Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

  When he was a college student he spent a summer in Florence as a guest of the Actons of La Pietra and at their dinner table in the company of artists and thinkers for whom numbers were meaningless or at best common and therefore beneath consideration he encountered the extraordinarily un-American idea that reality was not something given, not an absolute, but something that men made up, and that values, too, changed according to who was doing the valuing. A world that did not cohere, in which truth did not exist and was replaced by warring versions trying to dominate or even eradicate their rivals, horrified him and, being bad for business, struck him as a thing that needed altering. He named his home La Incoerenza, incoherence in Italian, to remind him daily of what he had learned in Italy, and spent a sizable proportion of his wealth promoting those politicians who held, usually because of genuine or fake religious convictions, that the eternal certainties needing protecting and that monopolies, of goods, information and ideas, were not only beneficial but essential to the preservation of American liberty. In spite of his efforts the world’s incompatibility levels, what Sanford Bliss in his numerical way came to call its index of incoherence, continued inexorably to rise. “If zero is the point of sanity at which two plus two always equals four, and one is the fucked-up place where two and two can add up to any damn thing you want them to be,” he told his daughter Alexandra, the adored child of his old age, born to his last, much more youthful, Siberian wife long after he had given up the dream of an heir, “then, Sandy, I’m sorry to tell you that we are currently located somewhere around zero point nine seven three.”

  When her parents suddenly died, when they fell out of the sky into the East River, the arbitrariness of their end finally proving to Sanford Bliss’s daughter Alexandra that the universe was not only incoherent and absurd but also heartless and soulless, the young orphan inherited everything; and having neither business acumen nor entrepreneurial interest, she immediately negotiated the sale of the Bliss Chows to the Land O’Lakes agricultural cooperative of Minnesota, thus becoming, at nineteen years of age, America’s youngest billionairess. She completed her studies at Harvard, where she revealed an exceptional gift for the acquisition of languages, becoming fluent, by the end of her time at the university, in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, Hungarian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Russian, Pashto, Farsi, Arabic, and Tagalog, she picked them up in no time, people said in wonderment, like shiny pebbles on a beach; and she picked up a man too, the usual penniless Argentine polo player, a healthy slice of beef from the estancias named Manuel Fariña, picked him up and dropped him fast, married and quickly divorced. She kept his name, turned vegetarian, and sent him packing. After her divorce she retreated forever into the seclusion of La Incoerenza. Here she began her long inquiry into pessimism, inspired by both Schopenhauer and Nietzche, and, convinced of the absurdity of human life and the incompatibility of happiness and freedom, settled while still in the first bloom of youth into a lifetime of solitude and gloom, cloistered in abstraction and dressed in close-fitting white lace. Ella Elfenbein Manezes referred to her, with more than a little scorn, as the Lady Philosopher, and the name stuck, at least in Mr. Geronimo’s head.

  There was a streak of masochistic stoicism in the Lady Philosopher, and in bad weather she was often to be found out of doors, ignoring the wind and drizzle or rather accepting them as truthful representatives of the growing hostility of the earth towards its occupants, sitting under an old spreading oak reading a damp book by Unamuno or Camus. The rich are obscure to us, finding ways to be unhappy when all the normal causes of unhappiness are removed. But unhappiness had touched the Lady Philosopher. Her parents were killed in their private helicopter. An elite death but at the moment of dying we are all penniless. She never spoke of it. It would be generous to understand her behavior, willful, remote, abstract, as her way of expressing grief.

