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

“Maybe lightning hit me during the hurricane and I lived but it wiped my memory clean so I didn’t remember being hit. And maybe I’m now carrying around some sort of insane electric charge and that’s why I’ve lifted off the surface of the earth.”

He didn’t think that until quite a while later, when Alexandra Fariña suggested it.

He asked the Lady Philosopher if he might bury his wife on her beloved green hill overlooking the drowned river and Alexandra said yes, of course. So he dug his wife’s grave and laid her in it and for a moment he was angry. Then there was an end to anger and he shouldered his shovel and went home alone. On the day his wife died he had worked at La Incoerenza for two years, eight months and twenty-eight days. One thousand days and one day. There was no escape from the curse of numbers.

Ten more years passed. Mr. Geronimo dug and planted and watered and pruned. He gave life and saved it. In his mind every bloom was her, every hedge and every tree. In his work he kept her alive and there was no room for anyone else. But slowly she faded. His plants and trees resumed their membership of the vegetable kingdom and ceased to be her avatars. It was as though she had left him again. After this second departure there was only emptiness and he was certain the void could never be filled. For ten years he lived in a sort of blur. The Lady Philosopher, wrapped as she was in theories, dedicated to the triumph of the worst-case scenario while eating truffled pasta and breaded veal, her head full of the mathematical formulae that provided the scientific basis for her pessimism, became herself a sort of abstraction, his chief source of income and no more. It continued to be difficult not to blame her for being the one who lived, whose survival, at the cost of his wife’s life, had not persuaded her to be grateful for her good luck and brighten her attitude to life. He looked at the land and at what grew upon it and could not raise his eyes to absorb the human being whose land it was. For ten years after his wife died he kept his distance from the Lady Philosopher, nursing his secret anger.

After a time, if you had asked him what Alexandra Bliss Fariña looked like, he would have been unable to answer with any precision. Her hair was dark like his late wife’s. She was tall, like his late wife. She didn’t like sitting in sunlight. Nor had Ella. It was said she walked her grounds at night because of her lifelong battle with insomnia. Her other employees, Manager Oldcastle and the rest, spoke of the persistent health problems that perhaps caused, or at least contributed to, her air of profound gloom. “So young, and so often sick,” Oldcastle said. He used the antique word consumption: tuberculosis, the sickness of little tubers. The potato is a tuber and there are flowers like dahlias whose fleshy roots, properly called rhizomes, are known as tubers too. Mr. Geronimo had no expertise in the tubercles that formed in human lungs. Those were issues for the house to deal with. He was out in the open. The plants he tended contained the spirit of his deceased wife. The Lady Philosopher was a phantom, though she, and not Ella, was the one who was still alive.

Alexandra never published under her own name, or in the English language. Her pseudonym of choice was “El Criticón,” taken from the title of the seventeenth-century allegorical novel by Baltasar Gracián which had greatly influenced her idol Schopenhauer, greatest of all pessimist thinkers. The novel was about the impossibility of human happiness. In a much-derided Spanish-language essay, The Worst of All Possible Worlds, “El Criticón” proposed the theory, widely ridiculed as sentimental, that the rift between the human race and the planet was approaching a tipping point, an ecological crisis that was metamorphosing into an existential one. Her academic peers patted her on the head, congratulated her on her command of castellano, and dismissed her as an amateur. But after the time of the strangenesses she would be seen as a kind of prophetess.

(Mr. Geronimo thought Alexandra Fariña’s use of pseudonyms and foreign languages indicated an uncertainty about the self. Mr. Geronimo too suffered from his own kind of ontological insecurity. At night, alone, he looked at the face in the mirror and tried to see the young chorister “Raffy-’Ronnimus-the-pastor’s-sonnimus” there, struggling to imagine the path not taken, the life not led, the other fork in the forked path of life. He could no longer imagine it. Sometimes he filled up with a kind of rage, the fury of the uprooted, the un-tribed. But mostly he no longer thought in tribal terms.)

The indolence of her days, the delicacy of her china, the elegance of her high-necked lace dresses, the amplitude of her estate and her carelessness regarding its condition, her fondness for marrons glacés and Turkish delight, the leather-bound aristocracy of her library, and the floral-patterned prettiness of the journals in which she made her almost military assault on the possibility of joy should have hinted to her why she was not taken seriously beyond the walls of La Incoerenza. But her small world was enough for her. She cared nothing for the opinions of strangers. Reason could not and would never triumph over savage, undimmed unreason. The heat-death of the universe was inevitable. Her glass of water was half empty. Things fell apart. The only proper response to the failure of optimism was to retreat behind high walls, walls in the self as well as in the world, and to await the inevitability of death. Voltaire’s fictional optimist, Dr. Pangloss, was, after all, a fool, and his real-life mentor, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, was in the first place a failure as an alchemist (in Nuremberg he had not managed to transmute base metal into gold), and in the second place a plagiarist ( vide the damaging accusation leveled at Leibniz by associates of Sir Isaac Newton — that he, G. W. Leibniz, inventor of the infinitesimal calculus, had sneaked a look at Newton’s work on that subject and pinched the Englishman’s ideas). “If the best of all possible worlds is one in which another thinker’s ideas can be purloined,” she wrote, “then perhaps it would be better after all to accept Dr. Pangloss’s advice, and withdraw to cultivate one’s garden.”

She did not cultivate her garden. She employed a gardener.

It was a long time since Mr. Geronimo had considered sex, but recently, he had to confess, the subject had begun to cross his thoughts again. At his age such thinking veered towards the theoretical, the practical business of finding and conjoining with an actual partner being, given the ineluctable law of tempus fugit, a thing of the past. He hypothesized that there were more than two sexes, that in fact each human being was a gender unique to himself or herself, so that maybe new personal pronouns were required, better words than he or she . Obviously it was entirely inappropriate. Amid the infinity of sexes there were a very few sexes with which one could have congress, who wished to join one in congress, and with some of those sexes one was briefly compatible, or compatible for a reasonable length of time before the process of rejection began as it does in transplanted hearts or livers. In very rare cases one found the other sex with whom one was compatible for life, permanently compatible, as if the two sexes were the same, which perhaps, according to this new definition, they were. Once in his life he had found that perfect gender and the odds against doing so again were prohibitive, not that he was looking, not that he ever would. But here, now, in the aftermath of the storm, as he stood on the sea of mud full of the indestructible shit of the past, or, to be precise, as he somehow failed to stand on that sea, hovering just a fraction above it, just high enough to allow a sheet of paper to pass without difficulty under his boots, now, as he wept for the death of his imagination and was filled with fears and doubts on account of the failure of gravity in his immediate vicinity, at this absolutely inappropriate moment, here was his employer, the Lady Philosopher, the fodder heiress Alexandra Bliss Fariña, beckoning to him from her French windows.