Distant Relations Read Online Free PDF Page B

directory…”
    â€œMy name?”
    â€œPlease bear with me. Actually, they were looking for their names and found yours.”
    â€œHow is that?”
    â€œIt’s a kind of game, please don’t take offense…”
    â€œTell them to go play games with their bitch of a mother,” spat the voice, and the line went dead.
    My friend returned to the salon and reported the failure of a mission he should have realized was absurd but had carried out because of an overrationalization of his keenness to participate in Victor Heredia’s games. This initial failure, he tells me, made him doubt his capacity to enter fully into the game, a game which even Hugo Heredia, at least a moment before, and to my friend’s surprise, had seemed reluctant to join in. Branly was aware of the Heredias’ restrained expectancy. My friend told them that he had failed, without going into detail. He waited, savoring the satisfaction of news withheld, certain that at any moment Hugo would ask the age of the man who had answered the phone. Was he old? Young? But the jesses of those questions were never loosed; they bound Hugo’s lips and his son’s as the falconer’s jesses immobilize his falcon. My friend finally broke the uneasy silence to say that he was sure they would be interested to know that the man who answered, who had said he was Victor Heredia, had the voice of an old or at least a tired man.
    Hugo displayed no glimmer of reaction. It was Victor who looked at his father expectantly and asked: “Then may I go tomorrow, Papa? Will you let me?”
    The father removed his spectacles, as if to suggest that eyes can be as tired as a voice, old or not. But he nodded in acquiescence, as if finally conceding that fatigue and old age are synonymous. My friend sipped his tea and wondered where the line lay that divided the unity of the father and son from their efforts to dominate one another. Victor accepted Hugo’s intellectual instruction; Hugo was not disturbed that his son whipped a servant. Both played the game of names together from the beginning, but Hugo refused to follow it to its conclusion and, if the occasion arose, to visit the man who bore his name. It was impossible to know which of the two was lying—the father, who perhaps wanted to protect his son from a risky encounter but not spoil an innocent game, or the son, who perhaps did not understand his father’s unwillingness to participate in the conclusion of the game, and so, though only in his imagination, included him in it.
    But that was not my friend’s problem. He repeated this to himself the following morning as Hugo left for the opening meeting of the conference on the Place Fontenoy, and Etienne drove them along the Seine toward Epinay and then plunged through a succession of the monotonous, haphazardly redeveloped towns of the Val d’Oise.
    Branly attempted to entertain Victor with some comments about the countryside; Etienne barely masked his yawns. The thought crossed my friend’s mind that he would have to find a more respectful and reserved chauffeur. He explained to Victor that they were approaching the region that from ancient times had been called the Pays de France, quite different from the neighboring provinces of Parisis, Sanlisis, Valois, Île de France, and Brie champenois; but all the time he was talking and entertaining Victor, believing he was concentrating on what he was saying, his mind actually was on what he is now telling me.
    â€œIt was only by a miracle that this lad and I happened to meet. I don’t mean because we were separated by geography, but because in the normal course of events I would have died before I met him, or even before he was born. Or possibly the boy might have died before I could meet him.”
    He says he almost asked Victor to describe his brother, but just then Etienne, who in spite of everything, honest ham face and rimless spectacles, was very