Distant Relations (5 page)

A date was inscribed on the molding above the doorway: A.D. 1870. Etienne thought it was the number of the house and that he had made a wrong turn; he muttered curses against a municipal system that would assign two numbers to one house. My friend knew it was a date, not only by the reference to the Year of our Lord, which meant nothing to Etienne, but also because as he preceded Victor out of the car he glanced toward the second story of the house, where he saw hovering in the window a silhouette whose sail, like that of an ancient schooner, blended into indistinct waves of flowing hair—sail, fluttering curtains, white gown, all glimpsed fleetingly yet as one in the impression of antiquity they made on a man, my old, my dear friend, who had arrived with his young foreign pupil at what he thought was the end of a game but really was only the beginning.

4

They returned to the Avenue de Saxe. Branly tried to interest Victor in other outings, but the boy, although friendly, was wrapped in his own thoughts and said he would rather stay in the house. My friend watched him wandering through the mansion, familiarizing himself with it, perhaps memorizing it, while my friend read a book in the library, whose well-fitted bookshelves eliminated the need for further decoration. Wallpaper imprinted with Greek busts, acanthus, flutes, and staffs had not penetrated here, nor bas-reliefs in which Minerva holds a protective hand over the head of Eros. Instead, there was a whispered, measured, intermittent dialogue with Balzac and Lamartine.

The volume of
Méditations
fell to my friend's knees. They had tried to rouse someone. He had rapped on the beveled glass of the doors. No one came. He ordered Etienne to blow the horn. The glass panes of the door reverberated beneath my friend's fingertips. In spite of the isolation of the Clos des Renards, they could hear the murmur of distant buses and impatient traffic. But neither the remote noises nor the immediacy of the Citroën's horn proclaiming their presence before the pale yellow façade, my friend realized, seemed to distract Victor where he stood on a terrace guarded by two symmetrically placed, crouching stone lions.

His back to the house, the boy was staring toward what my friend then began to see—he tells me he knows now—thanks to Victor. Above the absolute contrast of woods and garden, the spirit of order that governed the garden marched toward an encounter with its denial in the woods. Order and disorder met without conflict among rosebushes, beeches, and a solitary willow, but especially in the birch grove bordering one wall of the manor house.

Branly again glanced toward the second story; what he thought he had seen was no longer there. In the sudden silence underscored by the absence of the sound of the horn, my friend heard Victor whistling a melody. As the boy walked down the front steps, his head bowed and his hands buried in the pockets of his corduroy trousers, gravel crunched beneath his feet. He walked to the end of the pebbled path and turned toward the long avenue through the woods. My friend says he could hear distinctly the transition from trodden stone to dead leaves, and only then what he is telling me now came to his mind: it was September, autumn was still some time away, yet the avenue of chestnuts and oaks was one long, uninterrupted path of dry leaves.

He still doesn't know why he called Victor to stop, not to walk any farther on the dead leaves, to return to the automobile. You see, there's no one here, perhaps if they came back another day they would have better luck. Docilely, Victor stopped, turned, and walked back to the automobile, where Branly awaited, holding the door open. After they returned to Paris, my friend did not insist again that they go out. Secretly, although without any reason, he hoped Victor would not be upset, that he would rather wander through the mansion on the Avenue de Saxe, the single story contained between the baroque cavern of the entrance, the courtyard of yellow stone, and the garden with its manicured lawn—unexceptional urns, and a thick sea pine placidly growing in sand that was in a certain way twin to the equally sterile asphalt of the street. My friend insists, however, that sand is a defense against the potential invasion of the street, and as proof he points out that the pine grows in sand but would be killed by asphalt.

In fact, in the moment he is now remembering, he corrects himself, he was thinking how unlikely it would be that his residence would be engulfed by the street, which would disdain the false oasis of the garden, recognizing it for what it was, a desert in disguise. But the woods of the Clos des Renards would not respect the fragility of plaster, stone, and slate of the manor house. Like the fleeting apparition at the window, there was something about the house that would not withstand aggression from its surroundings. He tried to draw comfort from the thought that, like the sand that nurtured the sea pine, his house provided protection.

