A Trip to the Stars

by Nicholas Christopher

  Such stuff seemed routine, however, beside the feats of the memory exemplars listed by Quintilian: Mithradates who spoke twenty-two languages fluently, and the Persian king Cyrus who could name all the soldiers in his army, which was mind-boggling until you encountered Lucius Scipio, who could list the entire population of Rome, and Charmadas, an Alexandrian Greek who could repeat the contents of any and all volumes in the great library from memory just as if he were reading them. In the same section of his treatise, right after this daunting list, I was delighted to find that, without apparent irony, Quintilian offers up the simple bit of advice which people the world over with a minimum of memory needs have followed ever since: when you want to remember something, tie a piece of string around your finger.

  I had been strolling through my memory palace—around that very same third-floor reading room—reviewing a list of famous volcanic eruptions in the Pacific, as I sat down to dinner the evening of New Year’s Day, 1969. Desirée and Calzas were at the table, as well as two Tibetan monks who had been staying at the hotel since early December. In that time, they meditated in the orchard nearly twelve hours a day, and though they dined with us each night, never said a word, even to each other. (They did, however, teach Samax a set of supplemental Qigong movements.) Dinner with Samax was a far less private affair than breakfast. He discussed ideas, juggling them like oranges, but seldom talked about himself and often reverted to one of the things he did best—better than anyone else I’d ever known: he listened. That night, he was quite talkative.

  Sirius was curled up as always behind my chair, and Labusi and Samax continued a discussion they had begun that afternoon, concerning the destruction of the Temple of the Moon and the imperial library that adjoined it in the great fire of Rome in 64 A.D. when Nero was emperor.

  “A great number of Greek statues were lost in the temple,” Samax was saying, “including one by Praxiteles. But the library was a secret one and the only clue we possess regarding its contents is a passing reference in Tacitus to ‘astronomical and navigational’ tracts.”

  “Books of discovery, in other words,” Labusi said, crushing some fresh rosemary between his thumb and index finger and inhaling its scent, “of the heavens, and of remote places on earth.”

  As always when I visited my memory palace while inside the hotel, I felt—sometimes with a rush of adrenaline—as if I were in two places at once: in this case, in the reading room following my loci, and in the tenth-floor dining room where we were sitting. And, listening to Samax and Labusi, gazing up at the stars through the skylight, it struck me powerfully that for as long as I lived, I would be one person who always carried the hotel in his head, down to the last detail, regardless of its earthly fate. When the library at Alexandria burned to the ground, it nevertheless continued to exist for a time, volume by volume, word by word, in Charmadas’s memory. Who was to say this was not also true of this secret library in Rome. Undoubtedly many of its texts had been memorized, and some would have been transcribed after the fire, perhaps with no mention of their origins.

  I was about to join the conversation, inquiring after this point, when Denise rang down to the kitchen for the meal to be sent up. For our New Year’s feast, Samax himself had prepared the menu—cactus salad, tomatillo soup, a casserole of octopus and beans, quinoa bread, and of course a platter of assorted fruit—which all of us except Labusi would enjoy. While using Pythagoras’s doctrines as a base, Labusi modeled his diet on a regimen concocted by a sixteenth-century Swiss physician, Gugliemo Grataroli, to strengthen the memory. That night he was dining on one of its staples, bulgar wheat boiled with dandelions and beets. Grataroli also recommended calves’ brains and pickled tongue for breakfast—both of course out of the question for Labusi.

  Finally Dr. Deneb and Hadar came into the dining room and took their seats. With Labusi, they were the hotel’s longest-running permanent guests—men who had come to the hotel for short stints and never left. Hadar was the man with the oversized gloves and the metal detector whom I had glimpsed outside the abandoned factory where Ivy took me to Samax; Deneb was the equally elusive character in the white suit and dark glasses, reading the book about Atlantis, whom I had encountered in the lobby on my first night at the hotel. It turned out that Deneb always wore a white suit and those glasses, and he was always reading about Atlantis.

