“My father had never forgiven the deceit, M. le Comte. My mother died in a brothel in Cuernavaca, where the Emperor Maximilian had a butterfly- and peacock-filled pleasure palace. But who knows where they buried her, because the Bishopric had forbidden loose women to be laid to rest in holy ground. Who knows what barranca they threw her into? But he had never forgiven the deceit, and he had published in all the local gazettes a funeral notice announcing the much-lamented demise of the Duchesse de Langeais. They say that the whole French court of Mexico had a good laugh over such a grotesque joke.”
“But at the beginning you told me your mother would make fools of all of you, Heredia. I do not understand…”
“Don’t you think it’s her turn?”
“Perhaps.”
“Do you know the names of every one of the Imperial officers who were stationed in Cuernavaca who visited Heredia’s brothel in the barranca of Acapaltzingo on the night of August 12, 1864, to celebrate the seventieth birthday of the Duchesse de Langeais?”
“No, of course not. Don’t you mock me, Heredia.”
“Very well. Do you think it a coincidence, M. le Comte, when two people have the same name?”
“No. It is merely a matter of chance, of onomastic arithmetic, when names coincide.”
“When they coincide, yes. And when they are sundered?”
Branly shook his head and consciously retrieved the rational tone he had decided to assume in his relations with the French Heredia. “Allow me, if you will, to express my doubts about everything I have heard here tonight.”
Heredia shrugged preposterously. “I am not to be trusted, is that it?”
“No. I must be frank. I am aware that everything you tell me has the effect of distracting me from something you undoubtedly want to hide.”
“Suspect what you want, M. le Comte. But nothing will prevent what once was joined from being joined again.”
Branly tried to see outside, but deep night lay over the woods and parks of the Clos des Renards; he realized that for hours he had been listening to voices as he stared into the nothingness of the night. The painted image of the pitiful woman known as the Duquesa de Lanché had disappeared into shadows far more obscuring than the hands that hid her face. Heredia exclaimed with feigned surprise and begged my friend’s forgiveness for everything: the darkness, the late hour, for keeping Branly awake, for the long-winded obsession with family histories that had neither interest for nor any connection with M. le. Comte, whose most illustrious family had had no association with such ugly realities for centuries, of course not. Perhaps nine centuries, or a thousand years ago, yes, but certainly not a short century before, such a thing couldn’t be. No ancestor of the esteemed Comte de Branly had been present at the whorehouse of Francisco Luis de Heredia one August night in 1864, nor had he been at the burial of the French Mamasel in the barranca of Acapaltzingo, with Clemencita singing in broken French, as a kind of prayer for the dead, a madrigal the Mamasel had adored and always played on her harpsichord, eló eté sibele, laughed Heredia, that’s how it sounded in Clemencita’s broken French, a madrigal transmuted into an Afro-Hispanic chant.
Heredia had been laughing with every word he spoke. Now, with false obsequiousness, he lighted the candles of a silver candelabrum to lead his guest back to his bedroom.
“Follow me, M. le Comte.”
“Please?”
“Is there something you want?”
“Nothing. Only that yesterday, when Victor brought my meal, I asked myself whether you were degrading him, Heredia, as your Francisco Luis degraded his wife.”
“But, M. le Comte. The boy is serving you, not me.”
Branly tried to smile. “Your father did not have such a good excuse. Perhaps he lacked an intermediary in his dispute.”
“Doesn’t it surprise you that he chose her as my mother?” Heredia asked unexpectedly.
“No,” Branly said, adding with deliberation: “You yourself told me that, in your manner of thinking, one is free only if one is born without father or mother. Perhaps this is the intermediate solution, to choose one’s parents.”
“You are truly the good, rational, sensual Frenchman, M. le Comte.” And Heredia laughed.
My friend nearly replied, “But never mediocre,” and then remembered his conversation with Hugo Heredia on the day he met him: the high Indian citadel at Xochicalco, the edge of the precipice, Victor running toward them with his discovery, Branly hooking his arm with his cane, preventing him from falling fifty meters.
“A rational Frenchman, sensual surely, but never mediocre.”
“Sensuality is but a chapter of violence.”
“On the contrary.”
He remembered, but he did not repeat, those words. Slowly, he followed his host, exhausted, leaning on his cane, and wondering whether the false Duchesse de Langeais of this hot-blooded and baroque story of the Heredias had fled his dream.
15
No. She returned punctually. But now she arrived laden with color, envisioned memories, signs and omissions more profound than her initial mystery. Then she had been separate from history, but now, Branly is telling me, it was in fact history that was responsible for making her more vivid but at the same time less real.
Nevertheless, though this invasion of his pristine dream of a woman eternally poised on the contiguous thresholds of birth and death by the concurrent, roiling tides of wars and passions, revenge and rebellion, the traffic of weapons and bodies, might have destroyed the pure essence of the woman now in addition mottled by a multiplicity of names, it made Branly realize that he was indebted to the Heredias for having interrupted his routine and its accompanying empty hours. This he acknowledged as he fell asleep that night, after he had been subjected to the schedule of his unsleeping host, and had judged a defeat the time spent with him, time that separated him from sunlit hours and the overheard conversations of the boys on the terrace.
At any rate, the elderly sleep very little; a drowsy old man is slightly ridiculous, my friend is saying now, as he consults the heirloom watch in his vest pocket, attached to an elegant gold chain.
“It is five o’clock.”
Branly asks which I would prefer, that he continue the story or that we go for a swim in the club pool and then (and here he laughs apologetically, as if this were a benevolent imposition), if I wished, dine together at the Laurent he had known as a youth. No, that would not be possible, the restaurant has been closed for many years, perhaps the Vert Galant on the Quai des Orfèvres: he has friends there, too. Shall he reserve a table for nine o’clock? I was struck by the unconscious associations his words reveal. He knows that one restaurant is still open for business and the other not, but he is not ready to accept the loss of the owners of the place he frequented in 1914; to him they are as real as the restaurateurs he sometimes visits today. At the moment, his second suggestion seemed considerably more attractive, but some irresistible compulsion caused me to say: “No, Branly, I don’t want you to interrupt your story.”
I did not dare explain that a terrible sense of inconclusiveness was beginning to assail me; I feared that a prolonged interruption would seal, unfinished, the various stories beginning to fuse into a single narrative. He acquiesced, and then told me that the real mystery of that night he had spent in the company of the French Victor Heredia lay in the fact that when he returned to his bedroom he fell into a deep dream, so deep that all that had happened seemed to become a part of it: his ascent into the attic of the Clos, his encounter there with the man with the white eyes and hair, his discovery of the painting of the woman whose face was hidden in her hands, the stories about Francisco Luis and the nana Clemencita. But curiously, he says, within that dream, which was like being immersed in a body of water too deep for him to touch bottom, his head, above water and illumined by the moonlight, was experiencing a kind of extreme and undesired lucidity; drowned in dream, he plotted various detailed schemes for fleeing Heredia’s estate the following day: he would call Etienne; why hadn’t he come to pick up the Citroën? He would call Hugo Heredia; why his astonishing lack of concern for his son? He and young Victor would be back in the house on the Avenue de Saxe in time for luncheon; would his Spanish servants José and Florencio have everything in order?