The woman beside the window was the very essence of an agitation not without order. Her Empire gown, white and diaphanous, high-waisted and with a long stole, was illuminated by the close, intense light of Ingres’s female portraits, and like them, this was a Neoclassic figure on the edge of Romanticism, observed but at the point of observing herself, rational but on the brink of madness, alert but on the edge of oblivion.
Her hands covered her face, and her rings, as well as her poisonous fingernails, were gilded with mercury. She was Ingres become Moreau, and Branly reeled before the image, steadied himself with his cane and leaned against the terminal, supporting pillar of the narrow stairway to the garret. The curtains of the window beside the woman’s figure were fine white muslin; they fluttered around her, animating her meaninglessly.
The French Victor Heredia closed the window and, with a circumspection Branly thought worthy of an old-fashioned chatelaine, rearranged the white curtains. The portrait of the woman in white illuminated by white lights and shadowed by the mask of her gold-tipped interlaced fingers rested against the vaulted wall of the attic.
“Ah, M. le Comte! I see we’re on our feet and ready to crow! I won’t ask you to help me with my ‘Madame Mère’ here, isn’t that what you say, ‘Madame Mère’? Bah, I don’t know, it’s so impersonal, the business of ‘Madame Mère.’ Every woman who doesn’t have a title like Duchesse de Langeais or Princesse de Lamballe, say, should have a short, catchy nickname like La Périchole or M’selle Nitouche, don’t you agree? But I won’t ask you to help me find a place for my mamá; to each his own, eh? and as the saying goes, we have only one mother.”
He laughed in his peculiarly irritating way, standing with arms akimbo, his hands hooked in the belt of a bizarre hunting outfit the likes of which Branly last remembered seeing in the second act of La Traviata.
“You know, M. le Comte? The ultimate freedom would be to have been born without a mother or a father. You wouldn’t understand this, yourself, being a man who prides himself on his ancestors, but, if you will forgive my frankness, one who wouldn’t have got very far without them. Ha! Don’t deny it! Who would you be if you’d had the opportunities of a paid laborer or a washerwoman’s daughter, eh? But when it comes to common, ordinary mortals like myself, who want to be responsible only to ourselves, we resent, believe me, that the debt we owe to those who give us life may be the very thing that allows them to take it back.”
“Why, then, have you kept the painting?” Branly inquired calmly.
Heredia chortled, executing a strange little dance punctuated by the heels of his knee-high hunting boots; Branly could only ascribe this behavior to a celebration of the gathering darkness in the garret. My friend was so captivated by the figure of the woman in the painting that only now, in hindsight, as is so often the case, was he able to complete the entire scene. His host had been hugging the shadows, avoiding the Ingres light that, to borrow from Quevedo’s great sonnet, lent a tone of enamored dust to the painting of the woman from the First Empire. Heredia shrank from that light; he was dancing a jig because night was falling over the world.
He asked his guest whether he thought anyone, a public or a private buyer, might be interested in a unique painting not really appropriate for hanging in a dining room or a museum, a woman hiding her face with her hands. Why, you would as little consider hanging something like this as hanging a horrifying painting he had once seen in a magazine of a Jesus crowned with thorns, wrists bound, bellowing with laughter, revealing sound teeth that indicated the diet in Palestine left little to be desired.
Branly pointed out to his host that he had not answered his question: why had he kept the painting?
He tells me he was not truly interested, as he was no longer interested in the person of Victor Heredia, in the answer of this Frenchman dressed as if for a big-game hunt in the time of the President-Prince. He asks it, actually, so as not to leave the story unfinished, to assign it to its proper place in the text.
“Every unborn being is one half of a pair, M. le Comte, you wouldn’t deny this, would you? it’s even true of dogs. Can’t you imagine, then, that the opposite is true, that young lovers are joined by the unborn child demanding creation through the souls of the young parents?”
Heredia looked at the painting and said, see, she seems to be pleading, the cold, the disdainful creature, interesting, yes, but disinterested; that was her manner, that was how she plotted to ensnare the ingenuous colonial, the Antillian planter, to capture his fortune by making him believe she didn’t need it.
“By the time he realized, it was too late. She had everything. His revenge was to have her painted like this, shamed in a painting, as she was never shamed in the bedroom, the salon, or the tomb. You see, M. le Comte, I picture my mother as a jeering skull with teeth like castanets, laughing at us night and day.”
“For her, there is nothing but night.” said Branly, again recalling the line from Lamartine.
Heredia laughed and replied that he doubted it. His mother could organize a fandango in the catacombs of death, a dance of skeletons, with long candles and tall candelabra, to continue her mockery — the colonists again deceived, exploited, and mocked by the European vixen who had appeared in La Guaira on the very eve of Independence to dazzle the young men with manners brilliantly adapted to the needs of the colonials, who in Bonapartist opportunism saw the mirror of their own dilemma.
“To fight a revolution in the name of the people, but for their own benefit. A simple matter of take-from-you and give-to-me, throw out the Spaniards and up with the Creoles, and what better model than Bonaparte?” my friend asks me, summing up Heredia’s lament. “The Creole revolutions weren’t fought for liberté, égalité, fraternité, but to acquire a Napoleon. That was and still is the secret desire of the ruling classes of Latin America.” I nod my agreement. “The Bonapartist consecration: my brother in Naples, my cousin the princess.”
The story was too simple and too predictable to explain satisfactorily Heredia’s rancor. But that evening the host of the Clos des Renards had nothing more to say, nor Branly more to imagine. The character, as my friend has already told me, fatigued him, but my friend also tells me that fatigue, paradoxically, was his greatest and most perverse strength. He was bored; the matter was easily forgotten. He forgot the context of the fatiguing apparition and lost interest in tying up loose ends.
That night, a kind of stupor, almost amnesia, prevented Branly from grasping the interrelationship of the diffuse images surrounding Heredia. He asks me now whether I — who have the advantage of hearing only the bare facts of the events, and was not, as he, immersed in the nonselective distractions of living twenty-four hours of every day — have been able to discern the connections he had not seen.