During breakfast Jean told my friend that, as he’d seen, the father and son were unusually close; the death of the mother and the brother had undoubtedly cemented that closeness. My friend recalls then, as he does now, that his own father died at thirty, when he himself was a child of four. Beside his bed in the large bedchamber on the Avenue de Saxe is a photograph of his father taken shortly before his death. He, a man of eighty-three, gazes upon the youth of twenty-nine who had been his father.
Every night before going to sleep, he gazes at the photograph a long while, he tells me this afternoon in the dining room of the Automobile Club de France, as he told Jean that morning in Cuernavaca at breakfast, before their return to Mexico City and before the sun began its impatient race toward midday.
In vain my friend looked for the trace of a presence in the barranca. A young servant in sandals and white shirt and pants served the delights of the tropical breakfast, flame-red fruits, tortillas, eggs smothered in cream and tomato and chili, and buns and breads as infinitely varied in savor as in name. The Heredias came down a little later, as the Frenchmen were drinking their second cup of coffee. Victor ate hungrily, rapidly, and asked to be excused to play in the garden that stretched to the edge of the barranca. He skipped away as Heredia said how pleased he and his son were to have met my friend; they had enjoyed the conversation and hoped they would soon meet again.
“I’m traveling to Paris in September for a Unesco conference,” Hugo said. “Victor will come with me.”
My friend still does not know why, but he almost asked them not to travel together. However, he realized just in time, he tells me, that since the preceding evening he had been experiencing a kind of vertigo, his mind racing simultaneously in several directions: he remembered the children in the Parc Monceau who no longer remembered him; he remembered a young man who was father to an old man; he tried to imagine Victor’s dead mother and brother; and also the boy or girl who had been singing in the barranca. But most of all he tried to penetrate Victor’s candid gaze, to become a child again and see through his eyes. In this way he might recapture the imperious innocence and the unanswered questions of his own childhood.
He was blinded by the sun now climbing the sky. Victor was a white, blurred figure in the glaring depths of the garden beside the barranca. As if with a gaudy flag, the Mexican sky proclaimed its intentions: high noon or nothing. My friend was on the verge of adding one more wrinkle to the travel plans designed to outmaneuver death. He was on the point of asking Heredia not to travel with his son; he almost offered to come himself to pick up the boy and take him back to France.
He says that everything was resolved, however, as is always the case with him, in a ritual of courtesy, because inevitably courtesy is the only reliable, true, honorable, and sincere means my friend the Comte de Branly can summon to impose order on human events, to offer them the refuge of civilization, to calm that orderly agitation, to exorcise the venomous flowers interwoven with precious jewels.
He invited the Heredias to stay at his home on the Avenue de Saxe while they were in Paris. It was only a few steps from UNESCO headquarters, he said, shielding his eyes against the savage glare of the sun. It would be a pleasure to welcome them, to renew their friendship, to offer his appreciation, he said, as he searched for his dark glasses to penetrate the thick lime-white light, the blurred landscape, of the garden where Victor was playing.
He returned to Mexico City that evening. The light faded suddenly, impatient now to cede its dominion to the abrupt nightfall of the high tropics. Resting his chin on his fist, my friend stared at the passing scenery sequestered by darkness. In the reflection of the car window he tried to re-create what he had seen that morning through the blinding sun after he had settled his sunglasses on his nose: the boy Victor on the lawn of the garden beside the barranca, beating Jean’s Indian servant, throwing him to the ground and whipping off his belt to lash him; a tiny feudal lord, master of lives and fortunes.
3
The Countess, who never leaves their castle near Cahors, suddenly became ill, and Branly hastened to join her. He left instructions with his chauffeur to meet the Heredias at Roissy airport, and with his Spanish servants to look after his guests in his town house on the Avenue de Saxe. He returned as soon as possible; his train arrived in Paris at eleven in the morning. My friend found a taxi and forty minutes later arrived before the eighteenth-century façade of his residence.
No one answered his ring. Impatiently, he located the correct key on his key ring and opened the heavy door. Highly irritated, he stalked through the beautiful interior courtyard paved in smooth stone and past the service quarters flanking it, to a short flight of steps leading to the main door of the one-story residence constructed according to the dispassionate principles of the French baroque.
At the top of the steps he whirled with that imperious gesture of his slender, transparent hands that I have seen so often, transforming the overcoat, casually tossed over his ancient but martial shoulders, into something decidedly impressive, half hussar’s jacket, half bullfighter’s cape. He sought, in vain, a sign of life — the chauffeur, the cook, the valet. Though it was almost noon, his automobile was not in the carriage house.
He clasped the lapels of his greatcoat under his trembling chin on this deceptively sunny September morning in which a knife edge of air signaled the coming of autumn. He opened the glass door onto a foyer decorated, like the rest of the mansion, in the Empire style favored by the Countess, whose family owed its titles to Bonaparte. My friend, amused, shrugged his shoulders. Being newer, his wife’s furniture was in better condition than his. From his ancestors Branly proudly claimed the house itself, the work of Gabriel and Aubert, a twin to the Hôtel Biron designed by those same architects. When my friend recalls, as he inevitably does, that the Biron mansion now houses the museum where the works of Rodin are collected, he quips that it is therefore unnecessary for him to open his doors to the public; he invites the public to visit the Rodin Museum instead. It is the same as coming to the Avenue de Saxe.
I told him it was not exactly the same. The public would be missing the gleaming ormolu of the superb collection of Empire candelabra and lyre-shaped clocks, the wooden cheval glass mirror crowned with winged figures and butterfly medallions, the Romagnese bas-reliefs and the spectacular malachite vases, the wedding of bronze, marble, plaster, and silver with amboyna, oak, beech, gilt, and mahogany. Their greatest loss would be the sight of the magnificent clock suspended from an arch of gilded bronze, with a seated woman playing an ornate piano with griffin legs, in a sumptuous mounting of motionless draperies and doors.
“Motionless, but poisonous,” my friend added on the evening he had honored me by inviting me to his peerless table. “That clock is the work of Antoine-André Ravrio. He fashioned several similar pieces for the royal family. Perhaps that is the only way Hortense de Beauharnais had of airing her musical compositions, as the melody of a clock striking the hours.”
“A clock may bore,” I said to him, “but surely not kill. I don’t believe in fatal tedium, in spite of the persistent efforts of several of our acquaintances to the contrary.”