Never.
They had no friends, no one ever called them, no one visited the house. They never went out. Sometimes I cast a look out the classroom window and saw her, your mother, leaning against the gate to peer through the little door at eye level—to catch sight of her husband coming back, I thought, after he left again, two weeks later. But no, because she’d also done the same thing, I’d seen her doing it, when he was there, perhaps studying the cars or people who went by (very few people along those streets, all of them in cars). Only Batyk ventured out, I saw him coming home from the market with loaded bags and sometimes Russian newspapers.
At that point I would go back to the lesson, I would think for a moment, or I would open the Book, cradling its spine in my hand and allowing its pages to fall open heavily, with the same weight as all the pages of the Bible, like a bibliomancer using the Book to prophesy, read the future. And on the morning I’m telling you about, my eye happened to fall on the beautiful passage that speaks of the sea, is full of the blue air of the sea, all its breadth and density reaching up to the sky, where the blue lives, Petya, every other color in the spectrum filtered out.
He fills those pages with a quivering group of girls (in flower, as the Writer enchantingly describes them), a scene that reveals the life, the promise of a better life, outside, throbbing, moving forward across the whole width of the beach. The Writer’s unique method, writing in slow motion, calm seaside strolls like these, Petya, some day: From the far end of the sea wall, where they formed a singular moving shape, I saw five or six young girls approaching, as different in look and gesture from the people usually seen in Balbec as a band of seagulls disembarked from out of the blue, and executing in measured steps—those left back catching up to the rest in quick bursts of flight—a stroll along the beach, a stroll whose purpose was as obscure to the bathers whom the girls appeared not to see as it was clearly determined in their own avian spirits.
Then I saw it beneath the sprinklers’ fine mist: a drop of dew, an artificially enlarged formation, big as a garbanzo. Blue.
4
I walked all morning toward that flash, making my way through the blades of grass beneath the weight of a terrible suspicion. I reached it laboriously, picked it up, that sparkle, that solidified spot of light between my thumb and index finger. A blue stone, some type of crystal that I examined as I crouched there, which lost its sparkle in my body’s shadow. Which diminished and was absorbed into my feet as I stood up without taking my eyes from the crystal, the sun at its zenith. I moved it then, the stone, turned it slowly to make it emit the sparks I’d noticed from above when I was turning my head and the stone was still, my eyes zeroing in on its blue.
In the garden, lying in the grass. How? Fallen from whose pocket? I knew instantly, as I gained velocity and my proportions diminished, whose pocket. Not from Lifa’s apron, not from the Buryat’s white nylon shirt or appalling gray pants, but from your father’s immense trousers. The night before (a starry night? a starry night) arriving at the house, and once inside, past the wall, throwing down the stones clenched in his fist. Certain now that he hadn’t lost his way back to the house, which he could almost touch, stretching his hands out in front of him like a sleepwalker and heading toward the illuminated living room. But before that, letting the stone drop, his strength gone.
The living room curtains blowing in and out all the while at my back, feeling the curtains there, no need to turn and see them. Should I walk in the opposite direction, through the gate, out into the street, lean back against the wall and study this object that serrated the air around it? Or turn and shout, “A diamond! Here in the grass!”? The air lapping at my pants, the sea breeze (or it came from inland, I don’t know) blowing at my back, the light touch of a god, the zephyr. To understand it, assent to it: “All right, but, how? Flee? Run away because of a diamond in the rough? Because of an uncut diamond in the grass?”
That question in my eyes, pulling myself up over the wall without taking my eyes off the sea, the sea that moved slowly toward the coast, time and again, a secret hidden in its folds, starfish and sea creatures seen in cross-section in its blue mass. Rolling across that mass, inside it, was the answer to my question: Who were they? What had I gotten myself into? What should I do now? I knew what to do. I understood immediately. Leave, Petya, leave your parents’ house, get out of there and go far away, taking care not to trample on the other houses. Like a giant striding away across the line of the horizon. Without looking back, without stopping to find out who they were. Contract killers. International blackmailers.
5
False, therefore, what the Commentator says. As if the Writer could have lacked the subject matter for an original or primary novel about anything at all, ancient or modern, a young man’s arrival in the south of Spain, in Marbella, at the home of some Russians (or Russian mafiosi) where he takes a position as a child’s tutor and comes under the spell of the owner’s wife and finds himself involved in the most incredible of stories. Isn’t that enough for an original book, a straightforward book, written out point by point, without flashbacks or commentaries, should anyone, a primary writer, be disposed to do so?
There was enough there in the story to fill several slim volumes, blonde women on their covers with eyes round as dinner plates, smoking guns. Seven paperbacks could easily contain it, there was matter enough to generate seven thrillers, or a series of seven little novels, each a hundred pages long, about the question of all the money the two seemed to have, the strange figure of the Buryat, the father’s frequent and inexplicable trips away from home, and Nelly, the chatelaine, the abandoned beauty.
All of it told from the tutor’s point of view, easily and comfortably, as if written in the 1920s when tutors were commonly employed (though still today, even now, I myself), with complete innocence and no need for commentary or any weight given to the detective stories and thrillers already written. Setting out to write it, should anyone ever try to write it, would he really have to eschew the frontal, vehement, and direct narration that the Commentator claims, or seems to claim with the whole body of his work, is now impossible?
