Philosophy Made Simple (9 page)

Aristotle’s appetitive man,
Rudy thought. “A man my age, Medardo,” he said, blushing slightly “I’ve put those things behind me.”

“A man your age! Why, you’re in the prime of life, Rudy A man your age indeed.” But Rudy waved him off and Medardo took his leave. Rudy could hear his footsteps in the passage that led to the kitchen, and then the sound of the door closing behind him, and then the sound of Medardo’s car on the gravel in the drive.

No more meaningful than singing
la la la, Rudy thought,
and isn’t it better, after all, to follow Aristotle’s advice and appreciate the wonder of the world around us, the wonder
of ordinary experience, instead of wandering like Plato out to the edge of the universe in order to see what lies beyond?

As he turned the pages, rereading the passages he’d underlined, he could feel Medardo’s hand on his shoulder, strong and warm and human.

“La la la,”
he sang, and laughed again.

Rudy was restless. He dug up a small garden next to the garage and put in lettuce, potatoes, a few tomato plants, some basil,
some hot peppers, and then he made the garden bigger and planted broccoli and cauliflower, zucchini and cucumbers, more herbs.
He wanted to plant arugula — Helen had been wild about arugula, which she’d tasted for the first time in Italy — but couldn’t find any seeds. He bought a teach-yourself-Spanish book and a Spanish dictionary at a used bookstore in Mission, determined to master the conditional and the subjunctive. He walked across the international bridge to Reynosa three times in one week,
on Monday, on Wednesday, and again on Friday, to practice his Spanish. On
Monday he ate a taquito at the Zaragoza market, surrounded by Mexican schoolgirls in their plaid uniforms; on Wednesday he ate the fixed-price
comida corrida
at Joe’s Place — a run-down nightclub with pictures of William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac on the wall behind the bar — and on Friday he ate
cabrito
at a place called Casa Viejo, where the middle-aged waiters wore tuxedos. Rudy had hoped that raising avocados would be as enlightening, in its own way, as philosophy; he hoped it might teach him patience and wisdom. But it wasn’t, and it didn’t.
The problem with avocados, Rudy discovered, was that they didn’t make many demands on him. The Texas Lula doesn’t have any natural predators and isn’t subject to any diseases, so there was no need to spray. Most of the avocado growers also had citrus trees to keep them occupied, but all Rudy had to do from April to September was irrigate once a month. He spent some time on the phone with Harry Becker in Chicago, and with Nick Regiacorte, who handled avocados for the Graziano brothers at the Houston Produce Center. He paid visits to the Texas A&M Extension agent in Weslaco, who had put in a small experimental grove,
and to the manager of the packing house in Hidalgo, who was going to ship his avocados. After that, there was no one to talk to except Medardo and the Russian, Norma Jean’s owner, whose name he couldn’t pronounce.

With Medardo he talked philosophy, trying to explain, in Spanish, whatever he’d been reading in
Philosophy Made Simple.
Medardo himself was a skeptic. Like Pyrrho, who’d served under Alexander the Great, he’d seen enough of the world to know that whatever people south of the border believed, the opposite would be believed by people north of the border. Rudy would always try to keep Medardo longer by offering him another bottle of Pearl, but Medardo would drink one beer and smoke one cigarette and then be on his way.

With the Russian he talked art, drawing on his memories of Helens lectures. Rudy’d always preferred pictures that were pictures of something, and for the most part Helen had too — saints and popes and cardinals and naked women, horses and buildings and landscapes — but at the end of her life Helen had turned to abstract art—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko —
as if being free from pictures
of
something was liberating. At first the abstract paintings meant nothing to Rudy, but they seemed to open up for Helen a warm,
silent space in which her spirit could rest, like a bird after a long flight, and that’s what Rudy looked for in Norma Jeans paintings, a place to rest. But the paintings troubled him the same way the paintings that Helen kept returning to troubled him. Was there really something
there?
Was he looking at true Beauty or just at some paint splashed on a canvas?

The Russian could be found every afternoon in front of his little barn at the edge of Medardo’s trailer park, sitting on a canvas chair while Norma Jean stood at her easel and painted. Rudy, who went into town every day to shop at Lopez Bros.
Grocery and at a Lebanese deli in McAllen — to have daily contact with other people — would stop on his way home to watch.
He bought several more paintings, and each time he bought one the Russian offered him a glass of vodka and they’d admire the new purchase together. The Russian had his own view of beauty: “Beauty is like death,” he’d say, lifting his glass. “You can’t understand it without vodka.”

Rudy laughed. They were looking at a painting called
Ants Climbing a Tree.

“Where do you get the titles?” he asked.

“I get them out of a Chinese cookbook.”

“What happens when you get to the end of the book?”

“I just start over again. It take me about two years.”

