Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (6 page)

He told her in his black-comic way about lonely men in remote localities who fucked the earth, who made a hole in the soil and planted their own seed there to see if man-plants would grow, half human, half vegetal, but she made him stop, she didn’t like stories like that, Why don’t you tell me happy stories? she scolded him, That wasn’t nice. He hung his head in mock apology and she forgave him, nothing mock about her forgiveness, she meant it, as she meant everything she said or did.

The years ran on some more. The trouble Father Jerry had predicted came to Bombay which had become Mumbai and there was a December and January of communal rioting during which nine hundred people died, mostly Muslims and Hindus, but, according to the official count, there were also forty-five “unknown” and five “others.” Charles Duniza had come to Mumbai from Goa to visit the Kamathipura red-light district in search of Manjula, his favorite
hijra
“sex worker,” to use the new morally neutral term
,
and found death instead of sex work. A mob angered by the destruction in Ayodhya of the Mughal emperor Babar’s mosque ran through the streets and perhaps the first victims of the Hindu-Muslim troubles were a Christian “other” and his transgender whore, an “other” of another kind. Nobody cared. Father Jerry was off his turf, at the Minara mosque in the Pydhonie district, trying, as a “third party,” neither Muslim or Hindu, to use his long eminence in the city to calm the passions of the faithful, but he was told to leave, and maybe somebody followed him, somebody with murder in mind, and Father Jerry never got home to Bandra. After that there were two waves of killings, and Charles and Father Jerry became insignificant statistics. The city which once prided itself on being above communal troubles was above them no longer. Bombay was gone, dying with the Very Rev. Fr. Jeremiah D’Niza. All that remained was the new, uglier Mumbai.

“You’re all I have now,” Geronimo Manezes told Ella when the news about his uncle and father reached him. Then Bento Elfenbein died, struck by lightning out of a clear night sky while he was smoking an after-dinner cigar on his beloved hundred acres in Big Groundnut after a jovial dinner with good friends, and it emerged that his entrepreneurial dealings had led him to the edge of ruin, he had been involved in a lot of funny business, not actual Ponzi schemes but similar smoke-and-mirrors con games, home improvement and office supply scams, a Max Bialystock–type movie production swindle that gave him intense pleasure,
Who’d have thought,
he had written in an incriminating notebook found hidden in his bedroom after his passing,
that
Springtime for Hitler
idea would actually work in real life?
There was at least one giant pyramid con in the Midwest, and his whole operation was so heavily leveraged that immediately after his death the Elfenbein house of cards went tumbling into the humiliation of seizures and foreclosures. The Groundnut acres were forfeited and not one of Bento’s dream houses was ever built. If Elfenbein had lived, he would have done jail time, Mr. Geronimo realized. The authorities were on Bento’s trail, for tax fraud and a dozen other infractions, and they were closing in. The bolt from the blue gave him a dignified exit, or rather one as flamboyant as his life. “Now,” said Ella, who inherited what she described as
next to nothing,
“you’re all I have too.” As he took her into his arms he felt a tremor of superstition shake his body. He remembered Father Jerry talking, at that strained Chinese lunch, about Ibn Rushd’s household being cursed by God to be lightning rods or examples. Was it possible, he wondered, that those families who were joined to his family by marriage fell under the curse as well?
Stop it,
he admonished himself.
You don’t believe in medieval curses, or in God.

This, when she was thirty and he forty-four. She had made him a happy man. Mr. Geronimo the contented gardener, his weathered days spread out in the open like mysteries revealed, his spade trowel shears and glove speaking the language of living things as eloquently as any writer’s pen, flower-pinking the earth in spring or fighting winter ice. Perhaps it is in the nature of workers to translate themselves into what they work upon, the way dog lovers come to look like their dogs, so perhaps Mr. Geronimo’s little foible was not so peculiar after all—but often, if truth be told, he preferred to think of himself as a plant, perhaps even as one of those man-plants born of sexual congress between a human being and the earth; and, consequently, as the gardened rather than the gardener. He placed himself in the soil of time and wondered, godlessly, who might be gardening him. In these imaginings he cast himself always among the rootless plants, the epiphytes and bryophytes, who must lean upon others, being unable to stand alone. So he was, in his own fancy, a sort of moss or lichen or creeping orchid, and the one he leaned upon, the gardener of his nonexistent soul, was Ella Manezes. His loving and much-loved wife.

