Philosophy Made Simple (15 page)

When he went up to bed that night, he stood outside the bed
room door and listened. He didn’t want to go in if she was talking into the tape recorder, because she wouldn’t record anything if someone else was in the room. He could hear her voice, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. And he never did find out, because the tape recorder had malfunctioned. The tapes had been blank.

At the thought of the tapes, which he kept on the shelf at the back of his desk, Rudy’s chest tightened up. He put one of his nitroglycerin tablets under his tongue and sat at the desk till the pain went away

E
strella Princesa was tucked away on a side street, like a small, old-fashioned hotel. There was no sign, only a bronze plaque on the wall, the sort of plaque on which you expect to find the name of a famous person who’d lived in this place a long time ago. A traffic cop in a brown uniform stood under the dark green awning, as if he were a doorman, and men were getting in and out of green taxicabs. Rudy and Medardo passed under a low colonial arch into a courtyard where parrots roosted in neatly trimmed flowering trees and a fountain bubbled and Peruvian flutes lilted softly, a. pleasant contrast to the raucous mari-achi music of the Plaza Morelos.

In the lobby, comfortable chairs were arranged around small tables that were cluttered with glasses and colorful plates.
Rudy’s idea of Mexican food was chips and salsa, beans and rice, tacos and burritos filled with ground beef, which is what you got at the Mexican restaurants in Mission, but a buffet by the bar offered a wonderful array of tempting hors d’oeuvres:
marinated shellfish and abalone, barbecued meats, fresh shrimps, pickled hot pep
pers, plates of little turnovers. Everyone — the old men, the young women, the waiters, the musicians — seemed happy to see Medardo, who was dressed in a chocolate-colored pin-striped linen suit and a pale yellow shirt with French cuffs, and who had an engaging smile on his broad face.

At first Rudy felt out of place in his old, all-purpose sport coat — inelegant, awkward, not at all like the men sitting in the comfortable chairs with
amiguitas,
their little friends, by their sides. Most were men his own age, but they were nothing like the pale-faced golfers pictured in the
Golden Age Digest
he’d looked through on the plane on his first flight down to Texas. These were men whom the sun had burnished to the color of the fine cigars they were smoking, men who looked as if they had left all their cares behind them and were looking forward to whatever pleasures the evening might hold in store. The
amiguitas
were truly beautiful. Did they really want to become secretaries and dental hygienists?

Medardo spoke briefly to a man who’d come out of the adjacent card room to greet him, his playing cards fanned out in his hand, and then ordered a glass of champagne at the bar. Rudy hesitated between a Cinzano and a Campari — he could never remember which it was that Helen had liked — and ordered Campari. “
Con sifón?”
the barman asked. Rudy nodded. He listened indifferently to the hum of conversations and the slap of playing cards and the click of the balls that came from the billiard room. He thought of slipping away, but Medardo held him by the arm and introduced him to one patron after another, men who greeted him with soft Mexican handshakes and who seemed to know him, or rather to know that he had had a heart attack recently and had been lifted into the back of a pickup truck by an elephant. The story,
with the photo of Norma Jean, had run in
El Mañana,
the Reynosa paper, as well as in the
Monitor.

Maria Gracia, the woman who specialized in older men with heart conditions, had just bought a flower shop —
a floresteria
— with a small inheritance, but she was still meeting some clients at Estrella Princesa, including a wealthy art dealer who flew down from San Antonio once a week just to see her. Rudy noticed her as soon as she came through the door in a black spaghetti-strap dress and began exchanging greetings with people. Everyone knew her; everyone was glad to see her, as they’d been glad to see Medardo. It took her twenty minutes to angle her way across the room and join them at the bar. Once she reached them,
she began to rummage in her purse for a package of cigarettes. Rudy, his heart accelerating, lit her cigarette for her — an Embajador — and took one for himself. She pulled the smoke deep into her lungs and then exhaled with obvious pleasure.

“Well,” she said, in English. “Now we can talk.” She kissed Medardo and held out her hand to Rudy, who shook it.

“So,” Medardo said, also in English, “how is your book coming?” He touched Rudy’s arm and explained: “Maria’s writing a book about her adventures. She’s got everyone very worried.”

