He spent the rest of the morning addressing and stamping the last of the wedding invitations, and most of the afternoon on the telephone, talking to the manager of the Taj Mahal, who had decided he wouldn’t be able to provide the dishes he and Rudy had selected at the price they had agreed upon, and to the pandit, who called to say that he had cast the horoscopes and determined that Saturday, September 9, was an inauspicious day and that therefore the wedding would have to be postponed.
Rudy didn’t know what to do. There were no other Indian restaurants in the area, no other pandits. And Molly wouldn’t be home till the first of September. The shoot was behind schedule because the monsoons had come early. If they hadn’t finished the movie by the end of August she’d have to go back after the wedding. Rudy tried to interest her in some of the more serious wedding problems, but she told him she had to go. TJ’s uncle Siva would be arriving early to help with the arrangements, she said. He’d deal with the pandit and the manager of the Taj Mahal.
When he got back from the post office, he set up Norma Jeans easel and her paints and listened to the radio while she painted. The news of the great world seemed to be coming from a place as far away as India, maybe even from another planet.
In the evening, when the sun finally went down, he grilled a pork chop and drank a couple of beers, and then he went out to the barn to say good night to Norma Jean. It was dark in the barn, and he didn’t realize at first that she was crying. But when his eyes got used to the dark, he could see that her head was lowered, her powerful trunk hanging loose, and big tears were flowing from under her wiry eyelashes and running down her elephant cheeks and splashing onto the floor.
Rudy knew just how she felt. “It’s going to be okay, sweet- heart,” he said. “You’re going to be all right. Your friend will be back tomorrow night. I’m here with you now. It’s just for a little while. I’ll take good care of you, don’t worry.”
Her tears upset Rudy. Were they really tears, or just some kind of natural discharge? Could she be in musth? But he thought that only male elephants went into musth.
She kept on crying, letting it all out now, sobbing, her whole frame trembling. Rudy climbed up on the rails of the stall so that he could reach her head. He rubbed the two humps, softly rounded like breasts or buttocks. He leaned over and kissed the hump nearest him. “It’s going to be all right.” He scratched her neck and her rough trunk. She used her trunk to put his hand in her mouth, and he stroked her tongue, which seemed to calm her.
He went up to the house and brought back his guitar, which he’d hardly played since he came to Texas. It was an old small-bodied Gibson that he’d picked up on Maxwell Street the first time Helen went to Italy. He sat down on a bale of alfalfa, and began to sing:
Winds on Lake Michigan,
Lord, blow chilly and cold,
Winds on Lake Michigan,
Lord, Lord, blow chilly and cold,
I’m going to leave Chicago,
Go back to Vicksburg, that’s my home.
Did she remember her old home, he wondered? Did she remember her mother and her elephant aunties? The hathi bazaar at Sonepur, where she’d been sold to the Russian’s father? The circus, the travels in Russia and then Poland, the long trip to South America in the hold of a ship? The trains in Mexico? Crossing the international bridge from Reynosa to Hidalgo, on foot, in the middle of the night?
Rudy remembered his old home, and Helen. If Helen were here … They’d talk things over at the kitchen table — the manager of the Taj Mahal, the pandit. A couple of jokers, a couple of wild cards. If Helen were here, he wouldn’t give them a thought, and he wouldn’t give a damn about the Ding an sich, or about the failure to get his hands on it, about the probability that his quest would come to nothing. That it was all foolishness. Like thinking that the lights and music on the river were coming from beyond the realm of appearances, when it was just a couple of kids making out in a pontoon boat. His excitement at reading the chapter on Kant had waned. What good was the Ding an sich if you could never get your hands on it? It seemed to him now that all the great questions were unanswerable. The things that matter most to us are unknowable, and this unknowability weighed him down. Death, beauty love, sex, pain. What can we know? How shall we live? What happens when we die? He didn’t know any more about these things than when he’d been sitting at Helen’s desk back in Chicago.
“If I get lucky, babe,” he sang, “and find my train fare home, I’m going to leave Chicago, go back to Vicksburg, that’s my home.”
