Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto

my disconcertion, your mother stepped into a jewelry store, with me all unaware of what prompted herto stop in front of the display window (the jeweler’s name etched in a semicircle on the glass), study some of the gems there, and then go inside for a closer look … Sensing that we’d be standing there for some time, I positioned myself next to the doorway in a patch of sunlight which was exactly that yellow color the Writer devotes such beautiful words to in the Book, but which now, in the aim of bothering and confounding Batyk, I used as the pretext for an odious discourse on Ferragamo: how that color, mingled with a lovely blue, would be perfect for a pair of Ferragamos, which is what we should have been looking at, not jewelry, Nelly. (I felt Batyk leaning over my shoulder, stretching out his neck—what shoes? which shoes?—stooping lower myself to make him stumble and fall on the slope of my false interest in fashion, inexplicable in a man like me, as if a matter of such little importance as a pair of shoes could occupy my mind, turn my thoughts aside for one second from what we had gone into that store to do.)
    The adorable dress of layered red muslin your mother wore that day, her hand palm down on her thigh, the better to scrutinize a pink gem in the display case. She raised her eyes, shooting me a meaningful glance beneath another client’s elbow: a diamond, innumerable tiny facets that light could go into and then not find its way out again for one beat or two, until it flashed once more against my eyes, my astonished eyes. I looked up into her eyes without knowing what I was supposed to be seeing there, as if she were a botany teacher who goes on ahead and waits for you beneath a tree on an excursion through a garden. You reach her out of breath, you want to tell her something about the day, the view, but she puts her finger to your lips and asks you with her eyes: “Understand?”
    Yes, Nelly: stones, diamonds, gothic diamonds, marquise diamonds, star diamonds. I don’t want them, have no money for them. Or else (I suddenly stood up straight, looked back into her eyes), or else: “Handover the stone, motherfucker, hand over the stone before my husband gets back and makes you talk. I know you’ve got it. No use pretending …” And I saw in the red of that stone, its blood-filled interior, how easily Batyk could smash my head against the counter, the iron grip of his fingers around my neck, or send me crashing against the reinforced glass. How the shopkeeper would shout, and not because of the glass (bulletproof), which would never break. Giving vent, in that moment of danger, to his anger and indignation, in Korean or Tamil. Meaning: Get out of here you Russian pigs, go kill each other outside.
    I’d give it back. I’d run back to the house, fly up the stairs, take it out from under the mattress. Here you go, Nelly, I never wanted it, you know that, don’t you? Never the slightest intention of keeping it, always meaning to give it back. And I had thought about doing that …
    Easily comprehending, at that moment, my mistake: the mistake of having wanted to steal from the mafia.
    â€œThat’s not true. My mama is not in the mafia.”
    â€œNo, it is true. Just wait.”
    I regretted everything in that fearful moment, entering cold regions full of fear and leaving them for warm regions full of fear. Having taken a position as the tutor of a child as wayward as you, Petya, having focused my thoughts on the wife of a mafioso and spoken of warps in space with your father. All that as I stood at the counter without daring to open my eyes and look at her, without seeing that she’d moved to the back of the store without any of this in her mind, that she hadn’t even noticed the stone was missing. So many stolen diamonds—if a single one fell down and was lost, what did it matter?
    Were there, I wondered immediately—horrors!