Free Distant Relations by Carlos Fuentes Page A

that of the father.
    The latter was looking at my friend with the eyes of a whipped pup. “Why are you so contemptuous of me, M. le Comte?”
    Branly looked up. He nearly dropped his fork on the tin tray with a great clatter, but instead lifted his eyebrows.
    â€œI said we don’t speak Spanish in my house, but you didn’t believe me, you told me to speak Spanish to your servants, that they would understand me, you…”
    Branly says he was seized by a violent emotion. Contrary to custom, he was tempted to express it.
    â€œBut,” as he explains to me this afternoon, “Heredia did not deserve my anger. A man who would bare himself in that way, whining and filled with self-pity, did not deserve my anger. Self-pity is merely a different manifestation of the resentment you and I find so intolerable.”
    â€œHad you set that trap for him deliberately?” I dare ask.
    He insists that, in a manner of speaking, he had acted in self-defense. For one thing, Heredia had woven a web of deceptions, expecting that his discreet and courteous guest would not call attention to them. Second, his deception could be countered only with similar, tacit, deceptions—for instance, asking him to speak Spanish to Branly’s servants. Branly had decided to dupe Heredia in whatever manner possible.
    â€œI am amazed, M. Heredia, that in the house of a man of Caribbean extraction there is no image of the patron saints of that area, a Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, a Mexican Guadalupe, a Virgen de Coromoto…”
    He pronounced the names with a heavy French accent, the Vir-guen de la Ca-rhee-dad del Co-brhay, the Ga -da-loupe, the Vir-guen de Co-rho-mo- to. He was willing, he explains, to wager that the French Heredia was lying about his ancestors, and if so, he was lying about other matters. But he did not accuse him that night.
    â€œWhat is important is that through my servants you relayed my message to Don Hugo Heredia.”
    He started to ask, “You did give them the message?” but refrained, not wanting to offer Heredia the opportunity, an opportunity silently solicited by the Spaniard of the Clos des Renards, to do as he did, to turn his back on Branly without answering, to pause on the threshold, and only then to speak, with a kind of hangdog rage. “Caridad, not Ca-rhee-dad, Gua-da- lu -pe, not Ga daloupe, Virhen, not Vir-guen, Co-ro- mo -to, not Corhomo to. This is not a whorehouse, M. le Comte.”
    He swept from the chamber wrapped in a dignity even more doleful than his initial self-pity. My friend smiled; Heredia had not dared refuse what Branly had asked as a favor, and because it was accompanied by a rebuff, Heredia had understood it to be an order.
    As he was eating his solitary meal, my friend pondered the relationship between the other father and son, Hugo Heredia and his son, Victor. As he tells me now in our conversation in the dining room abandoned by everyone except the two of us, he realized that between the two Mexicans there was a kind of understanding, an interpenetration, inconceivable between the French father and son. As far as he had been able to tell, the young Heredia of the Clos des Renards could not be less like his father. He did not have to see the boy; one had only to hear that voice to recognize the delicacy, the sweetness, the moderation of the youth, whose very being repudiated the crude insolence, the excesses, of the father. Yes, from that first evening beside the barranca he had accepted without question the unspoken understanding between Victor and Hugo Heredia. He was sure that, because of their mutual confidence, the call from his unpleasant host had been sufficient to allay the anthropologist’s uneasiness about his son’s absence. Their understanding, Branly murmured in his temporary bed, and now to me at his customary table in the Automobile Club, was somehow connected with the boy’s brutal treatment of the servant in