Rex (20 page)

And I entered the lobby certain I would find them there, my future guests. But this was what I found, Petya.

I found a man—it's unlikely that he was a gentleman—standing in front of the reception desk who attracted my attention powerfully the minute I walked in. His blond hair and awkward bearing, the ponderousness of a nouveau riche who must constantly give to understand—with his manner of stopping to scan an empty spot between the armchairs in the lobby or speciously consult his watch with an expression of irritation or complacency, depending on whether he was on time or running late—his new status, the importance he's gained in his own eyes.

The way he speciously straightened the lapels of his raspberry-colored blazer, bringing his chin down close to his chest, his neck tormented by a wide tie that was out of place and out of climate.

And I felt attracted by that unknown face, unknown though familiar—in its general aspect? Touched by a vulgar and predictable taste, smiling through the fluorescent light. I crossed the lobby for a chat, friendly. They always find it odd, let me tell you, to be addressed by me. They are my friends but don't know it; they deny me and my friendship. Together, I would say to them, in the trenches of socialism! How's that? In the trenches! The trenches of socialism! But now, almost next to him, I changed my mind, his face clearly illuminated by the massive gold watch that slipped forward on his wrist as he raised the tiny telephone, little blue screen to pink earlobe. The gleam of his too new shoes, unmarked by wear (small and overly elaborate coffins are what such shoes always remind me of when I see them,
unworn, in stores). I walked past him and limited myself to calling: Sasha!—a name invented on the spot, any name. He turned in surprise, reached within that beam of light by my call. And without taking the phone from his ear he studied me from head to toe and spat back: “
Nu, i kak banani v etom godu v tvoem Gondurase?” Well, how are the bananas this year in your Honduras?
(Or wherever it is you're from, he meant.)

The cutting phrase, the tone. To the point that I regretted having addressed him. He himself in a rush to abandon the Asiatic depths, little taste for fraternizing with a former ally, all that. Vast zones of his past totally clear to me: breakfasts of cheap sausage not three years ago, hard-boiled eggs in the train's café car for the two-day trip, a mother and a father back in Russia.

I pretended to have mistaken him for someone else. I said: “I've mistaken you for someone else.” And he let it go, knowing I was lying, conscious that my retreat was due to his harsh response, the bulldog hostility he had turned on me.

You don't want to? Then I don't either, I explained to him, my eyes fixed on the elevator.

“Kirpich?”

I had calculated: a
garden party
, the effect of fair-haired aides-de-camp fluttering across the grass distributing pamphlets which candidly recounted our plan, your mother's and my plan, the speed and simplicity with which leaflets can recount and explain the world: the Russian tradition of and love for monarchy, the fervor of a people who despite the errors of an entire century (or of almost a century, almost a century is better, Nelly), that despite the many errors (and horrors! And horrors) had not—ever!—stopped loving and venerating their czars, the imperial family. Who acknowledged the monarchy as the clearest and most natural and most perfect for a country, indisputably identical to the authority of a father.

An inaugural ball, the snobbery such a thing would awaken, that we could churn up around an inaugural ball. The reporters we'd have from many TV channels—guests passing by in the background smiling idiotically at the cameras, so much nonsense to talk. The dresses to describe, the celebrities who'd pose for a photograph with the new king and queen or czars of Russia, the men in tuxedos, the women in long gowns, the hairstyles of the Duchess of York and Athina Onassis, the impossible hats on certain ladies, strange as antigravity engines. The enthusiasm the celebration would generate across the world, the early-morning dash to the kiosk for the front pages, something with which to fill up and structure an otherwise empty Sunday. With this: caravans of Mercedeses (or of Rollses, I'd have to exchange the Mercedes for a Rolls), a policeman's gloves holding a bouquet of roses, in
black and white on the
Tribune
and in color on the
Sun
, the miraculous absence of security measures because so beloved a king, because the Russian people, so many years without a king. How enchanting it would be, the enthusiasm it would give rise to, how marvelous it would be to restore the imperial house of Russia.

