Rex

by Jose Manuel Prieto

  Enough to reign for three hundred years.

  Or like the victory of Augustus at Actium, or that other coup de theatre in India or Asia Minor by Nicephorus Phocas, who had himself publicly levitated to impress Liutprand, bishop of Cremona, I told you about this already, in 949 (no small thing, this effect of liberating oneself, annulling terrestrial gravity!). All the pomp and circumstance of Westminster, of the Hall of Mirrors (in Versailles), but in the air, pure play of lights. Broadcast live, seen by millions of viewers. And the videos and the “behind the scenes” footage; a whole twelve-hour program on the new Imperial House of Russia. The only authentically exotic royal house, the most long-suffering of them all, an ideal candidate for relaunching, eighty years after its forced defenestration.

  9

  Regressing back to Babylon, to a Babylonian apprehension of kingship, however much we may resemble modern men, whatever we fast food eaters may look like. Changing the cut of the suits, widening and narrowing the lapels, still looking like pencil pushers and wives of pencil pushers, some of the women pencil pushers themselves, but with an inner transformation, the fine substance of a sense of hierarchy in their souls. Conscious of the many rungs that separate them, the abyss between the simple construction of their bodies and the more formidable fabric of a king. The futility of all movement understood, all pride set aside: just men, you know? What better thing than this? What better than to dance?

  Me with the millions, finally. God knows I hadn’t stopped dreaming about that money and God knows, too, how much it surprised me to discover it glittering there in the garden grass when I had told myself: you won’t get it. Never. My failure with the butterflies, the fiasco of my education of Linda, which I’ll tell you about someday. All that, in its moment, drove me across certain countries, uncontrollably or as if uncontrollably, not only toward the sea, as I told you, but also toward the reflection of the golden stone. And I had closed my eyes in resignation, saying to myself: an illusion, you’ll never get it. I had accepted this and lowered myself to giving a few classes, earning a little money (never as much as I’d imagined), until the day I saw the stone in the garden and everything changed, the world turned upside down as I looked at it.

  Nelly and Vasily dancing there among the azure sparkle of those final days of the century, in perfect awareness that those years were blue. I’d felt this, too, I had sensed it and adjusted myself to blue. Not gray, as in the Writer’s life, or some shade of red, the inexplicable reddish orange of my childhood. The blue of those years that still have not gone by, your mother’s metallic skin and hair gleaming among ribbons of blue. OK, fellows, God would say, floating overhead, the best you can do, the wisest: blue. Precisely what I had in mind for those years.

  10

  Vasily gravitating in the middle of the room with a slow and majestic air, augustly. Absorbing all the light that rushed toward him, all the objects and the party guests spinning around him. Bathed by the brilliance of the stone. Large as an outcrop of rock or a colossus. His mass augmented, but also, like a neutron star, infinitely dense. The party flowing around him, gliding downward with the smooth tension of a curtain of water as he watched, spellbound, approaching for a closer look, then understanding that the curtain, seeming to flow as it fell, was revolving around him in iridescent bands, slower and slower.

  He gave an involuntary start of surprise. I saw it appear on his face, observed it from afar, unable still, in that moment, in the heat of the dance, to understand or explain to myself the expression of wonder that rose to the surface of his eyes. He understood himself, comprehended himself as an object of almost infinite mass beneath which space warped, around which the hours grew still.

  (For this, Petya, is where the principal lines of the Book arrive at their confluence: that of gravity and that of time.)

  Only now do I understand, only now have I succeeded in explaining to myself his figure standing motionless in the center of the room, his surprise as he watched everything spinning slower and slower: Astoriadis’s fork poised in midair, Lifa’s apple cheeks, Batyk’s bilious eyes, and the tedium in yours, Petya, as you waited for the moment of your escape to the sea, the shock in his wife’s face, the three phases or moments it took me to understand what was happening before my eyes. All of us going, diluting into a single gray movement.

