Chapter 16 of a memoir by Ricardo Nirenberg

         Sweet bird that shun’st the noise of folly,
         Most musical, most melancholy!
            Milton, Il Penseroso.

 

When I recall the month I spent in the wooded Andes of Chubut, three kinds of things first come to mind: songs, long walks, and Zulema’s soft and peaceful knees.  In the evenings, after a strenuous excursion, I sat by the campfire, my head resting on the knees that Zulema kindly reserved for me, while we all sang to the strains of Trenet’s “Ménilmontant”:

En el fogón, al fin del día                   
es siempre grato quieto estar,            
mientras allá en la lejanía                   
su compañía                                      
nos da el brillar.                                                        

(By the campfire, at the day’s end, / it’s always pleasant to be still, / while over there and far away, / we share the company / of the stars.)

Some songs were rituals well established for certain activities, like the one above, or the one sung when we cooked polenta, which was often enough, as the grain is easy to store.  It began, if I remember right, with “Così si pianta la bella polenta” (This way one plants the gorgeous polenta), while one moved the long wooden spoon one way, and then, inverting the words, “la bella polenta si pianta così”, while one moved the spoon in the opposite sense; and so one proceeded, using different verbs, starting from “si pianta”: “si cresce” (one grows it), “fiorisce” (it flowers), “si taglia” (one cuts it), “si macchina” (one grinds it), “si cuoce” (one cooks it), “si mangia” (one eats it), and for good measure we added as a coda something very hard to translate: “si inyuya”, pronounced “inshusha”.  I’ll explain.

At the camp there were no modern facilities; we defecated either crouching among the weeds or, as I liked to do on occasion, climbing up a tree with a horizontally protruding forked branch, and sitting on it.  In all cases, we referred to the act itself as “inyuyar”, from the Spanish yuyo = weed, so in English it would be “to inweed” — and indeed, the word, with roughly the same sense, appears once in Sidney’s Arcadia of 1586 and nowhere else, according to the OED.  Thus the song we sang as we cooked polenta in our Patagonian Arcadia, ended with,

Così si inyuya la bella polenta,
oh la bella polenta così.

(So one inweeds the gorgeous polenta, / oh the gorgeous polenta, like this.)

Still another song of a ritualistic kind, or perhaps this one should rather be considered of a religious kind, appropriately set to the melody of “Auld Lang Syne,” was sung by the campfire as a sort of solidarity incantation:

Acampante que lejos te vas,
un sincero adiós yo te doy,
porque hemos pasado en este lugar gratas horas de felicidad.
Volverás, yo lo sé,
y estaremos todos juntos otra vez...
Acampante que lejos te vas.

(Oh camper who’re going far away, / I say a heartfelt goodbye, / since here we’ve spent a pleasant and happy time./ You’ll come back, I am sure, / and we’ll be all together again.../ You camper who are going far away.)

Was I sure?  Really?  I haven’t been back to Lago Verde in the Los Alerces (The Larches) National Park, and even if, unlikely as it is, I were to go back there, old and shaky as I am now, we would not be there all together again, for Zulema Gampel died exactly three years ago, in May of 2021.  But perhaps the authors of those lines had bought into a Nietzschean eternal return of the same, or else believed in an eternal Chemical Camp installed up in Heaven: that’s why I speak of a religious song.  Four years after the memorable Patagonian excursion, I chanced on Borges’ sonnet “Everness”, whose first quartet I translate below:

Sólo una cosa no hay. Es el olvido.
Dios, que salva el metal, salva la escoria
y cifra en Su profética memoria
las lunas que serán y las que han sido.

(One and only one thing does not exist: oblivion. / God, who saves the metal, saves the dross / and keeps in His prophetic memory without loss / future and past moons, letting them shine on.)

 

My familiarity with Borges leads me to believe that this God with a prophetic memory is but an ad hoc construct: he did not usually believe in any god. But he was a poet, and the ancestral mission of the poet is to save real or feigned events and adventures from oblivion. During the European Renaissance, Castiglione, Cervantes, and many others discoursed on the relative merits of the professions of arms and letters: the former performed the deeds, and the latter preserved them from oblivion.  Even in the twentieth century, the Surrealists with their automatic writing sought to preserve the mysterious whims of the unfettered mind, as we can still hear in their words, cadavres exquis. 

