But picture this, Petya: a gentleman with a lady by his side and, with them, a dwarf. A rather different image from the one I’d had in mind, an image that can be read or glossed with no other significance but this: the dwarf was Batyk, who’d insisted on coming with us and whom I call a dwarf in the literal sense of a physical dwarf, not a moral dwarf. And not at all, never, in the allegorical sense to which the Commentator alludes with deepest hypocrisy in order to justify his own imposture: the sense of newcomers who, however small or dwarflike they may be, can see farther because they’re perched on the shoulders of the giants of the past.
The same went for Batyk, on my shoulders, though it would be more correct to say on the Writer’s shoulders, feeling him walk along behind me, paying attention to what he was seeing from that height, without understanding a thing. As when, to my disconcertion, your mother stepped into a jewelry store, with me all unaware of what prompted her to stop in front of the display window (the jeweler’s name etched in a semicircle on the glass), study some of the gems there, and then go inside for a closer look … Sensing that we’d be standing there for some time, I positioned myself next to the doorway in a patch of sunlight which was exactly that yellow color the Writer devotes such beautiful words to in the Book, but which now, in the aim of bothering and confounding Batyk, I used as the pretext for an odious discourse on Ferragamo: how that color, mingled with a lovely blue, would be perfect for a pair of Ferragamos, which is what we should have been looking at, not jewelry, Nelly. (I felt Batyk leaning over my shoulder, stretching out his neck—what shoes? which shoes?—stooping lower myself to make him stumble and fall on the slope of my false interest in fashion, inexplicable in a man like me, as if a matter of such little importance as a pair of shoes could occupy my mind, turn my thoughts aside for one second from what we had gone into that store to do.)
The adorable dress of layered red muslin your mother wore that day, her hand palm down on her thigh, the better to scrutinize a pink gem in the display case. She raised her eyes, shooting me a meaningful glance beneath another client’s elbow: a diamond, innumerable tiny facets that light could go into and then not find its way out again for one beat or two, until it flashed once more against my eyes, my astonished eyes. I looked up into her eyes without knowing what I was supposed to be seeing there, as if she were a botany teacher who goes on ahead and waits for you beneath a tree on an excursion through a garden. You reach her out of breath, you want to tell her something about the day, the view, but she puts her finger to your lips and asks you with her eyes: “Understand?”
Yes, Nelly: stones, diamonds, gothic diamonds, marquise diamonds, star diamonds. I don’t want them, have no money for them. Or else (I suddenly stood up straight, looked back into her eyes), or else: “Hand over the stone, motherfucker, hand over the stone before my husband gets back and makes you talk. I know you’ve got it. No use pretending …” And I saw in the red of that stone, its blood-filled interior, how easily Batyk could smash my head against the counter, the iron grip of his fingers around my neck, or send me crashing against the reinforced glass. How the shopkeeper would shout, and not because of the glass (bulletproof), which would never break. Giving vent, in that moment of danger, to his anger and indignation, in Korean or Tamil. Meaning: Get out of here you Russian pigs, go kill each other outside.
I’d give it back. I’d run back to the house, fly up the stairs, take it out from under the mattress. Here you go, Nelly, I never wanted it, you know that, don’t you? Never the slightest intention of keeping it, always meaning to give it back. And I had thought about doing that …
Easily comprehending, at that moment, my mistake: the mistake of having wanted to steal from the mafia.
“That’s not true. My mama is not in the mafia.”
“No, it is true. Just wait.”
I regretted everything in that fearful moment, entering cold regions full of fear and leaving them for warm regions full of fear. Having taken a position as the tutor of a child as wayward as you, Petya, having focused my thoughts on the wife of a mafioso and spoken of warps in space with your father. All that as I stood at the counter without daring to open my eyes and look at her, without seeing that she’d moved to the back of the store without any of this in her mind, that she hadn’t even noticed the stone was missing. So many stolen diamonds—if a single one fell down and was lost, what did it matter?
