A Trip to the Stars

  I liked Labusi from the moment I met him, despite the fact he could be irascible, cranky, and incredibly aloof. He was also generous to a fault, not with money or affection or even with his time, but with that most valuable of rare materials: his knowledge. As far as knowledge went, he was one of the wealthiest men I ever encountered.

  The day Samax took me into the library on the third floor of the hotel to introduce us, Labusi was bent over a semicircle of opened books, making notes on an index card. A thickset, swarthy man with close-cropped gray hair, he was in his mid-fifties at that time, a month after my arrival at the hotel. You had to watch his brown eyes for a long time—and I often did—to see him blink. He had identical moles beside each eye, which could be disconcerting, as he once told me they had been to his chess opponents; by falling in a perfectly straight line with his pupils, they gave the illusion at times that there were, not two, but four pupils fixed on you.

  I felt that way when he looked me over quickly, shook my hand, and in a deep, measured voice, said, “Diogenes of Sinope wrote, ‘If, as they say, I am only an ignorant man trying to be a philosopher, then that may be what a philosopher is.’ Do you understand that, Master Enzo?”

  I thought about it, screwing up my eyes. Then I nodded.

  “Good,” Labusi said, more to Samax than to me.

  Thus, in our very first conversation he was laying the cornerstone for his ultimate lesson to me.

  “Now,” he went on, “do you know who Diogenes was?”

  I shook my head.

  “His home in Athens was a tub. People called him The Dog. He was the son of a forger. Famous for wandering the streets with a lantern, searching for an honest man, he claimed he never found one. He died a slave. Would you like to know more about him?”

  “Yes, I would.” I noticed that Labusi had a triangular chip in his two top front teeth which made certain words—all those beginning with s, z, or a soft c—slip off his tongue trailed by the faintest whistle.

  “Diogenes advises,” he continued, “that a boy should first be taught poetry, history, and philosophy. Then geometry and music. Your uncle says you’re ready for that and more.”

  “I am ready.” Slipping my hands in my pockets, I shifted my weight from one leg to the other. “Excuse me, Mr. Labusi, but I have a question.”

  “Oh?”

  “Why did they call him The Dog?” I asked.

  Labusi smiled.

  “Yes, why?” Samax said.

  “Because he lived with a pack of stray dogs,” Labusi replied. “In Greek, the word for ‘stray dog’ is cynic. At the same time, Diogenes also invented the word cosmopolitan, insisting that he was a citizen, not of any state, but of the world.” Turning back to his semicircle of books, he said, “Enzo, I’ll see you tomorrow morning at eight.”

  So in lieu of the Las Vegas public school system, of which Samax held a low opinion, and the nearby private schools, which he considered stiflers of the imagination and spirit, for ten months of the year I spent six hours a day five days a week—as required by county law—in a reading room off the library being tutored by Labusi. In all the years he tutored me, we missed maybe a dozen days, and then only because I had the flu or chicken pox or because he had an acute gout attack. And gradually, through his anecdotes and object lessons, I came to learn his personal history, too.

  Born in Cyprus, educated in London, twice married and divorced as a young man, Labusi was one of those guests who had come to the hotel for a visit years before and never left. Samax had first met him in Cairo where Labusi was part of a research project at the mnemonics institute attached to the university. Just as he had been comfortable in a desert climate in Cairo, Labusi had found Las Vegas—a city in all other ways so different!—very much to his liking. He played the cello for his own pleasure, usually alone, in his two-room suite, and he would only listen to music if it was performed live, never on a stereo or tape recorder. So he subscribed religiously to what few concert opportunities presented themselves in Las Vegas and at least twice a month took the train into Los Angeles—he didn’t like airplanes—to hear visiting symphony orchestras. He no longer competed in chess professionally, but with his memory skills he could still play twelve simultaneous games while blindfolded. With Samax he often played three such games at a time, and on occasion Samax would win one of the three. Labusi always kept a small bowl of rosemary beside him when he played, and stuffed porous bags of it in his jacket pockets; renowned for its memory-nourishing properties, rosemary was his other great addiction. He even put a few drops of rosemary oil in his hair every morning.

