“I hope to God you were not mistaken.”
“We shall soon know, my friend. What do you think?”
I look at the sadly illuminated figure of Branly sitting listlessly in his threadbare brocade chair, wrapped in an ancient plush bathrobe, a man without descendants. I am seized by compassion, but refuse to be governed by it; I remember what his heritage is: the Heredias, Mexico, Venezuela, the story of which he is gladly divesting himself to give to me — who do not want it.
Even so, a kind of contrary compulsion, irreversible and irresistible, forces me to insist that my old friend tell me everything, as if exhausting all the possibilities of the narrative might mean the end of this story I never wanted to hear, and the resulting release from the responsibility of telling it to someone else. This is the only explanation I can offer for my next incredible questions.
“Isn’t there anything more, Branly? Are you sure you aren’t forgetting something? I must know everything before…”
As my elderly friend hears these words his eyes clear. He looks at me with a profound, almost mordant irony worthy, I say to myself, of his greatest moments of pleasure, intuition, presence, and power. This is how I imagine him looking that last time at Hugo Heredia, through the dusk of a solitary, sacred barranca where the gods of the New World lie slumbering.
“Before I die? Ah, my friend. Not quite yet. For a number of reasons.”
He sighs; he drums his fingers on the shabby brocade chair arm. I realize now that my questions were counter to my best interests: as the gods will one day rise from the rotting mangrove thickets where long ago they were murdered, so my questions sprang from my irrational desire to know. I must know everything before Branly dies and can no longer tell me, cannot bequeath me his story, condemning me to wander like a blind beggar pleading for the few verbal coins I must have to finish the story I inherited. If he died before I knew the conclusion, I would never be free. I had to know everything before I could transmit the story in its totality to another. But Branly was not aware of the chaos of my thoughts; he was enumerating the reasons he would live a while longer.
“No, I shall not die as long as I remember her and she remembers me. That is the first reason. The second, and more important, is that my death will not be borne on tonight’s wind; I sense the warmth of a St. Martin’s summer. Autumn will be detained a little longer, my friend. You remember that St. Martin was sainted because of his generosity. Did he not share his cloak with a beggar?”
Now he stares at me with disquieting discernment.
“Tomorrow is November 11th, Fuentes. Your birthday. You see, I am not yet senile, I remember the birth dates, the dates of the deaths of my friends. No, you must not worry. You and I are living but one of the infinite possibilities of a life and of a story. You are afraid to be the narrator of this novel about the Heredias because you fear the vile demon who may take revenge against the last man to know the story. But you are forgetting something I have tried to tell you more than once. Every novel is in a way incomplete, but, as well, contiguous with another story. Take your own life. In 1945, Fuentes, you decided to live in Buenos Aires, near Montevideo; you did not return to your native Mexico; you became a citizen of the River Plate region, and then in 1955 you came to live in France. You became less of a River Plate man, and more French than anything else. Isn’t that so?”
I said yes, he knew that as well as I, though at times I questioned the degree of my assimilation into the French world. He touched my hand with affection.
“Imagine; what would have happened if you had returned to Mexico after the war and put down roots in the land of your parents? Imagine; you publish your first book of stories when you are twenty-five, your first novel four years later. You write about Mexico, about Mexicans, the wounds of a body, the persistence of a few dreams, the masks of progress. You remain forever identified with that country and its people.”
“But it was not like that, Branly.” I spoke uncertainly. “I don’t know whether for good or ill, but I am not that person.”
With a strange smile, he asks me to pour him a drink from the bottle of Château d’Yquem beside his bed. Shouldn’t he, I ask, go back to bed? Yes, he will; later, when he decides it is time. Would I like a glass of that late wine, the fruit of the autumn grapes?
I join him in a toast.
“To your other life, Fuentes, to your contiguous life. Think who you might have been, and celebrate with me your birthday and the coming St. Martin’s summer days with a wine that postpones death and offers us a second vintage. St. Martin has again divided his cloak to shelter us from the winter. Think how the same thing happens with every novel. There is a second, a contiguous, parallel, invisible narration for every work we think unique. Who has written the novel about the Heredias? Hugo Heredia amid the ruins of Xochicalco, or the boorish owner of the Clos des Renards? I, who have told you the story? You, who someday will tell what I have told you? Or someone else, someone unknown? Here is another possibility: the novel was already written. It is an unpublished ghost story; it lies in a coffer buried under a garden urn, or under loose bricks at the bottom of a dumbwaiter shaft. Its author, need I say it? is Alexandre Dumas. Have no fear, my friend. I know how to survive terror.”
I press his hand. As I leave, he asks me to tell the housekeeper that she can go to bed, he will not be needing her. He wants to sleep late. But I really have no desire to speak with the woman whose eyes shine with the glimmer of unshed tears.
Yet, as I walk along the hallway leading from Branly’s bedchamber to the salon, I notice an open door that had been closed when I came to visit my friend this St. Martin’s eve.
As I left Branly in his bedroom, I had been thinking of the luminous, warm city, the renewed summer he had promised for the following day. As I pass the open door, I feel attracted as if by the light in my imagination, light that disperses the phenomena of the day, rain or fog, scorching heat or snow. I turn, curious about the source of the light, and watch as one tiny flame after another begins to flicker in the candelabra I had earlier, with surprise and dismay, noticed were missing from the salon.
I can dimly discern a pale hand in the shadows, moving from candle to candle. I remember how once young Victor in broad daylight, but behind drawn drapes, had lighted these same candelabra in this same house, but now, to my sudden awe, the room is transformed, transported to a different space, its axis equivocal, its symmetry questionable.
I enter the room. In vain I try to penetrate the ecclesiastic gloom enveloping the figure lighting the candles. Dazed, I retreat to the farthest corner, as far as possible from the candelabra with their bronze ram’s-head bases, the garlands of blindfolded girls whose bodies serve as candle holders, the bronze serpents whose fangs fasten on glass shades, the melted wax on the argentine backs of a pack of hunting hounds.
The dolorous hands light the last candle. The room is filled with light; a woman kneels before the table by her leather-canopied bed. On the table is the object I had always before seen in the salon, the clock suspended in an arch of gilded bronze, with the figure of a seated woman playing an ornate piano with griffin legs, in a sumptuous mounting of motionless draperies and doors. On the same bedside table is the sepia photograph of Branly’s father.
The woman is weeping, still on her knees, her hands covering her face.