Rex

by Jose Manuel Prieto

  8

  “Kirpich?” Of course not. Why would it be Kirpich? Just some Russian or another, an old pal (said with irony).

  The sinister man I had to pass on my way into the elevator and whom I forgot instantly, intent on seeking out my guests across the hotel, the Russians who in all certainty were now populating it, after having discovered this one example who was, in any case, impossible to invite to the party. At least not dressed like that, in the blazer with the gilded buttons. Without having resolved what I would do, almost happy about the failure of my trip to Madrid, the impossibility of the party, free now of the obligation to sell the stones in order to come up with money for musicians, flowers, and caviar.

  Without any result whatsoever, not one tourist in the hallways, not on nine and not on twelve, upon quick inspection (holding open the elevator doors), traveling back down. But when I’d returned to the lobby and the elevator doors opened again, without yet having taken my hands from the nickel-plated rail or made a clear sign of intent to get out, I saw a radiant face come in, a face that filled up the space in front of me. A woman with red hair and Asiatic cheekbones, the transparent skin of her throat. Filling the space of the elevator from wall to wall. I blinked and weighed more for a second or two, felt that I was sinking because the elevator was rising. The new passenger took a step toward the glass, seemed to go into ecstasy at the sight of the glass wall, growing as well, her torso and her legs, more visible and coming into focus. The freckles on her face, the incredible mauve of her eyes glowing more intensely.

  “My God,” I couldn’t restrain myself and exclaimed in all sincerity, wanting to warn her, “you can’t go out in the sun with that skin.” And, eyes squinting, I pointed it out to her, the sun, round and flaming on the other side of the tinted glass.

  This woman, the tourist, dressed with impeccable taste: the blue silk blouse forcibly containing her breasts, the string of chalcedony across the fresh skin of the clavicle, the same red color illuminating her shoes, with absolute (Western) elegance. So much so that I pointed once more to the sun and to the freckles on her face because for a moment I thought that dressed like that, with such good taste: not a Russian. Perhaps only from the north, from a place without summers, going south every year to toast in the sun.

  “Well,” she answered, “in just the same way, in a hotel near here, a nice, friendly young man like you, decently dressed …”

  (I was a bit more than decently dressed, I wanted to tell her, the laughter dancing in my eyes until I heard her: the horrible confusion.)

  “They talked, agreed to see each other and … just like that! He had stolen her purse.”

  Such a bad beginning, Petya! Me as a hotel elevator thief. I’m almost ready to let her go, I let her go, so disconcerted was I: the doors of the elevator opened and her face and legs, her tattooed ankle, disappeared. Impossible to overcome such ill will, so much suspicion. Having descended to the lowest point of my mission, at zero. On such a bad footing. A Lancôme consultation! My ridiculous Lancôme consultation!

  The breath of perfume she left behind: violets. The sun warming my arms, my feet slightly sinking into the carpet, a horrible hotel carpet.

  But something curious here, some kind of fate: I’d forgotten to press the button, and no one had summoned the elevator from the lower floors (there’s no elevator man in hotels nowadays: you do it yourself). The elevator cabin stopped there, the air-conditioning blowing on my neck. The elevator bell rang, I heard it ring from a place as far away as the sun and felt the doors slide open at my back. The distant hum of the cocktail hour reached me once more, snatches of music, the bartender’s unbearable banter, some vulgarity in reference to the unknown lady, the Russian: “Did you get a load of that chick?” Or “Pretty hot, isn’t she?” something like that. Not that vulgar myself, Petya, I would never have said or shouted that as the man carrying a tray through the lounge chairs did.

  Very impressive she must be indeed, I said to myself then (I knew that, I’d noticed it immediately), for this waiter with so many women, so many Swedish girls (though, why Swedish? Not particularly pretty), so many Italians … And I felt a slight, oh so light, almost imperceptible oscillation or feeling that the floor was giving way and the red of her feet, the kid glove, the tattooed ankle entered my field of vision once more. She put her hand on my back and gave me a friendly pat: “Don’t be upset,” she said. “Not every girl is as smart as I am. You’ll be able to fleece some of them. Anyway, I like your shirt. Do all the swindlers in Marbella dress as well as you do?”

