Rex (22 page)

You'll say to me: at the mere sight of a stone? At the mere sight of a stone! Beautiful, of a brilliance, a resplendence never before seen, a stone that would have an entire vast chamber to itself in the palace of their memories.

I know it will work: it worked with the first of the Russian imposters. In a bathroom, where, humiliatingly but with dignity intact, he was serving a Polish nobleman, an unworthy individual, a minor noble in whose home he, Dmitri, had taken a position as a valet. And in the bathroom of that house, for the trivial matter—can you believe this?—of some water that was a degree or so too cold to the touch of his soft and cerulean back, he, that man, gave him a hard slap, a slap to Dmitri, the son of Ivan Kalita, miraculously saved from Godunov's knife. The emperor endured the affront, bowed humbly, and, with his cheek burning, said: “Sire, if you knew who your servant is, if you could imagine it, you would not behave so.” The Pole, shivering in the tub but from cold rather than fear, replied: “Who are you? Who is it that I should not, in such a situation, my back placed in contact with water so unpleasantly cold, deal a slap to, my fingers delivering the message of my anger, etcetera?”

“I,” Dmitri, still almost a boy, replied, “I am the son of Ivan Kalita, and my throat escaped Godunov's knife in 1591, for another child, put in my place, was the one who lifted his neck to the criminal flattery of the murderer when he said, ‘What a lovely necklace you are wearing today,
Gosudar
,' or ‘Show me that lovely necklace, Prince.' And innocently the boy raised his chin to show off his beads—to the murderer!—opening an interstice in the bloc of his physical being that the murderer instantly took advantage of to slice open his neck, and the poor boy fell, convulsing and bathed in blood …”

That said, Dmitri drew from his clothing a gold baptismal cross studded with gems and placed it before the eyes of he who until that moment had been his master, and who now sat frozen with shock in the bathwater.

None other, the Polish nobleman said to himself: none but the Russian czarevitch could wear such a baptismal cross at his bosom. And he leapt from the tub and ran to his wife, ordering her to prepare the table for a banquet and invite all the other minor nobility. He returned to the bathroom where the pseudo Dmitri was waiting and invited him to rise, placing one hand upon his shoulder and gesturing with the other toward the brocade robe woven with golden thread and freshwater pearls, the cloak of sable, the sword of Toledo steel with its gold-plated hilt. Then he pushed open the leaded glass window to show him the beautiful horses that had been made ready: their manes hennaed and braided, their legs wound with silken ribbons, pawing the ground, steam rising from their snorting nostrils.

The effect your father's diamond had on me was identical! Unable to linger over any of the shades of blue, not a sapphire blue, nor an indigo: not cobalt. Deep and infinite as the waters of a frozen sea. It fluctuated, though not like the sky's changing face at sunset, trembling in the air as the light goes down; rather like the waters of a pond whose depths are shot through with white stripes of caustic light. Greater and more beautiful than any you have ever seen, Petya, the serenity and beauty of a lake in the midst of a meadow, all the light of morning in it. Enormous, glittering. I said: “Vasily, I have no words! …” (Something like that, I said.) Not even I myself …

He had listened with attention, had understood to perfection: a diamond as grand and luminous as the very idea of a king. Patiently grown at the rate of 0.2 karats a day. Its growth uninterrupted, or interrupted only at the moment when, mathematically: the largest diamond. Ever.

Because understand me: all that he'd suffered, the depths from which he'd had to ascend. I hadn't seen it that way, Petya, and blame myself for that. The most absolute poverty, the deprivation in which his entire childhood was spent, the life he had dreamed of, believing that he was allowed to rob, to swindle, in order to attain it. So far in the depths that he came to imagine that never, in all his years, would there be things, small pleasures like orange juice at breakfast, you know, day after day. A trick, that, to dupe the gullible—it must be: there could
never be enough juice for so many people. And once in the West, he discovered in astonishment the golden sea of orange juice in which the simplest country folk of Valencia were floating. How he wept in secret at what he saw in Rome and Vienna, the pain he felt remembering his childhood, the hard clay of autumn before the first snow. His father, deaf and mute, face raised to the sky, snow falling on his silhouetted figure. That pained me, Petya, that image. Did you know that? Your grandfather, deaf and mute, all those years.

