Distant Relations (6 page)

Actually, he says, he was saved the necessity of a choice when a figure hurrying toward them bumped into the boy and interrupted his flight. The man grasped Victor firmly by the shoulders and led him back to the scene of the accident, inquiring what had happened. At that moment, Branly had no way of knowing whether the man was a casual passerby or had come from the avenue leading to the Clos des Renards. The new arrival immediately dispelled any doubt. “Please. Come along to my house, I can help your man there.”

Branly responded that Etienne couldn't manage the distance from the road to the house, and he invited the obliging stranger to get into the car with them. He cast a quizzical glance at Victor and climbed in behind the wheel. He started the Citroën and turned into the avenue of the woods. A hunched-over Etienne sat beside him, moaning between clenched teeth, wrapping a handkerchief around his bleeding hand. Victor and the stranger sat in the back seat, and from time to time my friend stole a glance in the rearview mirror through flashes of a sun setting at the very hour of the Île de France that he and I were now awaiting in the heart of Paris. On that day, it arrived just as he was driving the injured Etienne and glancing into the rearview mirror to observe a man wearing a wool-tweed hat whose brim did not obscure pale eyes above a singularly straight nose with no noticeable bridge and a thin-lipped mouth as straight as the nose—the mouth partly hidden behind the turned-up lapels of an overcoat, like the hat, of greenish Scottish wool.

As their glances met in the mirror, the stranger smiled and said, “Forgive me. My name is Victor Heredia. I deeply regret this accident at the very doors of my home. We will do whatever we can to help your chauffeur, Monsieur…?”

“Branly,” my friend said dryly.

Today he acknowledges an emotion that was either cowardice or prudence, or pure and simple fear, neither cowardly nor prudent: he did not introduce Victor Heredia to Victor Heredia.

Neither could he see in the mirror the boy's reaction when the man, whose age my friend still could not determine, as he could not absolutely identify his voice as the voice on the telephone, introduced himself. My friend stopped the car at the terrace. The French Heredia quickly got out, and between them they helped Etienne up the steps of the terrace and to the French doors. Heredia softly pushed them open and the three stepped into a cavern of dark wood marked by a strong smell of leather, apparently the foyer of the residence.

The owner, still in hat and overcoat, hurried up the stairs while Branly examined Etienne's injured hand. It was only after the master of the house had returned, removed his hat to reveal a white mane of hair, and begun amateurishly to swab the chauffeur's hand with iodine and to apply a simple bandage, that my friend realized that his host, although possessing a youngish face, was not young. And it was only after Heredia said they had better call an ambulance, and went to the telephone to make the call, that my friend looked about for the other Victor Heredia, and glancing through the French doors, spied the boy on the terrace, standing with legs wide apart, one arm akimbo, the other resting on the back of the crouching stone lion, the boy as motionless as a second statue, and, like a statue's, his gaze lost in the far distance.

My friend tried to follow the direction of that gaze. Heredia was telephoning for the ambulance; Etienne was gritting his teeth, cradling the injured, iodine-swabbed, bandaged hand. Branly moved toward the glass panes to observe the motionless boy, who was staring at the grove of birches suspended between the soothing mist of dream and the fading light of dusk that outlined the boy's slim whiteness seemingly born of the germinal mist. The sleek silvery trunks were the perfect recapitulation of the mist and the light of the setting sun—the sun, satisfied; the mist, indecisive. At that hour the woods were a misty curtain of light, wispy as the tree trunks, white as chiffon, against which one could barely see—interrupting the vertical symmetry of the trunks and as vague as the horizontal mist that veiled it and the oblique light that revealed it—the silhouette of a motionless figure observed by the motionless boy observed by my motionless friend from behind the half-opened French doors.

The spell was broken. The figure in the woods moved toward the house, whistling. The Mexican youth dropped his arm and then covered his face with both hands, as if trying to hide it. His back was turned to Branly, but my friend clearly recognized that gesture, as he heard on the lips of the figure moving toward them from the woods the tune of the timeless madrigal of the clear fountain and the beautiful waters.

