Read Online Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jose Manuel Prieto
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her hair rippling, my linen shirt loose. There was a moment when we reached the house and she finally turned to me and broke her silence, resolving to let me into the secret, moving me or roughly ejecting me from the safe and peaceful time where I was moving (or floating) into nights criss-crossed by white gunfire beneath a red rain. With blinding clarity. Only there, her eyes told me, only beneath that rain could I kiss her, only if I came to meet her there, leaving the island of dry air within which I walked.
Stopped there, having come full circle: on one side, my scant monthly salary as a tutor, my commentaries on the Book, the arid landscape of Spain glimpsed through a door in a wall. And on the other side, Petya,without words, without any need to use all the words Iâm expending on you, a golden woman beneath a red rain. And even more diamonds among the garden grass. Diamonds revolving octahedrally in the air. Which one would you have opened, which door? Even if you knew a tiger was lurking beyond the frame, waiting to pounce?
Fourth Commentary
1
There are writers I
can
mention by their names, minor writers like H. G. Wells. A contemporary of the Writer, a man who also pondered and addressed himself to the subject of time. But in a clumsier, more mechanistic way, not like the Writer, who imagined a more subtle procedure for transporting himself into the past and recovering lost days. A state he summoned upâas everyone knowsâby means of certain magic potions, certain mushrooms or fungi he kept in the pocket of his artistâs smock and which, whenever he wished to travel back to his childhood and reconquer a day that was lost, he needed only to nibble, as if they were crusts of time itself (not madeleines as in the common misconception and not lime flower tisane, either) that took him immediately back to the segment of the past from which those mushrooms, those potions, came.
Not given over to daydreams, either, like an opium smoker luxuriantly sprawled on a cloud, as was fallaciously proposed by that predecessor of the Commentator (De Quincey), to whom the Commentator owes, let it be noted in passing, almost all of his tone, his subject matter, and his cynicism. A man cynically installed at the very height of a literature upon which he commented as if from the bottom of a barrel. Or like Diogenes, the cynic. And all of these opium eaters, all these minor writers or commentators, have claimed to travel in time or have pretended to travel in time and bring back smooth, round memories, rubies and sapphires, recovered without difficulty.
Only the Writer discerned, amid the blue-green mass of the past, between the sinuous, oscillating lines of lost memory, time itself. And saw that the past is made up not of hard, tangible memories that can be recovered at will, but of vague blue and violet memoriesânot red, not hard nuggets. And he conceived of writing a detailed report that he inserted into a chapter of the Book where he mentions in passing, without its being his primary concern, the solution he arrived at to the technical matter of time travel. And to ensure that it would more easily reach the minds of dull readers (that is, of the public) he used the words âlost timeâ (etcetera) in the title of his book. A book, he seemed to be saying, that also attempted to offer a solution to the question, so much in vogue during his era, of time travel. A man who wasnât afraid to resort to a small deception, a minor imposture, in order to advance a project, oiling it just enough so that it could be introduced with minor friction or noise into the minds of his contemporaries. Later the Book would be cleansed of it; the more intelligent men of coming generations would know that this, the matter of time travel, was not the subject of the Book, was only mentioned in passing. And what was his subject? Everything, all things, all men, the greatest book ever written, a summation of all experience â¦
Stopped there, having come full circle: on one side, my scant monthly salary as a tutor, my commentaries on the Book, the arid landscape of Spain glimpsed through a door in a wall. And on the other side, Petya,without words, without any need to use all the words Iâm expending on you, a golden woman beneath a red rain. And even more diamonds among the garden grass. Diamonds revolving octahedrally in the air. Which one would you have opened, which door? Even if you knew a tiger was lurking beyond the frame, waiting to pounce?
Fourth Commentary
1
There are writers I
can
mention by their names, minor writers like H. G. Wells. A contemporary of the Writer, a man who also pondered and addressed himself to the subject of time. But in a clumsier, more mechanistic way, not like the Writer, who imagined a more subtle procedure for transporting himself into the past and recovering lost days. A state he summoned upâas everyone knowsâby means of certain magic potions, certain mushrooms or fungi he kept in the pocket of his artistâs smock and which, whenever he wished to travel back to his childhood and reconquer a day that was lost, he needed only to nibble, as if they were crusts of time itself (not madeleines as in the common misconception and not lime flower tisane, either) that took him immediately back to the segment of the past from which those mushrooms, those potions, came.
Not given over to daydreams, either, like an opium smoker luxuriantly sprawled on a cloud, as was fallaciously proposed by that predecessor of the Commentator (De Quincey), to whom the Commentator owes, let it be noted in passing, almost all of his tone, his subject matter, and his cynicism. A man cynically installed at the very height of a literature upon which he commented as if from the bottom of a barrel. Or like Diogenes, the cynic. And all of these opium eaters, all these minor writers or commentators, have claimed to travel in time or have pretended to travel in time and bring back smooth, round memories, rubies and sapphires, recovered without difficulty.
Only the Writer discerned, amid the blue-green mass of the past, between the sinuous, oscillating lines of lost memory, time itself. And saw that the past is made up not of hard, tangible memories that can be recovered at will, but of vague blue and violet memoriesânot red, not hard nuggets. And he conceived of writing a detailed report that he inserted into a chapter of the Book where he mentions in passing, without its being his primary concern, the solution he arrived at to the technical matter of time travel. And to ensure that it would more easily reach the minds of dull readers (that is, of the public) he used the words âlost timeâ (etcetera) in the title of his book. A book, he seemed to be saying, that also attempted to offer a solution to the question, so much in vogue during his era, of time travel. A man who wasnât afraid to resort to a small deception, a minor imposture, in order to advance a project, oiling it just enough so that it could be introduced with minor friction or noise into the minds of his contemporaries. Later the Book would be cleansed of it; the more intelligent men of coming generations would know that this, the matter of time travel, was not the subject of the Book, was only mentioned in passing. And what was his subject? Everything, all things, all men, the greatest book ever written, a summation of all experience â¦
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