Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto Read Free Book Online Page A

transported by a genie from the
Thousand and One Nights
to the distant wildernesses of Africa and then back that same afternoon to the airport in Buc, on the outskirts of Paris. Though in that same plane she would crash into the sea and meet her death: Albertine, drowned.
    The Writer never stops weeping for her or remembering the times he drove with her to the airport’s green meadow, she in her ski helmetand driving gloves, attentive to the silvery circle of the propeller and the lamps of the stars she would fly toward, leaning out over the edge of the plane, letting her honey-colored eyes, like unfathomable quartzes, fill up with the green of the forests, the blue of the sea, the red of the sun on the horizon. The beauty of that passage filling my heart, certain that when the time had elapsed I would leave that house with all the money I’d been promised. Or was I deceiving myself?
    Or was I deceiving myself, and had I not fetched up in the house I imagined?
2
    Now, how to think of Nelly as a great lady? To see her through the Writer’s eyes when, in the third volume, he gazes at his neighbor. A great lady like the Princesse de Laumes? Yes, I was sometimes inclined to believe that. Despite the vulgarity of the house, the shady business I imagined going on there, which the unbearable furniture hinted at. A woman on whom I could confer all the natural elegance of the Guermantes. Where the Writer says: beneath a mauve hood one day, a navy blue toque the next morning. And throughout this passage: One morning during Lent … I met her wearing a dress of pale red velvet, cut quite low at the neckline.
    Alone, her husband away again.
    The way she would focus her gaze fixedly on the tablecloth, her eyes inclined or falling at an angle like a shaft of light. And in the interior of that shaft the tiny figures of the false rich ancestors she never had. Obsessed with the idea that they’d been aristocrats at some point, that Vasily Guennadovich (your father) had grown up in a family of nobles, dispossessed, stripped of everything and excoriated around the year ’17 and through the years ’18, ’19, and ’20. The factories they’d owned in Finland—she was lying—all stolen. To the point that I told her, that first time in the kitchen: You should write a letter, go to Tampere, find those papers.
    And she smiled to herself and gave me two quick glances.
    Having sought out and hired me, I finally understood, as one more element of that deception, which would permit them to say: “A tutor forPetya, just like the one Guennadi Nicolaevich, Vasily’s grandfather, had. A certain level of instruction—you know?—a knowledge the boy would never have had access to in one of those schools, those prisons or warehouses for children, really. Although the one we hired is crazy or has had his brains scrambled by a writer he never stops talking about”—and she looked at me smiling when she thought that—“but he is good and generous and we have trusted him from the first moment.”
    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.
    â€œShe 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?”
    â€œI’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