Still, he helped them to get it planted and covered, on his hands and knees digging happily, and showing worms to Joe. After the planting it was mostly a matter of watering and weeding. Also removing snails and slugs. Joe carried these carefully to the back of their lot, where they could start life over in the weeds bordering the lawn.
“Don’t overwater,” Charlie advised Nick. “You don’t want to drown things in their beds. You have to be precise in how much you water them. I estimate about say this much, if you want to be accurate.”
“Do you mean accurate or precise?” Anna asked from the new flower bed.
“No quibbling allowed.”
“I’m not quibbling! It’s an important distinction.”
“Hello, what do you mean? Accurate and precise mean the precisely same thing!”
“They do not.”
“What do you mean,” Charlie was giggling at her now, “how so?”
“Accuracy,” she said, “means how close an estimate is to the true value. So if you estimate something is five percent and it turns out to be eight percent, then you weren’t very accurate.”
“This is statistics.”
“Yes, it is. And precision refers to how broad your estimate is. Like, if you estimate something is between five and eight percent, then you aren’t being very precise, but if you say a range is between 4.9 and 5.1 percent, then it’s a more precise estimate.”
“I see,” Charlie said, nodding solemnly.
“Quit it! It’s a very important distinction!”
“Of course it is. I wasn’t laughing at that.”
“At what then?”
“At you!”
“But why?”
“Oh, no reason.”
“It is a real distinction,” Nick pointed out to Charlie.
“Oh of course, of course!”
So this then became one of the recurrent motifs of the Quiblers on patrol, a distinction applicable, once you agreed it existed, to an amazing number of situations. Cell-phone call to fine-tune the grocery list, with one of them in the store and one at home; get some potatoes. How many? Get about half a dozen potatoes. Was that being accurate or precise? Or when someone was remarking that Nick was a very precise person, Charlie quipped, “He’s not precise, he’s accurate.” And so on.
On the way back to the garden-supply store, to get more plants and stakes and other supplies, Charlie said, “I wonder how many cubic feet of compost we need if we want to cover all four of the beds, let’s see, they’re six by twelve, say a foot deep in compost, make it simple….”
“Mom can tell you.”
“No that’s all right, I’m working on it—”
“Two hundred and eighty-eight cubic feet,” Anna said, while driving.
“I told you she would.”
“It isn’t fair,” Charlie said, still looking at his fingers. “She uses all these tricks from when she was in math club.”
“Come on,” Anna said.
Nick was helpless with laughter. “Yeah, right, Dad—she uses all these clever fiendish tricks—like multiplication,” and he and Anna laughed all the way to the store.
Unfortunately their new spring quickly became the hottest and driest on record in the Potomac watershed, and soon, it having been a dry winter on the whole, the region had to resort to water rationing. Between that and the mosquitoes, everyone began to reminisce with affection about the long winter, and wonder if it had been such a good idea to restart the Gulf Stream, since cold winters were so much preferable to drought. Crops were dying, the rivers falling low, streams drying out entirely, fish populations dying with them; it was bad. A bit of snow and cold temperatures would have been easy in comparison. You could always throw on more clothes when it got cold, but in this heat!
But of course now they didn’t have a choice.
The Quiblers did what they could to micro-irrigate their crops, and they had enough water to water such a small garden; but many of the plants died anyway. “We’re only going to have about a fifty percent survival rate, if that!”
“Is that being accurate or being precise?”
“I hope neither!”
Anna was going to websites like safeclimate.net or fightglobalwarming.com and comparing how they rated when she entered their household statistics on a carbon-burning chart. She was interested in the different methods they were using. Some accepted general descriptions as answers, others wanted the figures from your heating and electric bill, your car’s odometer and its real miles per gallon. Your actual air travel miles; charts of distances between major flying destinations were given. “The air travel is killer,” Anna muttered. “I thought it was a really energy-efficient way to travel.”