  A typical six hours under Labusi’s tutelage consisted of the following, which more than satisfied, and often astonished, the inspectors who came around annually from the Las Vegas Board of Education, and certainly would have impressed Diogenes himself: in varying doses, mathematics, geography, geology, world history (with an emphasis on the ancients), mythology (Greek, Chinese, Scandinavian), zoology, and musicology. In addition, Labusi presented me with an outline of the Pythagorean doctrines, but under clear strictures laid down by Samax, who wanted me to examine philosophy and religion in good time like everything else, without prejudice. Nevertheless, knowing of the subject’s personal importance to Labusi, I listened with particular attentiveness when he spoke of Pythagoras, a Greek born twenty-six centuries ago on the island of Samos.

  In order to “tend and purify” the soul, Labusi instructed me, Pythagoras’s followers practiced silence for long stretches, studied mathematics and astronomy, and trancelike drew musical harmonies into the depths of their inner selves. They were strict vegetarians, also avoiding beans (Labusi took his caffeine, not from cocoa or coffee, but black Russian tea), who believed in the mystical significance of numbers, the eternal recurrence of events, and in metempsychosis, which he succinctly explained to me one afternoon.

  “Have you ever felt suddenly,” he began, “as if you were seeing or hearing something with which you were familiar, though you were sure you had never seen or heard it before? ‘Déjà vu,’ some people call it, as if it were a parlor game. But serious people, including Buddhists, who also believe in the transmigration of souls, insist the phenomenon represents a memory from a former life. Pythagoras once ordered a man in the street who was beating a dog to desist at once, saying he heard in the dog’s yelps the voice of a deceased friend. Our bodies die, but he believed our souls at death enter another human being or an animal. That is why he abhorred eating an animal’s flesh. It is also why he said that when we encounter a person or creature who reminds us of someone we once knew, it is that person, in another earthly form.”

  Because I had noted certain human characteristics, and high intelligence, in my dog Sirius—who had been given to me by Calzas—this notion did not strike me as particularly bizarre. Far stranger to me was the idea that when our bodies die, our souls, still somehow in human form, travel straight to either heaven or hell. When everyone, without exception, as Samax liked to point out, was an uneasy, ever-shifting amalgam of saint and sinner, how—by what determination—could it be such an either/or proposition in the end? At any rate, at one point, for a week, I attempted heavy purification of my soul, to better the quality of my subsequent lives. (For someone like me, who even at thirteen felt he had already moved in and out of several lives, this notion that there were more to come also did not seem far-fetched.) I enjoyed silent meditation, having in all my lives been an only child, listened to plenty of music from Bach to hard rock (electronically, alas), and was good at mathematics, but my vegetarianism soon lapsed and I liked Mexican cooking, to which Calzas had introduced me, far too much to give up beans for very long.

  But Labusi planted some important seeds, which would come to fruition later in my life.

  “Pythagoras’s school peaked and then disappeared from view in the fourth century B.C.,” he concluded his instruction, “but he has always had his followers. In the first century A.D., they revived his doctrines, enriched in Egypt by the wi
sdom of Hermes Trismegistus, the father of astrology and alchemy, who some say could travel to the stars at will. Out of this fusion of Greek and Egyptian mystical beliefs grew Gnosticism, which is, at heart, salvation through self-knowledge. Something the Zunis understand well.” He put his finger to my chest. “In short, Enzo, look in here for your gods.”

  But even with all the time I spent under Labusi’s tutelage, Samax covered some areas of my education himself, tutoring me in the subjects dearest to his own heart: Latin and art history, and more informally but no less seriously, botany and pomology, about which we had long, ongoing conversations while working in the greenhouse or the orchard.

