I might have an answer for you, said Saul suddenly and then he smiled. Yeah? said Javier, lifting both of his heavy eyebrows.
Giorgio de Chirico, said Saul, or, rather, one of his paintings, The Anxious Journey. That’s how we got him to talk about the war. What? said Javier and he fixed his eyes on Saul with bewilderment. Yeah, I played a small accidental role in that interview, and I remember it exactly too, said Saul. I went with my grandfather to Park Ridge where the Sicilian soldier, or, rather, ex-soldier, lived. I think I was eight or nine. And you’re right about him by the way. He was afraid of rebuke, and also wary of the way Americans might perceive him. In short, he was nervous about the whole thing, even though my grandfather and him had already been friends for a few years. But just imagine, said Saul, you’re an ex-Axis soldier and a Jewish American historian shows up with his orphaned Israeli grandkid and asks you to violate a promise you made to yourself to keep silent. Then he added: and all just for the sake of a history book only a few people would read anyway.
Exactly, said Javier, that’s the puzzle to me.
Well, said Saul, by then it was the fifth time my grandfather had paid a visit to the Sicilian ex-soldier with the intent of asking about the war, but this was the first time he had brought me. He offered me cookies and Coke to make sure I was comfortable. It’s really strange how adults treat orphans, said Saul, as if, somehow, they were also at fault for their orphanhood. And, come to think of it, maybe he was at fault for someone’s orphanhood since, as you said, he had killed a British soldier.
He showed us pictures of his family, his elderly parents in Sicily, his daughter who had recently graduated as a lawyer, and his son who worked in a small theater in the city. He was very proud of both of them. He also showed us his shop in the garage where he tinkered with old neon signs and computers. Of course, he was stalling. Anyway, at some point, I asked about a framed print of Giorgio de Chirico’s The Anxious Journey hanging in the garage. I didn’t know the name of the painting at the time.
The Sicilian ex-soldier smiled and explained that it was a print he’d bought at the MOMA just a few years back during a trip with his wife to New York City. The Anxious Journey was a claustrophobic, surreal painting of an ominous locomotive behind a brick wall in the background and in the foreground a series of colonnades which led to nothing and opened onto nothing, which is exactly how the Sicilian ex-soldier described it. He clearly respected the artist, a fellow Italian, greatly, and these were the exact words about the painting my grandfather later recorded in his notes, but I don’t think they appear in the book. His editor must’ve cut it or maybe he did later, I don’t remember, which is why you wouldn’t know about the painting anyway.
My grandfather then said, Saul here likes the print, and I do too, Carlo, but what compelled you to buy it out of all the other posters at the MOMA gift shop? As if jolted suddenly by a brief electric charge the Sicilian ex-soldier started talking about the war. During the evacuation of Sicily in the summer of 1943, he had been separated from his battalion for a day and a night. It was a real mess, he told us, especially as the Allies under Patton moved toward Messina. Exhausted and fearful of the advancing Allies he sought safety in an abandoned town on a large hill with a steep winding descent toward a shore full of drying seagrass and corpses of starfish and men tossed up by the waves. The town was really just collapsing buildings and empty streets and stray wolfish dogs, like here, said Saul, come to think of it, like this city.
In any case, said Saul, he walked around the town for some time like a sleepwalker and he began to admire all the still-standing doors which had once given purpose to now ruined buildings—“doors which led to nothing and opened onto nothing and which gave me the terrible sense that I was lost inside of something monstrous, inaccessible, and withdrawn from the rest of the world.” Those were his exact words and that is what my grandfather recorded and later quoted in the book.
Later that night, continued Saul, the Italian soldier ate the last of his rations and slept in an empty niche in a cemetery bordering that town and another, dreaming of a dark, pristine forest in the north of Italy and a wolf wearing a medieval suit of armor, which is where the title of the book, On Dreams and Tombs, actually originated. The Sicilian ex-soldier never said it outright, but it was perfectly clear to me even at that age that The Anxious Journey by Giorgio de Chirico and that one day and night during the evacuation of Sicily were the same in his memory. That’s why he used the same words to describe both, but only my grandfather and I would ever know that.