At the end of May, as I am writing this, this wunderschönen Monat Mai, I feel the melancholy of another spring slipping away, and if I only could, I would write something to save this melancholy and this month of May from oblivion.  But I am no poet.  Guillaume Apollinaire was one, and it is quite enough for me to repeat some lines from his “Vitam impendere amori”:

Encore un printemps de passé
Je songe à ce qu’il eut de tendre
Adieu saison qui finissez
Vous nous reviendrez aussi tendre.

(Another spring has slipped by / I recall how much in it was tender / Adieu mein wunderschönen Monat Mai / You will return no less tender. )

Another couple of lines, way down, I retain from that poem, appear to contradict the above, since they speak of decay rather than sameness:

Ô ma jeunesse abandonnée
Comme une guirlande fanée...

(Oh my youth abandoned / Like a withered wreath...)

***

Dear reader, be calm, as Chesterton once said, for they come to their goal at last, my wandering wits.  For as it happens here, the goal is the wandering itself, the long, delightful walks.  The Germans, who since their early Romantic movement, with works like Ludwig Tieck’s  Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, have been in love with wandering, especially in the woods, have several words for it: der Ausflug, das Wandern, die Wanderung, die Wanderschaft.  For my part, I had fallen in love with Müller’s and Schubert’s Schöne Müllerin, knew it by heart, and now put it to good use by singing it in my long walks with Teodoro “Toto” Sikorski, a student of architecture I met right there in Lago Verde, who became my Wanderung Geselle, my wandering buddy.

My buddies, Luis Saintout, Buby Zolhofer, and Wolfgang the German, who had advised me to buy a pair of crampons to join them in a climb of Cerro Torrecillas and its glacier, had determined on the spot that such a climb was well beyond my capacities. I had set aside the crampons and grabbed my walking staff.  Toto and I wandered in the rustling woods, me singing,

“Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust, das Wandern...” (To wander is the miller’s pleasure, to wander...)

Schubert had a genius for mimicking with his music the sense of the words, whether the rhythm of walking or the murmur of the brook.

“Das muss ein schlechter Müller sein, / Dem niemals fiel das Wandern ein...”
(He must be a miserable miller who never thinks of wandering).

Those strongly accented German iambics, that I translated for Toto’s benefit, wonderfully energized our walking.  When we encountered a streamlet, which happened often, I switched to one of the songs where the wandering miller interrogates the brook, his faithful friend, either about wither he’s headed to or about whether the beautiful Müllerin loves him or not.

“Will’s ja nicht weiter sagen, / Sag’, Bächlein, liebt sie mich?”
(I’ll tell no one: Tell me, streamlet, does she love me?)

While I sang those words I thought of Zulema, who might have been walking herself with another female camper, or Heaven forbid, a male one who would displace me from her soft and restful knees.  As for Toto, he was really more interested in identifying the trees and bushes we encountered in our path, than in listening to my singing of Schubert’s romantic Lieder, but he listened to them with endless patience and good grace; he never disparaged the roughness of my voice.  I cannot help recalling my conversations with Chaucha during our train trip in the previous chapter, and the way he dismissed my mention of Cervantes and don Quixote with a brutal, ¿Y eso con qué se come? (That’s eaten with what kind of dressing?)  I never had another word with Chaucha, while today, sixty-five years later, Toto and I are still friends.

So we walked until we came into a clearing and in it a hut.  A man was sitting by the door and motioned to us to join him, which we did.  He seemed to be in the threshold of old age and was drinking mate.  We took off our rucksacks and crouched near him on the ground.  The man offered us his full gourd and told us to call him don Cornelio; his parents, he said, were part of the wave of Welsh people who had settled in Chubut towards the end of the nineteenth century.  Don Cornelio was kind enough to inquire about our whereabouts and occupation; he had held, he said, many jobs, among which that of grounds warden or ranger.  At some point, to keep my balance while I was sipping from the gourd, I put my left hand on the ground and let out a scream.  I had pressed with my palm on the crampons, which were hanging from my rucksack and lying on the ground.

After reassuring Toto and don Cornelio that I was okay, I explained that those damned crampons had given me nothing but grief, and I asked don Cornelio if he was interested in having them.

— What would I want crampons for? he asked.

 — I guess you could climb Cerro Torrecillas, I replied, and Toto went on to explain that three of our buddies had just done it, climbed the mountain and walked on its glacier.

— Ha, ha, ha!  I do that with just my alpargatas on, don Cornelio laughed.