Now if a true Russian noble had appeared before them he would have struck them as false. Like a young, virginal, and untalented actress who can't manage to be convincing in the role of a young, virginal girl. We wouldn't invite the Grand Duchess Maria. The Russian people wouldn't understand her: a good lady, but a little bit, perhaps just a tiny bit fat, the lumpy figure of the lady in number eleven who goes downstairs to get her milk every morning. Vanquished by Nelly's breathtaking beauty, very much in the Russian tradition, Petya, your mother, the beauty pageants that Ivan Kalita (or the Terrible) organized in 1547 and in 1561. A great deal of intelligence in that idea of Kalita's, an absolute sure thing, a solidly historical detail: girls, vestals from across Russia, a beauty contest in all rigor, parading in bathing suits, wreathed in smiles, standing up to Kalita's interviewers (or Kalita himself) with political platitudes, embracing the winner with false affection (nails long as spears ready to bury themselves in her back), the tears of happiness of the newly chosen czarina. Unerringly the most beautiful and intelligent woman—what doubt could there be?—in the whole country. A strictly historical antecedent, the intelligence and subtlety of the northern Slavs: only the most beautiful queens, only the wisest kings.

Which would all be received with understanding because of the total madness of the Russian people. The TV program I watched one night, my mouth gaping, not believing what my eyes were seeing: an imbecile, an idiot, an impossible man, who was passing himself off as the grandson of the last Romanov! And all Russia was supposed to believe
this on the basis of a single test, a laughable demonstration in a TV studio. Do you know what such and such a word means in Greek? Such and such a word in German? Oh! Excellent! And I have written here (the host consulting his notes) that you know … how to tune a piano! Perfectly! Am I right or have my assistants misinformed me? Yes? … Excellent! A piano! To the studio! Though without your tools … It's a long process … Some other time. Better yet, why don't you say something to us? Something in Slavonic, old or ecclesiastical Russian.

The fact that the person who claimed to be a Romanov spoke many languages fluently had seemed to his children, crowded together at his feet like the children of a miller (in the Writer), to be the final and convincing proof that their father was the son of the last emperor, miraculously saved. Who had survived and triumphed over his hemophilia and the terrible eyes of Yurovksi, the gaze of deepest hatred cast on him in that cellar, where he knew enough to lie still, Alexei, while he saw the bullets that were nearing him turned away by the force of the years that remained to him to live. His sisters no, Anastasia even less so, and not his parents, Nicholas and Alexandra, either. The bullets that flew past him and buried themselves in the sodden wallpaper at his back like the rays of a distant star which, through the effect of the gravitational lens, Petya, bypass the sun and end up shooting into your eyes, the day of an eclipse, in 1919. The same year when Alexei recovered consciousness in the middle of a forest, got up, walked, asked for help at a peasant isba, the memory of his former life as heir to the throne flowering colorfully in his mind, placing itself between his eyes and the sole of a shoe that had to be nailed down (such was his adopted father's profession).

Wasn't it enough to make you die laughing? A madness like the one Larissa had laughed and jeered at, and rightly so? We had to elude, to leap over it: not a restoration or an inauguration. Neither would I tell
them that the invitation was from the czar and czarina of Russia (too much, no?). Better to say a party thrown by some nouveaux riches … How rich? “Very rich, believe me, I wouldn't lie about a thing like that.” Looking them straight in the eye: “Very rich, you know?”

“Kirpich?” Of course not. Why would it be Kirpich? Just some Russian or another, an old pal (said with irony).

The sinister man I had to pass on my way into the elevator and whom I forgot instantly, intent on seeking out my guests across the hotel, the Russians who in all certainty were now populating it, after having discovered this one example who was, in any case, impossible to invite to the party. At least not dressed like that, in the blazer with the gilded buttons. Without having resolved what I would do, almost happy about the failure of my trip to Madrid, the impossibility of the party, free now of the obligation to sell the stones in order to come up with money for musicians, flowers, and caviar.