  Unfolding his napkin, he immediately picked up on the topic of discussion. “The records of the northern voyages of the Carthaginian general Himlico,” he said in his high-pitched nasal voice, “off the Iberian peninsula in 500 B.C., were lost in that library, and they certainly contained his speculations on the possibility of Atlantis being situated at the mouth of the Mediterranean. It’s a shame because Himlico’s observations when he circumnavigated Africa proved to be remarkably accurate.”

  A self-described Atlantologist, Deneb had spent five years visiting nearly every conjectural site of the lost continent. Now he planned to read all the serious literature he could find on the subject of Atlantis, absorb it without taking a single note, and then, as he put it, “write a distilled monograph that will be the quintessential word on the subject.” He told Samax and me one night that he was perhaps two years from completing his reading and picking up his pen. Always fascinated, I had heard him expound dozens of Atlantis theories that variously placed the island’s ruins in places as far-flung as Brazil, Antarctica, and the Sahara Desert. I had several favorites. One was that Atlantis had indeed been an island–continent opposite the Straits of Gibraltar which sank around ten thousand years ago after its mountain ranges erupted volcanically. Another was that the earth once boasted a second moon which burst out of its orbit and crashed into the ocean, destroying Atlantis. Variations of this story, Deneb asserted, are found in the many ancient mythologies, notably the Bushmen’s, whose primary myth concerns a continent west of Africa that disappeared in an epoch they identify as “when two moons revolved around the earth.”

  Though Samax was often bemused by Deneb’s fantastical digressions, my uncle’s interest in Atlantis itself was genuine. It did not spring, as I first thought, from his passion for the ancient world, but from something at once simpler and stranger. Samax was of Basque descent (which meant that I was, too, at least partially) and many Basques were convinced that their ancestors hailed, not from the Pyrenees, but the island of Atlantis. More Basques lived in Nevada than in any of the other fifty states, and I had heard a number of them speak matter-of-factly of their Atlantean roots. It’s true that anthropologists have never ascertained the Basques’ origins. Definitely not a native Iberian race, the Basques reject any ancient connection to the Spanish or French. Their language is untraceable. Samax didn’t let on to what degree he accepted the Basques’ claims to be Atlanteans. But he grew animated when Deneb explained to us that the southern Spanish city of Cadiz, with its large, anomalous Basque population, was in ancient times known as “Gades.”

  “It is Plato, Junius, who tells us that this city was named after Gadeirus, a king of Atlantis, suggesting that Iberia was an Atlantean colony. If so, the Atlantans probably colonized even farther eastward, for alone among Europeans, the Phoenicians and Etruscans shared with the Basques the unusual fact that ninety-five percent of their people shared the Double-O-negative blood type”—and here Samax cast me a knowing glance—“with hardly any strains of the A type. That is still true of Basques today, while the opposite ratio is found among Frenchmen and Spaniards.”

  At this particular dinner, Hadar took over the conversation, a rare occurrence. Rare because he often traveled abroad, and when he was around was naturally laconic. In fact, he spent more time away from the hotel than he did under its roof. Unlike Deneb or Labusi, Hadar had been specifically hired by Samax during his first visit. But when he listed his occupation, on travel visas and the like, I couldn’t imagine what he put down. He was a meteorite hunter, scouring the earth for them under Samax’s sponsorship. He was on Samax’s payroll because in the course of his travels he scouted and
acquired antiquities for him. Calzas went on special missions for Samax, but Hadar simply roved, always on the lookout for rare objects.

  I never got along with Hadar, as I did with most of the other guests. He was gruff and impatient, and there was something about him, a remoteness, that made it seem as if in spirit he truly inhabited the cold realms in which his meteors traveled. Usually he wore a blank expression, only his sharp black eyes, screwed deep in their sockets, betraying the fierce mental activity going on behind the mask. A loner who stood out among other loners, Hadar treated me just as he did everyone else. He didn’t dislike me; in fact, I doubt he had much feeling for me at all.

