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  REX

  ALSO BY JOSÉ MANUEL PRIETO

  Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire

  REX

  A Novel

  José Manuel Prieto

  Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen

  Copyright © 2007 by José Manuel Prieto

  Translation copyright © 2009 by Esther Allen

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  The boldface text that appears throughout this book indicates that a passage has been quoted from another work. A list of sources is available in the author’s note at the end of the book.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9991-1

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  Esse is percipi.

  To be is to be perceived.

  —Bishop Berkeley

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are many people I want to thank for the support they gave me as I wrote this book. First among them is Francisco Goldman, who has been an invaluable promoter of my work. Many thanks, as well, to Beatrice Monti della Corte, who offered me a home at the Santa Maddalena Foundation where I wrote the first chapters of Rex. Alma Guillermoprieto read the book in manuscript and had many insightful observations. The Guggenheim Foundation gave generous support. Finally, I finished writing Rex as a Fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and am very grateful to everyone there. Special thanks, as well, to Esther Allen, for her excellent translation, which is in fact a rewriting of this book in English. Thanks, as well, to Amy Hundley and to the rest of the Grove/Atlantic family, especially Morgan Entrekin.

  Finally, I want to express all my gratitude to my family, my daughter, Alicia, and my wife, Elena Bezborodova, for their many years of support and understanding.

  PART ONE

  First Commentary

  1

  I’ve been reading it for years, the one Book. Over and over without stopping. Beginning again whenever I reach the final description of the vast party, the inaugural ball, returning immediately to the first words, when he’s dozing off in the house in Combray and dreams of stopping time in its tracks, solidifying it. I’ve opened it at random in ship terminals (Helsinki), English pubs, Istanbul cafés. Each and every time, without fail, I’ve been stunned by the intelligence, the penetration, the unique capacity to perceive things that escape every other writer. Always the right words, flowing out miraculously, as if he never had to stop and think about them, as easily and naturally as someone randomly humming syllables, nonsense noises, tra-la-la-ing a tune.

  Language, an aqueous thing, foundationless, a river of words. Yet how rapidly I sail along it, the mass of that river flowing beneath me: no mere suspension of sediment washed along by chance but the immense briny depths of a living liquid. And we can peer down and scrutinize its surface, see it at work, discover its life, watch its cells move and exchange information and energy without ever ceasing to transmit an idea. A profligacy of means, an expenditure far beyond most other writers. Not simply piecing together a more or less coherent story—making the sun come up, in the novel, over that red sea—but reducing the incredible life of that prose or song that lies beneath our own to its essence, as if the Writer had used blood where others only water, simple sea water. And the same astonishment when, turning your gaze from the adulterous woman, the fraudulent scientists, the aristocrats of dubious lineage, you discover that all of it moves and glides upon the very finest material, the bodily fluid, the lymph of an immense animal, the earth itself a gigantic living being that easily, shockingly, secretes blood. In a single, sudden, galactic rhythm.

  To such a degree that when the manuscript reached the publishing houses—pages of this new substance placed beneath the microscope for the first time—its editor, M. Van Leeuwenhoek, could see nothing but platelets, red blood cells, and pushed it away in disgust, deeming it no more than a polluted liquid, devoid of human beings, storyline, any resemblance to the patterns of life. He quested across that vast sea—which in itself was an unprecedented extravagance, a technique from somewhere beyond the skies—in search of the skiffs and galleons of its characters and found very few of them, and those few as if becalmed. And he thought, “Can this be a story? Is it a book, even?” And it was the final book!

  2

  It startled, even frightened him when I spoke that way about the Book, this being without fixed age—at first I’d thought that was me, that the Writer might be referring to me, but on an instant’s further reflection I realized the phrase applied rather to the man who had greeted me, Batyk. A man bearing a perfect resemblance to a peon, someone fetched from the depths of the darkest, sootiest oil painting.

  I am concerned, he announced, with the infinite cunning and unction of Norpois (in the Writer); I am concerned, I fear that your manner of teaching, an education such as the one you propose, based on a single book, may not be the correct or appropriate one. So distorted an education, its vortex resting upon a single book, cannot, by all rights, amount to much. Didn’t you list the classes you were to give him on my behalf? Spanish, mathematics, geography in Spanish? Hadn’t you also mentioned physics? Didn’t you assure me you were well grounded in physics, extremely (sarcastic here) well grounded in physics, didn’t you agree to cover the entire sixth-grade curriculum and the seventh, as well?

  And yet all I did in the first class was talk about the Book, and in the second I talked only about the Book, and in the third read aloud selected passages from the Book. That drew him closer.

