“Although only harebrained for that reason. The idea itself is excellent, your idea, the one you were arguing about with Vasily …”
Then she made a point which I understood and which left me speechless.
Left speechless by her intelligence. That’s the passage where the Writer says, in the words that Appian of Alexandria used with reference to Cleopatra VII, last of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt: He [Julius Caesar] looked upon her as a marvel not of beauty alone but also of wit.
Or, and it amounts to the same thing: get out of there right now. Out to the garden and from there to the street and into a taxi that would carry me to Puerto Banús. Without a clear idea of what I would then do, but with the obvious, crystalline, sole, and unique meaning, Petya, of leaving, fleeing.
For what gives the Book its greatness, what makes it unique and unrepeatable is the fact that it is a machine for thinking, the greatest compendium of instructions ever written. And all of them in the exceptionally user-friendly form of a novel, with characters whose lives and vicissitudes concern and move us. And when your brain makes contact with the encoded surface of that paper, it will always give you the most fitting solution, the canniest response, the one most effective for your intelligence: flee as soon as you possibly can, right now. Without the money, but safe and alive.
9
My hands and feet connecting themselves with places where I could try my luck, safe from her insanity, places with sea. The swaying boat attached to the wall by a ring of metal. Taking out the stones and studying them over the foam. Regretting the money I could have earned, forced now to leave it all behind. The airplanes I saw descending in the distance to land at Pablo Ruiz Picasso International, and I’d have to board one of those planes and fly away.
Returning, then, after less than an hour, to a café on the Paseo Marítimo, the soothing pale cream of its tablecloths. Might I not be fleeing or thinking of fleeing, I said to myself, from the greatest stroke of luck, the most immense fortune, placed at my feet by the woman I love? As if, sitting there at the table distractedly sipping my iced tea, I’d seen your mother materialize in the air in front of me, heard her speak to me. The talking head that calls out to the hero from atop a crag and helps him unravel the mystery, predicting that by tomorrow a strong wind will finally swell his sails. Or as if, and to my infinite astonishment, I had noticed that I understood the song of the birds, the parliament they were holding on the café’s awning. The knight who slays the dragon, bathes in its blood, and discovers to his bewilderment and wonder that he understands the lark’s song and decodes its twittering with the speed and skill of a Morse operator probing the heavens, deciphering the cave’s coordinates at top speed, the nonsensical password.
Running to save her, back to the Castle. Everything understood, having understood all of it, Petya, your mother’s whole ingenious plan. The giant or colossus who is first seen sniffing a bunch of daisies and then destroys everything in his path as he runs, the diminutive globe spinning beneath his feet. Able, in no more than the life span of a sigh, to cover the distance that separated me from her face, from the enormous windows of her eyes, as if her head had been engineered by Dalí. And she was laughing, too, her hair snapping in the wind like a row of oriflammes, her adorable, darkly honey-hued locks. My euphoria, all the happiness of that night in these words which the pedant Bloch falsely attributes to Avicenna: For love is a disorder resembling a hallucination, similar to melancholy … On some occasions it incites lasciviousness, on others not. The symptoms of this disorder are as follows: the eyes of the afflicted one are sunken and dry, the cheeks twitch constantly. Such a person laughs without cause.
Laughing—me, too—without cause. As if a team of young men were hidden in the folds of my face, among the smooth muscles and undrooping cheeks, and, having received an order to pull, were making me smile despite my strong will not to laugh for fear that Vasily, your father, would find out my secret. But my brain, by that mechanical action, was receiving in its turn the neuroperception of a smile, at the same time as another team was pulling at the muscles of my back, raising me to my feet by a thousand ropes as if I were a fairground colossus or an assault tower positioned before your mother’s face to throw across the bridge by which I would easily gain access to the city within, and enter. Certain that she had come up with the perfect solution, as if discovered in the Book! Laughing in great bursts, absurdly confident. Watching us make our exit like that, dressed as if for a Greek tragedy, attired in tunics, our faces grave, our fingers bejeweled. All of it in the Writer, easily understandable. Or as in Mozart.
