Rex

by Jose Manuel Prieto

  The panic I lived with for many days, the danger that filled the air until one afternoon looking out the window, keeping watch in case the killers were coming, I realized none of it was true. The tree growing out at a far point along the beach, which I hadn’t seen until that day. Crystal clear: their story was made up out of whole cloth, for the manipulative, shady, dirty purpose of making me sell the diamonds.

  All of it false, Petya, from beginning to end! There was no Kirpich, no Raketa, no one had swindled anyone, your mother’s fear was pure dramatic performance, as in the movies! My love for her, my obvious love and deep feeling for her, used and channeled to force me to take this step.

  They’d agreed on it, planned it out with Batyk, who had mysteriously disappeared the day we took the second outing. They were subtly winning me over, plunging me—a mere child, no older than you in spirit—into a dense cloud of ink and deception, knowing me incapable of correctly reading the twisted minds of three adults, allowing me to hold her close while dancing, the heat of her breasts through the dress. From her warm arms to the fear of being executed for having seduced his wife.

  And then, without giving me time to come back to my senses, zap!—Larissa! The ultimate blonde, the most beautiful woman, the incredibly appealing young lady in whose delightful proximity I’d be softened up once and for all. Thus weakened, and previously addled by the revelation of the ersatz diamonds, I would agree to sell them, my eyes vacant, my pulse fluttering.

  And should I fail to yield immediately, should they perceive some residual stiffness in my neck, there was the showy ploy of the cell phone call and their feigned panic that the monsters straight out of Wells and Welles were catching up to us.

  Coming toward us, those men, and nothing could stop them.

  I inquired: And if you gave them back the money, wouldn’t they be satisfied with that? Wouldn’t we ultimately gain the most important thing, Nelly, which is time?

  They don’t want it back, was her answer, they want us dead. What’s more, we’d never manage to sell so many millions. Nor is that the plan; we don’t want you out there selling that many stones, only what’s necessary, just enough money to fly to South America and settle there.

  I wouldn’t go back there with them, Petya, repatriated by that strange affair and then suffering and regretting later, many winters later, in that hotel room.

  And when I’d reached this point in my reflections, the tree out at the far point along the beach explained to me, rustling its branches: “Excellent! Very good! What you’ve come up with is the true explanation, the closest reading, the correct gloss of all that part of the Book, its first chapters or commentaries, no less.” Or was I to read that fiction as real, the whole improbable story of the swindle, the tall tale about murderers? False, Petya! False, Vasily! And—forgive me!—false, Nelly!

  There were no such murderers, no danger threatening us, no malevolent pursuit, only your father’s infinite ineptitude, Petya. The times he’d tried to sell the diamonds and hadn’t been able to, staying at Larissa’s place instead, contemplating her alabaster breasts like a modern jeweler who selects mother of pearl, opal, and quartz where others before him had used only diamonds. But for what reason? Why diamonds? he must have said to himself, when I have garnet lips and cheeks of pearl right here?

  No murderers. They could have refrained, Petya, from lying to me, your mother putting on that big show of fear. Dreaming up the whole thing entirely for my benefit in the sole—and now, in the branches of the tree, clearly discernible—aim of making me sell those stones.

  5

  Now, just as I took to be false the Commentator’s claim that the ancients had no word for blue, that they didn’t distinguish between the various tones of blue so that to them the sea really was a sheet of red, the wine-dark sea, I resisted believing in the reality of the murderers and took them for a tale ingeniously spun by your parents in the sole and obvious aim of making me sell the diamonds. Until one morning I heard it, the sound and rumble of the sea changing color. The machinery ground weightily to a halt; the motor in the depths of the ocean ceased to pump out blue, and the whole sea, its entire surface, took on that other, impossible coloration.

  Perhaps I’d thought the wine color was some optical device, the sea studied through a prism, an uncut diamond. Or else colored by nostalgia, sadness, the words the Writer confides to his private journal in Balbec, sighing inconsolably over the Duchess of Sanseverina: Why is the spectacle of the sea so infinitely and eternally pleasing? Because the sea makes us think both of immensity and of movement. For a man, six or seven leagues are the radius of infinity—an infinity in miniature. But what does that matter if it’s enough to suggest the idea of total infinity? An annotation in blue, azul, no red about it, and I wasn’t tempted, even for a second, to look through the window for ocular confirmation. For that would be to put it to the test, to experiment. Far more efficient and unobjectionable to rely on the Writer’s authority, pulverizing the wine-dark sea by the greatness of the passage in which he speaks of its unfathomable blue, of its infinite spectacle.

  My fear? Vanquished, Petya, completely vanquished. Listening to music at night, growing calm, a single record. I slept better with that record, I managed to reconcile myself to sleep again after having believed them to be so close, the Writer’s monsters, that I imagined them floating out there in the darkness beyond my window, peering in. And I would turn out the light and listen, before falling asleep, to a record whose story I’ve hesitated to tell you. In Dresden, in 1947, the ambassador plenipotentiary of Russia, a nobleman with a German family name, was suffering from severe insomnia (though there is nothing in Forkel or in Spitta about the reasons for his anguish). In the middle of the night, Johannes Goldberg, a disciple of Bach, would be summoned to staff headquarters on Vogelstrasse. His cab fare was covered, and I imagine he was rewarded afterward with generous tips. Goldberg would race up to the Count’s chambers and sit down before the clavier in a corner of the spacious bedroom. He would begin by playing the Aria which the Commentator mendaciously attributes to an anonymous French author and not to the divine inspiration of Bach, the greatest ever, the musician who is to musicians what the Writer is to writers.