Giving her numbers to play with was like giving catnip to the cats, and Charlie watched her affectionately, but with a little bit of worry, as she speed-typed around on a spreadsheet she had adapted from the chart. Despite their garden’s contribution to their food supply, which she estimated at less than two percent of their caloric intake, and the flex schedule for power that they had signed up for with their power provider, still they were burning about 75 metric tons of carbon a year. Equivalent to eight football fields of Brazilian rain forest, the site said. Per year.
“You just can’t get a good number in a suburban home with a car and all,” she said, annoyed. “And if you fly at all.”
“It’s true.” Charlie stared over her shoulder at her spreadsheet. “I don’t see what else we can do here either, given the infrastructure.”
“I know. But I wish there was a way. Nick! Turn that light off, please!”
“Mom, you’re the one who told me to turn it on.”
“That’s when you were using it. Now you’re not.”
“Mom.”
VI. SACRED SPACE
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B eing Argentine, he was angry. Not that all Argentines were angry but many were, and rightfully so, after all the mistakes and crimes, but especially after the dirty war and its dirty resolution—a general amnesty for everybody for everything, for anything, even the foulest crimes. In other words repression of the past and of even the idea of justice, and of course the return of the repressed is a guaranteed thing, and always a nightmare, a breakout of monsters.
So Edgardo Alfonso had left Argentina behind, like so many other children of the desaparecidos, unable to live among the torturers and murderers both known and unknown who were free to walk the streets of Buenos Aires and ride the trams, who stared at Edgardo over the edges of their newspapers which held on their backsides the articles Edgardo had written identifying and denouncing them. He had had to leave to remain sane.
So of course he was at the Kennedy Center to see an evening of Argentinean tango, Bocca’s troupe out on Bocca’s farewell world tour, where the maestro would dance with a ladder and handstand his way to heaven for one last time, to Piazzolla’s “Soledad.” Edgardo cared nothing for dance per se, and despised tango the dance the way certain Scottish acquaintances winced at the sound of bagpipes; but Edgardo was a Piazzollista, and so he had to go. It was not often one got a chance to hear Astor Piazzolla’s music played live, and of course it would never be the same now that Astor was gone, but the proof of the strength of his composing was in how these new pickup bands backing the dance troupes would play their accompaniments to the dancers, tangos for the most part made of the utterly clichéd waltzes, two-steps, ballads, and church music that had been cobbled together to make old-style tango, and then they would start a piece by Astor and the whole universe would suddenly become bigger—deeper, darker, more tragic. A single phrase on the bandoneon and all of Buenos Aires would appear in the mind at once. The feeling was as accurate as if music possessed a kind of acupuncture that could strike particular nerves of the memory and immediately evoke it all.
The audience at the Kennedy Center was full of Latin Americans, and they watched the dancers against the black backdrop closely. Bocca was a good choreographer and the dances were insistent on being
interesting—men with men, women with women, little fights, melodramas, clever sex—but all the while the band was hidden behind the black curtain at the back, and Edgardo began to get angry yet again, this time that someone would conceal performing musicians for so long. The itch of their absence bit into him and he began to hate the skillful dancers, he wanted to boo them off the stage, he even wondered for a second if the music had been prerecorded and this tour was being done on the cheap, like the Bolshoi in Europe in 1985.
Finally however they pulled back the curtain, and there was the band: bandoneon, violin, piano, bass, electric guitar. Edgardo already knew they were a very tight group, playing good versions of the Piazzolla songs, faithful to the original, and intense. Tight band, incandescent music—it was strange now to observe how young they were, and to see the odd contortions they had to make in order to get those sounds; strange but wonderful; music at last, the ultimate point of the evening. Huge relief.
