Rex (7 page)

In one movement, supple as a thief in a hotel room, I switched off the lamp. Then, Petya, as the light slowly withdrew from the halogen
bulb and went out, the stones began shining crazily, phosphorescing as if they were the last two points of solder a gigantic man were applying to my chest, sealing up the vacuum in that ampoule. Then, certain I was closed up inside, seeing me raise my bewildered eyes in there, he rubbed his hands in satisfaction, took a step, and was gone.

Those stones phosphorescing, glowing on the palm of my hand, trying to tell me something, foggily. That I'd been spied on! Suddenly I understood: I'd been spied on! The memory hadn't come to me until the moment I switched the light off and remembered those eyes, gleaming like carbuncles in the cave of a face. In the discotheque, at the back of the discotheque, as day was dawning or almost dawning outside but the corridors within were still dark. And in the darkness inside, someone, over by the wall, had been spying on me, watching me dance, given over to the foul—and for me insane—diversion of dancing. From the moment I stepped onto the dance floor until I went out along the corridor to the parking lot and the sun hit me in the face.

And those eyes, which I didn't remember having seen until now, which I'd buried among other impressions, bloomed before me at that moment or were dragged out into the light by the maddening glow of the stones on my hand.

The anguish, now, of having been watched, the anxiety of having seen, as I twirled and spun, a pair of eyes gleaming from the back of the disco and, I had only just understood: fixed on me. Like the terrible eyes the Writer sees flashing in a hallway in Saint Petersburg; he realizes he's being watched because he sees a gleam, and when he turns his head he sees it blink out. Hidden there, that man, knife in hand, to kill me. And, in the Writer, I had to stand there like an idiot, or with the magnanimity of a prince, seeking him out in the darkness, making my eyes, brimming with goodness, illuminate the other man's, which
were cold and inhuman. I should have called out to him, told him, Don't spy on me, Batyk (for it was Batyk): Don't spy on me. There's nothing here for you to take back to Nelly or Vasily, nothing I would be ashamed of. Even if I did go home with great fear in my heart, the tremendous anguish of having danced like that, unstoppably, thinking: Dancing for what? With what end in mind? Dancing continually like a man possessed until the last song, whether commented upon or without commentary. God! When I had a house, a job, my pupil awaiting me. What if they could take advantage of my late homecoming, those who were spying on me (if it wasn't Batyk), the ones inside the house were so afraid of; what if they were waiting for me to open the door so as to erupt violently into the garden. Not Batyk, I repeat: the Russian mafiosi they were all so fearful of, the ones they never stopped talking about. Waiting outside until dawn in order to get into the house.

But no: it had been him, Batyk.

If not, then where did that comment come from, the one that stopped me in my tracks, asking myself … How does she know that I dance? Frenetically? (That was what she meant, your mother.) How does she know?

And then, two days later, back down to the city again. Your mother and I, arm in arm, strolling farther and farther from the little bay in search, I hoped, of a place where we wouldn't be seen. Then, at the end of that long walk, we sat down on a bench at the tip of a jetty and she kicked off her red moccasins and lifted her feet so that, after an instant of weightlessness, her calves rippled with a dense movement that touched me to the core. And I realized I loved her desperately and was full of tenderness for her.

On that dock, far out over the water, she was continually looking back at the path—in case Batyk were coming, in case he'd followed us, I imagined then, but now I understand: she was debating whether to let me in on the secret. The water pounding beneath us like the motor of a boat about to speed away, the first spin of the propeller. Gazing at me while the dock behaved as if it were about to move, all the force of that water, and Nelly calculating whether or not to get me involved in it. If only she herself had weighed anchor, told me, putting her hand on her heart, gazing into my eyes, “Stay here. I'll be back in two weeks, I'll call you.” Or, rather: “Go ahead, what are you going to do all alone here? You'll get bored.” Separated by the blades of water down there between the boards, the sun in the sky. Stripes of water between the jetty's planks and on her breast. And she was debating.

