Rex

by Jose Manuel Prieto

  Overwhelmed by the truth that such a thing could never be written, a work like that, a book infinitely greater than that of the Writer emanating from her eyes. However great my triumph might be, however clamorous my discrediting of the Commentator, there were more stories in her alone, in this woman, than in any of the books, an original sea in her eye with thousands of pages diluted in it. And I would never again take my eyes off a woman, never again settle them on the Book. Betraying, you’ll tell me, the Book for the woman I love. No matter, Petya, God will forgive me.

  The circles of the swimming pools very far below our feet like springs welling up from an underground river of light, their turquoise waters flowing from that reservoir deep in the entrails of the earth, ascending along those veins to illuminate the night, the silver and alabaster vault of the Castle, the gold and quartz of its battlements. The sky lightening, the rosy-fingered dawn coming in to illuminate everything around us.

  Isn’t it beautiful, that image: the rosy-fingered dawn? Isn’t it? Isn’t it true that what I’m saying is perfectly logical and makes sense? How astonishing and amazing it is that so much could be contained in a single Book?

  EPILOGUE

  Twelfth Commentary

  1

  “Oh merciless destiny, how sorely heavy hast thou stamped with both thy feet upon all the Persian race!” says the Writer, but when he says “Persian” it’s only a manner of speaking: neither Nelly nor Vasily is Persian. It’s simply that the Writer requires an ancient race, upon which, because of its antiquity, the weight of destiny will fall more visibly. How right one of his biographers is to affirm that all literary production prior to him “seems like a panoramic literature, a bird’s-eye view.” Because where another writer would simply have written “destiny,” in the sense that destiny fell on Vasily, the Writer has destiny jumping up and down on him—and with both feet!

  Those feet that enter our visual field as they descend, the large, heavy feet of Kirpich and Raketa in their swanky Ferragamos. Though they didn’t trample on your father, that’s not what gangsters do nowadays, or only in the movies, to provide a more precise visual idea of the humiliation endured by the fallen man. Same thing with the Writer, in this passage where he speaks so wisely of the Persians and a thing as ancient as human dignity, which he places on the same level as the antiquity of the Persian race, all in that brilliant prose of his that seems to recast the literary erudition of the West beneath the enormous weight of the years.

  All possible hues of literature in him, all sensibilities: so great a Writer! For at times he writes with the force and parsimony of Franz Kafka in Prague, in books that fall on us like a stroke of bad luck and distress us as profoundly as the death of a person we loved. Or else with the terrible obsession of the possessed, the bloodshot eyeball, the bitter misanthropy of a Thomas Bernhard, an author who was, curiously, subsequent. Or the faint gleam of those parts of the Book where the enigmatic words of Confucius blossom, without being him! Amalgamated into his unique style, cast in gold and silver. Not a cento, not a florilegium, not a chain of commentaries.

  I could enumerate a thousand reasons to explain this to you, cite you his words in infinite numbers to illustrate what can appear to be a miracle: the breadth, the cosmic coherence, the profound ethical sensibility of the Book. Easier and more credible if taken for a miracle, the fruit of a roll of the dice, than for the vision that the Commentator slyly insinuates. Of an astute flaneur strolling through the literary wardrobe of the West and pilfering as he goes along, an overcoat here, a vest there, a pair of velvet gloves over there, a hat here.

  An image against which my entire being and even my common sense rebels, and therefore I do not hesitate to exchange it at once for that of a prince, a king, a great personage whom I watch make his way into the forest of the years. Inclining with infinite humility before its carnelian and lapis lazuli fruits, harvesting authorities: here a diamond in Aeschylus (this being where he includes, in an astonishing great leap backward, the Persians), there a ruby in Stevenson, there a precious blue gem in Poe.

  But not even that, for this metaphor of the gleaner vanishes, disappears in the presence of the giant who makes his entrance at the very end of the Book, the surprising reappearance on its final page, five lines from its grand finale, of the king of Uruk, Gilgamesh.

