It is an old man’s voice, my friend thought, and he says that in that instant he wondered if the Heredias were playing a game within a game, seeking, in addition to their names, and complementing that game, a correspondence between ages as well. He had just learned that the Victor Heredia in Monterrey was an old man; he guessed that the Victor Heredia of Enghien was also old. Had the names and ages of the Hugo in Puebla and the Victor in Mérida coincided, so that the father, who was the loser in names, was winner in the category of ages? Or it could be, ironically, that the ones with Victor’s name were to be old, and those with the father’s name young. The inherent nonsense of these combinations piqued Branly’s curiosity and his sense of humor; it also occurred to him that this might be the reason for Hugo’s unexpected irritation. Was my friend going to reward him with the news that this time the person who bore his son’s name was a young man? He disliked having to disillusion him.
“I hope you will accept what I am going to say in good humor. Two foreign friends of mine looked up your name in the telephone directory…”
“My name?”
“Please bear with me. Actually, they were looking for their names and found yours.”
“How is that?”
“It’s a kind of game, please don’t take offense…”
“Tell them to go play games with their bitch of a mother,” spat the voice, and the line went dead.
My friend returned to the salon and reported the failure of a mission he should have realized was absurd but had carried out because of an overrationalization of his keenness to participate in Victor Heredia’s games. This initial failure, he tells me, made him doubt his capacity to enter fully into the game, a game which even Hugo Heredia, at least a moment before, and to my friend’s surprise, had seemed reluctant to join in. Branly was aware of the Heredias’ restrained expectancy. My friend told them that he had failed, without going into detail. He waited, savoring the satisfaction of news withheld, certain that at any moment Hugo would ask the age of the man who had answered the phone. Was he old? Young? But the jesses of those questions were never loosed; they bound Hugo’s lips and his son’s as the falconer’s jesses immobilize his falcon. My friend finally broke the uneasy silence to say that he was sure they would be interested to know that the man who answered, who had said he was Victor Heredia, had the voice of an old or at least a tired man.
Hugo displayed no glimmer of reaction. It was Victor who looked at his father expectantly and asked: “Then may I go tomorrow, Papa? Will you let me?”
The father removed his spectacles, as if to suggest that eyes can be as tired as a voice, old or not. But he nodded in acquiescence, as if finally conceding that fatigue and old age are synonymous. My friend sipped his tea and wondered where the line lay that divided the unity of the father and son from their efforts to dominate one another. Victor accepted Hugo’s intellectual instruction; Hugo was not disturbed that his son whipped a servant. Both played the game of names together from the beginning, but Hugo refused to follow it to its conclusion and, if the occasion arose, to visit the man who bore his name. It was impossible to know which of the two was lying — the father, who perhaps wanted to protect his son from a risky encounter but not spoil an innocent game, or the son, who perhaps did not understand his father’s unwillingness to participate in the conclusion of the game, and so, though only in his imagination, included him in it.
But that was not my friend’s problem. He repeated this to himself the following morning as Hugo left for the opening meeting of the conference on the Place Fontenoy, and Etienne drove them along the Seine toward Epinay and then plunged through a succession of the monotonous, haphazardly redeveloped towns of the Val d’Oise.
Branly attempted to entertain Victor with some comments about the countryside; Etienne barely masked his yawns. The thought crossed my friend’s mind that he would have to find a more respectful and reserved chauffeur. He explained to Victor that they were approaching the region that from ancient times had been called the Pays de France, quite different from the neighboring provinces of Parisis, Sanlisis, Valois, Île de France, and Brie champenois; but all the time he was talking and entertaining Victor, believing he was concentrating on what he was saying, his mind actually was on what he is now telling me.
“It was only by a miracle that this lad and I happened to meet. I don’t mean because we were separated by geography, but because in the normal course of events I would have died before I met him, or even before he was born. Or possibly the boy might have died before I could meet him.”
He says he almost asked Victor to describe his brother, but just then Etienne, who in spite of everything, honest ham face and rimless spectacles, was very proficient at the wheel, turned from the highway and drove into the narrow business streets of Enghien, past the esplanade of the casino, the lake and the hot baths, beneath the railroad bridges, until he came to one of those magic, unexpected woods that redeem the ugliness of Parisian suburbs and obliterate not only the reality but even the memory of everything but these oaks lining the road, these arching chestnut trees filtering the fading September light.
As the Citroën turned into the private avenue of the Clos des Renards, my friend felt as if he were sinking into a world of undersea greenness. Once the automobile left behind the stone and iron arch displaying the name of the property, the avenue descended swiftly but smoothly and the trees, in conjugal embrace overhead, seemed to rise even taller. Below, lifting fingers of ivy covered the bed of this vegetal ocean. Cherry trees lent fiery grace to the deep, breathless coolness. Branly felt a sense of suffocation, as if in approaching this villa in Enghien he were descending in a submarine; the sea, too, cools as it drowns.
The car proceeded slowly over the thin layer of dead leaves. At the end of the avenue my friend could see a clearing, like the light at the end of a tunnel. He was eager, he confesses, to leave behind the suffocating darkness of the woods for what he could glimpse ahead, a French park, a garden of intelligence, a chessboard where the wild woods of a surely romantic imagination had been checkmated by a geometric precision of shrubs, greensward, pansies, and stone urns placed in perfect symmetry, like a brief prologue to the manor house, whose solitary façade rose as symmetrical as the garden, as if garden and house were reflecting one another, Branly says, in a nonexistent pool. In vain he looked for the element of order that as it duplicated would accentuate the symmetry: a mirror of water. The solid mansion rose from the level of the warning gravel — now crushed by an equally solid Etienne as he circled the garden and came to a stop before the entrance steps — to the crown of three slate-colored mansards and twin brick chimneys. And as if transported from the world of the forest, the villa became an undersea fortress, the useless barbican of a forgotten battle at the bottom of the sea.
A date was inscribed on the molding above the doorway: A.D. 1870. Etienne thought it was the number of the house and that he had made a wrong turn; he muttered curses against a municipal system that would assign two numbers to one house. My friend knew it was a date, not only by the reference to the Year of our Lord, which meant nothing to Etienne, but also because as he preceded Victor out of the car he glanced toward the second story of the house, where he saw hovering in the window a silhouette whose sail, like that of an ancient schooner, blended into indistinct waves of flowing hair — sail, fluttering curtains, white gown, all glimpsed fleetingly yet as one in the impression of antiquity they made on a man, my old, my dear friend, who had arrived with his young foreign pupil at what he thought was the end of a game but really was only the beginning.