Rex (2 page)

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.

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.

Surer now that I would know how to teach the boy. A flexible pedagogy, not forcing him into any subject, any particular branch of knowledge. It was, for that matter, what I'd have wanted for myself: not to have wasted months making my way through mathematics and algebra. To adopt the Writer as the sole basis, transmute the knowledge the Book contained into wisdom. A boy who was happy when I met him because he didn't have to go to school—and what boy wouldn't be, Petya?

A sense of having arrived finally settling into me, the impressive view beyond the garden wall, the highway parallel to the bay that I'd driven along that first day, gazing up, trying to guess which of the houses it was. Without, of course, ever imagining anything like this: the magnificent layout of the rooms, the bedspread stretched taut to a degree I would be incapable of achieving, ever.

The excellent idea of these houses with swimming pools, the days I would spend swimming, reading until all the light had gone out of the sky and the ones inside the house were coming on. The perfume that wafted up from the rough fabric when I leaned down to drop my towel in a movement that brought my eyes close to the deck chair. So strong a scent that I could visualize her, the lady of the house, walking along the edge of the pool in the same dress she wore that night, pale cream with a green patterning, the fabric stretching across her legs as she walked toward where I lay. Precisely the abandoned wife I would want for a house like that, undoing her hair before lying back onto the deck chair and impregnating it with her perfume.

Enveloped from that first day in the sound of the sea and wondering from the beginning how the waves could be audible, a thing quite impossible at the distance we were. Until I discovered a few silver columns in the living room that didn't look like, couldn't possibly be, but, on closer inspection, proved to be speakers, a very slender, very expensive type of speaker. Impossible to say which speaker it came
from, of course. I couldn't tell if it was the one under the gem-encrusted lamp or another: the whisper of surf barraging the coast.

A thing I'd not heard of before, a new style for that type of house, rich people's house. But why the stereo? Why not simply, and better, the real sound of the air, the trill of the birds? To what end the plasma screen's aquarium of tropical fish I'd watch rise through their water, shifting from side to side like real fish, with the slight movements and trailing bubbles of real fish?

The cool breeze that greeted me the next day when I opened a door by accident, taking it for the door of my room, and air came wafting across enameled mosaic, afternoon light softly illuminating the tessellated sea of a floor. A design I couldn't take in without moving several steps back into the hallway to study from there the whole effect, the tub at floor level, the hard, clumsy head of a marine animal affixed there. Revolving, twisting its tentacles as I circled the tub in amazement. So much money! A simple bathroom transformed into a sanctuary! At the end of each looped tentacle: a three-paneled mirror, a rosewood chest of drawers, an enameled scale—like some sea monster in an engraving holding a sailboat, a bit of broken mast, a sailor in the air.

Ignoring all the other details, the many-eyed sponge, the nebulizers with their perfumes: my eyes on the faucets, gleaming at floor level and over the sink, plump as birds with puffed-out plumage. The delicate, unmistakable sheen, the doubloon glint. As I drew closer, the radiance intensified along with my certainty that yes, gold—but it cannot be! (I drew even closer.) Gold! Gold faucets in the bathrooms! How could it be? All the astonishment of finding chamber pots and spittoons wrought of finest gold on an adventure in some mythic kingdom. Nothing to draw attention to the fact, though, no sign attached nearby to explain the faucets or point arrows at them, the
labels carefully peeled away that first day, the ones that said eighteen-karat gold. Without dwelling on it for a second, or maybe so, in the early weeks, tilting the head and half closing the eyes to the bright gleam, happy at the touch of the precious metal's smooth patina, but then dipping one toe into the tub to check the water temperature, immersed in the flow of days, without a thought for the faucets. Cool water splashing against green porcelain. And now there I was, standing at the edge of that tub as if at the mouth of a well, staring, hypnotized, at the bubbles.

