Rex (17 page)

Suddenly acquiring, over the course of just a few pages, the certainty that assaults you definitively as an adult, that now we'll never love anyone else. At least not with a love like that. That we won't fall in love again with the force and the intensity (and the abandon? and the abandon) with which we fell in love that one time, years ago. Never again. And without having lived much at all at that point, only seven years older than you are now, Petya, I perceived that truth. And yes, I have fallen in love, I have had loves, I have admired other writers and allowed them to enter my eyes and my soul. I've lived inside them, studied some of them, but have always gone back to the Writer, in the end. In the same way, if the trustees were to see two plays, two
tragedies, three comedies, appear on the table next to their cups of steaming coffee, they wouldn't be able to go on drinking their terrible coffee, they would sit stock still, as if struck by lightning. The government ministers, the doughnut-gobbling presidents, the owners of country estates, the false connoisseurs of Russian literature, the ridiculous opera-lovers, they would all stop in their tracks if their black souls permitted, to prostrate themselves before a king as the thing most healthy and natural to their hearts, acknowledging and proclaiming that not all men are created equal, that some are superior. And yet they are hardened, bad; they pretend to be equal. Equal to whom? To Shakespeare? To the Writer?

You had conceded, after a certain time, and without thinking it necessary to tell me in so many words, the reality of the story I'm telling you. Understanding that however fantastic it might appear, having heard me out to that point, it was entirely factual: names like Kirpich and Raketa existed, as well as the two scientists, old friends, who had imagined the most harebrained scheme, given proof of the most insane imagination, forced the limits of the credible, carried the plausible to an extreme. And you assimilated that, as well, you let the pages with fistfuls of diamonds pass, in Ophir, the Solomonic kingdom of Ophir, millions in stones, bezants, and florins flowing between your fingers into the gilded mouths of coffers. Luxury and wealth, Petya, to that degree. You'd heard me out, followed and believed up to this point, hadn't you?

You didn't even stand up or dismiss as impossible something that, in view of your young age and so as not to affect the balance of your tender and childish mind, I kept from telling you until the last moment. Your father: Emperor of Russia … This, too, you accepted and allowed, though with an understandable expression of amazement, making space in your mind for this new and implausible plot twist: your father, King. On behalf of which I had to present arguments to you, supported by much evidence taken from the Book. An explanation you were skeptical of at first, and I, too, had had to give in, adding 1 or 2 percent more spandex to my mind's barrel staves, making room, putting my schoolmaster's satchel on my knees so that your father's other
body could fit into the carriage that was now ready to flee, his symbolic body: the ridiculous little crown at the back of the head and Vasily smiling in embarrassment as if begging our pardon for not having a normal body like any other human being but—as the Writer explains and argues—a double body, the two bodies of the king. Fine like that? Comfortable? Let's close the door and finally be on our way.

But not, for all that, to accept, now, the absurdity of antigravity.

To imagine it feasible for men to fly. That? No.

And your mother complained of it bitterly. Why on earth expose us to ridicule, risk everything, the truth of our story, with the absurd idea of antigravity? Undermine our plan with something like that, Psellus? What reader in all the earth would ever believe such a thing? Refutable, moreover—added your mother, to my astonishment, for she was right—by the simple experiment of a falling apple, if such a thing were necessary, if there were a need for empirical refutation. “You see?” She would say to that gentleman (she was referring to Astoriadis): “You see? I drop it, and it falls!”

Good, Nelly. Correct!

“You, Psellus, had brought your good sense and wisdom to bear, we had a plan—and only to endanger all of that now with the ridiculous idea, the childish notion, of levitation? A petty and fatuous fairground attraction, what is it but that, Psellus? Which he claims will sell for a billion or two to the president of General Motors, to John F. Smith Jr., at this autumn's Salon de l'Automobile in Cannes. He hasn't stopped pestering my husband about how the country will rise again, how to recover the money that Nicholas loaned to the British, how the nation can overcome the crisis and reconstitute its union into a single happy family of Bashkirs, Tajiks, and Buryats.”

