by Jon Bilbao
But not even this idea offered him any relief, because beyond any of the possible reasons the professor might have had at the time, Joanes, and Joanes alone, was responsible for his pitiful career.
And a second later he’d tell himself no, that he couldn’t be the only one responsible. That there must be someone else to blame, someone to share some of the responsibility. And his old don fitted the bill just perfectly.
And in this way the professor became the virtual stooge for Joanes’s problems. During their brief encounter on the balcony, he hadn’t merely foreseen the unfortunate future that lay in store for the boy who’d once been his student; he—the professor—had provoked it. For whatever reason, he had condemned him in some way, cursed him.
Joanes let himself think this way. And in time he came to believe it. The professor became a vessel for all his frustrations and rage. And the vessel gradually filled up, and its contents grew more and more viscous, until eventually they became as hard as stone; the professor was no longer a mere emotional device, a fantasy for self-exoneration, he’d become the one true culprit of everything bad that had ever happened to Joanes.
The room measured four by five feet. While it had seemed big enough at first, now it gave Joanes the impression that there was barely space to move. He stood waiting, unsure what to do. The professor was sitting in the only available seat, which he’d put next to the bed where his wife was resting. She’d changed into a pale pink dress, as much like a hospital gown as the previous one. She looked a little better. Her husband had helped her freshen up. On the floor there was a washbowl with soapy water and a sponge inside. The professor had also gotten ahold of a pillow, and his wife was resting, her head upright, against it.
“That strange girl, the owner’s daughter, came by,” said the professor. “She put the hammock up.”
Joanes would have more than happily thrown himself into the hammock, but he rejected the idea; the stance would have seemed too indolent, insulting even, given the circumstances. Instead of lying down, he went over to the window and remained there, on his feet. Apart from the chair where the professor was sitting, there was just one other seat—the wheelchair. He didn’t even entertain the idea.
“How are you doing?” he asked the woman.
She cocked her head in a gesture that could have meant anything.
The professor was holding a damp handkerchief, which every now and then he used to cool her forehead. His face betrayed no emotion whatsoever. He wore the same vacant expression he used to in class when he would fall suddenly into one of his absorbed silences. If someone had asked Joanes what the professor might be feeling, he’d have said “exhaustion” or “anger” long before “concern.”
A few minutes later, his wife began to make fitful snoring sounds, and the professor got to his feet, taking care not to wake her. He moved over to the window. Joanes and he both looked out.
Up in the sky, the black silhouettes of a few vast birds traced out circles around a single point in the undergrowth.
“There’s something out there in agony, or something dying,” said the professor, almost in a whisper. “Did you know that in ancient Egypt it was a commonly held belief that there were no male buzzards, only females? And that when the time came to reproduce, these females would simply expose their vaginas to the wind?”
After a meditative pause he added, “It’s not a bad method. Pretty agreeable, if you ask me. Avoids unnecessary ties.”
Joanes considered this affected, erudite, and ultimately useless statement as the kind of thing the professor would come out with when he wanted to assert his superiority over the students.
“They’re not buzzards, they’re black vultures,” he said.
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“I believe not.”
The professor watched the birds keenly, squinting his eyes.
“Buzzards, black vultures . . . it’s all the same.”
He went on, “You’re lucky your family isn’t here.”
Joanes conceded the point.
“I’m glad they don’t have to spend the night in this place,” he said.
“That’s not what I mean. I mean that you’re lucky. You’re not dependent on anybody, and nobody’s dependent on you.”
Joanes nodded in agreement. Then he said, “You’re right.”
“Are your wife and daughter alone?”
“No. My father-in-law’s with them.”
“Even more reason to feel lucky. He’ll look after them.”
Joanes imagined his wife and daughter under the care of his father-in-law and felt a mixture of relief and remorse. It also occurred to him in that same moment how alike the professor and his father-in-law were, in various ways.
“I’m going to keep hunting for a telephone,” said the professor. “In all likelihood, the wind will blow some telephone tower down soon, and then I’ll have no way of calling. Would you mind staying with her?” he asked, gesturing toward his wife.
“Of course not.”
The professor left the door ajar on his way out, to let some air into the stifling room. A couple of kids were chasing each other up and down the hallway. Every time they passed the room, they would stop and look inside, grinning. When they appeared for the umpteenth time, the professor’s wife opened her eyes and, in a reedy whisper, asked Joanes if he could close the door. He did as she asked.
“Where is he?”
“Your husband? He’s gone to look for a telephone.”
She tried to sit up, and Joanes helped her, arranging the pillow she was leaning against.
“You’re very gentlemanly.”
“It’s nothing.”
“You’ve been very kind to us, and I still haven’t thanked you.”
“Forget about it. I wish I could have gotten you to Valladolid. And I wish you had a better place to get some rest.”