  The Hudson at the end of its journey is a “drowned river,” its fresh water pushed beneath the incoming salt tides of the sea. “Even the goddamn river makes no sense,” Sanford Bliss told his daughter. “Look how often it flows the wrong goddamn way.” The Indians had called it Shatemuc, the river that flows both ways. On the banks of the drowned river La Incoerenza likewise resisted order. Mr. Geronimo was called in to help. His reputation as a gardener and landscape artist had grown, and he was recommended to her manager, an avuncular British grizzlechops named Oliver Oldcastle with the beard of Karl Marx, a voice like a bassoon, a drink problem, and a Father Jerry–style Catholic upbringing that had left him loving the Bible and loathing the Church. Oldcastle ushered Mr. Geronimo into the grounds, looking like God showing Adam into Eden, and charged him with the task of bringing horticultural coherence to the place. When Mr. Geronimo started working for the Lady Philosopher tangles of thorns filled the ha-ha at the bottom of the garden as if surrounding a sleeping beauty’s castle. Obstinate voles burrowed underground and popped up everywhere, ruining the lawns. Foxes raided the chicken coops. If Mr. Geronimo had run into a snake coiled around a branch of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he wouldn’t have been surprised. The Lady Philosopher shrugged delicately at the state of things. She was barely twenty then but already spoke with the pitiless formality of a dowager. “To bring a country place to heel,” the orphan châtelaine of La Incoerenza stiffly said, “one must kill and kill and kill, one must destroy and destroy. Only after years of mayhem can a measure of stable beauty be achieved. This is the meaning of civilization. Your eyes, however, are soft. I fear you may not be the murderer I need. But anyone else would probably be just as bad.”

  Because of her belief in the growing weakness and increasing incompetence of the human race in general, she agreed to put up with Mr. Geronimo, and suffer with a sigh the consequent imperfections of her land. She retreated into thought and left Mr. Geronimo to the war of the thorns and voles. His failures went unnoticed, his successes earned him no praise. A deadly oak blight struck the region, threatening Alexandra’s beloved trees; he followed the example of scientists on the country’s far western coast who were coating or injecting oaks with a commercial fungicide that kept the fatal pathogen, Phytophthora ramorum, at bay. When he told his employer that the treatment had succeeded and all her oaks were saved, she shrugged and turned away, as if to say, Something else will kill them soon enough.

  Ella Manezes and the Lady Philosopher, both young, smart and beautiful, could have become friends, but did not: what Ella called Alexandra’s “negativity,” her insistence, when challenged by the ever-hopeful Ella, that it was “impossible, at this point in history, to adopt a hopeful view of humanity,” drove them apart. Ella sometimes accompanied Mr. Geronimo to La Incoerenza and walked the grounds while he worked, or stood atop the estate’s single green hill watching the river pass by in the wrong direction; and it was on that hill, seven years after her father died, that she too was hit by lightning out of a clear sky, and died on the spot. Among the many aspects of her death that Mr. Geronimo found unbearable was this: that of the two beauties at La Incoerenza that day, the lightning had singled out the optimist for death, and had let the pessimist live.

  The phenomenon colloquially known as a “bolt from the blue” works like this: the lightning flash emanates from the rear of a thundercloud and travels as many as twenty-five miles away from the storm area, then angles down and strikes the ground, or a tall building, or a lone tree in a high place, or a woman standing alone on a hilltop watching the river pass by. The storm from which it came is too far away to be seen. But the woman on the hilltop can be seen, falling slowly to the ground, like a feather complying, very reluctantly, with the law of gravity.

  Mr. Geronimo thought of her dark eyes, the right eye with its floaters that hampered her sight. He conjured up her talkativeness, thinking of how she always had an opinion about everything, and wondering what he would do without her opinions now. He remembered how she hated to be photographed and listed in his thoughts all the foods she would
n’t eat, meat, fish, eggs, dairy, tomatoes, onions, garlic, gluten, almost everything there was. And he wondered again if lightning was stalking his family; and if, by marrying into that family, Ella had called down the curse upon herself; and if he might be next in line. In the weeks that followed he began to study lightning as never before. When he learned that nine-tenths of the people who were struck by lightning survived, sometimes developing mysterious ailments, but managing to live on, he understood that lightning really had it in for Bento and his girl. Lightning wasn’t letting them off the hook. Maybe it was because he had convinced himself that he wouldn’t stand a chance if lightning ever came for him that even after he was caught in the great storm that first day, even after he discovered that his feet were suffering from the mysterious ailment of refusing to touch the ground, it took him a long time to think the obvious thought.

  “Maybe lightning hit me during the hurricane and I lived but it wiped my memory clean so I didn’t remember being hit. And maybe I’m now carrying around some sort of insane electric charge and that’s why I’ve lifted off the surface of the earth.”

  He didn’t think that until quite a while later, when Alexandra Fariña suggested it.