Because the Writer speaks, finally, of a young man (right away, when he says:
many years younger
), almost a child, a late-blooming adolescent: me. Who goes on to fall madly in love, yes, I concede that, stupidly in love, which makes it all forgivable, even the very reprehensible abandonment—how I condemn myself for it!—of the Book. Younger that afternoon than I am now, Petya. I'd gone down every hallway of that mansion, finding bolted doors, daggers in the air, like a knight dragging his feet laboriously along in his blued armor, the tree in the window blue as well, the birds on its branches turquoise blue. Knowing I would never leave that place, at least not through the same door I'd come in by, knowing that, with every step I took, the configuration of the castle's corridors was shifting behind me.

In love, Petya, and prepared to distort the spirit of the Book, to wrest from its pages all that my heart and the heart of the woman I loved were seeking. Anything: a man hoisted upon a coat of arms, the most outlandish plan anyone could imagine, and the greatest danger, as well. My face turned toward those pages without knowing, the day I first arrived at your house, that it would all turn out this way: the text's meanings passing over my face, their colors iridescing.

Happy, Petya, when the man I might have taken for a Filipino butler, had I been a character in some California noir thriller, opened the door and I discovered, before taking a single step, the blue gem of the swimming pool sparkling in the distance. How to understand it? All that money? How was it come by?

Dishonestly. Certainly not earned, as your mother tried to make me believe, from the sale of a unique invention patented by your father. Because that was the first thing she told me, but then, as if she were someone whose
level were constantly changing
, she spoke of a sale of military surplus, mutually exclusive and contradictory versions of the (illicit) origin of that money. Multiple interpretations, Petya, infinite meanings. Pausing before one explanation, exploring it, then moving on to another. Without suspecting that I would spend hours in the middle of your room trying to gather up the various meanings the Writer placed in the Book and find a way to leave that place and the tangled mess that I myself, of my own free will …

Or as it appears, magisterially, in the complete passage:
For man is a being without fixed age, a being who has the faculty
(the faculty, Petya!)
of becoming in a few seconds
(in just a few seconds!)
many years younger, and who, surrounded by the walls of the time in which he has lived, floats there as if in a pool
(isn't that beautiful? as if in a pool!)
whose water level is constantly changing, placing him within reach now of one period, now of another
.

Isn't it incredible that he can say so much? Isn't it astonishingly precise? Because I see the day of my arrival, Petya: how the slow emerald wave swells up and I swim along its crest, the whole story laid out inside it. Not buried in its depths, but encrusted along its surface so that I can scrutinize different portions of it at will. The morning I spent several hours in the garden, wondering at the blue of the swimming pool. And how I stopped for a long moment in front of the doorbell: the little camera that bore my face to the eyes of Batyk, the “Filipino butler,” the Book deep in my backpack, its radiance emanating from there, the center around which my work as a schoolmaster would be organized. A profession in which I had no prior experience, Petya; well aware that I'd be lying if I took that first step toward the garden's lawn, the blue of the swimming pool, and that I'd save myself from lying if I turned around and retraced my steps. But going in nevertheless, becoming someone who deceived your mother that same night, who spoke to her in lies, like the Commentator. To such a degree that in my story I emerged from the sea in the semblance of a
Greek doctor cast up by a storm between Kasos and Knossos, regaining the coast by swimming all night, water dripping all over the living room floor. Muscular as a cyclops, phosphorescent jellyfish clinging to my shoulders.

An image that struck her with all the force of a holographic projection: a man mutely embodied in the air before her, shaky as an old movie. And I had a book, a single copy of a book that I managed to save from the shipwreck, carefully wrapped in plastic. A horrible night, all the water in the world under my feet, my back, my belly. Precariously suspended over the abyss of the sea, as if on a wobbling stack of chairs. How did I avoid the reefs? How did I keep from smashing my head against a rock? I overlooked her questions, returning insistently to the image of the strong, cyclopean body emerging laboriously from the depths, bearing the Book. Because I'd managed to save it, a volume in octavo that I studied, standing there on the sand, the plastic that enveloped it, droplets disappearing in the morning sunlight as if by magic.