  The cascade of the first variation emerged from the clavier into Keyserlingk’s ears, and he listened attentively, without ever understanding its mathematical formulation. Perhaps he would close his eyes at the sound of the first chords, his knees quivering in agitation during some of the canons and fugues. Dresden and Leipzig both under his command, the Soviet troops billeted there trafficking in carpets and wristwatches, and he wishing ardently to go home—or not, I don’t know. He would raise his eyelids and study Goldberg’s emaciated back, his thin arms opening wide and closing in over the keyboard. A Jew, as his surname indicated, a survivor of Auschwitz, and the Count listened to him play, wiping away the tears, moved by the harsh fate of this young man, hundreds of kilometers from home. Until a deep sleep would overcome him, he’d succumb during the fifteenth variation, an inverted canon. I know he would because I never managed to make it past that one either, couldn’t get out of bed to turn the record over. Once the sixteenth started, my sleep was guaranteed.

  I didn’t know—can you believe me?—that somniferous powers are often attributed to this piece. I discovered those powers by chance, and since I invariably fell asleep at the end of side one, I didn’t know the latter variations very well for several years. Sometimes I managed to turn the record over, and I would always wake up again when the Aria resumed, just as in the beginning, the same slow and majestic air. I should have gotten up then to turn the stereo off, but I preferred not to, anguished by the darkness, in the disquiet of late night. The record would go on spinning, the stroboscopic eye tirelessly counting the grooves on the edge of the turntable (a model from the 1980s; they don’t make them like that anymore), the needle advancing toward the center of the record.

  What can he have meant by total infinity? Spinning in silence, turning hi
s words over and over until suddenly: a tumult. Like the sound of a sea changing color, I thought. A roar, the machine of the sea first stopped and then set back into furious motion, a bitter dispute, as if in gibberish, unintelligible. I jumped to my feet, my eyes on the window: they’re here, idiot—on a Saturday morning? A Saturday morning. They are here, you idiot: run for your life.

  6

  From the top of the stairs, trembling in the skylight’s illumination, certain that they’d seen me, that it hadn’t escaped their notice that I’d slipped on the tiles in the hallway and had now stopped in my tracks, aware that there was no other avenue of escape, the only exit to the street blocked. The voices of those men, brawny as Achaeans. One I could see from behind, the brief bronze of his right hand cleaving the air, wondering aloud who to leave alive and whose throat to cut: this head, this other head (Batyk’s), the boy’s (go right ahead!), but mine? The tutor’s? To what end? What good would that do Kirpich and Raketa—for the hoplites with shoulders bulging out from beneath their chitons were none other than they?

  The violent argument before the none too receptive ears of their victims, their throats slit, arranged in a circle on the living room floor like complacent spectators or enormous puppets they would later carry out to the trunk of the car without worrying about banging their heads on the front porch’s flagstones or thudding them down the steps.

  Without worrying about hurting them because they were dead!

  Paralyzed by the noise of the violent argument, I didn’t make a move, until they fell silent, and one of the killers, the woman, looked toward me, raised her eyes, discovered me at the top of the staircase, and asked without turning: “Which of us is right?”

  I looked at her a second, still gripped by fear and without managing to conceal my surprise. I went down to her, seeking in her eyes an explanation. Then, removing her gaze from the figure that had so irritated her, the figure of her husband, Nelly settled her eyes on me. Eyes of a mauve tint now, like spheres containing an oscillating liquid, a miniature sea complete with waves, a sailboat rocking upon its silken waters.

  A vision of a sailboat and the sea that makes the tutor fall to his knees and raise his enraptured eyes. Another tutor in another book, let’s say. Not me. I held her gaze, though without daring to explain the source of that liquid to myself or from whence that sailboat … Nelly raised a hand toward me, raised the white circles of the palms of her hands to my eyes. She discovered, incredulous, the effect her words had had on me and burst out laughing.

  About which the same bad writer, an epigone of the Commentator, a glosser of no imagination, would have noted that it had the effect of breaking the spell, undoing the enchantment, but which that morning, in the reality of the Book, made all the crystals that filled the garden gather in all the energy of her laughter and become even denser, frenetically multiplying, growing throughout the house. Imprisoning me.

  Nelly asked me again: “You, you’ve been listening to us!”—I hadn’t been listening to them, I’d heard her without understanding her, had made an effort not to understand her—“Which of us is right?”

