José Manuel Prieto - Rex

“A walk? With all my heart!”

3

I imagined, Petya, that we were off to withdraw some money, that our little jaunt had to do, finally, with matters related to my paycheck. Progressing happily down the Paseo Marítimo. Without a monocle, it’s true, to bounce along on my chest. A monocle that would speak as clearly as the Writer of the happiness that suffused me, the soft purity of the morning. The hotels along the beach, the yachts with their colorful banners, the blue and white striped awnings of the beach clubs, the money we drew in with every breath, that perfumed the air of that city by the sea.

But picture this, Petya: a gentleman with a lady by his side and, with them, a dwarf. A rather different image from the one I’d had in mind, an image that can be read or glossed with no other significance but this: the dwarf was Batyk, who’d insisted on coming with us and whom I call a dwarf in the literal sense of a physical dwarf, not a moral dwarf. And not at all, never, in the allegorical sense to which the Commentator alludes with deepest hypocrisy in order to justify his own imposture: the sense of newcomers who, however small or dwarflike they may be, can see farther because they’re perched on the shoulders of the giants of the past.

The same went for Batyk, on my shoulders, though it would be more correct to say on the Writer’s shoulders, feeling him walk along behind me, paying attention to what he was seeing from that height, without understanding a thing. As when, to my disconcertion, your mother stepped into a jewelry store, with me all unaware of what prompted her to stop in front of the display window (the jeweler’s name etched in a semicircle on the glass), study some of the gems there, and then go inside for a closer look … Sensing that we’d be standing there for some time, I positioned myself next to the doorway in a patch of sunlight which was exactly that yellow color the Writer devotes such beautiful words to in the Book, but which now, in the aim of bothering and confounding Batyk, I used as the pretext for an odious discourse on Ferragamo: how that color, mingled with a lovely blue, would be perfect for a pair of Ferragamos, which is what we should have been looking at, not jewelry, Nelly. (I felt Batyk leaning over my shoulder, stretching out his neck — what shoes? which shoes? — stooping lower myself to make him stumble and fall on the slope of my false interest in fashion, inexplicable in a man like me, as if a matter of such little importance as a pair of shoes could occupy my mind, turn my thoughts aside for one second from what we had gone into that store to do.)

The adorable dress of layered red muslin your mother wore that day, her hand palm down on her thigh, the better to scrutinize a pink gem in the display case. She raised her eyes, shooting me a meaningful glance beneath another client’s elbow: a diamond, innumerable tiny facets that light could go into and then not find its way out again for one beat or two, until it flashed once more against my eyes, my astonished eyes. I looked up into her eyes without knowing what I was supposed to be seeing there, as if she were a botany teacher who goes on ahead and waits for you beneath a tree on an excursion through a garden. You reach her out of breath, you want to tell her something about the day, the view, but she puts her finger to your lips and asks you with her eyes: “Understand?”

Yes, Nelly: stones, diamonds, gothic diamonds, marquise diamonds, star diamonds. I don’t want them, have no money for them. Or else (I suddenly stood up straight, looked back into her eyes), or else: “Hand over the stone, motherfucker, hand over the stone before my husband gets back and makes you talk. I know you’ve got it. No use pretending …” And I saw in the red of that stone, its blood-filled interior, how easily Batyk could smash my head against the counter, the iron grip of his fingers around my neck, or send me crashing against the reinforced glass. How the shopkeeper would shout, and not because of the glass (bulletproof), which would never break. Giving vent, in that moment of danger, to his anger and indignation, in Korean or Tamil. Meaning: Get out of here you Russian pigs, go kill each other outside.

I’d give it back. I’d run back to the house, fly up the stairs, take it out from under the mattress. Here you go, Nelly, I never wanted it, you know that, don’t you? Never the slightest intention of keeping it, always meaning to give it back. And I had thought about doing that …

Easily comprehending, at that moment, my mistake: the mistake of having wanted to steal from the mafia.

“That’s not true. My mama is not in the mafia.”

“No, it is true. Just wait.”

I regretted everything in that fearful moment, entering cold regions full of fear and leaving them for warm regions full of fear. Having taken a position as the tutor of a child as wayward as you, Petya, having focused my thoughts on the wife of a mafioso and spoken of warps in space with your father. All that as I stood at the counter without daring to open my eyes and look at her, without seeing that she’d moved to the back of the store without any of this in her mind, that she hadn’t even noticed the stone was missing. So many stolen diamonds — if a single one fell down and was lost, what did it matter?

Were there, I wondered immediately — horrors! Petya, horrors! — were there many more of those diamonds lodged along the edges of the staircase, hidden between the sofa cushions and under the living room rug?

4

I must amplify the previous commentary. I had just returned to my room to flop down, not bothering to pull back the bedspread, lying diagonally across the bed, still trembling, when I heard music that someone had put on, and lowered the Book to listen.

The stereo’s silvery columns filling the air with a melody that made me think of the Writer, of a breeze and the shimmering surface of water that is exactly what the Book is about: the days you discover from your window without there being the slightest gap between the vision of the sea lapping at the coast, the cypresses in the distance, and your mother, her soul, the way she had of gazing gratefully up at me, the way she squeezed my hand when we’d returned to the house, happy to have gone out. As if I, as if my chest were armored with metal plaques that bullets would rebound from. Or as if the Book, placed between my heart and the gun barrel, could miraculously stop the bullet that was tearing through its pages with a single line, this line: one is a count or one is not a count, it’s not of the slightest importance, as Mme. de Villeparisis notes, and with good reason.

For she didn’t stop talking, all the way there and as we went from store to store, nervously talking about the mafia, the many Russian mafiosi who’d taken refuge there, the whole coast crawling with them. And I stared at her in amazement, thinking: But you people are the mafia, maja ! What are you talking about? You yourselves are mafia! And as we went past, I signaled her with a pointed glance at a Guardia Civil’s lacquered bicorn. Look there, I meant to tell her. Why is it that you wouldn’t go outside unless I was with you?

Bent over the pages of the Book without reading, or reading blankly, pages going past without the Book’s allowing anything inside — a rare thing in the Writer who always grabs you, his pages like Velcro, your eyes like felt. Trying to decipher, suddenly lowering my eyes to focus on the explanation, first found in the Book, for their great fear. But then she appeared in my room, your mother: knocking, tock tock , on my doorframe.

“I have a gift for you,” she said. “Though it’s not a gift, it’s your salary.”

She came closer.