In those two months, nevertheless, I came to a realization that was unfortunately to prove all too true: whenever she could, and by whatever means, Ivy would try to make my life a living hell. She was a master manipulator. And whether by innuendo or distortion, subterfuge or outright sabotage, she would do her best to undermine me in Samax’s affections—as she had never been able to undermine my mother Bel—hoping, scheming, working overtime to get me out of the picture as abruptly as I had entered it. And as cut-down-to-size as possible. Her relationship with me aside, from what I had seen in those two months, Ivy was generally unpopular around the hotel. The fact that her favorite reproach, freely tossed at the staff—from the doorman to the gardener—was “shit-for-brains” didn’t endear her to anyone. Her relationships with Dolores and her daughters were more complex and problematic, as I was to discover later. But for three years running I had been free of her, and in that time it was always one of the sisters who sat across from Samax at dinner.
What I was to learn over the years was that the crux of Ivy’s hatred for me was a carryover of her feelings for my mother, Bel, her half-sister. At first I thought Ivy wished Samax had never found me; then I realized she wished I’d never been born.
My longest discussion about my mother with Samax was a very formalized one, initiated by him. Taking me up to his study one day a few months after my arrival at the hotel, he unlocked a wall cabinet and took out a small leather-covered chest which he unlocked with a tiny key. “You asked me how I came to find you in Brooklyn,” he began, “and I promised I would show you. The answer is in here, where I’ve kept a few of Bel’s possessions—things she had with her when she died.” He paused and studied my face, as if to assure himself I wasn’t going to get upset. “Though I had sifted through these things many times before,” he went on, “one morning last October I suddenly spotted something I had never seen before—that is, I had not seen it clearly. It was thus I discovered the fact of your existence, unknown to me until then.”
Peering at the chest’s contents, I tried to imagine which object contained the momentous clue. There was a red felt cap. A brown handbag with a brass snap. A gold hairbrush, monogrammed with a B, in which a single strand of blond hair was still wound. A hand mirror with an ivory handle. A slim red fountain pen. A set of car keys. A silver pendant on a chain. A blue bankbook. And several unused—but stamped, with 2¢ stamps—postcards depicting a low skyline and captioned RENO—THE BIGGEST LITTLE CITY IN THE WORLD.
I held the brush up to the light and the blond hair appeared red-tinged; I looked at my face in the mirror; I jangled the car keys, which I noted were for a Buick; I examined the pendant, on which a small bird was embossed, and then unscrewed the top off the fountain pen.
But it was the bankbook that Samax lifted from the chest and opened flat on the table.
“The clue was in here,” he said, slowly turning the pale blue pages.
The numerals, punched in by machine in black ink, dated in red, showed that the bankbook’s owner, Bel Samax, Hotel Canopus, Las Vegas, made only six deposits and one withdrawal in all of 1953 and 1954, but in the last two months of 1955 and the first month of 1956 made dozens of withdrawals for small sums—fifteen, twenty-five, a couple of times fifty dollars. These transactions abruptly ended in February, 1956, at which time her balance had dwindled from $2,982 to $366.40.
“I opened this account with her on her sixteenth birthday,” Samax said. “Every three months, I added five hundred dollars. As you see, only at the end of her life did she begin using the money. But what I want to show you is here at the end.”
He flipped to the very last two pages in the bankbook, well beyond the tellers’ entries. There, scrawled in pencil in a small hand, was a maze of figures. Numerals scattered in all directions—being subtracted, added, multiplied and divided, erased and crossed out.
“Obviously Bel used these pages to make her calculations,” Samax continued. “I glanced at them years ago, and never paid attention to them again. But if you closely examine these particular numbers in the lower right-hand corner,” he said, putting his index finger on the page, “concealed among many other numbers—it’s clear they’re not calculations.” I bent low over the book and saw the numerals: 33–879, and below that, 6244511.
