José Manuel Prieto: Rex

Or as it appears, magisterially, in the complete passage: For man is a being without fixed age, a being who has the faculty(the faculty, Petya!) of becoming in a few seconds(in just a few seconds!) many years younger, and who, surrounded by the walls of the time in which he has lived, floats there as if in a pool(isn’t that beautiful? as if in a pool!) whose water level is constantly changing, placing him within reach now of one period, now of another.

Isn’t it incredible that he can say so much? Isn’t it astonishingly precise? Because I see the day of my arrival, Petya: how the slow emerald wave swells up and I swim along its crest, the whole story laid out inside it. Not buried in its depths, but encrusted along its surface so that I can scrutinize different portions of it at will. The morning I spent several hours in the garden, wondering at the blue of the swimming pool. And how I stopped for a long moment in front of the doorbell: the little camera that bore my face to the eyes of Batyk, the “Filipino butler,” the Book deep in my backpack, its radiance emanating from there, the center around which my work as a schoolmaster would be organized. A profession in which I had no prior experience, Petya; well aware that I’d be lying if I took that first step toward the garden’s lawn, the blue of the swimming pool, and that I’d save myself from lying if I turned around and retraced my steps. But going in nevertheless, becoming someone who deceived your mother that same night, who spoke to her in lies, like the Commentator. To such a degree that in my story I emerged from the sea in the semblance of a Greek doctor cast up by a storm between Kasos and Knossos, regaining the coast by swimming all night, water dripping all over the living room floor. Muscular as a cyclops, phosphorescent jellyfish clinging to my shoulders.

An image that struck her with all the force of a holographic projection: a man mutely embodied in the air before her, shaky as an old movie. And I had a book, a single copy of a book that I managed to save from the shipwreck, carefully wrapped in plastic. A horrible night, all the water in the world under my feet, my back, my belly. Precariously suspended over the abyss of the sea, as if on a wobbling stack of chairs. How did I avoid the reefs? How did I keep from smashing my head against a rock? I overlooked her questions, returning insistently to the image of the strong, cyclopean body emerging laboriously from the depths, bearing the Book. Because I’d managed to save it, a volume in octavo that I studied, standing there on the sand, the plastic that enveloped it, droplets disappearing in the morning sunlight as if by magic.

1

Your papa held out his hand without taking his eyes off me for a second. I studied his face from below, still pretending to be more daunted than I actually was, though I was, in fact, slightly daunted. The shadow of a tan, hair ranging in color from wheat blond to the ash blond of more recent years, sleeves rolled halfway up the arm, the glass of orangeade in his hand (no alcohol in it, even more dangerous that way, I thought). His eyes drilling into me, which had about half the desired effect (the other half I feigned). He held his head to one side, opened his lips, inquired mockingly, “The tutor?” And then smiled because he was grasping my hand now and could, if he liked, abruptly twist my whole body around or shake me like a rag doll. I pretended his grip terrified me more than it actually did (though it terrified me) and returned his greeting with an affable expression, offering no resistance to the relentless spin of his drill bits: just an inoffensive person with no other thought in mind but to take advantage of his money and relax in the sunshine. A simple person, like any speaker of Spanish, an aborigine with certain skills — in this case, Spanish — summoned to serve in his house.

Full of prejudices, your papa: against foreigners, against Spain, against us, the Spaniards. I read it in his eyes. It didn’t bother me, nor did I have any thought of changing his opinion. I didn’t say to myself: I’ll show him, with my work, my erudition. I waited for him to release my hand, which he did right away because he could feel the strength in my eyes, in the effortless way I removed them from beneath his gaze. With a sweeping gesture, familiar from some movie, he motioned me over to the tawny sofa. My fear, real and feigned, was rapidly giving way to a deep conviction that he was insignificant (my papa? yes, listen), that all the valves in his chest were about to open and he would go soft, deflating after the long journey.

His little show, the way he greeted me, was like the involuntary performance of an actor who meets an admirer on his way to the dressing room and can’t keep from continuing to play Mithridates, accepting the bouquet with the august expression of the character, not of the old, tired actor that he is. He invited me to be seated, still within that same impetus, as if preparing to speak of the great benefits conferred by an education within the home, the deficient instruction offered by schools. But the moment his back recognized the living room sofa, all the energy went out of him, and he sat there a moment, blinking and switching gears. When he opened his mouth again, he turned toward his wife with a sob: “A disaster!” Her displeasure was a very real and hard surface off which the black point of my gaze rebounded. I turned and asked their permission to withdraw. I said: “I think it’s best if I leave; you must have things to discuss.”

She didn’t thank me for the sensitivity of the gesture, your mama; her expression didn’t change. The two of them remained there, in suspension, a quivering freeze-frame that, the moment I’d gone upstairs and they heard the door of my room shutting, rushed forward as if some play button had released the image, the remaining twenty-three frames of that second tumbling out en masse.

2

Something had happened, Petya, but there are two ways of reading the passage, with opposite meanings. First: I should leave the place immediately and not wait to become an involuntary witness to even more terrible confessions. Because something had gone wrong for your father, so wrong that, the previous night, he couldn’t wait for me to leave the room before telling his wife that the operation had been a “failure” (without my knowing precisely what operation). The hand he raised, with which he said — the fingers of his right hand slapping his palm — I tried there and … nothing, and over there, too, and … nothing again. Despite the luxury that filled my eyes, Petya, despite his unbelievable monogrammed slippers, the gold watch revolving on his wrist, the way he rose to his feet and shrugged on his plush bathrobe, the way he walked along the pool, past the row of orange trees, followed by the borzois, so slender they were like the silhouettes of dogs. The black sheen of the Mercedes in the breezeway. Despite all that.

And another reason I should leave: because I felt the same way. A failure! All the times I would go into the boy’s bedroom — your bedroom, Petya! — and see how little headway you’d made in your education. Reproaching myself for wanting to hit you, as when, in Septimius Severus’s house, the Writer breaks his pointer in despair over his pupil’s head — that diabolical child who was beginning to manifest, whose blue eyes were beginning to show the early symptoms of the disease that would eventually kill him, to the great jubilation and delight of the Writer who did not take one step in his sandaled feet to clasp the child in his arms, run away with him, save him. Watching, instead, from the height of his eyes, the progress of the disease, the worms that entered through the nasal passages, perforating the hard mass of the brain. Not the infinite patience and honeyed words of the magister: no. Instead, those water snakes, thick and lustrous, made their nests in that unreceptive brain, almost entirely closed to knowledge. A boy he had come to hate, conscious that all his pedagogical art, all his zeal, would be incapable of penetrating that indolence, passing through the armor plating of that yellow hair into his head.