Philosophy Made Simple (36 page)

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 located 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.

Rudy looked. Dozens of tiny flowers were clustered around a yellow spike. He shook his head. “Amazing. I’ll take these too,”
he said.

She looked at her watch. “Alejandro—the new owner—will be here any minute,” she said. “Want to stay and have lunch with us?”

“Thanks,” he said, “but I’ve got to be getting home.” Rudy took out his wallet while she wrapped the flowers carefully in newspaper. He had a twenty and two tens and a couple of hundred-peso notes. “On the house,” she said, waving his money away
“You can get me something extra special for the wedding.” Rudy thanked her, turning for one last look as he went out the door.

Late in the afternoon Medardo stopped by with the entire picking crew. They were on their way to Reynosa for a cultural Friday.
They’d stopped by as a
cortesía
to see if Rudy wanted to go along. There were six of them in the car, but there was always room for one more. All six were smoking, and the smoke puffed out the open windows of the Buick Riviera. Through the smoke Rudy could see their eager faces as they leaned forward in the soft leather seats. They were just boys, but they had wives back home in Montemorelos. Rinaldo and Carlos had children. Medardo would give them each a hundred pesos—Rudy’s pesos—which they’d spend at the Lipstick or the Tropicana while Medardo enjoyed himself at Estrella Princesa.

Rudy shook his head. “Not today,” he said. “I’m going to listen to some music and fix a little supper and take it easy.”

“Just another day, huh?”

“I guess so,” Rudy said, but as they drove off he thought: Just
another day.
For them it’s just another day And for me and for the pandit too, and for Maria. Just another day, and something that had been about to sink in for a long time finally sank. He was overwhelmed. God really
is
dead. It hadn’t seemed to make that much difference at first, no more difference than the death of a distant, elderly relative.
What he hadn’t realized before now was that even
the smaller meanings had to go too, like lifeboats that are pulled down into the vortex when the big liner sinks. He hadn’t counted on that, hadn’t thought it through. He no longer cared about the big meanings. Let them go. But to think that there was nothing out there
at all.
All the holidays that mark the progress of the year, all the rites, rituals, ceremonies designed to ground human experience in some larger reality…smoke and mirrors. Nothing but human creations.
Christmas is just another day, a human invention, like Easter, like Thanksgiving, like Ganesh Chaturthi, the birth anniversary
of Ganesh, the son of Shiva and Parvathi, like every birthday, every baptism, every commencement, every funeral, every inauguration,
every wedding. All that effort to convince ourselves that the desire of two people to fuck is grounded in some larger, ultimate
reality, or that a man’s life or a woman’s love really matters in the larger scheme of things, or that endings are really
new beginnings. There are no signs, no omens, not even little ones. There’s only what we choose to do. The triptych I saw
on Christmas Eve, the vision of the river
—
even these small signs have to be discounted completely. Nothing out there was calling to me. Nothing. The lightning that
struck Norma Jean was a natural electrical discharge, nothing more. In every case we just did what we wanted to do, and then
we attributed it to signs and omens and callings. I sold the house in Chicago and came to Texas because that’s what I wanted
to do. Nandini went back to Assam because that’s what she wanted to do. It’s as simple as that.