“M. le Comte, you told us that we should obey the young gentleman at all times.”
Their voices were growing faint behind him. Barefoot, my friend followed the gash in the garden, seeing about him the infinitely mutable landscape of his dreams, as if the places he had dreamed of in his bedroom had always been here, within view of his windows, where a woman he had loved in the past had appeared.
“Yes, listen: in the center of the formal garden surrounding me, I saw re-created the most beloved — I realized it then — the most irreplaceable, landscape of my life, the Pare Monceau of my childhood, and in that moment I knew that whatever the end, whatever the meaning, of the life I have lived, I would owe to Victor Heredia, my young Mexican friend, this moment when I recaptured what I had most loved but had nevertheless forgotten. We imagine that the instant belongs to us. The past forces us to understand that there is no true time unless it is shared.”
He pressed my arm affectionately, a rare gesture from a man of such correct and courteous, although never effusive or sentimental, behavior, and his silence allowed me to stammer that, in the end, whatever travels we have undertaken are nothing more than a search for the one place we already know, a place that embraces all our emotions, all our memory.
“Yes,” Branly nodded. “Yes. Precisely so. And that is what I owed to the boy whom in the normal course of events I would never have known because he would have been born after my death. Why was that not so? When Victor Heredia was born, I was seventy-one. My father died at the age of thirty.”
Branly was not looking outside. His back was turned to the windows overlooking the square, and before him there was but one face, my own, obscured by the shadows. This may be why he was speaking in this fashion, he may have felt he was talking to himself. Emboldened, I asked, as one asks oneself: “Do you wish you had never known the Heredias?”
“I did not know the Heredias,” my friend replied after a pause. “The person I came to know was myself, have you not realized?”
He spoke with a kind of affectionate intensity I found moving, because I know in all sincerity that in that affection were joined all the disparate emotions of his own life, as well as everything my friend felt for those of us, living or dead, who shared in it. This conviction was born of a vision: Branly, in the center of the formal garden of the Clos des Renards, had seen himself (perhaps he was also seen by the two boys, and by the French Heredia from his hiding place) again in the Parc Monceau; behind him walked a girl dressed in white and before him the stubbornly closed beveled windows through which peered a child whose face belonged to oblivion.
He walked toward the boy, leaving the woman behind. He chose the boy, he needed him, ultimately, more than anything in his life, because to no one had he given less. Now, this time, seventy-one years after he had forgotten him, he would not cheat him, whoever his lost friend might be …
He continued walking until he came to the crushed gravel bordering the terrace of the lions. Monceau, the house on the Avenue Vélasquez, its residents, all dissolved, and in their place appeared what had been there all the time, the massive, unexceptional, suburban manor house existing in the limbo of an outmoded elegance very much in the style of Louis Philippe, its yellow-painted exterior peeling slightly. He stepped across the threshold with the shield bearing the inscription A.D. 1870, and crossed the dark foyer. He walked through an even darker dining room lined with cordovan leather, a library which instead of books had piles of faded papers on its shelves, a kitchen with few signs of food but a quantity of tree leaves steeping in cold copper cauldrons smelling of rainwater. He passed the antiquated telephone, and the no less old and creaking dumbwaiter.
The upper story contained the attic. On the second floor was the bedroom he had been occupying. Heredia’s room should be on the same floor. And it could only be, he told himself, mentally reconstructing the floor plan of the house he had just explored for the first time, behind one of the symmetrical, leather-covered doors along the hallway between his bedroom and the dumbwaiter.
Again he was walking down the hallway, as he had that morning, though now it seemed immeasurably longer, the hall he had first investigated while looking for the breakfast he found in a dumbwaiter in a pillar beside the stairway. As he advanced, he rapped at each of the symmetrically placed doors.
“They were simply trompe l’oeil, my friend. Like the houses and streets on the backdrop of the Palladium’s Olympic Theater in Vicenza, the doors had been painted on the leather. As I knocked, I heard no hollowness at all, only the dull thud of a sturdy brick wall.” A flayed house, yes, but also, Branly tells me, a walled-in house.
One door sounded hollow, the one beside the column that housed the dumbwaiter. Branly opened it and, at the end of a vast gallery stripped of furniture or ornamentation, saw his host.
18
The French Victor Heredia was clad all in black. Black shoes, trousers, coat, and shirt. The only white article of apparel was a clerical collar as white as the hair, skin, and eyes of this disagreeable man standing in the corner of an enormous room whited like the sepulchers to which Christ compared the Pharisees. There was in the narrowed and satisfied eyes of Victor Heredia, in his ridiculous priestly attire, in the arrangement of the stubby-fingered, greedy hands clasping the lapels of his jacket, something utterly repulsive, which, added to the deathlike radiance of the room, provoked in my friend the biblical associations so uncommon in him and, generally, in the Latin cultures, which believe in Jesus only because he was legitimized by Rome.
The absence of windows added to the feeling of suffocation; but if my friend was aware of a sense of asphyxia, it was because of Heredia’s words, welcoming Branly with his infuriating, accustomed vulgarity. “What’s the matter, M. le Comte? Did you lose your slippers? At your age you shouldn’t be wandering around without shoes. Why, you might catch pneumonia, and before you know it, pow! you’d find yourself pushing up daisies; then how could you ever make it barefoot over the coals of hell?”
He punctuated his words with strident laughter, and although Branly was not prepared to offer his host the least consideration and would have preferred to have announced succinctly his impending departure in the company of the young Victor Heredia, the spectacle of the older, guffawing Heredia garbed like a parish priest precipitated words that perhaps in other circumstances Branly would not have uttered:
“I have come to say goodbye. But not without informing you that I am aware that I have no reason to be grateful to you. Your duplicity has been unremitting. I shall simply recall to you the first of your tricks; that will be sufficient to disabuse you of any idea that you are still deceiving me. You offered to take care of Etienne if the boy and I returned to Paris. But you knew perfectly well that I would remain, because Etienne is in my employ. Wait, please. I want you to hear one thing. I fully realize that my chauffeur and I have been mere pretexts for getting the boy here. I wanted to tell you this before I left, and to admit that I may have fallen into your snare at the beginning, but today, as I return home, I am undeceived. You, sir, are a charlatan.”
The French Heredia, Branly tells me, looked at him with theatrically exaggerated amazement. “Why the devil are you telling me all this?”
Branly drew himself up, supporting himself on his cane. “I am telling you that I am a man of honor and that you are an unconscionable swine. I regret that my age prevents me from giving you a thrashing, whether public or private. It is all you deserve.”