He had felt swindled himself, so why not swindle? It had to have begun very far back, Petya, in the deepest depths. Desperately seeking a shortcut to the light, to the money that was beginning to flow swiftly into the whole country like a river rushing back into its dry bed. Until he saw it: to change the gradient and grow, layer by layer, the most perfect diamonds ever fabricated. Never, no one in the whole universe. And he saw all that this could secure for him, not money, no, not a con job, that came later: fame, honor, a place in the Academy which—ay!—would soon cease to exist.

Determined, on the morning he had the idea of passing them off as real—counseled, it must be said, by the Buryat's dark heart—no longer to be a small man, the character in the Writer who dies of anguish for having sneezed on a count's bald head … To be the count himself, gravely mopping his head with a silk handkerchief and murmuring, without turning around: “Don't trouble yourself, it's nothing.” That was the transformation he had sought, none of your blinding blizzards or the catastrophe of an overcoat for which he had scrimped and saved his whole life suddenly torn from his shoulders.

We crossed the garden, I walked alongside him, deeply touched. I said: “I know what you mean, Vasily, I understand perfectly: you'd like to invite Larissa to the party but can't.” He shot me the glance of
a king hidden in a cart (in Varennes). Infinite sadness in his appearance, his bad eye gone out entirely or like a dying ember. He got into the car, leaned toward the dashboard, started the engine. The way the front wheels of expensive cars bolt forward, dig into the turn, rear back, and take off in a single impulse—your father, the king, at the steering wheel.

And in the same flash of insight that accompanied my recovered dignity I knew what heraldic device would best suit our House. A frank and pithy vindication of imposture:
Esse est percipi
.
Meaning: if you perceive a king, if a man with the bearing of a king, the august gaze of a king, the eloquent reserve of a king appears before you, then do not doubt that you are in the presence of a King, a Prince. Who also, in the bargain, God willing, will float without sinking,
Fluctuat nec murgitur
, like Paris.

In the first quadrant: the sea, the happy days, or days we would remember as happy, by the sea. A wavy field of azure and upon it, floating, the Castle, Miramar, the many-dollared mansion. A simple escutcheon, the scant furniture of a new dynasty: rising sun in splendor over illuminated diamond … Forgetting the attributes of the old Russian families, the Orlovs' falcon, the double-headed eagle of the Paleologos. Just as Napoleon himself once wisely abandoned the fleur-de-lis for bees of gold on field of azure. The blazon of a new dynasty, that of the Pool, upon which I would reserve for myself the modest role of supporter: a moor or savage, a natural man, a long-haired American, one foot forward, my tutor's quill poised at the ready. And reading from dexter to sinister, facing me, an animal with human face, a monster. Not a unicorn, not a lion rampant, not a mermaid in her vanity: the head facing two directions, in symbol of its duality, jaws gaping, viscous tongue hanging out.

I had stopped speaking to him—for how truly the Writer affirms:
the earth is full of people who don't deserve to be spoken to!
To Batyk, that is, whom I ran into after having said good-bye to your father, having heard his tremendous confession. Stretched out next to the water, in the full light of the sun, his falsity all the more visible for that, like an ordinary lizard and not one from the island of Komodo. He saw me coming toward him across the grass, crossing the garden and about to pass him by. He stuck out his forked tongue and spoke.

“They move me.” He was addressing Astoriadis, who was eating grapes (bought with my money) from a plate. “What we have here is two charming friends who have never failed to amuse me. A pair of innocents who imagine that someone, some time, will take their plan seriously, the absurd idea of an emperor … I've said as much to Nelly, I've insisted on smaller diamonds, for engagement rings: flood the market with them, sell them as real …”

It was something like that, what he said, Petya. Bragging, essentially, about his unbridled passion for lying. At a moment when we'd all decided to turn our backs on him, had understood that his was a false solution. But not Batyk. He returned over and over again to the same point: Lie, lie! he shouted. Never tell the truth, on the contrary: always lie. Never affirm or cite or even allude to the line about fooling some of the people some of the time but not all the people, an entire country, all the time, a piece of sheer nonsense to which no sentient adult would ever subscribe. A phrase which, correctly glossed (he was
openly mocking my method, Petya), says—and he raised his finger, as I was supposedly in the habit of doing—but I don't do that, do I? I don't assume false scholarly airs?—quite the opposite: “Swear and perjure yourself, but don't ever reveal your secret.” Here he laughed odiously, rubbing his thighs hard and looking me up and down in amusement.

