Rex

by Jose Manuel Prieto

  And when the words about the amazing size of the diamonds, their unusual coloration and, consequently, the money and Asiatic luxury of the whole house stopped emerging, the magnifying glass vanished, and I lifted my eyes and gazed deep into hers for a long second, throwing her a gaze of astonishment. Still more air entering my chest when she nodded her head several times, trying not to lose my gaze in order to transmit in that gesture the weight and gravity of her message. Which had the contrary effect of pumping even more air into me and making me continue on my upward trajectory with irresistible momentum.

  9

  To journey back into the past, set myself down at that point on the walls of time, walk through the garden, introducing myself into that moment as a wiser man, someone with the experience and exact knowledge of having already lived through that day, the late afternoon light in which we came back from the walk, went into the sun porch, and I was about to exclaim: “Synthetic diamonds!” To go over to myself and put my index finger on my own mouth, introducing a partition into the flow of that day. So that my words would flow down the opposite slope, at a wider angle, in order to extract them from my life.

  And yet, no. I did none of that, none of it happened: we stopped for a second in front of the pool like two blank silhouettes, her hair rippling, my linen shirt loose. There was a moment when we reached the house and she finally turned to me and broke her silence, resolving to let me into the secret, moving me or roughly ejecting me from the safe and peaceful time where I was moving (or floating) into nights criss-crossed by white gunfire beneath a red rain. With blinding clarity. Only there, her eyes told me, only beneath that rain could I kiss her, only if I came to meet her there, leaving the island of dry air within which I walked.

  Stopped there, having come full circle: on one side, my scant monthly salary as a tutor, my commentaries on the Book, the arid landscape of Spain glimpsed through a door in a wall. And on the other side, Petya, without words, without any need to use all the words I’m expending on you, a golden woman beneath a red rain. And even more diamonds among the garden grass. Diamonds revolving octahedrally in the air. Which one would you have opened, which door? Even if you knew a tiger was lurking beyond the frame, waiting to pounce?

  Fourth Commentary

  1

  There are writers I can mention by their names, minor writers like H. G. Wells. A contemporary of the Writer, a man who also pondered and addressed himself to the subject of time. But in a clumsier, more mechanistic way, not like the Writer, who imagined a more subtle procedure for transporting himself into the past and recovering lost days. A state he summoned up—as everyone knows—by means of certain magic potions, certain mushrooms or fungi he kept in the pocket of his artist’s smock and which, whenever he wished to travel back to his childhood and reconquer a day that was lost, he needed only to nibble, as if they were crusts of time itself (not madeleines as in the common misconception and not lime flower tisane, either) that took him immediately back to the segment of the past from which those mushrooms, those potions, came.

  Not given over to daydreams, either, like an opium smoker luxuriantly sprawled on a cloud, as was fallaciously proposed by that predecessor of the Commentator (De Quincey), to whom the Commentator owes, let it be noted in passing, almost all of his tone, his subject matter, and his cynicism. A man cynically installed at the very height of a literature upon which he commented as if from the bottom of a barrel. Or like Diogenes, the cynic. And all of these opium eaters, all these minor writers or commentators, have claimed to travel in time or have pretended to travel in time and bring back smooth, round memories, rubies and sapphires, recovered without difficulty.

  Only the Writer discerned, amid the blue-green mass of the past, between the sinuous, oscillating lines of lost memory, time itself. And saw that the past is made up not of hard, tangible memories that can be recovered at will, but of vague blue and violet memories—not red, not hard nuggets. And he conceived of writing a detailed report that he inserted into a chapter of the Book where he mentions in passing, without its being his primary concern, the solution he arrived at to the technical matter of time travel. And to ensure that it would more easily reach the minds of dull readers (that is, of the public) he used the words “lost time” (etcetera) in the title of his book. A book, he seemed to be saying, that also attempted to offer a solution to the question, so much in vogue during his era, of time travel. A man who wasn’t afraid to resort to a small deception, a minor imposture, in order to advance a project, oiling it just enough so that it could be introduced with minor friction or noise into the minds of his contemporaries. Later the Book would be cleansed of it; the more intelligent men of coming generations would know that this, the matter of time travel, was not the subject of the Book, was only mentioned in passing. And what was his subject? Everything, all things, all men, the greatest book ever written, a summation of all experience … human experience? Human experience.

  Nor did the Writer ever speak of or allude to any “time machine.” For when Wells speaks of the “time machine,” he’s referring to an actual machine, a mechanical device that allows you to travel in time, enter the fourth dimension, physically. The machine seen or glimpsed as it makes its way through the puff pastry of the ages, biting into and pulverizing an enormous swath of lives, a wheel or plate of diamond that cuts straight through with perfect ease, never encountering a hard bone to gnaw at, a prince, a princedom, a particular year. All of it neatly reduced to dust.

  2

  I was left with a single woman, as the Writer was left with Albertine alone, among all the girls in the little band: Andrea, Rosamund, Giselle. Among the compulsive gambler I’d been imagining, the murderess, the international con artist, among the multitude that your mother—cloned into an entire band of bad and perfidious women—had been until that day, I’d chosen a single one. Just as the Writer chose Albertine. I listened to her, my eyes brimming with tears as I sat with her on the leonine sofa, entering into her tale of love and diamond cutters.

