José Manuel Prieto - Rex

Songs I myself used to hum a few years ago, a tune which, that very autumn, earlier that autumn, had filled me with happiness each time I heard it sung (by an Englishman, a young Englishman), now commented upon by these musicians with all the disdain and profound sordidness of commentary. Hardened and old as commentators, the young black musicians, not moving toward us like the kind of singer who seeks to convey something to the audience and might even leap into the air, full of emotion. Shifting, rather, from side to side, without ever leaving the floor’s level plane, barricaded, incredulous, with nothing to say about themselves, about their own lives, but something to say, apparently, about the song they were commenting on, as if intoning a Gregorian chant. First a passage, cited in scholarly fashion: author, year, and place of publication. Then they proceeded without pause to comment upon it, words weakly mouthed, in murmurs (or something like murmurs). Having lost, generationally, their skill, their faith in new songs, melodies that could make them run to the edge of the dais and put their hands to their chests in a burst of passion. No, never that: cool , you know? Arms dangling, peering up from beneath their eyebrows, faces turned toward the floor.

As if the Commentator himself had waited for me outside the disco to stand up and say: “See? I was right. Even these musicians here … All stories, all combinations of notes, all original melodies having — make no mistake about it! — run out. Nothing left but commentary, as these boys from America have grasped.”

I didn’t give it a second’s reflection. I saw, outside there, across the whole width of the beach, that this truth was not his. That perhaps there was only this one justification, one principle, for commentary: pedagogical purposes. Only for that reason important. My career as a tutor, all my work as a teacher, running on commentary. And didn’t that make sense? In this case? Rather than hiding it, pretending I had better things to say, something better than teaching you every day about the Book, the gold mine of wisdom that is the Book?

Though only as a pedagogical method or procedure, I repeat: the method of commentary still execrable in itself. You may be thinking: a certain intelligence, a certain good taste in that, in commentary and the Commentator. The portions of text he ripped steaming from books and spoke about with subtlety and in detail, about the peculiarities of those books, the peculiarities of their authors. This is good; even, at times, praiseworthy. But never acknowledged, as I did from then on with you, declaring openly: yes, this is commentary; yes, these are commentaries. On the contrary, he always tried to seem like something more than a commentator and always avoided citing or commenting on any text by the Writer. In the medieval tradition of never, or only exceptionally, citing the moderns, or so he said.

8

The reception your papa gave me when I’d cleared the garden wall as the sun rose. Looking, whenever he would approach the kitchen window, like a gigantic monster: an eye that glanced outside, enlarged by the glass, and then immediately diminished in size, racing from one point of the kitchen to another like a toy car (a Hot Wheels? a Hot Wheels), growing larger and smaller in pulses, nervously.

Orbiting around me, your papa, like a binary system, two stars of different brightness and intensity. The hemispheres of two different men at work diagonally behind each eye, moving toward me at an angle to put me off guard with whichever eye was commanded to scrutinize me at that moment, the right eye being the good cop. A better blue, this eye: his scientific side, let’s put it that way. The fathomless benevolence of that iris capable of disarming any observer, anyone who didn’t notice that then, immediately, he would lower his shoulder and head transversally to scorch you with the terrible blink of the left eye, receiving orders, dilating on orders from his bad hemisphere, that eye.

Looking for a break in the light, a flaw in my shining, transparent self. He inspected my farthest corners and found nothing but my good intentions, my crystalline density, the excellent disposition and exquisite preparation of a reader of the Book, a man with clear ideas about the horrors of being educated in a school and the innumerable advantages of a private education in the home. All of which my lips had made audible from the first day. Without the slightest incongruence between my nucleus of goodness and the phenomenalization or external projection of that nucleus. None of the lace curtains, hateful partitions, cunningly placed screens for other people’s eyes to slide along, baffled: no one had hired me to take the child — you, Petya — outside and place him, bound and gagged, in the hands of his abductors. I was not sent by the local mafia to spy on them, open the door, let anyone in to the walled enclosure of this house. None of that did he find in my bosom, in my arms crossed jauntily over my chest, no guilt (the stolen gem was mine, mine! I was the one who found it!) weighing on my shoulders to reduce my cyclopean size.

How great I was. How convincing. I convinced him.

But having brought his eyes so close to mine, I took advantage of the moment to cast a single glance, a fulminating bolt of blue lightning, inside his concerned father persona, seeking to read all at once, and not bit by bit as his gemologist’s or jeweler’s (or whatever he was) eye was doing, who he really was, to see the images of however many corpses had imprinted themselves at the back of his iris. But some barrier protected the dank, murky depths of his life and kept me from reading anything. And I withdrew immediately, having achieved nothing, no news whatsoever as to the provenance of his fortune, the money that had metamorphosed into his Mercedes 600, the Italian furniture, the Chinese porcelain, the fabulous sum that lay over the rainbow — silver-plated two-seaters, miniature yachts, perfect little airplanes precisely to scale — when to my surprise he mentioned the physics class he wanted me to give you. Bringing it up like this: “Batyk told me he’s already spoken to you about this. Will you be teaching the boy physics at some point?” Obstinate in his farcical portrayal of a physicist and crystallographer.

He surprised me. I didn’t know what to say, I stammered yes, soon, and wanted to clarify (but kept myself from doing so): that Batyk hadn’t spoken to me, no, that he had tossed it away, the Book, had thrown it down and tried to dance on it. And yes, of course, some day I would teach him physics. Any kind of class can be taught with the Book, everything is in the Book.

Seeking by this absurd and misplaced request, I understood, to forget his fear, the terror he’d allowed me to glimpse, of a massacre or whatever it was that was keeping them hidden, your mama and your papa, in the worst place for it, a site they never should have retreated to, Petya, if they were afraid of robbery or assault. Which was why they’d never let you go out, in all those months. Six months there without ever having gone down to the sea, without ever having touched it, wet your hands in it. And wasn’t I right to yield to my impulse, take you by the hand, lead you to the gate, push back the heavy bolt, and step through, the air hitting us full in the face when we were outside and heading, your hand in mind, down toward the sea?

To stroll along the beach, take out the Book, let the air ruffle its pages, open it up to any passage at all. To go out, I thought: a tiny incision. Letting the sea air rush in with a whistle, the real birds of southern Spain.

9

It was an impulse toward the sea, Petya. All those years I’d been moving toward the sea. Irresistibly attracted to the edge of the earth from the deepest heart of your country where my feet had taken me in an earlier part of my life to lock myself in behind kilometers and kilometers of land with no sea. I learned to love rivers, unknown to me until then, and sometimes, looking out a train window, an endless line of blue-green pines in the distance, tightly and evenly packed, would leave me speechless, for it looked like a sea! A deep nostalgia for the years spent near the sea, afternoons when I felt I would never again have all the sea — you know? — all the sea to myself. And I began, without being fully aware of what I was doing, to move, slowly, like a tectonic plate that begins to migrate. Toward Spain, I thought, and once in Spain toward the sea. To bring an end to all the false moves, the blue-green pines, the signs, the water dreams where I would sometimes see myself on the edge of a great lake and walk in amazement toward the undulating water, its movement thick and heavy, a primitive reproduction, a mental construct. Like a man on Solaris, an earthling, who never for a single day stops dreaming of the earth.