  To deny, like the Commentator, the greatness, the usefulness of the Book. To begin, like the Commentator, from his own terrible incapacity—the Commentator’s—to speak in a frank and direct way about something that truly interests him. Abandoned, instead, to his zeal for denying all good books, ignoring the many that have been written, his particular vice of paying attention only and almost exclusively to minor authors, names in an index. The unwarranted fixation with which he studied them, reducing them to their elements, vivisecting them. Not vivisecting but morisecting them, for they lay there lifeless before my eyes. The satisfaction of a gambler who watches a machine, a miracle of engineering, busily revolving. The little wheels of his citations spinning in their niches, toothlet locking into toothlet, but a machine—you know?—devoid of human warmth. Perfect—but a machine.

  Who hasn’t felt that to be so? I invite any reader to write and try to refute me with the story of how he or she closed one of those commentaries in a state of agitation, moved by one of the dry commentaries that the Commentator sought to pass off as literature. Any reader on earth, ever.

  And such a man, such a horror, in your house. His surprise when I spoke to him of the Book and he asked me for it, wanting to take a look. He held it up before me, rocking on his heels, moved it away from his eyes, as if farsighted, pretended to read it. He wondered, in a very loud voice replete with falsity, “And why doesn’t it mean anything to me? Why doesn’t this book speak to me and tell me what you say it says?” (The character who appears on stage in the
second act wearing Moorish slippers; the instant we see him, his socks drooping, the djellaba thrown over his shoulders, we know he’ll behave badly, perfidiously.)

  As indeed he did, opening wide his arms, as wide as arms are opened in Syria or Istanbul (not in Angarsk, in Buryatia, where he came from), and pretending that the Book had slipped from his grasp. His whole malevolent being in that gesture. Falsely conciliatory at first, but then he threw the Book down on the corner of the table. From which, under the momentum of its own weight, it slipped and fell on its spine.

  3

  I didn’t move or change expression, Petya. True, I did inch away from the wall, white with rage, but I regained my calm before making any further move. Then I walked to the middle of the room, forcing my feet to the place where the Book had fallen, and picked it up from the floor. I regretted having given it to him, having made such a miscalculation; how right the Writer is when he says: the faculty of becoming in a few seconds.

  Words that mean or allow for this reading: as I bent over to pick it up I kept my face down and my intentions concealed, aware that there was only one person in your house I could go on talking to, only one person whose company had any appeal. The day of my arrival—horrified by the heavy tassels on the curtains, the ghastly luxury of every aspect of the decor, a garish statue of a turbaned Moor at three-quarters scale perfectly in keeping with all the rest—a change of plans suddenly occurred within me, running precisely counter to my earlier notion of abandoning the whole project. Like a liquid that polarizes, reorders its crystals in a new direction. At the exact moment I met your mother, and after our conversation in the living room, the blue water of the swimming pool sparkling at her back. She opened out before me like a strange new device, deploying all its antennae, setting its vital systems at their highest levels, and then emitting signals to me across the marble tabletop; the consistent breadth of her conversation, the isotropic structure of her intellectual armature sending out a strong signal in any direction you cared to go, an unvarying quality of lively intelligence, penetrating mind, open eyes.

  The dress she was wearing that night without expecting any guests, the sobriety and intelligence of everything about her. The Italian furniture and carved ivory had led me to expect an overweight, slack-faced housewife in flowery poplin with enormous breasts at 8:00 p.m., the sort of pampered lady who goes out to buy cigarettes two blocks from her house and you stare at her, thunderstruck with horror, as she steps out of the car and lights up: the lacquered helmet of her hairdo, the antique cell phone on which she gives instructions to the distant executors of her idiotic will.

  But no. Quite the contrary. The knee astutely concealed beneath the smooth fabric of the pale dress, the breasts discreet, youthful, the arm farther extended by the pen or pencil she continually pointed at me as she spoke, instructing me on the nature of my pedagogical undertaking, the education she wanted for her son.

  And the light source on the index finger of that hand—an enormous stone, all the more tasteful and intelligent for its size, intentionally huge and disproportionate—could be seen, I think now, as the only point of contact between her and the dismaying lady buying cigarettes at the corner store. But she was fresh, without a single false note: the thin, oscillating blade of a clarinet theme introduced in a first movement. That was the tone—slightly masculine, not a flute or a harp doing arpeggios, but steady and delicate, addressing its questions to the heart … And not for one second was I tempted to tell her the truth; I lied as promptly as a chorus of strings and brass responds to the first violin.

  4

  Which is where the Writer, to whom no error whatsoever can be ascribed, says, a pool. In the sense that those houses, seen from the sky, had seemed mere appendices to their swimming pools, places from which to understand the more important fact of water in the garden. A cliff overlooking the sea, the highest point on the coast, and along it a row of beautiful houses with swimming pools. As if connected, the swimming pools, to the blue mantle of the sea, the wellspring that secretly nourished them and toward which, before ringing the doorbell, I turned back, for another look at the water breaking against the coast, the mist over the beach, the distant cypresses, before returning to the shards of blue ceramic over the gateway. Nothing about that wall spoke to me of the kind of house I feared: people you wouldn’t want to sit next to on a plane, watching them take out their cell phones and petulantly mutter their final instructions before the doors are locked, shooting suspicious looks at your hands on the armrests, openly bellicose. Or, in another scenario: a voice warily inquiring from behind the video screen, a man looking up and down the street in both directions in case I’ve brought along an accomplice, currents of ill will, a graying muscle-man ceaselessly tickling the ivories in the shadowy bar, flashy suits swarming across the garden.

