Rex (19 page)

Following, in this, I commented to the boy, the Writer, who starts a party on the 1,001st page of the Book, where he reunites all his characters (and all the plotlines! And all the plotlines). The great final chords of a nineteenth-century symphony, no less thrilling for being long-awaited. A party to which we would invite Simon of Bulgaria, Leka of Albania, Duarte of Braganza, all the crownless monarchs who, for some obscure reason, chose Spain as their place of refuge.

Though not really so obscure: didn't Spain exert a magnetic attraction on them, Madrid, the unparalleled example of the Spanish royal
house with its affable king? They would be able to recognize and understand our plan in a second, they would take the book for the Book. The volume in quarto that all the kings of Europe would receive at Yuletide, sent from Russia, and which they would open by placing a jeweled index finger (that of Harold of Norway) beneath its cover of gold, silver, and marble. And he would sit down to read it, instantly forgetting the ambassador of Grenada, the chancellor of Laos, allowing the full and reasonable meaning of the Book to enter in through his eyes, a text that requires no commentators, no false scholars heaping up commentaries at its mouth like gangs of miners. Its readers able to interpret any passage without strain, no need for any gloss to aid the comprehension of those for whom the real possibility of the new royal house of Russia would be obvious, clear, and feasible.

For the difficult passages, which the Book certainly does contain, are not necessary to an understanding of the message in its entirety, and furthermore I'm here to explain them to you, Petya. For example, at one point in volume 3 the Writer says
Princess Demidoff
. And this is a mistake (though a minor one, certainly), just the type of mistake we must avoid: this name has never existed, there has never been a Russian house that ended with that double
f
, a thing that would take aback any even slightly knowledgeable adult, a professor of Russian who, putting on his thick plastic glasses (nails stained with nicotine), about to leave for his class at the Mendeleev Institute (that family name, yes, in Moscow), would give a start of indignation: no such family exists; never have there been, in the nineteenth century nor at any other point, any Demidoffs, etcetera. The base and pretext for an exhaustive and ill-timed survey of the history of heraldry.

No genetic analysis either to decant with great finesse between a Trubetskoi and a Romanov, or between a Kuropatov (Vasily's own family name) and a Romanov. This many
X
s on that back (tattooed
there by fire) and this many here: the numbers don't coincide! We would steer around those reefs into a world without the sharp-edged crags of physical resemblance, an old lady, a Romanov, who would howl, poking her bejeweled finger into his chest: It isn't him! We would condense seas, we would conjure up vessels, we would imagine reaching land without our minds projecting the crag of DNA onto the physical world for one second.

Only the Writer's enameled prose, his Versace prose. Functioning in all brains, entering into all ears, bearing to all central nervous systems the order required for the reorganization of their internal structure: to believe us. A prose adorned with veers and curlicues, an art nouveau prose, organic, vegetal, gleaming.

But here's another apparent triumph and another apparent truth of the Commentator, Petya: the conduct of the travelers in the train that took me to Madrid. The commentaries a young woman was delivering while continually looking out the window. The words she repeated again and again, the way she pursed her lips, rolled her eyes and said: “Can you imagine? She said to me. And I said to her.” Indefatigably. An argument from the day before that was able to nourish a commentary many kilometers long, the changing landscape, the first houses at the outskirts of Madrid, a hillside covered with hideous multifamily housing units and her words, her commentary, still flowing from between her pursed lips, a series of gestures representing the entire incident. How that woman had come over to her cubicle and had come out with it the moment she arrived: such and such a thing. And she, could her friend imagine, not knowing how to react, taken by surprise, the steaming cup of coffee at her lips.

But she'd thought about it and an instant later was able to come up with a response. She'd put down the cup without taking a sip (moving the little telephone away from her lips, from which I inferred the matter of the coffee cup) and shot back: “But who do you think you are?”

