I hesitate before answering him. I know that if I say yes, I shall offend him; in spite of everything, he will take it as a presumption of superiority on my part, though I am his inferior in age and worth. But also, if I tell him no, he will take it as lack of attention or interest on my part.
“Perhaps this time you might have taken the extra step, Branly, the step that you did not take as a child that afternoon in the Parc Monceau.”
As I spoke, my friend aged before my eyes. I am not being ironic; it is not age that makes us appear old, and Branly is a young man of eighty-three. His face openly displayed an emotion that in his words had until then been only the latent expression of the hostile and unknown. But if, while he was speaking, hostility had hovered about him, now, as I spoke, it became a reality.
“Why do you say that?”
I replied that perhaps the boys’ deception had not, as he believed, consisted of trying to make him think that the woman in the painting existed, and remembered him; nor were they really suggesting, cruelly, that he could not remember the women he had loved; they were challenging him to remember the child in the window of the house on the Avenue Velásquez, whom, he himself admitted, he had forgotten.
“Do you remember his face, Branly?”
Sunk in thought, with an almost episcopal gesture of one hand, my friend sighed, “No.” And he placed his fingertips to throbbing temples, and said that this was exactly what he had been thinking that evening with Heredia in the garret of the Clos des Renards, that his host was inviting him to imagine the true motive for an ancient rancor buried in remote places and times. But he, Branly, had seen this as yet another trick by Heredia to divert him from the truth of his involuntary confinement, as well as the true relationships between the boy Victor Heredia, the French Victor Heredia and his son André, and himself, the uninvited guest, the indiscreet and suspicious fourth, whose presence — he felt it now — the other three, once he had accomplished the mission of reuniting them, resented.
“The simplicity of the story Heredia told me in the attic made me believe that his motive was to satisfy my curiosity and send me on my way back to Paris. But that was not the heart of the problem. They all knew I would not return alone. The Mexican boy would go with me. That is what I saw behind those pale, narrowed eyes. I saw hostility, the unknown. Something that did not recognize me but hated me.”
Branly fell silent for a moment, then drew in his breath, as if suppressing a cry, before speaking. “Now you tell me that in fact the equation was reversed. He hated me because I did not recognize him.”
I did not dare ask Branly whether finally he admitted this was true. There was something too sad, too wounded, too anguished about my friend. I did not have to look in his eyes; his slumped figure conveyed his feeling that an opportunity had been lost forever.
13. CLEMENCITA
La bête épanouie et la vivante flore.
The French Heredia remembers with nostalgia that the wild January seas beyond the breakwater in the harbor of Havana — like holding to one’s cheek an icy bottle swept from distant waters and bearing a message of crushed salt and splendid desperation — taste of snow. He remembers, too, the dark, quiet ocean along the sandy shores of Veracruz, where the exhausted Mediterranean flings itself on the beach with a flash of scales, like a suicidal fish. Especially, because it was where she disembarked, he remembers the sunny sea of La Guaira, an unruffled mirror stretching placidly at the feet of mountain and fortress, rocks and pelicans.
It is difficult for Branly to believe that Heredia can evoke even a modicum of tenderness. He prefers to suppose that he has slipped back into his interrupted dream, and that from the heights of San Carlos he is watching a small sailing vessel flying the pale colors of the realm of the bees sail into port. He strains to see the distant figures pacing slowly back and forth on the deck, men with hands clasped behind their backs, women with opened parasols. He wishes he were close enough to see them, and instantly his wish is fulfilled. Now he is on deck, but the ship is adrift, crew and passengers have abandoned her, and the woman, at the estate on the high cliffs, and cloaked in the mists of a La Guaira dawn, is instead wandering through corridors of ochre stucco, through dew-wet patios that open into passageways of salt-air-pocked stone that lead to other patios of lichen and dry grass, vainly seeking a mirror in which to see and remember herself; yet all she knows is what is whispered in her ear.
“Memory may be a lie.”
She likes the feel of coolness against her face. From the heights of the mountain, rain, mud, and stones thunder down toward the port, but also clear streams still untouched by city filth. She dips her hands in the waters, peers into them, searching for her face; there is no reflection, the waters flow too swiftly. They have told her she should not seek her reflection, she might meet a wraith, but she guards her secret. The phantom appears only when at dawn she sits at her harpsichord, her father’s childhood gift. It is her only memory of France, and when at dusk she sits for hours on a balcony overlooking wet red-tiled roofs and far below and in the distance she sees the ocean, she feels the tug of her French homeland, but she tells herself it is futile to think of it, more futile to return. If only she had never left. She cannot return to the country she left behind, after living here. France would not be the same. She should never have come, she sighs to herself, and tells her child-nana, much younger than she, when the little mulatto appears, dancing in a blond wig to amuse her.
“I had a Venezuelan nana,” says Heredia. “She cooked delicious dishes, but one day she said she missed her homeland and wanted to go there to die. Since she was very old, and not a little befuddled, I went along with her, you understand? Oh, she was smug when she left here, that mulatto, wearing a kerchief she hadn’t had on her head for thirty years, and carrying her wicker suitcases. She traveled in a circle from Paris to Cherbourg and from there by ship past Gibraltar to Marseilles, from which she returned to Paris by train, convinced she was back in Caracas. I prepared a room for her here with hammocks and parrots and a small greenhouse with arcades and red tiles to deceive her; but, the truth was, I deceived myself. Do you know what she told me before she died? ‘The boat sailed between a cliff and a green shore, young Victor, where the sea was very narrow. I could see the houses plain as day, and the eyes of the people hiding behind their shutters in mortal fear, watching the passing boats as if they carried the damned. I looked high up in the masts, and they were swarming with howler monkeys smoking cigarettes. Oh, my God, I said to myself, I’ve come home.’”
“Did she never ask what you were doing at her destination when she should have left you far behind?”
“No. I tell you the truth, she was the one who deceived me. She knew the New World had left its impression on Europe for all time. Don’t you agree?”
“The devil always knows what time it is,” Clemencita murmured, “as long as it’s somewhere else.”
La Guaira is like a vine that keeps clawing its way up the face of the mountain to escape the unbearable heat of the coast, to reach the mist of the fort of San Carlos, from there look back toward Cádiz and Palos de Moguer to see whether the return caravels have sailed. At the balls of that long-ago summer she sparkled in her beautiful, diaphanous white gown with the high waist and long stole, the first appearance in these lands of Empire fashion. The salons of La Guaira — do you remember, Clemencita? — were cool, the bricks wetted down, the high ceilings, the high, cool wood, too, great beams, archiepiscopal shutters, unreachable armoires.