A subject that Mozart chose for an opera; that must be a good subject, mustn’t it? Imposture is precisely that: Mithridates, the imposter, in a land today called Russia. Vasily on high as King or Czar: pretender to the throne of Russia, no less! Only thus would we be safe from the danger that menaced us and had encased the Castle and all the Castle’s gardens in ice. Which the Writer, with his enormous wisdom and strength, had to break up. Right now.
PART TWO
Seventh Commentary
1
And this other defect (I do not use that word in relation to the Book as it would be imprecise: there can be no defects in the Book). I’ve often thought, just as another great writer, Milton, once mused, long before the Writer, that a good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, and I have meditated that the flaw in the Book, its one flaw, is to have built its story not around the life and great deeds of a king, but rather around the minor, lackluster life of Swann, a gentleman, and, still worse, around the anemic existence of Saint-Loup and the sterile life of the Baron de Charlus, mere bourgeois gentleman and minor aristocrat, respectively. Neither one a king—not kings. A flaw no scholar of the Book, however great, has observed.
For the subject of a great book … for only the life of a king, placed at the heart of the narrative—though for that to occur the book would have to be constructed very deliberately … Only thus should a literature be brought to a close, the cycle completed: not with the dry and tearless commentaries of the Commentator. In their place, a story tempered from beginning to end around the figure of a king, braided beard beneath eyes of stone: the distinction and gravity of a torso swollen with laws.
I could dedicate years of my life to it. In the noble aim of erasing all trace of the Commentator’s work, so that those years, seen from distant points on the scale, would not remain years of coldness, written by a man who did not fall in love, did not have children, and saw himself brought by the very nature of his stories—their bloodless nature—to a dubious protagonism. Concealed (me, the person who took on the noble task) behind the figure of a king, a sovereign whom I could serve and who, in the Book, embodies all that we know is about to disappear. For there are still people living among us who knew the Writer in his lifetime, men (and women) who were born and lifted up their little hands in their cradles when the Writer was still throwing pages to the floor day by day (as his schoolmaster or private tutor, who was used to it, tells us he did). Gentlemen who chew soft bread with their bare gums today, but once watched him stroll out of the Ritz. This is the moment. A few years more, another generation, and it will be too late.
And a final commentary: let’s imagine, putting ourselves in his place (which I, by the way, would not leave in Balbec, a beach town on the Norman coast, etcetera, but would resituate among the colossal Roman ruins of the city of Heliopolis or Baalbek, far better Baalbek than Balbec), that the Writer had written a Book whose central theme was restoration, the ascent to the throne of a fifth dynasty. Would that not be a superior book? Its pages magically illuminated by the purple glory of such a tale? Would it not simply be a far better book?
Another writer, whom the Writer placed among the greats and mentions in the Book (volumes 1 and 4), a writer who was also unique, felt this to be so. And in his final book he addressed—and placed at the central point in its pages, standing over them—a king. And an act of regicide. King Alexander II, who mee
ts his killer, Alyosha Karamazov. He didn’t manage to write it and it fell to—I was about to say to the better writer, but no, simply to the Writer—to do so. But some deep-seated internal weakness, something, kept the Writer from it. Nothing that had to do with his capacity for writing, his matchless genius. A certain absence, a certain secret failing that kept him from placing a king at the center of his Book, as in the very first book, the one about the king of Uruk.
For something happened to the Writer, something terrible, I suspect. I see it sometimes, as if a light source were illuminating his lines from behind, casting a striped shadow, a fan of light. Which I observe in astonishment, but without managing to discover the secret. There must be something. I’ll find out what it is. Ceaselessly concentrating on the Book, extracting sense and meaning from the text, I will learn it some day and come and tell you what it is, wherever you might be. But—you know?—I’m afraid of discovering something terrible.
