Distant Relations by Carlos Fuentes

Author:Carlos Fuentes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

15

No. She returned punctually. But now she arrived laden with color, envisioned memories, signs and omissions more profound than her initial mystery. Then she had been separate from history, but now, Branly is telling me, it was in fact history that was responsible for making her more vivid but at the same time less real.

Nevertheless, though this invasion of his pristine dream of a woman eternally poised on the contiguous thresholds of birth and death by the concurrent, roiling tides of wars and passions, revenge and rebellion, the traffic of weapons and bodies, might have destroyed the pure essence of the woman now in addition mottled by a multiplicity of names, it made Branly realize that he was indebted to the Heredias for having interrupted his routine and its accompanying empty hours. This he acknowledged as he fell asleep that night, after he had been subjected to the schedule of his unsleeping host, and had judged a defeat the time spent with him, time that separated him from sunlit hours and the overheard conversations of the boys on the terrace.

At any rate, the elderly sleep very little; a drowsy old man is slightly ridiculous, my friend is saying now, as he consults the heirloom watch in his vest pocket, attached to an elegant gold chain.

“It is five o’clock.”

Branly asks which I would prefer, that he continue the story or that we go for a swim in the club pool and then (and here he laughs apologetically, as if this were a benevolent imposition), if I wished, dine together at the Laurent he had known as a youth. No, that would not be possible, the restaurant has been closed for many years, perhaps the Vert Galant on the Quai des Orfèvres: he has friends there, too. Shall he reserve a table for nine o’clock? I was struck by the unconscious associations his words reveal. He knows that one restaurant is still open for business and the other not, but he is not ready to accept the loss of the owners of the place he frequented in 1914; to him they are as real as the restaurateurs he sometimes visits today. At the moment, his second suggestion seemed considerably more attractive, but some irresistible compulsion caused me to say: “No, Branly, I don’t want you to interrupt your story.”

I did not dare explain that a terrible sense of inconclusiveness was beginning to assail me; I feared that a prolonged interruption would seal, unfinished, the various stories beginning to fuse into a single narrative. He acquiesced, and then told me that the real mystery of that night he had spent in the company of the French Victor Heredia lay in the fact that when he returned to his bedroom he fell into a deep dream, so deep that all that had happened seemed to become a part of it: his ascent into the attic of the Clos, his encounter there with the man with the white eyes and hair, his discovery of the

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