José Manuel Prieto - Rex

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would feel an urge to get up and take a train, a plane, walk with my rucksack on my back, wear out the soles of my shoes, eat cold food in roadside bars, sleep outdoors, fall in love with the girl in the post office, wake up one day with birds flying over my head. They, too, heading south. On my way to the sea.

What wouldn’t I have done in order to take a job in your house, enter it like a young tutor in the nineteenth century who loves the lady of the house (not your mother, the sea) and finds work there so as to have occasion to see her every day? I read the advertisement. I lied in my response, endowing myself with pedagogical experience I do not have. All that so I could live, spend a summer, near the sea, let the sea come in through the window and in a single night displace the leaden sea of my dreams.

I asked Batyk if the house had any sea, any view of the sea. I’m not going anywhere, I told myself, unless someone brings me certain news of the sea. I interrogated him very thoroughly on that point. The advertisement read: “Young native speaker of Spanish wanted as schoolmaster of a young boy, private tutor, on the Costa del Sol.” A small square advertisement, in Russian, published in El Sol de Málaga (this newspaper exists and that is its exact name: El Sol de Málaga ). I called and didn’t have to wait more than two days: Batyk rang me back to arrange for the interview. When, what day could he come and see me? It turned out to be a scorcher, an afternoon I spent walking barefoot across the tiled floor of the little apartment I was renting. An urban horror, a visual horror: a circle of bald hills, barren lots without green that I gazed out at and cursed bitterly.

My surprise when I opened the door and, with a step back, let in a man who looked … Russian? No: a man whose looks and manner were completely Buryat, whom I pegged easily and immediately as a Buryat. I told him so, and his surprise was so great he almost turned and left on the spot. As if I’d seen through his disguise. It gave him doubts about hiring me, a person with such minute knowledge of your country, but something in me, the sincerity and goodness radiating from my eyes, the exquisite fluidity of my manners, made him reconsider, change his mind. My duties would consist of giving classes to an eleven-year-old boy. Basic subjects: Spanish, geography, physics in Spanish. How to imagine that those classes would become the magnificent thing they are now, Petya? Magnificent, isn’t that true? Or am I lying?

What was my profession, he inquired, what had my studies been? I lied, just as I’ve always advised you to do in such a situation. I would be able to teach an eleven-year-old, prepare him to begin going to school six months later. I didn’t tell him, stopped myself from telling him, that a child didn’t need Spanish classes, that a child would learn the language in a few weeks by repeating obscenities, clumsily swearing on a school playground. What need did he have of a professor all his own? A tutor who wouldn’t even tell him what he most wanted to know, would avoid teaching him obscenities? Well, anyway. That’s how it happened, Petya.

10

Or, to put it another way: there is no point or portion of human experience that did not affect the Writer and is not reflected in the Book, complete, clear, understandable, humanly comprehensible, and stunningly beautiful. Passages that require no commentary because they overwhelm the soul with their pristine force, Petya. The motives a young man might have for remaining in a house like your parents’ house, after that first month. I might allege an explanation and convincing motive in my encounter with your mother one Monday at noon. I’d already seen and understood her to be a woman of overwhelming beauty, but then I watched her come into the living room that morning, her face illuminated by the stones of a necklace. Dressed as if to go out, though she never did, and for that reason I was doubly perplexed, trying to decipher where on earth, dressed like that, so beautifully attired, and with that string of stones at her neck. This time a cluster of immense diamonds, big as pigeon’s eggs, cut smooth and round (cabochons, your mother would later clarify), all the light of morning inside them.

Everything is in the Book!

Paralyzed, not taking my eyes off the necklace as her legs bore it across the room, until someone — Batyk, undoubtedly — made her go back upstairs and take it off.

Without my being able to take a step or rather drop to the ground, return to earth, my feet a handsbreadth above the carpet, then falling slowly back down onto it, still plunged in my astonishment. All right: I’d noticed, I knew they were fabulously rich, but … that necklace! Diamonds, without a shadow of a doubt. Because if once in your life you’ve paid attention, if ever you’ve seen a diamond, you won’t mistake one for anything else, Petya. Just as it’s enough for me to read a single page by the Writer, a single paragraph: how it glows, how it scintillates! And I’m not the type to say — as I know some people would, affording themselves the pleasure of stupidly proclaiming: So what? Diamonds? What do I want diamonds for? Why would I pay for a diamond if it’s all the same — you know? — as a piece of cut crystal. I, a reader of the Book, was better prepared.

Terrible, that necklace. How much was that necklace worth? A fortune. The pink diamond, a fortune, the blue diamond, two fortunes, the red one, four fortunes. And so on. Not a king in distant India could come up with enough wheat to place on each successive square of that chessboard in exponential sequence. Indecipherable, the sum they’d carried off with them, and their fear all too explicable. Terrifying, Petya, that necklace: another level of complexity I wasn’t imagining and that neither the blue of the sky nor the lily white of the clouds had foretold. The grace with which she then began wearing it every day, the disturbing poise with which she came down to breakfast with it glittering around her neck. And then she would go for a swim in the pool, and I would follow her progress with the attention of a sentry watching a submarine’s red and blue navigation lights in the dark waters of an estuary.

1

I went on reading to you: They didn’t generally dine at the hotel, where the electric bulbs sent floods of light across the great dining room, making it like a vast, marvelous aquarium beyond whose glass precincts the working population of Balbec, the fishermen and petit bourgeois families, invisible in the darkness outside, would press against the windows to watch the luxurious life of the people inside, gently rocked on swells of gold — as extraordinary to the poor as the life of fish and strange mollusks …

But you interrupted me, Petya. You asked: “What is it about? What’s the subject? The subject of the whole Book?”

“I’ve never thought about that …” I had to confess.

I had never thought about that. I stopped looking out the window, turned around. What is the Book about? I had never thought about that, can you believe me? I’ve read it thousands of times, I’ve entered its pages at random, at any point, like a child who learns to go into the house through the windows, familiarly. But once within I’d never asked myself the question you had just posed. You forced me to pause, having no clear idea of what he found a need to write about, a thing that could be enunciated thus: The subject of the Book is. But now that you ask, I can tell you. I know! It’s money. The Book deals entirely and exclusively with money. Because when the Writer takes a job as the tutor of the sons of Romanianus and the weeks go by and he is not paid, he stands at the window and asks himself a singular question: Shouldn’t they be fabulously rich? Shouldn’t they have money in little leather cases, hidden away in vaults, shelves full of glittering gold, all that money emitting a sense of calm and security?