She shook her head. “No. I am already telephoning to the airport.”
Rudy started to argue: “Your brother said you’d never be able to remarry in India…” He thought she almost faltered at this point. She began to cry again. He put his arm around her to comfort her. “God is dead, Nandini,” he said. “We can do whatever we want to do. We should do whatever we want to do.”
But after a while she stopped him. “No, Mr. Rudy, you mustn’t say that.”
“Its not just me, Nandini,” he said. “My daughters love you too. Don’t you see that?”
“Yes, I can see that too. It is maximum good family my son is coming into.”
“How can I explain love itself, Nandini?—not mutual convenience, but the thing itself. For which we risk everything. I am a young man again. I’m afraid to touch you. Afraid to take your hand. To kiss you.” He took her hand, even though he was afraid. “I’m thinking about the tent,” he went on. “About the one corner flapping in the night. You told Ashok not to stake it down. Don’t stake it down now, Nandini.”
“The pandit was right, Rudy. What happen to Narmada-Jai is a baadha, a very bad sign. I hope Molly and TJ will overcome it.”
“But don’t you think it was a good sign, for us and for them? In the end? The way she got up and went down to the river?” But he realized that he was repeating himself. “There are so many good signs, Nandini: love, reason, self-interest, desire, TJ and Molly, how my daughters love you, prem.”
But opposing these arguments was a powerful counterforce, deeper than reason, more primitive than love. Rudy didn’t know what to call it: Superstition? Religion? Spirituality? Tao? Karma? Dharma? It was like encountering some force of nature, like Hurricane Beulah, or one of the fundamental constants, like the strong nuclear force, or the weak nuclear force, like gravity or electromagnetism. Rudy couldn’t understand it any more than he could understand how these constants held the universe together.
That night Nandini took another whirlpool bath. Rudy lay down on his bed. He was very tired, but he didn’t sleep. He listened to the hum of the whirlpool in the bathroom downstairs. After her bath Nandini came into his room. She sat on the edge of the bed and he pretended to be asleep for a while, waiting to see what she would do. He thought he might be in a parallel universe.
“Don’t be angry with me, Rudy,” she said. “And don’t be sad.” She walked her fingers up his back from his waist to his neck. He reached around and put his hand on her thigh. He turned over and looked at her. She was wearing a special sari, lacy, like a negligee.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said.
“This is what I want to do. Is it okay?”
He nodded.
After a few minutes she raised her arms up and unfastened the lovely bird-shaped clip that held her hair back. He could hear her put it down on the little table next to the bed. He touched her, tentatively, the way he’d touched Narmada-Jai the first time, not knowing what to expect. He was always surprised by the Pendleton-blanket feel of Narmada-Jai, and now he was surprised by the feel of Nandini, like a smooth peach. He kept his hand on her back while she unwrapped her sari. He rubbed the back of her knee a little with his fingers, as if he were searching for something.
“A little bit higher up,” she said, putting her hand over his eyes.
He raised his hand as far as he could without shifting position. He could feel the pull of the silk sari sliding under his hand, and then the smooth skin of her thigh.
“You wouldn’t let Molly and TJ sleep together in Assam,” he said.
She laughed. “Maximum restraint yield maximum pleasure, don’t you think?”
He was naked under a flannel sheet and a light blanket, but he’d left a couple of sticks of ironwood on the fire in the wood-stove, so the house was not too cold.
She stretched out beside him. He moistened his finger with his tongue and touched her nipples, which contracted and then hardened, and then he traced her milk line down to her crotch, her sacred yoni. The insides of her thighs burned his hand, and his heart started to beat faster. He reached for the little bottle of nitroglycerin tablets next to the bed, and then decided to let whatever was going to happen happen.