It was the first time Rudy had heard Medardo speak English. His slight accent was charming. Rudy wondered if his own accent was charming when he spoke Spanish. Somehow he doubted it.

Maria laughed.

“Are
you
going to be in it?” Rudy asked Medardo.

“No, but
you
might. Just be careful, and keep your nitroglycerin pills handy.”

“I only
say
I’m writing a book,” Maria said, “so that everyone will be nice to me.”

Medardo left them and they smoked their cigarettes.

“Medardo warned me not to fall in love with you,” Rudy said. This was the same advice that the Italians who worked for
Becker had given him at the Casino, on Roosevelt Road, before he’d gone upstairs for his first time, with a girl named Shirley,
who later became the mistress of a prominent politician. But he’d fallen in love with Shirley anyway That was the summer before he’d met Helen.

“That’s probably good advice,” Maria said. “When you’re in love you’re defenseless. And,” she went on, “Medardo told
me
that you’re a
pensador, a filósofo,
a lover of wisdom. Men like you are greatly admired in Mexico.” She adjusted one of the straps of her dress. “Why don’t you say something wise and then we’ll go into the dining room.”

“Something wise?” Rudy said. “I don’t know …”

“A
pensador, a filósofo
… you must have plenty of wisdom.”

“How about this?” Rudy said, holding his hand up and crooking his finger.

“Is this a secret signal, Rudy?”

“No,” he said. “But it shows how little we know How can the mind, which is immaterial, move the finger, which is material?
That’s Descartes, and that’s just the beginning. Have you ever heard of Bishop Berkeley?”

“An American?”

“No, he was a British philosopher. Two hundred years ago. From Ireland, actually.”

“Oh,” she said. “And this Bishop Berkeley?”

“If Bishop Berkeley is right,” Rudy went on, “we can’t even be sure the finger exists. Outside the mind.” He crooked his finger again, and Maria crooked her finger too. “We don’t know anything, Maria. And if we can’t understand how we crook our fingers, all the big questions … love, death, beauty …”

She put her cigarette down in the ashtray and touched his hand. “Let’s eat,” she said. “I can’t think when I’m hungry.”

“Tell me something,” she said when they’d been seated in the dining room, a bottle of white wine open on the table between them, “that you’ve never told anyone before.”

Rudy filled her glass. He hesitated for a moment — he was too old for this — but then he let himself go: “My wife fell in love with Italy,” he said, filling his own glass and setting the bottle down. “And she fell in love with an Italian.”

Maria added a splash of jalapeño sauce to her abalone cocktail and passed the bottle to Rudy. “Here’s all the Italian I know,”
she said, when she’d finished chewing, and she used her index finger to pull down on the cheekbone under her right eye. “How about you?”

Rudy shook his head. “The problem was,” he said, lifting his glass and then putting it down again without drinking, “that she had this way of talking about Florence — Helen did, my wife, after she got back — that always bothered me. She talked as if just to be in Florence were enough to make a person happy. As if you didn’t need anything else. Just to
be
there. And she ate like an Italian, scraping her food onto her fork with her knife and raising it to her mouth with her left hand. For a while, after she got back, she answered the phone in Italian, as if she were still in Florence — I’d call home and she’d say ‘Pronto’ — and she dated her checks in Italian, with the day of the month first and then the name of the month,
in Italian, and then the year. She made her ones like sevens and put a crossbar through her sevens so no one would mistake them for ones. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem wasn’t mistaking sevens for ones but ones for sevens, which happened all the time, and caused a lot of grief with the bank. It was silly.”

“But that’s the way you’re eating, Rudy,” Maria said. “That’s the way I’m eating.”

“Maybe so.”

“Not maybe, Rudy. That’s the way you’re eating right now.”

“There’s more to it than that,” he said. “I can’t figure it out. It permanently altered her, made her into a different woman.”

“More confident, more sure of herself?”

Rudy nodded.

“Livelier in bed?”

Rudy nodded again. “Then at the end, just before she died, she made these tapes for me. For the family. I’ve got them in my study out at the grove. But something went wrong with the tape recorder. The punch-in/out switch that I bought so she could turn the recorder on and off from the bed was activating the tape recorder without activating the recording heads.”