I saw that and was afraid for a moment that she'd actually say something. I said something, spoke to her about what I'd been paid. “You
don't know how grateful I am. I will need, would have preferred cash, but no! Nelly, I'm lying: How can I tell you? It's more than I was owed, much more …”

“Let's go,” she interrupted.

We'd be seeing more jewelry, I thought. She'd give me a few lessons on how to spend that money, the fortune it no doubt represented—a diamond! Then the rest of it seemed to happen under water, as if it was us flowing between the boards. The blur of beach-goers pretending to smoke in the sidewalk cafés, lighting a cigarette in an alley between two stores, the two of us sheltered from the wind, the narrow passageway with its service entrances and a man with a gun, visible for a second, before diving into the mist to fire at us from there, under cover. Leaving the shore at top speed, racing to a high point along the coast.

Like a pair of assistant directors scouting along the edge of a steep cliff for the right location to film a scene of love and complicity against the wide-open sky. The way she gave me her hand without looking at me, placing or lodging her moccasins in the grass, her calves flexing at every step. Without turning toward me when we reached the top, both looking out, both of us educated in the same antique (or primary) painters, our eyes seeing, and my legs feeling from the air that blew in through the bottoms of my trousers and swept at her skirt, that we had arrived.

I'd imagined for a moment that I would still be telling her about the hatred I harbored against the Spaniard, that painter (“the greatest of the moderns”—in other words, a commentator), and that she would listen to me without saying a word, only to suddenly turn and present me with her lips, rapidly revolving, pivoting on the axis of her neck, her eyes shooting out sparks, transformed by the sun into diamonds.

But this was what she did: she lifted her arm and stretched out her hand so that a ray of light reached my eyes, sweeping the meadow to its right, directing that light with dizzying skill or invisible diligence: the blue, the gold of the tardy sun, the green of the plants, the violet of flowers that seemed to grow larger as the beam of light swept over them.

And, revealed and concealed by the turning blades of the sun, which was simplified like a sun in a poster, its rays slicing the air into circles, her lips drew near and revolved before me, appearing and
disappearing behind the beams. Pale pink outside the ray of light, shiny red within it.

Because the gesture of extending her finger had warped the surrounding atmosphere and as this magnifying glass developed in the air around it, the blue stone on her finger began shining brighter and brighter. I had only to lean forward a bit more to analyze its chemical composition (carbon, rings of carbon) and to marvel for the umpteenth time, now very close, at its unusual size: the disproportion between the size of that gem, the size of her necklace's cabochons, and the cheesy little stones worn by Silvia of Sweden and Margriet of the Netherlands.

And along the edge of that airy magnifying glass entered the words of a long explanation that I read as if in a trance, without being able to take my eyes off its surface for a second, the words distending as they reached the edges, then disappearing—but I had no need to reread them because their meaning was not escaping me. This was not a passage to comment upon, delve deeply into, and explore in order to extract some hidden message. All was expressed and stated with utmost clarity, golden words against a blue background. Without my ever having been able, without my ever having imagined anything like that, not the slightest inkling in all that time.

And when the words about the amazing size of the diamonds, their unusual coloration and, consequently, the money and Asiatic luxury of the whole house stopped emerging, the magnifying glass vanished, and I lifted my eyes and gazed deep into hers for a long second, throwing her a gaze of astonishment. Still more air entering my chest when she nodded her head several times, trying not to lose my gaze in order to transmit in that gesture the weight and gravity of her message. Which had the contrary effect of pumping even more air into me and making me continue on my upward trajectory with irresistible momentum.

To journey back into the past, set myself down at that point on the
walls of time
, walk through the garden, introducing myself into that moment as a wiser man, someone with the experience and exact knowledge of having already lived through that day, the late afternoon light in which we came back from the walk, went into the sun porch, and I was about to exclaim: “Synthetic diamonds!” To go over to myself and put my index finger on my own mouth, introducing a partition into the flow of that day. So that my words would flow down the opposite slope, at a wider angle, in order to extract them from my life.

