A Trip to the Stars (20 page)

The cornerstone of my unusual education—while not reported to the Las Vegas Board of Education—was in fact Labusi’s memory technique, the world of memory palaces. The concept of the memory palace was developed in Greece long before Aristotle, who wrote of it with enthusiasm, as did Cicero and that same Quintilian who so admired the quincunx. All agreed that the classical model of the memory palace originated with the story of Simonides of Ceos, known as the inventor of the art of memory.

“Simonides was a poet,” Labusi told me one day, pacing behind my chair with an unlit pipe between his teeth, as was his custom. He never smoked, but each day he put fresh tobacco in the pipe, and to emphasize certain points of instruction he tapped its stem against one of the three silver rings he wore on his left hand. “A wealthy nobleman named Scopas hired him to entertain at a banquet. Plucking the lyre—like the one in your uncle’s collection—Simonides chanted a poem in honor of his host, but included a passage of praise for the twin warriors, Castor and Pollux, whose images Zeus later set among the stars as the constellation Gemini. When Simonides finished performing, Scopas paid him only half his commission, suggesting sarcastically that he try to obtain the other half from Castor and Pollux. Soon afterward, Simonides was summoned from the banquet by two young men who were waiting outside to see him. He went out, but found no one, and at that moment the roof of the banquet hall collapsed, killing Scopas and all his guests. The corpses were crushed so badly they could not be differentiated, but Simonides remembered exactly where each guest had been sitting and so was able to identify them all. The twins Castor and Pollux had repaid the poet for the respect he had shown them, and in the process enabled him to discover the twin pivots—
loci
, which is the word for ‘places,’ and
imagines
, the word for ‘images’—for the memory systems that would preserve the bulk of ancient thought.”

I took notes with my fountain pen as fast as my hand could fly, filling up one of the dozens of blue notebooks I accumulated in those years.

“There are digital and alphabetical memory systems,” Labusi went on. “The alphabetical system dates back to the great library at Alexandria that burned down, whose layout mirrored the alphabetical memory system its scholars developed. There is another system based on the chessboard and its pieces. But the greatest memory system is the architectural one. Quintilian’s description of it is the best and simplest.

“Take a building you know well, the more spacious and varied the better, including all its corridors, stairwells, and rooms, throughout which, in and around their furnishings and ornaments, you arrange your
loci
, by the dozens or the thousands. The
loci
must form a series and be remembered in a precise sequence along which you can move backward and forward, from room to room, furnishing to furnishing. On the
loci
place evocative images of the concepts or things you wish
to remember. Let’s say you wanted to memorize the names of the fruits growing in the greenhouse. Having placed the image of each fruit on a successive
locus
, as you strolled through the memory palace you might see a lemon on an end table, a plantain under a lamp, a papaya on the windowsill, grapes on a shelf. The
loci
remain in your memory indefinitely—the same windowsill, shelf, and so on—while the specific images fade or are replaced. Cicero compared the
loci
to wax tablets on which images may be traced and erased repeatedly.”

Of course I chose the Hotel Canopus as the site of my memory palace, superimposing throughout the building the series of
loci
I chose for my images. On the third floor, for example, I used the reading room off the library, with
loci
on a succession of chairs, several dozen shelves, and various potted plants—over a hundred
loci
altogether. And that was just one medium-sized room! Thus, as I expanded into many other rooms, the hotel become as palpable to me in my mind as it was in reality. Gradually the hotel and my memory palace conflated, and I sometimes felt when I wandered the hotel at night as if I were roaming corridors in my head. Conversely, there were times I was sure I had made a circuit of the hotel’s rooms when, never leaving my own room, I had merely closed my eyes and entered my memory palace, approaching the very first of my
loci
, the desk in the lobby where Della or Denise always sat. Except that in my memory palace, there was no Azu at the front door and the desk was never manned; in fact, in this realm, I had the entire hotel to myself.

