Rex

by Jose Manuel Prieto

  “I knew it, I knew it from the first time you told me about the piano that mourned like a bird abandoned by its mate and the violin that heard it and answered from the top of another tree.”

  “But that is by the Writer! … It doesn’t matter … I won’t say now (though perhaps this is the reason): it was my life, it was my life that was at stake. Pusillanimous. No, it wasn’t that.”

  “Listen: you could never have been our sovereign. Never!”

  “I know, Petya … Piotr Vasilievich. You mean they never would have accepted me as I am? I never could have ridden into Moscow on a white horse? I know that.”

  5

  “Well, yes, he is named Borges, J. L. Borges—how did you find out? I didn’t want to tell you, didn’t want his name embedded in you like the names of the philosophers in Diogenes Laërtius who are known only by the fragments he cited or commented on in his book, most irresponsibly, I would say. Such an honor for the Commentator were you to sit down some day, grown up, and write about the days in the Castle, exalt the beneficences of the Book and the intelligence of your tutor … You, Petya, who could easily write such a thing, a real book, a primary book, without commentary or citations in bold face, and without the dark gleam of his name, the Commentator’s, contained within or casting its light from any page of your book or any of the folds of your adult memory.”

  There are names, experiences, upon which a good person, educated in the Book, must never set eyes or think of. Not in pursuit of greater knowledge, not in pursuit of cultural breadth. A culture and an erudition that are false!

  A man—forgive me for insisting upon this point—incapable of thinking straight or of writing with the unvarying frankness of a truly great author, and who, on the single occasion he met the Writer, during a ride in an automobile, didn’t exchange a word with him but only exclaimed, toward the end, with feigned astonishment, “Sir, you slow and accelerate the rotation of the earth at your pleasure: you are greater than God.”

  Greater than God? How could anyone claim to be greater than God?

  The Writer never claimed that, or to have made any great scientific advance, discovered any practical application for his Book, for the fragments or blue stones of Time he holds in his hands in volume 7 and gazes at in amazement, for, having taken his sincerity further than any other Writer in the world, each time he has asked himself What is time? he has been able only to keep himself from lying, only to confess, to respond, wisely and with absolute sincerity, with Augustinian wisdom: “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

  Or, what amounts to the same thing: We must never imagine the solution of imposture, never pretend to be more than God. Better to entrust ourselves to our fate.

  6

  But I already told you about my blindness, when I mentioned to you and commented extensively on that phrase by the Writer where he says, quite rightly: he was a good man. And allow me to add: naive.

  Who took some time to understand the slander that another man, a false youth, a gentleman of Germanic surname, Aschenbach, put out against the Writer. A jeweler in Santa Monica whom I saw reading in his shop, and who did not get up when I went in, but put down the book he was reading to attend to me, placing it facedown.

  So that I could read, decipher the title in English, and shiver in wonder: What? You have the Book, too? You know the Writer, too? And read him with veneration? And I asked his permission to pick it up and examined it rapturously, Petya, not understanding anything in that language, but leafing through it in ecstasy, surrendering before it.

  Until I heard him speaking of the Writer as a standard-bearer—you know, Petya?—and I came to realize. That he was reading it because supposedly only in its pages would he find a knowledge and a comprehension, an exact and inclusive portrait of all the colors of the rainbow. I was horrified to hear this. The Writer as a standard-bearer!

  I would dedicate an entire book, years of my life, to demonstrate the falsity in that, to clean … Petya, I couldn’t stop myself from leaping over the counter to beat him in rage, until his mouth was bleeding, the mouth that had spoken ill of the Writer and said those things, odious prevarications, never!

  An instrumental use, Petya—as if the Book were some sort of manifesto. Never! I beat him until someone, an accomplice of his, his employee (Tadzio! I heard him call him, Tadzio!), must have hit me on the back and I collapsed unconscious on the floor.

  7

  The beating I got in my turn, the interrogation I was subjected to. The tooth I spat out at my feet: blood and saliva. The things I howled: Is he not an imposter? Is he not assuming the personality of another man? Is he not using his words? Is he not putting in the mouth of a single Writer the words of many other writers? Is he not eternally falling into the fallacy of amalgamating many writers into one?

  On the floor of the police station, my body aching but without regretting for one second having assaulted that man. All of him false (his horrible teeth, like a young man’s), propagator of those nauseating falsehoods about the Writer. Unable to bear so much deception, so many lies: as if there, so far from death, from the place where he must be, Batyk were speaking through his mouth. But why should it matter to me: I know your mother, I know your father, I know you, Petya—all of you are full of respect for the Book.

