José Manuel Prieto - Rex

You’ll say to me: at the mere sight of a stone? At the mere sight of a stone! Beautiful, of a brilliance, a resplendence never before seen, a stone that would have an entire vast chamber to itself in the palace of their memories.

4

I know it will work: it worked with the first of the Russian imposters. In a bathroom, where, humiliatingly but with dignity intact, he was serving a Polish nobleman, an unworthy individual, a minor noble in whose home he, Dmitri, had taken a position as a valet. And in the bathroom of that house, for the trivial matter — can you believe this? — of some water that was a degree or so too cold to the touch of his soft and cerulean back, he, that man, gave him a hard slap, a slap to Dmitri, the son of Ivan Kalita, miraculously saved from Godunov’s knife. The emperor endured the affront, bowed humbly, and, with his cheek burning, said: “Sire, if you knew who your servant is, if you could imagine it, you would not behave so.” The Pole, shivering in the tub but from cold rather than fear, replied: “Who are you? Who is it that I should not, in such a situation, my back placed in contact with water so unpleasantly cold, deal a slap to, my fingers delivering the message of my anger, etcetera?”

“I,” Dmitri, still almost a boy, replied, “I am the son of Ivan Kalita, and my throat escaped Godunov’s knife in 1591, for another child, put in my place, was the one who lifted his neck to the criminal flattery of the murderer when he said, ‘What a lovely necklace you are wearing today, Gosudar ,’ or ‘Show me that lovely necklace, Prince.’ And innocently the boy raised his chin to show off his beads — to the murderer! — opening an interstice in the bloc of his physical being that the murderer instantly took advantage of to slice open his neck, and the poor boy fell, convulsing and bathed in blood …”

That said, Dmitri drew from his clothing a gold baptismal cross studded with gems and placed it before the eyes of he who until that moment had been his master, and who now sat frozen with shock in the bathwater.

None other, the Polish nobleman said to himself: none but the Russian czarevitch could wear such a baptismal cross at his bosom. And he leapt from the tub and ran to his wife, ordering her to prepare the table for a banquet and invite all the other minor nobility. He returned to the bathroom where the pseudo Dmitri was waiting and invited him to rise, placing one hand upon his shoulder and gesturing with the other toward the brocade robe woven with golden thread and freshwater pearls, the cloak of sable, the sword of Toledo steel with its gold-plated hilt. Then he pushed open the leaded glass window to show him the beautiful horses that had been made ready: their manes hennaed and braided, their legs wound with silken ribbons, pawing the ground, steam rising from their snorting nostrils.

5

The effect your father’s diamond had on me was identical! Unable to linger over any of the shades of blue, not a sapphire blue, nor an indigo: not cobalt. Deep and infinite as the waters of a frozen sea. It fluctuated, though not like the sky’s changing face at sunset, trembling in the air as the light goes down; rather like the waters of a pond whose depths are shot through with white stripes of caustic light. Greater and more beautiful than any you have ever seen, Petya, the serenity and beauty of a lake in the midst of a meadow, all the light of morning in it. Enormous, glittering. I said: “Vasily, I have no words! …” (Something like that, I said.) Not even I myself …

He had listened with attention, had understood to perfection: a diamond as grand and luminous as the very idea of a king. Patiently grown at the rate of 0.2 karats a day. Its growth uninterrupted, or interrupted only at the moment when, mathematically: the largest diamond. Ever.

Because understand me: all that he’d suffered, the depths from which he’d had to ascend. I hadn’t seen it that way, Petya, and blame myself for that. The most absolute poverty, the deprivation in which his entire childhood was spent, the life he had dreamed of, believing that he was allowed to rob, to swindle, in order to attain it. So far in the depths that he came to imagine that never, in all his years, would there be things, small pleasures like orange juice at breakfast, you know, day after day. A trick, that, to dupe the gullible — it must be: there could never be enough juice for so many people. And once in the West, he discovered in astonishment the golden sea of orange juice in which the simplest country folk of Valencia were floating. How he wept in secret at what he saw in Rome and Vienna, the pain he felt remembering his childhood, the hard clay of autumn before the first snow. His father, deaf and mute, face raised to the sky, snow falling on his silhouetted figure. That pained me, Petya, that image. Did you know that? Your grandfather, deaf and mute, all those years.

He had felt swindled himself, so why not swindle? It had to have begun very far back, Petya, in the deepest depths. Desperately seeking a shortcut to the light, to the money that was beginning to flow swiftly into the whole country like a river rushing back into its dry bed. Until he saw it: to change the gradient and grow, layer by layer, the most perfect diamonds ever fabricated. Never, no one in the whole universe. And he saw all that this could secure for him, not money, no, not a con job, that came later: fame, honor, a place in the Academy which — ay! — would soon cease to exist.

Determined, on the morning he had the idea of passing them off as real — counseled, it must be said, by the Buryat’s dark heart — no longer to be a small man, the character in the Writer who dies of anguish for having sneezed on a count’s bald head … To be the count himself, gravely mopping his head with a silk handkerchief and murmuring, without turning around: “Don’t trouble yourself, it’s nothing.” That was the transformation he had sought, none of your blinding blizzards or the catastrophe of an overcoat for which he had scrimped and saved his whole life suddenly torn from his shoulders.

We crossed the garden, I walked alongside him, deeply touched. I said: “I know what you mean, Vasily, I understand perfectly: you’d like to invite Larissa to the party but can’t.” He shot me the glance of a king hidden in a cart (in Varennes). Infinite sadness in his appearance, his bad eye gone out entirely or like a dying ember. He got into the car, leaned toward the dashboard, started the engine. The way the front wheels of expensive cars bolt forward, dig into the turn, rear back, and take off in a single impulse — your father, the king, at the steering wheel.

6

And in the same flash of insight that accompanied my recovered dignity I knew what heraldic device would best suit our House. A frank and pithy vindication of imposture: Esse est percipi .Meaning: if you perceive a king, if a man with the bearing of a king, the august gaze of a king, the eloquent reserve of a king appears before you, then do not doubt that you are in the presence of a King, a Prince. Who also, in the bargain, God willing, will float without sinking, Fluctuat nec murgitur , like Paris.

In the first quadrant: the sea, the happy days, or days we would remember as happy, by the sea. A wavy field of azure and upon it, floating, the Castle, Miramar, the many-dollared mansion. A simple escutcheon, the scant furniture of a new dynasty: rising sun in splendor over illuminated diamond … Forgetting the attributes of the old Russian families, the Orlovs’ falcon, the double-headed eagle of the Paleologos. Just as Napoleon himself once wisely abandoned the fleur-de-lis for bees of gold on field of azure. The blazon of a new dynasty, that of the Pool, upon which I would reserve for myself the modest role of supporter: a moor or savage, a natural man, a long-haired American, one foot forward, my tutor’s quill poised at the ready. And reading from dexter to sinister, facing me, an animal with human face, a monster. Not a unicorn, not a lion rampant, not a mermaid in her vanity: the head facing two directions, in symbol of its duality, jaws gaping, viscous tongue hanging out.