  He didn’t run toward that curtain but conducted himself with unfeigned grandeur: he approached it in the natural evolution of its orbit, moving unhurriedly, with reserved, noble, majestic gestures. He put out his hand and broke through the iridescent sheet that churned around his index finger. He tested the substance it was made of, the thickness of that panel or curtain, and fully understood what was before him.

  11

  Time for the individual self or time in itself: biological time or physical time, the Commentator wouldn’t have thought twice about fatiguing us with such matters. Whereas the Writer, in modesty and with infinite intelligence, didn’t hesitate to return to an old title, a combination of words already used by another writer, and simply typed out: time machine.

  The brief pastiche he inserted in the Book as a divertissement, a ploy, a way of charging that title, that phrase, with a new meaning. He imagined, he tells us, that a certain minor writer, a bourgeois by the surname of Menard (a Frenchman), understood one afternoon, after long meditation, how and in what way to repeat the work of the English author H. G. Wells.

  But not by the procedure of imitating his life, reproducing his raptures over Morris’s bibliographic gems, his rejection of the prolix Jugendstil, his calisthenic defense of Swiss gymnastics: all his manias explored, his every irascible thought codified, incarnated, in a word. A procedure that Menard (in the Writer) would reject as far too easy. “Impossible, rather!” the reader will exclaim, etcetera. Something richer and more brilliant by far was what the Writer had in mind, more worthy of his unique and astonishing imagination: the expedient of rewriting page for page, word for word, two chapters of that Book. So that now, easily legible, enclosed in that simple title, The Time Machine, we have the Writer’s more subtle reading, different, brimming over with new meaning, dictated by a new and scientific understanding of time.

  To read instead—where our Englishman had simply written The Time Machine—this combination of words: physical artifact, vehicle in which to cross through the puff pastry of the years in the ridiculous aim of quarreling with the Morlocks of the future, redeeming the Eloi and other such trifles. In the Writer’s Menard this phrase assumes a new meaning, an unprecedented nuance: time machine.

  In the mind of the reader who wonders: in what way is this machine of his constituted? What is its internal structure? How does this machine generate time? What puts it in motion? Readings far ahead of their time, the brilliant treatment of new concepts: event horizon, spatial rupture or singularity, stalled light, unstable stars.

  12

  I understand now that this is what was happening. But at that moment, in the midst of the party, my mind rejected this explanation as fanciful (or as too literal, you’ll say). Though I took it in immediately, with a single glance, intuitively. I understood what your father was preparing to do, how he discarded the possibility of escaping, entering into this infinity that was opening out before him, time gliding by in ever more widely spaced stretches or portions, the hand-lettered panels of the centuries, the painted screens of the days, the rune-covered shades of the hours opening up, sliding silently on their oiled tracks, at every turn of the machine.

  How in the end it slowed and grew still—time. Its panels came smoothly to a stop, floating and glittering before him like some sort of large window that he looked through and saw, in amazement, the dull gleam of nontime. The flickering doorway, the entrance through which he could escape, flee from the assassins, disappear as if by magic from the Castle, from Marbella, and he chose not to do it.

  Worthy, I mean. Saved, I mean. His inner workings as a great scientist reassembled. A great scientist who rejects with profound repugnance t
he mere idea, the urgency of hiding. He renounced it because the slumbering king who dwelt within him had listened to me with utmost attention. The Book had done its work in his breast. The emotion I saw in his face, the triumph and the truth of the Writer in the cry he let out this time, the words he uttered, from Aristophanes: I walk in air and contemplate the sun! I walk in air and contemplate the sun!

  13

  The Writer’s sumptuousness, the always noble characters who people his pages, the slow intonation, the poise with which he introduces the theme of rescued honor, recovered dignity, the skill with which he places it before the reader’s eyes. The majestic style of that part of the Book, the fantastic final climax, its tone and vehemence demanding something more than a calm reading as you sit there in your armchair: demanding that you jump up, toss the Book aside, raise your eyes and say: I believe!

