Free Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto Page A

from. They’re from another writer, but what does it matter? From another great writer …”
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    The fright I had, the fear I felt when I raised my teary eyes to your mother’s, not wanting to believe, unable to fathom that her lovely clavicle, her soft shoulders, had born such weight, that your father, so inconsiderately, without calculating the pressure of his horrible embrace, had dragged her into that life of privations like the owner of a delicate alpaca who burdens it with a heavy load and drives it along a precarious mountain path with continual thrashings. And I moved nearer and spoke to her and told her I was there … to save her! (To save her? To save her!) With such vehemence that she could only smile at my impulse, first drawing closer to me, then changing her mind and standing up with a smile, touched or amused, I couldn’t tell, changing a record, her neck and shoulder blades smiling at me.
    She waited for the music to come on, making sure it was the record she wanted, and turned with another smile on her lips: months of goodness and dry towels on the bathroom shelves. The golden eyes of a woman no longer young, older now than the girl Vasily had swung through the air for whole nights. And I was older, too, you know? Than fifteen or ten years ago. All of us, necessarily, older than ten or fifteen years ago, and slower. But don’t I like slower songs nowadays? Melodies that make my sandals speak with greater sincerity than the frenetic boogie-woogie of my dancing shoes? The way I went over to her, the drop of sweat that fell from my arm, inside my shirt, fell and left a discernible and isolated wet spot on my waist.
    Afraid of frightening her, with a parsimony similar to Lifa’s, in the kitchen, making her way among the copper pots, bending down, slowly lowering her torso to one side to check the height of the stove’s flame. In which the two of us danced, Nelly’s face and mine, our faces consumed by fire, the blue tongues of my passion, the impulse that led me to inhale the aroma of her hair, bewitched by the arc of her brows, revolving at the center of a slow song that astonished me when I heard its first chords because I said to myself: jazz, but without being able to tell you, you up in your room at that moment, to interject a rapid commentary, overlooking for the moment the commentaristic (or belated? or belated) nature of jazz. A song that now, each time I hear it, of course.
    Intending this in every turn of the dance, making this clear: whatever she wanted from me, without a second’s hesitation. Anything, so as to show her … Anything. The molecules of my soul arrayed in a unique pattern, through which would always blow, through those molecules, the same air, the same tune. Wherever I might happen to be, in whatever segment of my future life. Forever back in that same afternoon, the uproar and shock that first reached my central nervous system and assaulted me there before I understood anything fully, the horror of your father, the octopus, having watched us through many bars of the music now, from the other side of the glass. Falsely modest and all the more terrible for that: Like a king standing in line outside a theater so long as the authorities haven’t been notified that he’s there .
    The light almost gone out of the afternoon behind him, the swimming pool’s water grown denser. No one else outside, nothing to keep him from coming in, putting a bullet in me or dragging me out, paralyzed, not daring to move a muscle, to drown me in the pool like apuppy, transmitting that water into my eyes, my trachea: the inadvisability of having wanted to kiss the boss’s wife.
    But I hadn’t kissed her! Do you hear me, Vasily? I hadn’t kissed her, I hadn’t taken, so to speak, my turn. I would die not only without guilt, but also without even having kissed her. Vasily!
    Nelly was smiling, still dancing though she’d seen him now, her