Distant Relations by Carlos Fuentes Page A

is well stocked, my friend; this isn’t your common Spanish inn, eh?”
    As they helped Etienne into the ambulance, he said: “I wouldn’t want M. le Comte to put himself out on my account.”
    â€œDon’t worry, Etienne,” said Branly. “I repeat, everything will be all right.”
    Branly and Heredia followed the ambulance, my friend driving the Citroën very gingerly, and during the brief ride to the hospital he had an opportunity to clarify the reason for their visit and to explain the coincidence of the names. The Frenchman laughed, and begged my friend to forgive him for the language he had used over the phone. He hadn’t known that such a distinguished person, a count no less, was calling; he’d thought it was some clown, it was almost an everyday thing these days to get that kind of call at any hour of the night or day, and when he’d answered that particular call—that is, the Count’s—he was still half asleep. He’d already told him he slept late. Would M. le Comte de Branly forgive him? He wanted to apologize for that, too. He hadn’t known he was a count or he would have used “de,” de Branly.
    Branly refrained from saying that he hadn’t used it himself, but the irrepressible Heredia had already launched into a tale about a Cuban family that had emigrated to Haiti during the uprising against the Spanish at the end of the century, first assimilated into the French language in the heat- and salt-pocked marble salons of Port-au-Prince, and then, become rich in imports and exports, absorbed into the France of the First World War, riding the crest of a savory and aromatic mountain of bananas, tobacco, rum, and vanilla. Relatives of the poet? What poet? And of course, he concluded with an ostentatious air of ennui, they had forbidden the use of Spanish, which for them carried only memories of restlessness, barbarism, and revolution.
    â€œFrench is like my garden, elegant,” said Heredia. “Spanish is like my woods, indomitable.”
    My friend can’t remember his response to the French Heredia; it doesn’t matter. Branly, who instinctively is courteous and hospitable to everyone, found something insufferable in the tone of this man with the pale eyes, straight nose, and white mane of hair. Heredia made a display of being courteous and hospitable, but this was precisely what bothered my friend. He suspected that Heredia’s affability was a maneuver masking some overweening sense of physical or moral supremacy not immediately apparent to Branly but which Heredia hoped to minimize by lavishing attention on his guest. My friend was particularly repelled by the obsequious and at the same time ironic humility typical of the bourgeois parvenu who, terrified at the possibility of again becoming a servant, attempts to subjugate those persons he fears and admires.
    My friend knows the world well enough to be able to identify those times when another person feels a superiority he does not want to show, but by that very fact, and by acting more than usually cordial, calls attention to what he wants to hide. He says he was on the verge of letting Heredia know by his actions that the opposite was more accurate, but the contrast between a French family of ancient lineage and a colonial transplant was so obvious that Branly felt embarrassed even for having considered snubbing Heredia. Undoubtedly, Heredia had too often suffered from French superiority and pedantry—which often go hand in hand—not to recognize the differences between them. He knew how to play on those differences and, in the case of those less cautious or less secure than Branly, how to ensnare the unwary.
    In contrast to Heredia, my friend decided to practice an impeccable courtesy based less on conscious will than on custom, running the risk that Heredia, in turn, would recognize my friend’s stratagem.
    That is why he is sure, he says, that he had done