José Manuel Prieto - Rex

I’d been afraid, had imagined him shoving me along the top of a cliff, pebbles rolling beneath my feet, a question in his bad eye: Have you been seducing my wife? Giving me a beating that is precisely described in the passage of the Book that prefigures The Matrix (everything is there in the Book!), the scene in The Matrix when one of the agents catches up with Neo in a metro station and launches a series of quick blows, a wheel of fists hitting Neo’s torso like the blades of a windmill — what a minor nineteenth-century writer might call a “hail” of fists, when it is in fact, as the Writer describes it, a constellationof fists, which fall by the simple force of gravity, breaking the torque at a certain point and then smashing down like pile drivers … All that, in this passage of the Book: as an astral phenomenon appears in the sky, … two ovoid forms … with vertiginous speed … Saint-Loup’s two fists … that enabled them to create, in front of[Smith, Agent Smith], an unstable constellation, etcetera.

I’m sure of this. I cannot be mistaken about something like this: I hold the whole Book in my memory, its text incarnate in me. Nor should you be confounded by the turban and cackling laughter, which may appear to be a later addition, a corruption introduced in a subsequent era. The same goes for this passage with the unusual image of the constellation of fists.

Carried away with that image, I was imagining fists in the air all the way to Torremolinos and the whole time we were there with Larissa. But there were no fists. Quite the contrary: Vasily was friendly and indulgent, a scientist who entirely understands that a young man, almost a boy, in so luxurious a mansion, in the company of so lovely a woman. Surrounded by diamonds, this woman, not only her neck but her whole being, an entourage, a cloud of diamonds orbiting around her: how could anyone not fall in love, not fall madly in love with such a woman?

Your papa’s demeanor had deceived me, I was thrown off, never having seen real mafiosi, only in the movies. I’d taken him for, believed him to be, one of those.

Now I understood: he was a defenseless scoundrel, a petty thief, a small-time crook, garroted by fear. His terror palpable in the way his eyes swept the top of the wall as he emerged from the swimming pool, putting his hands on the edge and pulling himself up, then quickly turning toward the wall as if someone might take advantage of his back in the water, a swimmer’s vulnerability, to put two bullets into him, a sudden red stain in the swimming pool spreading out in a purple cloud, and Vasily floating strangely in the center, fixedly observing or as if fixedly observing the glint of a coin at the bottom, the bullets that missed.

But this, too, this thought yielding speedily to fear of an encounter with the windshield, even more terrible!

These people I’d believed and imagined to be fabulously rich, immensely affluent? Horribly poor, in reality! Bankrupt! He himself had confessed it: bankrupt! Catastrophically bankrupt! Nobodies!

Profoundly swindled, Petya. I felt profoundly swindled by your parents, deeply deceived by this couple who had so well, so consummately, so garishly played the role of supperrich. To the point that I’d believed them, presumed I was living in a castle, sucking deeply and directly from the udder of their wealth and congratulating myself upon it. And let’s be clear about this: only to gain some time and make myself a little money (never enough) to save up for the hard days ahead and go on with my journey. True, I’d had moments of suspicion, sudden rushes of glimmerings, my hands and feet trying to correct the false picture, the mistaken perception my brain was constructing.

For example, there was the exaggerated tip I’d seen him give a few hours earlier on the way out of a disco even more luxurious and expensive than Ishtar. Indignant over it, angry at seeing myself forced to emend the error, wrest the bill away from the astonished doorman … And the worst of it was — my gaze fixed on a church steeple that I didn’t stop watching until it disappeared around a bend in the road — they hadn’t paid me! At all! Ersatz diamonds? They hadn’t paid me!

How much is an ersatz diamond worth? How much money can an ersatz diamond be sold for?

He read it all in my face, Vasily; he didn’t stop watching me all the way there, but without ever seeming anxious or cornered. Quite the contrary: a smile on his lips. A smile of aplomb and impudence, of smug self-satisfaction with the car he was driving, the lovely creature he had for a wife, and the beauty, the ineffable beauty, he had for a lover. I studied her again this morning, couldn’t take my eyes off her: Larissa, standing there in front of her house, then walking back toward the door in her sequined jean jacket, thick blonde hair halfway down her back, turning and waving to me happily, her arm held high. To the point that I wondered, as in a nineteenth-century novel: Will I see her again? Ever?

3

I didn’t open my mouth for several kilometers. Along that part of the road we ran into a cloud of insects that I took for locusts or African grasshoppers but that turned out to be tiny yellow butterflies. The Writer has a beautiful passage where Swann and Agostinelli enter such a cloud of butterflies and roll along pulverizing them beneath the wheels of their Hispano-Suiza, hearing them crunch and watching them pile up on the windshield until they have to stop the car and clean the small crushed thoraxes off the glass. The sun about to rise on that April morning, still a little chilly, and those butterflies, the golden dust from their wings.

And there was this: the relief that your mother was not a member of the mafia. Impossible that she could be evil, so sweet a woman with whom I’d talked over so many things during the evenings he said he was in Rotterdam. Married to a man who was cheating on her, a man I couldn’t hope to control or set limits on and who was escaping me at top speed, his left eye opening a path for us a few inches above the asphalt. Not taking his eyes off the road for a second, laughing, his eyes surrounded by the bunching wrinkles of a man laughing gleefully to himself. He had a very beautiful lover (I’d seen her), a fast car, and his wrists had grown larger — how could he have failed to be in excellent spirits that morning? Sunrise over the Costa del Sol.

The wrists had appeared suddenly. All the force of his new look, his newfound internal security enlarging his wrists. But I, too, eh? I, too, could hit back at them, could reduce them to nothing, though they had to be taken into account, those wrists. They dovetailed without deviation into his arms or rather his arms fit with greater security and strength into the bridge of those wrists, wider now, more blood could pass along them, more troops, if needed. I could let him stand up, the muscles of his back rippling menacingly, and throw himself confidently onto me, only to catch him in midflight. By the wrists. Not grown so large, Vasily, that I couldn’t encircle them with my thumb and index finger if I wanted. An optical illusion, Vasily, an optical illusion I myself was about to fall victim to. In fact they were not that large or thick, those wrists. Normal wrists. Piece of cake. One: (to the ground). Two: (say uncle?).

“How can you do this to Nelly?” I protested. “I wish I had the Book here, I’d show you; you’ll end up saying to yourself: To think I’ve wasted years of my life, I’ve wanted to die … for a woman who wasn’t my type!”

“Not true,” he snorted. “I’m never going to say that,” not taking his eyes off the road until he did move them for a second, threw a glance at me, and laughed. “No way am I ever saying that, batiushka .”