Rex Page 4
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.
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 breakfas
t 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.
Third Commentary
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?
The Writer was able to address this with complete frankness, a whole chapter dedicated to the subject. For doesn’t money figure at the center of all experience? Don’t we need money for almost everything?
The way he pauses and speaks with exquisite delicacy of the beneficent influence of money, the detailed description of the ruby ring the narrator’s grandmother leaves him at her death. A constellated ring: when the stone was turned downward, the flow of money dwindled; when turned upward, wealth came gushing in. Golden doubloons, antique florins with which he buys Albertine an airplane, a nice little one-seater with tarred wings that he, the Writer, uses as an introduction to the sections of the Book about flight.
Albertine—whom he never held prisoner nor kept with him against her will as so many commentators and myopic biographers have claimed—loved to fly. Obviously, if those claims were true he’d never have given her the airplane, for she would have been able to escape, to fly, literally, from the room, where she always returned, nevertheless, and where the Writer waited for her, avid for her stories, the herds of animals she saw grazing from the air, stampeding at the roar of the plane overhead. Dry lake beds imprinted with the cuneiform script of gnus. And sometimes she felt, he says, in pages brimming with a unique lyricism, like a friendly Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin sailing upon the ocean of air, or a Baroness Blixen, raised to the heights, transported by a genie from the Thousand and One Nights to the distant wildernesses of Africa and then back that same afternoon to the airport in Buc, on the outskirts of Paris. Though in that same plane she would crash into the sea and meet her death: Albertine, drowned.
The Writer never stops weeping for her or remembering the times he drove with her to the airport’s green meadow, she in her ski helmet and driving gloves, attentive to the silvery circle of the propeller and the lamps of the stars she would fly toward, leaning out over the edge of the plane, letting her honey-colored eyes, like unfathomable quartzes, fill up with the green of the forests, the blue of the sea, the red of the sun on the horizon. The beauty of that passage filling my heart, certain that when the time had elapsed I would leave that house with all the money I’d been promised. Or was I deceiving myself?
Or was I deceiving myself, and had I not fetched up in the house I imagined?
2
Now, how to think of Nelly as a great lady? To see her through the Writer’s eyes when, in the third volume, he gazes at his neighbor. A great lady like the Princesse de Laumes? Yes, I was sometimes inclined to believe that. Despite the vulgarity of the house, the shady business I imagined going on there, which the unbearable furniture hinted at. A woman on whom I could confer all the natural elegance of the Guermantes. Where the Writer says: beneath a mauve hood one day, a navy blue toque the next morning. And throughout this passage: One morning during Lent … I met her wearing a dress of pale red velvet, cut quite low at the neckline.
Alone, her husband away again.
The way she would focus her gaze fixedly on the tablecloth, her eyes inclined or falling at an angle like a shaft of light. And in the interior of that shaft the tiny figures of the false rich ancestors she never had. Obsessed with the idea that they’d been aristocrats at some point, that Vasily Guennadovich (your father) had grown up in a family of nobles, dispossessed, stripped of everything and excoriated around the year ’17 and through the years ’18, ’19, and ’20. The factories they’d owned in Finland—she was lying—all stolen. To the point that I told her, that first time in the kitchen: You should write a letter, go to Tampere, find those papers.
And she smiled to herself and gave me two quick glances.
Having sought out and hired me, I finally understood, as one more element of that deception, which would permit them to say: “A tutor for Petya, just like the one Guennadi Nicolaevich, Vasily’s grandfather, had. A certain level of instruction—you know?—a knowledge the boy would never have had access to in one of those schools, those prisons or warehouses for children, really. Although the one we hired is crazy or has had his brains scrambled by a writer he never stops talking about”—and she looked at me smiling when she thought that—“but he is good and generous and we have trusted him from the first moment.”
With that facility for the third person so natural in intelligent women, which she used to downplay her obsession with the subject of nobility, speaking of herself as a more ironic, more observant person would, acting like a girl on a visit to someone else’s house.
“She is, I confess, obsessed with the matter of nobility. And sometimes she’d like to fly away, escape from here. She’d love to pay you handsomely, to thank you for all that you do for her son … You don’t wear rings?”
“I’d like to, you know?” I lowered my head toward her hand. Admirable, that blue gem, set high over the finger like a hard flower of stone.
I said nothing about her necklace, pretended she wasn’t wearing the most fabulous necklace I’d seen in my life. Without taking my eyes off it, powerfully attracted by that necklace, fascinated and held by it, leaning toward her throat, with my feet firmly on the floor, imbibing the light her necklace radiated. Incredibly beautiful there on her breast. Obsessed with that necklace to the point that I’d searched through the fashion magazines they had lying around the house as instruction manuals for life in the West, scrutinizing the jeweled breast of every fashion model, Spanish or Greek, burnished skin glistening over the clavicle, neck tendons taut, for a gem like that one, the same size as that one. And finding not one, ever. Most of them, the best of them—it was easy to see from the design and the very bright colors—were just cut crystals.
I could think of nothing to say to her. I said:
“And yes, Nelly, it is something I have thought of. To surpass the objectives of a princely education, or rather, ignore them entirely. What sense in learning a foreign language if, once within that other world or universe, you’d only be fatally drawn in again by the magnet of the Book? Better to focus on it, for it’s the same in all languages, impervious—as the Commentator perversely affirms, though of course without referring directly to the Book—to the fire of translations. Constructed on t
he solid foundation of a universal language, a primordial speech. All nuances, all distinctions, all subtleties within it. A Theory of Everything, Nelly, a Book for all days. I don’t wish for, could never have wished for a better education for myself …”
“Solntse,” she interrupted me. She went over to the window and set her hands on the frame like a bird alighting there to await her husband, who was not coming, scanning the horizon from there. “Wouldn’t you like to go out for a stroll?”
And she turned toward me.
Her face.
Having stood back, the maker of that face, at twenty weeks’ gestation, to study the precise placement of the cheekbones’ brief elevation, the almond frame of the eyes. Rotated one second of arc downward at the inner corner and one second of arc upward at the outer, like wings. I was afraid to look her full in the face: the dangerous fascination voltaic arcs exerted on me when I was a child. But I couldn’t help throwing a look at the white-hot point, the acetylene flare hurtling toward me, the nucleus of a star expanding outward in a sphere. And in the center of that sphere, birds and bands of angels.
Her throat.
The stones around her throat.
“A walk? With all my heart!”
3
I imagined, Petya, that we were off to withdraw some money, that our little jaunt had to do, finally, with matters related to my paycheck. Progressing happily down the Paseo Marítimo. Without a monocle, it’s true, to bounce along on my chest. A monocle that would speak as clearly as the Writer of the happiness that suffused me, the soft purity of the morning. The hotels along the beach, the yachts with their colorful banners, the blue and white striped awnings of the beach clubs, the money we drew in with every breath, that perfumed the air of that city by the sea.