He sang the songs he used to sing to his daughters when they were sad: “Key to the Highway” and “Sittin’ on Top of the World” and “Wimmin from Coast to Coast”:
Sometime my baby wear a hat,
And sometime she wear her tarn,
Sometime my baby wear a hat,
Sometime she wear her tarn,
She got them great big legs
And they shaped like Georgia hams.
He kept playing till Norma Jean stopped crying, and then he took his shoes off and lay down on the Russians cot in the tack room. There was no tackle left now, nothing but the storage cabinets and the old hooks and an old raincoat, stiff with age, and the Russians duffel bag next to the cot. As Rudy faded into sleep, Norma Jean made her presence felt, a great gray shape, moving gently like a shadow in the dark.
The Übermensch
None of them had ever encountered a real philosopher before, much less an Ubermensch, and they were all a little apprehensive when they heard the car in the drive. When they stepped outside onto the veranda, TJ’s uncle Siva, who’d called from the Starlight Motel, was climbing out of the car he’d rented at the airport, a shiny blue-black Mercedes. It was hot. The temperature had been in the upper nineties all week. The thick adobe walls kept the house comfortable, and Rudy’d installed a big exhaust fan in the roof of the barn to draw off some of the hot air. The Russian, who’d gone to visit his sister again, had been hosing down Norma Jean twice a day. Rudy’s zucchini plants had collapsed, but the herbs were doing well and he had all the tomatoes and cucumbers he could eat.
Uncle Siva shaded his eyes, though he was wearing sunglasses, and surveyed the grove before turning toward the house. He wasn’t a big man, but he carried himself like a big man and wore his suit jacket over his shoulders, like the men Rudy’d seen in Italy when he went to confront Helen about Bruni, men who walked around the piazzas like kings or popes, men whose faces showed up in the pictures in the big Uffizi museum there—Frederick Montefeltro, or Pope Leo, or Lorenzo the Medici. This was the way he’d always pictured Bruni, walking around with his jacket over his shoulders. And this was the way he’d been picturing Nietzsche’s Übermensch. What did these men know that he didn’t know? What made them so sure of their place in the world, their place in the great scheme of things?
Uncle Siva had written very forcefully about these supermen in Philosophy Made Simple —these men who step outside traditional moral values, these men who dispense with ordinary notions of good and evil and create their own versions of life—and it was clear to Rudy that Siva regarded himself as a member of this select club. But how did you do it? How did you join? And how did you know when you’d been accepted as a member? And was it a good thing to do in the first place?
Rudy’d been planning to discuss these questions with Siva privately, but he was a little apprehensive, and at the last minute he invited Medardo and Father Russell and Maria to join them for dinner. Safety in numbers. Maria would have to leave early because the art dealer she’d been seeing was coming in that evening instead of Saturday. The art dealer owned two galleries—one in San Antonio and one in Austin—that specialized in southwestern art, and Rudy’d been wondering if he might be interested in some Norma Jeans.
In spite of the heat, Uncle Siva wasn’t sweating, though his high brown forehead shone as if he’d polished it. He removed his sunglasses and turned to look at Rudy, and Rudy could see that he was a force to be reckoned with, which was just
what he needed: a man who could deal with the manager of the Taj Mahal and with the pandit.
In the kitchen Medardo and Father Russell rose to shake hands with the philosopher. “You must be used to this heat,” Father Russell said.
“It’s been very hot in New York,” Uncle Siva said, “but it wasn’t bad in California.”
“I was thinking of India.”
“It doesn’t get this hot in Assam,” Siva said. “Not up in the hills, but it rains a lot.”
Rudy took a tray of Italian meringues out of a slow oven. He was working on the last of the frozen Saint-Cyrs he’d planned for the wedding reception. He’d spent a lot of time with Norma Jean in the afternoon and was running late, and the meringues were taking a long time to dry out because of the humidity.
Maria had brought a bouquet of brightly colored flowers from her floristería. Rudy didn’t have a proper vase and she was arranging them in a tall beer glass. “Irises,” she said, smiling. “These sword-shaped leaves symbolize the sharpness of the Virgin Mary’s pain at her son’s suffering.” She was wearing tiny emerald earrings that matched the color of the leaves.