I could write, for example, that I did not know the source of that money (the gem in the garden!). I imagined various possible pasts, your father’s fists pumping in and out of a stomach, a man flying back, doubled over by the blows. Your mother had told me, had lied to me, that both of them were scientists: “Vasily, my husband, is a scientist.”
In the sense—I suppressed a smile—that a famous bank robber is nicknamed “the Professor” for his habit of arriving at heists, bank vaults, long after midnight with a white lab coat over his shoulders and a leather case in which the security camera records not Herr Professor’s stethoscope but the lock picks and rubber gloves of his trade, though there is a stethoscope, too, which he speciously applies to the iron chest of a Mosler with ten combinations. In that sense a scientist. The pair of con artists who, after years of sustaining their performance, have been completely swallowed up by their roles: the big strong man and his delicate wife, the ermine stole and suitcases with reinforced corners that the hero of a bad novel stumbles over in the hotel lobby, a detail the Writer would never have introduced, though he does have the passage—everything is there in the Book, everything!—where the narrator thinks he’s detected a thief, a dubious character, out in front of the casino, and it turns out to be the Baron de Charlus.
He describes him in alarm and in minute detail: a thief! He wants to warn the hotel’s owner. And then, no: it’s the Baron de Charlus.
But with your papa and your mama I’m certain of it—no unexpected transformations. Your mother had the eyes of a thief, the long arms of a thief, the swaying walk of a thief: the way your papa had heaped the side table with remote controls was precisely the way a mafia kingpin, maybe a hit man, accumulates expensive audio and TV equipment and moves his hand without looking across the pile of remotes, picking one up at random and pushing a button to see what comes on. And if i
t’s music, fine, and if the enormous screen lights up, that’s fine, too. Like a mafia honcho on his day off. His wife, his inexplicably slender and lovely wife, stroking his hair against the arm of the sofa, fingers entwined in her husband’s hair.
Like two big mafia honchos.
6
I left the house that same night, Petya, and walked all night beneath vast leaden clouds in a sky illuminated by bolts of lightning. Carried along by my feet and my despair at missing out on the vacation I’d anticipated next to your parents’ swimming pool, hating and fearing my employers, your mother and your father, asking myself over and over what I’d gotten myself into and whether I should proceed immediately to the nearest FBI office and turn them in, like the deplorable citizens in certain deplorable Hollywood movies, who think that informing on or betraying someone in any way—that a snitch can help his country, save it from danger. Lamenting having taken the job with them, those Russians.
Careful! I had to tell myself as I walked toward Marbella, toward the Marbella night. Careful with them! Given all the money they had and how dangerous they were, and of course: the gem! Going toward the night, and in the night, though I didn’t yet know it, a discotheque I hadn’t imagined was so close by, an edifice immense as a castle, huge as the Ishtar Gate.
Without having planned to go in, Petya. But the spotlight sweeping across the sky, a movie theater, I thought at first, the beam of light announcing a premiere, and I stopped and saw it was a disco, the massive stone blocks of a castle’s walls handsomely inflated, larger than life. Every color applied to it, the whole palette, on the battlements, the buttresses, the fake drawbridge. A structure that would have gladdened the heart of Bergotte (in the Book), his discovery of color fully comprehended and painted onto the building’s gigantic walls, the discovery that thus, with various layers of color. The dense yellow he finds in Vermeer, to which other more Disneyesque hues had been added: phosphorescent greens and acrylic reds, the magenta doorway at which two Nubian slaves kept watch, ponderous and muscular as a pair of winged bulls. Understood: a rest, a place—when I’d gone inside and looked around—where I could leave the whole question of the stone to settle into the air as I moved, letting it flow freely around me without thinking about any spot or niche in which to place it.
Swinging across the dance floor with a thousand levels of freedom, spinning at any angle, not merely reaching the four cardinal points, like some medieval machine, but touching any and all points on the sphere. Behind, before, making stops at sonorous stations, my arrival marked by the beat, my hips and shoulders at a precise spot in the air. Smooth as a machine cunningly articulated on tiny ball bearings, endlessly spinning to the sound of that music, my head taken a thousand different places by the undulations of the dance. Tunes I could dance to perfection, tunes about which, Petya, I could have taught classes, entire, extensive courses, for I was vastly erudite in the secrets of dance, expert at moving back and forth with an ease conferred by early apprenticeship.
Or, as the Writer calls it (with reference to Swann): the elementary gymnastics of a man of the world.
7
But then a triumph and a truth on the Commentator’s part, Petya! The surprise in store for me at the center of that sphere. A thought that forced me to stop in my tracks, my arms falling toward my body like the flywheels of one of Watt’s machines. I drew near in astonishment the moment that evening’s group started playing and watched their performance, stupefied. Never having suspected a thing like that. The way the singers, young black men, were moving across the dais, reaching the edge and retreating, as if tired, weary. The spirit of commentary permeating and making its nest in their innocent souls, the soul of the Commentator speaking through their mouths.