Because at the same time I was developing my memory palace I was also accumulating intense personal memories in the hotel, this duality between the “real” building and the “imagined” one would always be with me: alongside my own memories were the facts and figures—the underpinnings of my learning—for which the imagined hotel had become my repository within the memory system. The conjugations and declensions of countless Latin verbs, Spanish vocabularly lists, the periodic table, and a vast menu of historical subjects. With my memory palace I could quickly retain a list of the American presidents, the kings of England and doges of Venice, and every world capital along with its population.

Such stuff seemed routine, however, beside the feats of the memory exemplars listed by Quintilian: Mithradates who spoke twenty-two languages fluently, and the Persian king Cyrus who could name all the
soldiers in his army, which was mind-boggling until you encountered Lucius Scipio, who could list the entire population of Rome, and Charmadas, an Alexandrian Greek who could repeat the contents of any and all volumes in the great library from memory just as if he were reading them. In the same section of his treatise, right after this daunting list, I was delighted to find that, without apparent irony, Quintilian offers up the simple bit of advice which people the world over with a minimum of memory needs have followed ever since: when you want to remember something, tie a piece of string around your finger.

I had been strolling through my memory palace—around that very same third-floor reading room—reviewing a list of famous volcanic eruptions in the Pacific, as I sat down to dinner the evening of New Year’s Day, 1969. Desirée and Calzas were at the table, as well as two Tibetan monks who had been staying at the hotel since early December. In that time, they meditated in the orchard nearly twelve hours a day, and though they dined with us each night, never said a word, even to each other. (They did, however, teach Samax a set of supplemental Qigong movements.) Dinner with Samax was a far less private affair than breakfast. He discussed ideas, juggling them like oranges, but seldom talked about himself and often reverted to one of the things he did best—better than anyone else I’d ever known: he listened. That night, he was quite talkative.

Sirius was curled up as always behind my chair, and Labusi and Samax continued a discussion they had begun that afternoon, concerning the destruction of the Temple of the Moon and the imperial library that adjoined it in the great fire of Rome in 64 A.D. when Nero was emperor.

“A great number of Greek statues were lost in the temple,” Samax was saying, “including one by Praxiteles. But the library was a secret one and the only clue we possess regarding its contents is a passing reference in Tacitus to ‘astronomical and navigational’ tracts.”

“Books of discovery, in other words,” Labusi said, crushing some fresh rosemary between his thumb and index finger and inhaling its scent, “of the heavens, and of remote places on earth.”

As always when I visited my memory palace while inside the hotel, I felt—sometimes with a rush of adrenaline—as if I were in two places at once: in this case, in the reading room following my
loci
, and in the tenth-floor dining room where we were sitting. And, listening to
Samax and Labusi, gazing up at the stars through the skylight, it struck me powerfully that for as long as I lived, I would be one person who always carried the hotel in his head, down to the last detail, regardless of its earthly fate. When the library at Alexandria burned to the ground, it nevertheless continued to exist for a time, volume by volume, word by word, in Charmadas’s memory. Who was to say this was not also true of this secret library in Rome. Undoubtedly many of its texts had been memorized, and some would have been transcribed after the fire, perhaps with no mention of their origins.

I was about to join the conversation, inquiring after this point, when Denise rang down to the kitchen for the meal to be sent up. For our New Year’s feast, Samax himself had prepared the menu—cactus salad, tomatillo soup, a casserole of octopus and beans, quinoa bread, and of course a platter of assorted fruit—which all of us except Labusi would enjoy. While using Pythagoras’s doctrines as a base, Labusi modeled his diet on a regimen concocted by a sixteenth-century Swiss physician, Gugliemo Grataroli, to strengthen the memory. That night he was dining on one of its staples, bulgar wheat boiled with dandelions and beets. Grataroli also recommended calves’ brains and pickled tongue for breakfast—both of course out of the question for Labusi.

Finally Dr. Deneb and Hadar came into the dining room and took their seats. With Labusi, they were the hotel’s longest-running permanent guests—men who had come to the hotel for short stints and never left. Hadar was the man with the oversized gloves and the metal detector whom I had glimpsed outside the abandoned factory where Ivy took me to Samax; Deneb was the equally elusive character in the white suit and dark glasses, reading the book about Atlantis, whom I had encountered in the lobby on my first night at the hotel. It turned out that Deneb always wore a white suit and those glasses, and he was always reading about Atlantis.

