Philosophy Made Simple

by Robert Hellenga

  “Texas consumes more avocados than any state in the country,” he said, “but if you walk into a supermarket all you find are California avocados.”

  Medardo agreed that it didn’t make sense. But what was one to do? He shrugged his shoulders.

  They were standing in Creaky’s study, which was empty except for the metal shelves that held Creaky’s grove records. Becker’s produce truck hadn’t arrived yet with Rudy’s furniture.

  “Something else that doesn’t make sense,” Rudy said, “are these viernes culturales? Cultural Fridays? You bring in guys from Texas A&M to give lectures?”

  Medardo put his hand on Rudy’s shoulder and explained. Once a month he took the boys — the pickers — across the border to Reynosa for a night on the town.

  “And you expect me to pay for this?” Rudy said.

  “You want to keep everybody happy, okay? You know what 1 mean?”

  Rudy was determined to be firm with Medardo from the very beginning, to let him know who was boss, but he found it hard to be firm in a language he didn’t know very well, and besides, the man was so handsome, his teeth so white, his smile so unforced, his animal spirits so contagious, his manner so generous, that Rudy couldn’t bring himself to cancel the cultural Fridays.

  “Yeah,” Rudy said, “I know what you mean.”

  Getting ready to live is easier than actually living, just as getting ready for a journey is easier than actually going on a journey Rudy was anxious to get on with Philosophy Made Simple, but there was a lot to be done first. He replaced the uncomfortable invalids toilet and seated a new one. He installed a shower. He bought a chain saw and, for the woodstove, cut up a couple of dead mesquite trees and a small ironwood tree that almost ruined the chain on his new Stihl saw. He slapped a new coat of calc on the thick adobe walls, and he arranged and rearranged the furniture when it finally arrived. There was no attic, no basement, no closets, but there were cabinets in the old tack room in the barn, where he stored his shotgun and fishing tackle, his Ampex tape recorder, Helens slide projector, and the footlocker with his dad’s magic stuff. He built bookcases in his study that had closed cabinets on the bottom, where he was going to put Helen’s record collection, and five adjustable shelves on the top. He didn’t have the pattern for Helens Florentine curve, but he didn’t need a pattern; that curve was fixed forever in his imagination. He drew it on a piece of cardboard and cut the top moldings by hand with his Japanese saw. He painted the bookcases forest green.

  At the end of his third week in Texas, Rudy got Medardo, who’d stopped by on his way to Reynosa for a cultural Friday, to help him carry Helens big post-office desk into the study and place it against the west wall so that he could look out the window at the upper grove and the rows of sabal palms that lined the drive.

  They rolled out a threadbare Oriental rug that Helen had bought at an auction, and Rudy cracked open a couple bottles of Pearl. Then he and Medardo unpacked the books and shelved them at random; Rudy didn’t care. He could sort them out later. Right now he wanted to see what the room would look like full of books. It looked beautiful. The finishing touch was Golden Flower and Jade Tree, another Norma Jean, which Rudy hung between the two deep-set windows on the north wall. It was a beautiful room, a serious room where serious thinking could be done.

  If Rudy and Medardo had been speaking English they would soon have exhausted their supply of conversation, but in Spanish things took time, and the beer and the fatigue made Rudy less self-conscious. In Spanish he was a different person — more relaxed, less impatient. Time slowed down in Spanish. A simple story about something that had happened on the market, which would take two minutes to tell in English, would take him fifteen minutes in Spanish. And there were topics he and Medardo would probably have avoided in English: Rudy’s philosophical project or quest, for example. Rudy couldn’t imagine giving an account of it in English, but in Spanish it seemed easy to explain to Medardo what he was trying to accomplish, as if he were spending Monopoly money instead of real money: to get some answers to the big questions, to settle on a rule of life. He drew a sketch of Plato’s cave and showed it to Medardo, and he explained how he’d thought he’d caught glimpses of the realm outside the cave — on Christmas Eve and then again when he first glimpsed the Rio Grande.