“My mother always called them ‘flags,’ “ Rudy said.
“Rudy says you’re some kind of superman,” Maria said, looking at Uncle Siva.
There it is, Rudy thought—out in the open.
Siva smiled. “Yes,” he said, “but not the kind who can fly and leap tall buildings at a single bound.”
Rudy closed his eyes.
“Not superman,” Father Russell said. “Übermensch. Its a German word—”
Rudy interrupted the priest to explain: “I’ve been reading the chapter on Nietzsche in Philosophy Made Simple, and I have to tell you, I have a lot of trouble with the Übermensch. Does noble morality really begin with an affirmation of the self?”
Uncle Siva looked at Medardo and then at Father Russell and then at Maria and then at Rudy. “Yes,” he said. “The answer to your question is yes.” And then he started to laugh. “I had no idea what I was getting myself into,” he said. “This is really astonishing. Why I’ve just come from a conference at Berkeley where no one would dare put such an important question so directly, but here in this out-of-the-way…”
“So,” Medardo said, “you are a superman?”
“Let me put it this way,” Siva said, removing his linen jacket and loosening his plum-colored tie. He rolled up his sleeves. “I’ve lived life my own way, on my own terms. I never wanted to be a conventional academic philosopher. I wanted to cut down jungles, not irrigate deserts. Once I saw New York, I knew exactly what I wanted from life. What I wanted was to live on the Upper West Side, somewhere in the sixties, write books, make enough money to entertain my friends and to go to the theater or to a concert at least three or four nights a week, to fall in love with a series of beautiful and interesting women, and to spend a month in Paris every fall. And that’s exactly what I’ve done. I support myself by writing books—Philosophy Made Simple, my maiden voyage, has been a real gold mine, if I may say so—and by producing television shows for educational television and for the BBC in which I interview contemporary philosophers about important philosophical issues: pragmatism and ethics, the pluralistic universe, logical atomism, the new logic, the verifiability principle, ordinary language philosophy, Kierkegaard’s solution to the Socratic paradox, how Heidegger would have responded to Nietzsche, and so forth.” He spoke with a British accent, saying “life” for “life” and “contempree” for “contemporary.”
“And what about Paris?”
“Ah, Paris. I’ll be leaving for Paris shortly after the wedding. A few things to take care of in New York—my sister Nandini is coming—and then…”
“Well then,” Rudy said, dotting a strip of waxed paper with butter and fastening it to the inside of a plastic ice-cream container. “You’re the perfect person to take care of a couple of little problems.” He explained the grief he was getting from the avaricious manager of the Taj Mahal and from the crazy pandit. He poured a bit of chocolate mousse into the bottom of the container and arranged a series of meringues around the edge. “These are supposed to look like the ribbons on the hats worn by cadets at Saint-Cyr,” he said, “the French military academy.”
“My sister is much better at that sort of thing,” Siva said, laughing. “She’ll take care of everything. You’ll see. I’m hopeless at these domestic problems. Besides, I’m flying down to Oaxaca in the morning. Nietzsche, you know, wanted to visit the high plateaus of Oaxaca, where he could look down on the Pacific. In a way I shall be his surrogate.”
“You can’t see the ocean from Oaxaca,” Maria said. “Not from the city. You’d have to go to Puerto Angel or Santa Cruz Huautuico.”
“Oh.”
“Your sister…,” Rudy said, adding a layer of crumbled meringues over the chocolate in the bottom of the container. “My daughter says your sister chased away a rhinoceros with a broom.”
“Oh, yes, but it would have been a one-horned bush rhinoceros, not a savanna one. The bush rhino has very bad eyesight. A savanna rhino is a very different matter.”
