Read Online Distant Relations by Carlos Fuentes - Free Book Online Page B

didn’t want to be held responsible, in case Branly should decide to file a claim for the second accident. Lucky for him, wasn’t it, that the first had happened outside and that the boy was responsible.
    Branly nodded, and asked Heredia to call Hugo, the boy’s father. But, as his host was about to leave the room, my friend said: “No, on second thought, don’t bother Señor Heredia; he might worry about his son, and there is no reason for that. Also, he is quite involved with his conference. If you don’t mind, speak with my servants. They are Spanish, so they will have no difficulty understanding you. Yes, that’s it, that way Señor Heredia will know where his son is, but will not worry about him. Could I trouble you, Heredia, to push my bed to the window? You can’t tell the hour in this gloom. And ask the boy to come up later and visit. I am not at all tired.”
    Without a word, Heredia pushed the bed closer to the window. Branly smiled; he commented to his host that he was indeed a sturdy fellow. He took the cane Heredia had propped against the bed and pulled aside the curtain to allow the sun to shine in.
    â€œAh,” he exclaimed with delight, and with a sincere impulse to share with Heredia his fundamental pleasure in life, the morning, and the sunshine. But the owner of the Clos des Renards had brusquely left the room. So, instead, instinctively seeking the signs of life his spirit had clamored for throughout the night, Branly looked out the window. His eyes took in the rational garden. He shook his head as he saw the spectacular evidence of his automobile’s collision with the oak tree, and only when his quite contented invalid’s eyes wandered toward the woods did he see the two figures standing hand in hand in the chiaroscuro of the birch trees. They stood so quietly they were barely visible; anything stationary in a natural setting succumbs to the universal law of mimesis.
    He dozed, thinking that perhaps his host had been right, perhaps he was not yet ready for strong emotion; the world had deceived him through the years by leading him to expect the respect he felt he deserved. A resentment as flagrant and gross as Heredia’s mounted in Branly’s breast, an indication of the existence of a world that he had vaguely known existed but had never known. How long had it been since anyone had had the effrontery to thwart his wishes? How long since anyone in his presence had interrupted the priestly murmur of conversation typical of the French; in fact, of any civilized people?
    Dusk was falling before his eyes, and as night approaches, the woods look like the sea. Vast, serene, inexhaustible, renewed in every breath. He felt suddenly suffocated, uncomfortably aware of the smell of tanned leather, and with a movement he then thought natural, but now, telling me, he recalls as violent, even desperate, he reached out with his cane and pushed open one of the casements of the window. As it swung open, he could hear the happy voices of the two boys, who obviously were playing beneath his window on the terrace guarded by lions.
    Their voices, Branly says, dissipated the asphyxiating odor of hide and filled the room, as if it were a delicate, tall-stemmed goblet, with tremors of the beautiful, melancholy twilight, and also with the ineffable, the quintessential, joy of the boys, who were laughing and singing—now he could hear it—the madrigal of the enraptured nightingale: Chante, rossignol, chante, toi qui as le coeur gai.
    Branly smiled and half-closed his eyes. There was an instant of silence and then the boys laughed again and began a question-and-answer game. He recognized the voice of the Mexican Victor Heredia. His was the voice responding to the questions posed by the second youth, the boy he still could not describe because he had not seen him clearly, only from afar, in the distance where the garden met the grove of birch trees. This