“Not very well. Do you remember me?”
“No, I don’t remember you. But I remember a terrible storm in August that stripped the leaves from the trees and left them naked; it seemed like November. Don’t you remember it?”
“No, Victor.”
“I also remember a country that was ours, our property. It was beautiful there, everything was always changing; nothing was twice the same, not grass or clouds or anything. Don’t you remember it?”
“No. But I remember you.”
“I don’t remember you.”
“You don’t remember when Alexandre Dumas came to visit?”
“No, not at all. Only the places that changed, whether it was hot or cold, rainy or sunny. Things like that. What was Dumas doing here?”
“I think he wrote a book. But it was lost.”
“We can find it, André.”
“I remember you a little. I especially remember that you were supposed to come back. I remember that. You’ve come a little late.”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“You were late with your gift, Victor.”
“No. I didn’t forget that. I have it.”
“You’ve brought it to me? You have it here?”
“No. It’s in my suitcase.”
“Get the suitcase. Please.”
“I will if you want me to. We’ll do everything together, won’t we?”
“Yes. Now you see I won’t do anything you don’t like.”
“Have you thought, maybe you were waiting for me?”
“Yes. I remember you, but not very well.”
“I don’t. I don’t know.”
“Speak more softly. Remember, he’s listening.”
“No. He’s asleep.”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, my God, M. le Capitaine. Are you all right?”
“It is nothing, madame, it must be the heat, or perhaps something I ate,” Branly managed to say. To avoid falling, he clung to the frame of one of the beveled glass windows from which eight years earlier a solitary boy had watched him, and from which Branly had not moved, that August afternoon in 1914, during the longest moments of his life.
“So long, my friend, that I decided to forget them. The forgetfulness was hastened by Myrtho when I stopped by to see her that evening. She was in the company of a general. I had to stand at attention. She looked at my medal and asked mockingly if it was chocolate; after all, hadn’t we had to retreat from Charleroi? They decorated you for a defeat — and Myrtho laughed as the general turned his back to me, making embarrassed sounds. When I returned to the street, the Parc Monceau was locked. Disconsolately, I walked back to my house. She was right, I had not been able to defend the cradle of the boy poet.”
12
He tells me that because he disguised his fear as timidity, he never returned to Monceau until after he was eighty, until recently, when he decided to relive the day of his leave in 1914, after the retreat from Charleroi and before following Joffre in the campaign that drove the Germans back to the river Aisne. We know what happened: the children did not even look at the old man, as the children of long ago had not looked at the lonely boy who watched them from behind the beveled windowpanes of the house on the Avenue Vélasquez.
He wished, as it sometimes happens in stories, that the children would gather round him while he told them tales of a time that everyone, with little justification, called the most beautiful and sweet, la Belle Epoque, la douceur de vivre. Instead, Branly leaves his park bench and walks slowly toward the Boulevard de Courcelles. As his eyes seek Myrtho’s balcony, he concedes that the children are right to have forgotten him as well as the atrocious war of the dead and the cruel life of the living.
“Poor Myrtho; she so wanted to save herself from the poverty and sickness that devastated her mother. Before she died, I saw her once, ravaged and tubercular. Was that the sweetness of life?”
He says that, more than anything, it is the memory of those days that stirs him that evening — once the voices of Victor and André are stilled, and the woods of the Clos des Renards, as night falls, begin to look like the sea — to get up out of bed and test his strength. He sighed as he closed the window, and said to himself what he is now telling me: “I hope they never grow up. Their mystery will be considered ingenuousness, or crime.”
He flexed his leg with greater ease, and in the mirror above the washbasin noticed that the swelling on his forehead had gone down — the same mirror the French Heredia had used the previous evening to demonstrate, surely in jest, that he was not the Nosferatu of Enghien-les-Bains. The truth was, of course, my friend already knew, and now remembered as with simple physical movement he emerged from the vast dream of the day that had been a kind of dark epiphany, that Heredia had acted to distract his attention from the mystery the boys — and this, too, Branly had decided — meant to be a second deceit, the reverse of, but complement to, the first. He shook his bald, gray-fringed head. Heredia wanted to trick him into believing there was no woman; the boys, that there was. He remembered the first time they had seen this house. The white phantom in the garret window had caused him to realize that 1870 was not an address but a date: a time, not a place.
His cane helped him master the hallway of symmetrically placed doors. He had become accustomed to the persistent, penetrating smell of leather, but as he approached the narrow stairway that led to the garret, he had an amazing olfactory sensation. We all know that experience, he is saying as the afternoon loses its prestigious light to fade into mousy hues; it is that sudden sharpening of the sense of smell which at a fleeting and unexpected moment recalls through a scent a city, a season, a person. Even, at times, what we call a civilization.
“No, I am not referring to the expected. If I walk through the Carrefour de Buci, I expect to be greeted by that marvelous, both fresh and pungent odor of pepper and pike, goat cheese, and bunches of marjoram. No, I mean when one encounters that sensation elsewhere, when the familiar odor occurs in an unexpected place.”
I said I understood what he meant. As an exile and a wanderer, I sometimes courted that sensation, but it came only when it was unsought. My lost cities of the River Plate, Montevideo and Buenos Aires, to me are the smell of hides, the dark river, cheap benzene, asphalt melted in the summer heat, wharves heaped high with wheat and wool, slaughterhouses and tea shops. I have found components of that odor here and there, in Nice and in Venice, along the Ramblas of Barcelona and on the docks of Genoa. It isn’t the same, only an approximation, like the dry, oppressive air of the high plains of Castile and Mexico.
As he climbs toward the garret room of the Clos des Renards, Branly, the hall behind him, confirms that the olfactory summons was that of hides, of skins of specific origin, each proclaiming its antiquity with a mute call to the nostrils: we are ancient Spanish hides, ancient Arab and Roman hides, we are hides from the tanneries of the Guadalquivir, the Tiber, the Tigris, we embellish desert caravans, the backs of long Christian breviaries, the sheaths of short Roman swords. And yet, to the sensitive nose of Branly — this friend so persevering and methodical in his passions and obsessions, whom I pictured sniffing like an old hound through the nooks and crannies of that villa hidden in the suburbs of Paris, a dusty oasis surrounded by commercial blight, discount stores, arcs of neon light — the farther he ascended the narrow staircase, the more that whirlwind of olfactory sensations was concentrated in a single superficially curious image, as if all the aromas of lost times and places ultimately had coalesced into an enormous painting of war trophies, a canvas with a David theme painted by a less harsh and less “disabused” Delacroix; a forgotten Imperial feast, decaying and decadent, Napoleonic splendor after the Maréchaux of the Grande Armée had looted the farthest corners of Europe and the Mediterranean to replenish the museums of France. He opened the door to the garret, the last gleam of daylight was a frozen star of dust, a milky winding-sheet, the perfect phantasmal crown for these trophies stripped from butchered beasts, cows, cats, camels, lions, sheep, monkeys, from the armies of the Carthaginians, the Ommiads, the Visigoths, all entwined in an absolute absence of historical connotation, vague rumors, crushed blossoms, a slough of names destined to be woven together in the scene that met his eyes as he opened the door, everything imagined or said or referred to resolved finally into a figure around which the hides, the skins stripped from the beasts of ancient armies, the trophies Masséna had plundered for France, were entwined like venomous flowers around precious jewels.