Without any result whatsoever, not one tourist in the hallways, not on nine and not on twelve, upon quick inspection (holding open the elevator doors), traveling back down. But when I'd returned to the lobby and the elevator doors opened again, without yet having taken my hands from the nickel-plated rail or made a clear sign of intent to get out, I saw a radiant face come in, a face that filled up the space in front of me. A woman with red hair and Asiatic cheekbones, the transparent skin of her throat. Filling the space of the elevator from wall to wall. I blinked and weighed more for a second or two, felt that I was sinking because the elevator was rising. The new passenger took a step toward the glass, seemed to go into ecstasy at the sight of the glass wall, growing as well, her torso and her legs, more visible and coming into
focus. The freckles on her face, the incredible mauve of her eyes glowing more intensely.

“My God,” I couldn't restrain myself and exclaimed in all sincerity, wanting to warn her, “you can't go out in the sun with that skin.” And, eyes squinting, I pointed it out to her, the sun, round and flaming on the other side of the tinted glass.

This woman, the tourist, dressed with impeccable taste: the blue silk blouse forcibly containing her breasts, the string of chalcedony across the fresh skin of the clavicle, the same red color illuminating her shoes, with absolute (Western) elegance. So much so that I pointed once more to the sun and to the freckles on her face because for a moment I thought that dressed like that, with such good taste: not a Russian. Perhaps only from the north, from a place without summers, going south every year to toast in the sun.

“Well,” she answered, “in just the same way, in a hotel near here, a nice, friendly young man like you, decently dressed …”

(I was a bit more than decently dressed, I wanted to tell her, the laughter dancing in my eyes until I heard her: the horrible confusion.)

“They talked, agreed to see each other and … just like that! He had stolen her purse.”

Such a bad beginning, Petya! Me as a hotel elevator thief. I'm almost ready to let her go, I let her go, so disconcerted was I: the doors of the elevator opened and her face and legs, her tattooed ankle, disappeared. Impossible to overcome such ill will, so much suspicion. Having descended to the lowest point of my mission, at zero. On such a bad footing. A Lancôme consultation! My ridiculous Lancôme consultation!

The breath of perfume she left behind: violets. The sun warming my arms, my feet slightly sinking into the carpet, a horrible hotel carpet.

But something curious here, some kind of fate: I'd forgotten to press the button, and no one had summoned the elevator from the lower floors (there's no elevator man in hotels nowadays: you do it yourself). The elevator cabin stopped there, the air-conditioning blowing on my neck. The elevator bell rang, I heard it ring from a place as far away as the sun and felt the doors slide open at my back. The distant hum of the cocktail hour reached me once more, snatches of music, the bartender's unbearable banter, some vulgarity in reference to the unknown lady, the Russian: “Did you get a load of that chick?” Or “Pretty hot, isn't she?” something like that. Not that vulgar myself, Petya, I would never have said or shouted that as the man carrying a tray through the lounge chairs did.

Very impressive she must be indeed, I said to myself then (I knew that, I'd noticed it immediately), for this waiter with so many women, so many Swedish girls (though, why Swedish? Not particularly pretty), so many Italians … And I felt a slight, oh so light, almost imperceptible oscillation or feeling that the floor was giving way and the red of her feet, the kid glove, the tattooed ankle entered my field of vision once more. She put her hand on my back and gave me a friendly pat: “Don't be upset,” she said. “Not every girl is as smart as I am. You'll be able to fleece some of them. Anyway, I like your shirt. Do all the swindlers in Marbella dress as well as you do?”

(Everything that is written has an author, and every author, an intention.)

I didn't turn around right away, Petya. I don't like being treated like that. I do like being treated like that. Certain women: the lapis lazuli trinket on her wrist. What to say to her? I have seen it—you know?—your plastic purse, made of that hard transparent vinyl with a flowery print: do you think I imagine money in there? Do you think I don't know there's only sunblock, face powder, lipstick? And anyway, how much money, ever, in the purse of a Russian woman? I didn't say that but thought it, and then I had to say to myself: look how she's dressed, stupid! More money on that woman, more money has passed through her fingers than you've seen in your life (well, there were the stones, that's true, the diamonds in my pocket—but they were fakes!). I studied her mauve eyes once more. Security, confidence, confidence in having seen me from behind: an inoffensive lad, crestfallen, there in the elevator.