José Manuel Prieto - Rex

Without the words of a commentary scrawled ineptly across the foreheads of many of these imposters — such and such an opera singer, the “best” performer of Bach, so many painters — they would collapse. On closer view, it’s easy to discover how diminutive the text that holds them up is: what a critic said about him, the most knowledgeable authority on Renaissance vocal music, the number one specialist in alfresco painting, men in their turn puffed out with words, repellant palmers off of citations, people whose words have no weight whatsoever, not even for themselves, if they can’t manage to make them refer to an authority. Impossible for that reason, Nelly, and for this one, too: ranged against the feasibility of a new czar is the fact that there are already ten royal houses in Europe; the Russian house would make an improbable eleventh.

7

Or how about has keen judgment, is clear-thinking and circumspectwhen he couldn’t stop admiring the ingenuity of the men who wanted to hunt him down, and was shouting, “Mother! Are you listening, Mother?” to Nelly (wasn’t it absurd, that way he had of calling your mother “Mother”?). “But which is better? Huh?”

Explaining how there was once some Vanya somewhere, a man in Russia, coming back from an important meeting, walking with the quick steps of a young mafioso to the distant black point of his car (also a Mercedes), pulled up on a patch of lawn. Not on the sidewalk, not on the asphalt of a parking lot — why would he park it on asphalt, between the yellow stripes that frame a normal car? And he saw, drawing closer, that someone, that something was hanging from the handle of the door — a plastic bag, tied around the handle by some idiot. Easy to see it now: a plastic supermarket shopping bag.

Tied or left there by some mechanic from the nearby garage or some TV repairman, a man walking to his shop in the morning or on his way home from the night shift, unable to keep his envy of that car parked on the grass from making him tie up that bag there, in passing, as a stupid and out of place reminder: Hey! There are still workers coming in or going out at these hours, while you, bourgeois thief, and not even bourgeois thief, big mafia strongman, go around robbing and thieving, leaving your car on the grass .

The man standing at the car door saw all that, imagined the mechanic’s gray overalls disappearing down the alley, leaving his stupid and inappropriate declaration hanging there, and thought of the many things he’d like to explain: how, for example, he himself had worked in one of those repair shops until not very long ago, but without time to argue or any desire to do so, very irritated and full of rage.

And he went to swipe the bag away with his hand and be rid of this impertinence, and it was a bomb — wasn’t it, Mother? — a bomb that exploded the moment his hand ripped it furiously away. “Low tech, huh, Mother?”

As if, during a production meeting, some young fellow, a killer newly arrived at the Technical Solutions Lab, had listened to his older colleagues’ meanderings about limpet bombs, motion-activated detonators, resins set off by remote control from beneath manhole covers (and how? with the car on the lawn?) and had modestly raised his hand and suggested this: low tech. A degree of acquaintance, a precise calibration of the sequence of thoughts triggered by a plastic bag left hanging from a car door. The final thought sequence of the man who ripped the bag away while still talking on his cell phone. “Russians! Huh, Mother? Russians!” Vasily grew animated as he told her about it, then lowered his eyes, defeated by the evidence of a multiform ingenuity that would hunt him down in the end, wherever he ran, wherever he hid.

Tormented not only by the ingenuity, but also by the perseverance of a sharpshooter, posted for many days at the top of a building. The attic where he waited patiently for the curtains to part in the house where, also patient, without ever going near the window, a father and son were hiding. Two men who’d swindled the mafia, two entrepreneurs who had robbed too much (millions), without succeeding in buying a better house, or without having had time to do so when their game was up and they’d had to run and hide in that apartment, never going near the windows. But one afternoon, the kitchen’s yellow light bulb already switched on, the cold air of winter coming in through the window above, the older of the two, precisely the one on whom the godfather’s order of execution was weighing, had approached, had wanted to see something in the courtyard, the scene that he knew from memory — snow flattened by cars, children playing in the vacant lot — and had taken the bullet before the curtain had fallen back into place, the finger withdrawn. One glimpse. An H & K abandoned next to a mattress in the attic of the neighboring house, its three-thousand-dollar price tag amply covered by the payment guaranteed under the contract, no fingerprints or cigarette butts or sandwich wrappers anywhere nearby.

“No one could shoot you, Vasily: we’re on a cliff, there are no houses higher than this one,” I told him.

Your father repeated my stupid words: “ Boooo, boooo! No one could shoot you, Vasily, there are no houses higher than this one … Booooo! ” And turned his head from shoulder to shoulder in a gesture of resignation inspired by my stupidity: and what about plastic bags with bombs in them, and the many other means of killing him that even he himself, without being a killer, has thought of?

8

For also, in Pollux, another difficulty: that he has far-reaching ideas. What far-reaching ideas, and how far-reaching? A single one that he succeeded in exploiting to the maximum degree, on the bad advice of the Buryat’s black heart. I do concede that the idea he had in his laboratory in the Urals was far-reaching and unique. For the first time in history, color diamonds that bore no trace of having been manufactured. A far-reaching idea? All right: one far-reaching idea, I grant that. But then led directly afterward, by hand and mouth, to small ideas, to the infinitely despicable and minuscule idea of the swindle that had ended in their precipitous departure from Russia.

Any good ideaI could isolate, stop in midair, and approach to study in detail was always your mother’s. Such as the idea of hiring a tutor because you were missing your classes, because on certain days she’d found you reprogrammed, with nothing in your eyes but tiny purple and green figures chasing each other at top speed across your irises. A good idea: and then me here, my consultation of the Book. Not to mention all the good ideas I generated after the day I crossed the threshold, following Batyk’s scrawny back. The way my knowledge of the Book allowed me to recognize the bad ideas immediately, bad ideas such as Batyk’s incredible mistake with the antigravity machine, which I will presently proceed to describe.

Nor is he just, humane, control[ling] himself and his passionseither. A man incapable of mastering himself, who would fall into deep depressions, whom I saw walking through the house at night, unable to sleep, a defeated man. Or rather, to use the whole phrase: on his back, eating bread, a defeated man.

Here: someone with nothing to do, without plans or goals, without obligations, no reason to cross the city from one point to another, to go to a meeting. Shackled like a Laocoön in his silk robe, enchained in the storied initials embroidered on his slippers. Or like a large animal with grass heaped up in one corner of the cage, always a little dirty, dejected by the hard asphalt onto which he slowly brings down a cloven hoof that opens out beneath the weight of the enormous leg.