And pay attention to me here: there’s only this one point I would dispute the Writer on, one thing I don’t agree with: not without there being any merit in me.
I went, I leapt, it was I who leapt. In me, as in one of the Writer’s heros, lies dormant the stuff of which a lord is made—Tuan, he calls it — and which finally organizes itself in the air before falling into that mud, in Patusan, in … the trust, the love, the confidence of the people.
Crowned on my voyage to the sea: at the center, Petya. Speaking to you from the center of the sphere. Assisted by a cloud of instantaneous beings or winged homunculi, the yahoos, they climb high trees as nimbly as a squirrel … with prodigious agility. Small and subjugated devils who would purge the horrible guilt of the treachery of their man Batyk in the court of their fathers, or like captive angels flying to the most remote confines of the sphere. To bring back, in their beaks, fragments and passages of all books, to hold them up in the air before me with profound reverence. All the wisdom of the Book, of all books, before my eyes, infinitely wise, fabulously rich.
Infinitely wise. The generative principle of the Book understood; adding further volumes to the seven initial ones about the Perfect King, confident that perhaps, at a distance of thirty centuries, they would amalgamate into a single book, my clumsy commentaries and allusions to the warm Mediterranean commingled with his infinitely detailed pages on the sea in Normandy. In a single book? In a single book!
And fabulously rich. Because what other proof did I have? What other way of confirming my young life to the emperor of Russia (but you, so young? Yes, me, so young) but the enormous wealth, the unimaginable sum in diamonds that I carried in my pocket like a voyager across time?
Not a flower, as the Commentator falsely states: imagine that, a rose as proof of a journey to paradise! For paradise, as is well known and sustained by the authority of John the Theologian, is thickly strewn with diamonds, the stones he cites with undeniable pleasure in the final pages of the Book: jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonyx, sardius, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, jacinth, amethyst!
What would you bring back, Petya, from a journey through time? A rose? Or diamonds stitched into the hem of your coat that — when the friends who had gathered for a banquet in your honor reacted with incredulity to your story, all you had seen and heard in China — you would produce before their disbelieving eyes, as Marco Polo did in 1295, the final argument of the diamonds he poured out from the unstitched lining of his coat or caftan?
So that those present opened their mouths in wonder and shouted: a million! Which is what that Book is titled, the fifth I cite here, in accordance with Valentinian’s rule for commentary: no more than five authors.
Millions in diamonds! Just like me. The best and only proof of my journey through time. Remember when you asked me: What is the Book about? What is its subject? And I told you, I answered: It’s about money, about how to make money. But now I can tell you this, too — for according to an old saying in the country where I am now, time is money—it is also about time. In search of lost money? (No, that would be vulgar and loathsome. Better to seek time.) You’re right, Petya. Time.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Rex is the third and final installment in a trilogy that began with Enciclopedia de una vida en Rusia (Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia; 1997) and Livadia, or Mariposas nocturnas del imperio ruso (1999; published in English translation as Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire, 2000). A few clarifications strike me as pertinent. With all three novels, I’ve tried to go beyond the realism commonly associated with the autobiographical novel (which all three are), yet not toward magic or magical realism, but rather toward science and a kind of magico-scientific realism, if such a thing is possible. Everything in this book, strange or outlandish as it may seem, is strictly factual and was exhaustively researched, in particular the plot line involving the manufacture of synthetic diamonds. The same is true of the many references to quantum physics, including matters as remote from a child’s mind as Bohm’s paradox of the fish, and terms taken from black-hole theory such as spatial rupture, singularity, event horizons, stalled light, etc.
It is not by chance, either, that Petya is the listener and sole recipient of the story; the whole tone of the book derives from that fact. Rex returns to the free fabulations of childhood, and the tales of Psellus, the tutor, are an amalgamation of all the books he read as a youth or a child, out of which he improvises for Petya a highly adorned story of his parents’ life, a story that otherwise, told in some other way, might have been sordid and terrible.
The primary human theme of this novel is the strategies used to overcome the terrible experience of totalitarianism. Like me, my characters are survivors of the totalitarian catastrophe. Therefore, Rex can be considered a post-totalitarian novel, whose characters are all profoundly disturbed. This explains their obsession with money, as well as their decision to embark upon the impossible adventure of imposture, their embrace of the surprising and implausible idea of relaunching thc Imperial House of Russia.
As many readers will inevitably have noticed, the Writer so frequently alluded to after the Fifth Commentary is not, in fact, Marcel Proust, but an amalgamated figure, much like the one described by Ralph Waldo Emerson when he very rightly says: “I am very much struck in literature by the appearance, that one person wrote all the books; as if the editor of a journal planted his body of reporters in different parts of the field of action, and relieved some by others from time to time; but there is such equality and identity both of judgment and point of view in the narrative, that it is plainly the work of one all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman.”
I believe it important to mention as well that the idea of using manufactured diamonds in a swindle alludes to a little-known work by Marcel Proust, which has only recently been translated into English by Charlotte Mandell in 2008. In a collection of his early writings, gathered under the title Pastiches et mélanges, the future author of the Recherche tells the story of Lemoine, a late-nineteenth-century adventurer who swindled the owner of De Beers and other leading figures in the diamond industry. They paid Lemoine considerable sums to keep him from causing the diamond market to collapse by revealing a secret method of manufacturing diamonds he claimed to have invented. When the swindle was discovered and the whole affair brought to light, a highly publicized trial took place that all Paris followed with utmost interest. Marcel Proust, whose family had a great deal of money invested in De Beers, was particularly caught up by the story and derived from it his idea for the “Pastiches,” which tell the story of Lemoine’s trial as a delectable series of stylistic exercises, composed in the manner of notable French writers such as Flaubert, the Gon-courts, Saint-Simon, etcetera.