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 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.