Had she changed her mind? Was it possible after all to imagine a future together? He cupped her head in his hands and kissed the creases on her forehead. Her sari and his flannel sheet had become tangled. He kicked the sheet aside. The sari fell to the floor with a whisper, and he could feel her breathing in his ear. How did she know what to whisper to create such intense sweetness, such promises of bliss? How did she know so exactly to whisper what he wished to hear? And how did he understand the words she murmured in song, even though they were in Hindi? Come to me, my darling, my breasts are young and firm, my thighs are soft as satin, my crop green and young, ready to be irrigated. Her breath in his ear was warm as a breeze in early spring. What philosopher could explain such warmth, such sweetness, like fresh herbs crushed in a mortar? What philosopher could give an account of the deep infrasonic rumbling that came from the most intimate part of her self, like the sounds he’d sensed coming from Narmada-Jai out in the barn? God is dead, he thought, but he fitted himself into her as if he were pressing the last piece into a puzzle.
Just Another Day
Socrates was a stonecutter, a blue-collar worker; but did Plato ever hold down a real job? Aristotle? Epicurus? George Berkeley became a bishop, but how hard could that be? David Hume? Immanuel Kant? Arthur Schopenhauer? Friedrich Nietzsche? Were they all academics? Rudy was thinking about manual labor now. He’d already sold half his crop to Becker in Chicago and half to Nick Regiacorte in Houston, and so—once he’d finished his morning phone calls—he’d go out in the field and work with the picking crew.
There was nothing about manual labor in Philosophy Made Simple, but Rudy’d been asking himself, how would the course of philosophy have been different if these philosophers had had to pick a thousand pounds of avocados a day? And sometimes he even imagined that the men on the tall wooden ladders to his left and his right—Medardo’s picking crew from his hometown, Mon-temorelos, who bunked in a double-wide at the back of the trailer park—were not Rinaldo and Felipe and Carlos and Antonio and Hilario, but Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Immanuel and Arthur. Would they be good workers? Do a days work for a day’s pay? Would Medardo scold them, as he scolded Rudy, if they jailed to press the knobs on the end of their blades up against the stems just so, to preserve the button? Would they look forward, as Rudy did, to gathering around the glass-topped table on the veranda at the end of a long day to drink a bottle or two of cerveza fria? What would they talk about? The good life? The One and the Many? The Ding an sich? The Veil of Maya? Free will? The mind-body problem?
And while they were talking would they be thinking about the last woman they’d gone to bed with? The last woman they’d loved? Or maybe the first? Would Rudy be able to follow their conversations, or would it be like trying to follow the conversations in Spanish on the veranda, which started out slowly and calmly enough, as they discussed the approaching hurricane or the new clutch that Rudy and Medardo had installed in the tractor, but which soon accelerated as they took up the problem of Rinaldo’s oldest boy, who was already giving the girls a hard time, or of Carlos’s mother-in-law, or of Hilario’s wife’s sister, who’d taken up with a married man?
It was a question for Uncle Siva, who’d sent a copy of Schopenhauer and the Upanishads and a note thanking Rudy for his hospitality and suggesting that he might enjoy Leibniz’s critique of Locke’s empiricism. I’ll see if I can find a decent translation, he wrote, and send it to you.
They enjoyed reasonably good weather after the storm that had killed Norma Jean, but Hurricane Beulah was on the news every night as it moved across the Caribbean into the Gulf. They worked in the lower grove every day picking as many avocados as they could in the week before the hurricane was expected to make landfall, filling the field bins, which Medardo carted away with a hydraul
ic lift. They worked right through Saturday—Diez y Seis, Mexican Independence Day—and Sunday, but on Monday, after taking two loads of avocados to the packing house in Hidalgo, they called it quits. Medardo went to batten down whatever could be battened down at the trailer park; Rudy went into town to stock up on pasta and canned goods and candles and flashlight batteries. He bought four sheets of three-quarter-inch plywood to board up the windows, he filled water jugs and the big bathtub, and he nailed down the shutters in the barn that he’d opened up again after the wedding.
Beulah entered the Texas coast at the mouth of the Rio Grande on the morning of September 20. By the time Rudy got around to boarding up the windows, it was too late. He couldn’t hold on to the sheets of plywood in the wind. Gusts of 135 miles per hour were reported at Brownsville, and of 86 miles per hour as far inland as Corpus Christi. Beulah spun off eighty-five tornadoes, and damage in the lower Valley was estimated at half a billion dollars. Medardo’s trailer park escaped damage, but the packing house in Hidalgo was destroyed by a tornado. The forty thousand pounds of avocados they’d picked the week before disappeared. Neither Mission nor McAllen was hit by a tornado, but the Rio Grande spilled out of its banks and out of the floodway, and the military launched Operation Bravo, sending out amphibious and high-wheeled vehicles to rescue people who were stranded. Blankets and medicine and food and snakebite kits were airlifted into flooded areas. The airport in McAllen was flooded. Light planes had been towed to the McAllen Country Club. A herd of cattle was driven down Highway 83 to get them out of the floodplain. Reynosa was flooded from the international bridge to Joe’s Place.