Alpargatas or espadrilles are footwear made of canvas with coiled-rope soles, then typically worn by workmen. I still remember the Peronist slogan heard all around when I was six and Perón was running for president for the first time, “Alpargatas sí, libros no” (Yes to espadrilles, no to books).  I don’t know whether the Welshman was just bragging. Perhaps he climbed the Cerro from a more approachable side.  In any case, I felt I owed him thanks, for he had lowered my three cramponed buddies, Saintout, Zolhofer, and Wolfgang, by a few pegs, which was a balsam to my scratched self-regard.

It’s time we return to Cantarito Bunge, my drinking boon companion of the previous chapter, the one who had offered me rhum liberally from his canteen while we were waiting at El Maitén.  He and I went on an excursion, I believe in the general direction of the Río Arrayanes.  There were other people with us, but no matter how hard I try, I fail to recall who they were.  Toto? He says he doesn’t remember it.  Zulema? Can’t be, for how would I have forgotten that she was there.  Anyway, there were at least two more people.  The first night it started to rain, and for three days and their nights it rained nonstop.  It was a second Flood, and we ventured out of our small tent only to go “inshushem” covered with a plastic sheet; our provisions of fruit and cheese were soon exhausted, and we were lying on the rubber bottom, hungry, gnawing on skins and rinds.  At long last, when it cleared up, we got up and immediately started cooking polenta on our Coleman stove.  We stirred it with renewed vigor and joie de vivre, all the while singing “La bella polenta”.  No sooner did we judge it ready, Cantarito and I rushed to devour some; he went first, passed me the ladle, and proceeded to sneeze so hard and suddenly that a copious spurt of phlegm fell into the pot.  Part of it fell into my ladle: unthinkingly, I gulped it down.  When I stopped to think of it, I concluded that Cantarito had been not less liberal with his nostrils than with his gourd.

 

***

My mathematical education continued uninterrupted with ups and downs.  A course I remember enjoying was General Topology, taught by Oscar Varsavsky, a remarkable character who was then in his late thirties.  In the years that followed, he changed his mind about the advisability of doing science the way it was done and still is.  He determined that science must be in the service of society, must promote solidarity, and diminish the dominance of capitalism and consumerism.  Scientific work for its own sake, without regard to the above strictures, he called scientism, and called for a crusade against that plague.  When I think of it in retrospect, I ask myself, did OV believe he could decide when a scientific discovery should be classified as “good science” and when as mere “scientism”?  Take Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem for example: does it further human solidarity or not?  Does it tend to diminish consumerism, or the rate of global warming?  Would it have been better, ethically and politically, to stick to the old Aristotelian logic?  Such questions may have answers: I wouldn’t know.  But it’s amazing that Varsavsky apparently thought he knew and that he could find those answers.  OV’s ideas, I’ve heard, influenced Hugo Chávez and the changes that occurred in Venezuela, whether for better or for worse I leave it to others to determine.

Oscar Varsavsky had a cousin, Carlos, a decade or so his junior, an astrophysicist with a PhD from Harvard, who was a professor at Exactas; I wonder if any philosophic debates took place between the two, as they used to between my father and my uncle Abraham.  Imagine Carlos asking Oscar if research in astronomy should be regarded as “scientism” or as “good science,” important for humanity.  From Babylon to Ptolemy, thence to Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, astronomy went from being the purveyor of gods and the mother of oracles, to the role of teaching us about how minuscule our world is in the vast universe, a lesson that resonates in the thoughts of Pascal.  Astronomy was certainly important for humanity.  But it is not clear that the research into black holes, remote galaxies, or the cosmic microwave background light has much relevance to the gladdening or saddening of humankind.  So Oscar might have charged his younger cousin with scientism.  Oscar died aged fifty-six, like my father; Carlos, at fifty.

Rafael Panzone was in charge of the problem sessions for Varsavsky’ class.  Seven years my senior, he had recently gotten his doctorate.  Those sessions, whose purpose was to have us solve the problems in Kelley’s 1955 book, were the high point of my math apprenticeship at Exactas.  It was great fun to play with infinities of different degrees, and to watch sequences desperately trying to approach, in vain, the first non-denumerable ordinal.  Time is sequence or becomes sequence as soon as we fix our attention on it; time flows, scrambling desperately trying in vain to approach eternity.  In time Panzone and I became friendly.  He was active and generous in providing me and other budding mathematicians with the opportunity to do research work: my first math paper was a joint one with Rafael Panzone, published in the journal of the Unión Matemática Argentina, whose title I don’t remember offhand, nor what I might have contributed.

