Rex (18 page)

A piece of intelligence, an astute observation, that was more than applicable, as well, to the fraudulence that encased Professor Astoriadis's whole body, codified in his execrable table manners and the strange way he had of walking, lost in thought, while making two of his fingers, the index and middle finger, wiggle like a trolley car's antennae. A trolley car deep in thought. His legs articulated at many points in addition to the hips, knees, and ankles of normal human beings, at least five more points, which made him totter as he moved, staggering in disarray, as if his energy were frequently shut off. Luck had decreed that he would meet up with Batyk: the two had approached each other, recognized each other, Batyk listened to him and conceived the notion of taking him to your father with this far-fetched and repellant—or rather, implausible and impossible—antigravity idea.

An idea that fell, I already told you, as music on your father's ears and that I tried to negate with this excursion, a chance to go out and show off his royal dignity for the first time. It struck Vasily as a beautiful plan; he hesitated at first, but then it struck him as beautiful. He had hesitated: wouldn't it be too much of an exposure, an unnecessary risk? But no, your mother convinced him, with Psellus nothing will go wrong; he'll be our guide and translator.

To go out, Petya, and see for himself that the world outside had changed in the same way as the world inside him, that to the new arrangement of his cells corresponded a greater outward brilliance, at last identifying the new melody the wind drew from him as it blew through his altered reticular structure, the birds that flew into his chest, each seeking a hollow spot to stop and twitter in, as on a cliffside or a rock.

That solid.

Or with what the Writer calls
the crushing force of monarchy
. Hunching his shoulders now, Vasily, preceding us down the glass-enclosed gallery. Stopping in front of the shop windows that advertised sales, poking a thick index finger toward a pair of sweatpants (for what? your papa never played any kind of sport or went running) or a stereo speaker identical to the ones he already had throughout the house, bought in Cyprus or wherever he lied to us about having traveled. Like a Minotaur in a labyrinth of stores with Chinese wares, ill-suited to his dignity, and not knowing how to reach them, for the monster was unacquainted with the brittle nature of glass. How easily he could have made his way through the walls, lowering his head and neck for a second while the glass cascaded around him, crashing through like a giant purple automaton and carrying everything off with him: wireless phones, juicers, garlands of colored lights for the garden.

Hesitating between the symbolic intent of the journey and his desire to go in and listen to some very expensive speakers, importuning the salesman with questions about their frequency response (from twenty to twenty thousand, Vasily, your ears wouldn't hear anything beyond that). Taking him aside most respectfully, without ever going nearer than the five steps he had required between himself and me, attempting to steer him away from his disproportionate interest in tabletop fountains with whispering waters, clocks that project time onto the ceiling, an enormous copper gong complete with a felt mallet, to announce visitors.

And in front of the window display of a store completely identical in every respect to another one several passageways and five turns behind us, he stopped to inspect some sneakers for his tired feet, for his son and his wife (for me? no thanks), sneakers with which to outfit themselves like those families whose every member wears identical shoes on Sunday afternoons, purchased in one fell swoop, scooped up during a foray into the depths of enemy territory, ripped from the saddlebags without dismounting, and then happy as children, raising them to the sky, inspecting them beneath the ruddy splendor of late afternoon. And through the glass, his gaze refocused on the brightly lit interior of the shop, your father saw that a small drama was being played out on the carpet, at the front lines of the combat between distant Taiwanese companies and all the gullible consumers in the world.

A small drama, I noticed it as well, because of the disposition of its participants in front of the row of chairs: the young salesgirls with long braids holding a sneaker by the heel. Opposed to and divided by the axis that the sneaker scored in the air from a colorful group of people strangely and miraculously grasping the other extreme of the sneaker, its toe, the hands of the whole group, or one hand and one arm, pulling on that sneaker. Motionless at the moment when His Serene Highness raised his eyes, perhaps in the intention of studying the interior of the store, finding a seat there in which to frame the calloused hillocks of his backside and point from within toward the window, the tennis shoe or sneaker that had caught his attention among the many on display there.