2
That same night I went back to her brilliant idea. Refulgent with a thousand sparks and with a thousand crystalline filaments by which to grasp it, a liquid and ever-changing mane in which the fingers of even the clumsiest hand could become entangled. A brilliant idea. That must be understood. An animal, a crystalline jellyfish, hard and supple in the red air of a helium planet. I stood there looking at it, stunned. At her idea.
“Excellent, Nelly, your idea: an excellent idea. I rejected it initially when I first learned what it was, but now I can’t help but see that it’s pure genius: a brilliant idea. A king! No more and no less than the immense, radiant figure of a king. As if taken straight from the Book, Nelly! O infinite subtlety and cleverness! Saved and protected by the legend of a king, a czar! Down there in Spain: a man who could be our king, who sees himself as king of all the Russians, but lives surrounded and threatened by killers who haven’t scrupled to pursue him and threaten the life of his son. Will the nation, will Russia, permit such a thing? Will the very decent and patriotic godfather of the Moscow mafia allow it? Brilliant, your idea: not to flee from the mafia, but go even deeper into it. Only a woman … Nelly!” Fully perceived and understood: precisely how the mafia would accept this project, in the most refined and intelligent way. With quick and supple minds: how much good a king could do for the country, a monarch, and how profitable that could be for them! They’d think it over a bit more before getting into their cars, casting a final approving gaze across the roof of the Mercedes at another elder or godfather, the contained and august gaze of a mafia kingpin, the old-fashioned square lenses of his glasses.
3
A complete imposture; an assembly of nobles (all of them imposters, too), with well-tended beards and cavity-riddled teeth. Perhaps one or two with a noble ancestor, well aware of their own illegitimacy, their role as attendant lords, swelling out a scene or two, convoked to elect a czar, as in 1613, the first Romanov: youthful and weak, malleable and easily abused. Would the public wish for a handsome sovereign, the sideburns and trim beard of the last czar? Though he was actually a grotesque being, one of those prognathous kings, deformed by generations of consanguineous matrimony, the trace of many monarchs in him, mutations, overlong cellular chains accumulated in the nucleus of his being: impotence, lack of will, and incapacity for command. A perfect nullity.
Or would the public heartily approve of and clearly prefer Vasily’s porcine roundness, the evidence of many potatoes boiled and bathed in butter and mugs of beer downed with smoked fish, the hard-boiled eggs whose shells he cracked open against the table, the pickles he fished out of the jar with his index finger? A man they would recognize as one of their own. The mutinous army of gladiators, having fled the circuses and united all together on the peninsula, elects a king who steps from his tent amid huzzahs—and we see that he’s potbellied and wide-shouldered, with the manners of a caveman (a king of clubs? a king of clubs).
And at only a few meters’ distance from your father, Kirpich and Raketa would receive the order from the Muscovite elders and without slowing their pace would begin to flex their legs in preparation for executing the dotted red line of a downward arc. To prostrate before Vasily the very knees that, back in Moscow, had been ordered, instead, to rise violently and plunge into his lower belly. Heads bowed, murderous eyes raised in devotion.
And Vasily, his hand extended, having discovered, the moment Kirpich and Raketa came in, that they were there to kill him; the gesture of one seeking to ward off men whom he fears, to keep them from approaching any nearer. And that hand, too, tracing a lesser arc now, pointing to the spot where they were to sink down, the moment he understood from the gaze of the two new arrivals that the elders had countermanded the original order. Meaning that they owed obedience to him, to their king.
Both assassins would stop and exchange astonished gazes, instantly understanding the sudden change in the intentions of their Moscow bosses and the rest of it, and would then proceed forward, but no longer to kill Vasily. To mutter, perhaps also obeying an order: Our Father. And then louder: Our Father! All their hatred, their infinite reserves of violence, transformed into wonder and devotion. With the facility and understanding that only the mafia can grasp, in its acceptance of a hierarchy: the total allegiance due a boss or godfather in the mafia. Orders understood and heeded without doubt or hesitation, without halting the smooth, slow movement of the red point of their knees which, borne downward by that order, appeared to glide and land softly on the cushion or royal footstool at the feet of Basil.