And yet, no. I did none of that, none of it happened: we stopped for a second in front of the pool like two blank silhouettes, her hair rippling, my linen shirt loose. There was a moment when we reached the house and she finally turned to me and broke her silence, resolving to let me into the secret, moving me or roughly ejecting me from the safe and peaceful time where I was moving (or floating) into nights criss-crossed by white gunfire beneath a red rain. With blinding clarity. Only there, her eyes told me, only beneath that rain could I kiss her, only if I came to meet her there, leaving the island of dry air within which I walked.

Stopped there, having come full circle: on one side, my scant monthly salary as a tutor, my commentaries on the Book, the arid landscape of Spain glimpsed through a door in a wall. And on the other side, Petya,
without words, without any need to use all the words I'm expending on you, a golden woman beneath a red rain. And even more diamonds among the garden grass. Diamonds revolving octahedrally in the air. Which one would you have opened, which door? Even if you knew a tiger was lurking beyond the frame, waiting to pounce?

Fourth Commentary

There are writers I
can
mention by their names, minor writers like H. G. Wells. A contemporary of the Writer, a man who also pondered and addressed himself to the subject of time. But in a clumsier, more mechanistic way, not like the Writer, who imagined a more subtle procedure for transporting himself into the past and recovering lost days. A state he summoned up—as everyone knows—by means of certain magic potions, certain mushrooms or fungi he kept in the pocket of his artist's smock and which, whenever he wished to travel back to his childhood and reconquer a day that was lost, he needed only to nibble, as if they were crusts of time itself (not madeleines as in the common misconception and not lime flower tisane, either) that took him immediately back to the segment of the past from which those mushrooms, those potions, came.

Not given over to daydreams, either, like an opium smoker luxuriantly sprawled on a cloud, as was fallaciously proposed by that predecessor of the Commentator (De Quincey), to whom the Commentator owes, let it be noted in passing, almost all of his tone, his subject matter, and his cynicism. A man cynically installed at the very height of a literature upon which he commented as if from the bottom of a barrel. Or like Diogenes, the cynic. And all of these opium eaters, all these minor writers or commentators, have claimed to travel in time or have pretended to travel in time and bring back smooth, round memories, rubies and sapphires, recovered without difficulty.

Only the Writer discerned, amid the blue-green mass of the past, between the sinuous, oscillating lines of lost memory, time itself. And saw that the past is made up not of hard, tangible memories that can be recovered at will, but of vague blue and violet memories—not red, not hard nuggets. And he conceived of writing a detailed report that he inserted into a chapter of the Book where he mentions in passing, without its being his primary concern, the solution he arrived at to the technical matter of time travel. And to ensure that it would more easily reach the minds of dull readers (that is, of the public) he used the words “lost time” (etcetera) in the title of his book. A book, he seemed to be saying, that also attempted to offer a solution to the question, so much in vogue during his era, of time travel. A man who wasn't afraid to resort to a small deception, a minor imposture, in order to advance a project, oiling it just enough so that it could be introduced with minor friction or noise into the minds of his contemporaries. Later the Book would be cleansed of it; the more intelligent men of coming generations would know that this, the matter of time travel, was not the subject of the Book, was only mentioned in passing. And what was his subject? Everything, all things, all men, the greatest book ever written, a summation of all experience … human experience? Human experience.

Nor did the Writer ever speak of or allude to any “time machine.” For when Wells speaks of the “time machine,” he's referring to an actual machine, a mechanical device that allows you to travel in time, enter the fourth dimension, physically. The machine seen or glimpsed as it makes its way through the puff pastry of the ages, biting into and pulverizing an enormous swath of lives, a wheel or plate of diamond that cuts straight through with perfect ease, never encountering a hard bone to gnaw at, a prince, a princedom, a particular year. All of it neatly reduced to dust.