They had been revealed in order to play “Adios Nonino,” of course, Piazzolla’s good-bye to his dead father, his most famous song out of the three thousand in his catalog, and even if not the best, or rather not Edgardo’s favorite, which was “Mumuki” for sure, still it was the one with the most personal history. Edgardo’s father had been disappeared. God knew what had happened to him, Edgardo resisted thinking about this as being part of the poison, part of the torture echoing down through the years and the generations, one of the many reasons torture was the worst evil of all, and, when the state used and condoned it, the death of a nation’s sense of itself. This was why Edgardo had had to leave, also because his mother still met every Thursday afternoon in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires with all the other mothers and wives of the desaparecidos gathered in their white scarves, symbolic of their lost children’s diapers, to remind Argentina and the world (and in Buenos Aires these two were the same) of the crimes that still needed to be remembered, and the criminals who still must face justice. It was more than Edgardo could face on a weekly basis. Now even in his nice apartment east of Dupont Circle he had to keep the blinds shut on Sunday mornings so as not to see the dressed-up, good, kindly Americans, mostly black, walking down the street to the corner church, so as not to start again the train of thought that would lead him to memories and the anger.
He had to look away or it would kill him. His health was poor. He had to run at least fifty miles a week to keep himself from dying of anger. If he didn’t he couldn’t sleep and quickly his blood pressure ballooned dangerously high. You could run a lot of anger out of you. For the rest, you needed Piazzolla.
His own father had taken him to see Piazzolla at the Teatro Odeon, in 1973, shortly before he had been disappeared. Piazzolla had five years before disbanded his great quintet and gone to Europe with Amelita, gone through the melodramas of that relationship and its breakup and a succession of bands trying to find a Europop sound, trying electronica and string quartets and getting angrier and angrier at the results (though they were pretty good, Edgardo felt), so that when he came back to Buenos Aires for the summer of 73–74 and regathered the old quintet (with the madman Tarantino sitting in on piano) he was not the same confident composer, devoted to destroying tango and rebuilding it from the ground up for the sake of his modernist musical ambitions, but a darker and more baffled man, an exile who was home again, but determined to forge on no matter what. But now more willing to admit the tango in him, Edgardo’s father had explained, he was willing to admit his genius was Argentinean as well as transcendental. He could now submit to tango, fuse with it. And his audience was much changed as well, they no longer took Piazzolla for granted or thought he was a crazy egoist who had gone mad. With the quintet dispersed they had finally understood they had been seeing and hearing something new in the world, not just a genius but a great soul, and of course at that point, now that they had understood, it was gone.
But then it had come back. Maybe only for one night, everyone thought it was only for one night, everyone knew all of a sudden that life itself was a fragile and evanescent thing and no band lasted long, and so the atmosphere in the theater had been absolutely electric, the audience’s attentiveness quivering and hallucinatory, the fierce applause like thanks in a church, as if finally you could do the right thing in a church and clap madly and cheer and whistle to show your appreciation of God’s incredible work. At the end of the show they had leaped to their feet and gone mad with joy and regret, and looking around him young Edgardo had understood that adults were still as full of feeling as he was, that they did not “grow up” in any important respect and that he would never lose the huge feelings surging in him. An awesome sight, never to be forgotten. Perhaps it was his first real memory.
Now, here, on this night in Washington, D.C., the capital of everything and nothing, the dancers were dancing on the stage and the young band at the back was charging lustily through one of Piazzolla’s angriest and happiest tunes, the furiously fast “Michelangelo 70.” Beautiful. Astor had understood how to deal with the tragedy of Buenos Aires better than anyone, and Edgardo had never ceased to apply his lesson: you had to attack sadness and depression head-on, in a fury, you had to dance through it in a state of utmost energy, and then it would lead you out the other side to some kind of balance, even to that high humor that the racing tumble of bandoneon notes so often expressed, that joy that ought to be basic but in this world had to be achieved or as it were dragged out of some future better time: life ought to be joy, someday it would be joy, therefore on this night we celebrate that joy in anticipation and so capture an echo of it in advance of the fact, a kind of ricochet. That this was the best they could do in this supposedly advanced age of the world was funny in an awful way. And there weren’t that many things that were both real and funny, so there you had to hang your hat, on how funny it was that they could be as gods in a world more beautiful and just than humanity could now imagine, and yet instead were torturers on a planet where half the people lived in extreme immiseration while the other half killed in fear of being thrust into that immiseration, and were always willing to look the other way, to avoid seeing the genocide and speciescide and biospherecide they were committing, all unnecessarily, out of fear and greed. Hilarious! One had to laugh!
