Salman Rushdie: Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

When her parents suddenly died, when they fell out of the sky into the East River, the arbitrariness of their end finally proving to Sanford Bliss’s daughter Alexandra that the universe was not only incoherent and absurd but also heartless and soulless, the young orphan inherited everything; and having neither business acumen nor entrepreneurial interest, she immediately negotiated the sale of the Bliss Chows to the Land O’Lakes agricultural cooperative of Minnesota, thus becoming, at nineteen years of age, America’s youngest billionairess. She completed her studies at Harvard, where she revealed an exceptional gift for the acquisition of languages, becoming fluent, by the end of her time at the university, in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, Hungarian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Russian, Pashto, Farsi, Arabic, and Tagalog, she picked them up in no time, people said in wonderment, like shiny pebbles on a beach; and she picked up a man too, the usual penniless Argentine polo player, a healthy slice of beef from the estancias named Manuel Fariña, picked him up and dropped him fast, married and quickly divorced. She kept his name, turned vegetarian, and sent him packing. After her divorce she retreated forever into the seclusion of La Incoerenza. Here she began her long inquiry into pessimism, inspired by both Schopenhauer and Nietzche, and, convinced of the absurdity of human life and the incompatibility of happiness and freedom, settled while still in the first bloom of youth into a lifetime of solitude and gloom, cloistered in abstraction and dressed in close-fitting white lace. Ella Elfenbein Manezes referred to her, with more than a little scorn, as the Lady Philosopher, and the name stuck, at least in Mr. Geronimo’s head.

There was a streak of masochistic stoicism in the Lady Philosopher, and in bad weather she was often to be found out of doors, ignoring the wind and drizzle or rather accepting them as truthful representatives of the growing hostility of the earth towards its occupants, sitting under an old spreading oak reading a damp book by Unamuno or Camus. The rich are obscure to us, finding ways to be unhappy when all the normal causes of unhappiness are removed. But unhappiness had touched the Lady Philosopher. Her parents were killed in their private helicopter. An elite death but at the moment of dying we are all penniless. She never spoke of it. It would be generous to understand her behavior, willful, remote, abstract, as her way of expressing grief.

The Hudson at the end of its journey is a “drowned river,” its fresh water pushed beneath the incoming salt tides of the sea. “Even the goddamn river makes no sense,” Sanford Bliss told his daughter. “Look how often it flows the wrong goddamn way.” The Indians had called it Shatemuc, the river that flows both ways. On the banks of the drowned river La Incoerenza likewise resisted order. Mr. Geronimo was called in to help. His reputation as a gardener and landscape artist had grown, and he was recommended to her manager, an avuncular British grizzlechops named Oliver Oldcastle with the beard of Karl Marx, a voice like a bassoon, a drink problem, and a Father Jerry — style Catholic upbringing that had left him loving the Bible and loathing the Church. Oldcastle ushered Mr. Geronimo into the grounds, looking like God showing Adam into Eden, and charged him with the task of bringing horticultural coherence to the place. When Mr. Geronimo started working for the Lady Philosopher tangles of thorns filled the ha-ha at the bottom of the garden as if surrounding a sleeping beauty’s castle. Obstinate voles burrowed underground and popped up everywhere, ruining the lawns. Foxes raided the chicken coops. If Mr. Geronimo had run into a snake coiled around a branch of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he wouldn’t have been surprised. The Lady Philosopher shrugged delicately at the state of things. She was barely twenty then but already spoke with the pitiless formality of a dowager. “To bring a country place to heel,” the orphan châtelaine of La Incoerenza stiffly said, “one must kill and kill and kill, one must destroy and destroy. Only after years of mayhem can a measure of stable beauty be achieved. This is the meaning of civilization. Your eyes, however, are soft. I fear you may not be the murderer I need. But anyone else would probably be just as bad.”

Because of her belief in the growing weakness and increasing incompetence of the human race in general, she agreed to put up with Mr. Geronimo, and suffer with a sigh the consequent imperfections of her land. She retreated into thought and left Mr. Geronimo to the war of the thorns and voles. His failures went unnoticed, his successes earned him no praise. A deadly oak blight struck the region, threatening Alexandra’s beloved trees; he followed the example of scientists on the country’s far western coast who were coating or injecting oaks with a commercial fungicide that kept the fatal pathogen, Phytophthora ramorum, at bay. When he told his employer that the treatment had succeeded and all her oaks were saved, she shrugged and turned away, as if to say, Something else will kill them soon enough.

Ella Manezes and the Lady Philosopher, both young, smart and beautiful, could have become friends, but did not: what Ella called Alexandra’s “negativity,” her insistence, when challenged by the ever-hopeful Ella, that it was “impossible, at this point in history, to adopt a hopeful view of humanity,” drove them apart. Ella sometimes accompanied Mr. Geronimo to La Incoerenza and walked the grounds while he worked, or stood atop the estate’s single green hill watching the river pass by in the wrong direction; and it was on that hill, seven years after her father died, that she too was hit by lightning out of a clear sky, and died on the spot. Among the many aspects of her death that Mr. Geronimo found unbearable was this: that of the two beauties at La Incoerenza that day, the lightning had singled out the optimist for death, and had let the pessimist live.

The phenomenon colloquially known as a “bolt from the blue” works like this: the lightning flash emanates from the rear of a thundercloud and travels as many as twenty-five miles away from the storm area, then angles down and strikes the ground, or a tall building, or a lone tree in a high place, or a woman standing alone on a hilltop watching the river pass by. The storm from which it came is too far away to be seen. But the woman on the hilltop can be seen, falling slowly to the ground, like a feather complying, very reluctantly, with the law of gravity.

Mr. Geronimo thought of her dark eyes, the right eye with its floaters that hampered her sight. He conjured up her talkativeness, thinking of how she always had an opinion about everything, and wondering what he would do without her opinions now. He remembered how she hated to be photographed and listed in his thoughts all the foods she wouldn’t eat, meat, fish, eggs, dairy, tomatoes, onions, garlic, gluten, almost everything there was. And he wondered again if lightning was stalking his family; and if, by marrying into that family, Ella had called down the curse upon herself; and if he might be next in line. In the weeks that followed he began to study lightning as never before. When he learned that nine-tenths of the people who were struck by lightning survived, sometimes developing mysterious ailments, but managing to live on, he understood that lightning really had it in for Bento and his girl. Lightning wasn’t letting them off the hook. Maybe it was because he had convinced himself that he wouldn’t stand a chance if lightning ever came for him that even after he was caught in the great storm that first day, even after he discovered that his feet were suffering from the mysterious ailment of refusing to touch the ground, it took him a long time to think the obvious thought.