Rex

by Jose Manuel Prieto

  Surer now that I would know how to teach the boy. A flexible pedagogy, not forcing him into any subject, any particular branch of knowledge. It was, for that matter, what I’d have wanted for myself: not to have wasted months making my way through mathematics and algebra. To adopt the Writer as the sole basis, transmute the knowledge the Book contained into wisdom. A boy who was happy when I met him because he didn’t have to go to school—and what boy wouldn’t be, Petya?

  6

  A sense of having arrived finally settling into me, the impressive view beyond the garden wall, the highway parallel to the bay that I’d driven along that first day, gazing up, trying to guess which of the houses it was. Without, of course, ever imagining anything like this: the magnificent layout of the rooms, the bedspread stretched taut to a degree I would be incapable of achieving, ever.

  The excellent idea of these houses with swimming pools, the days I would spend swimming, reading until all the light had gone out of the sky and the ones inside the house were coming on. The perfume that wafted up from the rough fabric when I leaned down to drop my towel in a movement that brought my eyes close to the deck chair. So strong a scent that I could visualize her, the lady of the house, walking along the edge of the pool in the same dress she wore that night, pale cream with a green patterning, the fabric stretching across her legs as she walked toward where I lay. Precisely the abandoned wife I would want for a house like that, undoing her hair before lying back onto the deck chair and impregnating it with her perfume.

  Enveloped from that first day in the sound of the sea and wondering from the beginning how the waves could be audible, a thing quite impossible at the distance we were. Until I discovered a few silver columns in the living room that didn’t look like, couldn’t possibly be, but, on closer inspection, proved to be speakers, a very slender, very expensive type of speaker. Impossible to say which speaker it came from, of course. I couldn’t tell if it was the one under the gem-encrusted lamp or another: the whisper of surf barraging the coast.

  A thing I’d not heard of before, a new style for that type of house, rich people’s house. But why the stereo? Why not simply, and better, the real sound of the air, the trill of the birds? To what end the plasma screen’s aquarium of tropical fish I’d watch rise through their water, shifting from side to side like real fish, with the slight movements and trailing bubbles of real fish?

  The cool breeze that greeted me the next day when I opened a door by accident, taking it for the door of my room, and air came wafting across enameled mosaic, afternoon light softly illuminating the tessellated sea of a floor. A design I couldn’t take in without moving several steps back into the hallway to study from there the whole effect, the tub at floor level, the hard, clumsy head of a marine animal affixed there. Revolving, twisting its tentacles as I circled the tub in amazement. So much money! A simple bathroom transformed into a sanctuary! At the end of each looped tentacle: a three-paneled mirror, a rosewood chest of drawers, an enameled scale—like some sea monster in an engraving holding a sailboat, a bit of broken mast, a sailor in the air.

  Ignoring all the other details, the many-eyed sponge, the nebulizers with their perfumes: my eyes on the faucets, gleaming at floor level and over the sink, plump as birds with puffed-out plumage. The delicate, unmistakable sheen, the doubloon glint. As I drew closer, the radiance intensified along with my certainty that yes, gold—but it cannot be! (I drew even closer.) Gold! Gold faucets in the bathrooms! How could it be? All the astonishment of finding chamber pots and spittoons wrought of finest gold on an adventure in some mythic kingdom. Nothing to draw attention to the fact, though, no sign attached nearby to explain the faucets or point arrows at them, the labels carefully peeled away that first day, the ones that said eighteen-karat gold. Without dwelling on it for a second, or maybe so, in the early weeks, tilting the head and half closing the eyes to the bright gleam, happy at the touch of the precious metal’s smooth patina, but then dipping one toe into the tub to check the water temperature, immersed in the flow of days, without a thought for the faucets. Cool water splashing against green porcelain. And now there I was, standing at the edge of that tub as if at the mouth of a well, staring, hypnotized, at the bubbles.