On the downside was the second course, Analysis 4, I took under González Domínguez, the professor who had advised me not to “force the machine” and to concentrate on math, as you may remember from the previous chapter, when I was taking Analysis 3.  I found this second course a Capernaum in which I couldn’t tell South from North nor head from feet, and so, unable to follow, I concentrated my efforts on the 1954 English translation of a Russian textbook, Petrovsky’s Lectures on partial differential equations.  I got a less than distinguished grade in that last course. Then, in 1960, the degree of Licentiate in Math was conferred upon me.

Licentiate!  That means that I was licensed.  Licensed to do what?  Well, above all, to pause and ask myself what I might do with my life.  Asking, whither?  Wohin? as the wandering Miller asks the stream.  Quod vitae sectabor iter? — which life road will I choose? — the question that had perturbed Descartes in his famous dream at the poêle in Ulm.  Now, for me, bless my soul, it was settled for the time being: I was licensed to go on with what I was licensed to do, namely math.  Licensed to become, as I did, an Ayudante (an assistant), and then a Jefe de trabajos prácticos in charge of problem sessions, the position Panzone was holding when I first met him.  To go further and become a professor, one needed to have a doctorate, which might come in due time — which would doubtless come in due time —, but meanwhile I was earning a salary, scanty yet enough for my needs.

Intellectually, it was a high road I had chosen, the highest perhaps in our day and age.  My math friends and colleagues shared this sense of riding high, well above the hoi polloi, which might explain why we were all so fond of imitating Don Quixote, who believed his deeds could overshadow those of the Twelve Peers of France and the Nine Worthies.  We would get together at an after-hours joint, “El Vómito Negro” (The Black Vomit), as we used to call it, drink a good deal of an infamous wine, then, out on the first block, the Easternmost, of Avenida de Mayo, which at night was well-nigh deserted, two pairs of us would stand at a distance of about thirty yards from each other and throw down mutual Quixotic-style challenges.  “Flee not, ye cowards and vile creatures! for it is only one knight that assails you!”  “With me fair words take no effect, for I know you well, treacherous knaves!”  Then we would ride or rather run toward the opposite guy and bravely bump shoulders. 

I remember Horacio Porta, Héctor Fattorini, and Néstor Rivière were usually there, and also Marisa, Néstor’s girlfriend.  Were we talking of the Homeric Nestor, any American classicist is ready to tell you her full name: why, she was Sandy Pylos.  In the case of Néstor Rivière, however, I cannot recall his girlfriend’s maiden name, because they married early, whereupon she called herself Marisa Rivière.  Anyhow, during our nightly knightly childish battles we never cracked a bone or hurt a rotator cuff, but Néstor ended up with a collapsed lung, and Marisa went with him to the Asistencia Pública (Public First Aid) on Calle Esmeralda.  She was, without the shadow of a doubt, Néstor’s Dulcinea.  She died in Minneapolis, in 2020, forty-four years after the early death of Néstor.

The year I was awarded my License in math I was rewarded, as if by celestial justice, with my own Dulcinea.  She was a first-year student at Exactas, born in a village near Limoges, France, in 1943.  Here, for the first time in these recollections, I will be using false names, since she is alive and “On doit des égards aux vivants ; aux morts on ne doit que la vérité.” Her father was a Sephardic Jew who had translated García Lorca’s Romancero Gitano into French; with his energetic and enterprising wife they had brought up three daughters: Sabine was the youngest.

For me it was love at first sight.  Or rather at second sight, for the first time I could not believe my eyes, and so I had to close and open them again to verify she was not a mirage.  Courting her, however, was not an easy task: Hoc opus, hic labor erat, paraphrasing Virgil.  To start with, she refused my invitations to go to the movies and would just talk about her p’tit copain Jean-Charles, the Devil take him.  Then, slily, I invited Sabine’s older sister, Pauline, to the movies, knowing she would not accept since she was seeing someone else, but she would tell Sabine, who, I hoped, would feel a tiny sting of jealousy, competitiveness, or some other kind of sisterly hostile reaction.  It worked.  Eventually Sabine accepted my invitations, and we began meeting regularly at Las Delicias, an elegant café on Avenida Callao close to her apartment on Calle Quintana, or going to the movies.  To my frequent declarations of love, she would respond with a French phrase that is difficult to translate, “Je t’aime bien, mais je ne t’aime pas.”  It roughly means, I like you, but I am not in love with you.  One day at the movies, I put an arm around her shoulders, we looked at each other, and we kissed — a French kiss, needless to add — upon which she exclaimed, “¡Por fin!”, meaning, At long last!  As if I, poor fool, had been procrastinating.