Despite having closed the door, the hotel noises could be clearly heard. Footsteps, voices, laughter. Doors were repeatedly being slammed.
She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose.
“Don’t you wish there were some kind of gadget that could give us absolute silence? Headphones, or something like that. Something connected to a container filled with silence.”
“It already exists,” said Joanes. “They’re called earplugs.”
The professor’s wife shook her head.
“You misunderstand. I’m not talking about preventing sounds from entering you, but rather introducing silence into your body. Having it fill up your lungs, course through your veins.”
It seemed to Joanes that the most appropriate response to a statement like that was to keep his mouth shut. She stared at him intensely.
“You were a student of my husband’s.”
Joanes nodded.
“Did he make your life miserable?”
“No.”
The speed with which he answered made her smile.
“You’re too polite. Come on, you can tell me. I won’t tell him. He fucked up your life?”
Joanes was silent.
“Of course he did,” she continued. “He loved doing that. Fucking with his students. And even those who weren’t his students. He liked that, too.”
Joanes didn’t respond.
“Come on,” she insisted. “He made things really hard? You still have nightmares about him? I know that lots of you do. Even I have them.”
“No,” answered Joanes. “He didn’t fuck with me more than anyone else.”
“Well, that makes you one of the lucky ones, I can assure you.”
She groped around on the bed for her eye mask, like a blind person, and put it on, her hands shaking. Then she sighed and went still.
With the door closed, the heat was even more intense. Joanes felt the sweat dripping down between his shoulder
blades. He tried to open the window, taking advantage of the breeze before the wind became too stormy, but as he wrestled with the handle, the professor’s wife told him to let it be. She’d lifted one end of the mask and was looking at him out of one eye.
“If you open it, the mosquitoes will get in. They’re worse than the heat.”
“I think I have some repellent in my first aid kit.”
“It smells terrible. Makes me dizzy.”
And with that, she pulled down her eye mask, concluding the conversation.
The professor was back before long.
“Did you get ahold of a phone?” asked Joanes.
“Yes, in exchange for every last dime I had on me. But given the circumstances, I wasn’t about to start haggling.”
“Any luck?”
The professor shook his head.
“They were right—the lines are down. I tried three times.”
Over on the bed, his wife, who had taken off her eye mask on hearing him enter the room, turned and looked over at the window.
“I’m sorry,” said Joanes. “Maybe you’ll have more luck later.”
“I can’t imagine how,” muttered the professor, taking a seat.
But he wouldn’t be defeated. That wasn’t his style. He straightened up, took a deep breath, and in a split second was back to his normal self.
“No doubt you’re regretting having stopped to bury that monkey now. If you hadn’t done that, you’d be with your family in a real hotel by now. Not putting up with our rotten company.”
“I did what I thought was right at the time.”
“And do you still feel the same?”
Joanes looked around their sad little hotel room—its badly aligned walls full of cracks that had been filled in with plaster, the faded print of the Virgin of Guadalupe hanging above the bed.
“Yes,” he said firmly. “I’d do the same again.”
“Interesting,” said the professor.
Joanes thought it best to change the subject.
“What was your conference about?” he asked.
“I’m sorr y?”
“The conference you came to give in Mexico City.”
The professor thought for a second, as if trying to remember something that had happened years ago, not the week before.
“It was called ‘Ethical Considerations On Artificial Intelligence.’”
“Sounds interesting.”
“It is,” the professor answered categorically.
“Would you tell me a little bit about it?”
“I don’t think now is the time.”
“Why not? It’s not like we have anything else to do.”
The professor thought about it for a second then nodded, clearly unconvinced. He began with a kind of telegraphic listing off of the main points of the conference, but the more he went on, the more he seemed to settle into his own words, as if they filled him with confidence, and his speech became increasingly exhaustive. He talked about the possibilities and risks involved in creating a machine that might “think too much,” about whether the process of building a thinking machine qualifies as a form of reproduction, whether that machine should therefore be considered “natural” or “unnatural,” and about the ethical implications of each and every one of these cases.
Joanes had sat down on the floor, his back against the wall. With him in this position, and the professor sitting in the chair, it was as if he were being given a lecture, something that neither of them failed to notice.
Once the professor finished his overview, they went on discussing the matter in more detail, keeping their voices down so as not to disturb the professor’s wife. Joanes was feeling more and more at ease. He was enjoying their sophisticated tête-à-tête, such a welcome change from the mind-numbing and intellectually undemanding discussions over costs and energy efficiency that he had in his day job. He hadn’t felt that animated for ages, and he had the impression that the professor, too, was enjoying himself. The conversation acted as a bubble that isolated and protected them from their surroundings, shutting out the woeful hotel, the hurricane, and all their worries. The professor even seemed to have forgotten about his son’s accident. With nothing but words, they’d created an intellectual environment, a warm microclimate of contemplation familiar to them both and in which they felt safe and sure of themselves.