Were there, I wondered immediately—horrors! Petya, horrors!—were there many more of those diamonds lodged along the edges of the staircase, hidden between the sofa cushions and under the living room rug?
4
I must amplify the previous commentary. I had just returned to my room to flop down, not bothering to pull back the bedspread, lying diagonally across the bed, still trembling, when I heard music that someone had put on, and lowered the Book to listen.
The stereo’s silvery columns filling the air with a melody that made me think of the Writer, of a breeze and the shimmering surface of water that is exactly what the Book is about: the days you discover from your window without there being the slightest gap between the vision of the sea lapping at the coast, the cypresses in the distance, and your mother, her soul, the way she had of gazing gratefully up at me, the way she squeezed my hand when we’d returned to the house, happy to have gone out. As if I, as if my chest were armored with metal plaques that bullets would rebound from. Or as if the Book, placed between my heart and the gun barrel, could miraculously stop the bullet that was tearing through its pages with a single line, this line: one is a count or one is not a count, it’s not of the slightest importance, as Mme. de Villeparisis notes, and with good reason.
For she didn’t stop talking, all the way there and as we went from store to store, nervously talking about the mafia, the many Russian mafiosi who’d taken refuge there, the whole coast crawling with them. And I stared at her in amazement, thinking: But you people are the mafia, maja! What are you talking about? You yourselves are mafia! And as we went past, I signaled her with a pointed glance at a Guardia Civil’s lacquered bicorn. Look there, I meant to tell her. Why is it that you wouldn’t go outside unless I was with you?
Bent over the pages of the Book without reading, or reading blankly, pages going past without the Book’s allowing anything inside—a rare thing in the Writer who always grabs you, his pages like Velcro, your eyes like felt. Trying to decipher, suddenly lowering my eyes to focus on the explanation, first found in the Book, for their great fear. But then she appeared in my room, your mother: knocking, tock tock, on my doorframe.
“I have a gift for you,” she said. “Though it’s not a gift, it’s your salary.”
She came closer.
“Don’t you love dancing? You should dance for joy. It’s more than we owe you, but I wanted to reward you for your goodness to the boy. That’s why we went to see the diamonds. I wanted to find out how much it’s worth.”
She left the center of the room and walked toward me without taking her hand out of her pocket. Certain of the effect it would (and, indeed, did) have to drop into my hand, rolling bumpily down from hers, a stone, a diamond in the rough, an uncut gem. The size of a pea or bigger still. The size of a rather large pea.
I didn’t manage to say a thing, or rather I said, stupidly, pointlessly, “Ah, yes!” and thought: How does she know I love to dance? So much?
And then immediately: My salary! Finally! But in the form of a small diamond (one karat, three karats, not small). A capsule or sphere of crystal in which I saw myself diving off a dock into water, younger and thinner than I was then (than I am now), wearing Hawaiian shorts … The yellow silk of her kimono, the birds and vegetation embroidered on it. The perfectly unrumpled boughs exquisitely situated on the sleeve which lengthened, following her arm. Without managing to raise my eyes and tell her (which is what I should have told her): But Nelly! It’s a fortune! It’s a lot of money! Which is what I thought and was about to say, but then, already incapable of thinking straight, I imagined kiss
ing her hand while my eyes remained on the stone, seeking there the words and explanation for such generosity and munificence.
There also entered my mind the idea, which I had not sought within myself, that this was the perfect twin of the stone I’d found in the grass. It kept me from lifting my eyes, that diamond, I gave it one more astonished glance and was about to raise my head, but Nelly had gone. Whether amused or annoyed by my surprise or apparent ingratitude, I don’t know.
5
Has anyone ever given you a blue diamond, Petya? Extracted from a woman’s kimono, the smooth glide of its silk across her skin? No longer thinking of her as the abandoned wife of a mafioso (she herself a member of the mafia: psst, quiet!), but as a woman I could seduce, my hands on her wrists, bringing her one, two faltering steps toward where I sat on the bed, the folds of silk coming toward my eyes in a rush. Surrounding her with my arms, letting them rest on her waist, breathing in the sweet fragrance of her body. What if she were a thief, what did it matter? What if she were a murderess? How many women do we watch in bedazzlement as they walk down the street, gazing at their legs, bedazzled, and those may well be the legs of a murderess, a thief—impossible to tell from the line of an ankle, the curve of an instep.
