Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto Read Free Book Online

each successive square of that chessboard in exponential sequence. Indecipherable, the sum they’d carried off with them, and their fear all too explicable. Terrifying, Petya, that necklace: another level of complexity I wasn’t imagining and that neither the blue of the sky nor the lily white of the clouds had foretold. The grace with which she then began wearing it every day, the disturbing poise with which she came down to breakfast with it glittering around her neck. And then she would go for a swim in the pool, and I would follow her progress with the attention of a sentry watching a submarine’s red and blue navigation lights in the dark waters of an estuary.

Third Commentary
1
    I went on reading to you: They didn’t generally dine at the hotel, where the electric bulbs sent floods of light across the great dining room, making it like a vast, marvelous aquarium beyond whose glass precincts the working population of Balbec, the fishermen and petit bourgeois families, invisible in the darkness outside, would press against the windows to watch the luxurious life of the people inside, gently rocked on swells of gold—as extraordinary to the poor as the life of fish and strange mollusks …
    But you interrupted me, Petya. You asked: “What is it about? What’s the subject? The subject of the whole Book?”
    â€œI’ve never thought about that …” I had to confess.
    I had never thought about that. I stopped looking out the window, turned around. What is the Book about? I had never thought about that, can you believe me? I’ve read it thousands of times, I’ve entered its pages at random, at any point, like a child who learns to go into the house through the windows, familiarly. But once within I’d never asked myself the question you had just posed. You forced me to pause, having no clear idea of what he found a need to write about, a thing that could be enunciated thus: The subject of the Book is. But now that you ask, I can tell you. I know! It’s money. The Book deals entirely and exclusively with money. Because when the Writer takes a job as the tutor of the sons of Romanianus and the weeks go by and he is not paid, he stands at the window and asks himself a singular question: Shouldn’t they be fabulously rich? Shouldn’t they have moneyin little leather cases, hidden away in vaults, shelves full of glittering gold, all that money emitting a sense of calm and security?
    The Writer was able to address this with complete frankness, a whole chapter dedicated to the subject. For doesn’t money figure at the center of all experience? Don’t we need money for almost everything?
    The way he pauses and speaks with exquisite delicacy of the beneficent influence of money, the detailed description of the ruby ring the narrator’s grandmother leaves him at her death. A constellated ring: when the stone was turned downward, the flow of money dwindled; when turned upward, wealth came gushing in. Golden doubloons, antique florins with which he buys Albertine an airplane, a nice little one-seater with tarred wings that he, the Writer, uses as an introduction to the sections of the Book about flight.
    Albertine—whom he never held prisoner nor kept with him against her will as so many commentators and myopic biographers have claimed—loved to fly. Obviously, if those claims were true he’d never have given her the airplane, for she would have been able to escape, to fly, literally, from the room, where she always returned, nevertheless, and where the Writer waited for her, avid for her stories, the herds of animals she saw grazing from the air, stampeding at the roar of the plane overhead. Dry lake beds imprinted with the cuneiform script of gnus. And sometimes she felt, he says, in pages brimming with a unique lyricism, like a friendly Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin sailing upon the ocean of air, or a Baroness Blixen, raised to the heights,