  And again: I believe!

  Fist and ax falling upon you, forcing you to exclaim that no other faith, no other Book: For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life …

  Isn’t it truly great and terrible, Petya? Don’t you see the strength and conviction, all his passion in this? Not a book to entertain us, the kind of book the Writer says justifiably that he could write thousands of. A unique Book: the book of life.

  And furthermore this: Margarita and the Master fly; Habundia, queen of the fairies, flies; the archangel Gabriel rises through the air. A certain dubious taste there, but the Writer never let himself be stopped by a minor and trivial obstacle like taste. What is taste? Is it in good taste for a Frenchman to spend twenty-seven years in prison and then emerge from that pouch of time to fall, immensely rich, among his enemies in order to kill and take revenge? Is it in good taste for a German, in the flower of his youth, to make a bargain with the devil, sell his soul to the evil one, and then flee and repent and rue the day? Is it in good taste to imagine a country in South America where it rains for four years without stopping and the dampness is so terrible that fish swim through the air in the rooms of houses and careen, gasping, among the cobwebs on the ceiling?

  I repeat: the Writer certainly never let himself be held back by a minor obstacle such as taste. Am I to be held back? To open my mouth and introduce so petty and commentaristic a reservation at the very moment I felt my feet lifting from the ground, my eyes glued to your mother’s, breathing through her mouth?

  14

  I caught a glimpse of you, Petya, during a brief pause in the party when the high tide of the dance grew still for a second and then diminished until it flowed out in retreat, washing the last guests out of the garden. I caught a glimpse of you in your scarlet moiré cape. Floating for a second next to the front gate, going, I instantly divined, toward the sea, having adopted—the Book in your heart here, too—the sea that inundates its pages.

  To go down to the beach by yourself for the first time, the dark and roiling front of danger far away, my plan triumphant. Tomorrow, when the sun rose, we would stroll unhurriedly down to the city, stopping to chat along the promenade, and the bathers, at the mere sight of us: “the king of Russia, in Marbella …” And I was about to take my eyes from the door, but something spoke to me at that moment, a glint from the ring on her finger, the hand that Nelly ran along the wall, that she’d left for a second, herself already outside, on this side of the garden wall. A message I was late in reading, its elements late in settling into me: the blue sequined dress, the Rabanne she’d worn that night to conceal her inexplicable transmutation, in those pages, that part of the Book, into a bird.

  But not yet past the gate. The rays of light that shot from her eyes when she came back to the doorway and looked through it; they seemed to seek me out, those rays, illuminating me in their violet color. The thread of light still trembling in the air as she turned back to the street and, the following instant, left the garden.

  Transported or abducted by the force of that ray, the floor sinking beneath me, curving beneath every step she took across the striped awning of the earth, careful not to put her foot down on the white. On the blue, only on the blue, her fear of falling. Sinking with each step into the taut substratum of space, ripping it open with my weight, a path that could be taken only once, along which she could never return or find her way back. Sand flowing through the gaping holes in the fabric, me falling at top speed toward the edge, the abyss where the rivers plunge.

  15

  The immaculate white of her back, the resplendent white of her shoulder blades, and she, lost or pretending to be lost in contemplation of the sea, gazing in rapt absorption at the waves that came to bathe her feet through the dazzling gleam of her Pradas.

  She, too, imprisoned by the passions that assail all mortal flesh, previously prepared, up there in the garden, to sabotage my plans entirely and stave off the twelve-pointed stars I’d explained to Claudia in the sky over Arles, Klimt’s gilding on the trunks, orange trees spinning in the garden and in Calder.

  She heard me out without turning around, my fevered explanation: never, Nelly! A mortal for a goddess? Never! The fine hairs on the nape of her neck assented, seemed to summon me: and? You don’t see it? What are you waiting for? One second, two, without being able to believe it, I no less a child than the child, you, Petya, you who were very far off now along the line of the beach.

