This town was founded by European immigrants. There is a decidedly foreign feel to this place, one that is not common in other parts of Chile, even though there are some small southern cities where you can also see blonde blue-eyed girls running among our decidedly homogenous mix of Spaniards and Mapuches. This place was built as a haven, high up in the mountains. One of the things that has always surprised me about Chile is that we do not inhabit the mountains. The Andes are there like a sword stuck down our backs, but we ignore those fabulous peaks and settle on the coast, as if the whole country suffered from terminal vertigo, a fear of heights that stops us from enjoying the most prominent feature of our unique landscape. Less than an hour away from this town, right where you leave the highway to head up the mountain road, there is a huge military garrison; the house I bought was built by a retired army lieutenant. I did a little research on him out of curiosity, and saw that he was accused of being involved in the disappearance of several political prisoners during the dictatorship. I met him on only two occasions: when he showed me the place and when we signed the papers. I did not know at the time, though I suspected it because of the low price he asked, but he was terminally ill. He died less than a year later. The night gardener tells me he was a hateful man, despised by everyone in town, since he would walk around with his old service revolver at his hip and refuse to pay workers for the repairs they did to his house. When we moved in, I found an old grenade atop one of the coffee tables in the living room, with no firing pin. Try as I might, I cannot remember what I did with it.
VI
The night gardener used to be a mathematician, and now speaks of mathematics as former alcoholics speak of booze, with a mixture of fear and longing. He told me that he had had the beginnings of a brilliant career but had quit altogether after encountering the work of Alexander Grothendieck, a world-famous mathematician who revolutionized geometry as no one had since the time of Euclid, and who inexplicably gave up mathematics at the height of his international fame, leaving a bewildering legacy that is still sending shock waves through all branches of his discipline, but which he completely refused to discuss, right up to his death in 2014. Like the night gardener, when Grothendieck turned forty, he left his house, his family and his friends, and lived like a monk, holed up in the Pyrenees. It was as if Einstein had given up physics after publishing his theory of relativity, or Maradona had decided never to touch a ball after winning the World Cup. The night gardener’s decision to drop out of life was not merely because of his admiration for Grothendieck, of course. He had also gone through a bad divorce, become estranged from his only daughter and been diagnosed with skin cancer, but he insisted that all of that, however painful, was secondary to the sudden realization that it was mathematics—not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon—which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant. Not that we ever did, he said, but things are getting worse. We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives. But it’s not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.
So he gardens now, tends to his own and also works on other properties in town. He has no friends that I know of, and his few neighbours consider him a bit of a weirdo, but I like to think of him as my friend as he will sometimes leave buckets of compost outside my house, as a gift for my garden. The oldest tree on my property is a lemon, a sprawling mass of twigs with a heavy bow. The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death. One can picture it in animal species, those million salmon mating and spawning before dropping dead, or the billions of herrings that turn the seawater white with their sperm and eggs and cover the coasts of the northeast Pacific for hundreds of miles. But trees are very different organisms, and such displays of overripening feel out of character for a plant and more akin to our own species, with its uncontrolled, devastating growth. I asked him how long my own citrus had to live. He told me that there was no way to know, at least not without cutting it down and looking inside its trunk. But, really, who would want to do that?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Constanza Martínez for her invaluable contribution to this book, namely for her fighting with me over every little detail. This is a work of fiction based on real events. The quantity of fiction grows throughout the book; whereas “Prussian Blue” contains only one fictional paragraph, I have taken greater liberties in the subsequent texts, while still trying to remain faithful to the scientific concepts discussed in each of them. The case of Shinichi Mochizuki, one of the protagonists of “The Heart of the Heart,” is a peculiar one: I did take inspiration from certain aspects of his work to enter into the mind of Alexander Grothendieck, but most of what is said here about him, his biography, and his research is fiction. The majority of historical and biographical references employed in the book can be found in the following books and articles, whose authors I would also like to thank, although a complete list would be excessively long: Walter Moore, Schrödinger: Life and Thought; Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality; Christianus Democritus, Maladies and Remedies of the Life of the Flesh; John Gribbin, Erwin Schrödinger and the Quantum Revolution; Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World; Alexander Grothendieck, Récoltes et Semailles; Arthur I. Miller, Erotica, Aesthetics and Schrödinger’s Wave Equation; Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science; David Lindley, Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the Struggle for the Soul of Science; Winfried Scharlau and Melissa Schneps (trans.), Who Is Alexander Grothendieck? Anarchy, Mathematics, Spirituality, Solitude; Ian Kershaw, Hitler; W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn; Karl Schwarzschild, Collected Works; Jeremy Bernstein, The Reluctant Father of Black Holes.
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TENDER IS THE FLESH
AGUSTINA BAZTERRICA
CROSSING
PAJTIM STATOV
CI
LIAR
AYELET GUNDAR-GOSHEN
MISS ICELAND
AUDUR AVA ÓLAFSDÓTTIR
WILD SWIMS
DORTHE NORS
MS ICE SANDWICH
MIEKO KAWAKAMI
THE PASSENGER
ULRICH ALEXANDER BOSCHWITZ
LEARNING TO TALK TO PLANTS
MARTA ORRIOLS
AT NIGHT ALL BLOOD IS BLACK
DAVID DIOP
SPARK
NAOKI MATAYOSHI
TALES OF TRANSYLVANIA
MIKLOS BÁNFFY
ISLAND
SIRI RANVA HJELM JACOBSEN
CARMILLA
SHERIAN LE FANU
ARTURO’S ISLAND
ELSA MORANTE
ONE PART WOMAN
PERUMAL MURUGAN
WILL
JEROEN OLYSLAEGERS
TEMPTATION
JÁNOS SZÉKELY
BIRD COTTAGE
EVA MEIJER
WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD
BENJAMIN LABUTUT
THE COLLECTED STORIES OF STEFAN ZWEIG
STEFAN ZWEIG
THE EVENINGS
GERARD REVE
AN UNTOUCHED HOUSE
WILLEM FREDERIK HERMANS
ODESSA STORIES
ISAAC BABEL
RABBIT BACK LITERATURE SOCIETY
PASI ILMARI JÄÄSKELÄINEN
ISOLDE
IRINA ODOEVTSEVA
BEAUTY IS A WOUND
EKA KURNIAWAN
BONITA AVENUE
PETER BUWALDA
IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE SEA
TOMÁS GONZÁLEZ
COIN LOCKER BABIES
RYU MURAKAMI
BINOCULAR VISION
EDITH PEARLMAN
THE SPECTRE OF ALEXANDER WOLF
GAITO GAZDANOV
JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT
ANTAL SZERB
TRAVELLER OF THE CENTURY
ANDRÉS NEUMAN
BEWARE OF PITY
STEFAN ZWEIG
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Original text © 2020 Benjamín Labatut
English translation © 2020 Adrian Nathan West
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When We Cease to Understand the World was first
published as Un Verdor Terrible by Anagrama
First published by Pushkin Press in 2020
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