  She told me everything, very animatedly at first. How they had to strip, in those workshops, and run in single file, completely naked, with the quick, awkward gait that women (not triathletes) have when they run: elbows too far from the torso, hands in the air in front of them, fingers open very wide. Watched at every moment by guards who kept them from hiding anything in their bodies, a half-cut gem, a diamond they could finish polishing at home.

  And she, in her tale, coiffed, as in one of those films that touch my heart when I see them, with a lovely little white handkerchief. The modest attire of a young girl from the provinces who’s never stolen anything, the simple dress beneath which, despite its baggy cut, the shape of her body can be discerned, the shoulder blades and delicate back of a very beautiful woman: who knows how she’s involved, why she’s part of this sordid story? Pure innocence in her thick eyebrows, her way of wearing the kerchief or babushka, her dress gray, the kerchief white.

  She’d been cutting gems for years, allowing the blinding brilliance of certain stones, the real diamonds of Yakutia, to make their way into her eyes and groove thick furrows in her irises, which are striated now as I watch her from a distance boarding the factory bus, looking for a place to rest her poorly shod feet: a pair of some kind of round, heavy worker’s boots. Without ever, for one second, she told me, gazing into my eyes, without ever for one second thinking of keeping or stealing any of the stones.

  That, stooping low over the faceting machine or raising a cup of tea to her lips, garbed in the white lab coat of a cutter, was where she met Vasily. He approached without her noticing that she was being observed by that right eye of his with all the intensity of a gemologist. Or a monster, a giant cephalopod waving its tentacles, floating through the empty air of the factory restaurant one afternoon in E*.

  From where, in the end, he scooped her up or abducted her and bore her down into the depths of an empty, provincial life. The hours he spent displaying his vast repertory of circus tricks to
her, the way he could lift her with one of his tentacles, spinning her high above as she blushed and laughed, her hair falling amorously across your papa’s horrible suckers (my papa? yes, your papa: listen), allowing him to deposit in her bosom a miniature image, the homunculus of an odious child who would grow up with his hair always too long and his ears always dirty. Such horror. The awful resemblance of Caliban, the child, to his father, horrid Prospero; the angelical sweetness of Miranda.

  “All that in the Writer?”

  “Not all … I can tell you where Caliban, Prospero, and Miranda are from. They’re from another writer, but what does it matter? From another great writer …”

  3

  The fright I had, the fear I felt when I raised my teary eyes to your mother’s, not wanting to believe, unable to fathom that her lovely clavicle, her soft shoulders, had born such weight, that your father, so inconsiderately, without calculating the pressure of his horrible embrace, had dragged her into that life of privations like the owner of a delicate alpaca who burdens it with a heavy load and drives it along a precarious mountain path with continual thrashings. And I moved nearer and spoke to her and told her I was there … to save her! (To save her? To save her!) With such vehemence that she could only smile at my impulse, first drawing closer to me, then changing her mind and standing up with a smile, touched or amused, I couldn’t tell, changing a record, her neck and shoulder blades smiling at me.

  She waited for the music to come on, making sure it was the record she wanted, and turned with another smile on her lips: months of goodness and dry towels on the bathroom shelves. The golden eyes of a woman no longer young, older now than the girl Vasily had swung through the air for whole nights. And I was older, too, you know? Than fifteen or ten years ago. All of us, necessarily, older than ten or fifteen years ago, and slower. But don’t I like slower songs nowadays? Melodies that make my sandals speak with greater sincerity than the frenetic boogie-woogie of my dancing shoes? The way I went over to her, the drop of sweat that fell from my arm, inside my shirt, fell and left a discernible and isolated wet spot on my waist.

  Afraid of frightening her, with a parsimony similar to Lifa’s, in the kitchen, making her way among the copper pots, bending down, slowly lowering her torso to one side to check the height of the stove’s flame. In which the two of us danced, Nelly’s face and mine, our faces consumed by fire, the blue tongues of my passion, the impulse that led me to inhale the aroma of her hair, bewitched by the arc of her brows, revolving at the center of a slow song that astonished me when I heard its first chords because I said to myself: jazz, but without being able to tell you, you up in your room at that moment, to interject a rapid commentary, overlooking for the moment the commentaristic (or belated? or belated) nature of jazz. A song that now, each time I hear it, of course.

  Intending this in every turn of the dance, making this clear: whatever she wanted from me, without a second’s hesitation. Anything, so as to show her … Anything. The molecules of my soul arrayed in a unique pattern, through which would always blow, through those molecules, the same air, the same tune. Wherever I might happen to be, in whatever segment of my future life. Forever back in that same afternoon, the uproar and shock that first reached my central nervous system and assaulted me there before I understood anything fully, the horror of your father, the octopus, having watched us through many bars of the music now, from the other side of the glass. Falsely modest and all the more terrible for that: Like a king standing in line outside a theater so long as the authorities haven’t been notified that he’s there.