So began our love, and soon I noticed a difference in our temperaments: Sabine planned ahead; she seemed to have a diagram in mind, indicating, with each stage of life, the age at which she would attain it.  I think great scientists tend to be like that: relatively few things in their lives are left to chance.  It was my good fortune she had established that at the age of seventeen she’d bid adieu to her maidenhood.  But there’s no such thing as an easy way out.  After several rushed, slip-shod, and frustrating attempts, we decided we needed a secluded, quiet place for an entire night.  So it happened that on a placid fall afternoon we took a train to Chascomús, 76 miles south of Buenos Aires.  On arrival, across the street facing the train station there was an old-fashioned sign, “Hotel Santa María”, and we walked straight in.

The verses of the fifteenth-century poet, el Marqués de Santillana,

“Faciendo la vía / del Calatraveño / a Sancta María, / vencido del sueño...”
(Along the route from Calatraveño to Sancta María, overcome by sleepiness...)

those came to mind when I saw that blessed sign, even though I was in no way overcome by sleepiness. We told the receptionist we were married, and the kindly lady took our word for it and seemed delighted.  We had dinner at the hotel dining salon: pejerrey caught that day in the Chascomús Lake and a glass of wine.  The following morning we could recite the self-congratulatory strophe of the Argentine National Anthem:

Our brows crowned with laurels,
and a Lion defeated at our feet.

I’ve often asked myself if my love affairs with French-speaking women the long of my life — I mean not only sexual love, but also filial love, or fraternal — are all avatars of my original love for my old French teacher, Madame de la Barre.  I’m quite convinced that it is so.  On second thought, though, I was only six when I fell in love with Charles Trenet’s “Douce France” and “Que reste-t-il de nos amours”, as I have told in chapter 8, and that was a little before I began taking French lessons.

Perhaps a tendency to love the French language abides in my DNA.  Anyhow, of all the French-speaking women I’ve met, Sabine is the most formidable; I daresay she’s a Faustian woman, since her ambition was, and still is, that of Goethe’s Faust:

Kennen was die Welt / Im Innersten zusammenhält. (To find out what, in the innermost, keeps the world together).

At Exactas, she studied with Carlos Varsavsky, whom we met a few pages back.  Her later career was brilliant, and let me stop here, for her honors and distinctions are too many for my abused, decrepit memory.

Something that comes to mind when I think of Sabine’s parents is their wisdom, the amiable freedom they allowed their seventeen-year-old daughter.  In her early twenties my sister spent a night out and my father went berserk.  He wanted to hit her and screamed that he was going to kill her: “Just as I gave you your life, I can take it back!”  Regarding my relationship with Sabine with a critical eye, he didn’t refrain for expressing his opinion: “It is easier,” he would say, “to be invited to a Frenchwoman’s bed than to her table.”  My mother had a cautionary observation: “Turkish girls are way too hot.”  By “Turkish girls” (las turcas) she meant young Sephardic women.  It was in good part to escape for a while this stifling shtetlich atmosphere at home that in 1961 I decided to accept a one-semester teaching job in Bariloche, a small town at the feet of the Andes in Northern Patagonia.

 

This adventure requires a brief historical introduction, a peek into Argentina’s calamities.  In the WWII aftermath Perón forced or encouraged the exile of scholars such as Paul Bénichou, María Rosa and Raimundo Lida (my wife’s aunt and uncle), Amado Alonso, who was their teacher at the Instituto de Filología, and many others, and in dismal exchange welcomed into the country Third Reich men such as Mengele, Eichmann, and Ante Pavelić.  Among the latter there was an Austrian physicist, Ronald Richter, who convinced Perón that he could achieve cold, controlled nuclear fusion so that very cheap, abundant energy could be sold by the bottle, like soda.  Richter established his lab on the Isla Huemul, an island in the big Lake Nahuel Huapí, quite close to the coastal town of Bariloche.  I had occasion to take a look at some remains of Richter’s project: a bunch of large, weathered electrical capacitors.