Then he heard the faint murmur that penetrated as far as the library only because of the hospitable tranquillity of that September afternoon. It was as if the city, deserted during the summer, had not yet recovered its customary bustle in spite of the frenzy he had noted the previous morning at the Gare d'Austerlitz—workers coming in from the suburbs, tourists returning from vacations in Spain, and Spaniards coming to France to look for work.

He heard the striking of Antoine-André Ravrio's clock. On the hour, the bronze figure of a woman adorned in an Empire gown played a piano gilded, like herself and the doors and draperies of the motionless salon, in an opulent, and poisonous, bath. My friend tells me that as he listened, and only in that instant—as is wont to happen with our aural memory, and especially in the case of music, which reaches our ears naked and stripped of words, nameless, wishing to be heard for itself and not because of descriptive and identifying titles that make a symphonic poem little more than the background fanfare of trumpets for a scene we must imagine before ever we hear the music—only then did he realize that the clock was playing the tune Victor had hummed that evening at Jean's and a second voice had echoed from the venomous depths of the barranca in Cuernavaca.

He walked slowly, with no intent of stealth, he assures me, but, rather, a desire to preserve the instant, to where Victor, as when Branly surprised him on his arrival, was stroking the gilded bronze of the clock in the sumptuous music box, now striking the first hour after noon, its metallic tune ringingly marking the impalpable mathematical hours told by the hands.

Branly was again a boy in the Parc Monceau, playing with the other children, who recognized him, who loved him, who called to him because he was a child like them. And as they grew tired of playing amid the columns, pyramids, crypts, and rotundas commissioned scarcely a century earlier by the Duc d'Orléans, they all gathered together beside the pond—the imagined scene of impossible naumachiae—and sang that timeless tune they had learned in their homes, not in school, a madrigal filtered through thousands of children's and lovers' voices throughout history. My friend, in a voice broken by the emotion of his memory, placed a hand on Victor's shoulder and murmured the phrases that recall the beautiful fountain with waters so clear one cannot resist bathing there:
“À la claire fontaine, m'en allant promener, j'ai trouvé l'eau si belle, que je m'y suis baigné.”

He would place no obstacle before Victor's new invitation. They dined with Hugo, but no one spoke of the game. The father seemed to have forgotten it, his thoughts on the work of the conference. The following day, my friend Branly and his young friend again set off for Enghien-les-Bains.

5

The search for Victor Heredia, Branly is telling me, was not unlike an exhausting vigil before a mirror. He asked me to imagine such a vigil, yes, he says, as he seeks my reflection in the window closed to the bustle of the Place de la Concorde, simply imagine biding one's time before a vacant mirror, waiting for it to take on life, to regain its lost image.

“Do you mean,” I ventured, “that, besides having the same name, the Victor Heredia of Enghien-les-Bains was a physical double of the boy?”

My friend shook his shiny bald head emphatically; his brow was unusually severe in refutation. That was not what he meant to imply, not at all. No, he meant precisely what he had said, keeping a vigil before a mirror, laying siege to it, a long and unremitting siege, until it was forced to reveal its image—not the reflection of the person looking in the mirror, did I understand? No, the mirror's own image, exactly so, its own hidden, illusive, reluctant, one might almost say coquettish, image.

For the second time, no one had responded when he knocked on the French doors at the end of the terrace of lions. It was Wednesday, racing day. Branly and Victor lunched at the casino, watching the passing throngs of elderly men and women who come every week to squander their pensions at the Enghien racetrack, and then, not content with losing on the horses, insist on losing at roulette. Their shuffling gait, their shiny dark-blue suits, their faded straw bonnets, belie—except in an occasional case of exemplary avarice—the success of such pursuits. My friend wondered whether our evasive Victor Heredia might not be found among the dispirited gamblers. Branly, you see, was still convinced that the person who shared the young Mexican's name was a man of advanced years. He says he had made that judgment when he heard the voice over the telephone. He admits that he rejected, a priori, the idea that the bearer of young Victor's name could be a physical double. At least, he said, he could find comfort in the fact that he had sensed what he was now trying to communicate to me, the feeling that he was keeping watch before a mirror, hoping it would dare incarnate the figure hiding within. At least, he says, he had that intuition.