  Here, Petya, where it says: like giants submerged in the years. Like Goya’s colossus, many leagues in height, who advances with the clouds around his knees, who keeps the secret of death hidden away in his chest. Moving toward that abyss that only he from his height can behold, the rest of us inevitably falling into it, without exception. A place from which no one returns, from which the only thing that reaches us is the distant uproar of battle, the clamor of a clash lasting for centuries, millennia, with a single foreseeable result: the crushing defeat of the human forces.

  And men must rise up, rebel against such a fate, believe fervently in victory, discover that they could die without finding any secret behind the enchanted forest, knot themselves together into a single sheaf, conquer fear, prepare to die, no longer live lying flat on the ground, like a defeated man (tablet 12, column 4, verse 270).

  The Pool stolen, and the glass jar where he piled up his diamonds as well; the press broken, which I saw for the first time and approached, intrigued, having suspected its existence, but seeing it that morning for the first time, strange as an engine that runs on ethereal fluid, unreal as an antigravity shield.

  Someone, perhaps Larissa, called him at that moment. His cell phone trilled and lit up with a green light like a goldfinch with a mottled throat, a bird singing from his shoulder, the brilliance of its screen illuminating the helmet’s visor, its lifeless eyes. I didn’t take the call, didn’t touch the telephone. I was the youthful page weeping inconsolably for the death of his lord, small and insignificant, the grass as high as my knees.

  2

  I required no proof whatsoever, had no need to turn to any kind of writing or for conclusions substantiated by any authority. I knew who had betrayed him, who had shown his killers the way. Here I can break the principle of authority, and I’m breaking it, Petya. I saw it with my own eyes, beneath the empyrean sky of my vision.

  “But it isn’t a vision? It isn’t a dream?”

  “What do you mean: a vision? a dream? It’s a device, an invention, a mental experiment. Not even Einstein, a contemporary of the Writer (more than contemporary, didn’t you tell me they were friends? Yes, also a friend of the Writer): Did Einstein physically carry out his experiments, in real life?”

  Mental or imagined all of them, that of the lift falling in a building in Zurich when its steel cables are severed. Or the other one, still more astonishing, in which he straddles a ray of light and rides upon it. Mine, my vision of Batyk, the way he took Kirpich to the laboratory, your parents’ bathroom, is also a mental experiment, though one based on investigation. And with a result no less immutable and trustworthy than C, the constant.

  I watched the Buryat show the killers the way, I saw him moving silently up from step to step, one foot (carefully) behind the other (very, very carefully). The pantomime that the Writer describes with jocular and chilling precision in the passage devoted to the Art of Ascending a Stairway … Turning in an angle of the landing, raising his eyes to the skylight from which they could have let down a rope, though no need for that thanks to Batyk, who opened the door to them, who gave them easy access to the place where otherwise they could never have …

  Vasily sleeps, exhausted after the long party, minuscule hand beneath enormous jowl, thread of saliva hanging from his lip … All in the Writer’s aerial swimming pool, the cube of condensed water. I see them walking, Kirpich and Raketa, stopping in front of the bedroom, awakening him with a kick. Because they must have wanted to give him some final message. Something like: Take that, you dog! (in an infinity of writers). Or: Did you think you could hide from us forever?

  The Pool in Batyk’s clutches, Batyk who tries, at that mome
nt, inappropriate as ever, to drum its blue surface with his claws. He smiles then, with perverse delight, letting it roll from his palm, furrowed by the deep lines of destiny, all of them fatal or obscure, into the simian hand or palm of Kirpich.

  Your father pivoting his head like a basilisk, explaining to them between clenched teeth how much gold, how many jewels (“Fakes!” his killers exclaim in unison at that point, they can’t help themselves, “Fakes!”) he could give them, how many mines and factories in the Urals he could hand over to them.

  And I imagine and see clearly in the condensed air how the two thugs laugh in his face, accusing him, like children, of being a liar, someone who wasn’t going to scalp them again, this time they’d do it to him, in the sense of the phrase used by Fenimore Cooper, another author much admired by the Writer during his childhood in Combray. In that sense, Kirpich and Raketa promised to scalp your father.

