Rex (16 page)

Nor is he
just, humane, control
[ling]
himself and his passions
either. A man incapable of mastering himself, who would fall into deep depressions, whom I saw walking through the house at night, unable
to sleep,
a defeated man
. Or rather, to use the whole phrase:
on his back, eating bread, a defeated man
.

Here: someone with nothing to do, without plans or goals, without obligations, no reason to cross the city from one point to another, to go to a meeting. Shackled like a Laocoön in his silk robe, enchained in the storied initials embroidered on his slippers. Or like a large animal with grass heaped up in one corner of the cage, always a little dirty, dejected by the hard asphalt onto which he slowly brings down a cloven hoof that opens out beneath the weight of the enormous leg.

Vasily: after Larissa, his lover, after the ephemeral delight of the Mercedes and the gold Rolexes, after the absurd luxury that was nothing but the incarnation of his wickedness and deceit, now
defeated
by fear. Imagining all the things purchased in his insatiability and bad taste rising threateningly into the air, the remote controls from atop the little marble table, the silver spoons, the fake samurai swords, all that was least blunt, all that was sharpest and most piercing, pointing at him, silently revolving, telling him: stop
eating bread
, stop
eating bread
. Leap to your feet! Make yourself Czar!

Eighth Commentary

For it was as if he, Batyk, were—you know?—a bad writer. Attributing to himself an as yet undemonstrated ability to hold forth on the most unlikely subjects with the greatest aplomb. Sweeping everything aside at his passage, all that he touched with his poisonous tongue. A toad stewed in vile potions, a sponge soaked in venom, a repugnant man living under a stone, lurking there to stain everything with his absurd and uncalled-for commentaries. Adhering the suckers on his tentacles to any topic, with the unctuousness of the charlatan, the security and false erudition of the hack writer, convinced that simply by pointing at things with his finger, “telling it like it is …”

I'm contradicting myself here or appear to be contradicting myself, but that's not the case.

A horror of a man, a man who would never take his hands off anything and spewed endless torrents of mistaken concepts, such as the notion that one can continue to wear nylon shirts decades after their appearance and apparent triumph in Europe, subsequently to be displaced, as we all know, by a return to natural fabrics, Egyptian cotton, Swedish linen. An inexhaustible source of interferences, a piece of ferrous metal, an ax beneath the compass, a block of confused signals sinuously dancing nearer, polluting the ether. And I incapable of finding one sensible word or commentary in this rain of ions, furious, white with rage or impotence, wondering at every step whether this wasn't the way—his way of speaking, lifting his chin with utmost insolence—that I, too, should speak: “getting right to the point.”

And I, I repeat, who admire and ponder the Writer's straightforwardness and steadfastness and wish for just such straightforwardness and steadfastness in any primary writer, any writer worthy of being qualified as such, could not cease to abhor and hate that man and the type of bloviator or pencil pusher he represented here, in your father's court. Forever giving erroneous advice, a vision of the world that was incorrectly simplistic and fallacious buzzing in my ears like some indigestible substance accumulating in layers at the entrance to the ear canal. Until finally I was deaf, watching him open his mouth and repressing my desire to jump on him—you know?—and reduce the flow to zero by exerting pressure with both hands on his stupid glottis, watching him inflate below that point, swell up like a toad with his lies, mistaken ideas, and stupid strategies. Like the plan to elevate Vasily, your father, on an antigravity shield—never! never! never! His bony elbows, his ready-made phrases. All bad, as in a bad writer, primary or secondary, what does it matter. Bad, bad, bad.

To the point that Batyk had come up with the most idiotic, delirious, and ridiculous solution, one that violated the strict security measures he himself had so zealously forced us to observe: not to allow any unknown person into the house to break through our protective barrier and endanger the life and security of all Miramar.

So imagine how I jumped, adrenaline rushing up my neck, the afternoon I came back from the beach (without you, your mother had again forbidden you to go down) and heard the dogs barking and knew they were barking at a stranger.