“At the feet of a pseudo Basil.”
“At the feet of a pseudo Basil, then. Who cares?”
4
Even I, a foreigner, could handle this. As when a director is invited to the Royal Danish Theater in Copenhagen, though he knows no Danish, not a word. Well, maybe one word: perhaps he can say “bad,” in Danish, to shake up the actors. But through the mouth of his assistant, his interpreter, comes his wise guidance on the lighting, the mechanics of a gesture, the wellspring of an emotion. And on opening day everyone is amazed by the brilliance of actors whose performances had until then been mediocre.
Guiding Vasily via remote control, like a puppeteer, making him raise the right hand and extend it forward, majestically caressing the head of the child bearing the bouquet of flowers. Vasily, moving within a sphere of crystal, an immense gem. Softly applying the bottom of his foot, moving it forward with care, the soft chamois of a soft shoe that makes it roll forward, applying its gentle torque to the entire sphere. Stopping, casting glances to both sides, as the Sun King did upon making his entrance into Versailles. Without passing through its walls, his eyes resting on the surface of the crystal, some courtier on the receiving end of that sight line, or the peasant bearing the summons. The careful spatial order, the pantomime that for well-known kings—Rainier of Morocco—generates a royal essence or substance.
The same thing in a man intent on dancing it. Liberating within him, within his bloodstream, the qualities of a perfect king. Which I can cite here extensively, in keeping with Valentinian’s rule, always haughtily ignored (no, not haughtily, perfidiously) by the Commentator: to cite no more than five authors. A king, states Julius Pollux, a king must be … Or rather, he says:
5
“Praise the king with these titles: Father, benign, peaceful, benevolent, foresighted, just, humane, magnanimous, frank. Say that he is no money-grabber nor a slave to his passions; that he controls himself and his pleasures; that he is rational, has keen judgment, is clear thinking and circumspect; that he is sound in his advice, just, sensible, mindful of religious matters, with a thought to the affairs of men; that he is reliable, steadfast, infallible, that he has far-reaching ideas, is endowed with authority; that he works hard, accomplishes much, is deeply concerned for those over whom he rules and is their protector; that he is given to acts of kindness and slowly moved to vengeance; that he is true, constant, unbending, prone to the side of justice, ever attentive to remarks about the prince; that he is well mannered, readily accessibl
e, affable in a gathering, agreeable to any who want to speak with him, charming, and open-countenanced; that he concerns himself for those subject to his rule and is fond of his soldiers; that he wages war with force and vigor but does not seek opportunities for it; that he loves peace, tries to arrange peace, and holds steadily to it; that he is opposed to changing forcibly the ways of his people; that he knows how to be a leader and a prince and to establish beneficial laws; that he is born to attain honors and has the appearance of a god. There are in addition many things that could be set forth in an address, but cannot be expressed in just a word or two.”
6
Except—I noticed this difficulty immediately—that a man, a baker, let’s say, in Padua, who by the most incredible fortuity receives an embassy of nobles come to inform him (to his infinite astonishment) that he is the lost heir of the House of Savoy! This man of austere habits, able to dine on a crust of bread, who, as he took sacks down to the mill and brought sacks back up from the mill, never once dreamed of a fortune, and when it was in his hands, was indeed circumspect, no money-grabber. But not your father. Not Vasily, who immediately, as soon as the bills passed into his possession in that cabin in the woods, saw miniature yachts, minuscule Mercedeses dancing before his eyes, and this house, here in Marbella, full-size, which he bought, ostentatiously, in cash, the briefcases stuffed with banknotes that he presented to the sellers who choked and salivated (they by no means free of the charge of money-grabber either).
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