Philosophy Made Simple (35 page)

“Mr. Rudy,” she said, “after what has happened, what my brother is hoping cannot be possible.”

“Nandini. I’m sixty years old. I never expected to fall in love again. But I’ve fallen in love with you. It’s that simple.
Prem.
I know it’s been only a short time…”

“That is how I am marrying the first time.
Prem. A
love match.”

“And now?”

“I am having this dream a little bit too, dreaming of leaving everything behind, my old life, my tea garden, with all its problems, even Champaa, to come to make a new life, but then I receive a sign that I must turn back. Lord Ganesh has placed an obstacle in my path. A
baadha”

“You mean Narmada-Jai? I thought Lord Ganesh was supposed to remove obstacles, not put them in your way.”

“We pray to him to remove obstacles, but when he does not, then we must turn back, not try to go around the obstacle. The obstacle is there for a reason. The lightning is striking her, Mr. Rudy I am trying to interpret it in every which way, but finally I am accepting the truth that the pandit is right. It was a
baadha.”

“But Narmada-Jai came to a good end, wouldn’t you say? I mean, the Rio Grande’s not the Brahmaputra, but it’s a good river.
She died a good death. The vet said it was a miracle that she was able to stand up again.”

“Yes, but afterward, Mr. Rudy, and that too is a sign.”

“After what?”

“It is after I have made my decision to go home.”

“You’re not even going to go to New York?”

She shook her head. “No. I am already telephoning to the airport.”

Rudy started to argue: “Your brother said you’d never be able to remarry in India…” He thought she almost faltered at this
point. She began to cry again. He put his arm around her to comfort her. “God is dead, Nandini,” he said. “We can do whatever we want to do. We
should
do whatever we want to do.”

But after a while she stopped him. “No, Mr. Rudy, you mustn’t say that.”

“Its not just me, Nandini,” he said. “My daughters love you too. Don’t you see that?”

“Yes, I can see that too. It is maximum good family my son is coming into.”

“How can I explain love itself, Nandini?—not mutual convenience, but the thing itself. For which we risk everything. I am a young man again. I’m afraid to touch you. Afraid to take your hand. To kiss you.” He took her hand, even though he was afraid.
“I’m thinking about the tent,” he went on. “About the one corner flapping in the night. You told Ashok not to stake it down.
Don’t stake it down now, Nandini.”

“The pandit was right, Rudy. What happen to Narmada-Jai is a
baadha,
a very bad sign. I hope Molly and TJ will overcome it.”

“But don’t you think it was a good sign, for us and for them? In the end? The way she got up and went down to the river?”
But he realized that he was repeating himself. “There are so many good signs, Nandini: love, reason, self-interest, desire,
TJ and Molly, how my daughters love you,
prem.”

But opposing these arguments was a powerful counterforce, deeper than reason, more primitive than love. Rudy didn’t know what to call it: Superstition? Religion? Spirituality? Tao? Karma? Dharma? It was like encountering some force of nature, like Hurricane Beulah, or one of the fundamental constants, like the strong nuclear force, or the weak nuclear force, like gravity or electromagnetism. Rudy couldn’t understand it any more than he could understand how these constants held the universe together.

That night Nandini took another whirlpool bath. Rudy lay down on his bed. He was very tired, but he didn’t sleep. He listened to the hum of the whirlpool in the bathroom downstairs. After her bath Nandini came into his room. She sat on the edge of the bed and he pretended to be asleep for a while, waiting to see what she would do. He thought he might be in a parallel universe.

“Don’t be angry with me, Rudy,” she said. “And don’t be sad.” She walked her fingers up his back from his waist to his neck.
He reached around and put his hand on her thigh. He turned over and looked at her. She was wearing a special sari, lacy, like a negligee.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said.

“This is what I want to do. Is it okay?”

He nodded.

After a few minutes she raised her arms up and unfastened the lovely bird-shaped clip that held her hair back. He could hear her put it down on the little table next to the bed. He touched her, tentatively, the way he’d touched Narmada-Jai the first time, not knowing what to expect. He was always surprised by the Pendleton-blanket feel of Narmada-Jai, and now he was surprised by the feel of Nandini, like a smooth peach. He kept his hand on her back while she unwrapped her sari. He rubbed the back of her knee a little with his fingers, as if he were searching for something.

“A little bit higher up,” she said, putting her hand over his eyes.

He raised his hand as far as he could without shifting position. He could feel the pull of the silk sari sliding under his hand, and then the smooth skin of her thigh.

“You wouldn’t let Molly and TJ sleep together in Assam,” he said.

She laughed. “Maximum restraint yield maximum pleasure, don’t you think?”

He was naked under a flannel sheet and a light blanket, but he’d left a couple of sticks of ironwood on the fire in the wood-stove,
so the house was not too cold.

She stretched out beside him. He moistened his finger with his tongue and touched her nipples, which contracted and then hardened,
and then he traced her milk line down to her crotch, her sacred yoni. The insides of her thighs burned his hand, and his heart started to beat faster. He reached for the little bottle of nitroglycerin tablets next to the bed, and then decided to let whatever was going to happen happen.