“Still…”
“Don’t worry—she’s quite capable of dealing with restaurant managers and pandits. And she’s very fond of your daughter. You don’t have to worry on that score either. I spoke to her just last week. She’s even teaching Molly to ride Champaa, her old elephant. It’s not impossible that she will move to the States herself, now that our father has died—its been two years. Nothing would make me happier. She has two thousand coolies to manage, so it’s not an easy life for her. Life on a tea garden is very tedious. And there are dacoits and kidnappings, and there’s always trouble brewing with the native tribes. So it’s not only tedious, it’s quite dangerous, rather like Schopenhauer’s vision of human life—boredom on the one hand, anxiety on the other. I’m here in the States, her son is here, and besides, she would like to remarry.”
“What are dacoits?” Rudy asked.
“Bandits. She can’t leave the garden at night without armed bodyguards.”
“Why can’t she remarry in India?” Maria asked.
“There’s almost no chance of that. For a widow…it’s almost impossible. Damaged goods. Especially for my sister. She married out of caste to begin with. What we call prem, a love match.”
“So your sister’s not happy in India?”
“Not entirely She has been not exactly ostracized—she’s a zamindar, a landowner, too wealthy to be ignored; too powerful—but…” He started to laugh. “I shall put in a good word for you, Rudy Maybe I can arrange something. My aunt has arranged several appointments with prospective suitors in Detroit, and I’ve turned up a couple of eligible bachelors in New York, but perhaps I’ll propose you instead.”
Rudy started to protest.
“Seriously, Rudy. My sister is an extraordinary woman. Not a great beauty, but something better—she enjoys the imperfections that make a work of art more striking. Like the extra limbs in some of Rembrandt’s drawings.”
“What kind of imperfections? You don’t mean she’s got an extra arm or leg?”
“Red hair, for one thing.”‘
“My wife had red hair,” he said.
“It is not really red, of course,” Siva said. “But there’s a hint of reddishness: laal. She could never live up to the ideal of the pa-tivrata, the wife who worships her husband like a god, but of course that doesn’t matter in the United States. And I can say that we would be in a position to promise a significant dowry. Think about it, Rudy. I believe in being straightforward in these matters. Also, I think she would like this place. Quite frankly, I think she would prefer it to New York or Detroit.”
The mousse in the bottom of the ice-cream container kept the meringue ribbons from slipping. Rudy added a layer of crumbled meringues, then more mousse. Then another layer of meringues. More mousse. Another layer of meringues. More mousse. Another layer of meringues, till the container was filled. Uncle Siva fell s
ilent as Rudy poured in the last of the mousse and took a deep breath. “I don’t know why I get nervous when I do this. There’s not much that can go wrong. And I enjoy working in a kitchen full of people. It reminds me of home.”
“That’s because you’re concentrating fully,” Uncle Siva said. “Like a true artist.”
“I never thought of it like that,” Rudy said. “You see the ends of these meringues sticking up?” Everyone looked. “If I bent them now, they’d break; but once they’re frozen you can bend them right over. That’s what I’ll do. For now I’m going to have to cover it with a piece of tinfoil instead of putting the lid on it.”
“I had a slice of a Saint-Cyr in Paris once,” Uncle Siva said, “at the Grand Véfour in the Palais Royal; it was served with crème Chantilly. Quite extraordinary. I never expected to eat it again in Texas.”
“I made a small one earlier—for tonight,” Rudy said, putting the newly prepared mousse in the freezer. He didn’t know what crème Chantilly was, but he didn’t ask.
“I’ve got two bottles of good claret in the car,” Uncle Siva said suddenly. “I don’t want them to cook.”
Rudy sent Medardo out to the garden for some fresh tomatoes and put on the water for pasta while Uncle Siva went out to the car to rescue the wine. Maria went to freshen up.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Rudy said to Father Russell.
“I think this man is dangerous,” Father Russell said. “I think you need to be very, very careful.”
By the time Rudy served the pasta, they’d finished the first bottle of wine and started on the second. The wine was certainly better than what Rudy was used to drinking, though it didn’t really stand up to the puttanesca sauce, which he’d made with tomatoes from the garden. When Uncle Siva asked if there was any Parmesan cheese, Maria put her hand on his arm. “Be careful, Uncle Siva. You don’t want to make brutta figura. You’ll upset Rudy.”
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