6

The French Heredia said they must take Etienne to the hospital on the Boulevard d'Ormesson; he was afraid the fingers were broken. That wasn't the greatest thing that could happen to a chauffeur, he added. As Branly heard him say this, he avoided the eyes of the young Mexican, who at that moment was entering the house for the first time. My friend did not want to think the French Heredia was reprimanding the youth who bore his name; even less did he want the boy to think he was a partner in what was at the very least a premature accusation.

Similarly incapable of expressing overt disapproval, however, Branly glanced at his new host, and then said quietly: “Don't worry, Etienne. It isn't anything that won't respond to treatment.”

“I suggest that you follow us in your car,” said Heredia.

Branly again checked the irritation provoked by such freely offered advice. There was a peremptory tone in the Frenchman's voice, as if in counseling Branly to follow he were ironically acknowledging in the master a concern for his servant that he, Heredia, would never be so weak as to feel, certainly not to reveal. But the behavior my friend was beginning to perceive, as evidence of a common upbringing, was not so much worthy of disapproval as something to be overlooked; it seemed, even before such rationalization, undeserving of any comment. His attention was absorbed by a more serious reality. The young Heredia, like a character in a silent movie, had paused as he crossed the threshold, enveloped in silence, framed in a shimmering light that changed him into a trembling flame. If his eyes were not closed, they were nearly so. He was breathing deeply, and seemed tense, but content. It was the contentment that impressed Branly.

As the boy breathed in that aroma of leather pervading the entrance to the manor house, his breathing became more and more agitated. My friend felt that he could take the boy's agitation as the delayed reaction to the terrible act he had committed against the chauffeur, and he was about to point this out to the master of the Clos des Renards as courteous proof of the boy's repentance, but something stopped him, something intimately linked to his growing perceptions about the man with Victor's name. He shook his head, he tells me, with the certainty that the less one knew about what was happening, the better. Once more, the same feeling prevented him from introducing the two Heredias. With any luck, Branly told himself, the boy's natural curiosity, particularly in view of recent events, would be satisfied simply with seeing Heredia. After all, it was Victor's actions that had shifted attention from names, however closely related, to the injured chauffeur, whom the French Heredia, ignoring the Mexican youth's presence, was urging they take to a hospital. He would go with Etienne in the ambulance, the Frenchman repeated, adding on second thought that he could look after the chauffeur himself and the others could drive back to Paris. He would inform them in the morning of the poor fellow's condition.

“Not at all. Etienne is my employee, and any responsibility for looking after him is mine,” said my friend, following a brief pause which at the time seemed natural to him but which in retrospect he considered deceitful. He still had not fathomed the French Heredia's intentions, and he had stumbled over an obstacle lying in the path of his inherent sense of propriety: the French Victor Heredia talked like a tradesman; his speech was in marked contrast to the nobility of his classic features, a contrast greater even than the physical contrast between the handsome leonine head and the squat body with its sturdy, squarish torso and the common, stubby-fingered hands.

As if to dispel any doubt about the extent of the responsibilities he was prepared to assume, my friend said
he
would accompany Etienne in the ambulance. But Heredia insisted. He knew the doctors on duty and that would facilitate the process. Branly did not want to tell anyone what he now admits to me, that he was trying to avoid having to drive at night on the always dangerous highways that by dawn are like battlefields, no less horrible for their repetitiousness; he is blinded by the aggressive headlights of drivers who view themselves as combatants in a modern joust. Visions of overturned trucks, little 2CV's flattened like the tin from which they are assembled, stretchers, ambulance sirens, and the flashing lights of patrol cars in the bloody gray dawn of the highways were suddenly fused into the single ululating tone of the ambulance coming to a stop behind the Citroën parked beside the terrace of the lions.

There was no time, Branly tells me, for discussion; it was as if everything had been planned, choreographed like a ballet. The boy would be all right, Heredia said. His own son would be arriving soon and the boys could keep each other company until the men returned from taking the unfortunate Etienne to the hospital.