In front of which he continued to stand without taking his eyes from the tableau. As a principal and organizing element now of the gazes of astonishment and admiration for his incontestable distinction. Some not so admiring, some looks of hatred in the eyes of the crowd confronting the shopgirls. Where—Vasily is wondering—does Juan Carlos of
Spain buy his sneakers? This is the type of small detail we've got to work on … The boy paralyzed at the center of the group, the gypsy boy (because no one else, etcetera), had managed to put on and was wearing one brand-new sneaker and the one he was holding was the right sneaker, interrupted on its way toward his unshod foot. And the ones in the shoebox were not, on closer inspection, new sneakers, but a very old and worn-out pair.

Vasily occupied the door frame for a second, sending a wave of silence out before him, an electromagnetic pulse that closed the mouths of both salesgirls and gypsies the moment it reached them. Their eyes could not sustain the force of his gaze and rolled back in their sockets just as children look away into space before breaking into speech. Before returning to the person in whom they discovered immediately, before Vasily had said a single word, an arbitrator. Either an inspector from the Better Business Bureau or a still greater personage—without, naturally, their being able to imagine his true rank: an Emperor.

Vasily gazed at them with the tired air of one who can easily imagine himself on the other side. He placed his hand on the shoe, a gesture that had the effect of deenergizing the group, which released it the moment that the force, which they instantly perceived, was transmitted. But with their hands freed from the physical effort necessary for hanging on to the sneaker, they quickly rechannelled that energy to their throats and began shouting at the referee.

The narrative of the whole story broke into little fragments that flew at him and accumulated on his shoulders and arms, on the hand he was still holding up in the air. He stopped to look at them for a second, at the words that were covering him as fast as the gypsy boys could release their lies and the shopgirls could try to catch them with open palms but without managing to keep them from adhering to Vasily with a slight click, attracted by the magnet of his body and his charisma.
Configuring on his chest the false story of how they had gone in—in all innocence!—to try on those sneakers, keeping their eyes on the door they planned to escape through and where the salesgirls had caught them.

Vasily understood it all, blood pumping through the muscles of his neck, making those lies jump with the relaying pitter-patter of an electromechanical telephone switch. He placed both hands on the sneaker and allowed a current to rise through his arms toward the thieving boys with the following message:
Hammurabi, the perfect king, am I, the king who is preeminent among kings. My words are precious, my wisdom is unrivaled. The perfect king am I
.

Such a message, such a sentiment within him. To make justice flow not toward the gypsy boys, as many in Sweden or perhaps in Norway would have wanted, and which would have been wrong, but to the shopgirls. Without proffering a word, with the muteness of a king settling a dispute in a remote region of his kingdom where he does not speak the language. Making the balloons of his words float throughout the store. So that everyone could see them rising to his lips and read them as well, without need of any interpreter. I was the one who, on seeing them emerge and discovering the spatial disposition of those bubbles in the air that floated off into the most distant departments of Marks & Spencer, identified the words that the Writer places on the lips of a king, through a secondary character in the Book, and which mean:
“I am the king preeminent among kings. My words are precious, my wisdom unrivaled. The perfect king am I.”

I was not the one who built the jets flying overhead across the skies of Marbella, my index finger had not followed their fuel and pneumatic lines, rendered in blue and red, across the blueprint. I overcame my fear each time I had to board one and fly in it across the firmament. And a jet would never stop in midflight or on the verge of takeoff, to open its mouth, lift its chin to the sky with these words on its propeller-lips, this absolute confidence in its own capacity for flight.
“The perfect king am I.”
Not a good king:
“the king preeminent among kings.”

“Like Lufthansa?”