The conversation grew livelier by the minute, and not even an intermission when the professor had to help his wife to the bathroom diminished their satisfaction at the moment.
“The conference was, on the whole, an extremely agreeable experience,” the professor explained as he returned to the room. “It was a shame that in the Q & A session someone had to lower the tone.”
“What happened?” asked Joanes.
“An audience member, someone with a clear antagonistic streak, explained what he thought would happen if further developments in the field of AI led to the creation of a intelligence surpassing that of human beings. As he saw it, such an intelligence would prompt a new moral order, one based on the machines and more elevated than man’s. He suggested that such a moral order might well represent the origin of a new religion.”
“What did you answer?” asked Joanes after an expectant pause.
“I spoke to him about Hans Hörbiger and his World Ice Doctrine.”
“I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know who he is.”
The professor nodded and cleared his throat before speaking again.
“Hans Hörbiger was born in Austria in the middle of the nineteenth century. He studied engineering and specialized in steam-powered machinery and compressors. He invented an incredibly low-friction valve, patented it, and before he knew it was a millionaire. He created a company to commercialize his invention and left it in the hands of his son. From that day on, he dedicated himself wholly to scientific investigation.”
“Our friend Hörbiger had two passions. The first was astronomy, and the second, as it is for most experts in steam-powered machinery, the transformation of water into its various states. From his telescopic observations, he had begun to suspect that the reflections he saw on the Moon were produced by great masses of ice, which in turn led him to think that the entire satellite was formed of this substance. What’s more, he believed that the same was true of other celestial bodies. Most likely he had this idea in mind when, one winter’s day, on a visit to a steelworks, he noticed how a quantity of molten steel spilled over the frozen ground. The earth sizzled and spat and cracked open under the burning steel and produced violent explosions of steam. Hörbiger had an epiphany.”
“The entire universe had to be the result of a encounter between ice and fire. Hörbiger imagined the origin of the universe as a collision between an enormous, incandescent mass—a super sun—and another mass of immense proportions, in this case made of ice. The meeting of these two bodies provoked a colossal explosion that broke both into pieces, which were then scattered throughout space. Out of this came fragments made solely of ice, like the Moon, others made solely of fire, like the Sun, and others, like Earth, made out of a combination of the two. Are you still with me?”
Joanes nodded a yes.
“Next, Hörbiger concluded his cosmogony by applying to it the Law of Universal Gravitation, or an adapted version of it. According to him, astral bodies did not adhere to fixed orbits around the larger bodies, as the Moon does around us. He believed that forces of attraction possessed a greater power than repulsive forces. As a result, a satellite, like the Moon, would not trace an elliptical orbit around its planet but rather a slow spiral that would gradually draw it toward the planet. At the end of this spiral, the two bodies would collide in a new cataclysm of fire and ice. According to Hörbiger, this will have happened various times since the beginning of the universe. Our Moon must be the fourth to have circled us since the beginning of time. Thre
e others would have preceded it, each with their own resulting cataclysm.”
The professor paused for a moment and cleared his throat before going on.
“Up to this point, Hörbiger’s theory, however erroneous, is based on scientific principles and would merit at least some consideration. But notes of fantasy-science gradually begin to creep in. The Moon’s approach toward the Earth, he suggested, must be very slow, which means there must also be a lengthy period—of several thousands of years—in which the two bodies find themselves in very close proximity. In this interval, the combined gravitational pulls of the satellite and the planet would have certain effects on the Earth’s inhabitants, primarily on their size. In other words, it would have been an age of giants. The Earth would have been populated by plants, animals, and human beings, all giant.”
“These giants wouldn’t have been entirely wiped from the Earth during the final collision. Some of them, the fittest, the super-giants, would have survived, and from there life on Earth would have regenerated. As you can see, a load of baloney.”
“But this boloney fell on fertile ground; ground peopled by goosestep aficionados and Wagner-loving opera-goers. Hörbiger’s cosmology fitted the burgeoning national socialist mythology like a glove. All those tales of giants, cataclysms, frozen landscapes, and biologically privileged survivors resounded perfectly with the Nordic mythology so admired by the Führer. Hitler adopted Hörbiger’s hypotheses as his own. As such, the deliriums of a madman who should never have left his valve workshop ended up turning into doctrine.”
“But we’re talking about the 1930s,” interrupted Joanes, “not the Middle Ages. Those deliriums would have met with staunch opposition.”
The professor threw him a pitying smile.
“Hörbiger considered objective science to be a kind of totem in decline. He also claimed that man’s preoccupation with coherence is a deadly vice. And Hitler thought the same. What’s more, as well you know, the Nazis’ methods for silencing their opposition were as effective as they were uncivilized.”