José Manuel Prieto: Rex

That question in my eyes, pulling myself up over the wall without taking my eyes off the sea, the sea that moved slowly toward the coast, time and again, a secret hidden in its folds, starfish and sea creatures seen in cross-section in its blue mass. Rolling across that mass, inside it, was the answer to my question: Who were they? What had I gotten myself into? What should I do now? I knew what to do. I understood immediately. Leave, Petya, leave your parents’ house, get out of there and go far away, taking care not to trample on the other houses. Like a giant striding away across the line of the horizon. Without looking back, without stopping to find out who they were. Contract killers. International blackmailers.

5

False, therefore, what the Commentator says. As if the Writer could have lacked the subject matter for an original or primary novel about anything at all, ancient or modern, a young man’s arrival in the south of Spain, in Marbella, at the home of some Russians (or Russian mafiosi) where he takes a position as a child’s tutor and comes under the spell of the owner’s wife and finds himself involved in the most incredible of stories. Isn’t that enough for an original book, a straightforward book, written out point by point, without flashbacks or commentaries, should anyone, a primary writer, be disposed to do so?

There was enough there in the story to fill several slim volumes, blonde women on their covers with eyes round as dinner plates, smoking guns. Seven paperbacks could easily contain it, there was matter enough to generate seven thrillers, or a series of seven little novels, each a hundred pages long, about the question of all the money the two seemed to have, the strange figure of the Buryat, the father’s frequent and inexplicable trips away from home, and Nelly, the chatelaine, the abandoned beauty.

All of it told from the tutor’s point of view, easily and comfortably, as if written in the 1920s when tutors were commonly employed (though still today, even now, I myself), with complete innocence and no need for commentary or any weight given to the detective stories and thrillers already written. Setting out to write it, should anyone ever try to write it, would he really have to eschew the frontal, vehement, and direct narration that the Commentator claims, or seems to claim with the whole body of his work, is now impossible?

I could write, for example, that I did not know the source of that money (the gem in the garden!). I imagined various possible pasts, your father’s fists pumping in and out of a stomach, a man flying back, doubled over by the blows. Your mother had told me, had lied to me, that both of them were scientists: “Vasily, my husband, is a scientist.”

In the sense — I suppressed a smile — that a famous bank robber is nicknamed “the Professor” for his habit of arriving at heists, bank vaults, long after midnight with a white lab coat over his shoulders and a leather case in which the security camera records not Herr Professor’s stethoscope but the lock picks and rubber gloves of his trade, though there is a stethoscope, too, which he speciously applies to the iron chest of a Mosler with ten combinations. In that sense a scientist. The pair of con artists who, after years of sustaining their performance, have been completely swallowed up by their roles: the big strong man and his delicate wife, the ermine stole and suitcases with reinforced corners that the hero of a bad novel stumbles over in the hotel lobby, a detail the Writer would never have introduced, though he does have the passage — everything is there in the Book, everything! — where the narrator thinks he’s detected a thief, a dubious character, out in front of the casino, and it turns out to be the Baron de Charlus.

He describes him in alarm and in minute detail: a thief! He wants to warn the hotel’s owner. And then, no: it’s the Baron de Charlus.

But with your papa and your mama I’m certain of it — no unexpected transformations. Your mother had the eyes of a thief, the long arms of a thief, the swaying walk of a thief: the way your papa had heaped the side table with remote controls was precisely the way a mafia kingpin, maybe a hit man, accumulates expensive audio and TV equipment and moves his hand without looking across the pile of remotes, picking one up at random and pushing a button to see what comes on. And if it’s music, fine, and if the enormous screen lights up, that’s fine, too. Like a mafia honcho on his day off. His wife, his inexplicably slender and lovely wife, stroking his hair against the arm of the sofa, fingers entwined in her husband’s hair.

Like two big mafia honchos.

6

I left the house that same night, Petya, and walked all night beneath vast leaden clouds in a sky illuminated by bolts of lightning. Carried along by my feet and my despair at missing out on the vacation I’d anticipated next to your parents’ swimming pool, hating and fearing my employers, your mother and your father, asking myself over and over what I’d gotten myself into and whether I should proceed immediately to the nearest FBI office and turn them in, like the deplorable citizens in certain deplorable Hollywood movies, who think that informing on or betraying someone in any way — that a snitch can help his country, save it from danger. Lamenting having taken the job with them, those Russians.

Careful! I had to tell myself as I walked toward Marbella, toward the Marbella night. Careful with them! Given all the money they had and how dangerous they were, and of course: the gem! Going toward the night, and in the night, though I didn’t yet know it, a discotheque I hadn’t imagined was so close by, an edifice immense as a castle, huge as the Ishtar Gate.

Without having planned to go in, Petya. But the spotlight sweeping across the sky, a movie theater, I thought at first, the beam of light announcing a premiere, and I stopped and saw it was a disco, the massive stone blocks of a castle’s walls handsomely inflated, larger than life. Every color applied to it, the whole palette, on the battlements, the buttresses, the fake drawbridge. A structure that would have gladdened the heart of Bergotte (in the Book), his discovery of color fully comprehended and painted onto the building’s gigantic walls, the discovery that thus, with various layers of color. The dense yellowhe finds in Vermeer, to which other more Disneyesque hues had been added: phosphorescent greens and acrylic reds, the magenta doorway at which two Nubian slaves kept watch, ponderous and muscular as a pair of winged bulls. Understood: a rest, a place — when I’d gone inside and looked around — where I could leave the whole question of the stone to settle into the air as I moved, letting it flow freely around me without thinking about any spot or niche in which to place it.

Swinging across the dance floor with a thousand levels of freedom, spinning at any angle, not merely reaching the four cardinal points, like some medieval machine, but touching any and all points on the sphere. Behind, before, making stops at sonorous stations, my arrival marked by the beat, my hips and shoulders at a precise spot in the air. Smooth as a machine cunningly articulated on tiny ball bearings, endlessly spinning to the sound of that music, my head taken a thousand different places by the undulations of the dance. Tunes I could dance to perfection, tunes about which, Petya, I could have taught classes, entire, extensive courses, for I was vastly erudite in the secrets of dance, expert at moving back and forth with an ease conferred by early apprenticeship.

Or, as the Writer calls it (with reference to Swann): the elementary gymnastics of a man of the world.

7

But then a triumph and a truth on the Commentator’s part, Petya! The surprise in store for me at the center of that sphere. A thought that forced me to stop in my tracks, my arms falling toward my body like the flywheels of one of Watt’s machines. I drew near in astonishment the moment that evening’s group started playing and watched their performance, stupefied. Never having suspected a thing like that. The way the singers, young black men, were moving across the dais, reaching the edge and retreating, as if tired, weary. The spirit of commentary permeating and making its nest in their innocent souls, the soul of the Commentator speaking through their mouths.