Not she; no, used up, solitary, she wasn’t good for anything. Let her talk to herself, play her harpsichord, sing her madrigals, and stare the livelong day at the sea of La Guaira, where she had arrived as a young girl with her papá, the model of her husband, who never forgave the fraud of a dowry-less marriage, vile French deceit, décolletage and stole and diaphanous ball gowns.
“A white dress, that’s best in this heat. I must wear it again. I must search through my trunks. It must be there somewhere. When I find my white gown, something extraordinary will happen, I know it here in my heart, Mamita Clemencita. Help me.”
Her nana, but younger than she, only thirteen, the little mulatto come from Puerto Cabello to beg in the streets of La Guaira when the militia of the unstable republic of the cruel Creoles was killing people, including her father and mother; and she listened to her all those years, and hummed the madrigals she was forever playing on a harpsichord more tinny and out of tune with every passing day, and dressed up in a blond wig to distract her, and with her she pawed through the large trunks of fetid clothing wasted by heat and humidity, the tyrannical leprosy of the tropics that disheartens, lulls, and corrupts as it slowly kills.
“An eternal and languid contemplation of the moment of death. Do you know Moreau’s painting, my friend? Do you know what the not disordered agitation of our spirit is? I will tell you: it is the opposite of the petrified disorder of the new Latin American republics.”
14. THE MAMASEL
Fatigués de porter leurs misères hautaines.
But Branly had renounced, like the situation he evoked, any tone as moderate and conversational as mine. I am not sure whether relating events that are a part of time — a memory, a premonition, or the dream that thrusts itself between the two and is our present — means one must recount it, bring it to life, with the fervor that suddenly had taken possession of my friend. It was as if through this story of another time and a remote place he were fulfilling many of the latent acts that in his conscious life he had let pass unrealized.
The liveliness of Branly’s account was in stark contrast to this shadowy hour in which — and only in deference to my friend — we were being permitted to prolong our after-luncheon conversation in such an unusual, not to say scandalous, fashion in the dining room of Gabriel’s pavillon on the Place de la Concorde.
“Do you feel all right, my friend?”
Branly nodded energetically, as one of the highly attentive club waiters approached, carrying a silver candelabrum. In my friend’s eyes I saw a series of questions illuminated and transmitted by intelligence. I prayed that my own eyes would not too flagrantly betray stupidity, and that the flickering candles which — in further deference — the waiter was bringing to us would illumine only Branly’s intelligence and not my faltering comprehension of a story he insisted was but another bead on the oneiric rosary of the Clos des Renards.
I reflected on what he had told me. I reminded him (more myself than him, it is true) that this was the hour of the evening when the French Victor Heredia usually appeared to bring dinner to his guest and to talk awhile with him, until Branly fell asleep, and then, the next morning, was awakened by the pleasant chatter of André and Victor on the terrace beneath the sickroom windows. This is, I reminded him, also the hour you dreamed, surely the story you are telling me is part of that dream.
The intelligence in Branly’s veiled eyes was not dimmed as amazement sparked there, and a hint of perplexity that reflected my own.
“I do not know yet,” he replied, “because I have not finished telling you the story.”
“But you know what happened,” I insisted, rather inanely, as if still not conceding that this was not one of the ordinary conversations my friend and I habitually enjoyed after luncheon or before swimming in the club pool.
“No,” Branly denied vehemently. “I shall not know until I tell it. That is the truth.”
As he spoke, he held my forearm in a viselike grip, as if my arm were wood, something he could cling to in the vertigo that I could know only vicariously. I tried to imagine how it must have been for him to live — if one may use that word, knowing its insufficiency — what for me became a verbal account only after it had gestated, uncomprehended, in the receptive soul of my friend, who was now illumined in the trembling light of the candelabrum being borne toward us by a servant, and she said to Clemencita, Blow out the candles, don’t you see that the light hurts my eyes, and I am dreaming of an earthquake that will toss us into the sea forever and uproot boulders with its force, Clemencita.
The mulatto patted the gray-streaked head of her child-grown-old, and said, Poor little honey bee, I don’t know where you want to fly, but you can never go back home, never, you know that your husband with his new wife and his son won’t want you near them there in Paree, but she said that none of it mattered, if she could only put on her ball gown and see herself in the mirror she was sure she would reign again as she had at the balls of La Guaira so many years before. And because the mulatto nana loved her very much she did not tell her there was no white dress in the trunks her cruel, sick husband had allowed her to bring with her. The absence of mirrors in the house had been Clemencita’s decision, so her mistress would believe she was still young, so she would never feel that she was growing old. And her mistress played her harpsichord to drown out the plaintive call of the toucan in the tall grass.
“Then, do you understand, child, I had to cut corners, I had to pawn two or three things to scrape together the money to go to the port and buy the silks and fine lawns to make your poor mother a white ball gown she might never wear except to her own funeral, do you understand, child?”
When Heredia’s second wife learned that the aged mulatto nurse was going around telling Victor such things, she asked Heredia to send her packing, back to the streets of Puerto Cabello to beg, but the cruel, sick Señor laughed at her and said that nobody, not even she, so distinguished, especially she, so respectable but so insipid, could compare to the beauty of the French Mamasel when she arrived in La Guaira at the time of the ball given by the Liberator, Simón Bolívar, who had just occupied the port and who had nothing but compliments and gallantries for her, thus setting Heredia’s cockscomb aquiver with jealousy and ambition.
“And you have not stopped since then, Francisco Luis, but I do not know which has been greater, your ambition or your blindness. Out of ambition you married a French girl without a sou to her name, thinking she was a rich heiress; but of necessity you made a virtue, and following in the footsteps of your detested father-in-law, you replicated his life and fortunes in the shadow of the Independence. Now you again find yourself on the brink of ruin — naïve, fawning, bowing and scraping before the brother of the third Bonaparte, involved in this Due de Morny’s financial adventures with the banker Jecker and his Mexican bonds. And do you see what Juárez has decided? I have just read in La Gazette de France: those obligations were contracted with the conservative government and are not worth the silk ribbon they’re tied with. What are you going to do now, Francisco Luis? How can you support your son and me in the luxury of the court of Napoleon and Eugénie — legitimate or not? How are you going to pay Herr Winterhalter for the portrait I asked you to have him paint of me?”