  And I saw it at that moment, as I fell toward her, understood how she must have laughed about the plan for flight, for antigravity, with the strength of a woman who could gaze into the evasive eyes of a charlatan and peck them out, cleanly. For there was only one quality she kept in her heart. So many things that cannot be gained by taking flight! No Russian would accept a bird-woman as queen, never could she transfigure herself on the throne, in view of everyone. Like a dress purchased directly from Lagerfeld that you keep at the back of an armoire and know you will never wear again. Or else only at a reception with other birds, a gathering or parliament of the birds, the bird-women, all of them able, with the greatest lightness and ease, to lift off and halt two feet from the floor, as if levitating there. But so what? What could that solve? She could have—you must understand this—blasted away Antoniadis’s arguments with a simple demonstration, a blow of her wings, and she didn’t.

  How not to see, given all this, how not to understand the senselessness of the Commentator?

  16

  How not to deplore her resistance, insistently negated by the reality of the girls the Writer describes toward the end of the Book, in the mysterious chapter set in a nocturnal Paris, in the house of ill repute near the Champ de Mars, or perhaps on Mars itself?

  Girls at 0.38 terrestrial gravity revolving between floor and ceiling, floating there, awaiting clients, the newest arrivals rising toward them with no more than a slight jump, capturing them in the air. The laughing certainty of those girls, skilled at dodging the client’s body, bending at the waist, spinning for a second before your embrace in the air.

  And I, caught up in her spin, without a second’s resistance, her lips transmitting the impulse of her whole body to me, pivoting on my axis with the speed of a mechanical device. Seeing the beach again, the sea, the base of the cliff again, the gray of the sea, and the path of the moon on the water. Rising in circles, leaving a trail of blue-green bubbles in the air, a double helix of turbulence. Gliding across the sand easily, lightly, gripping her shoulders, pressing against her. Strong and natural as an embrace in a corridor of the metro, your body against hers, a river of strangers at your back, a crack in the tiles behind her neck. Her eyes, a sigh. God! The longest kiss ever!

  17

  But not, as the Writer had suggested and I myself, as well, under his influence, when I said: unfathomable quartzes. That had been replaced, in her eyes, by a superdense gel, a trap for cosmic particles with which
she gazed at the sky, all the light of the first days of the universe in that gel, the weeks during which she had not ceased to study me, that light transformed into rays that now emerged from her eyes with the power of a spotlight illuminating a field and the sky over the field, at the far end of the runway, the furrows in the grass left by airplanes. The ease with which I could read it, the clarity, despite the distance across the confines of the sphere: projecting itself around me against the screen of clouds. A book, a sea of stories emanating serenely from her eyes, and we turned on the slow rhythm of its waves like a body electric.

  The men who lived in her eyes like inclusions in a diamond, the sailboat and the captain with gold braid on his sleeves, whom I thought I’d seen that morning as I approached the window of her eyes on tiptoe, moved by the suspicion of something, the far-off silhouette of a soaring eagle describing a distant arc across the back of her iris, over that sailboat, the house on the shore, the woman looking out the window.

  And I hadn’t believed my eyes, I had doubted that strange vision: the life she contained within herself. The pair of swordsmen who were now doing battle in her eyes on the circular stairway of a palace by the sea, first in sunshine, then in rain, engulfed in their capes, interminably. Killing mercilessly, then disappearing into the mass of men without the slightest sign of fatigue, leaving a trail of blood behind them that was visible from the sky, across the city.

  And one of those men was me!

  Me, Petya! Can you believe that?

  But where was this city, where was this valley? Where was the palace by the sea? Was it Larissa who lay at the foot of the staircase, a purple bloodstain blooming on her dress? With whom would I have to fall in love now, Petya, in this new sequel? All in an instant, the vertigo of many paintings in a dark room, the second half of a film projected rapidly in front of us before we leave our seats and go into the street, exposing ourselves to the heat or chill outside.