  He asked the Lady Philosopher if he might bury his wife on her beloved green hill overlooking the drowned river and Alexandra said yes, of course. So he dug his wife’s grave and laid her in it and for a moment he was angry. Then there was an end to anger and he shouldered his shovel and went home alone. On the day his wife died he had worked at La Incoerenza for two years, eight months and twenty-eight days. One thousand days and one day. There was no escape from the curse of numbers.

  Ten more years passed. Mr. Geronimo dug and planted and watered and pruned. He gave life and saved it. In his mind every bloom was her, every hedge and every tree. In his work he kept her alive and there was no room for anyone else. But slowly she faded. His plants and trees resumed their membership of the vegetable kingdom and ceased to be her avatars. It was as though she had left him again. After this second departure there was only emptiness and he was certain the void could never be filled. For ten years he lived in a sort of blur. The Lady Philosopher, wrapped as she was in theories, dedicated to the triumph of the worst-case scenario while eating truffled pasta and breaded veal, her head full of the mathematical formulae that provided the scientific basis for her pessimism, became herself a sort of abstraction, his chief source of income and no more. It continued to be difficult not to blame her for being the one who lived, whose survival, at the cost of his wife’s life, had not persuaded her to be grateful for her good luck and brighten her attitude to life. He looked at the land and at what grew upon it and could not raise his eyes to absorb the human being whose land it was. For ten years after his wife died he kept his distance from the Lady Philosopher, nursing his secret anger.

  After a time, if you had asked him what Alexandra Bliss Fariña looked like, he would have been unable to answer with any precision. Her hair was dark like his late wife’s. She was tall, like his late wife. She didn’t like sitting in sunlight. Nor had Ella. It was said she walked her grounds at night because of her lifelong battle with insomnia. Her other employees, Manager Oldcastle and the rest, spoke of the persistent health problems that perhaps caused, or at least contributed to, her air of profound gloom. “So young, and so often sick,” Oldcastle said. He used the antique word consumption: tuberculosis, the sickness of little tubers. The potato is a tuber and there are flowers like dahlias whose fleshy roots, properly called rhizomes, are known as tubers too. Mr. Geronimo had no expertise in the tubercles that formed in human lungs. Those were issues for the house to deal with. He was out in the open. The plants he tended contained the spirit of his deceased wife. The Lady Philosopher was a phantom, though she, and not Ella, was the one who was still alive.

  Alexandra never published under her own name, or in the English language. Her pseudonym of choice was “El Criticón,” taken from the title of the seventeenth-century allegorical novel by Baltasar Gracián which had greatly influenced her idol Schopenhauer, greatest of all pessimist thinkers. The novel was about the impossibility of human happiness. In a much-derided Spanish-language essay, The Worst of All Possible Worlds, “El Criticón” proposed the theory, widely ridiculed as sentimental, that the rift between the human race and the planet was approaching a tipping point, an ecological crisis that was metamorphosing into an existential one. Her academic peers patted her on the head, congratulated her on her command of castellano, and dismissed her as an amateur. But after the time of the strangenesses she would be seen as a kind of prophetess.

  (Mr. Geronimo thought Alexandra Fariña’s use of pseudonyms and foreign languages indicated an uncertainty about the self. Mr. Geronimo too suffered from his own kind of ontological insecurity. At night, alone, he looked at the face in the mirror and tried to see the young chorister “Raffy-’Ronnimus-the-pastor’s-sonnimus” there, struggling to imagine the path not taken, the life not led, the other fork in the forked path of life. He could no longer imagine it. Sometimes he filled up with a kind of rage, the fury of the uprooted, the un-tribed. But mostly he no longer thought in tribal terms.)

