“Wait.” He pressed my hand. “I myself did not understand. As I told you, I shall not understand this story until I have finished telling it.”
“In spite of having lived it?” I persisted.
“In spite of that. What possible relation can there be, tell me, between living something and telling it?”
“Perhaps none, you may be right.”
“Forgive my violence,” said Heredia, as he eased his lethal, crazed hold on Branly. “I am an insecure and fearful man, ha! ha! It takes blue blood like yours if a man is to feel he’s sitting on top of the world!”
“You are unmitigatedly vulgar,” said Branly with a twisted smile. “Unmitigatedly … Heredia? Is that your real name?”
The host of the Clos thrust his hands into his pockets and shrugged like a surly urchin.
“I would like, after all this time, to know the name of the boy I did not hold out my hand to seventy years ago in the Pare Monceau. I know it is very late to make amends.” Branly’s voice was moved, grave, restrained. He sought, as he spoke, the pale eyes of the French Victor Heredia. His host was silent for a long while, grinding his heel into the whitewashed floor of this suffocating gallery.
“André,” Heredia said finally. “My name is André.”
“Like your son,” said Branly, with one of those polite formulas with which one courteously fills the pauses in social conversation.
“No,” Heredia shook his head. “Like myself.”
“Like you, Heredia? Did I not say that I want to make amends for my indifference — my cruelty, if you prefer? Is that not enough? Must you persist in your low sarcasm?”
“Do you know why I never appear in the daytime? No, don’t say anything. I will tell you. True phantoms appear only in daylight, M. le Comte.”
Mincing like some elderly maiden, Heredia walked to the corner of the room. Branly, as he tells me now, was by this time sufficiently familiar with Heredia’s tricks to anticipate, following this mimicry, some new and disconcerting revelation from his host. Accentuated by the newly assumed gestures of an ancient virgin, Heredia said that he feared the daylight phantoms, and his distinguished guest, the Comte de Branly, should fear them, too. Was it his hope to save the boys? Had he ever thought that maybe the boys did not want to be saved? How many things must there be that he never realized? Wrapped in his aristocratic arrogance, so remote from the black and rotting ravines where French mademoiselles in exile in the New World sing madrigals to frighten away the dogs and owls waiting to devour their dead bodies, so secure in his mansions and symmetrical gardens, so unyielding in a land that had never known an earthquake or the cholera morbus or trichinosis or the oil companies’ murderous White Guards or the forced labor of Indians or hurricanes bearing dead leaves in a gale that in mid-August can strip an entire jungle of leaves and fruit to scatter afar, beyond the sea, to impregnate with pure tropical pollen austere European wives who then give birth never knowing that seed travels, carried on the air filters into nostrils, ears, mouths, asses, the uncountable orifices of a human body that is more water and pit and puddle than anything else, eh? Oh, there were so many things he didn’t know.
“Do you know anything of my desire to give life to everything that could have been but was denied existence?” asked “Heredia,” suddenly pulling himself to his full height and acquiring a dignity Branly would not have believed possible.
“André, then, should have been the … son of Francisco Luis and Mademoiselle Lange?” Branly stammered.
“He is, M. le Comte. You must believe me, he is. That is the only element of truth in this entire farce. Except that this time my little angel is going to be born whole, not as he was before, but whole again.”
“Heredia” again seized my friend’s arm, but now with a strength, Branly says, incredible not only in his host but in any man. He twisted Branly’s arm behind his back, forcing his head and body in the direction desired by this monster of many guises, whose role at that moment my friend could not define: was he a dangerous clown, a harmless madman, an ineffective mythomaniac, or a wretched, defeated, lonely man deserving of pity?
“You see, you doddering old bastard, you senile old motherfucking asshole, you see, that’s what you get for going around sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, trying to separate what was always joined and will be forever, you see, Victor Heredia doesn’t belong to your time now but to mine, and at last my son has the companion I never had…”
With one arm locked around Branly’s neck, “Heredia” with his free hand raised the door of the dumbwaiter and forced my friend’s head toward the empty shaft, as if preparing him for the executioner’s ax or the blade of the guillotine. Branly stared into the depths of the space in which the monte-plats, converted in English into the more obsequious dumbwaiter, ascended and descended. An icy blast rumpled his hair, tiny daggers of ice needled his skin, forcing him to close his eyes filled with involuntary tears. In that instant he had seen what he had to see.
Branly’s hand still clasped mine.
“Have you ever paused, my friend, to think about the appalling concept of infinity, time and space without beginning or end? That is what I saw that morning in the shaft of the dumbwaiter. Infinity was like the flesh of a wet, bland squid, slimy and slobbery, a texture without color or orientation, the pure vertiginous sensation of a great white mollusk ignorant of time or space. Something interminable cloaked in perpetual fine snow.”
“What do you plan to do, you pitiful old bastard? Do you think when you leave here you can set your police on me, accuse me, demand that I return Victor? Forget it. Victor and André are no longer here. Victor and André are no longer André and Victor. They are a new and different being. No one could recognize them. Not even I. They could walk past you in a café, or on a street, and you would never recognize them. You would never recognize them. True madness passes without notice.”
“Heredia” again burst out laughing, and Branly, his senses reeling, deprived of any intellectual means by which to deal with this devil who was most satanic because he was incomprehensible, unknowable, and therefore to be feared, did what he had never done in his life, what no one had ever forced him to do.
“That morning — you must believe what I tell you — imprisoned by ‘Heredia’ ’s arms, with that unutterable vision of infinite emptiness before my eyes, I did something I had not done in all my eighty-three years. I screamed, my friend I screamed the way they used to scream in the Frédérick Lemaître melodramas our great-grandparents attended on the Boulevard du Crime. I screamed, convinced that my voice was my deliverance, my life, my only chance, my only salvation. Bah, of course, on more careful consideration, I believe I must have screamed that way in my cradle.”
And with those words he withdrew his hand from mine, which he had held throughout this portion of his story. He clasped his own hands in that typical, gracious gesture that served in circumstances like these to dissipate any hint of solemnity and to return things to a properly rational level not without humor.
“Bah,” he repeated. “The things one must do. I screamed, terrified by that vision and by the sensation of my impending death, I admit it. But as I screamed I turned melodrama into comedy. As I struggled against ‘Heredia,’ the hinges of the door of the suffocating, whitewashed gallery burst open under the weight of Florencio’s shoulder. José rushed in on the heels of his husky companion with the visage of a Basque jai-alai player, and both rushed to free me from ‘Heredia,’ subduing him. I sank to the floor, out of breath, exhausted. In the struggle, ‘Heredia’ was roundly drubbed by Florencio: he staggered, and fell headlong down the shaft of the dumbwaiter. The two servants exchanged rapid comments in Spanish, peering down into empty space.