  Only once did I think I had glimpsed another side of him. It was a simple incident, which might have had terrible consequences for me. I was eleven, and had slipped out of the hotel by the back entrance to go for a late-night swim. I was forbidden to swim alone in the pool, and rarely did so. But as luck would have it, that particular night, after swimming for a half hour, exhausting myself, I took one last lap underwater and bumped my head against the side while surfacing too fast. Groggy, afraid I’d pass out, I began flailing and swallowing water while the hedges and trees surrounding the pool spun around on me like a carousel. Then out of nowhere a hand with fingers like steel closed around my arm, lifted me out of the water, and deposited me on the grass. I spat up some water and gulped for air. My eyes were closed, burning with chlorine, and when I opened them finally, there was no one near me—all I saw was the bleary image of a man’s back, fifty yards off, rounding the hedges. I was sure it was Hadar. Shy and taciturn, he was the only person at the hotel who would have left my side at such a moment. But when I sought him out the next day to thank him, he gazed at me as blankly as ever. Finally he shook his head, and in his watery voice, as if delivering a biblical command, growled, “Obey Samax.” Then he walked away. And for a while afterward I felt he was watching out for me at times when I wasn’t watching out for myself.

  Hadar, characteristically, worked out of the remotest corner of the hotel: a windowless office at the end of the very last corridor in the second subbasement. The adjoining laboratory was filled with meteorites, labeled and set out on metal tables. He also had a spectrograph, an X-ray machine, and an assortment of microscopes. With these he analyzed specimens for the eight minerals—most of them combinations of iron and nickel—that, in varying mixtures, make up the content of all meteorites. The latter, he once explained to me, are simply the roughly two thousand meteors out of a billion each year that survive the earth’s atmosphere and reach the surface.

  Hadar subscribed to the theory, put forth in 1800, that meteors share their origin with asteroids: they are the fragments of a planet which once revolved around the sun between Mars and Jupiter. The planet exploded—for reasons unknown—leaving behind in the same orbit nine concentric asteroid belts, consisting of billions of asteroids. About 3,500 of these are large enough to have been given names. By collecting and examining meteorites from all over the world, and analyzing their shared properties, Hadar hoped to prove the hypothesis of the planetary explosion. So, while the two men seemed so different, at heart Hadar was very much like Deneb; but instead of a lost continent, Hadar’s Atlantis was a lost planet.

  In fact, I thought, pouring myself some iced tea, the Hotel Canopus was filled with people looking for lost things, Samax most prominent among them, and with people who had once been lost—like me.

  Hadar informed us that he had just returned from Mexico. Before that, he had been in Australia, crisscrossing the Tamani Desert in a Land Rover.

  “A different kind of desert,” he said in his clipped voice. “Red stone juts from the ground. Slashes your tires. Pretzel-shaped cacti. Lizards the size of dogs. Mountains with names like ‘Destruction.’ 116° at noon. Found two glass meteors. Type 3 chondrites. Olivine and pyroxene crystals surrounding pure glass cores. But in Mexico there was real booty.”

  Reaching into a scuffed briefcase beneath his chair, he took out three shiny arrowheads and pushed them to the center of the table.

  I saw that Labusi’s mind was elsewhere, for meteorites were not one of his passions, but Samax listened intently while serving each of us from the platter of fruit.

  “Tell us about it,” Samax said.

  “I found the arrowheads in a mountain valley south of Matahuala. They’re also chondrites. Valuable, but not surprising. As you know, Eskimos fashioned arrowheads from meteorites. Indians in Patagonia, too. But this,” he said, again dipping into his briefcase, “this is a surprise.” With a self-satisfied twitch of his nose, he produced a shiny black dagger with a bone handle and passed it down the table to Samax. I held it for a long moment—it was heavier than I had expected, and the curved blade was razor-sharp, with a six-pronged silver star near its base.

  “Obviously Aztec,” Hadar continued, “used in sacrificial ceremonies. Animal and human. The star on the blade is a royal marking. Like the Egyptians with their pharaoh, the Aztecs had a god-king. Quetzalcoatl. Also had pyramids, of course. Aztecs and Egyptians believed their king was reborn as a star.”

  Samax admired the dagger, holding the blade up to the light.

