Free Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto Page B

husband, in a turn of our ridiculous dance, halfway through that awful song. Yes, awful. I would be the … what number would I be, Petya? How many tutors had you had before me, how many of them had Vasily gotten rid of already after finding them, like me, seducing or being seduced by his wife? I can explain everything, Vasily! The fright, the terror, like a bolt of lightning scorching everything in its path, exploding everything inside me, soldering me with its fire, rewiring me for life, leaving only certain combinations of synapses activated.
    And how is it that this doesn’t figure in the books that someone—I, for example—someone sitting down to write, would write?
    Inconceivable, unthinkable, always in me, from that afternoon on, Vasily’s darkening silhouette, before he came in and threw … And threw nothing and no one out! Casually coming toward me as if only going to switch off the stereo and then, having gone past or pretended to have gone past me, turning back to slip a knife between my ribs with Nelly screaming “Vasily, the carpet!” (which she didn’t do). The scream I was about to let out like the black slave surprised by Schahzaman, which echoed in my head, now wired or reprogrammed forever. I screamed, within myself:
Rex! Rex! Rex! Rex tremendae majestatis!
Overwhelmed with panic, as in Mozart. Can you believe me?
4
    Now: if time is a discrete or discontinuous magnitude, then tiny spaces must exist between its smallest fractions, little gaps in which no time whatsoever transpires, minute spaces of eternity.
    And someone, a man, who had reasoned out the intermittent structure of time, could take advantage of this, slow his body’s revolutions, discover, beyond a certain point, those interstices, like windows in the air, passageways to eternity, a substrata of nontime in which the hours stand still. Catching up to it there, advancing toward the beginning of my stay in your house, the moment before my arrival, when I should not have knocked on the door, banged the knocker, rung the bell insistently. Or else flying in the opposite direction, toward the plot’s denouement, with all mysteries resolved, its keys laid out in front of me, deciphered.
    Or like the thief of the peaches of longevity, in the Writer, who impassively observes his pursuers, Forcheville and Andrea, hopping with impotence from the other side of the canvas, unable to lay a hand on him. A journey like that, immediate or sudden. Not the one in which I rode along trembling, from the moment Vasily asked me to get into the Mercedes, and we sliced through the air at a thousand miles an hour. Looking, he said, for a place to set me down, the cliff where I’d been with his wife hours earlier, an isolated spot where he could settle accounts with me, because his wife should never, in a burst of sincerity and frankness.
    Let in now on the dirty secret, going to die now because of the dirty secret of that money. Trembling and hating myself for having allowed myself to be softened up and won over by his lovely spouse.
    I thought of Lifa, the only person in the whole house who really loved me. Who, having seen me get into the car, hands behind my back, eyes vacant, would try to contact someone, call the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or the Guardia Civil (it didn’t matter! whichever could reach me first!).
    Out of a mistake on Lifa’s part, a confusion, but that’s fine, I accept it. For she’d taken the Book for that other book and I’d allowed her to retain that belief. The apparent devotion with which I pressed the Book to my heart made her notice it, believing she had discovered in my hands—in the volume in octavo I always held open, toward which I lowered my nose, over which, following the lines, my nose and eyes would move, my brain scanning page after page, tirelessly—a breviary, a Gospel I was reading, far from home, finding myself among strange people and bewildered by my