Free Distant Relations by Carlos Fuentes Page B

Jean’s house, and of his own Spanish servants on the Avenue de Saxe. Undoubtedly, he murmurs as he gazes penetratingly at me, and murmured then as he was again falling asleep, that feudal impunity of Latin Americans, as anachronistic, as picturesque, as delicious, as suicidal … Fermina Márquez in Paris, Doña Bárbara on the plains of Apure …
    In a sterile landscape—but one that he dreamed was perfectly normal, even desired for its absolute absence of forms, colors, weather, or space, as if other landscapes, the accustomed ones, were the aberration and the names of its objects, forgotten and disgusting, were a perverse invention contrived to cloak the perfect whiteness of a self-sufficient cosmos, without need of trees, stones, flumes, blumes, and snew—captured in its own ineffectual, exhausted progression, advanced, without advancing, the sumptuous train of palanquins and trumpets, pages and palfreniers, prancing steeds and ragged beggars. And among the beggars he beheld the king adorned in all his robes and regalia, but icily ignored by all who surrounded him, soldiers and mendicants, as if he were but one of them, himself deceived, and on the litter of the king, borne on the backs of the palfreniers, traveled, in place of the king, a blond young beggar with black eyes, still a child, dressed in rags, with no crown but his golden curls, reclining languidly, unsure whether this was but another, innocent sport, neither cruel nor kind, but one the youth was inclined first to accept, and then renounce or accept according to his whim, as long as no one contested his place, and the king, whom everyone ignored except the dreamer who was listening from a different world, told how he had found the boy in an abandoned house, how to love him and care for him was to love or care for a little beggar.

8
    He was awakened very early by a persistent humming. When he opened his eyes, he had the sensation that the room was swelling, but it was merely the early-morning breeze, the pungent, far-reaching, ebullient air of the Île de France that lends its flavor to this region—air, a still drowsy Branly told himself, he had been breathing for eighty-three years.
    â€œOne of the positive attributes of ancient peoples is that they have learned to respect their old, because in them they see themselves. In their rush, young nations deny their elderly their wisdom and respect—even, finally, life.”
    â€œYou may be right,” I interrupted. “Unfortunately, Europe wants today to see itself as young, and, as you say, denies the existence of her old.”
    â€œIf for no other reason,” Branly continued, as if he had not heard me, “I deserve to live because I carry a library in my head. Do you know that if tomorrow we awoke to find all the world’s books disappeared, a few elderly men could, among us, re-create them.”
    I realized that he hadn’t appreciated my interruption, even less its demurrer. In the moment he was narrating to me, the breeze was billowing the curtains like sails, like Branly’s intelligent, curious eyes, half-open. He vaguely remembered a nocturnal visit from his host, but the empty tray from his haphazard meal was nowhere to be seen. And the window was now standing open. He could hear the morning sounds from the highways, increasingly feverish activity, laborers on their way to work. Branly could see them in his mind’s eye, ruddy-cheeked, flushed by the early-morning chill and their breakfast of cognac, dressed in blue denim and turtleneck sweaters and, sometimes even now, the traditional beret. He heard their joking, their gravelly laughter, heard them humming the melody of the madrigal— à la claire fontaine, m’en allant promener —as they walked by. In the distance, crows flocked above the woods in Enghien; but in the garden that, by pushing aside the curtains, he could admire in the solitude of the white light of a