José Manuel Prieto - Rex

7

I had stopped speaking to him — for how truly the Writer affirms: the earth is full of people who don’t deserve to be spoken to!To Batyk, that is, whom I ran into after having said good-bye to your father, having heard his tremendous confession. Stretched out next to the water, in the full light of the sun, his falsity all the more visible for that, like an ordinary lizard and not one from the island of Komodo. He saw me coming toward him across the grass, crossing the garden and about to pass him by. He stuck out his forked tongue and spoke.

“They move me.” He was addressing Astoriadis, who was eating grapes (bought with my money) from a plate. “What we have here is two charming friends who have never failed to amuse me. A pair of innocents who imagine that someone, some time, will take their plan seriously, the absurd idea of an emperor … I’ve said as much to Nelly, I’ve insisted on smaller diamonds, for engagement rings: flood the market with them, sell them as real …”

It was something like that, what he said, Petya. Bragging, essentially, about his unbridled passion for lying. At a moment when we’d all decided to turn our backs on him, had understood that his was a false solution. But not Batyk. He returned over and over again to the same point: Lie, lie! he shouted. Never tell the truth, on the contrary: always lie. Never affirm or cite or even allude to the line about fooling some of the people some of the time but not all the people, an entire country, all the time, a piece of sheer nonsense to which no sentient adult would ever subscribe. A phrase which, correctly glossed (he was openly mocking my method, Petya), says — and he raised his finger, as I was supposedly in the habit of doing — but I don’t do that, do I? I don’t assume false scholarly airs? — quite the opposite: “Swear and perjure yourself, but don’t ever reveal your secret.” Here he laughed odiously, rubbing his thighs hard and looking me up and down in amusement.

To what a striking degree was Batyk’s taste bad! How vulgar and plebeian of him to have replaced the eye he lost in a fight with that diamond! The dendrites of his lies, the metallic iridescence of their tangled web glittering hatefully on his chest, Petya, a very thin thread, almost invisible, which until that instant I hadn’t noticed and finally perceived then only because of a reflection that shimmered across him as if he were a puddle of oil.

8

I didn’t open my mouth for a second or unclench the fist in which I was hiding the Pool. I moved away without turning my back on him and went into the kitchen, still with enough time before the guests’ arrival to implement the second half of my plan: something simpler but with no less impact (the description and operative principles of a bubble machine there in the Book). I built it quickly and effortlessly before Lifa’s astonished eyes. I had only to assemble the parts and dip the perforated disk in the soap solution and the machine’s blower produced a bubble in every orifice, the smaller bubbles rising more easily through the air, clearing the wall with greater agility, falling without hurting themselves on the rough asphalt, wisely adapting themselves to the sharp protrusions of this new situation, transforming myself into a different young man, a new me in the dark street. I would cast a final gaze over my shoulder: there’s only one city in the world whose name corresponds to this condition, to a lighter, more buoyant soul: Los Angeles. Wasn’t that a lovely name to dream of here in Miramar, knowing that all of us were heading toward the inevitable bursting of this bubble?

I went back to the living room, took one of the elephant tusks from its base and put the Pool there. I assessed the thickness of the glass with my eyes, and out of the usual fear of robbery and renewed disgust with Batyk, I thought, without taking my eyes from the stone, about how the Writer introduces an ostrich into the party in Kimberley, for, strangely, his characters travel down to Kimberley, to a drawing room in Kimberley (South Africa), where the ostrich swallows a stone that is on display, a diamond of incalculable worth.

I don’t believe I need comment at any length on that passage for you, only this: in the ostrich’s warm craw, the stone, mingled with the other stones the bird uses to grind up the grains it eats, survives intact, due to the thin film of grease covering it. Then months later, after being extracted and cleaned, the diamond explodes.

But before that, on the night of the party, the Writer’s characters, gathered in the drawing room, don’t realize that the diamond has disappeared, nor does the Writer himself, waiting in the library where he’d been ushered as the music played and as the ostrich, unremarked by the other visitors, was crashing the party, moving one leg forward — its thick ostrich thigh (they sell them in the supermarkets now) as yet unfrozen — in the direction of the stone’s flickering brilliance.

Here in Marbella we ran no risk of an ostrich coming in; not one family here keeps ostriches.

My plan would work. We had successfully eluded the danger.

9

Whatever you want, I’d told her, whatever you want: the idiotic and absurd notion of a King, an Empire. As long as it made her bend her waist more supplely, arching her back in my arms like a tango dancer, the two of us on the dance floor at Ishtar while her husband dealt with the ambassador from Martinique. Myself seen in profile in far more photographs than were necessary, my head rising above the feather boa around her neck. The most beautiful woman, I must say that: despite Larissa’s splendid, cloudless complexion and Claudia’s pink-tinged skin, the most beautiful. Beauties that were similar though resolved in different color schemes: gold and turquoise for Larissa, ruby and violet for Claudia, and marble and onyx for my girl. The way her hair fell between her beautiful shoulder blades, the soft curve of her neck, the most beautiful woman, Petya, and the most sensual, your mother.

The way your mother’s behavior toward me gradually changed — rather unpleasant at first, during the early weeks when she would invariably call me “Mr. Lonelyhearts,” and then that same Lonelyhearts began growing and changing in her eyes and her esteem, along the lines of I am the king of Babylon who makes the light shine on the earth of Sumer and Acadia.

I hadn’t wasted a second on sentimental calculations of the number of years she had on me, the number that would go by before I was the same age she was now. As in those novels where a young man falls in love with an older women or even, in the Writer himself, with the countess of Stermaria. There would be more women in Moscow and in seaport cities like Bordeaux and Lisbon, their breasts which I would capture in passing in my capacity as royal secretary, the lineup of pale breasts like faces along a hallway. Down which I would advance, strongly perfumed, on the way to my office. To rubber-stamp signatures with my right hand without my palm ever losing the conical shape of those breasts and without ever being tormented, even for a second, by the fear of death. Launching into a dance with some of them, their bejeweled arms and bellies, when, in midafternoon, I tuned in to the carefree burble of a happy day, the amber light of the hour, reclining my head on the bosom of the youngest one, having her read to me, Petya, fragments of the Book.

Vats of chilled wine in that garden, rose petals in the illuminated water.

I hadn’t stopped looking at her for a single second, a single day. There had been many nights when I came back from the discotheque and wondered whether to go up and find her, whether her prelude to a kiss on the clifftop might end in something more. Sometimes I paused in the middle of a class, raised my eyes from the page and walked over to the window to see if she was there below, swimming in the pool. Circling around her, moving toward her with the inevitability of a sphere rolling, falling, and sliding along an inclined plane. But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun, etcetera, precisely as in Marlowe. Standing, Petya, beneath the illuminated window of your parents’ bathroom, the lawn dappled with colored lights. Nelly, at that moment, smoothly slipping into the foaming water in the round tub, checking first with her foot to see whether it was too cold or hot, the soft curve of her foot like a swan’s feathered neck. (The secret desire to see her naked, to spy on her while she preened in front of the three-paneled mirror.) And more! First me, Petya ( on some occasions it incites lasciviousness), then her, the two of us sliding down together along the smooth porcelain. Or, if she was startled to see me in her room, I would tell her it was only to show her the bubble machine, that pretext. In the dark bedroom I pushed open the bathroom door, the panel smoothly pivoted, slowly glided back, opening, and a vision was revealed to me in sharpest clarity and left me speechless: the wings and breast and neck of a bird.