“After toying with them,” Samax said, “it hit me that the second set is simply a phone number. I called the number, and it was an adoption agency in Reno. The first set of numbers, I then realized, referrred to one of their case files. Right away, I thought, oh my god, Bel must have had a child and put it up for adoption. Why else would she have that number? At first, the agency wouldn’t give me any information about the file. Quite properly. But I have a few connections in this state, and eventually I got to see that file. You can judge if that was the right or wrong thing to do. But the file led me to the County Clerk’s office you yourself visited, where I found your birth certificate.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “And here you are, Enzo. Probably with as many questions as I had when I first saw all this, but I don’t know much more than I’ve told you. The other circumstances around Bel’s putting you up for adoption are still in the dark for me. I know now when and where it happened, and then who adopted you, but not much more.”
I took all this in wide-eyed, hanging on his every word, my lungs seemingly frozen. When I drew my breath again, I said, “So the adoption records didn’t say who my real father was.”
He shook his head, not surprised at the question. “They read unknown, just like your birth certificate.”
I looked hard again at those numbers, camouflaged and circumscribed by other numbers, as if I might find some further meaning in them.
Samax seemed to anticipate my thoughts. “We’ll never know whether or not Bel left those numbers there as a deliberate clue,” he said. “I tend to doubt it—maybe because it took me ten years to decipher them. But certainly, subconsciously, she must have known she was leaving them there.…”
“You mean, she wanted you to find me.”
He smiled faintly. “I think we can say now that she would have been pleased I did find you.” He locked the chest after returning all the contents, including the bankbook, except for the red pen and the pendant. “You can have these other things someday, if you want them. But the pendant and the pen I’d like you to have now. That bird on the pendant is the desert hummingbird, sacred to the Zunis. The pendant was made by a craftsman at the Zuni pueblo, and Bel cherished it, wore it all the time. The pen is one I gave her many years ago.”
When I returned to my room, I examined the hummingbird for a long time, running my finger over it, imagining the smooth side of the pendant pressed to my mother’s chest. The pen I filled from the inkwell on my desk, and after holding the tip poised above a sheet of paper for a long moment, I signed Enzo Samax. Then, just below it, I signed Bel Samax, as I imagined my mother would have signed her name. It would be several years before I saw what her handwriting actually looked like.
Samax was a man of fixed habits. He woke at five o’clock punctually, swam a dozen laps in the pool, did his Qigong regimen (the eighteen ancient “stork” movements that direct vital energy), spent twenty minutes in the sauna, and then was served his customary breakfast: strong maté tea with a sliver of lime, a pint of mixed fruit juices, fresh figs with yogurt, and amaranth toast with jam. (My suspicion that Desirée was Samax’s daughter truly began when I realized that, just as I dined with him every day, she shared his breakfast, usually out in the garden.) Befitting his boundless appetite for fruit, but unusual for a man who chose to live in the desert, Samax’s great passion after antiquities was pomology. He had a full-time gardener named Sofiel—a dark diminutive man, half-Tunisian, half-Korean—who looked after the trees and bushes. Wearing a broad straw hat and loose white smock, chamois gloves, and his darkest glasses, Samax often joined Sofiel in the impeccably tended orchard, digging, hoeing, and watering.
The garden was as much a wonder as the hotel itself: it was a quinc
unx. That is, a series of rhombuses with a tree planted at each corner and one in the middle. Like so: Samax told me that the ancient gardens around the Tigris and Euphrates and the fantastical plantations of India that filled entire river valleys were all quincuncial. As were the hanging gardens of Babylon, the orchard of fig trees Laërtes planted for his son Odysseus on Ithaka, and even the Garden of Eden itself. At the Hotel Canopus there was a self-contained quincunx within the larger one that consisted of forty-nine female date palms and, at its center, one male, which was sufficient balance for them to propagate. The quincunx was carried over to architecture, Samax explained, where it was evident in the walls of both Roman and Gothic buildings, and even in the Egyptian pyramids. Once in his library, Samax took down a small volume bound in red morocco from the set containing much of Roman literature that filled four shelves.
“This is Quintilian, first century A.D.,” he said, and after reading me the Latin, he translated: “What is more beautiful than the well-known quincunx which, in whatever direction you view it, presents straight lines?”
