Distant Relations

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Books by Carlos Fuentes

  Copyright

  For my friend Luis Buñuel, in his eightieth year:

  “Ce qui est affreux, c’est ce qu’on

  ne peut pas imaginer.”—M.P.

  LA CHAMBRE VOISINE

  Tournez le dos à cet homme

  Mais restez auprès de lui

  (Ecartez votre regard,

  Sa confuse barbarie),

  Restez debout sans mot dire,

  Voyez-vous pas qu’il sépare

  Mal le jour d’avec la nuit,

  Et les cieux les plus profonds

  Du coeur sans fond qui l’agite?

  Eteignez tous ces flambeaux

  Regardez: ses veines luisent.

  Quand il avance la main,

  Un souffle de pierreries,

  De la circulaire nuit

  Jusqu’à ses longs doigts parvient.

  Laissez-le seul sur son lit,

  Le temps le borde et le veille,

  En vue de ces hauts rochers

  Où gémit, toujours caché,

  Le coeur des nuits sans sommeil.

  Qu’on n’entre plus dans la chambre

  D’où doit sortir un grand chien

  Ayant perdu la mémoire

  Et qui cherchera sur terre

  Comme le long de la mer

  L’homme qu’il laissa derrière

  Immobile, entre ses mains

  Raides et définitives.

  JULES SUPERVIELLE

  THE ADJACENT ROOM

  Turn your back to that man

  But do not leave him

  (Avert your gaze,

  Its dim barbarity),

  Stand without saying a word,

  Don’t you see how nearly he fails

  To distinguish day from night,

  And the farthest skies

  From the bottomless heart which troubles him?

  Extinguish all these torches.

  Look: his veins glisten.

  When he extends his hand,

  A breath of precious stones

  From the circular night

  To his long fingers flows.

  Leave him alone on his bed,

  Time tucks him in, watches over him,

  Within sight of those high rocks

  Where, forever hidden, moans

  The heart of sleepless nights.

  Let no one enter the room

  From which a huge dog will emerge

  Having lost its memory

  And it will search the earth

  And the ocean’s breadth

  For the man it left behind.

  Motionless, between hands

  Both hard and decisive.

  1

  My friend’s pallor was not unusual. With the passing of the years his skin had become fused to his facial bones and his gesturing, slender hands had become translucent.

  I had seen him shortly after his return from Mexico, which seemed to have somewhat dissipated his resemblance to a civilized phantom. Sun had given him density, fleshly presence. I almost didn’t recognize him.

  The return of his habitual pallor should have made him look entirely familiar, but there was something different about his manner. When I saw him alone at his table in the club dining room, I walked over to greet him and to suggest we have lunch together.

  “Only if you join me here,” he said, glancing toward the other tables, some distance from his.

  His eyes were lost in depths far more profound than that of the vast shadowy dining room. The preferred tables, placed beside a large balcony overlooking the Place de la Concorde, escape the gloom. As these are the best in the club, it is only natural that they be allotted to the senior members. I accepted his invitation for what it was, a courtesy to a younger friend.

  “I haven’t seen you since you returned from your trip,” I said.

  He continued studying his menu as if he hadn’t heard me. He was leaning forward slightly, his back to the windows. The bluish light of that early afternoon in November illuminated his bald head and fringe of gray hair. Abruptly, he looked up, but not toward me. He turned and stared into the distance beyond the square, toward the bank of the river.

  “Order for me,” he asked me as the waiter approached. He spoke with the sense of urgency that now seemed characteristic of all his actions. I wondered if he had always behaved this way, and I had simply not noticed it before. His small, darting eyes measured the square, focusing for a long moment on the tree-lined promenade of the Tuileries.

  “Well,” he said finally, after we had been served our wine and his restless eyes had found repose in its depths. “I had made a wager with myself, wondering if anyone would come over to speak to me, if I would find anyone to tell my story to.”

  I looked at him, bewildered. “I’m not just anyone, Branly. I’d always thought we were friends.”

  He touched my hand lightly, apologized, and said that when it was all over he would have to take stock of his life; it had all been very exhausting for a man of his age.

  “No,” he added, “I shall not resort to clichés, I will not say that at eighty-three I have become sated. Only those who have never lived say that.”

  He threw back his head, laughing, and in the same movement raised his hands, saying it was mere pretense to believe oneself immune to surprise. Perhaps, more than pretense, it was simple stupidity. Only a deep sense of insecurity would force a man to suffer such a foolish loss as that of his innate capacity to be amazed. He said death conquers only those who are not surprised by it; life as well. He blinked repeatedly, as if the light, less pale than the face of my friend, was painful to him.

  “Until the time of my trip, I believed that I had achieved a certain equilibrium,” he said, shielding his eyes with his fingers.