Songs I myself used to hum a few years ago, a tune which, that very autumn, earlier that autumn, had filled me with happiness each time I heard it sung (by an Englishman, a young Englishman), now commented upon by these musicians with all the disdain and profound sordidness of commentary. Hardened and old as commentators, the young black musicians, not moving toward us like the kind of singer who seeks to convey something to the audience and might even leap into the air, full of emotion. Shifting, rather, from side to side, without ever leaving the floor’s level plane, barricaded, incredulous, with nothing to say about themselves, about their own lives, but something to say, apparently, about the song they were commenting on, as if intoning a Gregorian chant. First a passage, cited in scholarly fashion: author, year, and place of publication. Then they proceeded without pause to comment upon it, words weakly mouthed, in murmurs (or something like murmurs). Having lost, generationally, their skill, their faith in new songs, melodies that could make them run to the edge of the dais and put their hands to their chests in a burst of passion. No, never that: cool, you know? Arms dangling, peering up from beneath their eyebrows, faces turned toward the floor.
As if the Commentator himself had waited for me outside the disco to stand up and say: “See? I was right. Even these musicians here … All stories, all combinations of notes, all original melodies having—make no mistake about it!—run out. Nothing left but commentary, as these boys from America have grasped.”
I didn’t give it a second’s reflection. I saw, outside there, across the whole width of the beach, that this truth was not his. That perhaps there was only this one justification, one principle, for commentary: pedagogical purposes. Only for that reason important. My career as a tutor, all my work as a teacher, running on commentary. And didn’t that make sense? In this case? Rather than hiding it, pretending I had better things to say, something better than teaching you every day about the Book, the gold mine of wisdom that is the Book?
Though only as a pedagogical method or procedure, I repeat: the method of commentary still execrable in itself. You may be thinking: a certain intelligence, a certain good taste in that, in commentary and the Commentator. The portions of text he ripped steaming from books and spoke about with subtlety and in detail, about the peculiarities of those books, the peculiarities of their authors. This is good; even, at times, praiseworthy. But never acknowledged, as I did from then on with you, declaring openly: yes, this is commentary; yes, these are commentaries. On the contrary, he always tried to seem like something more than a commentator and always avoided citing or commenting on any text by the Writer. In the medieval tradition of never, or only exceptionally, citing the moderns, or so he said.
8
The reception your papa gave me when I’d cleared the garden wall as the sun rose. Looking, whenever he would approach the kitchen window, like a gigantic monster: an eye that glanced outside, enlarged by the glass, and then immediately diminished in size, racing from one point of the kitchen to another like a toy car (a Hot Wheels? a Hot Wheels), growing larger and smaller in pulses, nervously.
Orbiting around me, your papa, like a binary system, two stars of different brightness and intensity. The hemispheres of two different men at work diagonally behind each eye, moving toward me at an angle to put me off guard with whichever eye was commanded to scrutinize me at that moment, the right eye being the good cop. A better blue, this eye: his scientific side, let’s put it that way. The fathomless benevolence of that iris capable of disarming any observer, anyone who didn’t notice that then, immediately, he would lower his shoulder and head transversally to scorch you with the terrible blink of the left eye, receiving orders, dilating on orders from his bad hemisphere, that eye.
Looking for a break in the light, a flaw in my shining, transparent self. He inspected my farthest corners and found nothing but my good intentions, my crystalline density, the excellent disposition and exquisite preparation of a reader of the Book, a man with clear ideas about the horrors of being educated in a school and the innumerable advantages of a private education in the home. All of which my lips had made audible from the first day. Without the slightest incongruence between my nucleus of goodness and the phenomenalization or external projection of that nucleus. None of the lace c
urtains, hateful partitions, cunningly placed screens for other people’s eyes to slide along, baffled: no one had hired me to take the child—you, Petya—outside and place him, bound and gagged, in the hands of his abductors. I was not sent by the local mafia to spy on them, open the door, let anyone in to the walled enclosure of this house. None of that did he find in my bosom, in my arms crossed jauntily over my chest, no guilt (the stolen gem was mine, mine! I was the one who found it!) weighing on my shoulders to reduce my cyclopean size.
How great I was. How convincing. I convinced him.
But having brought his eyes so close to mine, I took advantage of the moment to cast a single glance, a fulminating bolt of blue lightning, inside his concerned father persona, seeking to read all at once, and not bit by bit as his gemologist’s or jeweler’s (or whatever he was) eye was doing, who he really was, to see the images of however many corpses had imprinted themselves at the back of his iris. But some barrier protected the dank, murky depths of his life and kept me from reading anything. And I withdrew immediately, having achieved nothing, no news whatsoever as to the provenance of his fortune, the money that had metamorphosed into his Mercedes 600, the Italian furniture, the Chinese porcelain, the fabulous sum that lay over the rainbow—silver-plated two-seaters, miniature yachts, perfect little airplanes precisely to scale—when to my surprise he mentioned the physics class he wanted me to give you. Bringing it up like this: “Batyk told me he’s already spoken to you about this. Will you be teaching the boy physics at some point?” Obstinate in his farcical portrayal of a physicist and crystallographer.
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