Distant Relations by Carlos Fuentes Read Free Book Online

wondered whether our evasive Victor Heredia might not be found among the dispirited gamblers. Branly, you see, was still convinced that the person who shared the young Mexican’s name was a man of advanced years. He says he had made that judgment when he heard the voice over the telephone. He admits that he rejected, a priori, the idea that the bearer of young Victor’s name could be a physical double. At least, he said, he could find comfort in the fact that he had sensed what he was now trying to communicate to me, the feeling that he was keeping watch before a mirror, hoping it would dare incarnate the figure hiding within. At least, he says, he had that intuition.
    â€œYou see, I always believed that even if I found him I would need to continue searching, to wait patiently until he revealed his true face. I did it for the lad, I assure you.”
    As dusk approached, the old man and the boy, who had met purely by chance, who under normal circumstances would never have met, because the man should have died before he met the youth, and the boy might easily have been born after the man’s death, strolled together to the lake at Enghien. They enjoyed the promenade and decided that this time they would walk to the Clos des Renards. Branly told Etienne to have a cup of coffee and in a half hour to pick them up at the entrance to the estate. As they walked, Victor kept lagging behind, inspecting and investigating and skipping in the childlike way that had caught Branly’s attention in Cuernavaca. My friend, who walks straight as a ramrod in spite of his wounded leg, now hung his head in thought, wondering whether it was possible that the half-glimpsed figure in the second-story window was the Victor Heredia they were searching for. But as often as he considered this possibility, he rejected it. My friend had no way of knowing if the voice he had heard over the telephone was actually that of the French Victor Heredia. As he walked ahead of Victor, erect, occasionally resting his weight on his cane, he tried to reconstruct the telephone conversation. When he had asked for Heredia, the voice had countered with the question: Who wants him? And when he explained that he had looked up his name in the directory, the man was at first surprised, then insulting; he had never conceded that his name was Victor Heredia.
    My friend tells me now, gazing at the goblet of sauterne scarcely less pale than the hand holding it, that as he walked along, followed by young Victor Heredia, and breathing the gasoline fumes, the train smoke, and the first mists from September woods decaying with their fruitless harvests, he wondered whether that voice could be related to the white sail-like silhouette that had passed so swiftly across the window of the Clos des Renards, whether the voice and the image, related or not, might belong to the person called Victor Heredia, or whether they merely served him, looked after him, taught him, tended him, recalled or awaited him. If the voice and the figure were not Victor Heredia’s, my friend insists this afternoon, then Victor Heredia was cared for by a servant, looked after by a guardian, taught by a tutor, tended by a doctor, recalled by a kinsman, or awaited by a lover.
    They were approaching the wall surrounding the estate of the Clos des Renards; my friend admits that he was weaving a mystery, and that doing so amused him. He stopped to wait for Victor, who was lagging behind, and saw him standing beside the high moss-covered wall, his head against the mustard-colored stone. Dusk was falling quickly now; Branly called Victor, beckoning to him; the boy left the wall and came running. He had a snail in his hands, which he showed to my friend. Heads together, absorbed in the mollusk, they walked toward the arch that marked the entrance to the woods with its avenue of chestnuts, oaks, and dry leaves that had not fallen from any of the surrounding trees. Branly started. Beneath leaden eyelids,