My first thought: Kirpich (and then, Raketa), his silhouette outlined against the glass sun porch, come to negotiate the handing over or reimbursement of the money (I still imagined them wanting their money back, demanding restitution of the swindled sum). And I moved like an Italian cardinal in a court full of Frenchmen, to keep them from noticing me, to avoid alerting them to the presence of another person (never forgetting the night of the slaughter), an invisible witness who could testify to the strange visitor's way of eating, his hand opening out in a fan over the plate from which he took not one nut or two but a whole fistful, which he threw into his mouth with sinister avidity.

No, not Kirpich or Raketa, but an accomplice of theirs: a man in a ridiculous checked suit worn-out at the elbows, bending over the plate of nuts with the debasement of having spent many years without eating as much as he wanted, little things like that.

But don't they have lots of money, these mafiosi? Don't they drink in bars that offer stylish ceramic dishes filled to the brim with assorted nuts or some variety of
fritto misto di mare
, on the house? Motionless on the grass, my back against the house wall, eyes on the swimming pool. Disbelieving my own ears: the most absurd and senseless plan.

That I would not have believed, Petya, I repeat, if I hadn't heard it quite clearly as I stood there in the garden. A character straight out of a traveling medicine show, a fraudulent inventor (fraudulent two centuries ago, not today!) come to his king to sell him the secret of manufacturing diamonds: carbon and graphite in the heart of a cannon, the flame fanned unceasingly. Or another scientist, who in the solitude of his lab had determined the feasibility of the
perpetuum mobile
, a loom weaving day into night without stopping. And three days after it was set in motion, full of admiration for the machine's autonomous movement, the vizier rushed to the royal chambers exclaiming loudly: “Yes! It's true!: without effort and without expenditure, HRH! In appearance and, I must affirm, no less in reality. The shuttle has not stopped moving; Professor Astoriadis's machine hasn't paused for a second.”

Then he would bow obsequiously, thrusting forward his massive shoe with its enormous buckle, face toward the ground, his chin lost in his ruff. And now, here he was again centuries later, leaning on the living room table, the torso's whole impulse and vectorial spin aimed at the small plate of nuts. A pettiness outdone only by Batyk himself, his way of pondering his kilims and the entirely mistaken explanation he gave of the professor's idea, while Astoriadis—a patently false surname—never saw fit to shut him up or correct any point of his error-riddled presentation. Chewing without pause, the professor, nodding with the tranquillity of an Oriental in a teahouse who walks toward you thinking nonstop about how he's going to swindle you.

And Vasily, to my infinite astonishment, falling for it. Thinking something like: if I, against all expectations and the jeering comments of my colleagues could make colored diamonds, then this man Astoriadis, also a scientist, perhaps true what he says about the annulment of gravity. Amazed by the flexible disk that would hold him up without bending beneath his weight, spinning at light speed
like a top
(the Writer notes in this passage, enchantingly), nibbling away with absolute efficiency at the gears of gravity. The user (he chose that ugly word) would perceive nothing at first; the very thin disk would be slipped beneath the user's feet, spinning at the speed of light. But before long he would notice that the lipstick falling from his wife's hand, the makeup case, the powder puff, were not dropping to the ground but remaining miraculously suspended in the air, free of the ties that bind us to the earth and, in the end, bring us down: Vasily, triumphant over them! No.

I perceived with clarity that a wave of indignation (these were lies! lies!) was welling up in me and moving forward out of the years when I was younger and more upright, only to lose its momentum in the subaqueous crags of my soul, without my managing to say what I was thinking, reveal my perspective, without my lips articulating a single word. Beneath the thick layer of oil which, in those adventure novels the Writer tells us he read as a boy, they poured out by the barrel to calm the angry sea and send out a boat, a whaler. Floating beneath that dense film of oil, the iron grip of its tiny molecular hands, watching them argue, the veins of the neck swelling, rocking to the rhythm of the waves, the tranquil viscosity of a jellyfish many kilometers long, swaying and dancing smoothly on the surface.

Thinking.