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Heredia. “I insist on it. You must spend the night here with my son and me. Tomorrow, M. Branly, you can drop by the hospital to see how this fellow is getting along; believe me, it's no bother; I'm a very late riser. You can just make yourself at home, my son André will look after you. Don't worry, the larder is well stocked, my friend; this isn't your common Spanish inn, eh?”

As they helped Etienne into the ambulance, he said: “I wouldn't want M. le Comte to put himself out on my account.”

“Don't worry, Etienne,” said Branly. “I repeat, everything will be all right.”

Branly and Heredia followed the ambulance, my friend driving the Citroën very gingerly, and during the brief ride to the hospital he had an opportunity to clarify the reason for their visit and to explain the coincidence of the names. The Frenchman laughed, and begged my friend to forgive him for the language he had used over the phone. He hadn't known that such a distinguished person, a count no less, was calling; he'd thought it was some clown, it was almost an everyday thing these days to get that kind of call at any hour of the night or day, and when he'd answered that particular call—that is, the Count's—he was still half asleep. He'd already told him he slept late. Would M. le Comte de Branly forgive him? He wanted to apologize for that, too. He hadn't known he was a count or he would have used “de,”
de
Branly.

Branly refrained from saying that he hadn't used it himself, but the irrepressible Heredia had already launched into a tale about a Cuban family that had emigrated to Haiti during the uprising against the Spanish at the end of the century, first assimilated into the French language in the heat- and salt-pocked marble salons of Port-au-Prince, and then, become rich in imports and exports, absorbed into the France of the First World War, riding the crest of a savory and aromatic mountain of bananas, tobacco, rum, and vanilla. Relatives of the poet? What poet? And of course, he concluded with an ostentatious air of ennui, they had forbidden the use of Spanish, which for them carried only memories of restlessness, barbarism, and revolution.

“French is like my garden, elegant,” said Heredia. “Spanish is like my woods, indomitable.”

My friend can't remember his response to the French Heredia; it doesn't matter. Branly, who instinctively is courteous and hospitable to everyone, found something insufferable in the tone of this man with the pale eyes, straight nose, and white mane of hair. Heredia made a display of being courteous and hospitable, but this was precisely what bothered my friend. He suspected that Heredia's affability was a maneuver masking some overweening sense of physical or moral supremacy not immediately apparent to Branly but which Heredia hoped to minimize by lavishing attention on his guest. My friend was particularly repelled by the obsequious and at the same time ironic humility typical of the bourgeois parvenu who, terrified at the possibility of again becoming a servant, attempts to subjugate those persons he fears and admires.

My friend knows the world well enough to be able to identify those times when another person feels a superiority he does not want to show, but by that very fact, and by acting more than usually cordial, calls attention to what he wants to hide. He says he was on the verge of letting Heredia know by his actions that the opposite was more accurate, but the contrast between a French family of ancient lineage and a colonial transplant was so obvious that Branly felt embarrassed even for having considered snubbing Heredia. Undoubtedly, Heredia had too often suffered from French superiority and pedantry—which often go hand in hand—not to recognize the differences between them. He knew how to play on those differences and, in the case of those less cautious or less secure than Branly, how to ensnare the unwary.

In contrast to Heredia, my friend decided to practice an impeccable courtesy based less on conscious will than on custom, running the risk that Heredia, in turn, would recognize my friend's stratagem.

That is why he is sure, he says, that he had done nothing to provoke the comment Heredia made as they parked in front of the hospital, facing the ambulance; and if the words were spoken, it was perhaps because they were, though for different reasons, in the minds of both men.

“You have no cause to look down your nose at a man who has worked for his wealth instead of inheriting it through no effort of his own.”

Such an unexpected sally, especially one so close to the mark in regard to what really was passing through my friend's mind, evoked a swift response: “Everything one owns has either been bought, inherited, or stolen. Have no fear. We are not as different as you seem to believe.”