  But no: the best impression. The sight of the pool sparkling across the lawn stopped me in my tracks, amazed. Not only connected among themselves, those pools, by some subterranean aquifer, but also in constant communication with the sea: the same slow ebb and flow, the same majesty. The striped bathrobe my first paycheck would buy me, a small percentage of my first paycheck. A lifestyle with ample space for the sea, striped bathrobes, the servant or butler who waited, motionless, with pronounced courtesy, for the two halves of the gate, pulled by the mechanical arm mounted on the wall, to move back into place, that second or two, without polite phrases or words of any kind, while the heavy iron plate rolls along its tracks and the five bolts are locked once more, your host checking them by sweeping his open fingers across them. Turning back toward me now, asking me, perhaps (I don’t remember) about my trip. Feigning friendliness and good manners and reawakening my distaste, my fear of objectionable companions. And then the horrendous luxury that inundated that house when I reached the glass wall, pushed back a curtain the breeze kept throwing in my face, and wondered, once inside, whether to put my bag down on the carpet, my bag containing the Book, which I hadn’t stopped reading the whole flight until we began our descent and I looked out the window and discovered that there were blue circles next to the houses instead of the patches of cultivated green you see farther north.

  5

  None too sure, true, that I could do anything to diminish the idiocy television had wrought in the child’s mind, like a vinyl disk scratched by an oversized needle, twenty-five inches wide: that was the width of the shaft of light the TV set projected onto him. Though I hasten to add: the time within which he has lived. Words to be read here as meaning: I would be able to tutor a child. But not, for example, an old man, walled up within habits acquired in the navy (the loathsome navy)—you leave the service thinking you’ll never again tap the key or probe the heavens for a signal, but then you see an advertisement for a Morse code operator at a base in Fiji and circle it, and there you are three weeks later in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt having a lazy smoke in the radio shack as you shuffle along in Vietnamese flip-flops, rubber soles slapping the floor.

  An intelligent boy, a clever boy, Petya: you. Who after letting me talk for a moment immediately understood what was up. Understood the method I’d chosen to educate him. Was able to understand instantaneously when he saw me linger over that phrase, in a passage, I told him, that illustrated to perfection what I had to say. Because somewhere the Writer explains that human ignorance, or, rather, human stupidity, is like the ocean cleaved by the keel of a ship, which is intelligence. And when traveling on that ship, one has the impression that something, a path, is opening up through the mass of stupidity (and human ignorance), but behind the ship the waters rejoin in an embrace that bears no trace of the ship’s passage, no more than a light tremor, the white froth of the wake, and then, a quarter of a mile later, nothing. He looked at me, then: he understood that only thus, with the Book.

  I was a young man of some self-possession, not a governess cast adrift in the world with all the amorous disappointments of her short life heaving in her bosom. The wisdom, in my case, of a reader of the Book
: I was a calm and balanced man, very stable and aware of his place in time, the most recent watermark at the level of twenty-nine years—my age when I appeared at your door with the Book in my hand and a clear mission to save you, Petya, to save the boy I found sitting cross-legged, Turkish fashion, the whole of his insides intricately wired from his blond head to the pads of his fingertips. Pushing the right button and toppling the monsters without blinking, without a second’s hesitation. The flautist (in the Writer) replaced here by an abhorrent being, a perverse dwarf with the deceptively simpleminded look of a mustachioed plumber and an unnatural way of leaping, as if about to levitate, when he tried to smash his big monkey wrench down on the small points of light circling through the air in the illuminated kingdom of Nintendo. And always another of those points of light emitting sparks over the doorway or in a hollow of the wall, showing the way forward to the next level of complexity.

  Confronting, that first morning, the tremendous difficulty of teaching the class: how, by what method, to tell you about geography, history? I opened the Book I’d brought upstairs with me for no particular reason, without knowing, when I picked it up, what use I might put it to, and began reading you one passage or another. For example, the passage concerning the Verdurins, where the Writer describes the horror of the furniture throughout their house, which seeks to give an impression of wealth and succeeds, but of an execrable newly gotten wealth, not a mark or a wrinkle on the upholstery, every finish perfect and all the more horrible for its perfection. The constant impression of running into a wall of bad taste, a mirrored surface, to the point that sometimes I couldn’t make myself go inside, hesitating, thinking: if I don’t slide open the glass doors.