In the large greenhouse at the foot of the orchard Samax usually worked alone. The greenhouse was state-of-the-art for its day, its daily upkeep overseen by Samax himself, who approached pomology philosophically. He liked to say that the fruit cycle was emblematic of man’s cycle, in accelerated form: from seed to blossom to a fruit that ripened, withered, and fell to the earth, decaying, as the flesh decayed, leaving behind only the pit; one in a hundred of these regenerated and the rest dried up, like bone, and turned to dust.
Samax grew many varieties of fruit trees indoors and out: date palm, pomegranate, Japanese persimmons, loquat, fig, prickly pear, azarole, passion fruit, and blood orange. They spanned extremes, like the rambutan and the durian, from the same province in Malaysia, that grew side by side in the tropical section of the greenhouse. The rambutan’s pendulous fruit was covered with soft red or yellow spines, exuded an intoxicating scent, and was centered with succulent flesh; the durian tree had slimy bark and was notorious for the mushy pulp of its hard, spiked fruit, which smelled and tasted like sewage. Samax spent countless solitary hours in the greenhouse, before long mossy tables in the aquamarine light, grafting shoots, planting seedlings, perfecting some species and attempting to create unique hybrids with others. (Early on I sometimes wondered if I was like one of his tree graftings, nurtured carefully in the hothouse of the hotel, provided—like Calzas and Desirée before me?—with the conditions that ensured I would produce a certain kind and quality of fruit, as yet unknown.) With hybridization, he’d had his share of failures, but as Desirée informed me, he had also successfully produced a hybrid that had officially been given his name. Grafting cuttings from quince and Egyptian pear trees, he had cultivated a light green, oval-shaped fruit with tart flesh and a triangular pit. In the pomology register, it was listed as Cydonia Samacis. There were now three of these trees in the garden, and on my birthday—a high honor—the cook had baked me a pie with their fruit.
“The one he’s working on now,” Desirée told me one morning, as we awaited Samax at the table beneath a Saharan pear tree, “is a combination star apple and starfruit, or carambola. It’s never been done, and he says it will be his masterpiece. He’s even got a name picked out: the Samax Astrofructus.” She leaned forward, spooning sugar into her coffee. “It will be like biting into a fleshy spice.”
At breakfast, Samax was at his most voluble. And so over the course of many mornings, often far apart, when I was able to get myself out of bed at six A.M. to join him in the garden, I heard much of his personal history in the cool mauve air as the sun appeared over the rim of the desert. Desirée, after finishing her fruit and black coffee, would casually lapse back into her typing, her eyes bright but distant; if there was a connection, as I sometimes suspected, between the words Samax was speaking and the ones she was tapping onto the sheets of yellow bond, I was unable to discern it. In his terry-cloth robe and sandals, occasionally stroking his white moustache with his fingertip, he told me the stories, in no particular order, it seemed, which to this day comprise the foundation of his biography as I know it and played an important part in shaping my own life.
To begin with, living in Las Vegas, I lost count of the number of times I heard that there was no such thing as a successful gambler, even as I was told how my uncle Junius had methodically become a rich man at the casinos. His seed money, as a young man, had come from a more conventional source—real estate—but in a highly unconventional way. He had had a falling out with his younger brother Nilus—my grandfather—over their inheritance from their father, a well-to-do manufacturer of ladies’ hats, amateur astrologer (he was devoted to Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, which Samax said catalyzed his own interest in the classics), and kinky raconteur in San Francisco. After a protracted legal battle that ate up nearly the entire inheritance, Nilus got the hat business—which he promptly sold for cash—and Samax ended up with nothing. The brothers never spoke again, but after Nilus’s unexpected death at thirty-four, Samax undertook the upbringing of his two daughters, my mother Bel and my aunt Ivy, with surprising devotion, but mixed results.