  7

  Because the Writer speaks, finally, of a young man (right away, when he says: many years younger), almost a child, a late-blooming adolescent: me. Who goes on to fall madly in love, yes, I concede that, stupidly in love, which makes it all forgivable, even the very reprehensible abandonment—how I condemn myself for it!—of the Book. Younger that afternoon than I am now, Petya. I’d gone down every hallway of that mansion, finding bolted doors, daggers in the air, like a knight dragging his feet laboriously along in his blued armor, the tree in the window blue as well, the birds on its branches turquoise blue. Knowing I would never leave that place, at least not through the same door I’d come in by, knowing that, with every step I took, the configuration of the castle’s corridors was shifting behind me.

  In love, Petya, and prepared to distort the spirit of the Book, to wrest from its pages all that my heart and the heart of the woman I loved were seeking. Anything: a man hoisted upon a coat of arms, the most outlandish plan anyone could imagine, and the greatest danger, as well. My face turned toward those pages without knowing, the day I first arrived at your house, that it would all turn out this way: the text’s meanings passing over my face, their colors iridescing.

  Happy, Petya, when the man I might have taken for a Filipino butler, had I been a character in some California noir thriller, opened the door and I discovered, before taking a single step, the blue gem of the swimming pool sparkling in the distance. How to understand it? All that money? How was it come by?

  Dishonestly. Certainly not earned, as your mother tried to make me believe, from the sale of a unique invention patented by your father. Because that was the first thing she told me, but then, as if she were someone whose level were constantly changing, she spoke of a sale of military surplus, mutually exclusive and contradictory versions of the (illicit) origin of that money. Multiple interpretations, Petya, infinite meanings. Pausing before one explanation, exploring it, then moving on to another. Without suspecting that I would spend hours in the middle of your room trying to gather up the various meanings the Writer placed in the Book and find a way to leave that place and the tangled mess that I myself, of my own free will …

  8

  Or as it appears, magisterially, in the complete passage: For man is a being without fixed age, a being who has the faculty (the faculty, Petya!) of becoming in a few seconds (in just a few seconds!) many years younger, and who, surrounded by the walls of the time in which he has lived, floats there as if in a pool (isn’t that beautiful? as if in a pool!) whose water level is constantly changing, placing him within reach now of one period, now of another.

  Isn’t it incredible that he can say so much? Isn’t it astonishingly precise? Because I see the day of my arrival, Petya: how the slow emerald wave swells up and I swim along its crest, the whole story laid out inside it. Not buried in its depths, but encrusted along its surface so that I can scrutinize different portions of it at will. The morning I spent several hours in the garden, wondering at the blue of the swimming pool. And how I stopped for a long moment in front of the doorbell: the little camera that bore my face to the eyes of Batyk, the “Filipino butler,” the Book deep in my backpack, its radiance emanating from there, the center around which my work as a schoolmaster would be organized. A profession in which I had no prior experience, Petya; well aware that I’d be lying if I took that first step toward the garden’s lawn, the blue of the swimming pool, and that I’d save myself from lying if I turned around and retraced my steps. But going in nevertheless, becoming someone who deceived your mother that same night, who spoke to her in lies, like the Commentator. To such a degree that in my story I emerged from the sea in the semblance of a Greek doctor cast up by a storm between Kasos and Knossos, regaining the coast by swimming all night, water
dripping all over the living room floor. Muscular as a cyclops, phosphorescent jellyfish clinging to my shoulders.

  An image that struck her with all the force of a holographic projection: a man mutely embodied in the air before her, shaky as an old movie. And I had a book, a single copy of a book that I managed to save from the shipwreck, carefully wrapped in plastic. A horrible night, all the water in the world under my feet, my back, my belly. Precariously suspended over the abyss of the sea, as if on a wobbling stack of chairs. How did I avoid the reefs? How did I keep from smashing my head against a rock? I overlooked her questions, returning insistently to the image of the strong, cyclopean body emerging laboriously from the depths, bearing the Book. Because I’d managed to save it, a volume in octavo that I studied, standing there on the sand, the plastic that enveloped it, droplets disappearing in the morning sunlight as if by magic.