With that one accidental question he granted my grandfather and me a little trust. In turn, my grandfather was able to get him to talk. It was like that with so many people he knew and interviewed. People loved to tell him everything, even at their own peril, said Saul and he laughed and handed the cigarette back to Javier.
* * *
The next morning when Saul woke up, Javier was gone. On the dresser there was a note that said, back later, I’d check the train station and the Red Cross in the French Quarter.
Saul went to the kitchen where he sat at a small rectangular table, sipping coffee. He then left the house, carrying the manuscript for A Model Earth in a backpack, walking first along Prytania Street, then Jackson Avenue, and finally along Simón Bolivar. The city at that hour, like no other city he had ever been to, was hollowed-out, blurred, and utterly empty, as if he were walking through the sulfurous vapors of another Earth. An Earth, in fact, as imagined by Adana Moreau. Then he thought of what little remained of her, if anything, in the ruins of the city. He thought of her exile, her stillness and dissension, her grace, and her total abandonment to science fiction, and he felt a surge of affection for her traveling back through the years, to 1929. Time—and all the killing hours it contained—had erased his parents, but it hadn’t yet erased Adana Moreau or his grandfather, incredibly too, it hadn’t yet erased the manuscript that somehow linked them and which he now carried like a porter through an extraterrestrial landscape.
At the train station, he stood near the Amtrak counter and watched for Maxwell Moreau in the small crowds of passengers disembarking. He saw a distressed young woman with an army backpack hurrying up the platform. He saw a cheerful-looking office worker with rolled up shirtsleeves approach another, older man, who looked as if he hadn’t slept in days and who began openly to cry. He saw a volunteer carrying a box marked donations in large black letters. Above the Amtrak counter the hands of a giant stainless-steel clock were frozen at 4:30.
* * *
On Canal Street he talked to two busy Red Cross volunteers who didn’t have any records for Maxwell Moreau, but who took Saul’s contact information and Maxwell Moreau’s address, in case anybody knew his whereabouts.
In a small bookstore on Chartres Street, he looked through a collection of magazines and newspapers. First he looked through stories of evacuees and then the stories of those who had stayed behind, then the death notices. Nothing about Maxwell Moreau.
Afterward, he talked to the owner of the bookstore, a fatigued and sympathetic man who explained that he had returned to the city as soon as possible to keep the bookstore going and who apologized to Saul. He didn’t know any theoretical physicists named Maxwell Moreau but would keep his eye out for him. Saul thanked him and bought a copy of The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, a novel about a fugitive hiding on a deserted island somewhere in Polynesia who discovers a machine capable of reproducing reality, a novel he had already read and liked some years earlier, but which, right then, in the cavernous blue light spilling in through the front glass windows of the bookstore, seemed entirely new to him.
Later, for lunch, he ate a turkey sandwich purchased from a small, busy corner store called Verti Marte. While he ate, he sat on a curb across the street and watched people go in and out of the corner store, a figure wearing a hazmat suit and a Darth Vader helmet, strippers in high heels and floral skirts and the off-duty military men f
ollowing them, and the dazed volunteers who, Saul thought with a sense of fatalism that surprised him, had probably arrived just before nightfall from Seattle or Denver or Cedar Rapids and would return the following week.
* * *
Later still, as Saul stood in front of a hotel on Royal Street, gazing at hundreds of Post-it notes, notecards, notebook paper, and ripped pieces of cardboard taped onto the hotel’s front window and scribbled with the names of missing family members and friends, he had the terrible Schrödinger-like sensation that Maxwell Moreau and, by the same logic, all those missing, were simultaneously right in front of him and somewhere else entirely; they were both at once lost and already found.
* * *
The following morning, Saul woke early. Javier was fast asleep in his clothes, a single blue bedsheet crumpled near his feet. Saul thought about waking him, but quickly decided against it.