Though throughout his life Samax negotiated the criminal underworld as comfortably as the mazes of finance and scholarship, his great fortune was based, not Balzac-style on a great crime, but a plate of bad oysters. Some years before his brother’s death, in the late 1920s, Samax, age twenty-eight, dead broke, scraped together some loans for a suburban housing tract outside New York—a novel idea at the time. With a real estate agent and two of his backers, he drove out of the city one July afternoon to look over the piece of land he hoped to acquire as a construction site. In the Bronx, they stopped for lunch at a road-house, and while the other men ordered the blue plate special, pot roast and mashed potatoes, Samax polished off two dozen oysters on the half shell. A half hour later, midway to their destination, he was gripped by fierce intestinal pain.
“It was like someone was going to work on my guts with a paint scraper,” he told me while paring a nectarine. “For about thirty seconds I thought I was going to die. The real estate guy pulled over to the shoulder. His car was a big Cord sedan, heavy as a truck, and the backers were sitting in the rear smoking cigars. I stumbled out and ran through the high grass undoing my belt, and when I hit the woods I got my pants down a split second before I would’ve shitted in them. I was green, rocking on my heels there in the dirt, and even after I got it all out of me I still felt woozy. Gripping a branch, I pulled myself up and stood there with my pants around my ankles, taking deep breaths. The foliage was thick around me. I remember the pollen filling my nose. And some crows making a racket in the treetops. Then suddenly I got the feeling there was open space beyond those trees. I lifted that branch high, then pushed another one aside, and the sunlight flooded in on me, with a strong breeze.
“There before me was this panorama, a flat green valley dotted with shade trees, that stretched to a line of low hills. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Exactly what I’d been looking for—the perfect place to build. I pulled up my pants and ran back to the car, and showed that land to my backers. But they were against it! Said it was in the middle of nowhere. Well, I’ve always been attracted to the middle of nowhere. Though my heart was no longer in it, we drove on to the other piece of land, and they were dead set on building there. So I let them have it all for themselves. After that, it took me several months, but I got new backers and I built forty houses in that other valley without cutting down a single tree. In fact, we planted two hundred more trees. I made my first million there—actually $860,000 before taxes.” He chuckled. “Happy to dispense with my cut, those original backers built too, on the other land, which turned out to lie over an ancient swamp. Poor guys lost their shirts. What shirt I had left I would’ve lost too, if I hadn’t eaten those bad oysters.”
This was the beginning of Samax’s fabulous run of luck. Following the formula he would stick to over the next twenty-one years, he sank
half his profits into further real estate and used the other half to bankroll his life as a gambler, first in Havana, Miami, and Monte Carlo, and then in Las Vegas. Amassing a fortune large enough to perpetuate itself indefinitely, he quit gambling on his fiftieth birthday, and never again placed a single bet.
“Gambling professionally, how did you beat the odds?” I asked him one day.
“Memory,” he replied simply. “No tricks, no scams, no system. Nothing a single casino ever could, or did, reproach me for. Mind you, lots of gamblers have good memories: how fast you assimilate and distil what you’re memorizing, how you read the results of that assimilation, and how you then apply it—all in the shortest possible time, under pressure—is something else altogether. And that’s just the beginning.”
“Where did you learn to do that?”
Here, for the first and only time in the years I had lived under his roof, he looked away evasively. “That’s another story.”
“Was it Mr. Labusi?” I asked.
“No,” he shook his head. “Though it was the reason I first met him.” He looked me in the eye again. “Someday I’ll tell you.”
Doméniko Labusi was one of the hotel’s three most prominent and permanent guests. He was a man of interesting contradictions: a memory expert, capable of amazing mnemonic exertions, who routinely forgot people’s names and missed appointments; a chess grand master, winner of international competitions in his youth, who otherwise had an aversion to games; a scrupulous Pythagorean who was a caffeine addict. And he was also my tutor. In this, his only contradiction was of a Socratic nature: prodigiously knowledegable himself, he never failed to remind me that the more I learned, the more I was to realize I knew nothing at all. Understood properly, The Apology and Critias were the pinnacles of wisdom, he insisted—unusually bitter texts for a Pythagorean to be so enamored of.
A Trip to the Stars Page 13