  Kirpich brought the butt of his pistol down hard on the Pool, which instantly shattered, the huge stone, the unique gem, transformed into a fine powder that blew across your father’s feet. Vasily tried, with an automatic reflex, to catch the Pool, as if it had been liquidated, and as he moved forward, thrown off balance, shots fired by both killers entered his body.

  I want to shout, to stop the murder, but I’m as powerless down below as a spectator before a screen, though the effect is incommensurably more vivid.

  The shots resolve, visually, in curving, dotted lines, as in a naïf Haitian painting, which disappear into Vasily’s immense bulk, lift him off the ground.

  In the lower parts of the cube, next to the real or submerged swimming pool, a few of the guests from the night before are sleeping: you can always count on finding two or five drunks on the lawn after a party with Russians (and non-Russians! And non-Russians, Okay). Nelly is dreaming placidly next to the czarevitch, next to you, Petya, where she fell asleep after the stroll along the shore … And in the watery air above her head, something like a cloudy excrescence that surrounds her head like a nimbus and which, more closely analyzed by me, as I stand on tiptoe, turns out to be something material, tangible. The dream that her brain secretes as the liver secretes bile, as the Writer affirms in his Against Avenarius, a book prior to and lesser than the Book. There, in that cloud, the very bright red of a peasant blouse and the vivid green of a rustic skirt that is pleated for pure joy. A man and a woman on the bank of a river, its water suggested by the blue lines at their feet. A pair of lovers, their hands interlaced … I could tell you who your mother was, is, in love with, who she was with in her dreams, abandoned to her love without a second’s anguish. A young man, not fat like your father, to whom she’s turning in this tableau, in the cloud, and at whom her eyes are smiling.

  And beyond the calm of the dream, beyond that haven, though still within the cube or blue block of water, the still larger diorama of the house, the darker cloud in which the Buryat turbidly moves. Rubbing his hands together in glee, the pink hairless little paws of a mole like the one who marries Thumbelina, the same type of horror. Without need for any kind of proof, Petya, without having to subject him to any interrogation.

  I’ve reached this point, this construction, only by imagining his steps, mentally extrapolating the duplicity of his silent, cunning movements, the grim gaze of his almond eyes. Brought here, me, by something my heart tells me; he, by his black heart itself; me, to the discovery of his crime; he, to the crime itself, planned and committed.

  A traitor. A betrayal.

  3

  Which I’ve not stopped pondering, studying as I leaned down over that cube of water, my light illuminated by that faint blue light. For I would never give you that advice, Petya, never tell you to let your feelings grow cold, to write from a healthy distance, to recollect in tranquillity, at your desk, the emotion that led you to love someone more than anything else in the world. For that day, the morning after the party, when I got up and peered through the Venetian blinds, I saw the Castle as the happiest place, the happiest existence, and thought of her. Of the hand I had kissed, the smooth, delicate skin on her hands, the tiny, fine wrinkles around her eyes. Desirable and lovable in all the fragility of her human form …

  Me, guilty? Me, who with my stupid confidence and absurd party had ruined everything, cleared the way for and given easy entrance to Kirpich and Raketa, as Larissa has not ceased to insinuate to me, jeering at me, hurling it bitterly in my face? How to believe that even for a second, Petya? And Batyk, whose body, whose scrawny corpse never appeared? Whose betrayal was apparent from the very first, the way he put himself first, letting them in if they would promise to spare his life. Not Lifa, Lifa died, and so did Astoriadis, and the dogs. And you, Nelly, and I would have met the same fate were it not for the power of the Book, which turned the heavy steering wheel of fate, which took you by the hand and led you down to the sea, and us after you.

  If we hadn’t flown that night, hadn’t kissed, if I hadn’t watched her preening in the bathroom (But was that it? All you did was spy on her while she was naked, all you did was kiss her, Psellus? No, Petya … Wait. Or yes, what does it matter?). If I hadn’t seen her naked, a vision that inflamed my passion and made me pursue her through the night, if the Book hadn’t intervened, we’d all be dead, Petya, corpses, horribly.

