José Manuel Prieto - Rex

The Pool in Batyk’s clutches, Batyk who tries, at that moment, inappropriate as ever, to drum its blue surface with his claws. He smiles then, with perverse delight, letting it roll from his palm, furrowed by the deep lines of destiny, all of them fatal or obscure, into the simian hand or palm of Kirpich.

Your father pivoting his head like a basilisk, explaining to them between clenched teeth how much gold, how many jewels (“Fakes!” his killers exclaim in unison at that point, they can’t help themselves, “Fakes!”) he could give them, how many mines and factories in the Urals he could hand over to them.

And I imagine and see clearly in the condensed air how the two thugs laugh in his face, accusing him, like children, of being a liar, someone who wasn’t going to scalp them again, this time they’d do it to him, in the sense of the phrase used by Fenimore Cooper, another author much admired by the Writer during his childhood in Combray. In that sense, Kirpich and Raketa promised to scalp your father.

Kirpich brought the butt of his pistol down hard on the Pool, which instantly shattered, the huge stone, the unique gem, transformed into a fine powder that blew across your father’s feet. Vasily tried, with an automatic reflex, to catch the Pool, as if it had been liquidated, and as he moved forward, thrown off balance, shots fired by both killers entered his body.

I want to shout, to stop the murder, but I’m as powerless down below as a spectator before a screen, though the effect is incommensurably more vivid.

The shots resolve, visually, in curving, dotted lines, as in a naïf Haitian painting, which disappear into Vasily’s immense bulk, lift him off the ground.

In the lower parts of the cube, next to the real or submerged swimming pool, a few of the guests from the night before are sleeping: you can always count on finding two or five drunks on the lawn after a party with Russians (and non-Russians! And non-Russians, Okay). Nelly is dreaming placidly next to the czarevitch, next to you, Petya, where she fell asleep after the stroll along the shore … And in the watery air above her head, something like a cloudy excrescence that surrounds her head like a nimbus and which, more closely analyzed by me, as I stand on tiptoe, turns out to be something material, tangible. The dream that her brain secretes as the liver secretes bile, as the Writer affirms in his Against Avenarius , a book prior to and lesser than the Book. There, in that cloud, the very bright red of a peasant blouse and the vivid green of a rustic skirt that is pleated for pure joy. A man and a woman on the bank of a river, its water suggested by the blue lines at their feet. A pair of lovers, their hands interlaced … I could tell you who your mother was, is, in love with, who she was with in her dreams, abandoned to her love without a second’s anguish. A young man, not fat like your father, to whom she’s turning in this tableau, in the cloud, and at whom her eyes are smiling.

And beyond the calm of the dream, beyond that haven, though still within the cube or blue block of water, the still larger diorama of the house, the darker cloud in which the Buryat turbidly moves. Rubbing his hands together in glee, the pink hairless little paws of a mole like the one who marries Thumbelina, the same type of horror. Without need for any kind of proof, Petya, without having to subject him to any interrogation.

I’ve reached this point, this construction, only by imagining his steps, mentally extrapolating the duplicity of his silent, cunning movements, the grim gaze of his almond eyes. Brought here, me, by something my heart tells me; he, by his black heart itself; me, to the discovery of his crime; he, to the crime itself, planned and committed.

A traitor. A betrayal.

3

Which I’ve not stopped pondering, studying as I leaned down over that cube of water, my light illuminated by that faint blue light. For I would never give you that advice, Petya, never tell you to let your feelings grow cold, to write from a healthy distance, to recollect in tranquillity, at your desk, the emotion that led you to love someone more than anything else in the world. For that day, the morning after the party, when I got up and peered through the Venetian blinds, I saw the Castle as the happiest place, the happiest existence, and thought of her. Of the hand I had kissed, the smooth, delicate skin on her hands, the tiny, fine wrinkles around her eyes. Desirable and lovable in all the fragility of her human form …

Me, guilty? Me, who with my stupid confidence and absurd party had ruined everything, cleared the way for and given easy entrance to Kirpich and Raketa, as Larissa has not ceased to insinuate to me, jeering at me, hurling it bitterly in my face? How to believe that even for a second, Petya? And Batyk, whose body, whose scrawny corpse never appeared? Whose betrayal was apparent from the very first, the way he put himself first, letting them in if they would promise to spare his life. Not Lifa, Lifa died, and so did Astoriadis, and the dogs. And you, Nelly, and I would have met the same fate were it not for the power of the Book, which turned the heavy steering wheel of fate, which took you by the hand and led you down to the sea, and us after you.

If we hadn’t flown that night, hadn’t kissed, if I hadn’t watched her preening in the bathroom (But was that it? All you did was spy on her while she was naked, all you did was kiss her, Psellus? No, Petya … Wait. Or yes, what does it matter?). If I hadn’t seen her naked, a vision that inflamed my passion and made me pursue her through the night, if the Book hadn’t intervened, we’d all be dead, Petya, corpses, horribly.

How your mother wept, sobs that made her face puffy, how bitterly she lamented when we found your father’s body on top of the shattered diamond. And when the police, the Guardia Civil, arrived at the scene, they had to walk across that iridescent dust and draw the body’s silhouette not on the floor, the mosaic of the floor, as is usual, but on that luminous dust. And when one of them went to the window and raised the Venetian blinds, a torrent of light poured through the panes, which seemed to move and run like tiny ants, a whole army of them, with Vasily, your father, lying there suspended between the glittering diamond dust and the luminous uproar raised by the windowpanes at the sight of their owner, dead.

And me? And me? And the pain I felt, the rage, the stab to the heart? And how, like Vagaus in Vivaldi’s Juditha triumphans , I shouted: Furiae! Furiae!

4

Her breast beneath the purple of the dress, her wings (turning her toward me). Kissing her back, the birthplace of her wings, the way she had of placing a colored stone on each of her moles, the way she would jump up in a single bound, her white thighs filling my eyes, the two panels of the armoire opening together. In the same impulse, because it was enough to open one and both would open, and she would take out the jar of colored stones and hold it up in the air. From which she would extract, from that red heart in the center of her chest, the gems she would place in my hand and with which I would cover, one by one, the beauty spots on her body, a bejeweled bosom, a breast studded with diamonds.

And nevertheless she left. And nevertheless I let her go, I said good-bye that same night, Petya, as you know.

In the darkness of my room I had caught the scent of the air of hers, like an animal, feeling it waft through the whole house. And read on that air, on the disposition of its volumes, that her door was open, that now was the time to get up, go down the dimly lit hallway, occupy your father’s place at her side. Not because the obstacle of her husband had disappeared. None of that I would tell her, to none of those causes or base motives would I allude, but only bring to its culmination what the two of us had begun. Obstinately: bring her to the throne, make her Empress of Russia, demonstrate the correctness of our calculations, the unerringness of the Book. My right eye peering through the crack of that idea: the faceted columns of a chamber in the depths of the walled city, the ermine cape on my shoulders, bent over a terraqueous globe, frozen in that pose, playing the regent until the czarevitch attained his majority, feigning to be from Italy or Monaco, from a country that would make me more bearable to the Russian people. As if not only your mother were awaiting me with her door open, but all of Russia, my adopted country.