Sometimes when they made love she told him he smelled like smoke. Sometimes she said it was as if in the throes of his passion the edges of his body softened, became blurry, so that her body could melt into his. He told her he burned garden refuse every day. He told her she was imagining things. Neither of them suspected the truth.

Then, seven years after Bento’s death, lightning struck again.

The thousand-and-one-acre La Incoerenza property had been named by a man dedicated to numbers who believed that the world didn’t add up, Mr. Sanford Bliss the animal-feed king, producer of the famous Bliss Chows for pigs, rabbits, cats, dogs, horses, cattle, and monkeys. It was said of Sanford Bliss that there wasn’t a line of poetry in his head but every dollar figure he’d ever encountered was neatly filed away and readily accessible. He believed in cash; and in the great vault in his library concealed behind a portrait painted in the Florentine manner depicting him as a Tuscan grandee, he stored, always, an almost comical amount of cash money, well over one million dollars in bricks of notes of different denominations, because, as he said,
you never know.
He also believed in numerical superstitions, such as the idea that round numbers were unlucky, you never charged ten dollars for a bag of feed, you charged $9.99, and you never gave a man a hundred-dollar tip, but always one hundred and one.

When he was a college student he spent a summer in Florence as a guest of the Actons of La Pietra and at their dinner table in the company of artists and thinkers for whom numbers were meaningless or at best common and therefore beneath consideration he encountered the extraordinarily un-American idea that reality was not something given, not an absolute, but something that men made up, and that values, too, changed according to who was doing the valuing. A world that did not cohere, in which truth did not exist and was replaced by warring versions trying to dominate or even eradicate their rivals, horrified him and, being bad for business, struck him as a thing that needed altering. He named his home La Incoerenza,
incoherence
in Italian, to remind him daily of what he had learned in Italy, and spent a sizable proportion of his wealth promoting those politicians who held, usually because of genuine or fake religious convictions, that the eternal certainties needing protecting and that monopolies, of goods, information and ideas, were not only beneficial but essential to the preservation of American liberty. In spite of his efforts the world’s incompatibility levels, what Sanford Bliss in his numerical way came to call its
index of incoherence,
continued inexorably to rise. “If
zero
is the point of sanity at which two plus two always equals four, and
one
is the fucked-up place where two and two can add up to any damn thing you want them to be,” he told his daughter Alexandra, the adored child of his old age, born to his last, much more youthful, Siberian wife long after he had given up the dream of an heir, “then, Sandy, I’m sorry to tell you that we are currently located somewhere around zero point nine seven three.”

When her parents suddenly died, when they fell out of the sky into the East River, the arbitrariness of their end finally proving to Sanford Bliss’s daughter Alexandra that the universe was not only incoherent and absurd but also heartless and soulless, the young orphan inherited everything; and having neither business acumen nor entrepreneurial interest, she immediately negotiated the sale of the Bliss Chows to the Land O’Lakes agricultural cooperative of Minnesota, thus becoming, at nineteen years of age, America’s youngest billionairess. She completed her studies at Harvard, where she revealed an exceptional gift for the acquisition of languages, becoming fluent, by the end of her time at the university, in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, Hungarian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Russian, Pashto, Farsi, Arabic, and Tagalog,
she picked them up in no time,
people said in wonderment,
like shiny pebbles on a beach;
and she picked up a man too, the usual penniless Argentine polo player, a healthy slice of beef from the estancias named Manuel Fariña, picked him up and dropped him fast, married and quickly divorced. She kept his name, turned vegetarian, and sent him packing. After her divorce she retreated forever into the seclusion of La Incoerenza. Here she began her long inquiry into pessimism, inspired by both Schopenhauer and Nietzche, and, convinced of the absurdity of human life and the incompatibility of happiness and freedom, settled while still in the first bloom of youth into a lifetime of solitude and gloom, cloistered in abstraction and dressed in close-fitting white lace. Ella Elfenbein Manezes referred to her, with more than a little scorn, as the Lady Philosopher, and the name stuck, at least in Mr. Geronimo’s head.