Everything revolved around that, all misunderstandings: around who other people thought, erroneously, that they were. And it was necessary, from time to time, to correct them, put them in their place. To ask, “But who do you think, who have you believed that you are?” And the other party never reacting appropriately, always proceeding
from the false position of the person she believed she was and not from the real and insignificant one of a person who was in fact a nullity.

A nobody!

And once the subject had been addressed, the incident acted out in a pantomime that was invisible to her interlocutor but transmitted to her through changes in the voice, pauses, the points of inflection of the altercation, once the whole matter had been explained and delineated, then and only then did the commentary per se begin. In the first place, opening with: who in reality this person was. An analysis that she could base on many factors, for even prior to this incident she had noticed: the horrible apartment the other woman shared with her mother, the hideous clothing she bought, the hairdresser she should have gone to but never did, for which reason she tied her hair back with a two-cent bit of elastic. All of this gone over in her presence yesterday in the office, details she now wanted to comment upon over the telephone so her interlocutor would understand, would finally manage to grasp the message, just as her enemy had finally grasped it the day before.

The train stopped. The cylinders in the doors released air. The woman in the red shoes stood up, the telephone still at her ear, her lips shaped into a pout from which words continued to fall into the receiver as from a cornucopia. She stepped uncertainly down to the platform and then walked along it with her head very still, listening now to the words of Ana or Inés, commentaries on her previous commentary or on a similar situation with the same person or on a similar incident with an equally unbearable person, perhaps she, too, stepping out of a train or, having waited throughout the whole conversation with one hand free, now parking her small car at the other end of the city.

It's no longer necessary to wait to see each other once a week in order to comment upon the offenses that are inflicted upon us every day. They can now be commented upon on the go, only minutes after
the coffee grew definitively cold and you had to get out of your seat—all because of that idiot!—and go warm it up in the microwave, taking advantage of that time to begin elaborating the principal points of your commentary as you watch the little cup spinning: but who does she take herself for? Who does she think she is?

I left the invitations in accordance with the procedure described by the Writer:
To myself I seem, when I have dealings with other people, to be, despite everything, the worst of them all, and all seem to take me for a fool, so much so that I tell myself: “Well then, I will in truth play the clown; your opinion doesn't matter because all of you, from first to last, are more vile than I am!”
Words that support this gloss: myself dressed as a lackey, with the diminished volume of such an individual, the sunken chest, the elbows, small hands folded in front of me, obsequious. Moving forward with little skips of my dancing shoes, a smile of placid stultification. All that in a quick message to their retinas and nervous systems. Entirely false and contrary to my true self (and feelings? And feelings. You know). Maneuvering among the currents of distrust I saw emerging from half-open doors, the spying maid or butler watching me advance from the front gate to the house. Applying my whole weight to it, pressing the trap down against the floor, without neglecting it for a second, fearing that it might suddenly spring free, give a leap and catch my throat in its toothed jaws. In Spanish, but as if it were a foreign language, masticated, slow and torturous. Romanov? No, not Romanov. (Like a second-rate artist who's always being confused with his competitors: Yes, you are Fili! No, I am not Fili, though I know and admire his work. What more do you want? Uri Geller, at your service. Though of course not Uri Geller either.)

Leaving those houses with the air of a beaten dog, a lackey (of Russian imperialism now), muttering poxes against them, who did they think they were? Doddering representatives of the doddering houses of Europe, little old men who went out to take the sun like those decrepit ancients in the Writer whose withered faces peer out over a courtyard, studying it with utmost care, its uneven flagstones, fearing it as they would a stormy sea where they might easily and, to my enormous rejoicing, break a leg, hearing their weak bones crunch, watching them fall to the ground from the height of their absurd belief that they might some day be called back: to rule! A thing that never in all of history! Ridding myself of this thought at top speed, unwilling or pained at having to concede that Batyk was correct. Who in his right mind, Batyk had laughed at us, at your mother and at me: what country would agree to acclaim as king someone invested with divine power? What country? In what possible way could you speak of sacred royalty, of the Davidic lineage of the kings of France or the lineage—what?—of the czars of Russia? How to retreat from the current state of triumphant and exemplary democracy to a state of abject (that's what he said: abject) subjugation to a king, to the caprices of a king? To betray, to turn away from the hard-won equality of the people (or, if you like, of the Russian people) with such an elevation, and establish, outside the law, beyond the reach of the law, a king?

