the sky. Victor was a white, blurred figure in the glaring depths of the garden beside the barranca. As if with a gaudy flag, the Mexican sky proclaimed its intentions: high noon or nothing. My friend was on the verge of adding one more wrinkle to the travel plans designed to outmaneuver death. He was on the point of asking Heredia not to travel with his son; he almost offered to come himself to pick up the boy and take him back to France.

He says that everything was resolved, however, as is always the case with him, in a ritual of courtesy, because inevitably courtesy is the only reliable, true, honorable, and sincere means my friend the Comte de Branly can summon to impose order on human events, to offer them the refuge of civilization, to calm that orderly agitation, to exorcise the venomous flowers interwoven with precious jewels.

He invited the Heredias to stay at his home on the Avenue de Saxe while they were in Paris. It was only a few steps from UNESCO headquarters, he said, shielding his eyes against the savage glare of the sun. It would be a pleasure to welcome them, to renew their friendship, to offer his appreciation, he said, as he searched for his dark glasses to penetrate the thick lime-white light, the blurred landscape, of the garden where Victor was playing.

He returned to Mexico City that evening. The light faded suddenly, impatient now to cede its dominion to the abrupt nightfall of the high tropics. Resting his chin on his fist, my friend stared at the passing scenery sequestered by darkness. In the reflection of the car window he tried to re-create what he had seen that morning through the blinding sun after he had settled his sunglasses on his nose: the boy Victor on the lawn of the garden beside the barranca, beating Jean's Indian servant, throwing him to the ground and whipping off his belt to lash him; a tiny feudal lord, master of lives and fortunes.

3

The Countess, who never leaves their castle near Cahors, suddenly became ill, and Branly hastened to join her. He left instructions with his chauffeur to meet the Heredias at Roissy airport, and with his Spanish servants to look after his guests in his town house on the Avenue de Saxe. He returned as soon as possible; his train arrived in Paris at eleven in the morning. My friend found a taxi and forty minutes later arrived before the eighteenth-century façade of his residence.

No one answered his ring. Impatiently, he located the correct key on his key ring and opened the heavy door. Highly irritated, he stalked through the beautiful interior courtyard paved in smooth stone and past the service quarters flanking it, to a short flight of steps leading to the main door of the one-story residence constructed according to the dispassionate principles of the French baroque.

At the top of the steps he whirled with that imperious gesture of his slender, transparent hands that I have seen so often, transforming the overcoat, casually tossed over his ancient but martial shoulders, into something decidedly impressive, half hussar's jacket, half bullfighter's cape. He sought, in vain, a sign of life—the chauffeur, the cook, the valet. Though it was almost noon, his automobile was not in the carriage house.

He clasped the lapels of his greatcoat under his trembling chin on this deceptively sunny September morning in which a knife edge of air signaled the coming of autumn. He opened the glass door onto a foyer decorated, like the rest of the mansion, in the Empire style favored by the Countess, whose family owed its titles to Bonaparte. My friend, amused, shrugged his shoulders. Being newer, his wife's furniture was in better condition than his. From his ancestors Branly proudly claimed the house itself, the work of Gabriel and Aubert, a twin to the Hôtel Biron designed by those same architects. When my friend recalls, as he inevitably does, that the Biron mansion now houses the museum where the works of Rodin are collected, he quips that it is therefore unnecessary for him to open his doors to the public; he invites the public to visit the Rodin Museum instead. It is the same as coming to the Avenue de Saxe.

I told him it was not exactly the same. The public would be missing the gleaming ormolu of the superb collection of Empire candelabra and lyre-shaped clocks, the wooden cheval glass mirror crowned with winged figures and butterfly medallions, the Romagnese bas-reliefs and the spectacular malachite vases, the wedding of bronze, marble, plaster, and silver with amboyna, oak, beech, gilt, and mahogany. Their greatest loss would be the sight of the magnificent clock suspended from an arch of gilded bronze, with a seated woman playing an ornate piano with griffin legs, in a sumptuous mounting of motionless draperies and doors.

“Motionless, but poisonous,” my friend added on the evening he had honored me by inviting me to his peerless table. “That clock is the work of Antoine-André Ravrio. He fashioned several similar pieces for the royal family. Perhaps that is the only way Hortense de Beauharnais had of airing her musical compositions, as the melody of a clock striking the hours.”

“A clock may bore,” I said to him, “but surely not kill. I don't believe in fatal tedium, in spite of the persistent efforts of several of our acquaintances to the contrary.”

“No,” my friend replied. “In his will, Ravrio bequeathed a sizable sum of money to anyone who could discover a means of protecting his workers against the deadly danger of poisoning resulting from gilding with mercury.”

“You prove me right. Your home should be open to the public. Rodin can offer no such mysteries.”

He laughed and said there was more mystery in the gesture of a statue than in the caprice of a queen. That morning my friend heard the metallic melody as he entered the large hall of his mansion. Stroking the gilded bronze, Victor Heredia stood before the figure of the woman seated at the piano.

“Careful,” my friend said.

Startled, Victor dropped the key with which he had been winding the clock, and turned to look at my friend. He recovered his aplomb as they shook hands. My friend says he asked the boy about his father and the boy said he would arrive that afternoon.

“Then you didn't make the flight together?”

“No,” Victor replied. “After what happened to my mother and Toño, my father thinks it's safer for us to travel separately.”

“Your brother?”

With clear eyes and an imperceptible smile, Victor nodded and stared at my friend. “I've already told Etienne to pick him up at four tomorrow. How elegant! A Citroën with all the extras, and a uniformed chauffeur. That's class!”

He laughed, and my friend attempted to smile in response, but for some reason the smile seemed a bit forced.