There was a streak of masochistic stoicism in the Lady Philosopher, and in bad weather she was often to be found out of doors, ignoring the wind and drizzle or rather accepting them as truthful representatives of the growing hostility of the earth towards its occupants, sitting under an old spreading oak reading a damp book by Unamuno or Camus. The rich are obscure to us, finding ways to be unhappy when all the normal causes of unhappiness are removed. But unhappiness had touched the Lady Philosopher. Her parents were killed in their private helicopter. An elite death but at the moment of dying we are all penniless. She never spoke of it. It would be generous to understand her behavior, willful, remote, abstract, as her way of expressing grief.

The Hudson at the end of its journey is a “drowned river,” its fresh water pushed beneath the incoming salt tides of the sea. “Even the goddamn river makes no sense,” Sanford Bliss told his daughter. “Look how often it flows the wrong goddamn way.” The Indians had called it Shatemuc, the river that flows both ways. On the banks of the drowned river La Incoerenza likewise resisted order. Mr. Geronimo was called in to help. His reputation as a gardener and landscape artist had grown, and he was recommended to her manager, an avuncular British grizzlechops named Oliver Oldcastle with the beard of Karl Marx, a voice like a bassoon, a drink problem, and a Father Jerry–style Catholic upbringing that had left him loving the Bible and loathing the Church. Oldcastle ushered Mr. Geronimo into the grounds, looking like God showing Adam into Eden, and charged him with the task of bringing horticultural coherence to the place. When Mr. Geronimo started working for the Lady Philosopher tangles of thorns filled the ha-ha at the bottom of the garden as if surrounding a sleeping beauty’s castle. Obstinate voles burrowed underground and popped up everywhere, ruining the lawns. Foxes raided the chicken coops. If Mr. Geronimo had run into a snake coiled around a branch of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he wouldn’t have been surprised. The Lady Philosopher shrugged delicately at the state of things. She was barely twenty then but already spoke with the pitiless formality of a dowager. “To bring a country place to heel,” the orphan châtelaine of La Incoerenza stiffly said, “one must kill and kill and kill, one must destroy and destroy. Only after years of mayhem can a measure of stable beauty be achieved. This is the meaning of civilization. Your eyes, however, are soft. I fear you may not be the murderer I need. But anyone else would probably be just as bad.”

Because of her belief in the growing weakness and increasing incompetence of the human race in general, she agreed to put up with Mr. Geronimo, and suffer with a sigh the consequent imperfections of her land. She retreated into thought and left Mr. Geronimo to the war of the thorns and voles. His failures went unnoticed, his successes earned him no praise. A deadly oak blight struck the region, threatening Alexandra’s beloved trees; he followed the example of scientists on the country’s far western coast who were coating or injecting oaks with a commercial fungicide that kept the fatal pathogen,
Phytophthora ramorum,
at bay. When he told his employer that the treatment had succeeded and all her oaks were saved, she shrugged and turned away, as if to say, Something else will kill them soon enough.

Ella Manezes and the Lady Philosopher, both young, smart and beautiful, could have become friends, but did not: what Ella called Alexandra’s “negativity,” her insistence, when challenged by the ever-hopeful Ella, that it was “impossible, at this point in history, to adopt a hopeful view of humanity,” drove them apart. Ella sometimes accompanied Mr. Geronimo to La Incoerenza and walked the grounds while he worked, or stood atop the estate’s single green hill watching the river pass by in the wrong direction; and it was on that hill, seven years after her father died, that she too was hit by lightning out of a clear sky, and died on the spot. Among the many aspects of her death that Mr. Geronimo found unbearable was this: that of the two beauties at La Incoerenza that day, the lightning had singled out the optimist for death, and had let the pessimist live.

The phenomenon colloquially known as a “bolt from the blue” works like this: the lightning flash emanates from the rear of a thundercloud and travels as many as twenty-five miles away from the storm area, then angles down and strikes the ground, or a tall building, or a lone tree in a high place, or a woman standing alone on a hilltop watching the river pass by. The storm from which it came is too far away to be seen. But the woman on the hilltop can be seen, falling slowly to the ground, like a feather complying, very reluctantly, with the law of gravity.