Rex (6 page)

With that facility for the third person so natural in intelligent women, which she used to downplay her obsession with the subject of nobility, speaking of herself as a more ironic, more observant person would, acting like a girl on a visit to someone else's house.

“She is, I confess, obsessed with the matter of nobility. And sometimes she'd like to fly away, escape from here. She'd love to pay you handsomely, to thank you for all that you do for her son … You don't wear rings?”

“I'd like to, you know?” I lowered my head toward her hand. Admirable, that blue gem, set high over the finger like a hard flower of stone.

I said nothing about her necklace, pretended she wasn't wearing the most fabulous necklace I'd seen in my life. Without taking my eyes off it, powerfully attracted by that necklace, fascinated and held by it, leaning toward her throat, with my feet firmly on the floor, imbibing the light her necklace radiated. Incredibly beautiful there on her breast. Obsessed with that necklace to the point that I'd searched through the fashion magazines they had lying around the house as instruction manuals for life in the West, scrutinizing the jeweled breast of every fashion model, Spanish or Greek, burnished skin glistening over the clavicle, neck tendons taut, for a gem like that one, the same size as that one. And finding not one, ever. Most of them, the best of them—it was easy to see from the design and the very bright colors—were just cut crystals.

I could think of nothing to say to her. I said:

“And yes, Nelly, it is something I have thought of. To surpass the objectives of a princely education, or rather, ignore them entirely. What sense in learning a foreign language if, once within that other world or universe, you'd only be fatally drawn in again by the magnet of the Book? Better to focus on it, for it's the same in all languages, impervious—as the Commentator perversely affirms, though of course without referring directly to the Book—to the fire of translations. Constructed on the solid foundation of a universal language, a primordial speech. All nuances, all distinctions, all subtleties within it. A Theory of Everything, Nelly, a Book for all days. I don't wish for, could never have wished for a better education for myself …”

“
Solntse
,” she interrupted me. She went over to the window and set her hands on the frame like a bird alighting there to await her husband, who was not coming, scanning the horizon from there. “Wouldn't you like to go out for a stroll?”

And she turned toward me.

Her face.

Having stood back, the maker of that face, at twenty weeks' gestation, to study the precise placement of the cheekbones' brief elevation, the almond frame of the eyes. Rotated one second of arc downward at the inner corner and one second of arc upward at the outer, like wings. I was afraid to look her full in the face: the dangerous fascination voltaic arcs exerted on me when I was a child. But I couldn't help throwing a look at the white-hot point, the acetylene flare hurtling toward me, the nucleus of a star expanding outward in a sphere. And in the center of that sphere, birds and bands of angels.

Her throat.

The stones around her throat.

“A walk? With all my heart!”

I imagined, Petya, that we were off to withdraw some money, that our little jaunt had to do, finally, with matters related to my paycheck. Progressing happily down the Paseo Marítimo. Without a monocle, it's true, to bounce along on my chest. A monocle that would speak as clearly as the Writer of the happiness that suffused me, the soft purity of the morning. The hotels along the beach, the yachts with their colorful banners, the blue and white striped awnings of the beach clubs, the money we drew in with every breath, that perfumed the air of that city by the sea.

But picture this, Petya: a gentleman with a lady by his side and, with them, a dwarf. A rather different image from the one I'd had in mind, an image that can be read or glossed with no other significance but this: the dwarf was Batyk, who'd insisted on coming with us and whom I call a dwarf in the literal sense of a physical dwarf, not a moral dwarf. And not at all, never, in the allegorical sense to which the Commentator alludes with deepest hypocrisy in order to justify his own imposture: the sense of newcomers who, however small or dwarflike they may be, can see farther because they're perched on the shoulders of the giants of the past.