  Medardo examined the sketch of the cave. “These people in the cave,” he said. “It’s like they’re sitting in a movie theater, right, or in front of the television set?”

  Rudy nodded. “Something like that, but they’re tied to their chairs, so they can’t get up and look out the window.”

  “And you feel you were looking out the window? On Christmas Eve? And when you saw the river the first time?”

  “That’s what it felt like,” Rudy said, “but Aristotle — Plato’s star pupil — Aristotle made fun of Plato’s ideal forms and said they were no more meaningful than singing la la la.” He laughed. “La la la. That’s very funny”

  Medardo laughed too. “Señor ‘arrington,” he said, “Señor Aristotle was right about these glimpses of higher reality. You have to be careful. My cousin in Matamoros had a vision of the Virgin Mary, naked, and the bishop and a whole carload of priests came all the way from the cathedral in Monterrey. The church always investigates these things, you know, visions, miracles, things like that. They asked him all kinds of questions, and then they told him not to talk about it anymore.”

  Rudy opened two more beers. He could never be sure, in Spanish, when Medardo was pulling his leg.

  “Do you think it was a vision?”

  “I think he got his hands on a copy of Playboy magazine and it unsettled his brain.”

  “How about you, Medardo? Have you ever caught a glimpse of anything?”

  Medardo leaned forward and put his hand on Rudy’s arm. “Sometimes, señor, in the act of love …” He poured some beer in his glass and watched the foam rise and spill over the edge and run down the side. He wiped the side of the glass with a large white handkerchief. “Sometimes in the act of love 1 seem to see something, but then afterward, I think …” Medardo paused to light a cigarette. “Afterward I think I was only singing la la la.”

  Rudy found one of Helen’s ashtrays in the desk and placed it on the arm of Medardo’s chair. “My wife used to tell a story about Aristotle that you’d appreciate,” he said. “When Aristotle was an old man he got a job as the tutor of Alexander the Great. He’s giving young Alexander a hard time about his girlfriend, so Alexander gets his girlfriend, whose name is Phyllis, to dance naked right in front of Aristotle’s window, where he’s writing his book about ethics. Pretty soon Aristotle has such an erection he can’t take it anymore and goes out and propositions Phyllis. Phyllis says sure, but she wants Aristotle to do her a little favor; she wants to play horsey —jugar a caballo”

  Medardo laughed. “What you want to say, Rudy, is montar al caballito”

  “Montar al caballito,” Rudy repeated. “In one of her lectures,” he went on, “my wife used to show a slide of a medieval tapestry with a picture of Aristotle and Phyllis. Aristotle’s wearing a bridle, and Phyllis is riding on his back, using a whip on the old man’s bare rear end. Alexander’s watching from behind a bush. You’d think Aristotle would be stuck. Here he is, caught with his pants down. But he was a smart old guy: ‘If love can do this to an old man like me, a philosopher,’ he says to Alexander, just think how dangerous it is for a young fellow like you.’“

  The dean at Edgar Lee Masters had asked Helen not to show this particular slide, but Helen had ignored his request on the grounds that the slide was an integral part of her lecture on the iconography of education. Iconography was one of Helen’s favorite words.

  Medardo laughed. “It would make a wonderful comedia, don’t you think? I’ll play Alexander and you can play Aristotle, and we’ll get one of the girls at Estrella Princesa to play Phyllis and ride on your back. What do you say? Ah, Rudy,” he went on, without giving Rudy a chance to respond, “I hope your wife had many mor
e stories like this one, but now I must be on my way.” He smiled, revealing his large white teeth, and put his hand on Rudy’s shoulder. “No, no, don’t get up. I’ll let myself out.” He stood in the doorway for a moment. “Maybe you’d like to join me one of these days. When you get settled. For a viernes cultural.”

  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 northe
rn 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.