  The light almost gone out of the afternoon behind him, the swimming pool’s water grown denser. No one else outside, nothing to keep him from coming in, putting a bullet in me or dragging me out, paralyzed, not daring to move a muscle, to drown me in the pool like a puppy, transmitting that water into my eyes, my trachea: the inadvisability of having wanted to kiss the boss’s wife.

  But I hadn’t kissed her! Do you hear me, Vasily? I hadn’t kissed her, I hadn’t taken, so to speak, my turn. I would die not only without guilt, but also without even having kissed her. Vasily!

  Nelly was smiling, still dancing though she’d seen him now, her husband, in a turn of our ridiculous dance, halfway through that awful song. Yes, awful. I would be the … what number would I be, Petya? How many tutors had you had before me, how many of them had Vasily gotten rid of already after finding them, like me, seducing or being seduced by his wife? I can explain everything, Vasily! The fright, the terror, like a bolt of lightning scorching everything in its path, exploding everything inside me, soldering me with its fire, rewiring me for life, leaving only certain combinations of synapses activated.

  And how is it that this doesn’t figure in the books that someone—I, for example—someone sitting down to write, would write?

  Inconceivable, unthinkable, always in me, from that afternoon on, Vasily’s darkening silhouette, before he came in and threw … And threw nothing and no one out! Casually coming toward me as if only going to switch off the stereo and then, having gone past or pretended to have gone past me, turning back to slip a knife between my ribs with Nelly screaming “Vasily, the carpet!” (which she didn’t do). The scream I was about to let out like the black slave surprised by Schahzaman, which echoed in my head, now wired or reprogrammed forever. I screamed, within myself: Rex! Rex! Rex! Rex tremendae majestatis! Overwhelmed with panic, as in Mozart. Can you believe me?

  4

  Now: if time is a discrete or discontinuous magnitude, then tiny spaces must exist between its smallest fractions, little gaps in which no time whatsoever transpires, minute spaces of eternity.

  And someone, a man, who had reasoned out the intermittent structure of time, could take advantage of this, slow his body’s revolutions, discover, beyond a certain point, those interstices, like windows in the air, passageways to eternity, a substrata of nontime in which the hours stand still. Catching up to it there, advancing toward the beginning of my stay in your house, the moment before my arrival, when I should not have knocked on the door, banged the knocker, rung the bell insistently. Or else flying in the opposite direction, toward the plot’s denouement, with all mysteries resolved, its keys laid out in front of me, deciphered.

  Or like the thief of the peaches of longevity, in the Writer, who impassively observes his pursuers, Forcheville and Andrea, hopping with impotence from the other side of the canvas, unable to lay a hand on him. A journey like that, immediate or sudden. Not the one in which I rode along trembling, from the moment Vasily asked me to get into the Mercedes, and we sliced through the air at a thousand miles an hour. Looking, he said, for a place to set me down, the cliff where I’d been with his wife hours earlier, an isolated spot where he could settle accounts with me, because his wife should never, in a burst of sincerity and frankness.

  Let in now on the dirty secret, going to die now because of the dirty secret of that money. Trembling and hating myself for having allowed myself to be softened up and won over by his lovely spouse.

  I thought of Lifa, the only person in the whole house who really loved me. Who, having seen me get into the car, hands behind my back, eyes vacant, would try to contact someone, call the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or the Guardia Civil (it didn’t matter! whichever could reach me first!).

  Out of a mistake on Lifa’s part, a confusion, but that’s fine, I accept it. For she’d taken the Book for that other book and I’d allowed her to retain that belief. The apparent devotion with which I pressed the Book to my heart made her notice it, believing she had discovered in my hands—in the volume in octavo I always held open, toward which I lowered my nose, over which, following the lines, my nose and eyes would move, my brain scanning page after page, tirelessly—a breviary, a Gospel I was reading, far from home, finding myself among strange people and bewildered by my fate.

  No other book could be the object of such veneration, could be read with such devotion. She didn’t fail to notice that I would skip pages, whole
sections, that I put my finger in without looking, letting the settling of the pages (I was watching Nelly come into the garden instead), the sun shining on their gilded edges, determine my reading for the day. And when finally they (the pages) fell to one side or the other, I would lower my gaze and plunge into the passage, the minuscule figures of Gilberte de Swann or Princess Mafalda activated by their contact with my eyes, the whole scene in the Book coming to life.

  The way she had of stopping things in midair, Lifa, and then moving about among them, dodging the frozen flies, the immobile birds three feet off the grass, passing through them like someone going past a hummingbird in a tropical garden. It was she who managed to save me from your father’s wrath that afternoon: she slowed down the flow of the day, stopped the sun in the sky, made it give light for more hours, interfered in Vasily’s plan and kept him from finding, as we traveled along that highway, any gulf of darkness, any cloud along the horizon to go into, the blade of his knife or small red dagger coming at me, glinting amid the cottony white.

  Vasily peered out the window of the car several times, slowed down on several occasions, but then had to go on, accelerating with rage, the sun obstinately in the sky, the overabundant daylight. Still shining in all its splendor when he turned the wheel and we drove down the circular driveway of a mansion or enormous house, also on the beach.

  5