Better yet. Not a single accident in centuries, dynasty after dynasty, dynasties falling and rising, materializing in midflight. Why wouldn't we entrust our lives to them? He was a new kind of machinery, your father, with less physical structure than a jet, but with the same instructions from centuries past, borne out in practice. The gravity and aplomb of a colossus who contained in his breast, packed tightly within him, all his servants, the whole crew, his blue warriors and their orange jumpsuits. Ready to propel with their own feet, should the fuel source give out, the dynamo of their king, make him advance, move his arm from right to left.

The visible fact, Petya, that leads us to the invisible one of: king.

Ninth Commentary

We can deny the real existence of all that falls outside the Book: swimming pools, for example, which the Writer never mentions and that are hard to read for that reason, because they don't figure in the Book, don't glitter in a single passage of that vast work; the Writer never had the faintest inkling or notion of them and it was up to me to stretch the thin film of the text, trying in some way to make it cover them, to comprehend them.

Views, elements of the landscape about which, undoubtedly, he did not write. Had they escaped the machinery of his sight or was it just that he didn't see everything? I paused to regain my balance, bent down over those little gaps in the stiff tarp and discovered the blue and red bubbles of plastic balls (for he never spoke of plastic either, impossible). The balls broke through, sticking out here and there, smooth and shiny, and only with great difficulty did I managed to cover them over with a passage that mentions balls—whether made of oilcloth, rubber, or natural resin (the Book does not specify)—round and multicolored, played with by children on the beach.

And nothing about swimming pools, either.

The very large and beautiful one in your garden, its notches of light, the submerged flank of an enormous blue fish, the scales suggested by the illuminated semicircles that crossed and segmented its whole belly, breathing down below. None of that anywhere in the Writer. How, then, to comment on it? Certain things, certain visions of the days?

I stretched out the edges, my fingers pressing down hard on the polyvinyl (not that either!), running to some distant place, some province in the vast empire of the Book from which to fetch back, copied out on my pupils, a fragment about the sparkle of the sea on the awnings of Balbec. I placed it carefully against the gap of the pool, trying to convince the boy, managing at times to bring together the jagged edges of the opening, without ever covering it entirely.

And through the uncovered holes it continued to rise, I observed as if hypnotized by the (new?) effect of the light from below. He hadn't seen it? There were no pools in that house near Balbec that belonged to the Verdurins? The water of a pond, a hollow amid the reefs, didn't produce the same effect? Or was it only visible if one is strolling in a swimsuit alongside one of those California swimming pools (or one as large as the pools in California), probing the water with a thumb, breaking through the golden scales that cover the back of the animal, the enormous pike down below?

I raised my eyes, assailed by the unease of a teacher who hasn't spent much time preparing the class and faces the children's expectant faces knowing that he will lie to them without allowing a shadow of doubt to cross his face, wringing out the text to a maximum degree like a fraudulent exegete. I plunged in and began to swim, breaking up handfuls of the surface's changing prisms with the fury of a man silencing voices of discontent in the mayhem of a saloon, distributing blows with flailing arms and absolute perfidy. Now the light no longer found that smooth surface on which to refract: only my back. An opaque medium swimming obstinately from one end to the other, swift as a shuttle, roiling the waters. To keep anyone from glimpsing the dimensions of the gap, as large in the text as a swimming pool in the ground.

Or the way the Writer encourages us at a moment of equal bewilderment and discouragement.
Onward, dear reader! Who has ever said that there can be no true, faithful, and eternal love in the world, that such a thing does not exist? May that liar's tongue be cut out!

Full of life at that moment, bursting with submission and devotion to her, ready to leap to my feet and do battle. Agreeing fully with the Writer that in any work one part must serve others, that a palace must have passageways. Very well, but through this passageway at a gallop: high and wide, two men on horseback can pass, or myself and your parents, our capes fluttering in the wind. Beneath chapters in which nothing happened, long strings of pages in which time seemed to have stopped, to emerge into fur-strewn salons, castles at the edge of the sea, the thronging banquet in the perfumed garden through which all the characters in the story move (and dance).