José Manuel Prieto: Rex

But when I had reached her, arrived in her room, I saw her sit up in bed, look at me once, only once, giving me to understand with that glance that all was lost and impossible, and dropping back to her pillow. I understood everything — it was the end! — and moaned with impotence in the hallway, gnawing my fists, quickly riffling through all possible responses, not prepared to yield. Wrapped in my bathrobe as if we were in the ancient Year of Our Lord 1997 and empires still existed, men who would kill to make room for themselves on a throne, who would poison their kings.

All that still true? All that still true, the air had sent me that message: to wed the young widow, become czar myself. A foreigner, but what did it matter? What about the other foreign emperors of Byzantium? Michael the Stammerer, Constantine the Filthy, Basil the Bulgar-Slayer? Just by stopping in my tracks or in mid-flight, returning to her eyes, caressing her slender hands.

Why didn’t I do it? Or here, you be the one to ask me: Why didn’t you do it? Little Mother Russia in the reclining figure of your mother, her alabaster thighs. Perhaps I was too young that day, I don’t know, Petya. I probed blindly at the Book, the whole text, consulted it extensively and did not find, for the first time — that’s how it was, Petya! for the first time! — a passage, words that conformed to my aims or served my purposes. I found things in other books, in certain great writers and even in minor writers, but I wasn’t going to be the one to attribute phrases to him, or even whole passages, that were not his, that clearly and patently had not emerged from his pen, Petya. Not when the heart of the matter was me, my life, this Writer. I passed over good and beautiful pages that I discarded immediately because they were not by him. I couldn’t tell myself what I had told you, Petya, couldn’t deceive myself as I had deceived you …

“I knew it, I knew it from the first time you told me about the piano that mourned like a bird abandoned by its mate and the violin that heard it and answered from the top of another tree.”

“But that is by the Writer! … It doesn’t matter … I won’t say now (though perhaps this is the reason): it was my life, it was my life that was at stake. Pusillanimous. No, it wasn’t that.”

“Listen: you could never have been our sovereign. Never!”

“I know, Petya … Piotr Vasilievich. You mean they never would have accepted me as I am? I never could have ridden into Moscow on a white horse? I know that.”

5

“Well, yes, he is named Borges, J. L. Borges — how did you find out? I didn’t want to tell you, didn’t want his name embedded in you like the names of the philosophers in Diogenes Laërtius who are known only by the fragments he cited or commented on in his book, most irresponsibly, I would say. Such an honor for the Commentator were you to sit down some day, grown up, and write about the days in the Castle, exalt the beneficences of the Book and the intelligence of your tutor … You, Petya, who could easily write such a thing, a real book, a primary book, without commentary or citations in bold face, and without the dark gleam of his name, the Commentator’s, contained within or casting its light from any page of your book or any of the folds of your adult memory.”

There are names, experiences, upon which a good person, educated in the Book, must never set eyes or think of. Not in pursuit of greater knowledge, not in pursuit of cultural breadth. A culture and an erudition that are false!

A man — forgive me for insisting upon this point — incapable of thinking straight or of writing with the unvarying frankness of a truly great author, and who, on the single occasion he met the Writer, during a ride in an automobile, didn’t exchange a word with him but only exclaimed, toward the end, with feigned astonishment, “Sir, you slow and accelerate the rotation of the earth at your pleasure: you are greater than God.”

Greater than God? How could anyone claim to be greater than God?

The Writer never claimed that, or to have made any great scientific advance, discovered any practical application for his Book, for the fragments or blue stones of Time he holds in his hands in volume 7 and gazes at in amazement, for, having taken his sincerity further than any other Writer in the world, each time he has asked himself What is time? he has been able only to keep himself from lying, only to confess, to respond, wisely and with absolute sincerity, with Augustinian wisdom: “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

Or, what amounts to the same thing: We must never imagine the solution of imposture, never pretend to be more than God. Better to entrust ourselves to our fate.

6

But I already told you about my blindness, when I mentioned to you and commented extensively on that phrase by the Writer where he says, quite rightly: he was a good man. And allow me to add: naive.

Who took some time to understand the slander that another man, a false youth, a gentleman of Germanic surname, Aschenbach, put out against the Writer. A jeweler in Santa Monica whom I saw reading in his shop, and who did not get up when I went in, but put down the book he was reading to attend to me, placing it facedown.

So that I could read, decipher the title in English, and shiver in wonder: What? You have the Book, too? You know the Writer, too? And read him with veneration? And I asked his permission to pick it up and examined it rapturously, Petya, not understanding anything in that language, but leafing through it in ecstasy, surrendering before it.

Until I heard him speaking of the Writer as a standard-bearer — you know, Petya? — and I came to realize. That he was reading it because supposedly only in its pages would he find a knowledge and a comprehension, an exact and inclusive portrait of all the colors of the rainbow. I was horrified to hear this. The Writer as a standard-bearer!

I would dedicate an entire book, years of my life, to demonstrate the falsity in that, to clean … Petya, I couldn’t stop myself from leaping over the counter to beat him in rage, until his mouth was bleeding, the mouth that had spoken ill of the Writer and said those things, odious prevarications, never!

An instrumental use, Petya — as if the Book were some sort of manifesto. Never! I beat him until someone, an accomplice of his, his employee (Tadzio! I heard him call him, Tadzio!), must have hit me on the back and I collapsed unconscious on the floor.

7

The beating I got in my turn, the interrogation I was subjected to. The tooth I spat out at my feet: blood and saliva. The things I howled: Is he not an imposter? Is he not assuming the personality of another man? Is he not using his words? Is he not putting in the mouth of a single Writer the words of many other writers? Is he not eternally falling into the fallacy of amalgamating many writers into one?

On the floor of the police station, my body aching but without regretting for one second having assaulted that man. All of him false (his horrible teeth, like a young man’s), propagator of those nauseating falsehoods about the Writer. Unable to bear so much deception, so many lies: as if there, so far from death, from the place where he must be, Batyk were speaking through his mouth. But why should it matter to me: I know your mother, I know your father, I know you, Petya — all of you are full of respect for the Book.

Quelle horreur that in America, horrible Amerika, the horrible Americans should devote themselves to staining and outraging the Writer’s memory. And I leapt on him the instant I understood the ignominious intent of his words until someone, his employee, as I told you.