  9

  (Everything that is written has an author, and every author, an intention.)

  I didn’t turn around right away, Petya. I don’t like being treated like that. I do like being treated like that. Certain women: the lapis lazuli trinket on her wrist. What to say to her? I have seen it—you know?—your plastic purse, made of that hard transparent vinyl with a flowery print: do you think I imagine money in there? Do you think I don’t know there’s only sunblock, face powder, lipstick? And anyway, how much money, ever, in the purse of a Russian woman? I didn’t say that but thought it, and then I had to say to myself: look how she’s dressed, stupid! More money on that woman, more money has passed through her fingers than you’ve seen in your life (well, there were the stones, that’s true, the diamonds in my pocket—but they were fakes!). I studied her mauve eyes once more. Security, confidence, confidence in having seen me from behind: an inoffensive lad, crestfallen, there in the elevator.

  “What do you do, apart from …?” She didn’t finish her question, laughed (apart from stealing she’d meant, jokingly, now knowing or now almost sure that I didn’t steal).

  And here, Petya, I knew that I would have to begin from so far back, go back so far and so implausibly that I desisted. How to say to her—you know?—“I work for the emperor of Russia?” Or present myself, with a click of the heels: “Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, tutor to the dauphin”?

  And what had seemed so easy to me, to spread word of the simple idea of the party among the Russian tourists, struck me at that moment as clearly impossible. And still more so with a woman like that, very refined, her eyes cleanly delineated. Nearly thirty (younger than Nelly, one or two years older than Larissa), at the point in her existence when gravity comes knocking at her door, to suspend from her cheeks those heavy weights that, in advertisements, pull them down. Terrible. And lovable and pitiable.

  The elevator doors slid open. I held them back with my hand, gallantly. I said: “I know what I said about the sun was stupid. Something you know or you must know, of course. But the sun is very strong here.”

  It was then that she asked: “But, who are you? What do you do?”

  I hadn’t foreseen this type of question. I mentally reviewed a great number of professions, placing them before her eyeballs like an oculist trying out lenses on a patient’s eyes. I placed a thousand images there: myself as a dancer, with thick gold chains or without them, as a painter of seascapes (on the Costa del Sol), a specialist in quantum physics. I was tempted to tell her a marquis (like Gumpelino), but no, impossible. I paused then at the portrait of the talented schoolmaster, adopted the air of an old-fashioned tutor so that she’d be able to imagine me in close-fitting pants and a frock coat. I explained, thus attired (at least in my body language): my life in your house, my classes for the boy, and more recently, just yesterday, the matter of the party. She gave me a shrewd glance, understanding it immediately, my plan. Her lips grew then and moved to tell me something, and her eyes shone, a brief shudder ran across her from head to toe while her forehead, her hair, and her chest swelled and grew, swelled and diminished in a second.

  Don’t fall asleep, Petya! Such a woman!

  Claudia was her name. I would have offended her if I’d shown her the letter Nelly and I had composed the day before to their throneless Majesties. No need for that. She asked me some questions, lingered over a couple of points. I explained them to her in detail. She played with the colla
r of her blouse for a moment, rolling it around her finger, letting it go. She conjectured: about twenty in our group, ten, maybe, in the other, the next hotel over.

  To convince only her, to tell only her the story and the nature of my mission. That would be enough. I followed her weightlessly down the half-illuminated hallway, the force and intelligence of her calves lit from behind, the perfect equation of the curve at her waist. We stopped in front of her room, she went in, and turned to close the door softly, smiling all the while. We’ll see each other two nights from now, she said, this Friday, no? and closed the door with a pleasant click and turned the lock, without appeal. Three rooms farther down an absurdly fat woman and a horribly fat man, a matrimonial alliance of obesity, came out into the hall, walked toward the elevator. The inadvisability of inviting people like that, tourists in shorts, people like the man I’d met down below.