  Self-taught himself, Samax was an eccentric but surprisingly effective teacher of Latin. Every evening except Friday, which was his personal day of rest, we met for an hour of intensive instruction. At first, he put me through the usual exercises, with the same focus and rigor he might have brought to instructing me in the catechism, had that been one of his passions. I memorized declensions and conjugations, explored the nuances of moods and tenses, the thickets of irregular verbs, and the tricky byways of the subjunctive. I learned to distinguish between gerunds and gerundives and I mastered the ablative absolute. And there were other fine points to which Samax taught me to be attentive. For example, the fact the English word desert comes from the Latin desertare, as in “to desert,” and means, not an empty, but an abandoned place. A distinction which caused me to look at the desert in an entirely different way.

  This was the way it went for the first two years, until I had the fundamentals of Latin down; after that, we read the schoolboy staples—Julius Caesar, Cicero, and Catullus—and by the time I turned thirteen, my assignments reflected Samax’s idiosyncratic tastes: Sallust and Lucretius and selections from the thirty-eight books of Pliny’s Natural History.

  As with all the important activities in his life, Samax was ritualistic about these tutoring sessions. We always sat across from each other at one end of the long marble reading table in his private library, which was off-limits to everyone except by invitation. The other end of the table was usually piled high with books newly arrived in the mail as well as Samax’s correspondence with various art dealers, museums, and university libraries. I was perched on the edge of a leather-cushioned, high-back chair beneath which I often slipped off my shoes. The base of the lamp before me was a jade carving of a sea nymph standing atop a wave. Her body was green jade and her eyes and hair were white jade. In her hand she clutched a fishing net filled with books. Her face was serene, and on some days her lips seemed to curve up into a smile. The lamp shade itself was hand-painted, depicting a vivid seascape for 360°. It cast a wide circle of amber light in which Samax arrayed the books we would use. There were the two well-thumbed grammar books, now bound in green leather, from which he himself had learned the language, the red Loeb Library editions of the texts, and a dictionary the size of a telephone directory. We each had a lined yellow pad, and I wrote out my vocabulary lists, exercises, and translations in red ink with the red fountain pen that had belonged to my mother. I would always associate writing in Latin with that ink and the nymph’s smile and the seascape on the lamp shade, a turquoise expanse flashing with whitecaps, which I stared at whenever I paused to work out a phrase in my head. If the problem took me long enough, I felt as if I could hear the muffled breaking of those waves and smell the salt spray in the air. During our early sessions, Samax, in a cashmere cardigan and glove-leather slippers, would quiz me at a steady clip, insisting I write out my answers.

  “Give me the third-person plural, pluperfect subjunctive of moneo,” he’d intone, and in my large, overly neat hand I would write monuissent. “The accusative plural of lux,” and I would write luces. When translating, he operated methodically, unraveling sentences as if they were threads he had pulled from a particularly dense fabric. He found satisfaction in translating, I think, as some people do in crossword puzzles or riddles, unlocking meanings, making connections, discovering how an initially indecipherable jumble of words worked in simple harmony. Running his thumbnail over his moustache, pulling at his chin, he once said to me, “A good translator is a detective, solving a mystery that has already been solved many times before and making it feel like a revelation.”

  At the end of each session, Samax would have me read him a passage from some text—Virgil or Livy—that was still too difficult for me to take on, so the sounds and rhythms of the language would become familiar to me. He was especially pleased when I began to translate bits and pieces of these passages, and then to commit them to memory.

  When it came to art history, Samax’s instruction, like his tastes, was even more eclectic. He was constantly acquiring new works, and in the passion of the moment, it was they, and not paintings or sculptures he had possessed for many years, that he wanted to discuss with me. For example, when I was twelve he went through a phase of amassing all the Cycladic and pre-Minoan stone figures he could lay his hands on. For months they dominated his monologues to me about sculpture more than any Rodin or Brancusi, including the ones he owned. When he discovered a cache of Vermeer miniatures, the discussion of Rembrandt and Titian which had been absorbing us went by the wayside. And it was always monologues he delivered—more like a museum guide than a teacher—hands thrust in his pockets, chin grazing his chest, as we strolled around the rooms in the hotel, where the cream of his treasures was on display, or the warehouse downtown where he kept the rest. It was amazing to me, when I thought back on it later, that I got my art history, not from slides or photographs in coffee-table books, but from viewing the objects firsthand, close enough to touch.