The same went for Batyk, on my shoulders, though it would be more correct to say on the Writer's shoulders, feeling him walk along behind me, paying attention to what he was seeing from that height, without understanding a thing. As when, to my disconcertion, your mother stepped into a jewelry store, with me all unaware of what prompted her
to stop in front of the display window (the jeweler's name etched in a semicircle on the glass), study some of the gems there, and then go inside for a closer look … Sensing that we'd be standing there for some time, I positioned myself next to the doorway in a patch of sunlight which was exactly that yellow color the Writer devotes such beautiful words to in the Book, but which now, in the aim of bothering and confounding Batyk, I used as the pretext for an odious discourse on Ferragamo: how that color, mingled with a lovely blue, would be perfect for a pair of Ferragamos, which is what we should have been looking at, not jewelry, Nelly. (I felt Batyk leaning over my shoulder, stretching out his neck—what shoes? which shoes?—stooping lower myself to make him stumble and fall on the slope of my false interest in fashion, inexplicable in a man like me, as if a matter of such little importance as a pair of shoes could occupy my mind, turn my thoughts aside for one second from what we had gone into that store to do.)

The adorable dress of layered red muslin your mother wore that day, her hand palm down on her thigh, the better to scrutinize a pink gem in the display case. She raised her eyes, shooting me a meaningful glance beneath another client's elbow: a diamond, innumerable tiny facets that light could go into and then not find its way out again for one beat or two, until it flashed once more against my eyes, my astonished eyes. I looked up into her eyes without knowing what I was supposed to be seeing there, as if she were a botany teacher who goes on ahead and waits for you beneath a tree on an excursion through a garden. You reach her out of breath, you want to tell her something about the day, the view, but she puts her finger to your lips and asks you with her eyes: “Understand?”

Yes, Nelly: stones, diamonds, gothic diamonds, marquise diamonds, star diamonds. I don't want them, have no money for them. Or else (I suddenly stood up straight, looked back into her eyes), or else: “Hand
over the stone, motherfucker, hand over the stone before my husband gets back and makes you talk. I know you've got it. No use pretending …” And I saw in the red of that stone, its blood-filled interior, how easily Batyk could smash my head against the counter, the iron grip of his fingers around my neck, or send me crashing against the reinforced glass. How the shopkeeper would shout, and not because of the glass (bulletproof), which would never break. Giving vent, in that moment of danger, to his anger and indignation, in Korean or Tamil. Meaning: Get out of here you Russian pigs, go kill each other outside.

I'd give it back. I'd run back to the house, fly up the stairs, take it out from under the mattress. Here you go, Nelly, I never wanted it, you know that, don't you? Never the slightest intention of keeping it, always meaning to give it back. And I had thought about doing that …

Easily comprehending, at that moment, my mistake: the mistake of having wanted to steal from the mafia.

“That's not true. My mama is not in the mafia.”

“No, it is true. Just wait.”

I regretted everything in that fearful moment, entering cold regions full of fear and leaving them for warm regions full of fear. Having taken a position as the tutor of a child as wayward as you, Petya, having focused my thoughts on the wife of a mafioso and spoken of warps in space with your father. All that as I stood at the counter without daring to open my eyes and look at her, without seeing that she'd moved to the back of the store without any of this in her mind, that she hadn't even noticed the stone was missing. So many stolen diamonds—if a single one fell down and was lost, what did it matter?

Were there, I wondered immediately—horrors! Petya, horrors!—were there many more of those diamonds lodged along the edges of the staircase, hidden between the sofa cushions and under the living room rug?

I must amplify the previous commentary. I had just returned to my room to flop down, not bothering to pull back the bedspread, lying diagonally across the bed, still trembling, when I heard music that someone had put on, and lowered the Book to listen.

The stereo's silvery columns filling the air with a melody that made me think of the Writer, of a breeze and the shimmering surface of water that is exactly what the Book is about: the days you discover from your window without there being the slightest gap between the vision of the sea lapping at the coast, the cypresses in the distance, and your mother, her soul, the way she had of gazing gratefully up at me, the way she squeezed my hand when we'd returned to the house, happy to have gone out. As if I, as if my chest were armored with metal plaques that bullets would rebound from. Or as if the Book, placed between my heart and the gun barrel, could miraculously stop the bullet that was tearing through its pages with a single line, this line:
one is a count or one is not a count, it's not of the slightest importance
, as Mme. de Villeparisis notes, and with good reason.