  Second Commentary

  1

  Your papa held out his hand without taking his eyes off me for a second. I studied his face from below, still pretending to be more daunted than I actually was, though I was, in fact, slightly daunted. The shadow of a tan, hair ranging in color from wheat blond to the ash blond of more recent years, sleeves rolled halfway up the arm, the glass of orangeade in his hand (no alcohol in it, even more dangerous that way, I thought). His eyes drilling into me, which had about half the desired effect (the other half I feigned). He held his head to one side, opened his lips, inquired mockingly, “The tutor?” And then smiled because he was grasping my hand now and could, if he liked, abruptly twist my whole body around or shake me like a rag doll. I pretended his grip terrified me more than it actually did (though it terrified me) and returned his greeting with an affable expression, offering no resistance to the relentless spin of his drill bits: just an inoffensive person with no other thought in mind but to take advantage of his money and relax in the sunshine. A simple person, like any speaker of Spanish, an aborigine with certain skills—in this case, Spanish—summoned to serve in his house.

  Full of prejudices, your papa: against foreigners, against Spain, against us, the Spaniards. I read it in his eyes. It didn’t bother me, nor did I have any thought of changing his opinion. I didn’t say to myself: I’ll show him, with my work, my erudition. I waited for him to release my hand, which he did right away because he could feel the strength in my eyes, in the effortless way I removed them from beneath his gaze. With a sweeping gesture, familiar from some movie, he motioned me over to the tawny sofa. My fear, real and feigned, was rapidly giving way to a deep conviction that he was insignificant (my papa? yes, listen), that all the valves in his chest were about to open and he would go soft, deflating after the long journey.

  His little show, the way he greeted me, was like the involuntary performance of an actor who meets an admirer on his way to the dressing room and can’t keep from continuing to play Mithridates, accepting the bouquet with the august expression of the character, not of the old, tired actor that he is. He invited me to be seated, still within that same impetus, as if preparing to speak of the great benefits conferred by an education within the home, the deficient instruction offered by schools. But the moment his back recognized the living room sofa, all the energy went out of him, and he sat there a moment, blinking and switching gears. When he opened his mouth again, he turned toward his wife with a sob: “A disaster!” Her displeasure was a very real and hard surface off which the black point of my gaze rebounded. I turned and asked their permission to withdraw. I said: “I think it’s best if I leave; you must have things to discuss.”

  She didn’t thank me for the sensitivity of the gesture, your mama; her expression didn’t change. The two of them remained there, in suspension, a quivering freeze-frame that, the moment I’d gone upstairs and they heard the door of my room shutting, rushed forward as if some play button had released the image, the remaining twenty-three frames of that second tumbling out en masse.

  2

  Something had happened, Petya, but there are two ways of reading the passage, with opposite meanings. First: I should leave the place immediately and not wait to become an involuntary witness to even more terrible confessions. Because something had gone wrong for your father, so wrong that, the previous night, he couldn’t wait for me to leave the room before telling his wife that the operation had been a “failure” (without my knowing precisely what operation). The hand he raised, with which he said—the fingers of his right hand slapping his palm—I tried there and … nothing, and over there, too, and … nothing again. Despite the luxury that filled my eyes, Petya, despite his unbelievable monogrammed slippers, the gold watch revolving on his wrist, the way he rose to his feet and shrugged on his plush bathrobe, the way he walked along the pool, past the row of orange trees, followed by the borzois, so slender they were like the silhouettes of dogs. The black sheen of the Mercedes in the breezeway. Despite all that.

  And another reason I should leave: because I felt the same way. A failure! All the times I would go into the boy’s bedroom—your bedroom, Petya!—and see how little headway you’d made in your education. Reproaching myself for wanting to hit you, as when, in Septimius Severus’s house, the Writer breaks his pointer in despair over his pupil’s head—that diabolical child who was beginning to manifest, whose blue eyes were beginning to show the early symptoms of the disease that would eventually kill him, to the great jubilation and delight of the Writer who did not take one step in his sandaled feet to clasp the child in his arms, run away with him, save him. Watching, instead, from the height of his eyes, the progress of the disease, the worms that entered through the nasal passages, perforating the hard mass of the brain. Not the infinite patience and honeyed words of the magister: no. Instead, those water snakes, thick and lustrous, made their nests in that unreceptive brain, almost entirely closed to knowledge. A boy he had come to hate, conscious that all his pedagogical art, all his zeal, would be incapable of penetrating that indolence, passing through the armor plating of that yellow hair into his head.