The farm-to-market roads were all closed. Rudy couldn’t get out for several days. He could have asked to be evacuated, but he had plenty of food and water, so he decided to stay. The phone lines were down, and there was no electricity.
It was during Hurricane Beulah—at the peak of the storm—that Rudy finished Philosophy Made Simple, read the last chapters by the light of a paraffin lamp, reached the end of the story. He couldn’t work up much interest in logical positivism, which seemed to him to reduce the fundamental questions to the level of grammatical mistakes, or in pragmatism, which was a kind of surrender. But existentialism was another matter. Helen had considered herself an existentialist. “Existence precedes essence,” she liked to say. Maybe so. Rudy’d never given it much thought, but now he saw it as the tail end of something that had started with Nietzsche or maybe even earlier, with Kant and Schopenhauer, though according to Uncle Siva, Kant had been a religious man himself. Think of Jean-Paul Sartre’s paper cutter. This paper cutter, according to Sartre, had a purpose in life because someone had designed it. Someone had had a plan. Someone had wanted to cut some paper and had designed a paper cutter to do the job. But a human being doesn’t have a purpose in life because no one designed a human being. No one had a plan. Human beings are just here. That’s existentialism in a nutshell: a paper cutter. Or the opposite of a paper cutter.
Oh, there was more, of course. At the kitchen table, Rudy turned the pages of the last chapter. What he concluded was that we’re all heading into an unknowable future; there’s no way to chart a course with any certainty; we face death troubled by angst and nausée and ennui; we search for ways to set the world on a firm metaphysical foundation, but we have no reason to believe that such a metaphysical foundation exists. The only meaning our lives have is the meaning we give them.
Outside, the storm raged, frightening but exhilarating. Through the kitchen window, when he raised his eyes from his book, Rudy could see nothing, and when he turned his eyes inward, the darkness was equally profound, the storm equally frightening and equally exhilarating. He closed the book around his thumb, thankful for these moments, thankful for moha, for passion, for all the threads that attached him to this world, this life.
He thought about Narmada-Jai plunging into the river. God is dead, but this death hadn’t been so bad. Not as bad as being crucified or burned at the stake. More like the death of Socrates. She’d just disappeared into the river. And he thought of Nandini unfastening her lacy sari and of the sound the sari had made as it rustled to the floor. He’d thought that night, when he heard the sari whispering to the floor, that she must have changed her mind, decided to stay. He thought that in the morning they could visit the pump house in Hidalgo and then walk over the bridge to Reynosa for lunch at Casa Viejo. But in the morning she packed her things and he took her to the airport in McAllen. From McAllen she’d flown to Houston, and from Houston she’d followed the same route that Molly had taken: from New York to Calcutta, and from Calcutta by train to Guwahati. She hadn’t stopped to see anyone. She’d gone home.
“The ancient Vedas,” the pandit said, “elaborate the social doctrine of the four ashramas, or stages of life. You have already passed through the first two stages: the brahmachari, or chaste student; the grihasiha, or married householder, begetting sons—or daughters, in your case—and sacrificing to the gods. Now you have entered the third stage. You have retired to the forest as a vanaprastha, to devote yourself to spiritual contemplation.”
They were sitting in a booth at El Zarate, where they’d met quite by chance. At least Rudy thought it was quite by chance.
“Well,” Rudy said, “an avocado grove is not exactly a forest, and Philosophy Made Simple is not exactly the Upanishads. Even so…What will become of me now?”
“That’s a good question,” the pandit said. “Will you move on to the fourth stage and become a homeless wandering ascetic, or sannyasin? The concept has always been problematic.” The pandit paused to blow on his tea. “A man may become a sannyasin on a mythological level,” he went on, “without literally becoming a homeless wanderer.”