Have you ever found a blue diamond in the grass, Petya? I fingered the earlier stone in my pocket and pulled it out, the two more alike on the palm of my hand than my preliminary mental comparison had registered. Fearful now of being spied on by fiber-optic cables: anything was possible in a house like that. Batyk stabbing at my face on the screen with his finger and shouting for Nelly. “Look, aren’t there two stones there? Isn’t that one identical to the one you just gave him for a paycheck? Where did he …” Etcetera. Then, breaking off his reflections, he would leap up the stairs, his chest full of hatred, to hit me.
In one movement, supple as a thief in a hotel room, I switched off the lamp. Then, Petya, as the light slowly withdrew from the halogen bulb and went out, the stones began shining crazily, phosphorescing as if they were the last two points of solder a gigantic man were applying to my chest, sealing up the vacuum in that ampoule. Then, certain I was closed up inside, seeing me raise my bewildered eyes in there, he rubbed his hands in satisfaction, took a step, and was gone.
6
Those stones phosphorescing, glowing on the palm of my hand, trying to tell me something, foggily. That I’d been spied on! Suddenly I understood: I’d been spied on! The memory hadn’t come to me until the moment I switched the light off and remembered those eyes, gleaming like carbuncles in the cave of a face. In the discotheque, at the back of the discotheque, as day was dawning or almost dawning outside but the corridors within were still dark. And in the darkness inside, someone, over by the wall, had been spying on me, watching me dance, given over to the foul—and for me insane—diversion of dancing. From the moment I stepped onto the dance floor until I went out along the corridor to the parking lot and the sun hit me in the face.
And those eyes, which I didn’t remember having seen until now, which I’d buried among other impressions, bloomed before me at that moment or were dragged out into the light by the maddening glow of the stones on my hand.
The anguish, now, of having been watched, the anxiety of having seen, as I twirled and spun, a pair of eyes gleaming from the back of the disco and, I had only just understood: fixed on me. Like the terrible eyes the Writer sees flashing in a hallway in Saint Petersburg; he realizes he’s being watched because he sees a gleam, and when he turns his head he sees it blink out. Hidden there, that man, knife in hand, to kill me. And, in the Writer, I had to stand there like an idiot, or with the magnanimity of a prince, seeking him out in the darkness, making my eyes, brimming with goodness, illuminate the other man’s, which were cold and inhuman. I should have called out to him, told him, Don’t spy on me, Batyk (for it was Batyk): Don’t spy on me. There’s nothing here for you to take back to Nelly or Vasily, nothing I would be ashamed of. Even if I did go home with great fear in my heart, the tremendous anguish of having danced like that, unstoppably, thinking: Dancing for what? With what end in mind? Dancing continually like a man possessed until the last song, whether commented upon or without commentary. God! When I had a house, a job, my pupil awaiting me. What if they could take advantage of my late homecoming, those who were spying on me (if it wasn’t Batyk), the ones inside the house were so afraid of; what if they were waiting for me to open the door so as to erupt violently into the garden. Not Batyk, I repeat: the Russian mafiosi they were all so fearful of, the ones they never stopped talking about. Waiting outside until dawn in order to get into the house.
But no: it had been him, Batyk.
If not, then where did that comment come from, the one that stopped me in my tracks, asking myself … How does she know that I dance? Frenetically? (That was what she meant, your mother.) How does she know?
7
And then, two days later, back down to the city again. Your mother and I, arm in arm, strolling farther and farther from the little bay in search, I hoped, of a place where we wouldn’t be seen. Then, at the end of that long walk, we sat down on a bench at the tip of a jetty and she kicked off her red moccasins and lifted her feet so that, after an instant of weightlessness, her calves rippled with a dense movement that touched me to the core. And I realized I loved her desperately and was full of tenderness for her.
