“There is one thing I could have done, something decisive,” my old friend said, suddenly aged as he spoke.
“What, Branly?” I was alarmed by the ominous curtain of age that suddenly descended over habitually taut features.
“I could have let the boy fall from the precipice. All I I had to do was hold out my cane, not hook his arm with its handle. He would have fallen at least fifty meters from the citadel to the pelota court in the ravine of Xochicalco.”
I made no comment. This linkage of deaths in a barranca in the Valley of Morelos seemed excessive, if not offensive: first, Mademoiselle Lange, now Victor Heredia. The same barranca? Always the same dogs and owls? Branly looked at me with a trace of amusement.
“You must remember, if you truly wish to be generous in absolving my guilt, that I was on the point of asking the father and son not to travel together. I might have invoked — it is my right, shall we say, of seniority — an intuition, a sixth sense, a profound respect for the dead: Latins understand this. In addition, I was on the point of asking the father not to travel with his son; I wanted to offer to come for the boy and then accompany him on his return to Mexico, is that not so?”
“That’s what you told me, Branly.”
“Why, then, did I immediately invite them to my home, allow them to run the risk of traveling together, of being killed together, like the mother and brother before them?”
As he asked this question, my friend leaned toward me slightly. I repeated my thoughts as I sat beside Branly in my canvas chair. “I was thinking that courtesy is the only reliable means you can summon to impose order on human events, to offer them the refuge of civilization.”
“And…?” he asked avidly.
“There is more. I thought this was how you calmed that not unordered agitation, to use your own words.”
He stared at me as if thirsting for my thought: “And to exorcise the venomous flowers interwoven with precious jewels, is that it?”
“You know better than I where the chance of human destinies ends and the art of literary selection begins.”
Branly offered me a profile sketched with a silver nib. “Can they be separated?” he asked, finally.
He underscored his question with a nervous glance, and this time he pressed my hand.
Then he relaxed, sinking back into his beach chair.
We did not look at each other. Sitting side by side in the canvas chairs of the club solarium, we stared toward an undefined point before us, the tiled floor, the glass between us and the swimming pool and the bar.
Finally I interrupted this shared reverie by asking my friend whether he had subsequently had any news of the Heredias. My question, which Branly did not answer, included, I admit, another. What did you do when you returned to your house on the Avenue de Saxe? I framed it aloud, and Branly replied with precision.
“I discharged Etienne and my Spanish servants. The last time a servant in our house allowed himself to be bribed was during the time of the Huguenots. Imagine! Only Protestants and Latin Americans have dared.”
“Or, if you will, a Hugo and a Huguenot,” I said, with a weak attempt at humor, as if hoping to hasten a return to normality between us, knowing that the situation was not normal, and that my words were purely a reflex action.
“No wonder that in the court of Carlos III a bribe was referred to as ‘Mexican pomade.’” My friend smiled.
His words were accompanied by the customary gracious movement of his hands, but now I saw in these gestures, in his banter, something more than an attempt to disavow the overly solemn mood of the occasion. Branly’s hands moved as if performing the final rite of an exorcism: dissolving, blessing, dispatching forever.
“But, Branly, none of the small coincidences, the implicit analogies, escaped your attention.”
I spoke in spite of myself; it was not my place to comment on what I had learned, since it was Branly who had told me, and his word was to be trusted. My friend started to get up, but then sank back into the canvas chair.
He closed his eyes. He clasped his long fingers under his chin and, instead of replying, recited a few lines from his favorite poem, which for me was becoming the mysterious leitmotif of this story that so often, I realized now, I had expected to be identical to the person who was telling it, yet, at the same time, independent of the teller.
My friend asked whether I remembered the title of the poem. Certainly, I replied, “La Chambre Voisine,” by Jules Supervielle, and again I said that I felt its lines had been with us throughout this long November afternoon.
“The eve of the Feast of St. Martin.” Branly’s eyes were still closed.
“What?” I struggled to follow the train of my friend’s thoughts.
“We were speaking earlier this afternoon of that privileged moment in Paris when the phenomena of the day are dispersed and the day is crowned in glory. A luminous moment, as you know, in spite of rain, fog, or snow.”
“Yes?”
“A true St. Martin’s Day is the jewel in the crown, a summer day in mid-autumn, an unexpected gift for those of us resigned to numb survival in the glacial burrows of a primeval world, the hostile world of wolf against wolf, my friend.”
A response seemed to be called for, so I commented that he was right, that in only a few days it would be the Feast of St. Martin, the eleventh of November, the Armistice Day of Branly’s Great War. My friend opened one slightly self-deprecatory eye, as if that epic warranted nothing more than an ironic memory. He had mentioned burrows. Now he was telling me that summer could be even more savage than winter; the trenches along the Marne were a hive of insects, and all of them, officers and men alike, grew accustomed to awakening with faces covered with the flies that cling to a soldier’s sweat, beard, and dreams. Flies make no distinctions.
“A St. Martin’s summer’s day is like a gift time grants to itself. It makes those of us who are older believe it is possible to prolong the sweetness of our days. Like the sauterne we drank at luncheon, you know. The golden sweetness of that wine is the result of November grapes, of fruit harvested after other wines are already in the casks. Only the ripest fruit, grapes dried almost to raisins, shriveled from exposure to sun and the dying earth, give us the incomparable sweetness of a good sauterne.”
“That may be so,” I replied, “but it is impossible to distinguish the line between that golden maturity and the corruption that hastens, even precipitates it. A dark, repulsive fungus, Branly, call it noble decay if you will. And that’s true of the sauterne.”
“As I have told you, I could not anticipate the events of this narrative, even though I have lived it, because it was one thing to live it and another to tell it.”
“But now the story is finished, and even though I didn’t seek it, you have made me the new narrator of everything you have told me.”
My friend seemed indifferent to my words, as if they were the accepted corollary to his story. I did not fully understand the nature of his disillusionment when, turning his heavy head to look at me, he replied that only part of what I said was true. I had become a probable narrator of his story, but the story was not concluded. No, it is the nature of narrative to be incomplete, to be contiguous with another story.
He answered my questioning look by wrapping himself more tightly in his white terry robe and asking with nervous severity, cold but inviting the heat the acceptance of his words would incur, what do you think a man like myself would do, a man in whom duty and pleasure have learned to live side by side, but only as long as they were justified and unified in the present, not in nostalgia, my friend, or hope, but in a sense of the present, the here and now, embodying the obligations as well as the potential of time; what is the meaning of being who I am and as I am, tell me, if I refuse to accept that sense of the present that others call responsibility, yes, but the ultimate responsibility that excludes, now listen carefully, any pretext of the now—“not this, it has already happened, or this, because it is still to come”—unless it encompasses a concept of being. Nothing dies completely unless we ourselves are guilty of condemning it to death by forgetting it. Oblivion is the only death; the presence of the past in the present is the only life; and this is what I came to understand after I returned to my house and reviewed my adventure with the Heredias. It is also what finally bound me to Hugo Heredia, in spite of everything that stood between us.