Philosophy Made Simple (11 page)

It was seven thirty when they opened the gate at the lateral canal, but one of the seals on the pump that lifted the water to
the upper grove was leaking and they had to close the gate and go into town to find a new seal. By the time they’d replaced the seal and opened the first two valves, at the edge of the grove, it was two o’clock in the afternoon. They opened the gate again and walked along the rows of trees to check the microsprinklers that were located under the canopy of each tree, and then Rudy fixed sandwiches and they drank beer on the veranda.

There were 110 avocado trees on an acre. Twenty-nine and a half acres times 110 equals 3,245 trees. Minus the skips, of course
— trees that had died or stopped producing. One valve could irrigate 110 trees in an hour and a half in the upper grove, where the water was forced through a series of microsprinklers. One valve could irrigate two hundred trees in the same amount of time in the lower grove, which used a gravity system. You could open two valves at a time. Rudy couldn’t figure it out in his head, but it took them five hours to irrigate the upper grove. Rudy fixed more sandwiches and they drank more beer on the veranda before going back to work.

They worked through the night opening and closing the individual valves that fed each row of trees. Each valve had its own personality, its own quirks. Medardo was familiar with them all. Some yielded to slow steady pressure, some to the tap of a rubber mallet. Some required a special wrench. A couple of the oldest valves (which should have been replaced long ago)
turned clockwise, instead of counterclockwise, to open. They walked the rows of trees to check the aluminum irrigation pipes for leaks.

As they came up to the last valve, Medardo had to take a leak. Rudy fitted the wrench over the spoke of the valve wheel and struggled to open the valve by himself, but it was stubborn. Rudy strained too hard — he didn’t want Medardo to think he
couldn’t manage it — and suddenly he felt as if he were being strangled. His chest tightened up like a fist, tighter than it had been when the river had taken hold of him, and he had to hang on to the valve so he wouldn’t fall down. He could hear Medardo peeing in the dark, heard him zip up, like someone striking a match.

In spite of the pain, Rudy tried once more to open the valve, but it wouldn’t budge.

“You’re turning it the wrong way,” Medardo said, shining his flashlight on the valve. “This is one of the old ones I was telling you about. You have to turn it clockwise.”

Rudy let go of the wrench and lowered himself to the ground.

“You all right, Rudy?”

“Just short of breath.”

Medardo turned the valve clockwise, and it opened easily

“Medardo,” Rudy said, “maybe that’s what I’ve been doing all along, trying to turn the valves the wrong way.”

“All along since when?”

“I don’t know. Maybe since my wife died.”

“Rudy,” Medardo said, “you want to know what I think?”

Rudy nodded.

“I think you spend too much time worrying about what things
mean,
about the meaning of life. It’s not good for a person. Now I’m going to speak to you as a friend.”

“Of course.”

“You asked me about the
viernes culturales,
do you remember?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“And I invited you to join me. Now I invite you again. Next Friday, what do you say?”

“To a whorehouse in Reynosa?”

“A whorehouse? No no no. Not the Lipstick or the Tropicana, where I send the boys. Of course not. A man like you doesn’t go
to a whorehouse and pick a woman out of a lineup. No no no, nothing like that. I’m talking about a private club. At Estrella Princesa there is no lineup. At Estrella Princesa a man will always meet someone he knows — an uncle, a cousin, a friend.
He can sit in a comfortable chair and have a drink and talk politics like a gentleman with a little
amiguita
at his side. Its all very civilized. And the women … These are not hardened professionals, señor; they’re serious young women,
very beautiful too, who wish to become dental hygienists or secretaries or even assist at the university. They are especially trained, of course, by Estrella herself. She teaches them how to shop, what clothes to wear, what books to read. They’ll know how to help you out of your cave. And as the sun comes up, we’ll sip tequila and weep at the sad songs sung by the mariachis who come over from the Plaza Morelos. What do you say?”

Rudy realized that this was not just a casual proposal but a special invitation that probably wouldn’t be offered a third time, and he couldn’t say that it didn’t appeal to him. Beautiful young women, trained by Estrella herself. But he couldn’t imagine his way couldn’t imagine himself walking into Estrella Princesa, talking politics, trying to explain American foreign policy to somebody’s uncle with a little
amiguita
at his side. What was Medardo thinking of? It was out of the question. But how to decline? How to explain to Medardo that the senses
are
the cave?

“Think about it, señor. Consider. Your books … Plato, Aristotle. They cannot explain everything. You have to live.”

Rudy wondered about Medardo’s affair with Maxine Wilson. He couldn’t imagine asking in English, but he felt free to ask in Spanish.

Medardo put his hand over his heart. “A man has one great love in his life, and she was mine. I confess this to you, and to you alone,” he said. “She was a remarkable woman, a beautiful
woman, and after Creaky’s accident… It was a terrible thing, to be paralyzed like that. He could move only one arm, you know,
just enough to use his special phone and manipulate the control of his electric wheelchair, and to smoke. He smoked all day.
He had a clothespin that hooked onto the sleeve of his shirt, and Maxine’d light a cigarette for him and put it in the clothespin.
She hated cigarettes and tried to get him to quit, but it was the only pleasure he had left.” Medardo paused to light a cigarette.
“Love is a strange thing, Rudy,” he said. “It was not a matter of choice. You
norteamericanos
think that love is the source of security and peace and happiness, but in reality it is a source of suffering and anxiety.
I was completely vulnerable. I even quit smoking for a while myself. It was a torture.”