On that dock, far out over the water, she was continually looking back at the path—in case Batyk were coming, in case he’d followed us, I imagined then, but now I understand: she was debating whether to let me in on the secret. The water pounding beneath us like the motor of a boat about to speed away, the first spin of the propeller. Gazing at me while the dock behaved as if it were about to move, all the force of that water, and Nelly calculating whether or not to get me involved in it. If only she herself had weighed anchor, told me, putting her hand on her heart, gazing into my eyes, “Stay here. I’ll be back in two weeks, I’ll call you.” Or, rather: “Go ahead, what are you going to do all alone here? You’ll get bored.” Separated by the blades of water down there between the boards, the sun in the sky. Stripes of water between the jetty’s planks and on her breast. And she was debating.
I saw that and was afraid for a moment that she’d actually say something. I said something, spoke to her about what I’d been paid. “You don’t know how grateful I am. I will need, would have preferred cash, but no! Nelly, I’m lying: How can I tell you? It’s more than I was owed, much more …”
“Let’s go,” she interrupted.
We’d be seeing more jewelry, I thought. She’d give me a few lessons on how to spend that money, the fortune it no doubt represented—a diamond! Then the rest of it seemed to happen under water, as if it was us flowing between the boards. The blur of beach-goers pretending to smoke in the sidewalk cafés, lighting a cigarette in an alley between two stores, the two of us sheltered from the wind, the narrow passageway with its service entrances and a man with a gun, visible for a second, before diving into the mist to fire at us from there, under cover. Leaving the shore at top speed, racing to a high point along the coast.
8
Like a pair of assistant directors scouting along the edge of a steep cliff for the right location to film a scene of love and complicity against the wide-open sky. The way she gave me her hand without looking at me, placing or lodging her moccasins in the grass, her calves flexing at every step. Without turning toward me when we reached the top, both looking out, both of us educated in the same antique (or primary) painters, our eyes seeing, and my legs feeling from the air that blew in through the bottoms of my trousers and swept at her skirt, that we had arrived.
I’d imagined for a moment that I would still be telling her about the hatred I harbored against the Spaniard, that painter (“the greatest of the moderns”—in other words, a commentator), and that she would listen to me without saying a word, only to suddenly turn and present me with her lips, rapidly revolving, pivoting on the axis of her neck, h
er eyes shooting out sparks, transformed by the sun into diamonds.
But this was what she did: she lifted her arm and stretched out her hand so that a ray of light reached my eyes, sweeping the meadow to its right, directing that light with dizzying skill or invisible diligence: the blue, the gold of the tardy sun, the green of the plants, the violet of flowers that seemed to grow larger as the beam of light swept over them.
And, revealed and concealed by the turning blades of the sun, which was simplified like a sun in a poster, its rays slicing the air into circles, her lips drew near and revolved before me, appearing and disappearing behind the beams. Pale pink outside the ray of light, shiny red within it.
Because the gesture of extending her finger had warped the surrounding atmosphere and as this magnifying glass developed in the air around it, the blue stone on her finger began shining brighter and brighter. I had only to lean forward a bit more to analyze its chemical composition (carbon, rings of carbon) and to marvel for the umpteenth time, now very close, at its unusual size: the disproportion between the size of that gem, the size of her necklace’s cabochons, and the cheesy little stones worn by Silvia of Sweden and Margriet of the Netherlands.
And along the edge of that airy magnifying glass entered the words of a long explanation that I read as if in a trance, without being able to take my eyes off its surface for a second, the words distending as they reached the edges, then disappearing—but I had no need to reread them because their meaning was not escaping me. This was not a passage to comment upon, delve deeply into, and explore in order to extract some hidden message. All was expressed and stated with utmost clarity, golden words against a blue background. Without my ever having been able, without my ever having imagined anything like that, not the slightest inkling in all that time.
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