José Manuel Prieto - Rex

Much has been made of how she, this girl, in all her irresistible candor, represents Amerika, and how the Writer, a fifty-year-old émigré in the Book, volume 4, is enchanted, transfixed by the vision of her frail, honey-hued shoulders(so he says) through which, through all her bearing, she transmits (or the Writer transmits, by means of her) the fatal attraction that the vulgar young American girl exerts on the soul of the ravaged and disenchanted old European.

I could lie to you, put my own clever spin on this passage, tell you I’d resolved to leave after the first week, disgusted by your parents’ impossible furniture and the atmosphere of palpable danger, the daggers in the air, but that the vision of your mother in a bathing suit next to the swimming pool stopped me. By which — incapable of lying to you — I would be transmitting the following message: unlike the Writer’s character, unlike Humbert, I, a young American, stood there paralyzed and ecstatic before legs that were still youthful and full of the wisdom of Europe. And your mother, with her hyphenated family name and the black moles on her breast, represented the enchantments of a civilization that was antique but still ripe for enjoyment and full of juice. And I, an inept young American, represented vulgarity and ineptitude, though full of drive and all that. As if I were showing you the reverse side of the plot (the Writer’s plot).

And what had I just said to her, telling her she was right without yet having fully understood her plan or knowing precisely what she’d been talking about, moved simply by my feeling for her? But once she’d explained it to me (and I’d understood it), I told her:

“The Writer has a phrase for this, Nelly: a harebrained idea. An idea that even after being hit over the head with a war mace, let’s say, can’t be picked up and flung off the battlefield or dislodged from the place where it appears or unexpectedly emerges, so it stays there, harebrained, without any possible application because it slips from the fingers of all those who try to grasp it. You see? (We were walking through the tall grass and I showed it to her, her harebrained idea:the lips a vivid scarlet, emeralds for eyes, a brightly painted doll among the meadow flowers.) How to get it away from there, how to stand it upright so it would move and talk with all the resource and sagacity of a mechanical doll? Not possible, it eludes me, it slips away. See?

“Although only harebrainedfor that reason. The idea itself is excellent, your idea, the one you were arguing about with Vasily …”

Then she made a point which I understood and which left me speechless.

Left speechless by her intelligence. That’s the passage where the Writer says, in the words that Appian of Alexandria used with reference to Cleopatra VII, last of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt: He[Julius Caesar] looked upon her as a marvel not of beauty alone but also of wit.

Or, and it amounts to the same thing: get out of there right now . Out to the garden and from there to the street and into a taxi that would carry me to Puerto Banús. Without a clear idea of what I would then do, but with the obvious, crystalline, sole, and unique meaning, Petya, of leaving, fleeing.

For what gives the Book its greatness, what makes it unique and unrepeatable is the fact that it is a machine for thinking, the greatest compendium of instructions ever written. And all of them in the exceptionally user-friendly form of a novel, with characters whose lives and vicissitudes concern and move us. And when your brain makes contact with the encoded surface of that paper, it will always give you the most fitting solution, the canniest response, the one most effective for your intelligence: flee as soon as you possibly can, right now . Without the money, but safe and alive.

9

My hands and feet connecting themselves with places where I could try my luck, safe from her insanity, places with sea. The swaying boat attached to the wall by a ring of metal. Taking out the stones and studying them over the foam. Regretting the money I could have earned, forced now to leave it all behind. The airplanes I saw descending in the distance to land at Pablo Ruiz Picasso International, and I’d have to board one of those planes and fly away.

Returning, then, after less than an hour, to a café on the Paseo Marítimo, the soothing pale cream of its tablecloths. Might I not be fleeing or thinking of fleeing, I said to myself, from the greatest stroke of luck, the most immense fortune, placed at my feet by the woman I love? As if, sitting there at the table distractedly sipping my iced tea, I’d seen your mother materialize in the air in front of me, heard her speak to me. The talking head that calls out to the hero from atop a crag and helps him unravel the mystery, predicting that by tomorrow a strong wind will finally swell his sails. Or as if, and to my infinite astonishment, I had noticed that I understood the song of the birds, the parliament they were holding on the café’s awning. The knight who slays the dragon, bathes in its blood, and discovers to his bewilderment and wonder that he understands the lark’s song and decodes its twittering with the speed and skill of a Morse operator probing the heavens, deciphering the cave’s coordinates at top speed, the nonsensical password.

Running to save her, back to the Castle. Everything understood, having understood all of it, Petya, your mother’s whole ingenious plan. The giant or colossus who is first seen sniffing a bunch of daisies and then destroys everything in his path as he runs, the diminutive globe spinning beneath his feet. Able, in no more than the life span of a sigh, to cover the distance that separated me from her face, from the enormous windows of her eyes, as if her head had been engineered by Dalí. And she was laughing, too, her hair snapping in the wind like a row of oriflammes, her adorable, darkly honey-hued locks. My euphoria, all the happiness of that night in these words which the pedant Bloch falsely attributes to Avicenna: For love is a disorder resembling a hallucination, similar to melancholy … On some occasions it incites lasciviousness, on others not. The symptoms of this disorder are as follows: the eyes of the afflicted one are sunken and dry, the cheeks twitch constantly. Such a person laughs without cause.

Laughing — me, too — without cause. As if a team of young men were hidden in the folds of my face, among the smooth muscles and undrooping cheeks, and, having received an order to pull, were making me smile despite my strong will not to laugh for fear that Vasily, your father, would find out my secret. But my brain, by that mechanical action, was receiving in its turn the neuroperception of a smile, at the same time as another team was pulling at the muscles of my back, raising me to my feet by a thousand ropes as if I were a fairground colossus or an assault tower positioned before your mother’s face to throw across the bridge by which I would easily gain access to the city within, and enter. Certain that she had come up with the perfect solution, as if discovered in the Book! Laughing in great bursts, absurdly confident. Watching us make our exit like that, dressed as if for a Greek tragedy, attired in tunics, our faces grave, our fingers bejeweled. All of it in the Writer, easily understandable. Or as in Mozart.

A subject that Mozart chose for an opera; that must be a good subject, mustn’t it? Imposture is precisely that: Mithridates, the imposter, in a land today called Russia. Vasily on high as King or Czar: pretender to the throne of Russia, no less! Only thus would we be safe from the danger that menaced us and had encased the Castle and all the Castle’s gardens in ice. Which the Writer, with his enormous wisdom and strength, had to break up. Right now.