  Quelle horreur that in America, horrible Amerika, the horrible Americans should devote themselves to staining and outraging the Writer’s memory. And I leapt on him the instant I understood the ignominious intent of his words until someone, his employee, as I told you.

  I wept that night on the floor of the police station but did not say, did not permit myself to say, did not sully my lips with the words of so filthy an accusation. The police unable to find an explanation or determine what had triggered (like a gun) my rage. What a child I was! How ingenuous my reaction! The shiver I felt, full of admiration, when I found him reading and saw what book it was. And how he displayed it to me in delight, believing me to belong to his cult, a worshipper of the same god.

  They didn’t understand a word, the police. They beat me all morning, powerless, a feeling of impotence growing within them. Hearing me speak in that foreign language, so obviously a foreigner (there’s only one small territory on the globe where I’m not, and therefore I am a foreigner more than I am anything else).

  Cuban? Cuban! I told them a thousand times. What does it matter? Cuban, yes! And I was dealt another blow. Why, then, does no one here understand you? Jorge is from Puerto Rico: Martínez, Pedro, they don’t understand a word. And he slammed his broad fist, its fingers tightly clenched—let me tell you—into my stomach again. And the questions rained down again: “Who are you talking about? Who are Pierre Hélie, Hugues de Saint-Victor, Borges?”

  I looked out at them through a single eye: they’re all French, I told them, or no, from South America, from a country, I don’t remember which one (I don’t know why I thought that if I said Argentina they’d beat me with even greater fury). I woke up that morning on the floor of the cell, and through the window high above me, when I’d risen to my feet and hoisted myself up by the bars, I saw the sea. A wine-dark sea. I wept …

  8

  Exhausted now, like a swimmer who’s abandoned all struggle and floats without reaching any shore, a man who on one afternoon of his life, full of strength, has the idea—in the Writer, in John Cheever—of crossing through the swimming pools of his neighbors, behind those gigantic Californian houses, and dives through their subterranean branches without finding a way out, the way home, lost in the labyrinth, dying there. Or like a swimmer in time, borne up by the whole movement of the wave and down by the whole movement of the wave, without there being any merit in him.

  Up to the service of the last emperor of Russia. The happy days after the journey to Barataria and the successful sale of the diamonds (which I didn’t tell you about), the night of the great ball, when the kingdom seemed to be at hand and I saw your mother as a queen, and
flew with her over the blue and white Castle, its galactic blue glittering from the sky.

  Down to that flat city, the entirely pernicious example of so many low houses, like a valid refutation of the idea of a king. And still lower, to the floor of the police station, beaten. All my efforts seeming to have led me to nothing, and left me without any desire, for the first time in years, to go down to the sea. The city awakening, its men and women breakfasting on enormous glasses of milk, steam rising from the plates that waiters held up against the sunlight as they came out of the kitchen.

  (How to bring her back? How marvelous it would be to make the journey to see her, simply going down the stairs and standing on the lookout on Alondra Boulevard where the taxis pass by, having first lied to Larissa about where I was going. Waiting for one impatiently, getting in full of air, floating in the backseat like those balloons we take home from a party and push inside a taxi, riding along smiling, enormous, lips laughing, teary-eyed, happy because in only half an hour’s travel through this low city … But she does not occupy any of the blocks of its grid; none is marked by having her inside it. I’d have to subjugate myself to the pressurization of an airplane, dragging my feet along the pavement toward its steel flanks. Cuernavaca is far away. There’s no sea in Cuernavaca, I’ve checked on the map. Only green and brown on the paper, an abhorrent place the Writer never heard of, about which he never wrote, though about Los Angeles, yes, I’m sure.)

  And pay attention to me here: there’s only this one point I would dispute the Writer on, one thing I don’t agree with: not without there being any merit in me.

  I went, I leapt, it was I who leapt. In me, as in one of the Writer’s heros, lies dormant the stuff of which a lord is made—Tuan, he calls it—and which finally organizes itself in the air before falling into that mud, in Patusan, in … the trust, the love, the confidence of the people.