Unfolding his napkin, he immediately picked up on the topic of discussion. “The records of the northern voyages of the Carthaginian general Himlico,” he said in his high-pitched nasal voice, “off the Iberian peninsula in 500 B.C., were lost in that library, and they certainly contained his speculations on the possibility of Atlantis being situated at the mouth of the Mediterranean. It’s a shame because Himlico’s observations when he circumnavigated Africa proved to be remarkably accurate.”

A self-described Atlantologist, Deneb had spent five years visiting nearly every conjectural site of the lost continent. Now he planned to read all the serious literature he could find on the subject of Atlantis, absorb it without taking a single note, and then, as he put it, “write a distilled monograph that will be the quintessential word on the subject.” He told Samax and me one night that he was perhaps two years from completing his reading and picking up his pen. Always fascinated, I had heard him expound dozens of Atlantis theories that variously placed the island’s ruins in places as far-flung as Brazil, Antarctica, and the Sahara Desert. I had several favorites. One was that Atlantis had indeed been an island–continent opposite the Straits of Gibraltar which sank around ten thousand years ago after its mountain ranges erupted volcanically. Another was that the earth once boasted a second moon which burst out of its orbit and crashed into the ocean, destroying Atlantis. Variations of this story, Deneb asserted, are found in the many ancient mythologies, notably the Bushmen’s, whose primary myth concerns a continent west of Africa that disappeared in an epoch they identify as “when two moons revolved around the earth.”

Though Samax was often bemused by Deneb’s fantastical digressions, my uncle’s interest in Atlantis itself was genuine. It did not spring, as I first thought, from his passion for the ancient world, but from something at once simpler and stranger. Samax was of Basque descent (which meant that I was, too, at least partially) and many Basques were convinced that their ancestors hailed, not from the Pyrenees, but the island of Atlantis. More Basques lived in Nevada than in any of the other fifty states, and I had heard a number of them speak matter-of-factly of their Atlantean roots. It’s true that anthropologists have never ascertained the Basques’ origins. Definitely not a native Iberian race, the Basques reject any ancient connection to the Spanish or French. Their language is untraceable. Samax didn’t let on to what degree he accepted the Basques’ claims to be Atlanteans. But he grew animated when Deneb explained to us that the southern Spanish city of Cadiz, with its large, anomalous Basque population, was in ancient times known as “Gades.”

“It is Plato, Junius, who tells us that this city was named after Gadeirus, a king of Atlantis, suggesting that Iberia was an Atlantean colony. If so, the Atlantans probably colonized even farther eastward, for alone among Europeans, the Phoenicians and Etruscans shared with the Basques the unusual fact that ninety-five percent of their
people shared the Double-O-negative blood type”—and here Samax cast me a knowing glance—“with hardly any strains of the A type. That is still true of Basques today, while the opposite ratio is found among Frenchmen and Spaniards.”

At this particular dinner, Hadar took over the conversation, a rare occurrence. Rare because he often traveled abroad, and when he was around was naturally laconic. In fact, he spent more time away from the hotel than he did under its roof. Unlike Deneb or Labusi, Hadar had been specifically hired by Samax during his first visit. But when he listed his occupation, on travel visas and the like, I couldn’t imagine what he put down. He was a meteorite hunter, scouring the earth for them under Samax’s sponsorship. He was on Samax’s payroll because in the course of his travels he scouted and acquired antiquities for him. Calzas went on special missions for Samax, but Hadar simply roved, always on the lookout for rare objects.

I never got along with Hadar, as I did with most of the other guests. He was gruff and impatient, and there was something about him, a remoteness, that made it seem as if in spirit he truly inhabited the cold realms in which his meteors traveled. Usually he wore a blank expression, only his sharp black eyes, screwed deep in their sockets, betraying the fierce mental activity going on behind the mask. A loner who stood out among other loners, Hadar treated me just as he did everyone else. He didn’t dislike me; in fact, I doubt he had much feeling for me at all.