  Then, with a graceful and lighthearted wave of his hand meant to dispel any hint of solemnity, he smiled. “My God! I have experienced every kind of age, golden or wretched, every kind of decade, roaring or mute, two world wars, a leg wound at Dunkirk, four dogs, three wives, two castles, a dependable library, and a few friends like yourself, equally dependable.”

  He sighed; he pushed aside his wineglass and then did something extraordinary. He turned his back to me, swung his chair around and stared out toward the Place de la Concorde, as if he were speaking to it. I chose to think that in this rather bizarre fashion he was addressing me, wishing to emphasize the unusual nature of our meeting as well as of the story he had alluded to. Finally (for the sake of my own peace of mind), I decided that my friend actually meant to speak to us both, to the square and to me, to the world and to that plural you I represented at that moment, which, ironic and hostile, lurks in the we of the Romance languages, nos/o
tros, we and others, I and the rest.

  Paris and I, Branly between the two of us. Only this interpretation could assuage my dignity, somewhat ruffled by my friend’s strange behavior.

  “The century is a brother to me,” he said finally. “We have lived the same times. It is also my child; I preceded it by four years, and my first memory—imagine!—is of its birth, dominated by one special, I scarcely need add, unforgettable, image: the opening of the Pont Alexandre III. I remember it as an arch of acanthus stretching across the Seine for my benefit, so that I, a child, might learn to know and love this city.”

  I watched him finger the wide blue necktie and adjust the pearl stickpin that adorned it. Branly was staring into the distance, toward the Quai d’Orsay. I followed his gaze, as he explained how that image had been born within him—and now, hearing him, in me—the expectation that every evening, as on that distant evening when for the first time he admired the bridge over the river, for one miraculous moment the phenomena of the day—rain or fog, scorching heat or snow—would disperse and reveal, as in a Corot landscape, the luminous essence of the Île de France.

  This is the equilibrium he refers to. He knows that each and every patient evening harbors that privileged instant. That hour has never disappointed him, and, thanks to him, I understand that neither has it disappointed me.

  He smiles, thinking that the only exceptions occur, fortunately, when one is away on a trip, far from Paris.

  2

  He met the Heredias in Mexico, only last summer. They were together on an excursion to Xochicalco organized by a mutual French friend, Jean, a longtime resident of Mexico City. My friend happily seized the opportunity to visit the Toltec ruins in the Valley of Morelos, especially in the company of Hugo Heredia, one of the outstanding archaeologists of Latin America. My friend’s appetite for ruins has never been sated, and when he saw Xochimilco he commented to Jean that, in spite of what Valéry had said, civilizations do not die completely; they endure, but only when they do not progress.

  As they contemplated the view of the valley from the high Indian citadel, he repeated his comment in halting Spanish to Hugo Heredia, and added that things that do not progress do not grow old: they alone survive.

  “Nothing more logical,” he concluded.

  Heredia limited himself to a comment in French that Xochicalco was a ceremonial center, not a sacrificial site, as if he anticipated that question and wanted to make clear to the foreigners that violence is not an exclusively Mexican privilege for which he need apologize, but rather one of the few constants in the infinite variety of human nature.

  My friend uttered a delighted aaah! in appreciation of Heredia’s excellent French, but thought to himself, shrugging, that the archaeologist’s remarks were intended to calm the sensibility of a rational Frenchman, sensual surely, but never mediocre.

  He repeated this later, laughing, to Heredia, who replied that sensuality is but a chapter of violence.

  “On the contrary,” my friend responded.

  The shapes in the valley that spreads out before the ruins of Xochicalco seem to approach or recede according to the caprice of the light and the speed of the drifting clouds. One has the illusion that he might touch the bottom of the ravine, as if it were rising from a prolonged geological dream; the dormant volcanoes seem forever beyond reach, longing for the return of their reign of fire.

  My friend tells his hosts that only the swoon of the god whose breath is the wind, or the fury of the goddess that invades a cloud, was needed to invert that relationship of proximity or distance and make the volcano loom near and the precipice seem as abysmal as the lonely entrance to Mexico’s paradise. “As far as I know, this is the only Eden imagined to be underground, there where Orpheus, Dante, and Sartre each reserved a site for hell.”

  “Look, Papa, look what I found.”

  Heredia’s son had come running, out of breath, to the brink of the precipice; my friend reached out with the curved handle of his cane and hooked the boy’s arm. He is convinced that he saved him from an accident; from the flat platform of the citadel to the surface of the pelota court below would be a fall of some fifty meters. The boy was highly excited, intent on capturing his father’s complete attention, and the father granted that attention with an intensity my friend considered untoward. In brown hands cupped like an earthen vessel, as if fearful a drop might escape from between the chinks of his fingers, the boy held an object, a glimmer of fleeting brilliance.

  “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 som
ewhat 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.”

 
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