Later that afternoon, after Javier had left yet again, Saul received a phone call from a professor of mathematics at the University of California who had seen Maxwell Moreau’s name and Saul’s contact on the Red Cross Missing Persons website. The mathematics professor, whose name was Robert Walsh, was originally from New Orleans. He didn’t have any information for Saul but was eager to know if he had found Maxwell Moreau. Unfortunately, I still don’t know where he is, said Saul.
Then, as if he had been caught in the middle of a hoax, Saul confessed that he had never actually met Maxwell Moreau. The story struck the mathematics professor as amusing and he asked why Saul wanted to find Maxwell Moreau in the first place. On the other end, there was the silence of someone between breaths, waiting for an answer, but Saul didn’t say anything. It’s okay, the mathematics professor said finally and with a little laugh, I get it, I once sought him out, too.
The story he then told, in short, was as follows: In 1980 when he was twenty and studying mathematics and physics on a study-abroad scholarship in Cambridge, a friend gave him a copy of The Hidden Multitude. He read it over the course of a single day, entirely awestruck, even if he understood little of it at the time. Still, he could sense even then that there was a hidden center concealed beneath the book’s mathematical models and theories, just as the title suggested, and that the theoretical physicist who wrote it was struggling against something vast and terrifying. In other words, he was blazing a path into the unknown and the young student wanted to be a part of it. He didn’t know it at the time, but there were many of them, young students—mathematicians and theoretical physicists alike—reading The Hidden Multitude as a rite of passage and defying their mentors and professors, who were unscrupulous in their feelings that they had already figured everything out. By the end of the ’70s, physicists had very accurate theories of three of the four fundamental forces of nature, and there were prospects for merging quantum physics with Einstein’s theory of the fourth force, gravity, and then pulling everything together into what would be called the Theory of Everything or the Final Theory.
Many physicists and students were attracted to the idea that a Theory of Everything could unify all of physics. But, according to Maxwell Moreau’s book, they were like intelligent fish in a pond who thought the entire universe was completely filled with water. Of course, from that day on the young mathematician was an enthusiastic supporter of Maxwell Moreau. So, when Robert Walsh heard that he was speaking at a physics conference in Brussels that summer, he saved and borrowed money to go. The conference itself was a type of ecology the young mathematician was unfamiliar with, and for the first two days he went from panel to speaker to meal with a trudging melancholy. But on the third day he went to see Maxwell Moreau speak in a small lecture hall at the Free University of Brussels and things started to pick up for him. From what he could tell, the audience in the lecture hall was divided between the old guard of physicists and the new, with which the young mathematician had already aligned himself. As he listened to Maxwell Moreau’s lucid, remarkable lecture on parallel universes it seemed to him that the limits of physics had suddenly dissolved or that reality had imperceptibly changed and that he was one of the first to witness it.
After the lecture, when the young mathematician was finally able to introduce himself to Maxwell Moreau, he mentioned that he was from New Orleans and the theoretical physicist took an immediate interest in him. Afterward, they went for a walk through the Ixelles Cemetery. They did not talk about New Orleans, but as they walked the cemetery’s calming and elegiac energy seemed to be a type of shared remembrance of both the bodies interred there and the distant crescent-shaped city itself. Instead they discussed a letter that Maxwell Moreau had recently received from a colleague with whose work the young mathematician was somewhat acquainted, a strange letter about the mathematical curiosities surrounding black holes and theoretical wormholes, which he then described in great detail.
He gets drunk and writes me letters, explained Maxwell Moreau and he laughed and the young mathematician laughed too, a cautious laugh, like he had not yet realized that great theoretical physicists were people made of flesh and blood and enamel, too.
Then they went into a bar and Maxwell Moreau ordered two beers and a plate of fries. As they drank and ate, the young mathematician talked about summer in Cambridge, which was an illusion of summer, and for some reason he talked for a long time about his charming yet turbulent father who had dropped out of high school to work on Gulf Coast oil rigs, and about his relationship with his girlfriend, which was, if he had to admit it, a type of prolonged distraction for both him and her.