  The pockets of mini-collections within Samax’s larger collection ran the gamut: delicate Japanese scroll paintings from the Edo period, early Russian ikons from monasteries in eastern Siberia, West African wood carvings, mosaics from Syria, Matisse’s pen-and-ink notebooks from Morocco, and Frederic Church’s Jamaican landscapes. There were also Samax’s Fauvist paintings—Derain, Dufy, Ernst, Vlaminck—which adorned the walls of a gallery on the tenth floor. He was very proud of the fact that of the sixty-five featured canvases in a landmark Fauvist show organized by one of the museums in New York twenty-one were borrowed from him.

  My favorites were his collection of botanical watercolors by John White, William Bartram, and William Young. He kept their work in a little used sitting room on the tenth floor, along three walls in illuminated glass cases. I remember the first time he took me in there, late one afternoon, soon after he had purchased what would be the final addition to the set, a pale yellow lotus.

  “You see,” he said, pacing the shiny marble floor, “Bartram and White were photographically accurate. Their watercolors, often executed in the field, were indispensable to European botanists who were cataloguing the flora of the New World in the eighteenth century. Look at the detail in the roots and buds, the fine veins in the leaves.” He tapped the glass with his pen. “Bartram was the first American flower painter. Many botantists thought of him as a colleague because he discovered several plants. But, unlike them, he wrote that plants had senses, like animals, and were to be approached as organic creatures, not inanimate objects. Now, look down here: White was a far more scientific draftsman, extremely conscious of painting to scale. His mantra was ‘exact proportions.’ He also made discoveries, like the horn plantain and the rose gentian, which—see here—he labeled Sabatia stellaris. Young was the most fanciful of all—a real artist. He worked so much from his imagination when he was cataloguing that to this day, many of the plants and trees he painted defy identification. But, wouldn’t you agree, his watercolors are really the most beautiful of all.”

  I did agree, for it wasn’t just the realistic detail and delicate coloration, but the strange beauty of these watercolors that drew me in.

  Not all of my schooling was so esoteric, by any means. Della gave me piano lessons every week (and, Pythagoras notwithstanding, I had no talent for it) and also taught me a bit about cook
ing. Much of the rest of my education, beginning with basic draftsmanship and exploration of the outdoors, fell to Calzas. He was one of the most important of the hotel’s small circle of permanent residents, and by far the closest to Samax. But he was also the one who traveled the most, and I missed him when he was gone. It wasn’t just the role he assumed as teacher and guide that endeared him to me, but his genuine affection for me, which I sensed from the first; knowing how cautious he could be with other people, it was all the more precious to me.

  Among other things, Calzas came to serve as my guide and overseer in the urban world of Las Vegas that existed beyond the Hotel Canopus. By this I do not mean the famous casinos and nightclubs, though to satisfy my curiosity about them, Samax himself had taken me on a tour when I turned thirteen. Years before my time, he had multiplied his fortune repeatedly in those casinos, but he never visited them anymore. As he put it, he still gambled, but with ideas, not money. It was clear that he frowned on the notion of my spending any time in casinos, but he knew the best antidote to my curiosity was simple exposure. With his connections, I was permitted entry to the gaming rooms, despite my age. So I saw close-up the blackjack and crap tables, touched the gleaming levers of slot machines and the chips at the roulette wheels, all the while studying the faces of the gamblers and gazing hard at the scantily costumed hostesses, miniskirted prostitutes, barroom cowboys, and hangers-on who populated the Strip. Samax gave me a total immersion course and got the results he wanted: within a week, my fascination turned to boredom, and as we were leaving the Tropicana I told him I had seen enough for the time being, could we do something else. The next night he had me assist him in the greenhouse, cleaning the leaves of the persimmons and azarole trees with sponges dipped in watered-down goat’s milk, and I couldn’t have been happier.