Distant Relations by Carlos Fuentes Page B

nothing to provoke the comment Heredia made as they parked in front of the hospital, facing the ambulance; and if the words were spoken, it was perhaps because they were, though for different reasons, in the minds of both men.
    â€œYou have no cause to look down your nose at a man who has worked for his wealth instead of inheriting it through no effort of his own.”
    Such an unexpected sally, especially one so close to the mark in regard to what really was passing through my friend’s mind, evoked a swift response: “Everything one owns has either been bought, inherited, or stolen. Have no fear. We are not as different as you seem to believe.”
    But whatever Heredia’s intentions—and Branly began to suspect that Heredia hoped to distract him, to involve him in a banal conversation, to challenge his honor, to provoke a long but courteous silence like the one that must have motivated the bizarre words Heredia had tried to thrust like banderillas into the neck of his guest—Branly freed his mind of the implications of this new and unexpected development, realizing with lucid clarity that a man like Heredia would not ordinarily worry about a chauffeur. Normally, he would not lift a finger for him, or go out of his way to offer him aid. Heredia had made up his mind, had acted, telephoned the hospital, before he knew who Branly was. His attentiveness toward Etienne did not spring out of compassion for the servant or adulation of the master, but from some other motive that Heredia had deceitfully hoped to obscure by proudly exhibiting the most repulsive emotion my friend and I know: resentment.
    Branly did not hesitate for a moment. The instant Heredia got out of the Citroën, my friend slammed the door and threw the car into reverse. The lights of the ambulance blinded him, but they also blocked out the astounded Heredia standing on the sidewalk with one hand to his eyes, protecting himself from the luminous lances of the ambulance and the Citroën crossed in blinding white combat that terrified my friend, until, still in reverse, he found space in which to turn the car, and, shifting into high gear, followed the signs that would lead him away from the hospital, away from Heredia and Etienne—standing like statues, watching his desperate struggle to reverse the car and drive off in the direction of the Clos des Renards. He knew now that Heredia had wanted him away from there—why? He had wanted to lure him away and keep him away, but he would not succeed. The dazzle of the headlights did not prevent him from seeing a truth spawned in darkness, untouched by any light except a psychic certainty: if the French Victor Heredia was not interested in him or his chauffeur, then he could be interested only in the person who bore his name, the Mexican Victor Heredia.
    My friend says he felt as if black shadows had congealed in his throat. The signs led him from the center of Enghien toward the highways that were the source of his night terrors, and in the prison of glass and lights surrounding him, the vision of his fatal accident and that of a park filled with children who no longer recognized him blended together like two crystalline rivers that for years had flowed side by side, finally to be silently joined that night. Victor needed him, he was in danger. That is why Heredia had lured him from the Clos des Renards, Branly tells me now, and adds that was all he knew—rather, all he needed to know—at this incredible moment in his life. He drove blindly, recklessly, certain that he was racing toward an encounter with his recurrent nightmare of death on a night highway. But, above all else, he felt that he was the object of an implacable hostility.
    He could not identify its source. He did not want to consider Heredia capable of transmitting such sovereign hatred. Besides, he had left the Frenchman standing on the sidewalk of the hospital on the Boulevard d’Ormesson just now, blinded by