“And?”

“I’ve always thought she must have said something about Bruno Bruni; that was her lover’s name. About what happened. Some explanation. I don’t know what. But something. Something I could hang on to. The truth.”

“I’ll tell you what the truth is, Rudy She wanted a little
aven-tura.
Every woman does. It’s human nature. And all by herself in Italy …”

“A little
aventura,”
he said as the waiter served their seafood enchiladas. “I suppose you’re right.”

“Now tell me about your daughters,” Maria said, cutting off one end of an enchilada with her fork and lifting it to her lips.

He told her about his daughters, and when he was through she said, “Look at me, señor. I’m not a young woman anymore. But I’m still beautiful. This is why you’re here. Can you put aside everything else and enjoy this evening? Now, this Bishop Berkeley,”
she said, smiling. “I’m sorry Rudy, but I have to smile when
you tell me that you can only experience things in the mind …” She crooked her finger at him and laughed. He touched the little bottle of nitroglycerin tablets in his shirt pocket.

“It’s more complicated than that,” Rudy protested. He took a bite of his enchilada, which was filled with creamy seafood,
like something you’d find in a French restaurant.

She shook her head. “No, Rudy. No, it’s not. Don’t drive yourself crazy with these questions. Look at Medardo. He’s happy,
you’re not happy. Why is that?”

Rudy didn’t answer.

“Seriously Rudy. Answer me. Why is Medardo happy and you’re not happy?”

Rudy’d already given some thought to this question. “I think,” he said, “it’s because he’s got the right touch on life. I think the Italians on the market in Chicago had it. Maybe all Italians. Certainly Bruno Bruni. Maybe that’s what Helen was looking for.”

“The ‘right touch on life,’ “ she repeated. “
Alegria.”

“Yes,” he said. “That sounds right. That’s a musical term, isn’t it.”

“Let me tell you something,” she said, still leaning forward, “that I think you already know. So your wife took a lover in Italy — it doesn’t really matter. What if she fell in love with him? A little
aventura,
that’s all. Does it matter now? She came home. That’s what matters. Look right at me.”

“Sorry,” he said. He realized he’d been looking down the front of her dress. He looked
at
her and she smiled.

“This is it, Rudy. This is what you’re looking for —
alegria.
The embrace of a woman. And the love of your daughters, your three lovely daughters. Rejoice in them, and remember your wife with love. Your whole world is full of love, Rudy, and I think you know that.
Gratitude
is the word that should be on the tip of your tongue. Not ‘I’m worried I’m worried I’m worried,’ but Thank you thank you thank you.’ For your daughters and the
good times you shared with your wife, for hot water in your bathroom and this good wine, and for these wonderful enchiladas.
Don’t be afraid.” She stuck her fork into the last bite of her enchilada, pointed it at him, and then stuck it in her mouth.

Rudy didn’t know if she was offering him the accumulated wisdom of a civilization older than his own, or if she was tempting him to abandon his quest.

A
man with three daughters will never run out of stories. At the beginning of June Margot called from London to say that she’d just auctioned off a book of erotic drawings she had found in the convent where she’d been working. She’d restored it herself and sold it at Sotheby’s for a quarter of a million dollars. She wanted to know how to set up a trust for the convent. Rudy tried to explain. Two weeks later Molly called from India. Someone had handed her a dead baby in front of the Kalighat in Calcutta; she’d placed a garland on the shaft of the great black lingam at the Golden Temple in Benares, where she’d met the King of the Dead — down at the burning ghats; a rhinoceros had wandered into the tea garden in Assam, and Nandini, TJ’s mother,
had shooed it away with a broom; she’d been riding Nandini’s elephant, Champaa, through the jungle every morning, before the rains came, and they’d been to see the erotic sculptures in the museum temple of Shakti in Madan Kamdev.

“What did you do with the dead baby?” Rudy asked.

“I handed it to someone else.”

“And the King of the Dead? What sort of guy was the King of the Dead? How did you meet him? Did you just bump into him on the street and he invited you in for tea?”

“There’re two of them, actually,” she said. “Two brothers — two kings — but they don’t speak to each other. They’re the richest men in India. They take on the bad karma of the people they burn.”