In short, he talked about the life of a disoriented American student living abroad. Really, what he wanted to ask in that bar in Brussels but couldn’t find the courage to ask was what Maxwell Moreau thought about all the rumors that he was a madman. Afterward, in front of the bar, they shook hands and the theoretical physicist went back to his hotel, somewhere in the north of the city, and the young mathematician decided to ditch the last night of the conference and he went to the Brussels Central Station and took a train to Antwerp instead.
The second and last time the mathematics professor saw Maxwell Moreau was during an international symposium in Los Angeles celebrating the 100th birth anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a famous self-trained mathematician from India. This was in 1987. He saw him in a muggy, crowded hallway outside of an auditorium talking to two mathematicians from New Delhi who had been invited to give speeches.
He recognized the theoretical physicist immediately and before he could think about what to do next, Maxwell Moreau had spotted him and was already walking over. They shook hands and he said, I heard you were teaching nearby, so I was hoping to run into you. The mathematics professor nodded and said, I didn’t know you would be here, too.
By then, a good portion of Maxwell Moreau’s work was beginning to circulate widely, especially by members of the new guard who considered it a type of infrastructure for their own work. So, in that crowded hallway full of detractors and admirers, the mathematics professor hadn’t expected to be remembered. He hadn’t expected anything to really happen at that symposium. Then Maxwell Moreau invited him to meet the two mathematicians from New Delhi, after which they resumed a conversation about infinity. Really, their conversation was a type of ode to Ramanujan.
As Walsh listened in silence, he started to feel worse and worse about standing there, like he was an imposter, and he excused himself and went to the bathroom, which was too bright and too small and smelled like cologne, piss, and fresh paint. The exact opposite of infinity, he remembered thinking. By the time he returned, the two Indian mathematicians were gone and Maxwell Moreau was standing by himself reading an old mass-market paperback with a cover of a cobalt blue, mineral green, and black nebula, like an immense burning tapestry, which the mathematics professor immediately assumed to be a book on cosmology or astrophysics, but which Maxwell Moreau explained was a novel called The Seas of Eternity written by Tomas Flores, a Mexican American science fiction writer who
had died in obscurity in Nevada in 1977. He then told him it was a novel about space pirates.
Maxwell Moreau explained that his father had been a pirate in New Orleans. One of the characters in the novel reminds me of my father, he said. The mathematics professor tried to imagine his own drunken father standing at the helm of a ship with a great black flag, a surprisingly easy task. Shit, maybe my father was a pirate too, he said and they both laughed. Some minutes later, the two Indian mathematicians returned and Maxwell Moreau left with them. He never saw the theoretical physicist again.
* * *
Did you ever read The Seas of Eternity? asked Saul. Yes, said Robert Walsh, as it happened, some weeks afterward a package from Maxwell Moreau containing the novel arrived at my office at UCLA. Was it any good? asked Saul. The mathematics professor couldn’t say. He wasn’t familiar with science fiction. He had never read anything like it before. He then explained: there are star systems and landscapes as seen through spectral prisms, Euclidian landscapes, and wormholes and nameless galaxies where nameless creatures the size of planets roam the peripheral edges of solar systems, and there are irreconcilable time and space wars between three empires vaguely resembling the United States, the USSR, and Mexico, and also space pirates with synthetic eyes, synthetic penises, synthetic fever dreams, with an aura of feverish humanity who are forced to negotiate between life and death on a massive scale.
Toward the end of The Seas of Eternity, he found equations written in dark pencil on sheets of folded notebook paper. He wasn’t sure if Maxwell Moreau had wanted him to find them or if he had forgotten all about them. In any case, he checked the equations night after night for nearly three sleepless months. It was a time in his life, he recalled, which seemed to pass through him like a rush of cool night air. Those equations, he said. They were all beautiful.
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau Page 14