Had she changed her mind? Was it possible after all to imagine a future together? He cupped her head in his hands and kissed the creases on her forehead. Her sari and his flannel sheet had become tangled. He kicked the sheet aside. The sari fell to the floor with a whisper, and he could feel her breathing in his ear. How did she know what to whisper to create such intense sweetness, such promises of bliss? How did she know so exactly to whisper what he wished to hear? And how did he understand the words she murmured in song, even though they were in Hindi?
Come to me, my darling, my breasts are young and firm, my thighs are soft as satin, my crop green and young, ready to be irrigated.
Her breath in his ear was warm as a breeze in early spring. What philosopher could explain such warmth, such sweetness, like fresh herbs crushed in a mortar? What philosopher could give an account of the deep infrasonic rumbling that came from the most intimate part of her self, like the sounds he’d sensed coming from Narmada-Jai out in the barn?
God is dead,
he thought, but he fitted himself into her as if he were pressing the last piece into a puzzle.

S
ocrates was a stonecutter, a blue-collar worker; but did Plato ever hold down a real job? Aristotle? Epicurus? George Berkeley became a bishop, but how hard could that be? David Hume? Immanuel Kant? Arthur Schopenhauer? Friedrich Nietzsche? Were they all academics? Rudy was thinking about manual labor now. He’d already sold half his crop to Becker in Chicago and half to Nick Regiacorte in Houston, and so—once he’d finished his morning phone calls—he’d go out in the field and work with the picking crew.

There was nothing about manual labor in
Philosophy Made Simple,
but Rudy’d been asking himself, how would the course of philosophy have been different if these philosophers had had to pick a thousand pounds of avocados a day? And sometimes he even imagined that the men on the tall wooden ladders to his left and his right—Medardo’s picking crew from his hometown, Mon-temorelos, who bunked in a double-wide at the back of the trailer park—were not Rinaldo and Felipe and Carlos and Antonio and Hilario, but Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Immanuel
and Arthur.
Would they be good workers? Do a days work for a day’s pay? Would Medardo scold them, as he scolded Rudy, if they jailed to
press the knobs on the end of their blades up against the stems just so, to preserve the button? Would they look forward,
as Rudy did, to gathering around the glass-topped table on the veranda at the end of a long day to drink a bottle or two of
cerveza fria?
What would they talk about? The good life? The One and the Many? The
Ding an sich?
The Veil of Maya? Free will? The mind-body problem?

And while they were talking would they be thinking about the last woman they’d gone to bed with? The last woman they’d loved?
Or maybe the first? Would Rudy be able to follow their conversations, or would it be like trying to follow the conversations
in Spanish on the veranda, which started out slowly and calmly enough, as they discussed the approaching hurricane or the
new clutch that Rudy and Medardo had installed in the tractor, but which soon accelerated as they took up the problem of Rinaldo’s
oldest boy, who was already giving the girls a hard time, or of Carlos’s mother-in-law, or of Hilario’s wife’s sister, who’d
taken up with a married man?

It was a question for Uncle Siva, who’d sent a copy of
Schopenhauer and the Upanishads
and a note thanking Rudy for his hospitality and suggesting that he might enjoy Leibniz’s critique of Locke’s empiricism.
I’ll see if I can find a decent translation,
he wrote,
and send it to you.

They enjoyed reasonably good weather after the storm that had killed Norma Jean, but Hurricane Beulah was on the news every night as it moved across the Caribbean into the Gulf. They worked in the lower grove every day picking as many avocados as they could in the week before the hurricane was expected to make landfall, filling the field bins, which Medardo carted away
with a hydraulic lift. They worked right through Saturday—Diez y Seis, Mexican Independence Day—and Sunday, but on Monday,
after taking two loads of avocados to the packing house in Hidalgo, they called it quits. Medardo went to batten down whatever could be battened down at the trailer park; Rudy went into town to stock up on pasta and canned goods and candles and flashlight batteries. He bought four sheets of three-quarter-inch plywood to board up the windows, he filled water jugs and the big bathtub,
and he nailed down the shutters in the barn that he’d opened up again after the wedding.

Beulah entered the Texas coast at the mouth of the Rio Grande on the morning of September 20. By the time Rudy got around to boarding up the windows, it was too late. He couldn’t hold on to the sheets of plywood in the wind. Gusts of 135 miles per hour were reported at Brownsville, and of 86 miles per hour as far inland as Corpus Christi. Beulah spun off eighty-five tornadoes, and damage in the lower Valley was estimated at half a billion dollars. Medardo’s trailer park escaped damage,
but the packing house in Hidalgo was destroyed by a tornado. The forty thousand pounds of avocados they’d picked the week before disappeared. Neither Mission nor McAllen was hit by a tornado, but the Rio Grande spilled out of its banks and out of the floodway, and the military launched Operation Bravo, sending out amphibious and high-wheeled vehicles to rescue people who were stranded. Blankets and medicine and food and snakebite kits were airlifted into flooded areas. The airport in McAllen was flooded. Light planes had been towed to the McAllen Country Club. A herd of cattle was driven down Highway 83 to get them out of the floodplain. Reynosa was flooded from the international bridge to Joe’s Place.

The farm-to-market roads were all closed. Rudy couldn’t get out for several days. He could have asked to be evacuated, but he
had plenty of food and water, so he decided to stay. The phone lines were down, and there was no electricity.