“The head of the Sociedad — why, Garcia,” I said, “that is your former boss. Remember the story about the impatient fellow?” Garcia was gesturing covertly but desperately for me to shut up, but Don Pedro had heard and was off:
“What, another story? This fellow Garcia is implacable. I tell you, my countrymen — and considering that this one seems more Latin American than Spanish with all this obsession for writing. You know, man?” He pointed at Garcia across the table: “You’ll never go back to Spain or even heaven unless you stop this nonsense. What you have to do is to throw away all your intellectual paraphernalia, build yourself up and lead a clean life. That’s all, my friend.” He looked at Garcia with mock ferocity: “Otherwise I will bring you personally by the ear into the presence of Satan.”
“All right, all right,” Garcia was saying helplessly. “I guess you are right I have often felt like doing that very thing. I mean, get rid of the intellectual paraphernalia, whatever it is you mean by that. All right, you win, but all I ask is that you spare—” he finished in an unintelligible babbling that was all but inaudible, but Don Pedro was not paying attention. With his usual volubility he had resumed his previous subject:
“The funny thing is, you know, that the only people here who know everybody else are Dr. Jesucristo and myself — well, maybe the Chink also, but the point is — of course you know, everything has a point and the point or points in this case are the foci. You see? What I say is that we hold the gathering together. You understand, this gathering is an ellipse and Dr. Jesucristo and myself are the foci, sitting at opposite ends, and hold it together. The sum of the tensions we produce on each individual here is always constant. This could only happen with our countrymen — they don’t know what it’s all about, but nevertheless ours is the only people who constantly realize a neat mathematical formula of life. That is what makes the pretty picture, the stage setting that foreigners consider as romantic as a play — but it is the national formula—” His voice faded into high pitch and he slapped his neighbor familiarly on the back: “Don’t worry, man, don’t worry. It’s quite all right.”
The Moor often expressed himself in mathematical terms, contrary, as he pointed out, to many modern scientists who like to speak of mathematics in humanistic language, and here I want to make a digression regarding things which impressed me enough to make me attempt to record them, however imperfectly, and which I fear may only throw more darkness on the complex personality of the Moor. I will always remember the first time I had an opportunity of observing this personality in its own lair. Then I concluded that if it had been difficult to know this man at first, I would only know him less as time went on.
The Moor lived atop a high building in the East Sixties. The apartment was all done up in Moorish Spanish style and there was the strangest Moorish garden with a fountain in the middle and covered by a huge glass dome which illuminated it sadly like an overcast sky. This transplantation, abducted from its natural down-to-earth and sunny habitat to be perched in this cloudy day atmosphere, was a melancholy contradiction, a strange symbiosis, like the master of the house.
And it was in these dreamy surroundings that the Moor fascinated us on that occasion with his wonderful music and also brought upon us a sort of jesting consternation with his great pseudology and strange theories about a rigid or solid universe, and where for once he also spoke directly about himself. As in that Moorish garden of his, the occasion was sadly illuminating.
Everything that time was confused and imprecise. His conversation alternated or combined with his music and burst dazzling like a Roman candle in every direction at the same time. One moment the rooms were filled with the strange elegance of Chopin, the cosmopolitan sophistication of Schumann, and the next permeated with his views on the fourth perpendicular and the nonexistence of motion.
The Moor oscillated between the two pieces of furniture which dominated his study: one, a concert grand piano; the other, a tremendously long blackboard before which he occasionally hobbled with the aid of his stick, rapidly tracing symbols and formulas more for the appreciation of Dr. de los Rios than for the rest of us mortals to whom he only gave the polite attention of a passing self-deprecatory remark. Now and then de los Rios stepped up to the blackboard and would add or change something and then they both laughed. What humor they could have derived from that, I don’t know, but there are many levels of humor and theirs must have been different from ours.
I remember that Garcia was also there and that later I was conscious of the presence of the Señor Olózaga, but cannot recall when he came in. I remember that the Moor was playing a section from a scherzo by Chopin which ended with four grand broken chords. He played them alternating: two strong, clearly defined; the other two soft and blurry, like an echo. He had turned to face us: “Not the way it is written but one should take one’s liberties when playing for one’s own enjoyment, and I don’t think Chopin would have minded. The business of romanticism is breaking rules. It is loyal to the spirit if not the letter of the music.” Then he was up again, his inseparable shillelagh in hand, and he began playing with another strange machine. Wound about two spools that could be turned at will, there was some black material with translucent lines of different shapes and colors illuminated from below which appeared as brightly colored points moving when seen through the narrow slit of a frame adjusted on top. It was perplexing and ridiculous. The little points moved with gathering acceleration, or stood still, or split into two or more and changed colors only to come together again, to oscillate back and forth with increasing rapidity until they were but a blurred vibration.
“See? There is a parabola.” He pointed at a curve and down came the frame: “There goes the dot, like an object falling freely. And there is a sine curve.” The frame dropped again: “And of course, it becomes a vibration and the colors change — like so many things. Understand what I mean?” He limped back to the piano: “But everything was spread out there for you to see, if only you could lift the frame: simply cinematographic.”
It was a theory about time being a fourth dimension and motion only an illusion created by extensions more or less inclined to our space. I had heard or read something about such things but did not know that it was to be taken literally as he claimed it should be. This made it, for some reason, a bit dreadful. I began to play with the little machine and ask some questions, and the Moor took from a desk some folded sheets and handed them to me saying that if interested, I could look through them when I had time. I sensed the net cast by someone sold on a pet theory which he hopes will settle all the difficulties of life, the proselytism which is ever ready to sign up anyone who unwittingly offers the faintest lead, but I was curious.
I unfolded the sheets and glanced quickly through them. They were typewritten hastily and interspaced with hand-penned equations and formulas and geometrical diagrams which took considerably more room than the text. They ranged from the very simple, which even I could understand, to the formidable and on whose merits I had no preparation to pass judgment. The text was obviously written hurriedly without much attention to order and apparently only as notes to be worked out later. The Moor said to disregard the mathematical formulas which I found difficult, that some of them were rather complicated and looked even more so, that this was a monograph he was preparing for some scientific society, and that in its final form he expected to present it in very simple terms that any high school boy could understand provided he had enough imagination: “All those complicated formulas are nothing but a roundabout way of stating something one has not seen quite clearly yet— Impressive, you know, but not as convincing to intuition as a simple graph. The complexities dissolve once the principle and the generalization are understood. If something cannot be presented in very elementary form, it is often of doubtful merit — the old demagogic stand. This question that these things can only be expressed in higher mathematics is only a bit of propaganda nonsense. First one would have to determine where mathematics begins to be high.” He pointed at the papers in my hand: “Don’t let it frighten you.”