  10

  Because I had, and this was the worst of it, Petya, what weighed on me most in that hallway, to put my plan into practice. The need to go ahead with it, the fatigue of all my past failures. Seeing it with absolute clarity, and not only in the Book: the only possible path to money, the most logical way of escaping from that situation without having to steel myself to enter the shop, then stroll around the jeweler’s glass display case, studying the jeweler himself without him realizing it, wait until there were few or no clients left inside, then step forward to get his attention, preparing myself.

  To sidestep in one swoop such a moment of discouragement, plunged into the most violent gravitational oscillation by the apparition of this third mass, large and luminous as a gigantic sun, like the sun of Aurora (in the Writer), not ceasing for a second to think about her, about Claudia, the beauty I’d just met. I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! I shouted to myself on my way back down to the lobby.

  I had imagined it, the beach, its hotels, full of women like that. I would like, I told her, I would be enchanted, I explained to her, to dance with you. Waltzing smoothly through the garden after nightfall, though can there be a garden party by night or only during the day, with illuminated tents beneath the floodlights, the white, cropped jackets of the mariachis, their trumpets burnished with toothpaste?

  Certain that the confusion would only be multiplied if I spoke to her of the Book, of my love for the Book. As on that occasion, newly arrived at your house, with your mother. I preferred, and it is something I advise you most earnestly always to do, Petya, to lie. I led the conversation far away from my (real, Petya, real) past as a smuggler and Saint Petersburg dandy. I hesitated a second, paused before answering her, because I didn’t want to be a tutor in her eyes, a failure, it’s the truth, without money. Who to tell her that I was, then, after so many years and in such swampy circumstances, on so viscous a sea? The watermark of a black past, the hologram that, seen in the sunlight, would give away the hidden traces of my existence? Finding all of my carefully set traps empty: nary a wolf cub nor a baby bear, not a coin earned in years; no money and no fixed occupation. I had planned to live only in the knowledge of the Book, never looking back, and this had seemed a more distinguished occupation, but not even: now here I was, plunged into the murkiness and opacity of your parents’ swindle.

  Because I asked myself the same question you’ve wondered about, son: Couldn’t they, wouldn’t it be easier to sell the car, mortgage the house, just get out of there? Why get in any deeper?

  “No, they’d catch up with us wherever we went,” Nelly explained. “That’s not the solution.”

  She’d pondered the question deeply without allowing anyone else to interfere—Batyk, for example, with his stupid ideas. A different and unique solution each time she threw the dice of the story into the air, the possible paths of escape. And they fell with iron logic: imposture, the delirium of imposture (even she herself saw it that way), because otherwise, no matter where they went to hide: the outpost of German cheesemakers in Chile, an abandoned mission in Paraguay, or even, spinning the globe, bringing the finger down on another sea, the exhippie colony in Goa.

  Tenth Commentary

  1

  The Writer awakens, opens his eyes in that grotto brimming with gold and jewels, and exclaims: Oh, Wonder of Wonders! Richly attired: the Malay kris at his waist, the turban at whose center the Koh-i-Noor, the Mountain of Light, glows ineffably. Toward the fantastic territory of the Book, where no one will ever be able to dethrone him, revoke his authority, cut him down to size with evidence. No principles to undermine, no evidence of his spuriousness to accumulate. No one, mounted on his shoulders, will be able to see any farther, as idiotic people (and the Commentator) claim. Farther than what? Than a bird? Farther than its feathers, farther than its beak, farther than its being as a bird? There is nothing farther, no “territory beyond”—a human construct that seeks to supplant the succinct and diaphanous idea of the Book.

  The force and the shattering wonder of the passage where Marcel, on an exploration of the Arctic Circle, discovers a new and unnameable kind of water, a liquid thick as gum arabic. The commingled astonishment and intense chill this marvel arouses in his breast. And throughout this passage, the first description, the origin of a new machine, for he imagines this water, Petya, taking on density, condensing not only in the Writer’s mind but also in that of the most minor and insignificant technician. The household use to which we could put it: no longer laboriously excavating swimming pools, but erecting in any garden a beautiful cube of these calm waters like the hues of a changeable silk, says the Writer, in every possible shade of purple.