  The indolence of her days, the delicacy of her china, the elegance of her high-necked lace dresses, the amplitude of her estate and her carelessness regarding its condition, her fondness for marrons glacés and Turkish delight, the leather-bound aristocracy of her library, and the floral-patterned prettiness of the journals in which she made her almost military assault on the possibility of joy should have hinted to her why she was not taken seriously beyond the walls of La Incoerenza. But her small world was enough for her. She cared nothing for the opinions of strangers. Reason could not and would never triumph over savage, undimmed unreason. The heat-death of the universe was inevitable. Her glass of water was half empty. Things fell apart. The only proper response to the failure of optimism was to retreat behind high walls, walls in the self as well as in the world, and to await the inevitability of death. Voltaire’s fictional optimist, Dr. Pangloss, was, after all, a fool, and his real-life mentor, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, was in the first place a failure as an alchemist (in Nuremberg he had not managed to transmute base metal into gold), and in the second place a plagiarist (vide the damaging accusation leveled at Leibniz by associates of Sir Isaac Newton—that he, G. W. Leibniz, inventor of the infinitesimal calculus, had sneaked a look at Newton’s work on that subject and pinched the Englishman’s ideas). “If the best of all possible worlds is one in which another thinker’s ideas can be purloined,” she wrote, “then perhaps it would be better after all to accept Dr. Pangloss’s advice, and withdraw to cultivate one’s garden.”

  She did not cultivate her garden. She employed a gardener.

  It was a long time since Mr. Geronimo had considered sex, but recently, he had to confess, the subject had begun to cross his thoughts again. At his age such thinking veered towards the theoretical, the practical business of finding and conjoining with an actual partner being, given the ineluctable law of tempus fugit, a thing of the past. He hypothesized that there were more than two sexes, that in fact each human being was a gender unique to himself or herself, so that maybe new personal pronouns were required, better words than he or she. Obviously it was entirely inappropriate. Amid the infinity of sexes there were a very few sexes with which one could have congress, who wished to join one in congress, and with some of those sexes one was briefly compatible, or compatible for a reasonable length of time before the process of rejection began as it does in transplanted hearts or livers. In very rare cases one found the other sex with whom one was compatible for life, permanently compatible, as if the two sexes were the same, which perhaps, according to this new definition, they were. Once in his life he had found that perfect gender and the odds against doing so again were prohibitive, not that he was looking, not that he ever would. But here, now, in the aftermath of the storm, as he stood on the sea of mud full of the indestructible shit of the past, or, to be precise
, as he somehow failed to stand on that sea, hovering just a fraction above it, just high enough to allow a sheet of paper to pass without difficulty under his boots, now, as he wept for the death of his imagination and was filled with fears and doubts on account of the failure of gravity in his immediate vicinity, at this absolutely inappropriate moment, here was his employer, the Lady Philosopher, the fodder heiress Alexandra Bliss Fariña, beckoning to him from her French windows.

  Mr. Geronimo arriving at the French windows noted the estate manager Oliver Oldcastle positioned behind Alexandra’s left shoulder. If he had been a hawk, thought Mr. Geronimo, he would have perched upon that shoulder, ready to attack his mistress’s foes and rip their hearts out of their chests. Mistress and servant they stood together, surveying the ruin of La Incoerenza, Oliver Oldcastle looking like Marx observing the fall of Communism, Alexandra her customary enigmatic self in spite of the drying tears on her cheeks. “I can’t complain,” she said, addressing neither Mr. Geronimo nor Manager Oldcastle, rebuking herself as if she were her own governess. “People have lost their homes and have nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep. All I have lost is a garden.” Mr. Geronimo the gardener understood that he was being put in his place. But Alexandra was looking at his boots now. “It’s a miracle,” she said. “Look, Oldcastle, a real miracle. Mr. Geronimo has taken leave of solid ground and moved upwards into, let us say, more speculative territory.”

  Mr. Geronimo wanted to protest that his levitation was neither his doing nor his choice, to make it plain that he would be happy to subside to the ground again and get his boots dirty. But Alexandra had a glitter in her eye. “Were you struck by lightning?” she asked. “Yes, that’s it. Lightning hit you during the hurricane and you lived, but it wiped your memory clean, so you don’t remember being hit. And now you’re filled with an unspeakably large electric charge and that’s why you’ve lifted off the surface of the earth.” This silenced Mr. Geronimo, who considered it gravely. Yes, perhaps. Though in the absence of any evidence it was no more than a supposition. He found it difficult to know what to say but there was nothing he needed to say. “Here’s another miracle,” Alexandra said, and her voice was different now, no longer imperious but confidential. “For most of my life I have set aside the possibility of love, and then, just now, I realized that it was waiting for me right here, at home, outside my French windows, stamping its boots towards the mud, but untouched by that evil filth.” Then she turned and vanished into the shadows of the house.