On her way to work, the neo-Mendelian cow-sodomatrix stops to polish off a couple of cannoli. For the record: one, then another, then yet another (!); the Palestinian counterman’s gaze ricochets up and down, to her scrawny upper body, then to her plump lower half, in search of an explanation. Restraint, she finds, is hard to achieve when it comes to sex and Sicilian cannoli. When she arrives at her little corner of laboratory, it’s already almost noon and she’s somewhat uneasy. Everyone knows her scientific productivity is outstanding, but she never feels she’s accomplished anything. At this point one might mention the Judeo-Christian et cetera guilt complex, but it won’t be me to do it, God forbid.
That afternoon she can’t keep her mind on gene amplification. When she stopped for the cannoli, she had glanced at the newspaper and seen the new data on CO2 emissions. Golden boy is absolutely right, she thinks, the politicians, rather than heed the urgent warnings of climate science, are doing their best to stoke so-called economic growth, i.e. increase pollution and set up a huge own goal. The only way out is for science to find immediate, effective responses to energy and contamination problems. People had better get on it fast. Her bacteria-fueled battery, if she can get it working, will be a contribution.
Now it bothers me a little (maybe even that’s saying too much) that this girl, who’s in some ways insufferable despite her many sympathetic qualities,* still doesn’t realize she’s been hypnotized by the paleoclimatic Casanova. I’m tempted to warn her (and yes, I can find a way, I assure you). However, I very rarely interfere in such matters. I mean, I’m no Aphrodite or Cupid, I’m a proper monotheistic deity with all that implies in terms of status and decorum. I’d never have a moment’s peace if I got mixed up in such chicanery; they’d all come begging and promising me this or that for some petty sentimental or sexual favor. Whatever happens I must safeguard my transcendental dignity.
* I’m the first to admit I’m amazed, because at the beginning I didn’t notice these at all. However, you would be very much mistaken to think divine justice implies an unshakable, irrevocable verdict; to be just also means to evaluate elements previously overlooked, as happens in criminal justice when new evidence emerges.
Exiting the laboratory, Ms. Einstein zigzags across town on her bike, zipping in and out of the lanes of traffic with infidel bravado. Another quick voluptuary stop—two cream filled cornetti—and she’s on her way toward the hills to the south. The hideously overbuilt plain behind her, she coasts over gentle dales pocked with neo-oligarchic villas, heads down the narrow valley inhabited by the dropouts, you might even say the wasted. When she gets there she parks her bike by her mother’s friend’s house (house: a euphemism). He’s in the shed next to the chicken coop, head deep in the engine of a decrepit Caterpillar tractor. His orange overalls are stained with oil, and his sparse hair, beginning at the sides of his head and at the nape of his neck, is gathered into a long, scant ponytail. After she has thoroughly cuddled the two big dogs and the small one, the sex maniac—the dogs make a big fuss when she comes and squabble for pole position—she approaches him and makes a pecking gesture with her long bird’s neck. Then her purple locks, too, disappear into the Neolithic engine.
Before a word has been exchanged, she’s understood that once again the problem is the diesel pump. The only good solution would be to go out and buy a new one. Instead, they try to revive it. As always, they work in silence, apart from “pass me this” and “pass me that.” Often they’re engaged, as now, in antiquarian mechanics, but it could also be the rebuilding of a collapsed wall, the replacement of a bent gutter, the pruning of a comatose apple tree, and other such bucolic operations linked to a lifestyle of semimystical autarchy. She helps him, and sometimes takes over where the problem is electronic (not this tractor) or even just involving very tiny screws. Often they lack the right equipment, but usually they find a solution. Much of their pleasure derives from that.
Once they’ve reassembled the pump the weary tractor starts up, expelling a plume of thoroughly unecological black smoke. Pleased with their success, he passes her a filthy rag to clean her hands, and, cigarette sinking into his large Indian beard, wipes his own on an old pair of underpants. They then go inside the wood-built part of the construction—to call it a construction is perhaps to exaggerate—that serves as kitchen and living room,† followed by the two big dogs, one with a long coat, one shorthaired, as well as the small addled dog and a cat of many colors. He offers her a beer, then settles into a yoga position to roll himself a joint, the laborer at last permitting himself a well-earned reward after a hard day’s work. She sits on the broken-down armchair and there they remain facing each other, not exchanging a word.
† The original camper (back in the days of Ms. Einstein’s mother, there had only been that) had been absorbed into an eclectic heap of discarded materials, like a small fish trapped in the stomach of a bigger one.
Under the porthole that gives onto the chicken coop (home to one lame and mangy duck) there’s an altar decorated with a string of colored lights like the ones you hang on a Christmas tree. Below the statue of a fat man bared to the waist sits an offering of overripe bananas and a pear in the final stages of putrefaction surrounded by a halo of happy, buzzing fruit flies. Thank heavens that slimy mess isn’t addressed to me, I say to myself. After years of ingesting psychedelics, her mother’s friend is now the follower of an orientalist-leaning cult. Brain fried by long sessions of transcendental meditation, he’s convinced that his lady friend has been reborn in India. Or rather, in his delirium she was first a red and yellow butterfly, and now (soul transposed with the ease with which you might move into a more comfortable apartment) she’s a woman with a red dot in the middle of her forehead. He has no doubts whatsoever, and even claims he sees her from time to time. It’s precisely to avoid listening to this lunacy that Ms. Einstein would rather not talk (and who could disagree with her?) but just sip her beer in silence.
As twilight fades to night he smokes another joint and she drinks a second beer and devotes her attention to the addled canine sex maniac, to whom she’s very partial. The animals each have their own seat on some chair or cushion, for this place belongs to them above all. They’re a bit puzzled, though, that food-wise nothing is happening, and seized by that restlessness that precedes a meal. Why aren’t these two amiable bipeds preparing something for us to chow down? they wonder (I can also read animal thoughts). Why aren’t they talking to each other the way humans do? When it’s pitch dark, she shakes her purple braids and bids goodbye to that derelict creature she calls father. A man who pays the rent by watering the garden and cleaning the pool for the ex-Communist wholesaler of organic bananas.
Mounting her bike now, she heads back into town.