How absurd an ambition! False kings, oh yes, gentlemen, a King of Pop or a Queen of Love Songs with the same credentials, pure falsity, knowing it to be pure falsity. And I the accomplice and spokesman of this absurd claim. Just a young schoolteacher, in fact, one who would never forget his humble origins, an immigrant myself, who would never treat a foreigner as those heartless kings had, Leka of Albania, all of them as if hiding out there in Madrid, their black hearts drawn there by the resplendent example of the king of Spain.

The servants and grooms who burst out laughing when I announced myself. The sixth? How many czars of Russia does that make this week, Ramón? And they didn't stop laughing as they rolled me down the stairs, delivering (this is true, Petya, absolutely true, it happened in Madrid) many blows to my back. These lackeys, unleashed and encouraged by their masters upstairs, dabbing at their lips with napkins of batiste linen and turning back to the
Financial Times
, not to
Hidalgia
, the (Spanish) magazine of nobility and weaponry, not to the
Gotha
. Coldly calculating the moment when a crisis in their countries would bring their people's patience to an end, after which they would go back, acclaimed as the legitimate heirs to the throne! Carried aloft on a wave of popular fervor! To restore the monarchy. Though we were not seeking, I thought at the time, my back aching terribly, we weren't trying to restore anyone. Ours was a better plan, more modern, less vulgar: a dynastic election.

I didn't manage to explain it because I didn't get past a single vestibule. I was not allowed to place our plan on the table, for which purpose I would have requested, with the greatest respect and consideration, that His Excellency move aside the plate bearing the Hohenzollern coat of arms (the china saved from the rockets of the T-34s in '45, in Bucharest). And at other houses I only managed to leave invitations—without a seal! I realize now, without a coat of arms!—in the mailboxes.

A despot of that kind, deformed by centuries of rule and consanguineous marriage, centuries of despotic power, how to get him off your back, Batyk had asked me jeeringly, how, without elections?

Easy, I could tell him now, without having dared to answer him then, neither I nor your mother, but now, full of hate: easy. I myself guiding the plotters through the dark passageways of the palace to Michael of Romania's quarters, smoking torch in my left hand, katana in my right, to bring an end to his absurd claim in one fell swoop.

Imagining and understanding Plato's wrath in Syracuse as he watched the coast of Sicily recede, his eyes burning with tears, all hope of a Philosopher King gone. Well, not that idiotic Dionysius; not in Syracuse. But a philosopher or scientist king somewhere else: why not? A physicist such as Louis-Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie, a blood prince with deep knowledge of quantum mechanics, discoverer of the undulating nature of matter: why not call upon him to reign?

Still attempting a solution. Imagining there might be one toward which to direct my steps. Until chance put it in my path, without deep thought or meditation. A solution that at first I believed to be outside the logic of the Book, but then I came to understand that no, steered by it as if along iron rails. Because I saw, Petya, when I left the Marbella station and headed out aimlessly along the Paseo Marítimo, a sign high atop a hotel toward which, when I had read it, without knowing what was guiding my steps, I began making my way with entire and perfect confidence.

Knowing that only thus: the only solution. That the Russians, in Russia, would have noticed the same hotel I'd just noticed, placed their index finger on the glossy photo of the hotel, at the level of the sign several feet high (but diminutive in the photo), certain it was the best, the most luxurious. They from bad taste: it was the Grand Hotel. Me from the taste instilled by the Writer: the Grand Hotel (of Balbec).
Easy to convince those tourists to attend a party very close by, along the beach, after the day's heat had diminished.