José Manuel Prieto - Rex

To go down to the beach by yourself for the first time, the dark and roiling front of danger far away, my plan triumphant. Tomorrow, when the sun rose, we would stroll unhurriedly down to the city, stopping to chat along the promenade, and the bathers, at the mere sight of us: “the king of Russia, in Marbella …” And I was about to take my eyes from the door, but something spoke to me at that moment, a glint from the ring on her finger, the hand that Nelly ran along the wall, that she’d left for a second, herself already outside, on this side of the garden wall. A message I was late in reading, its elements late in settling into me: the blue sequined dress, the Rabanne she’d worn that night to conceal her inexplicable transmutation, in those pages, that part of the Book, into a bird.

But not yet past the gate. The rays of light that shot from her eyes when she came back to the doorway and looked through it; they seemed to seek me out, those rays, illuminating me in their violet color. The thread of light still trembling in the air as she turned back to the street and, the following instant, left the garden.

Transported or abducted by the force of that ray, the floor sinking beneath me, curving beneath every step she took across the striped awning of the earth, careful not to put her foot down on the white. On the blue, only on the blue, her fear of falling. Sinking with each step into the taut substratum of space, ripping it open with my weight, a path that could be taken only once, along which she could never return or find her way back. Sand flowing through the gaping holes in the fabric, me falling at top speed toward the edge, the abyss where the rivers plunge.

15

The immaculate white of her back, the resplendent white of her shoulder blades, and she, lost or pretending to be lost in contemplation of the sea, gazing in rapt absorption at the waves that came to bathe her feet through the dazzling gleam of her Pradas.

She, too, imprisoned by the passions that assail all mortal flesh, previously prepared, up there in the garden, to sabotage my plans entirely and stave off the twelve-pointed stars I’d explained to Claudia in the sky over Arles, Klimt’s gilding on the trunks, orange trees spinning in the garden and in Calder.

She heard me out without turning around, my fevered explanation: never, Nelly! A mortal for a goddess? Never! The fine hairs on the nape of her neck assented, seemed to summon me: and? You don’t see it? What are you waiting for? One second, two, without being able to believe it, I no less a child than the child, you, Petya, you who were very far off now along the line of the beach.

And I saw it at that moment, as I fell toward her, understood how she must have laughed about the plan for flight, for antigravity, with the strength of a woman who could gaze into the evasive eyes of a charlatan and peck them out, cleanly. For there was only one quality she kept in her heart. So many things that cannot be gained by taking flight! No Russian would accept a bird-woman as queen, never could she transfigure herself on the throne, in view of everyone. Like a dress purchased directly from Lagerfeld that you keep at the back of an armoire and know you will never wear again. Or else only at a reception with other birds, a gathering or parliament of the birds, the bird-women, all of them able, with the greatest lightness and ease, to lift off and halt two feet from the floor, as if levitating there. But so what? What could that solve? She could have — you must understand this — blasted away Antoniadis’s arguments with a simple demonstration, a blow of her wings, and she didn’t.

How not to see, given all this, how not to understand the senselessness of the Commentator?

16

How not to deplore her resistance, insistently negated by the reality of the girls the Writer describes toward the end of the Book, in the mysterious chapter set in a nocturnal Paris, in the house of ill repute near the Champ de Mars, or perhaps on Mars itself?

Girls at 0.38 terrestrial gravity revolving between floor and ceiling, floating there, awaiting clients, the newest arrivals rising toward them with no more than a slight jump, capturing them in the air. The laughing certainty of those girls, skilled at dodging the client’s body, bending at the waist, spinning for a second before your embrace in the air.

And I, caught up in her spin, without a second’s resistance, her lips transmitting the impulse of her whole body to me, pivoting on my axis with the speed of a mechanical device. Seeing the beach again, the sea, the base of the cliff again, the gray of the sea, and the path of the moon on the water. Rising in circles, leaving a trail of blue-green bubbles in the air, a double helix of turbulence. Gliding across the sand easily, lightly, gripping her shoulders, pressing against her. Strong and natural as an embrace in a corridor of the metro, your body against hers, a river of strangers at your back, a crack in the tiles behind her neck. Her eyes, a sigh. God! The longest kiss ever!

17

But not, as the Writer had suggested and I myself, as well, under his influence, when I said: unfathomable quartzes. That had been replaced, in her eyes, by a superdense gel, a trap for cosmic particles with which she gazed at the sky, all the light of the first days of the universe in that gel, the weeks during which she had not ceased to study me, that light transformed into rays that now emerged from her eyes with the power of a spotlight illuminating a field and the sky over the field, at the far end of the runway, the furrows in the grass left by airplanes. The ease with which I could read it, the clarity, despite the distance across the confines of the sphere: projecting itself around me against the screen of clouds. A book, a sea of stories emanating serenely from her eyes, and we turned on the slow rhythm of its waves like a body electric.

The men who lived in her eyes like inclusions in a diamond, the sailboat and the captain with gold braid on his sleeves, whom I thought I’d seen that morning as I approached the window of her eyes on tiptoe, moved by the suspicion of something, the far-off silhouette of a soaring eagle describing a distant arc across the back of her iris, over that sailboat, the house on the shore, the woman looking out the window.

And I hadn’t believed my eyes, I had doubted that strange vision: the life she contained within herself. The pair of swordsmen who were now doing battle in her eyes on the circular stairway of a palace by the sea, first in sunshine, then in rain, engulfed in their capes, interminably. Killing mercilessly, then disappearing into the mass of men without the slightest sign of fatigue, leaving a trail of blood behind them that was visible from the sky, across the city.

And one of those men was me!

Me, Petya! Can you believe that?

But where was this city, where was this valley? Where was the palace by the sea? Was it Larissa who lay at the foot of the staircase, a purple bloodstain blooming on her dress? With whom would I have to fall in love now, Petya, in this new sequel? All in an instant, the vertigo of many paintings in a dark room, the second half of a film projected rapidly in front of us before we leave our seats and go into the street, exposing ourselves to the heat or chill outside.

Overwhelmed by the truth that such a thing could never be written, a work like that, a book infinitely greater than that of the Writer emanating from her eyes. However great my triumph might be, however clamorous my discrediting of the Commentator, there were more stories in her alone, in this woman, than in any of the books, an original sea in her eye with thousands of pages diluted in it. And I would never again take my eyes off a woman, never again settle them on the Book. Betraying, you’ll tell me, the Book for the woman I love. No matter, Petya, God will forgive me.