Rudy pictured the middle-aged, graying woman who’d shown him Creaky’s files the first time he’d come to Texas, and who’d sat across from him in the lawyer’s office at the closing, signing the papers with a ballpoint pen. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Your philosophers, Rudy,” Medardo said, “what do they know about love and suffering?”

“Well,” Rudy said, “I don’t know about love, but Socrates was executed; and Aristotle had to leave Athens or he would have been executed too.”

“Really? Executed? Philosophers? Why would they execute philosophers?”

“I guess they asked too many questions.”

“Ah, Rudy,” he said, dropping his cigarette and stamping it out in the sandy soil, “maybe you’d better be careful, no?”

“I don’t think I’ll be executed,” Rudy said. “Not for a while, anyway.”

Medardo stepped forward and gave Rudy a proper Mexican
abrazo.
It took a bit of doing to get the
abrazo
right — like learning to use his Japanese saw, or getting the curves just right for
Helen’s bookcases — but in the end Rudy’s right arm went over Medardo’s left, his left under Medardo’s right, and they tilted their heads to the left and administered a series of
palmadas,
little pats on the back, as if they were burping babies, an ancient and powerful means of expressing kinship and love, joy and comfort.

What sorts of things did Medardo get up to at Estrella Princesa? Rudy had a vision of himself as Aristotle, bare-assed with some bare-assed whore riding on his back, while Medardo, like Alexander, watched from behind a bush. No, thank you. But he remained a little uneasy, nonetheless, about Medardo’s invitation, which he had neither accepted nor declined. He felt that Medardo had been a little disappointed in him, and so he was trying to work out an explanation, trying to articulate the things he should have said on Wednesday night when they were irrigating. But what should he have said?

Rudy noodled his explanation all day Thursday and all day Friday, but when Medardo stopped by he had trouble putting his thoughts into words. “
Querido
Medardo,” he said. “Forgive me, but my love for my wife was quite a different thing from what you propose. The pleasure you enjoy at Estrella Princesa is only a rough sketch of true pleasure, like my drawing of Plato’s cave. It is mixed with pain.
Only when your soul follows wisdom do you find true pleasure. Most men live like brute animals. They look down and stoop over the ground; they poke their noses under the table; they kick and butt each other with their horns and hooves because they want these animal pleasures. True happiness is only when the soul acts in harmony with virtue.”

Medardo smiled. “So,” he said, “you don’t want to go?”

Rudy shook his head.

“The trees look good,” Medardo said. “Did you notice how the leaves are opening up? They were starting to curl before we irrigated.
Just a little. You have to know what to look for. Now they’re fine.” He waved from the window of his Buick Riviera as he drove off. In the late-afternoon sun his car looked black rather than sky blue.

A
week later Rudy had a heart attack. If Norma Jean hadn’t picked him up and laid him in the back of his truck, and if the Russian hadn’t driven him to the hospital in McAllen, the date on his tombstone would have read May 3, 1967. And he wouldn’t have cared.

He’d eaten a fiery chicken vindaloo at an Indian restaurant in McAllen, the Taj Mahal, and had spoken to the manager about catering Mollys wedding. He’d been prompted by a call from Molly, who’d found a hotel in Detroit that offered an assortment of Indian wedding packages.

Rudy was annoyed. “Are you trying to punish me?”

“Punish you? Papa, we just thought it would be easier for everyone. TJ’s relatives live in Detroit. Our friends are in Ann Arbor. It just makes sense. All you’d have to do is show up. With your checkbook. The hotel will need a deposit fairly soon.”

“It doesn’t make sense to me,” Rudy said, “and I’m the one with the checkbook.”

“Just think about it, that’s all.”

“I’ve already thought about it,” he said.

“Well then,” she said, “suit yourself.”

The manager of the Taj Mahal had been very accommodating, and had given him the business card of a pandit, a Hindu priest,
who ran a small ashram near Bentsen State Park. Rudy studied the card:

Pandit Sathyasiva Bhagvanulu

WEDDINGS, FUNERALS, HOROSCOPES, PUJAS

“Is this the guy who’s getting rid of the crows?” Rudy asked.

“Yes, he is a very remarkable man.”

“I read about him in the
Monitor”
Rudy said.

“Precisely. I have a copy of the article in my office if you’d like to see it again.”

Thousands of crows had been gathering in the downtown area, nesting in the trees, fouling the sidewalks and the car lots along Highway 83. The city had tried everything, including bringing in a falconer, but nothing had worked. The crows had mobbed the falcons, which had then refused to fly. Now the city had employed the pandit. The pandit refused to explain how he proposed to get rid of the crows — except to say that he wouldn’t kill them; and he wouldn’t allow anyone to observe him. This secrecy prompted people to watch for him, and various sightings were reported — in a car lot on Highway 83, on the municipal golf course, walking along the Mission Main Canal just north of the second lifting station — as if he were a rare bird, and in his bright robe, according to the article in the
Monitor,
he did look rather like a flamingo. There was a photo of him in the paper looking up at a dozen or so crows perched on telephone wires. The crows dispersed during the day to forage but gathered in the city in the evening, darkening the skies.