  Crowned on my voyage to the sea: at the center, Petya. Speaking to you from the center of the sphere. Assisted by a cloud of instantaneous beings or winged homunculi, the yahoos, they climb high trees as nimbly as a squirrel … with prodigious agility. Small and subjugated devils who would purge the horrible guilt of the treachery of their man Batyk in the court of their fathers, or like captive angels flying to the most remote confines of the sphere. To bring back, in their beaks, fragments and passages of all books, to hold them up in the air before me with profound reverence. All the wisdom of the Book, of all books, before my eyes, infinitely wise, fabulously rich.

  Infinitely wise. The generative principle of the Book understood; adding further volumes to the seven initial ones about the Perfect King, confident that perhaps, at a distance of thirty centuries, they would amalgamate into a single book, my clumsy commentaries and allusions to the warm Mediterranean commingled with his infinitely detailed pages on the sea in Normandy. In a single book? In a single book!

  And fabulously rich. Because what other proof did I have? What other way of confirming my young life to the emperor of Russia (but you, so young? Yes, me, so young) but the enormous wealth, the unimaginable sum in diamonds that I carried in my pocket like a voyager across time?

  Not a flower, as the Commentator falsely states: imagine that, a rose as proof of a journey to paradise! For paradise, as is well known and sustained by the authority of John the Theologian, is thickly strewn with diamonds, the stones he cites with undeniable pleasure in the final pages of the Book: jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonyx, sardius, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, jacinth, amethyst!

  What would you bring back, Petya, from a journey through time? A rose? Or diamonds stitched into the hem of your coat that—when the friends who had gathered for a banquet in your honor reacted with incredulity to your story, all you had seen and heard in China—you would produce before their disbelieving eyes, as Marco Polo did in 1295, the final argument of the diamonds he poured out from the unstitched lining of his coat or caftan?

  So that those present opened their mouths in wonder and shouted: a million! Which is what that Book is titled, the fifth I cite here, in accordance with Valentinian’s rule for commentary: no more than five authors.

  Millions in diamonds! Just like me. The best and only proof of my journey through time. Remember when you asked me: What is the Book about? What is its subject? And I told you, I answered: It’s about money, about how to make money. But now I can tell you this, too—for according to an old saying in the country where I am now, time is money—it is also about time. In search of lost money? (No, that would be vulgar and loathsome. Better to seek time.) You’re right, Petya. Time.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Rex is the third and final installment in a trilogy that began with Enciclopedia de una vida en Rusia (Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia; 1997) and Livadia, or Mariposas nocturnas del imperio ruso (1999; published in English translation as Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire, 2000). A few clarifications strike me as pertinent. With all three novels, I’ve tried to go beyond the realism commonly associated with the autobiographical novel (which all three are), yet not toward magic or magical realism, but rather toward science and a kind of magico-scientific realism, if such a thing is possible. Everything in this book, strange or outlandish as it may seem, is strictly factual and was exhaustively researched, in particular the plot line involving the manufacture of synthetic diamonds. The same is true of the many references to quantum physics, including matters as remote from a child’s mind as Bohm’s paradox of the fish, and terms taken from black-hole theory such as spatial rupture, singularity, event horizons, stalled light, etc.

  It is not by chance, either, that Petya is the listener and sole recipient of the story; the whole tone of the book derives from that fact. Rex returns to the free fabulations of childhood, and the tales of Psellus, the tutor, are an amalgamation of all the books he read as a youth or a child, out of which he improvises for Petya a highly adorned story of his parents’ life, a story that otherwise, told in some other way, might have been sordid and terrible.

  The primary human theme of this novel is the strategies used to overcome the terrible experience of totalitarianism. Like me, my characters are survivors of the totalitarian catastrophe. Therefore, Rex can be considered a post-totalitarian novel, whose characters are all profoundly disturbed. This explains their obsession with money, as well as their decision to embark upon the impossible adventure of imposture, their embrace of the surprising and implausible idea of relaunching thc Imperial House of Russia.

  As many readers will inevitably have noticed, the Writer so frequently alluded to after the Fifth Commentary is not, in fact, Marcel Proust, but an amalgamated figure, much like the one described by Ralph Waldo Emerson when he very rightly says: “I am very much struck in literature by the appearance, that one person wrote all the books; as if the editor of a journal planted his body of reporters in different parts of the field of action, and relieved some by others from time to time; but there is such equality and identity both of judgment and point of view in the narrative, that it is plainly the work of one all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman.”