  7

  The meaning of the Book must not be altered by facile interpretations such as those proffered by the Commentator in his insubstantial commentaries. Nor should it be distorted by the opportunistic interpolations he performed in the depths of that public library. Seeing her and hearing her argue in that tone of voice, and then understanding her question with absolute clarity and seeing myself compelled, unnaturally, to concede that she was right, made me understand how much intelligence the Writer put into that phrase of his, which mentions neither astonishment nor bewilderment, only the force of an ax that falls and strikes. Without my ever yielding to the temptation to add words, inclusions you would never notice, Petya. Keeping myself honest and at a respectful distance, using my lips to give voice only to the words of the Writer, without falling into the heresy, so frequent in the Commentator, so much to be expected from him and never any the less reproachable for that, of interpolating his own glosses, as when he twists and does violence to sentences by lesser writers in the deliberate and, coming from the Commentator, false aim of extracting a few drops of sense, interpreting.

  Letting myself be taken by surprise, always, yielding to the greatness of the Writer’s images. Because once or twice I, too, have wondered: like a fist, only a fist? However great the power with which it hits you, would I wake up, as in the Writer: If the book we read doesn’t wake us up like a fist pounding against our skulls, what are we reading it for? Clear and beautiful, Petya, incomparably strong. But only one fist? I’ve approached that fist (in my mind), I’ve opened it, spread out its fingers and inserted that hand into an iron gauntlet. And then it goes like this: If the book we read doesn’t wake us up like a fist [clad or enveloped in an iron gauntlet] pounding against, etcetera. You see? But this step was rendered unnecessary by his redoubtable intuition, because he glanced back over his shoulder, without need to take the fist away or envelop it in anything else, and this time hefted an ax which he raised and let fall with all the force that the first image lacked. And even more: A book should be the ax that breaks up the frozen sea inside us.

  Which is to say, first this: If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up like a fist pounding against our skulls, why are we reading it? To which he wisely adds this: A book should be the ax that breaks up the frozen sea inside us!

  How to write, then, simply: “Your mother’s words, as I listened to her and instantly grasped her plan, the scope and (unquestionable) insanity of her plan, left me frozen, immobile, such was the astonishment, so immense the impact”? No—on the contrary: her words broke up and shattered all I had vaguely thought about her and your father, the mansion or castle. Shattered it absolutely.

  As can always be said of the Book and its words about the fist and the ax: that not only is it clear, but also simple and restrained. Simple because it’s not difficult to understand; restrained because it employs only those words that are necessary (he doesn’t, for example, include a gauntlet, bristling with spikes). And unambiguous because it says and means a single thing (thus forestalling divergent readings). It means: absolute astonishment, total bewilderment on my part. It means: her words, the details of her plan, falling on me with the force of an ax.

  “Which of the two of us is right? Whose argument is correct?” she asked me.

  “You are, of course,” I had to say. “Yours, naturally,” I said.

  8

  Or else lie to you, Petya? Tell you I’d decided to leave the house that first afternoon, not twenty minutes after my initial inspection, as in the Writer, or else after the first week, put off by the unbearable sheen of the unbearable furniture, the fake swords and suits of armor—until I saw your mother next to the swimming pool and suddenly changed my plans? Just as in the Writer: the passage where he’s given up trying to find lodging in a series of houses in a New England town and decided to leave when he sees a young girl, a nymphet barely twelve years old, on the lawn, a girl with a Spanish name, come to think of it.

  Much has been made of how she, this girl, in all her irresistible candor, represents Amerika, and how the Writer, a fifty-year-old émigré in the Book, volume 4, is enchanted, transfixed by the vision of her frail, honey-hued shoulders (so he says) through which, through all her bearing, she transmits (or the Writer transmits, by means of her) the fatal attraction that the vulgar young American girl exerts on the soul of the ravaged and disenchanted old European.

  I could lie to you, put my own clever spin on this passage, tell you I’d resolved to leave after the first week, disgusted by your parents’ impossible furniture and the atmosphere of palpable danger, the daggers in the air, but that the vision of your mother in a bathing suit next to the swimming pool stopped me. By which—incapable of lying to you—I would be transmitting the following message: unlike the Writer’s character, unlike Humbert, I, a young American, stood there paralyzed and ecstatic before legs that were st
ill youthful and full of the wisdom of Europe. And your mother, with her hyphenated family name and the black moles on her breast, represented the enchantments of a civilization that was antique but still ripe for enjoyment and full of juice. And I, an inept young American, represented vulgarity and ineptitude, though full of drive and all that. As if I were showing you the reverse side of the plot (the Writer’s plot).

  And what had I just said to her, telling her she was right without yet having fully understood her plan or knowing precisely what she’d been talking about, moved simply by my feeling for her? But once she’d explained it to me (and I’d understood it), I told her:

  “The Writer has a phrase for this, Nelly: a harebrained idea. An idea that even after being hit over the head with a war mace, let’s say, can’t be picked up and flung off the battlefield or dislodged from the place where it appears or unexpectedly emerges, so it stays there, harebrained, without any possible application because it slips from the fingers of all those who try to grasp it. You see? (We were walking through the tall grass and I showed it to her, her harebrained idea: the lips a vivid scarlet, emeralds for eyes, a brightly painted doll among the meadow flowers.) How to get it away from there, how to stand it upright so it would move and talk with all the resource and sagacity of a mechanical doll? Not possible, it eludes me, it slips away. See?