A Trip to the Stars (17 page)

The garden was as much a wonder as the hotel itself: it was a quincunx. That is, a series of rhombuses with a tree planted at each corner and one in the middle. Like so:
Samax told me that the ancient gardens around the Tigris and Euphrates and the fantastical plantations of India that filled entire river valleys were all quincuncial. As were the hanging gardens of Babylon, the orchard of fig trees Laërtes planted for his son Odysseus on Ithaka, and even the Garden of Eden itself. At the Hotel Canopus there was a self-contained quincunx within the larger one that consisted of forty-nine female date palms and, at its
center, one male, which was sufficient balance for them to propagate. The quincunx was carried over to architecture, Samax explained, where it was evident in the walls of both Roman and Gothic buildings, and even in the Egyptian pyramids. Once in his library, Samax took down a small volume bound in red morocco from the set containing much of Roman literature that filled four shelves.

“This is Quintilian, first century A.D.,” he said, and after reading me the Latin, he translated: “What is more beautiful than the well-known quincunx which, in whatever direction you view it, presents straight lines?”

In the large greenhouse at the foot of the orchard Samax usually worked alone. The greenhouse was state-of-the-art for its day, its daily upkeep overseen by Samax himself, who approached pomology philosophically. He liked to say that the fruit cycle was emblematic of man’s cycle, in accelerated form: from seed to blossom to a fruit that ripened, withered, and fell to the earth, decaying, as the flesh decayed, leaving behind only the pit; one in a hundred of these regenerated and the rest dried up, like bone, and turned to dust.

Samax grew many varieties of fruit trees indoors and out: date palm, pomegranate, Japanese persimmons, loquat, fig, prickly pear, azarole, passion fruit, and blood orange. They spanned extremes, like the rambutan and the durian, from the same province in Malaysia, that grew side by side in the tropical section of the greenhouse. The rambutan’s pendulous fruit was covered with soft red or yellow spines, exuded an intoxicating scent, and was centered with succulent flesh; the durian tree had slimy bark and was notorious for the mushy pulp of its hard, spiked fruit, which smelled and tasted like sewage. Samax spent countless solitary hours in the greenhouse, before long mossy tables in the aquamarine light, grafting shoots, planting seedlings, perfecting some species and attempting to create unique hybrids with others. (Early on I sometimes wondered if I was like one of his tree graftings, nurtured carefully in the hothouse of the hotel, provided—like Calzas and Desirée before me?—with the conditions that ensured I would produce a certain kind and quality of fruit, as yet unknown.) With hybridization, he’d had his share of failures, but as Desirée informed me, he had also successfully produced a hybrid that had officially been given his name. Grafting cuttings from quince and Egyptian pear trees, he had
cultivated a light green, oval-shaped fruit with tart flesh and a triangular pit. In the pomology register, it was listed as
Cydonia Samacis
. There were now three of these trees in the garden, and on my birthday—a high honor—the cook had baked me a pie with their fruit.

“The one he’s working on now,” Desirée told me one morning, as we awaited Samax at the table beneath a Saharan pear tree, “is a combination star apple and starfruit, or carambola. It’s never been done, and he says it will be his masterpiece. He’s even got a name picked out: the
Samax Astrofructus
.” She leaned forward, spooning sugar into her coffee. “It will be like biting into a fleshy spice.”

At breakfast, Samax was at his most voluble. And so over the course of many mornings, often far apart, when I was able to get myself out of bed at six
A.M
. to join him in the garden, I heard much of his personal history in the cool mauve air as the sun appeared over the rim of the desert. Desirée, after finishing her fruit and black coffee, would casually lapse back into her typing, her eyes bright but distant; if there was a connection, as I sometimes suspected, between the words Samax was speaking and the ones she was tapping onto the sheets of yellow bond, I was unable to discern it. In his terry-cloth robe and sandals, occasionally stroking his white moustache with his fingertip, he told me the stories, in no particular order, it seemed, which to this day comprise the foundation of his biography as I know it and played an important part in shaping my own life.

To begin with, living in Las Vegas, I lost count of the number of times I heard that there was no such thing as a successful gambler, even as I was told how my uncle Junius had methodically become a rich man at the casinos. His seed money, as a young man, had come from a more conventional source—real estate—but in a highly unconventional way. He had had a falling out with his younger brother Nilus—my grandfather—over their inheritance from their father, a well-to-do manufacturer of ladies’ hats, amateur astrologer (he was devoted to Ptolemy’s
Tetrabiblos
, which Samax said catalyzed his own interest in the classics), and kinky raconteur in San Francisco. After a protracted legal battle that ate up nearly the entire inheritance, Nilus got the hat business—which he promptly sold for cash—and Samax ended up with nothing. The brothers never spoke again, but after Nilus’s unexpected death at thirty-four, Samax undertook the
upbringing of his two daughters, my mother Bel and my aunt Ivy, with surprising devotion, but mixed results.