  I believe it important to mention as well that the idea of using manufactured diamonds in a swindle alludes to a little-known work by Marcel Proust, which has only recently been translated into English by Charlotte Mandell in 2008. In a collection of his early writings, gathered under the title Pastiches et mélanges, the future author of the Recherche tells the story of Lemoine, a late-nineteenth-century adventurer who swindled the owner of De Beers and other leading figures in the diamond industry. They paid Lemoine considerable sums to keep him from causing the diamond market to collapse by revealing a secret method of manufacturing diamonds he claimed to have invented. When the swindle was discovered and the whole affair brought to light, a highly publicized trial took place that all Paris followed with utmost interest. Marcel Proust, whose family had a great deal of money invested in De Beers, was particularly caught up by the story and derived from it his idea for the “Pastiches,” w
hich tell the story of Lemoine’s trial as a delectable series of stylistic exercises, composed in the manner of notable French writers such as Flaubert, the Gon-courts, Saint-Simon, etcetera.

  Finally, I think it may perhaps be useful to the reader if I include an (incomplete) list of the works cited in Rex, either explicitly (in boldface) or implicitly:

  First Commentary: Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past; William Shakespeare, Macbeth; Herodotus, The Histories. Second Commentary: Jorge Luis Borges, “The Approach to Almotasin,” “The Mirror of Ink,” “The Secret Miracle”; Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. Third Commentary: Molière, The Imaginary Invalid; Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa; Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way and Within a Budding Grove; Stockton, Frank R., “The Lady or the Tiger.” Fourth Commentary: H. G. Wells, The Time Machine; Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland; Ivan Efremov, Andromeda Nebula; Chutan Tse, The Thief of the Peaches of Longevity; Marcel Proust, Swann in Love; Michael Psellus, Chronographia. Fifth Commentary: Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451; Washington Irving, Tales from the Alhambra; Alexander Pushkin, Ruslan and Ludmilla; Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Robert I. Friedman, Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America; Victor Hugo, Les Miserables; George Lucas, Star Wars; Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough. Sixth Commentary: Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV; Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s; H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds; Homer, the Iliad; Charles Baudelaire, Mon coeur mis à nu; Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors; Appian, Roman History; Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Avicenna, The Canon of Medicine; Racine, Mithridates. Seventh Commentary: Anonymous, The Song of the Nibelungs; Erasmus, The Education of the Christian Prince; Anonymous, the Epic of Gilgamesh. Eighth Commentary: 1 Kings 9:26–28, 10:11, 22; 2 Chronicles 8:17–18, 9:10; Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology; Aristophanes, The Clouds; Maurice Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble; Hammurabi, Codex Hammurabi. Ninth Commentary: Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita; John Milton, Aeropagitica; Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov; Heinrich Heine, The Baths of Lucca; Thomas Mann, Time Magic Mountain; Isaac Asimov, “I’m in Marsport without Hilda.” Tenth Commentary: Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; Prosper Mérimée, Demetrius the Impostor: an Episode in Russian History; Anton Chekhov, “The Death of a Goverment Clerk”; Bishop Berkeley, Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge; Jules Vernes, The Vanished Diamond; William Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet; Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island. Eleventh Commentary: Thomas De Quincey, “The Sphinx’s Riddle”; Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov; Saint Augustine, Contra mendacium; Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (Paracelsus), Three Treatises; Alfred Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory; Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, Amadis de Gaula; Henry James, Daisy Miller; Confucius, The Analects, John Amos Comenius, Didactica Magna; Jules Verne, Dick Sand: A Captain at Fifteen; Bishop Liutprand of Cremona, Relatio de legatione Constantinopolitana ad Nicephoruni Phocam; Saint John the Divine, Revelations 22:18–19; Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”; William Morris, The Water of the Wondrous Isles; Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo; Gabriel Garcia Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Farid al-Din al-’Attar, The Conference of the Birds; Homer, the Iliad. Twelfth Commentary: Aeschylus, The Persians; Ortega y Gasset, “Time, Distance and Form in the Work of Marcel Proust”; Anonymous, the epic of Gilgamesh; Julio Cortázar, “Instructions on How to Climb a Staircase”; James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans; Vladimir Ilych Lenin, Materialism and empirocriticism; the Brothers Grimm, Thumbelina; Antonio Vivaldi, Juditha Triumphans, George D. Painter, Marcel Proust, a Biography; Saint Augustine, The Confessions; Thomas Mann, Death in Venice; John Cheever, Stories; Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels; Saint John the Divine, Revelations 22:18–19; Marco Polo, Il Millone.