“You see, I always believed that even if I found him I would need to continue searching, to wait patiently until he revealed his true face. I did it for the lad, I assure you.”

As dusk approached, the old man and the boy, who had met purely by chance, who under normal circumstances would never have met, because the man should have died before he met the youth, and the boy might easily have been born after the man's death, strolled together to the lake at Enghien. They enjoyed the promenade and decided that this time they would walk to the Clos des Renards. Branly told Etienne to have a cup of coffee and in a half hour to pick them up at the entrance to the estate. As they walked, Victor kept lagging behind, inspecting and investigating and skipping in the childlike way that had caught Branly's attention in Cuernavaca. My friend, who walks straight as a ramrod in spite of his wounded leg, now hung his head in thought, wondering whether it was possible that the half-glimpsed figure in the second-story window was the Victor Heredia they were searching for. But as often as he considered this possibility, he rejected it. My friend had no way of knowing if the voice he had heard over the telephone was actually that of the French Victor Heredia. As he walked ahead of Victor, erect, occasionally resting his weight on his cane, he tried to reconstruct the telephone conversation. When he had asked for Heredia, the voice had countered with the question: Who wants him? And when he explained that he had looked up his name in the directory, the man was at first surprised, then insulting; he had never conceded that his name was Victor Heredia.

My friend tells me now, gazing at the goblet of sauterne scarcely less pale than the hand holding it, that as he walked along, followed by young Victor Heredia, and breathing the gasoline fumes, the train smoke, and the first mists from September woods decaying with their fruitless harvests, he wondered whether that voice could be related to the white sail-like silhouette that had passed so swiftly across the window of the Clos des Renards, whether the voice and the image, related or not, might belong to the person called Victor Heredia, or whether they merely served him, looked after him, taught him, tended him, recalled or awaited him. If the voice and the figure were not Victor Heredia's, my friend insists this afternoon, then Victor Heredia was cared for by a servant, looked after by a guardian, taught by a tutor, tended by a doctor, recalled by a kinsman, or awaited by a lover.

They were approaching the wall surrounding the estate of the Clos des Renards; my friend admits that he was weaving a mystery, and that doing so amused him. He stopped to wait for Victor, who was lagging behind, and saw him standing beside the high moss-covered wall, his head against the mustard-colored stone. Dusk was falling quickly now; Branly called Victor, beckoning to him; the boy left the wall and came running. He had a snail in his hands, which he showed to my friend. Heads together, absorbed in the mollusk, they walked toward the arch that marked the entrance to the woods with its avenue of chestnuts, oaks, and dry leaves that had not fallen from any of the surrounding trees. Branly started. Beneath leaden eyelids, his gaze shifted from the tiny snail to the lane that led into the estate, and he recognized what had been nagging at his mind, what until this instant had been suspended in mid-air, floating like the uncertain mist at the end of the lane over the house without a pool. This was the second revelation of this crepuscular hour: how strange that a house of this size and pretension had no mirror of water, no pond or fountain.

Etienne abruptly braked the car near the entrance to the private avenue and blew the horn; he explained that it was rapidly growing dark and he was worried about the count's health. Besides, for the first time, the chauffeur kept repeating, he had noticed a slight chill in the air. He was standing on the pavement beside the car, facing Branly and Victor and deferentially holding the door, waiting for his gentleman and the boy to climb into the automobile, where he had arranged lap robes for them. My friend says he is still trying to follow Victor's quick, nervous movements: the boy's hesitation, barely perceptible but real as a bolt of lightning, as he tried to decide whether to run down the avenue covered with dead leaves or climb into the car or do what he did—summing up his options in a kind of terrible desperation, slamming the door of the Citroën on the chauffeur's hand. Etienne himself, stifling a scream of pain, managed to open the door as Branly cast aside his cane to grasp the servant's arm. Branly hesitated, as Victor had just done. Should he help Etienne or stop Victor, now running toward the avenue of dry leaves beneath the leafy trees.