To what a striking degree was Batyk's taste bad! How vulgar and plebeian of him to have replaced the eye he lost in a fight with that diamond! The dendrites of his lies, the metallic iridescence of their tangled web glittering hatefully on his chest, Petya, a very thin thread, almost invisible, which until that instant I hadn't noticed and finally perceived then only because of a reflection that shimmered across him as if he were a puddle of oil.

I didn't open my mouth for a second or unclench the fist in which I was hiding the Pool. I moved away without turning my back on him and went into the kitchen, still with enough time before the guests' arrival to implement the second half of my plan: something simpler but with no less impact (the description and operative principles of a bubble machine there in the Book). I built it quickly and effortlessly before Lifa's astonished eyes. I had only to assemble the parts and dip the perforated disk in the soap solution and the machine's blower produced a bubble in every orifice, the smaller bubbles rising more easily through the air, clearing the wall with greater agility, falling without hurting themselves on the rough asphalt, wisely adapting themselves to the sharp protrusions of this new situation, transforming myself into a different young man, a new me in the dark street. I would cast a final gaze over my shoulder: there's only one city in the world whose name corresponds to this condition, to a lighter, more buoyant soul: Los Angeles. Wasn't that a lovely name to dream of here in Miramar, knowing that all of us were heading toward the inevitable bursting of this bubble?

I went back to the living room, took one of the elephant tusks from its base and put the Pool there. I assessed the thickness of the glass with my eyes, and out of the usual fear of robbery and renewed disgust with Batyk, I thought, without taking my eyes from the stone, about how the Writer introduces an ostrich into the party in Kimberley, for, strangely,
his characters travel down to Kimberley, to a drawing room in Kimberley (South Africa), where the ostrich swallows a stone that is on display, a diamond of incalculable worth.

I don't believe I need comment at any length on that passage for you, only this: in the ostrich's warm craw, the stone, mingled with the other stones the bird uses to grind up the grains it eats, survives intact, due to the thin film of grease covering it. Then months later, after being extracted and cleaned, the diamond explodes.

But before that, on the night of the party, the Writer's characters, gathered in the drawing room, don't realize that the diamond has disappeared, nor does the Writer himself, waiting in the library where he'd been ushered as the music played and as the ostrich, unremarked by the other visitors, was crashing the party, moving one leg forward—its thick ostrich thigh (they sell them in the supermarkets now) as yet unfrozen—in the direction of the stone's flickering brilliance.

Here in Marbella we ran no risk of an ostrich coming in; not one family here keeps ostriches.

My plan would work. We had successfully eluded the danger.

Whatever you want, I'd told her, whatever you want: the idiotic and absurd notion of a King, an Empire. As long as it made her bend her waist more supplely, arching her back in my arms like a tango dancer, the two of us on the dance floor at Ishtar while her husband dealt with the ambassador from Martinique. Myself seen in profile in far more photographs than were necessary, my head rising above the feather boa around her neck. The most beautiful woman, I must say that: despite Larissa's splendid, cloudless complexion and Claudia's pink-tinged skin, the most beautiful. Beauties that were similar though resolved in different color schemes: gold and turquoise for Larissa, ruby and violet for Claudia, and marble and onyx for my girl. The way her hair fell between her beautiful shoulder blades, the soft curve of her neck, the most beautiful woman, Petya, and the most sensual, your mother.

The way your mother's behavior toward me gradually changed—rather unpleasant at first, during the early weeks when she would invariably call me “Mr. Lonelyhearts,” and then that same Lonelyhearts began growing and changing in her eyes and her esteem, along the lines of
I am the king of Babylon who makes the light shine on the earth of Sumer and Acadia
.