Afraid of chaos, afraid of disintegrating, Rudy spent a lot of time getting organized: kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, barn. He organized Helen’s record albums on the lower shelves and then arranged and rearranged her books. There were art books, history books, a few novels, an edition of Shakespeare’s plays, and the
Collected Poems of Robert Frost,
but there were also a lot of books that defied any kind of classification, even alphabetical order. What was he supposed to do with all the books on death that they’d bought at Kroch’s & Brentano’s when Helen got back from Italy? What was he supposed to do with
Woman’s Day Home Decorating Ideas
#1, and with
Intimacy, Sensitivity, Sex, and the Art of Love,
in which the authors “explain the use of the ‘bioloop,’ the recently developed method of controlling mentally what had previously been thought of as autonomous bodily functions”? Where had these books come from?

When he’d finished arranging the books, he took up birding. His grove was located between the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge and the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park, right at the convergence of the Central and Mississippi flyways. Along the river in the morning, and again in the evening, the birds made a terrific racket. Rudy’s mother had been a serious birder,
a member of the Audubon Society who had over four hundred birds on her life list and who could imitate the sounds of dozens of birds. She participated in the Christmas Bird Count every year, and one fall she took Rudy with her to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to watch as thousands of migrating birds — raptors, waterbirds, songbirds — were funneled through a natural corridor to Whitefish Point. He’d started a life list of his own after the trip, but he hadn’t kept it up.

He bought Petersons
Field Guide to the Birds of Texas
and started a new list, getting up at four o’clock and heading over to the state park, a six-hundred-acre stand of subtropical vegetation only three miles upstream. Bentsen was home to almost three hundred documented species, and he soon had a list of seventy birds, but by sunrise every morning the trail that looped through the park was so crowded with birders searching for elusive “life birds” that he preferred to do his birding at home, sitting on the stump of an old mesquite tree that he’d cut up for firewood, near the spot where he’d waited for the Second Coming, and simply enjoying the society that presented itself to him: the great kiskadees that nested in the flowering mesquite trees and greeted him on his way to the river by calling out their name:
kis-ka-dee,
and the strange chickenlike chachalacas from Mexico who clattered like castanets; high-flying hook-billed kites, a pair of Harris’s hawks, a family of least grebes who swam in Creaky’s old swimming hole, a little cove carved out of the northern bank of the river; the belted kingfisher who guarded Rudy’s stretch of shoreline, and the small green heron who crouched on the edge of the cove; the sandhill cranes who sometimes visited from the park. The kingfisher and the heron and the cranes,
like other winter Texans, were getting ready to head north for the summer. The grebes and the kites and the hawks, like Rudy,
would stay all year.

He was reluctant to call Meg and Molly too often because they were still angry. At least Meg was. She couldn’t understand why he’d moved so far away from home. He wanted her to drive down with the dogs, but she didn’t think it was a good idea.
“They miss you, Pop. Just like the rest of us. But the kids love them.” He figured she was holding them for ransom.

This was something new for Rudy. He’d never been at odds with his daughters before. He’d read all the articles in the Sunday papers about the problems that fathers had with their daughters, but he’d never experienced these problems firsthand. Oh,
he’d had plenty of battles with the girls, especially when they were in high school, before Helen died, but they’d always been friends, that was the important thing, they’d always been good friends. He was beginning to look forward to Mollys wedding in August the way a child might begin looking forward to Christmas, even though it was only April, because he hoped it would mend the circle that had been broken. Molly and TJ were going to India in June, returning later in the summer. He wanted to put an end to this estrangement, which tugged at his heart, drew it down like a lead sinker on the end of a fishing line.

Early in the morning on the anniversary of Helen’s death, April 22, Rudy was down by the river. As he turned to head back to the house, his arms aching pleasantly from the weight of his binoculars, he heard a distant trumpet blast. He thought it might be a whooping crane and his heart leaped up, but he scanned the horizon with his heavy binoculars in vain.

His fleeting experiences of beauty — and there were a lot of them — were so intense that they were painful rather than pleasurable.
He couldn’t figure out what to make of them. The birds, like Socrates’ bird, reminded him of the soul, gazing upward and caring nothing for the world below. Norma Jean’s paintings — there was one in every room now — opened like windows onto an uncharted inland sea. The Michelangelesque curves along the top of the bookcases stirred up an ache in him, like an old war wound, every time he took a book down off a shelf. Instead of becoming happy he became irritable and impatient. He lost his
temper at material objects, as if he suspected that the universe was conspiring against him, playing tricks on him. He bumped into things in the dark, tripped over his shoes; he dropped things in the kitchen; he spilled his wine at dinner; the plastic garbage sacks tore when he tried to pull them out of the trash container he’d bought for the kitchen.