A danger to turn all the work in that direction, in terms of physics: to endow it with a mass that was difficult to steer when set against the infinite and far less tangible effect of an imposture. An intelligent man, Vasily, very intelligent! But far too attached to the high flame of bunsen burners, to alloys of iron and tungsten—which could not easily be replaced by the sale of small portions of colored air, easily transported in carry-on luggage, shaped at will.

Thinking.

It will be science, nevertheless, that places a new monarch on any throne from now on, whether in Russia or in Portugal. No one will have any objection to a scientifically distilled monarch, whose capacity
for command we understand with scientific precision. A certain interior disposition that obliges a king to raise the napkin to his lips in a certain august manner, to sweep the room with august eyes. Without anyone having a second's doubt about his capacity to reign. Not politicians—you know—party leaders, gobblers of greasy doughnuts, swillers of beer. Something in the last gene of the sequence that would move him to lift his arm in an unrepeatable gesture, a penetrating vision that would enable him to throw his gaze across the mass of problems and find, always, like the knife the Writer (Chuang Tse) speaks of, the most recondite interstices, without ever blunting the blade, the sharp edge. Simple, clear solutions where everyone else sees only the murkiest obscurity. Moving forward with grace, deactivating them, one by one. The ascendance and power of the one who knows.

And since his other talents would be known as well—that of growing diamonds, for example, gem-quality stones—there could be no doubt as to his capacity to rule. Like the man who, in Byzantium, from the depths of an encamped army, strode out onto a hillock and crossed the camp beneath a beam of light that shone on him from the zenith (and that light later passed into legend), to take command, to strip control from the Basileus, who was weeping and shivering. And no one—for they'd been raised to know that not all men are created equal, that there are superior men—no one ever doubted that he was the one.

With absolute certainty, inspired science. At one glance. Walking down a hill beneath that light, the last hill before the tent with the imperial flag, and then entering that tent to grasp the reigns of Empire, like Michael the Stammerer or Phocas the Usurper: men rough in aspect as they rode roughly across Asia Minor but who awoke one day suddenly knowing themselves to be kings.

And now: that certainty clarified by science. Because, I repeat, there would be or would exist some such genetic tendency or predisposition,
blockages in their brains that would finally rearrange themselves one day, like an equation whose solution takes years to become clear, and then appears to them, lights up blinking in their minds, and they leap to their feet and stride outside to meet the army, the Empire, that awaits them.

Not the arbitrary process of the Tibetans who seek traits or certain signs of the Dalai Lama in the round faces of many babies. Until they find one on which they can stamp, by common consent, the mental image of a king. Though that works. They've been doing it for centuries, and it's never failed!

A boy, a pure soul, a tabula rasa, who ends up reigning over them and they yield to his government with gratitude and wisdom. Without any sort of certainty or scientific evidence playing a role in the process, only such inexact techniques as smelling the breath, inspecting the urine, scrutinizing an iris. And without their ever being mistaken, neither with Lama two nor with Lama five, the favorites of Lhamo Thondup, the current Lama. Differing among themselves, each one capable of making his own mark.

Think now, linger a moment over a dynastic selection in which the electorate consists primarily of the scrawny-shouldered (in a manner of speaking—your papa is not scrawny of shoulder), and this selection, in the depths of the laboratory, delivers an unobjectionable result: the finest one. Not a group of the best and the brightest—the finest one of all!

Or as if a young dramaturge who once hailed from Stratford-upon-Avon were to appear miraculously right now and place three tragedies on the table during the meeting of a theater company in England or anywhere else. If only the people in the meeting knew how to read it, the professors, the trustees, should it happen that they were able to read it as I do, with the simplicity, the appreciation or perception of its entirety, the certainty that comes of being in the presence of a masterwork, as when (I remember it perfectly), at the age of nineteen (so early an age), on the semicircular front stairway of my school, I opened the Book and set my eyes on the first sentence of that volume (
Swann in Love
) and knew immediately that this was the Book, and that its author—a unique writer—was the Writer. That day. Like someone who finds the solution to a math problem.