When time passed and Perón saw no bottles of energy, nor anything of any worth coming out of Huemul Island, he charged two Argentine physicists, Enrique Gaviola (whom I have mentioned in Chapter 14) and José Antonio Balseiro with evaluating what Richter was doing. They reported back that the Huemul project was nonsense, an obvious hoax.  As a result, Richter’s project was dismantled, and in its stead the Instituto de Física de Bariloche was created in 1955.  Balseiro served as the first director of the new institution: that is the school where I got a one-semester math teaching job in 1961.  At that time Balseiro was diagnosed with leukemia, of which he was to die the following year; his wife María Mercedes was taking care of him, and I ended up substituting for her at a Bariloche high school for girls, where she taught math.  So in the afternoon I taught math to physics students at the Physics Institute and in the morning to sixteen- and seventeen-years-old girls: the latter assignment was the more challenging, and thereby hangs a tale for another chapter.

But first things first.  I had freedom as to the math I was to teach the physics students at the Institute, and I chose my favorite math book at the time, Functional Analysis by the Hungarians Frigyes Riesz and Béla Sz. - Nagy. Either by a whim of Fortune or by the design of the Creator, Who, as is well known, favors mathematicians, Jean Dieudonné, a founding member of the Bourbaki group, appeared in Bariloche.  He came by boat over the lake from Chile, accompanied by his wife and their daughter, who wanted to try the nearby ski slopes.

Then in his mid-fifties, Dieudonné was pleasantly surprised to find a young fellow with whom he could speak French and math.  I suggested he give a talk to my physics students at the Institute about the Bourbaki enterprise, which was to write down all of mathematics, rationally organized, in a series of volumes — a most cherished dream of the Enlightenment.  He graciously consented, and I acted as interpreter.  To any question more or less reducible to a “What is it?” he replied with the typical French shrug and pout, “Ça c’est de la métaphysique” — That’s metaphysics.  And that was it.  Metaphysics belonged, as Auguste Comte had taught, to “un âge révolu”, an age already gone, much like magic and magical thought.  I am pleased to offer the following comment as a gift to literary scholars who study Structuralism or Post-structuralism: the Bourbakis, who were undoubtedly the source of both, were disciples of Comte, the positivist: having said that, scholars can cite me, genuflect, and then reach their own conclusions.

But to continue with my conversations with Dieudonné, he told me, with the typical mathematician’s assurance that even the unrankable can and should be ranked, that Alexandre Grothendieck was the greatest mathematician alive, so much so that he, Dieudonné, had abandoned his own research to become the younger man’s amanuensis.  It was the first time I heard the name of a remarkable man I was to meet a decade later, so here I’ll only say that in Grothendieck I found a person with an enormous, colossal esprit de géométrie and a total lack of esprit de finesse, to use the pair of spiritual categories introduced by Pascal.  Whoever wishes to read more will find it at https://www.albany.edu/offcourse/issue59/grothendiek.html

At one point Dieudonné asked me what I was teaching to the physics students, and I said, integral equations.  “Well then,” he said, “you must start with the theorem that any locally convex topological vector space with a compact neighborhood must be finite dimensional.”  Or something like that.  I observed that I was teaching physics students, and that such theorems would be too abstract for them to appreciate or understand, but the illustrious man was adamant: one must begin where one must logically begin, and that means from the most general possible statements, never from particular cases.  That approach, a relatively new pedantry in the history of the world, is a disaster from the pedagogical point of view, but it is of one piece with the creed of Dieudonné and Bourbaki.  Few people remember today that Jean Dieudonné was the spirit behind the “New Math.” 

Sabine took a break from her studies and came to be with me at the physics institute for a week or so.  She was given a room near mine at the Institute. While I was teaching she used to go on long walks by herself.  Once, she was assaulted by a soldier from the army regiment quartered nearby, but she defended herself adroitly, making a fist with her index and little finger extended, and thrusting them into the man’s eyes, so he ended up on the ground howling with pain.  A Faustian woman indeed!

We walked together too, she and I, discussing plans for the future.  The administrators at the institute wanted to keep me as a mathematics instructor, and they were willing to assign to us one of their cozy chalets to live in if we got married, and they promised to send us abroad to study for our doctorates after “a few years.”  We were making plans.  In letters to my parents I gave them to understand that Sabine and I were contemplating marriage.  They did not respond.

One of the few books I had brought with me from home was a Spanish version of Spinoza’s Ethics.  When we were not making love, Sabine and I would be reading Spinoza and asking ourselves what in the world would be a clear example of causa sui, something “whose essence involves existence,” and we were able to find only two things satisfying that outlandish requirement: she for me and me for her.  Or we would dwell for a while into the depths of the proposition, “The more we understand particular things, the more we understand God.”  From such metaphysical exercises we derived the habit of calling each other Barujito and Barujita, Spanish diminutives of Baruch, Spinoza’s given name, which means blessed.