“Where are Florencio and José? Didn't they prepare your breakfast?”

The boy looked at my friend inquisitively. “Oh yes, yesterday,” he responded with a composure that was beginning to set Branly's nerves on edge.

“No, no, no. This morning. Where are they? Why didn't they come to the door? Where is everyone?”

Only then, as he turned to look for his servants, did he realize that his entire magnificent collection of candelabra was ablaze, candle after candle, all the bronze ram's-head bases, the garlands of blindfolded girls whose bodies served as candleholders, the bronze serpents whose fangs fastened on glass shades, the spirit lamp on a side table, the wall sconces in the form of bearded masks, the silver-winged Victories, the innocuous wax on the argentine backs of a pack of hunting hounds.

“They must be sleeping,” said Victor, quite seriously.

“At twelve noon!” exclaimed my friend, incredulous in this familiar refuge now transformed by his young visitor into a forbidden, alien, distant space darkly funereal compared to the September sun outdoors, to the commotion of returning vacationers at the Gare d'Austerlitz, to the sharp contrast between the autumnal breath of an approaching St. Francis' Day and the St. Martin's Day hope of a late summer.

He pulled back the drapes, moved by an annoyance that contrasted sharply with the ostentatious calm of his young guest. As the sun poured in, its rays quelled the brief luminescence of the blazing candles, silver, and bronze.

Victor smothered a laugh as my friend caught a glimpse of his Spanish servants passing through the entry hall laden with shopping bags overflowing with the clamoring evidence of celery, carrots, tomatoes, and onions. My friend confesses that he, too, smiled. He had envisioned the ashen José and the florid Florencio bound to the foot of the bed, unable to free themselves to tend the wounds of bodies scourged by the feudal Mexican youth, master of lives and fortunes, young lord of gibbet and blade, eager to wreak vengeance on the brutal Spaniards who with blood and fire had conquered the lands of the Indian.

“Good morning, M. le Comte,” murmured José, looking more and more like a figure from a Zurbarán painting.

“We're a little late,” added Florencio, who looked like an exhausted jai-alai player. “There was a power failure this morning before you arrived.”

Branly nodded with severity, and a little later, lunching with his young friend, said to himself, as now he says to me, that the soundest intelligence is that of one who has survived the tribulations of the prolonged adolescence we call maturity, with its seriousness and its obligations, to regain the authority of childhood.

“And the proof,” he says, “is that as children we shape our worlds; as adults, the world shapes us. Adolescence is that wretched proving period when we must accept or reject the laws of adults.”

That adults almost always triumph, he tells me, toying with the stem of his wine goblet as he had that afternoon during luncheon with Victor, makes all the greater the victory of those who have preserved the well-being the mature world calls sickness: childhood and its private domains.

“You see,” he said during our long luncheon at the club, “there was a reason for the hospitality I extended to the Heredias, no less compelling for being cunningly conceived by my subconscious and hidden from my conscious mind. To put it simply, I wanted Victor to let me live his childhood with him before we both lost it; he because he was growing up, I because I was going to die.”

I am accustomed to my friend's stoicism; although befitting his age, it is still admirable. But now there was something more than stoicism in his words. That morning, he said, Victor had invited him to join in his game and, stupidly, he had nearly missed the opportunity, nearly rejected it because of his 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. They ate in silence. Later, my friend passed the afternoon in his austere but comfortable bedchamber, a refuge from the Napoleonic delirium the Countess had imposed on the remainder of the mansion.

A rigorous delirium, rather than a delirious rigor, Branly thought as, following his custom, he gazed at the faded photograph of the thirty-year-old man who had been his father. A handsome man, the son thought now, his best feature the profile, at least in this sepia photograph in which the photographer, as if privy to the still undiscovered potential of his art, had transcended the sharp relief of the stiff family portraits of the epoch to create a diffused light of his own, a nimbus seemingly born of the intensely clear eyes of my friend's father. In fact, I say to myself when again I have the opportunity to examine that admirable photograph, he possessed the secret of being able to create an atmosphere around his subject, in the very way the suspended dusk of Paris, at this hour when my friend and I are being served our café filtre, is the distillation of all the dusks of all the epochs of our city. The atmosphere, I say to Branly, can evoke a time that is not our own, invisible, without end, and as secret as the ageless voices which, according to another of my friends, have remained suspended throughout time, awaiting the person who will rediscover and rearrange them.

My friend says that he inherited from his mother his least refined, but also his most resilient, qualities, the essence of stony, storm-hewn Breton stock. From his father he inherited only the hands—clasped under a cleft chin in the photograph—as if this Captain de Branly were praying with singular verve, given the fact that he's dressed as a soldier. He had not inherited his father's eyes, or the long wavy blond hair of this reserve officer, photographed before his death in 1900—not a death in battle but in a hospital room, and for causes that penicillin would have eradicated in twenty-four of our hours.

With measured affection my friend runs his hand across the face of his father, dead at thirty, as if wishing to close the eyelids and forget the eyes that in the photo look as if they were silver. Born in 1870. Now, that was a year for a soldier. The son, in 1914, would live and win battles, unlike the father, who could neither win nor lose during the three decades of peace he was fated to live following the triumphant return from Tonkin and the inglorious return from Mexico, the humiliation of Bazaine by Moltke and the bloody insurrection of the Paris Commune. He covered his father's eyes and closed his own.

He says that beside the father's photo he keeps a volume of the poems of Jules Supervielle, because in the presence of his father's likeness he always reads a few verses he is deeply convinced are appropriate. This isn't something he could explain, he adds, and asks whether I have ever had a similar experience with a book, say, or a painting.