  A Mountain of Water! Sparkling in the sun. Can you imagine it? Imagine it!

  In which we would swim, plunging in without causing the structure to collapse, for it would hold its rectangular shape, its cubic constitution. We would ascend through it, our arms open wide, like birds in a solid patch of sky.

  Quite a vision, isn’t it: men flying through this water that has somehow, we don’t know how, been condensed? Isn’t it?

  And behind every house, in every garden, such a cube would rest on the surface of the earth where a swimming pool was once dug into it. Having learned to hold your breath and accelerate within the mass of water, pushing off from wall to wall, calculating and controlling your momentum so as to stick only your head outside, gulping in a mouthful of fresh air, your hair dripping, the sun sparkling on your wet head. Coming out, breaking the film of the surface before the astonished gazes, one head still below—heads up, guys!—laughing and taking a deep breath, shouting out for pure joy, then plunging back inside the cube.

  A prodigy, a fabulous invention, this marvel that we would examine, attired like a couple in an engraving of the World’s Fair, the bowler hat, the tiny, unnecessary parasol stuck into the lawn. Or else both of us in shorts, young ourselves, turning our backs on the cube, grown accustomed to the miracle, however strange it may seem, for it’s still a miracle even in 2049, a miracle, and so is my vision of the young men rising up through the cube, slicing through it like birds soaring across the sky. The undulating block on the green lawn. Have you seen it? Shall I turn off the generator? The force field?

  No, leave it on a moment longer, please—I’m still looking at it. (You should look, too.)

  2

  Or what amounts to the same thing: I sold the stones without a second’s hesitation, because the consequences that can be derived from the Book are more than clear: somewhere in the house, I could never figure out where, your father had a laboratory, a replica of the laboratory in the Urals. Let’s say it was in the cellar, and that he went down wearing a leather apron, a jeweler’s magnifying glass at his forehead, the straps cinched tight around his skull, through the graying hair. No pincers in his hands—though a scene in a movie would have required that—but I’m better informed about the scientific procedure: no pincers in my hands either. Unnecessary when you’re growing diamonds as big as garbanzos, diamonds he tossed into a glass jar or an empty vase like candies in a pediatrician’s office.

  He wo
uld open the room, a dimly lit place, the shadow of his big body, lips opening in a smile that broke the outline of the shadow on the wall. Or else he would release the hatch on a sort of glass diving bell and step inside, wearing a waterproof suit made of rubber or asbestos. Then he would switch on the machine after priming the edges of the growth chamber with a paste made of enriched metal or whatever it was.

  Your mother didn’t explain it to me in detail and I didn’t ask. Just this: a portable installation that Vasily took out from under the bed and took with him into the bathroom, or an enormous, stationary press installed in the depths of the garden or in the Buryat’s room, next to mine. He could fabricate diamonds of any color, any number of karats, she told me. Sapphire blue, ruby red, emerald green, raising or lowering the flame on the Bunsen burner (in a manner of speaking: in fact the apparatus was much more complex than that), increasing or diminishing the inclusions with extreme precision, sometimes leaving defects that seemed natural but were in fact perfidiously calculated. Enormous gems, like the Eugene or the Coromandel, even larger. At will. Essentially indistinguishable from natural stones. Not cubic zirconia: this is cubic zirconia and this, too—easy to tell the difference.

  3

  My first thought was red. Red for royal crimson, for the red of the sun. But then I understood: blue. For the sky, which isn’t blue, and for the sea, which isn’t blue either, and because blue is the color of deceit, the other colors of the spectrum filtered out: blue clearly favored in the design. For some occult reason, a cause I cannot discern: because life here, beneath the celestial vault, is a dream? And if that’s true, then make it a large stone, Vasily, blue in color and immense as an orb. Forget the small colored stones we could try to pass off as real. Lots of money in that, perhaps, but the immediate impact is diminished. A single stone, on the other hand, heightens it. At the very top of the scale that establishes in descending order the value of all the others.