I don’t know, Branly, what you may have forgotten about yourself, about your past, your family line — obviously, considerably better documented than our own. With better reason, what have we Heredias forgotten? Now I spend entire nights trying to evoke things I no longer know: a desired violation, all the transgressions of the flesh, the ambition, money, power, and caste that shaped and kneaded the lives of people like the Heredias are forgotten, yes, perhaps because we couldn’t live with the constant consciousness of the lives we have sown, the fortunes we have usurped, the misery on which those of us who are anything in the New World have built our being. Lucie will be proved right. A black utopia devoured by a bloody epic; you see what has happened to that dream of a rediscovered Eden, and its noble savage.
In contrast, an object is never cruel, Branly, it has no passions, it harms no one; rather, it gives testimony to permanence, glimmering with the twin lights of a yesterday and a today indistinguishable in art.
“Who was just here, who were you talking to?” I asked, brutally shaking my son awake in our bedroom in the Hotel Ancira.
“André,” my son replied. “André…”
I don’t care about his name. He was a child with us, and will grow old with us. I hope that, thanks to me, my son will enjoy whatever time he has with that boy he so fervently desired to see, or be, or have, I don’t know which verb to use, as I, thanks to the boy, will enjoy my time with Lucie and Antonio.
And if I have understood correctly, one day the four of us will be together, because somehow Victor will be with us again. Then we can all be partners in mourning.
But everything depends on your understanding the words. You had a past, but you do not remember it. Try to recapture it in the little time you have left, or you will lose your future.
This is the obligation shared by all of us who were actors in this story. I pass it on to you, Branly, hoping you will accept it as proof of my gratitude. It is because I am grateful that I have told you everything I know — no more, no less. I know I am exposing myself to a terrible fate if you betray me by repeating what I have told you. But, between gentlemen, that question doesn’t arise.
You see, Branly, you and I are bound together by a shared rejection of the death of the past, the present of civilizations. “Heredia” and I were bound by the Pragmatic Sanction, if I may call it that, of the same attitude: our will to serve the dead, so that someday the living will serve us. Through me as intermediary, you and that demon were finally allied in a common goaclass="underline" the recovery of an angel.
21
When Branly finished his long account of the words of Hugo Heredia in Xochicalco during the vigil of All Saints’, its final meaning, like a ball of paper tossed into the sea, was slow to sink to the depths of my consciousness. First, it had to be saturated with water and sun, the vapors of iodine and salt, the agents that allow us to convert what is said into what is known, and what is known into something more: the fate contained in every word, as well as what, prophetically, it announces.
Consequently, the only question that then occurred to me to ask Branly was whether the boy Victor had told his father anything more at their first meeting after being separated by “Heredia” in the Hotel Ancira. But my friend seemed not to hear me; I sensed from his faraway gaze, his murmuring lips, that he had not completely returned from the mournful celebration in Mexico.
I dared not interrupt his strange self-absorption. When he did speak, the words did not sound his own, it was as if Hugo Heredia were still speaking through the voice of my friend.
“Everything depends on your understanding the words. You had a past, but you do not remember it. Try to recapture it in the little time you have left, or you will lose your future.”
Again his eyes focused on a point near me.
“Branly.” I spoke with a certain anxiety. “Are you all right? Is something the matter?”
“It was the eve of All Souls’ Day, the day of the dead,” he said, once more in his own voice.
“I know. You told me.”
He had told Hugo Heredia that eve of the departed, in Xochicalco, that he had come to hear the truth from his lips because he had greatly admired him when they met, and he could not believe that a man of Heredia’s intellectual caliber was a barbarian.
“I had to face him, and force him to face me. I had to know his reasons for acting as he did, for participating in the trickery of that savage “Heredia,” for bribing my servants and deceiving the authorities of my country with his report of the drowning of his son on the Normandy coast. He could, my dear friend, tell me nothing I did not already know about the vulgarity of that man you have glimpsed on a carnival night in Caracas, in a tasteless silver-painted apartment, a hotel in Monterrey, and, finally, his own domain, the Clos des Renards.”
Branly’s eyes clouded at the mention of Enghien-les-Bains. He spoke somewhat incoherently, as if to another person, of the circles, the mute laments, the gray wounds of that tormented city “Heredia” seemed to carry with him, opening the chasms that are the scars of this story, in order to give voice to an intolerable universe of harsh sighs, strange tongues, appalling gibberish, tones of rage, and fields of ashen misery beneath a sky barren of stars.
I knew that my friend was still quoting, reproducing the voices and murmurs associated with the spiritual journey of the night spent amid murmurs and voices on a hill alight with blind lights. What more had Hugo Heredia said, I pressed him. Finish the story, Branly. What did he say?
My friend looked at me as if he scarcely recognized me.
“Hugo Heredia? Hugo Heredia told me that he was passing on the story to me, asking me to accept it as proof of his gratitude. ‘I know I am exposing myself to a terrible fate if you betray me by repeating what I have told you. But, between gentlemen, that question doesn’t arise,’ he said that night.”
At last Branly’s words settled into the depths of my consciousness. I did what I had never done before because of my affection, my respect, for this eighty-three-year-old man. I seized him by the shoulders, I shook him violently, I told him to tell me the truth. Were those the words Hugo Heredia spoke to Branly when he told him the story, or were they words Branly meant for me today, here in the solarium of the Automobile Club pool?
My action was motivated by sudden terror. I didn’t want to be the one who knew, the last to know, the one who receives the devil’s gift and then cannot rid himself of it. I didn’t want to be the one who receives and then must spend the rest of his life seeking another victim to whom to give the gift, the knowing. I did not want to be the narrator.
The watery paleness disappeared from Branly’s eyes. He hadn’t even noticed my violence. I felt ashamed. I removed my hands from his shoulders, but I did not avert my eyes.
“Branly, do you hear me?”
“Perfectly, my friend.” And he nodded with absolute composure.
“Then tell me. Tell me the truth. I’ve listened very carefully. Now I must know what you knew before you talked with Hugo Heredia. I want to know what you knew but haven’t told me. I asked whether all the small coincidences, the implicit analogies, had escaped your attention.”
My friend started to rise from his chair, then sank back.
“Yes, the portrait of my father beside my bed; the clock made by Antoine-André Ravrio, in whose workshop several men died from contact with the mercury used in gilding; the Empire-robed woman playing the harpsichord … I nearly destroyed both, my friend. I, too, suspected that in some mysterious way the photo and the clock with its gilded bronze figure linked my destiny, much against my will, with the story of the Heredias.”