For she didn't stop talking, all the way there and as we went from store to store, nervously talking about the mafia, the many Russian mafiosi who'd taken refuge there, the whole coast crawling with them. And I stared at her in amazement, thinking: But you people are the mafia,
maja
! What are you talking about? You yourselves are mafia! And as we went past, I signaled her with a pointed glance at a Guardia
Civil's lacquered bicorn. Look there, I meant to tell her. Why is it that you wouldn't go outside unless I was with you?

Bent over the pages of the Book without reading, or reading blankly, pages going past without the Book's allowing anything inside—a rare thing in the Writer who always grabs you, his pages like Velcro, your eyes like felt. Trying to decipher, suddenly lowering my eyes to focus on the explanation, first found in the Book, for their great fear. But then she appeared in my room, your mother: knocking,
tock tock
, on my doorframe.

“I have a gift for you,” she said. “Though it's not a gift, it's your salary.”

She came closer.

“Don't you love dancing? You should dance for joy. It's more than we owe you, but I wanted to reward you for your goodness to the boy. That's why we went to see the diamonds. I wanted to find out how much it's worth.”

She left the center of the room and walked toward me without taking her hand out of her pocket. Certain of the effect it would (and, indeed, did) have to drop into my hand, rolling bumpily down from hers, a stone, a diamond in the rough, an uncut gem. The size of a pea or bigger still. The size of a rather large pea.

I didn't manage to say a thing, or rather I said, stupidly, pointlessly, “Ah, yes!” and thought: How does she know I love to dance? So much?

And then immediately: My salary! Finally! But in the form of a small diamond (one karat, three karats, not small). A capsule or sphere of crystal in which I saw myself diving off a dock into water, younger and thinner than I was then (than I am now), wearing Hawaiian shorts … The yellow silk of her kimono, the birds and vegetation embroidered on it. The perfectly unrumpled boughs exquisitely situated on
the sleeve which lengthened, following her arm. Without managing to raise my eyes and tell her (which is what I should have told her): But Nelly! It's a fortune! It's a lot of money! Which is what I thought and was about to say, but then, already incapable of thinking straight, I imagined kissing her hand while my eyes remained on the stone, seeking there the words and explanation for such generosity and munificence.

There also entered my mind the idea, which I had not sought within myself, that this was the perfect twin of the stone I'd found in the grass. It kept me from lifting my eyes, that diamond, I gave it one more astonished glance and was about to raise my head, but Nelly had gone. Whether amused or annoyed by my surprise or apparent ingratitude, I don't know.

Has anyone ever given you a blue diamond, Petya? Extracted from a woman's kimono, the smooth glide of its silk across her skin? No longer thinking of her as the abandoned wife of a mafioso (she herself a member of the mafia:
psst
, quiet!), but as a woman I could seduce, my hands on her wrists, bringing her one, two faltering steps toward where I sat on the bed, the folds of silk coming toward my eyes in a rush. Surrounding her with my arms, letting them rest on her waist, breathing in the sweet fragrance of her body. What if she were a thief, what did it matter? What if she were a murderess? How many women do we watch in bedazzlement as they walk down the street, gazing at their legs, bedazzled, and those may well be the legs of a murderess, a thief—impossible to tell from the line of an ankle, the curve of an instep.

Have you ever found a blue diamond in the grass, Petya? I fingered the earlier stone in my pocket and pulled it out, the two more alike on the palm of my hand than my preliminary mental comparison had registered. Fearful now of being spied on by fiber-optic cables: anything was possible in a house like that. Batyk stabbing at my face on the screen with his finger and shouting for Nelly. “Look, aren't there two stones there? Isn't that one identical to the one you just gave him for a paycheck? Where did he …” Etcetera. Then, breaking off his reflections, he would leap up the stairs, his chest full of hatred, to hit me.