Thus spoke Nelly, as if the Writer were speaking through her mouth. Turning against that repugnant and empirical being, a man who loved nothing more than rooting around in the mud of the physical world. All that Batyk imagined, the delirium that the vision of my success at court, my rise from tutor to Royal Councillor, gave rise to in him, stirring the bile of his envy. And he had cast caution to the winds, the security measures he'd so zealously forced us to observe. He started going out more often, to Puerto Banús (where he went to spy on me in Ishtar). He begged God to send him a solution, and one night he seemed to have come up with one and brought that man home with him, a stranger, a Russian, someone who might perfectly well have been an accomplice of Messrs. K and R, murderers. A Trojan horse, with his very strange way of moving, sneaking around next to the walls. The fifth column that would run out to draw back the bar on the gate; he was more of a traitor, that man, than a whole squadron of Saracens.

It hadn't taken much effort to find him among the many Russians who visited Marbella, who came so far south to observe with their own eyes the life being lived here and how well set up they were here, those who robbed most. That it was true: all the Russians here, all the money. He invited him in, allowed him to move his things to the Castle for an indeterminate stay. The only profit in this being that any visitor who might come to see us, in the hypothetical case that such a thing might occur, would observe that our household was growing: two liveried lackeys now instead of just one.

Continually moved, it didn't take long for me to realize, by the need to fill his belly, that Astoriadis. No thought of spying on us or alerting anyone else, that at least. Repressing with some difficulty—each time I found him on one of his nocturnal journeys to the refrigerator, closely studying its interior in front of the open door, valiantly stamping his many legs—my desire to jump on him, shouting: “The door! Haven't you, a scientist, heard about the ozone layer?” God! How I would have liked to hit him. With the Book, if I'd had it at hand. Quite certain of the result, for it's right there in the Writer:
When a head and a book come into collision and one of them rings hollow, is it always the book
?

What? From the Book, Petya? How could the sound come from a book? Is this a joke? Yes and notice, too, that he doesn't speak of a physical book or a physical head, he refers—had you grasped this?—to the obtuseness of certain minds, calling our attention to the fact that there can be heads that are hollower than the emptiest book. The danger and senselessness of levitation illustrated, moreover, by the influence of Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier with such nefarious effect for the monarchy; the example of ascension, the mechanical ascension of goats and dogs in 1783, or, in successive demonstrations, of any hatter, however mad, which inflamed the French, filling their breasts with the absurd ambition to fly, the belief that they could go higher than the sun, higher than their own king.

Quite the contrary, in reality: never could there be flight, never could anyone ever fly as Astoriadis claimed, levitating, as we fly in our dreams. Vasily atop a wall, his hair tousled by the land breeze blowing out from among the orange trees, the sun now very low, his feet illuminated by the light that after traveling through space without interruption for eight minutes has come to collide against his laughable little shoes, suspended in the air by the grace and effect of Astoriadis's
ingenuity and that of the antigravity shield. The air, the emotion on his face turned to us down below: I'm flying! I'm flying!
I see the air and walk upon the clouds!

To approach his ear, pressing myself into the spiral of his ear so my words would reach the soft mass of his brain and rescue him from his error. He landed gently on the grass, moved his feet toward me, raised his head. “It's false, Vasily, no such thing as a gravity-blocking shield exists. It's false. Can't you see?”

(If, as the Writer affirms, the external world is pure phenomenon, that is, something that appears before our senses and whose appearance is constructed by us, and if, as the Writer never thought, that phenomenon is a pure projection of the self, a shadow with nothing else behind it, then the world is a fable and so is the sphere in which the will to power is exercised.)

I surprised him when I cried: “Majesty!” He shot me a look, raised his eyes, both at once, and since he was too far away to scrutinize my eyes and cheeks millimeter by millimeter as was his custom, he wondered if I might not be pulling his leg. He was eager to get up, come over to me, and drill his eyes into mine with the same intensity with which, in certain primitive Italians (Masaccio, for example), Jesus gazes into the traitorous eyes of Judas.

