Words that mean or allow for this reading: as I bent over to pick it up I kept my face down and my intentions concealed, aware that there was only one person in your house I could go on talking to, only one person whose company had any appeal. The day of my arrival — horrified by the heavy tassels on the curtains, the ghastly luxury of every aspect of the decor, a garish statue of a turbaned Moor at three-quarters scale perfectly in keeping with all the rest — a change of plans suddenly occurred within me, running precisely counter to my earlier notion of abandoning the whole project. Like a liquid that polarizes, reorders its crystals in a new direction. At the exact moment I met your mother, and after our conversation in the living room, the blue water of the swimming pool sparkling at her back. She opened out before me like a strange new device, deploying all its antennae, setting its vital systems at their highest levels, and then emitting signals to me across the marble tabletop; the consistent breadth of her conversation, the isotropic structure of her intellectual armature sending out a strong signal in any direction you cared to go, an unvarying quality of lively intelligence, penetrating mind, open eyes.
The dress she was wearing that night without expecting any guests, the sobriety and intelligence of everything about her. The Italian furniture and carved ivory had led me to expect an overweight, slack-faced housewife in flowery poplin with enormous breasts at 8:00 p.m., the sort of pampered lady who goes out to buy cigarettes two blocks from her house and you stare at her, thunderstruck with horror, as she steps out of the car and lights up: the lacquered helmet of her hairdo, the antique cell phone on which she gives instructions to the distant executors of her idiotic will.
But no. Quite the contrary. The knee astutely concealed beneath the smooth fabric of the pale dress, the breasts discreet, youthful, the arm farther extended by the pen or pencil she continually pointed at me as she spoke, instructing me on the nature of my pedagogical undertaking, the education she wanted for her son.
And the light source on the index finger of that hand — an enormous stone, all the more tasteful and intelligent for its size, intentionally huge and disproportionate — could be seen, I think now, as the only point of contact between her and the dismaying lady buying cigarettes at the corner store. But she was fresh, without a single false note: the thin, oscillating blade of a clarinet theme introduced in a first movement. That was the tone — slightly masculine, not a flute or a harp doing arpeggios, but steady and delicate, addressing its questions to the heart … And not for one second was I tempted to tell her the truth; I lied as promptly as a chorus of strings and brass responds to the first violin.
4
Which is where the Writer, to whom no error whatsoever can be ascribed, says, a pool. In the sense that those houses, seen from the sky, had seemed mere appendices to their swimming pools, places from which to understand the more important fact of water in the garden. A cliff overlooking the sea, the highest point on the coast, and along it a row of beautiful houses with swimming pools. As if connected, the swimming pools, to the blue mantle of the sea, the wellspring that secretly nourished them and toward which, before ringing the doorbell, I turned back, for another look at the water breaking against the coast, the mist over the beach, the distant cypresses, before returning to the shards of blue ceramic over the gateway. Nothing about that wall spoke to me of the kind of house I feared: people you wouldn’t want to sit next to on a plane, watching them take out their cell phones and petulantly mutter their final instructions before the doors are locked, shooting suspicious looks at your hands on the armrests, openly bellicose. Or, in another scenario: a voice warily inquiring from behind the video screen, a man looking up and down the street in both directions in case I’ve brought along an accomplice, currents of ill will, a graying muscle-man ceaselessly tickling the ivories in the shadowy bar, flashy suits swarming across the garden.
But no: the best impression. The sight of the pool sparkling across the lawn stopped me in my tracks, amazed. Not only connected among themselves, those pools, by some subterranean aquifer, but also in constant communication with the sea: the same slow ebb and flow, the same majesty. The striped bathrobe my first paycheck would buy me, a small percentage of my first paycheck. A lifestyle with ample space for the sea, striped bathrobes, the servant or butler who waited, motionless, with pronounced courtesy, for the two halves of the gate, pulled by the mechanical arm mounted on the wall, to move back into place, that second or two, without polite phrases or words of any kind, while the heavy iron plate rolls along its tracks and the five bolts are locked once more, your host checking them by sweeping his open fingers across them. Turning back toward me now, asking me, perhaps (I don’t remember) about my trip. Feigning friendliness and good manners and reawakening my distaste, my fear of objectionable companions. And then the horrendous luxury that inundated that house when I reached the glass wall, pushed back a curtain the breeze kept throwing in my face, and wondered, once inside, whether to put my bag down on the carpet, my bag containing the Book, which I hadn’t stopped reading the whole flight until we began our descent and I looked out the window and discovered that there were blue circles next to the houses instead of the patches of cultivated green you see farther north.
5
None too sure, true, that I could do anything to diminish the idiocy television had wrought in the child’s mind, like a vinyl disk scratched by an oversized needle, twenty-five inches wide: that was the width of the shaft of light the TV set projected onto him. Though I hasten to add: the time within which he has lived. Words to be read here as meaning: I would be able to tutor a child. But not, for example, an old man, walled up within habits acquired in the navy (the loathsome navy) — you leave the service thinking you’ll never again tap the key or probe the heavens for a signal, but then you see an advertisement for a Morse code operator at a base in Fiji and circle it, and there you are three weeks later in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt having a lazy smoke in the radio shack as you shuffle along in Vietnamese flip-flops, rubber soles slapping the floor.
An intelligent boy, a clever boy, Petya: you. Who after letting me talk for a moment immediately understood what was up. Understood the method I’d chosen to educate him. Was able to understand instantaneously when he saw me linger over that phrase, in a passage, I told him, that illustrated to perfection what I had to say. Because somewhere the Writer explains that human ignorance, or, rather, human stupidity, is like the ocean cleaved by the keel of a ship, which is intelligence. And when traveling on that ship, one has the impression that something, a path, is opening up through the mass of stupidity (and human ignorance), but behind the ship the waters rejoin in an embrace that bears no trace of the ship’s passage, no more than a light tremor, the white froth of the wake, and then, a quarter of a mile later, nothing. He looked at me, then: he understood that only thus, with the Book.
I was a young man of some self-possession, not a governess cast adrift in the world with all the amorous disappointments of her short life heaving in her bosom. The wisdom, in my case, of a reader of the Book: I was a calm and balanced man, very stable and aware of his place in time, the most recent watermark at the level of twenty-nine years — my age when I appeared at your door with the Book in my hand and a clear mission to save you, Petya, to save the boy I found sitting cross-legged, Turkish fashion, the whole of his insides intricately wired from his blond head to the pads of his fingertips. Pushing the right button and toppling the monsters without blinking, without a second’s hesitation. The flautist (in the Writer) replaced here by an abhorrent being, a perverse dwarf with the deceptively simpleminded look of a mustachioed plumber and an unnatural way of leaping, as if about to levitate, when he tried to smash his big monkey wrench down on the small points of light circling through the air in the illuminated kingdom of Nintendo. And always another of those points of light emitting sparks over the doorway or in a hollow of the wall, showing the way forward to the next level of complexity.