Rex (23 page)

I hadn't wasted a second on sentimental calculations of the number of years she had on me, the number that would go by before I was the same age she was now. As in those novels where a young man falls in love with an older women or even, in the Writer himself, with the countess of Stermaria. There would be more women in Moscow and
in seaport cities like Bordeaux and Lisbon, their breasts which I would capture in passing in my capacity as royal secretary, the lineup of pale breasts like faces along a hallway. Down which I would advance, strongly perfumed, on the way to my office. To rubber-stamp signatures with my right hand without my palm ever losing the conical shape of those breasts and without ever being tormented, even for a second, by the fear of death. Launching into a dance with some of them, their bejeweled arms and bellies, when, in midafternoon, I tuned in to the carefree burble of a happy day, the amber light of the hour, reclining my head on the bosom of the youngest one, having her read to me, Petya, fragments of the Book.

Vats of chilled wine in that garden, rose petals in the illuminated water.

I hadn't stopped looking at her for a single second, a single day. There had been many nights when I came back from the discotheque and wondered whether to go up and find her, whether her prelude to a kiss on the clifftop might end in something more. Sometimes I paused in the middle of a class, raised my eyes from the page and walked over to the window to see if she was there below, swimming in the pool. Circling around her, moving toward her with the inevitability of a sphere rolling, falling, and sliding along an inclined plane.
But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun
, etcetera, precisely as in Marlowe. Standing, Petya, beneath the illuminated window of your parents' bathroom, the lawn dappled with colored lights. Nelly, at that moment, smoothly slipping into the foaming water in the round tub, checking first with her foot to see whether it was too cold or hot, the soft curve of her foot like a swan's feathered neck. (The secret desire to see her naked, to spy on her while she preened in front of the three-paneled mirror.) And more! First me, Petya (
on some occasions it incites lasciviousness
), then
her, the two of us sliding down together along the smooth porcelain. Or, if she was startled to see me in her room, I would tell her it was only to show her the bubble machine, that pretext. In the dark bedroom I pushed open the bathroom door, the panel smoothly pivoted, slowly glided back, opening, and a vision was revealed to me in sharpest clarity and left me speechless: the wings and breast and neck of a bird.

An enormous bird.

Its powerful feet clutching the edge of the porcelain in an iron grip, its thighs covered with feathers like the thighs of a Lagerfeld model. The luxuriant resplendence of a garment made from the feathers of a single gigantic bird that had first been hunted and caught, and then carefully sewn, its fabrication supervised by the strong, knotty hand of Lagerfeld himself so that it would adhere perfectly to the model's torso and extend to midleg, leaving the muscular calves visible. The way she moved, like a tigress (though in this case, a bird). Falling, letting herself fall onto one hip, then the other. Settling on one hip as if to stay there a long while, then switching to the other. Without advancing in any direction: a bird in your parents' bathroom, poised on the edge of the circular tub known by its Japanese name: Jacuzzi. Arms demurely at the sides, leaning forward, balancing, with all the strength of its expression aimed toward its breast. The chin—of its face! a woman's face!—against the feathered breast.

Thrown off by surprise, Petya, without knowing where on earth that enormous, soft monster … Was it the holographic image of an immense bird that some Professor Kuropatov or, better yet, Professor Caligari had created in his laboratory, going farther than anyone else in the world here, too, in this new field: household avatars? A phantom, a creation of air? But then how could it be so vivid and so real? Repressing the impulse to go in and embrace it, as when we drew closer to the television the better to see the lovely newscaster's face and bump against the glass, in love …

The bird opened its mouth, balancing for a second on the edge, and let well up through its breast, with no effort by the neck muscles, a first note, a prolonged sigh that flowed out long and uncontainably as it tried to open the hands that had remained trapped, slender and fragile, in the bones of its wings.