He wasn't yet a monarch; there was no majesty in him. His far too expensive shoes peeked from beneath the hem of his pants as if placed there by a clever caricaturist who knew his trade well. All the absurdity of his repressed movement was concentrated in them, his need to cross the room and the manner in which he had to do it. A comic figure, or at least his pants fit badly. He should have paid only half the money he'd shelled out for that Versace to a tailor who could have cut him a good Savile Row suit with no gold-toned buttons, no fake monogram on the chest.

He stood there like that the whole morning, incapable of covering the distance that separated us, the sun shining through his translucent eyelashes. He had wanted to ask me: Is there something about this in the book you spend so much time reading? But my words had taken him by surprise, my brazen outburst, and now he would never dare ask me the question. Which I did not regret. He'd been needing a blow like that. To keep him far away, all the better to handle him with the long pole of the Book, maintaining the distance, exactly three and a
half meters, that separated us, I calculated, looking down at my feet and lifting my eyes toward him as we do before snapping a photo.

I didn't pretend to have been mistaken or to have used the word lightly, but with perverse purpose, rather. He was a smart enough man, but I had to manipulate him like a puppet, an animated figure in a theatrical presentation, that alone would get us out of there with our lives (get them out, get me out, with the money). I had simply assigned him to a role, as when we were children and would sing out: You? Cop! You? Robber! The game about to begin.

Slowly he began to understand, at the rhythm at which a splash of sunlight made its way across the floor: I in my study, he eternally at the window. When finally the sun had moved quite a way across the sky, he seemed to have understood. In his face began to appear, along with the greater darkness, the signs of an intelligence of his new role. It didn't take him too much time, which says a lot for how clever he was: a test of anyone to accept a role like that, fallen from the sky, so quickly. To go from the white-collar worker one is, from the lowliest engineer on the project, from a doctor to His Imperial Majesty.

He seemed to understand, he no longer hesitated, but then he wondered: why now, we two, alone, in this room? And the public? The people before whom to …? To pretend?

You must pretend for yourself, Vasily, play the role for yourself and not abandon it ever again.

He understood finally and was about to move his lips but the sun went into hiding at that moment and the two of us stood in the dark.

I end here: the curtain falls. The show is over. As you like it.

It didn't bother me for a second; the word didn't cause any change in my expression. It rose to my lips in the most natural way; my heart expelled it in an uninterrupted column of air, and it broke with a click as it detached from my lips, calling out happily to your father: “Majesty! Prince!” For he was a superior man, whom I approached with the serenity and peace of mind of one who has discovered voluntary servitude. Never would a black soul, a mediocrity like the Commentator, a man suffering from a mania for precise adjectivization, understand this or understand the soft and delicate air of that morning. Never would he place on paper or accept those two adjectives which, in that air, were simple and true. Only those, nevertheless, did I permit myself, those two adjectives.

I floated on that air and through it drew close to Nelly. I saw Vasily walking toward the car, pulling hard at the door. And that air, soft and delicate, brought me the sound of its slam, Nelly's friendly grimace and the angular elbows of Batyk who was running at top speed to feed him a lie without being able to address him as I had learned to do: Majesty! Prince!

Traveling now with Vasily to premiere his royal dignity, a place where he could stage a tryout of that other life (with symbolic intent? With symbolic intent). Approaching, across fields withered by the sun, the glittering isle of a shopping mall that we saw floating on the line of the horizon. Everyone in the car happy and dressed up for the occasion, you like a little boy in an engraving, wearing suspenders and
ankle boots, your mother in her red dress, your father's three-piece Armani suit.

Only the Buryat's attire was out of sync, for he could never be convinced to change his fringed doublet, made of a striped cloth that was in very poor taste, suitable only for Cockneys or contemptible lackeys. Or, as the Writer calls Morel,
the shadiest of secretaries
. A man capable of splashing ink on all your papers, of muddying the most distant wellsprings of a day, who intuitively, among so many fine fabrics, had chosen this one with its very broad stripes, broader than good taste and decorum permitted (for no one had worn such a thing in public since 1975). He'd held it up against his torso and seen in satisfaction how the lines of the cloth perfectly matched the horrible lines on his face, and it's here that the Writer exclaims: “
Is it thoroughly clear to you that, if there be evil in your heart, your mere presence will probably proclaim it today a hundred times more clearly than would have been the case two or three centuries ago?”