Though throughout his life Samax negotiated the criminal underworld as comfortably as the mazes of finance and scholarship, his great fortune was based, not Balzac-style on a great crime, but a plate of bad oysters. Some years before his brother’s death, in the late 1920s, Samax, age twenty-eight, dead broke, scraped together some loans for a suburban housing tract outside New York—a novel idea at the time. With a real estate agent and two of his backers, he drove out of the city one July afternoon to look over the piece of land he hoped to acquire as a construction site. In the Bronx, they stopped for lunch at a road-house, and while the other men ordered the blue plate special, pot roast and mashed potatoes, Samax polished off two dozen oysters on the half shell. A half hour later, midway to their destination, he was gripped by fierce intestinal pain.

“It was like someone was going to work on my guts with a paint scraper,” he told me while paring a nectarine. “For about thirty seconds I thought I was going to die. The real estate guy pulled over to the shoulder. His car was a big Cord sedan, heavy as a truck, and the backers were sitting in the rear smoking cigars. I stumbled out and ran through the high grass undoing my belt, and when I hit the woods I got my pants down a split second before I would’ve shitted in them. I was green, rocking on my heels there in the dirt, and even after I got it all out of me I still felt woozy. Gripping a branch, I pulled myself up and stood there with my pants around my ankles, taking deep breaths. The foliage was thick around me. I remember the pollen filling my nose. And some crows making a racket in the treetops. Then suddenly I got the feeling there was open space beyond those trees. I lifted that branch high, then pushed another one aside, and the sunlight flooded in on me, with a strong breeze.

“There before me was this panorama, a flat green valley dotted with shade trees, that stretched to a line of low hills. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Exactly what I’d been looking for—the perfect place to build. I pulled up my pants and ran back to the car, and showed that land to my backers. But they were against it! Said it was in the middle of nowhere. Well, I’ve always been attracted to the middle of nowhere. Though my heart was no longer in it, we drove on to the other piece of land, and they were dead set on building there. So I
let them have it all for themselves. After that, it took me several months, but I got new backers and I built forty houses in that other valley without cutting down a single tree. In fact, we planted two hundred more trees. I made my first million there—actually $860,000 before taxes.” He chuckled. “Happy to dispense with my cut, those original backers built too, on the other land, which turned out to lie over an ancient swamp. Poor guys lost their shirts. What shirt I had left I would’ve lost too, if I hadn’t eaten those bad oysters.”

This was the beginning of Samax’s fabulous run of luck. Following the formula he would stick to over the next twenty-one years, he sank half his profits into further real estate and used the other half to bankroll his life as a gambler, first in Havana, Miami, and Monte Carlo, and then in Las Vegas. Amassing a fortune large enough to perpetuate itself indefinitely, he quit gambling on his fiftieth birthday, and never again placed a single bet.

“Gambling professionally, how did you beat the odds?” I asked him one day.

“Memory,” he replied simply. “No tricks, no scams, no system. Nothing a single casino ever could, or did, reproach me for. Mind you, lots of gamblers have good memories: how fast you assimilate and distil what you’re memorizing, how you read the results of that assimilation, and how you then apply it—all in the shortest possible time, under pressure—is something else altogether. And that’s just the beginning.”

“Where did you learn to do that?”

Here, for the first and only time in the years I had lived under his roof, he looked away evasively. “That’s another story.”

“Was it Mr. Labusi?” I asked.

“No,” he shook his head. “Though it was the reason I first met him.” He looked me in the eye again. “Someday I’ll tell you.”

Doméniko Labusi was one of the hotel’s three most prominent and permanent guests. He was a man of interesting contradictions: a memory expert, capable of amazing mnemonic exertions, who routinely forgot people’s names and missed appointments; a chess grand master, winner of international competitions in his youth, who otherwise had an aversion to games; a scrupulous Pythagorean who was a caffeine addict. And he was also my tutor. In this, his only contradiction was of a Socratic nature: prodigiously knowledegable himself, he never failed
to remind me that the more I learned, the more I was to realize I knew nothing at all. Understood properly,
The Apology
and
Critias
were the pinnacles of wisdom, he insisted—unusually bitter texts for a Pythagorean to be so enamored of.

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.”