That song reached into my soul, lifting me above the house and above the entire coastline and bringing me back in one second. The memory of that vastness, the hollow or void of a feeling expanding my chest, its song crossing through me like the blade of an airy knife that twisted in my heart and lodged in all the chambers of my soul. And without knowing what I was doing, without understanding that the movement might give me away, I pushed the door farther to see her better. My hand swinging out over the tessellated floor, I checked the windows, swept the ground with my eyes to try and glimpse the projector or generator of that image, the woman, the bird (I didn't find it). My foot went to follow the hand and step out onto the floor's mosaic when a thought made me stop, this passage, flashing across my mind:
“Sperrit? Well, maybe,” he said. “But there's one thing not clear to me. There was an echo. Now, no man ever seen a sperrit with a shadow; well, then, what's he doing with an echo to him, I should like to know? That ain't in natur', surely?”

It was Nelly! And I realized this, as well, and right away, from the necklace around the bird's neck which I'd seen her wear so often when she swam in the pool, for she never took it off to swim. Radiating now from her neck as she sang and slowly turned her head, rays of light emanating from the stones dappling the walls, the windowpanes, the floor, with multicolored points. The echo of her song having prevented me, Petya, from making a false step, giving away my presence, having the queen raise her eyes and approach me speedily with the jerky movement of a running bird, setting down its feet or claws along an
invisible line, to take out my eyes, harshly, with her beak, one and two (pecks), blinding the eyes that had spied on her, although she was not naked: only transformed, terribly transformed into a bird.

But what was she afraid of? What was she afraid of, that I couldn't be allowed to see? Toward what abyss were we sliding without my being able to see it, this song speaking to me of the danger that menaced us, her gaze fastened on her face in the water, the reflection broken up by her tears. Unable to rest in midflight, unable to glide calmly along with arms opened out in a cross through the indigo of the sky and the reds of the horizon, for this once in our lives, Petya. Because even in our flight … Furies, such as Batyk.

The gong in the entryway boomed: someone, an important guest, had arrived. A
daaaaa
, thick and violet-colored, came through the window, flowed into the bathroom. The bird raised its eyes to look at it and discovered me standing next to the door. It was about to tell me something, about to open its mouth, but first Batyk, down below in the drawing room, opened his beak and squawked: His Most Serene Highness Simeon of Bulgaria!

I ran downstairs. The party was waiting. There wasn't a second to lose.

“My mama?”

“Your mama.”

Eleventh Commentary

… a thoroughly good man, no more dreaming of the horrors in which he was entangled than the eye at noonday in midsummer is conscious of the stars that lie far behind the daylight
. This from the Writer.

Meaning that the young tutor, his frank face turned toward them, allowing the light that bathed their luminous figures to enter his eyes, was incapable of understanding where the currents of the plot were flowing, the afternoon's cascading red mane streaming toward the horrible denouement. The boy getting out of the pool, the Buryat invariably standing next to it (I'd never seen him swim and how could I not mistrust a man like that, a man who mistrusted water?): all of it evanescing, bodies made of smoke that vanish if someone opens a window or porthole; we see them lengthening, limbs pulled out in whatever direction the breeze or howling gale is blowing, breaking apart at a neck that stretches too thin, all of them disappearing into the same vortex, heads detached from torsos. The simple structures that, on a nuclear testing ground, represent a family, a house and its yard, all eradicated by the expanding shock wave, sucked up by the blast behind them.

And the tutor, in this scene of the Book, is unable to discern anything, makes no conjecture. Which the Writer alludes to in this surprising image: of a man no more capable of perceiving
than the eye at noonday in midsummer is conscious of the stars that lie far beyond the daylight
.

Can you imagine or conceive of, in all the literature of the universe, a better, greater image of unconsciousness, involuntary blindness?

No. And it will serve to illustrate—you understand?—any similar state of mind or equivalent confusion in any other man or tutor. Forever.