  Or else—the second reading—I should stay. Divided.

  I would watch your mother emerge from the water, stroll through the garden. All her innocence in the way she stood at the gate, warily scrutinizing both sides of the street, then come back toward the house with the spontaneity of Albertine appearing on the Balbec beach, that beautiful passage in the Writer, full of the charm of the group of young girls, each one different from all the others as she comes along the promenade. As if a bird were making its way across the grass, though have you ever seen a bird walk? Nothing clumsier. Not at all like flight.

  But your mother was flying across the garden with infinite grace, hair brushing against her shoulders, thighs gleaming beneath the fabric of her dress. A courtesan and a murderess was Nelly—easy to see that in her way of walking, her calves speaking to me, her shoulder blades.

  Standing at the window, watching her go by.

  Like the peasants the Writer speaks of, their faces pasted to the great window of the hotel dining room in Balbec, gazing inside without giving away their thoughts, their terrible conviction that the bourgeois fish inside that aquarium would look better in a forced labor camp, working spiritedly toward rehabilitation, pushing heavy carts along and calling out to each other by their first names. Furtively observing: this or that fish, this or that form of conduct. Noiselessly sliding open the fish tank’s sluice gates, toward which each swims of its own volition, the eyes of one filled with dreams of women, jewels in another’s. And thus tricked into leaving the aquarium, they’re forced to shovel earth and push carts.

  The discovery I made that midday, the day after your father’s arrival, and which changed everything I’d thought until then about the house, the porcelain elephants, the Asiatic luxury. A find whose décor or backdrop was the rainbow the “Japanese” gardener’s sprinklers flung into the air from one end of the garden to the other.

  For there was a treasure at the end of that rainbow, one drop twinkling among the blades of grass,
immobile as a planet amid a flight of twilight stars. A drop of water artificially enlarged to the size of a garbanzo, though its walls had not collapsed. Blue.

  3

  This is what I’d been doing: I’d gone up to the boy’s room to teach my class, as I did every day. I would go into the room, I would open the windows wide, I would shout into his ear: “For what purpose? Why so much time, Petya, between these sulfurous walls, these illuminated screens?”

  Or was it to your advantage that you’d never read anything? A blank mind, ready to be inculcated with a love of reading, even if it was only a single book? I opened the Book, seeking an explanation there for your stupid fixation on the TV, and also for the other enigma that had been occupying my mind: What made them stay home all the time? Why didn’t they go out, ever? Batyk’s way of checking the locks throughout the house before going to bed, like a shadow, and the dogs, the borzois, brought from Russia expressly for the purpose, always panting at his heels. The wind that blew through the square garden, the low wind that blew in from the coast and enveloped us all there, next to the swimming pool after the boy’s classes were over, and I would be thinking: Well, I’ve worked, I’ve done battle with his obtuse brain, why not go out? Go for a stroll? Go, all of us, down into the Marbella night? (I’d heard the phrase “Marbella night” somewhere; it wouldn’t have occurred to me to call it anything else when I saw the streetlights along the Paseo Marítimo go on, a garland of light along the water.) A discotheque to dance in, a woman, Nelly, your mother, who would, at her age, be the prettiest, the most luminous on the dance floor. But no: they spent hours next to the pool, drinking orangeade, lying in the sunshine without making any move to get up, without saying to each other: Look, it’s getting dark, the heat of the day is past. Put on your green dress, Nelly, why don’t we go to that Portuguese restaurant, that Cambodian place? Yura and Natasha will come along, Juan and Arantxa.