  “For your collection, Junius,” Hadar said, sipping his tea.

  Samax nodded his thanks. “So the king himself would have used this?” he asked.

  “He would have attended the ceremonies. And kept the dagger in his temple.”

  “I have seen a similar dagger,” Deneb put in, “but of clear quartz, in Morocco.”

  Samax smiled. “I’ll tell you about a clear dagger,” he said, sitting back slowly. “In Florence. For their most important and dangerous murders, the Borgias used one which left no trace.”

  “How so?” Calzas said.

  “They had a dagger-shaped mold which they filled with water and froze. Then, with a dagger of ice, timing became everything, for their victim had to be stabbed while the ice was still hard. Once it had penetrated the victim, the dagger melted, leaving no trace in the body except a tiny puncture and a bit of extra water. There might be a small amount of water beside the body, too, if the victim fell a certain way. Even today’s medical examiners and police laboratories would be hard-pressed to determine the cause of death. There would be no incriminating weapon. And water doesn’t hold fingerprints. I’m only surprised it’s a method that’s not caught on,” he added, smiling faintly.

  I knew my uncle had made some serious enemies, and that in business dealings he was reputed to be as tough and ruthless as the occasion—and the antagonist—demanded. If he had been the sort of man to have one of those plaques with a motto facing outward on his desk, it might have read: Bend, but only when you’re sure it’s a way to make the other guy break.

  Later that night, after he and I retired to his library for my Latin lesson, Samax finally told me where he had discovered the memory techniques that had served him as a gambler; at the same time, I also learned a piece of his private history to which only a few people were privy. We were sitting facing each another in leather easy chairs while Sirius sat attentively between us. I was eating fig ice cream with whipped cream while Samax carefully sectioned a white apple on a crystal plate.

  “Uncle Junius, what were the other tricks the Borgias used?”

  “Oh, so you liked that story. Well, they were big on poison. Hollow rings, for example, filled with poison that they could squirt into your glass when you weren’t looking. Hat pins dipped in arsenic, that kind of thing.” He slipped a wedge of apple into his mouth. “But one of their favorites they could do with what I’m holding right now.”

  “You mean, you stab someone with a knife dipped in poison?”

  “Nothing so crude. Observe, Enzo, that I am holding a knife and an apple.” He laid the knife flat in his palm. “Cesare Borgia would smear poison along only one side of a knife blade. While dining with his victim, he would halve an apple with the knife and casually eat his half. The victim would follow suit, but eat the half where the poison had come off
the blade. Even to the most suspicious person, even to an enemy, it might not occur that one could so easily poison half a piece of fruit.”

  Desserts were finished, Sirius was snoring softly on his side, and Samax had related a few more anecdotes about the Borgias before he came to what was really on his mind. It was unusual for him to let me stay up with him there so late, just past ten-thirty. Usually at that hour he played a game of chess with Labusi or retired alone to read or spend time with his sculptures and ceramics. Sometimes he got on the phone with dealers, agents, and curators in Europe and the Middle East—where it was morning—in order to set in motion or complete the acquisition of some new piece.

  Samax lighted a petit-corona, a Havana, and studied me for a moment through the smoke.

  “Last year, Enzo, you asked where I had picked up the memory technique I used to gamble, and I said I would tell you sometime.”

  I nodded.

  “The technique itself is nothing to me now. It was a simple placement method which, because you have studied with Labusi, you would be able to learn yourself quite rapidly. Originally developed by astronomers, it is deceptively simple. Instead of a palace, a small circular garden should be the site of the loci. Like the flowers and plants on a gaming table, the garden repeatedly ‘sprouts’ new cards as they are dealt and turned over. Remembering a sequence at poker, blackjack, or chemin de fer became child’s play for me.” He smiled grimly. “It was at that time I discovered my love of gardens. Which was not surprising, considering where I was.” As he laid his cigar in the groove of a marble ashtray, I noticed that his other hand was tightly balled into a fist. “You see, I was in the Ironwater Federal Prison in Colorado. Now that you’re getting older, I thought you should know about this—and hear it from me, not someone else.”