“And the other Heredia, the old man?”
“He had no reason to hate me. I recognized him. He got what he wanted.”
“Forgive my stupidity; what did he want?”
“The child was born, don’t you see?”
He removed his bathrobe and tossed it on the chair. His body was firm, his pale flesh revealed few signs of age except the vivid tracery of blue veins. I watched my friend Branly, clad in blue bathing trunks, walk toward the pool, and something in me argued that I owed him an apology; but the fact that I had learned the story of the Heredias gnawed at me like a strange malady, a tumor in my imagination. I did not want to be the last to know the story, and even though my imagination was racing with fear, I did not know why the knowing burned me like the reunited halves of that object Branly had touched in the Citroën as Victor and André made it whole.
Branly walked toward the pool, and I followed, admiring how completely he had recovered his military bearing. He reached, before me, the fiber matting that rings the enormous, olympic-sized pool notable for a beauty both palatial and bucolic. The pool of the Automobile Club de France should not be reserved for its members — wealthy financiers, government officials, businessmen — but for nymphs and satyrs. Its green mosaic walls suggest a sylvan glen, the golden rim a Roman bath. The cascade of crystalline waters spilling from a seashell-shaped fountain would transport us to ancient times were it not for the strange construction that shatters this heraldic enchantment like the broad stroke of a fountain pen on medieval papyrus: an iron catwalk that spans the pool some nine or ten meters above its surface, near the dome of the skylight that in the daytime illuminates this extraordinary pool sunk in the heart of Paris between the Place de la Concorde and the Rue St.-Honoré, the Hôtel de la Marine and the Hôtel Crillon.
I watched Branly dive into the pool and begin to swim with measured strokes. He was alone in the pool and the water welcomed him with unusual concentration; only he broke its stillness, but, in turn, only he offered himself to the water, delivered himself to its tranquillity. Like the pool and its bridge, water and steel, my friend, I knew by now, was living in a dual state of receptivity and hermeticism that accentuated both his generosity toward others and the exacerbated ritual of his idiosyncrasies.
It was at that precise instant I looked up and saw the waiter walking across the iron catwalk suspended above the pool. I wouldn’t have noticed him if he hadn’t stopped, his empty tray in his hands, a peculiar expression on his face, instantaneous and indescribable, his eyes narrowed and feline, strangely incongruous with the aureole of curly bronze hair, the similarly golden skin, the smiling moist lips. It was as if parts of his head and body — which, I knew intuitively, was at once tense and relaxed, like the bodies of certain animals whose calm we merely imagine because in the presence of man they adopt a cringing, begging pose — belonged to different creatures.
Suddenly the water in the pool erupted. For an instant I stood paralyzed by the phenomenon; the tranquil lake was transformed into violent waves, and I saw Branly lift one arm, struggle against the roiling, tumultuous water, and then succumb. I dived after him. I cannot swear that my presence calmed the fury of the pool, but I do know that by the time I reached my friend, cupped his chin in my hand, and swam toward the side of the pool, there was no movement in the water except in our wake. I looked up at the catwalk. There was no one there. Attendants came running to help us; club members turned toward us from the bar; some rushed to see what was happening; someone commented that Branly should be more careful, that he had not been himself these last few weeks.
With the attendants’ help, I carried my friend to a chaise longue in the dressing room, where he lay back without a word.
Later I drove him to his home. His housekeeper, a beautiful woman of about forty, met us at the door. I hadn’t seen her before, as she had been hired to take the place of José and Florencio. As I say, I had never seen her, and I was struck by the fact that, although she was smiling and she seemed perfectly natural, her eyes glistened with tears. I know people like that, especially women, who seem always on the verge of weeping, and in fact they are individuals of unusual kindness, restrained emotions, and extreme shyness. What I had yet to learn was that they are also acutely sensitive to the pain of others.
The photograph of Branly’s father was missing from his bedside table. I noticed its absence as we helped him into bed. He apologized for the accident, smiling, saying that perhaps at his age he should forgo sports.
He held out his hand. I took it. I was surprised by its warmth.
I left his room bearing an impression of eyes that were both near and faraway, which is perhaps another way of saying that his eyes saw something I could not see. In any case, I felt vaguely uneasy, as if in leaving I were abandoning my friend in his stubborn, never-ending, and, most of all, unequal, battle with something or someone who had banished from the room the photograph of the young Captain de Branly, born in 1870, and dead in 1900 of a germ that could not have withstood an injection of penicillin.
Later I walked through the salon. Once again I admired the wedding of bronze, marble, plaster, and silver with amboyna, oak, beech, and gilt, and I compared the incredible luxury of the silver candelabra, the malachite vases, the mirrors crowned with winged figures and butterfly medallions, with Branly’s description of the interior of the Clos des Renards, its suffocating sensation of flayed skin, its smell of leather, and damp whitewash. The comparison led me, unconsciously, to seek, though in vain, the magnificent clock suspended from an arch of gilded bronze, with a seated woman playing an ornate harpsichord with griffin legs, in a sumptuous mounting of motionless draperies and doors. The absence of the clock caused me to remember something else: the tune the clock played as it struck the hours, a timeless madrigal. How did it go? Where, only recently, had I heard it?
It was perhaps this spirit of inquisitiveness that led me to Branly’s library. I had asked the housekeeper to call my friend’s physician, and I wanted to wait to assure myself that he was all right. With aimless curiosity I ran my finger along the backs of the volumes on shelf after shelf of that small but splendid library. I paused with bitter pleasure as I recognized the titles of certain books that had appeared in the course of this narration: La Duchesse de Langeais, by Honoré de Balzac; the Méditations poétiques of Lamartine; Poésies, by Jules Supervielle; Les Chants de Maldoror, by Isidore Ducasse, known as the Comte de Lautréamont; Les Trophées, by José María de Hérédia; Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune, by Jules Laforgue; and the Mémoires of Alexandre Dumas.
I was intrigued by the presence among this special group of books of a volume my friend the Comte de Branly hadn’t mentioned in the course of his account — but then I remembered that the two boys, Victor and André, had spoken of The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and The Man in the Iron Mask. A yellow silk bookmark slit the gold that dusted the page edges. I held the volume in my hand, stroking the creamy leather cover and maroon corner-pieces. The spine cracked as I opened it and scanned a page on which the print stood out as if embossed by reading and by time; the letters in old books seem to want to free themselves from the pages, to take flight like a flock of migrating birds.
What I read was not actually part of the memoirs of that powerful writer, whom fortunately no one — though Flaubert wished it, ironically — had with a wave of a magic wand transported to the cult of Art. I have always believed that Dumas’s books are like men themselves — intemperate, merry, lavish, generous, limpid but secretly erotic and insatiable. The page before me records that as he was dying, the elder Dumas gave a louis d’or to his son, author of the Dame aux Camélias, saying: You see this coin? Your father may have had the reputation of being a profligate, a spendthrift who threw away a fortune on his castles on the road to Bougival, an unrepentant lover of women who, wiser than he, asked nothing of him but the blossoms of the day; but look at this louis d’or, he’d had it when he arrived in Paris and he’d held on to it until the hour of his death.