I didn't need days to understand it, to discover the monstrosity of her deception, the perfidy of her fingers caressing my neck, tenderly interlaced with my hair. Horror! I had been prepared to give up everything, to jeopardize my trip to Amerika, to endanger my life for a woman who had thought of nothing from the very start but deceiving me, lying to me. A woman most unfortunately in love with her husband (and not her son's tutor). Who every time she'd come to see me on the pretext of some interest in the (princely) education of her son—you, Petya—had stuck, through the half-open door, a head full of the blackest schemes to deceive me and make me a vendor of gemstones, the remainder of her husband's vast production of colored stones. Having failed and miserably botched all sales missions themselves, finding themselves stranded on that plain in Spain, amid the desert dunes, and without seeing in any direction, neither from ahead nor from behind (turning back to scan the arid landscape), a knight, clad in gold and silver, glittering in the sun, coming to their rescue. In a terrible impasse, and mistrusting and hating Batyk, without my suspecting it and without their ever making it clear to me, Batyk, whose idea it had been, as you know, to swindle the residents of Saint Petersburg, and whose even worse idea it had been to hide out in Spain, and, worse still, in the last place in Spain they should have chosen, Marbella, a city rife with felons and Russian mafiosi.

But not them: they're merely scientists and amateur swindlers.

And one afternoon (I already told you about that afternoon, described it to you) they'd heard the knock at the door, the timid scratch of this small
Holgersson
whom they let in without taking their minds off the problem for a second. Hiring this diminutive personage to save the boy or at least momentarily distance him from the insufferably plebeian and lowbrow Spanish television, without interrupting even for a second their tortured deliberations. Until I tugged at the hem of your mother's dress and forced her, tiny as I was, to bend down, look down at the floor, and pointed out to her with my index finger a passage of the Book, its illuminated plates, the many tableaux that began moving before her astonished eyes. Here, I said to her: a way out and a solution. To all your problems. And I straightened and grew larger the longer they bent down, and I saw them stooping beneath the weight of the Book's evidence, and myself there, resplendent in the center of the room, until we reached the solution: the king, to become king. They looked at each other; she and her husband swiftly exchanged a look and conceived of the idea of swindling me, harnessing the strength of my generous heart and my candid goodness to their own, shadowy ends.

Where it says, for example,
without my being able to take a step or rather drop to the ground, return to earth, my feet a hands-breadth above the carpet, then falling slowly back down onto it, still plunged in my astonishment
. Which acknowledges, this passage, and must be interpreted—as I had to explain with patience to the person who had made her take off her necklace that morning, to Batyk—to mean that on the contrary she must never stop wearing the necklace, must come down every morning to breakfast in it. That the necklace, the sheer weight of the necklace, would tilt the floor beneath me so that I would roll easily toward her, attracted by its sparkle; that only thus would they convince me to sell the stones, that I would not cease
to orbit near her, spinning before her chest like a bird caught in the slipstream of a larger bird. Prepared to save her (prostrate at her feet), to find—at the risk of my life—the money they needed in order to flee.

But that doesn't matter.

Or yes, it does matter. Explained with absolute clarity in the sixth book. When old Karamazov says, in the most literal way, requiring no commentary whatsoever:
And I have been lying, I've been lying all my life long, every day, every hour. Verily, I am a liar, the father of lies!

And then, where it says, where I told myself: that a diamond cutter, a jeweler, must see himself as a ray of light or, even more peculiarly, as riding upon a ray of light. Must imagine himself entering the gem astride that ray of light in order better and more fully to understand the effect of the light on its interior, the walls against which the light will rebound and through which it will depart, refracted, to wound the imagination and deceive the eyes.

How could a woman like that not have known everything or have failed to deceive me: a woman like that, a siren, a bird-woman? Can you tell me, Petya? Can you, dear readers? How?

All right then, it doesn't matter: I loved her. All right then, it doesn't matter: this Book is the greatest ever written. All right then, it doesn't matter: we would get out of there, we would figure out how to make my plan work. I love her, I continue to love her, Petya. Even if there are things that cannot be explained. Obscure passages that defy the imagination and put the reader's credulity to the test. I know that; it doesn't stop me. Because it's more than likely that the original text was corrupted by Humblot, that the same envious hand that rejected the original manuscript may have interpolated phrases that do not figure in the first version and whose meaning, Your Majesty, can never be revealed (this to Simeon).