  How your mother wept, sobs that made her face puffy, how bitterly she lamented when we found your father’s body on top of the shattered diamond. And when the police, the Guardia Civil, arrived at the scene, they had to walk across that iridescent dust and draw the body’s silhouette not on the floor, the mosaic of the floor, as is usual, but on that luminous dust. And when one of them went to the window and raised the Venetian blinds, a torrent of light poured through the panes, which seemed to move and run like tiny ants, a whole army of them, with Vasily, your father, lying there suspended between the glittering diamond dust and the luminous uproar raised by the windowpanes at the sight of their owner, dead.

  And me? And me? And the pain I felt, the rage, the stab to the heart? And how, like Vagaus in Vivaldi’s Juditha triumphans, I shouted: Furiae! Furiae!

  4

  Her breast beneath the purple of the dress, her wings (turning her toward me). Kissing her back, the birthplace of her wings, the way she had of placing a colored stone on each of her moles, the way she would jump up in a single bound, her white thighs filling my eyes, the two panels of the armoire opening together. In the same impulse, because it was enough to open one and both would open, and she would take out the jar of colored stones and hold it up in the air. From which she would extract, from that red heart in the center of her chest, the gems she would place in my hand and with which I would cover, one by one, the beauty spots on her body, a bejeweled bosom, a breast studded with diamonds.

  And nevertheless she left. And nevertheless I let her go, I said good-bye that same night, Petya, as you know.

  In the darkness of my room I had caught the scent of the air of hers, like an animal, feeling it waft through the whole house. And read on that air, on the disposition of its volumes, that her door was open, that now was the time to get up, go down the dimly lit hallway, occupy your father’s place at her side. Not because the obstacle of her husband had disappeared. None of that I would tell her, to none of those causes or base motives would I allude, but only bring to its culmination what the two of us had begun. Obstinately: bring her to the throne, make her Empress of Russia, demonstrate the correctness of our calculations, the unerringness of the Book. My right eye peering through the crack of that idea: the faceted columns of a chamber in the depths of the walled city, the ermine cape on my shoulders, bent over a terraqueous globe, frozen in that pose, playing the regent until the czarevitch attained his majority, feigning to be from Italy or Monaco, from a country that would make me more bearable to the Russian people. As if not only your mother were awaiting me with her door open, but all of Russia, my adopted country.

  But when I had reached her, arrived in her room, I saw her sit up in bed, look at me onc
e, only once, giving me to understand with that glance that all was lost and impossible, and dropping back to her pillow. I understood everything—it was the end!—and moaned with impotence in the hallway, gnawing my fists, quickly riffling through all possible responses, not prepared to yield. Wrapped in my bathrobe as if we were in the ancient Year of Our Lord 1997 and empires still existed, men who would kill to make room for themselves on a throne, who would poison their kings.

  All that still true? All that still true, the air had sent me that message: to wed the young widow, become czar myself. A foreigner, but what did it matter? What about the other foreign emperors of Byzantium? Michael the Stammerer, Constantine the Filthy, Basil the Bulgar-Slayer? Just by stopping in my tracks or in mid-flight, returning to her eyes, caressing her slender hands.

  Why didn’t I do it? Or here, you be the one to ask me: Why didn’t you do it? Little Mother Russia in the reclining figure of your mother, her alabaster thighs. Perhaps I was too young that day, I don’t know, Petya. I probed blindly at the Book, the whole text, consulted it extensively and did not find, for the first time—that’s how it was, Petya! for the first time!—a passage, words that conformed to my aims or served my purposes. I found things in other books, in certain great writers and even in minor writers, but I wasn’t going to be the one to attribute phrases to him, or even whole passages, that were not his, that clearly and patently had not emerged from his pen, Petya. Not when the heart of the matter was me, my life, this Writer. I passed over good and beautiful pages that I discarded immediately because they were not by him. I couldn’t tell myself what I had told you, Petya, couldn’t deceive myself as I had deceived you …