The pandit picked up the check that was on the table and said something in rapid Spanish to the waitress. “Everything is flux,” he said, producing a twenty-dollar bill from under his saffron robe and turning to Rudy. “To meditate is to become aware of this flux as it happens moment by moment.” The waitress took the check and the twenty.
“I’m aware,” Rudy said.
“To meditate,” the pandit said, as the two men stood up, “is also to become aware of the continuum of consciousness that lies behind that awareness.”
“The Ding an sich?” Rudy asked.
The pandit shook his head. “Not exactly,” he said. “More like ananda, God-consciousness—individuality being literally destroyed as the world expands and takes on splendor. It cannot be explained, only experienced.”
The waitress brought the pandit’s change, and the pandit gave her a generous tip. He invited Rudy to visit the ashram. Rudy didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no.
It was Helen’s birthday, October 6, and he’d taken the day off. He was going to stop at the public library in McAllen and then at the Lebanese place on the way home for some fresh pasta. He was planning to listen to Helens favorite opera, Il saraceno, in the afternoon, and then fix Helens favorite supper: spaghetti alle von-gole, followed by a little fillet and a nice avocado salad. He wanted to have some flowers too, and to say good-bye to Maria, who’d sold her floristería and was moving to San Antonio to marry her art dealer and help manage his two galleries. He left his car in Hidalgo, in the lot by the river market, and walked across the international bridge. A sign on the bridge warned him not to pee: FAVOR DE NO ESPERAR AQUÍ.—POLICíA. Or was it warning him not to loiter? He’d have to look it up.
He had a future to look forward to: Maria’s wedding to the art dealer at the end of the month, and the Norma Jean opening, both in San Antonio. The dealer had already sold three Norma Jeans for a total of six thousand dollars. Rudy got 50 percent, after the cost of framing. He was going to Milwaukee for Christmas and to Italy at the beginning of April, after the harvest, to visit Margot.
The future wasn’t the problem. The problem was the past. What to do with the past? There was so much of it.
On the Mexican side of the bridge he walked to the floristería, which was loc
ated just beyond the Plaza Morelos, sandwiched between a dentista and a relojería. María’s name on the side of her van had already been painted over—Alejandro Torres—but it was still there on the window in the front of the shop: MARíA GRACIA, FLORISTA. ARREGLOS PARA BODAS, QUINCEAÑERAS, Y MÁS.
Maria was behind the counter, examining a vase of brightly colored flowers. Rudy knew she needed glasses, but he’d never seen her wearing them before. Behind her was a handsome new refrigerated case with sparkling glass windows.
“You look good,” Rudy said. “Happy, relaxed, prosperous, ready for the next thing.”
When she looked up at him her face broke into a broad smile. “Rudy,” she said, removing her glasses and setting them on the counter. “Its been forever. Come and kiss me. This is my last day. The new owner takes over tomorrow.”
“I’m happy for you.”
“Thank you, Rudy I know you are.”
“I need some flowers,” he said. “Maybe some wildflowers.”
“Fresh wildflowers I can’t do,” she said, leaning over the counter. “You should know that. Tell me what you need them for, and I’ll come up with something better.”
“I just felt like some fresh flowers,” Rudy said.
“Have you heard from Nandini yet?”
Rudy shook his head. “No, but her brother sent me a copy of his book, Schopenhauer and the Upanishads. I haven’t looked at it yet.”
“I’m sorry Rudy,” she said. “She was a lovely woman.” She removed one of the flowers from the vase and pinned it to his lapel. “Paphiopedilum,” she said. “Named after the island of Pa-phos, where Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was worshipped. The pedilum part means ‘shoe.’“
“In Greek?” Rudy asked. He looked at the beautiful flowers in the vase: white calla lilies and purple irises and multicolored orchids.
She nodded. “These come from near Mexico City,” she said, touching the long stem of one of the calla lilies. “You can buy them for nothing in the markets there. This white sheath isn’t really a petal at all; it’s a leaf. The real flowers are inside. See these little flowers?” she said, pulling the sheath back.