During intermission the beautifully dressed people filled the halls outside and gulped down little plastic flutes of wine as fast as they could. The sound of three thousand voices all talking at once in a big enclosed space was perhaps the most beautiful music of all. That was always true, but on this night there was a lot of Spanish being spoken, so it was even more true than usual. A bouncing glossolalia. This was how the apostles had sounded when the tongues of fire had descended on them, all trying to express directly in scat singing the epiphany of the world’s glory. One of Piazzolla’s bandoneon lines even seemed to bounce through the talk. No doubt one appeal of that thin nasal tone was how human it sounded, like the voice of a lover with a cold.
And all the faces. Edgardo was on the balcony with his elbows resting on the railing, looking down at the crowd below, all the hair so perfect, the raven blaze of light on glossy black tresses, the colorful clothes, the strong faces so full of the character of Latin America. This was what they looked like, they had nothing to be ashamed of in this world, where indeed could you find handsomer faces.
His friend Umberto stood down there near the door, holding two wine flutes. When he looked up and met Edgardo’s eye, Edgardo raised his chin in acknowledgment. Umberto jerked his head a fraction to the side, indicating a meeting; Edgardo nodded once.
In the second half the band was kept in view throughout the dances, and Edgardo was happier. Now the black curtain was his own eyelids, he could close them and ignore the dancers who were in any case making their limitations known, and only listen to the Piazzolla. The second half had four songs by Astor out of the eight, same as the first; this was typical in tango shows passing through the States on tour, sticking to the maestro to be sure of blowing away the audiences. In one
case a touring troupe’s leader had had some kind of a problem with Piazzolla, perhaps political in nature but probably mainly personal, the maestro could be withering, and so to avoid printing Piazzolla’s name even though he was playing his music, this leader had printed no composers’ names at all in the program book, a maneuver which had made Edgardo furious, although he had wanted to hear the music too much to able to walk out on the performance, because the band had been excellent, with four bandoneonists to re-create the effect Astor had made by himself. A better band even than on this night, though these young people were good, especially the young woman sawing away at her bass, amazing what a difference that made. And they were going to finish with the “Four Seasons of Buenos Aires,” a suite of four pieces, one for each season, on the model of Vivaldi.
These were among Piazzolla’s masterpieces, and Edgardo loved them all. Through all the years in Washington he had played the one that was appropriate to the season in the southern hemisphere, over and over, to keep himself properly oriented, or rather australized. Thus when Phil Chase had won the election he had been playing “Primavera Porteño” at high volume, because it was November, spring in Buenos Aires, and also perhaps on that night it marked a different kind of spring in the American political world, a much-needed birth of a new dispensation. Piazzolla had captured perfectly that magical budding sensation of springtime, the whole world quick with life and dancing.
Now it was baking summer in the world capital, a dry sauna with the rain gone, and at home he was playing “Invierno Porteño” to express the chill raw world to the south, and now the band was doing a very creditable job of it themselves, even the bandoneon player, who seemed suddenly possessed. And in the coda the pianist plinked the final falling trios of single notes in a perfect little ritard. Could be a lover walking away forever; could be the end of winter and thus the passing of another precious year. The two dancers sank to the floor in a knot—very nice, but not Edgardo’s image of it. He closed his eyes again and listened to the band rip into “Primavera Porteño,” the last one in the sequence. He bobbed and tapped his feet, eyes closed, uncaring about the people around him, let them think what they like, the whole audience should be on its feet at this moment.
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