3
I didn’t open my mouth for several kilometers. Along that part of the road we ran into a cloud of insects that I took for locusts or African grasshoppers but that turned out to be tiny yellow butterflies. The Writer has a beautiful passage where Swann and Agostinelli enter such a cloud of butterflies and roll along pulverizing them beneath the wheels of their Hispano-Suiza, hearing them crunch and watching them pile up on the windshield until they have to stop the car and clean the small crushed thoraxes off the glass. The sun about to rise on that April morning, still a little chilly, and those butterflies, the golden dust from their wings.
And there was this: the relief that your mother was not a member of the mafia. Impossible that she could be evil, so sweet a woman with whom I’d talked over so many things during the evenings he said he was in Rotterdam. Married to a man who was cheating on her, a man I couldn’t hope to control or set limits on and who was escaping me at top speed, his left eye opening a path for us a few inches above the asphalt. Not taking his eyes off the road for a second, laughing, his eyes surrounded by the bunching wrinkles of a man laughing gleefully to himself. He had a very beautiful lover (I’d seen her), a fast car, and his wrists had grown larger — how could he have failed to be in excellent spirits that morning? Sunrise over the Costa del Sol.
The wrists had appeared suddenly. All the force of his new look, his newfound internal security enlarging his wrists. But I, too, eh? I, too, could hit back at them, could reduce them to nothing, though they had to be taken into account, those wrists. They dovetailed without deviation into his arms or rather his arms fit with greater security and strength into the bridge of those wrists, wider now, more blood could pass along them, more troops, if needed. I could let him stand up, the muscles of his back rippling menacingly, and throw himself confidently onto me, only to catch him in midflight. By the wrists. Not grown so large, Vasily, that I couldn’t encircle them with my thumb and index finger if I wanted. An optical illusion, Vasily, an optical illusion I myself was about to fall victim to. In fact they were not that large or thick, those wrists. Normal wrists. Piece of cake. One: (to the ground). Two: (say uncle?).
“How can you do this to Nelly?” I protested. “I wish I had the Book here, I’d show you; you’ll end up saying to yourself: To think I’ve wasted years of my life, I’ve wanted to die … for a woman who wasn’t my type!”
“Not true,” he snorted. “I’m never going to say that,” not taking his eyes off the road until he did move them for a second, threw a glance at me, and laughed. “No way am I ever saying that, batiushka.”
“Yes, you are, I can’t be mistaken about a thing like this. What’s more, I’m saying it, too. I’m saying it to you: how can you do this to Nelly?”
(Although it wasn’t true, undoubtedly wasn’t true. How could she be a woman who wasn’t my type when she was the perfect blonde, the Platonic ideal of a blonde, an iridium blonde, immune to any variation in temperature, a blonde who was the octagonal seal wrought of gold which, in heaven, imprints its form on all other blondes? How, in what way, could I ever come to regret or conclude I was wasting the best years of my life after dancing with a woman like that?)
And hold on, wait a second: I hadn’t yet heard your father’s proposal.
“They’re counterfeit, aren’t they, Vasily, the diamonds?” I said.
And waited, in the deepest part of my soul, watching through the car window as the steeple began to move, waited for him to answer: No, they’re real.
“They’re counterfeit,” he answered, as we flew home. “But they’ll sell with absolutely no problem, for thousands. There’s no one else in the world who makes them that way, nothing similar.”
“Sell them? How? I had to loan you money just now, back in the disco. Out of cash, Vasily? Washed up?”
“Yes, I noticed that, and allowed you to do it because I love you like a father would,” he lied. “And you’re wrong. I want to show you something.”
4
What does it matter what you see with your own eyes if it isn’t there in the Book, Petya? How to believe in any empirical fact, any phenomenon not sustained by the authority of the Book? Such a thing would cast down the whole edifice of your education and damage the key to my method, which is to supplant a reading of its pages with direct observation, only slightly displacing the Book from its well-deserved position as the one source of knowledge and understanding in the world, healthy and beneficial to our hearts, casting its light on all enigmas and offering us a glimmer of the divine inspiration that engendered it and without whose aid its existence cannot be explained. For how could it have been written by a mere mortal, a Frenchman afflicted with asthma, a man who spent his whole life literally gasping for air and yet produced one million words, 3,500 pages, the most magnificent Book ever written?
I had said to myself, had sagaciously deduced: here’s a man who has invented the phantom menace of a band of gangsters for the benefit of his wife, to make her live in fear of being attacked in a foreign country, ensuring that she won’t dare leave the house unaccompanied, or even accompanied. A city she imagines to be crawling with mafiosi, a nest and refuge of evildoers. All to keep her at home and thus go out with the other woman, a great beauty, Petya, a real pinup. Your mother must never come to understand that the people in the mansion next door are peaceful Jordanians, and the couple in the big empty house at the bottom of the hill are only caretakers, that the same tranquil decency, respectability, and wealth prevails along the entire coast from Algeciras to La Cala. Instead: urban guerillas, low-intensity conflicts, scores to settle — all visions deliberately nourished by your father. It was that simple.
He read it in my face in the way I leaned against the door and studied him incisively for a second, the false danger I, too, had believed we were living in all these months now deciphered. He didn’t find it necessary to make any counterargument, no need to press the point. He bent toward the glove compartment and waited with marked calm for me to take my hand off the panel marked, in tiny letters: air bag. He held that position a moment as if to say: You see? You see how patient I am with you, young man, despite your being an unbearable know-it-all? His eyes laughing again. And he didn’t say — though I’d been expecting him to come out with it all day — he didn’t say: What were you doing seducing my wife? Dancing with her?
He took a case made of buttery leather out of the glove compartment, holding it between thumb and forefinger. The panatelas that a cigar aficionado takes along on a two-day trip in its ridged interior? He tossed it onto my lap and returned his gaze to the road, consulting the speedometer and the time, far too busy to occupy himself with a callow youth like me. Leaving me to the task of understanding why the case, what was inside.
A square of thin fabric that I took out and tugged on, extending its corners: there, rolling around in its depths, were a few small cubes, a few chunks of frozen light, a few diamondlike objects in all colors and forms. More of them and bigger than the ones I’d imagined and even more beautiful and incredible than the ones in your mother’s necklace. Gems, precious stones, their color both intense and diaphanous.
Their light entering my eyes, the most genuine expression of astonishment on my face, as darkness fell along the coast. Emerald greens, blues like the finest sapphires, tender lilacs, ruby reds. Losing track of whole kilometers of the way as I rolled them back and forth across the cloth, unable to read this correctly, leafing through the pages of this book of stone without understanding what passage to delve into, whether, in this case, a literal exegesis of the danger would be adequate — jewels, beautiful women — or whether a more allegorical, Alexandrian interpretation was required: great danger, jewels, beautiful women.