Chapter 18 of a memoir by Ricardo Nirenberg

The last summer I spent in Argentina saw the breakup of my love affair with Sabine.  She left me for a handsome fellow her age who was also a student of astrophysics. I must say that this fellow’s French was pretty good and that he played the traverse flute assez bien, though his sense of humor appeared to consist in intercalating the Spanish words por delante – por detrás (from the front – from the back) while reading aloud any text:

“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank — from the front — and of having nothing to do — from the back — once or twice she had peeped — from the front — into the book her sister was reading — from the back...”

The resultant level of salaciousness depended on the chosen text, but the joke, insipid to begin with, had a very short shelf life. Sabine left me for this guy, and that made me angry and sad.  For weeks on end Jacques Prévert’s and Joseph Kosma’s “Les Feuilles mortes” did not leave my mind:

“Oh je voudrais tant que tu te souviennes...  Mais la vie sépare ceux qui s’aiment, tout doucement, sans faire de bruit...” (Oh I would so much want you to remember...  But life parts lovers, quietly, noiselessly...)

It had been neither quietly nor noiselessly: quite the contrary.  My mother’s maenadic ruckus that summer morning in Miramar was at the root of the undoing and the denouement: no one ever harbored any doubt about that.  When I got wind that Sabine was going out with the handsome flutist, I had phoned her and given her a piece of my mind, a pretty rude one — yet I never spoke up to Mom, who had meanwhile concocted an absurd excuse for her brutal behavior toward Sabine: once I had promised Mom I would buy her a pearl necklace, and Sabine, who was sitting next to me, made a wry face.  If you conclude that I was a coward and a Momma’s boy, by all means go ahead: I will not gainsay you.

When the fall semester at the university started in March, already sundered from Sabine, I was a Jefe de trabajos prácticos in charge of a problem session of the freshman course Analysis I (Calc 1) for math majors.  Since there were several such sessions, about thirty-five names from the list of registered students were chosen quite randomly: those were the ones I was supposed to teach and to help solve problems for two hours twice a week.

The second week a student approached me after class and asked me a question; it was a math question though I don’t remember the substance; clearly, however, it was a silly one, and my impression was that her intentions were personal rather than scientific, so I told her that instead of asking silly questions she should go home and study.  The impression her style, her voice and her face made on me I have forgotten: my mind was still upholding the image of Sabine surrounded by barbs, thorns, and painful arabesques, which may help me now in excusing almost to my own satisfaction the rough, almost insulting way I replied to the student’s silly question.  Later, I came to believe that she had looked in my heart and seen I was mourning for the loss of love, but rather than being driven away by the image of another woman, she had taken pity on me and decided to nurse my wounds.

She was there once again, after class, when another student asked me a question which did not properly pertain to calculus but to elementary statistics: the meaning of “grading by the curve.”  I drew the Gauss curve on the board and proceeded to explain standard deviation, percentages of the area under the curve, and so on, and finally remarked that on both ends the curve never touches the horizontal axis but gets closer and closer to it: y goes to zero as x becomes larger in absolute value.  Then, after a pause and on a sudden impulse, with my chalk I closed the two gaps between the Gauss curve and the horizontal axis and drew a dot inside one of those closed gaps.  — And guess what this represents? I asked.

To my surprise and that of the other students standing before the blackboard, she immediately responded, — “It is a boa that has swallowed an elephant (the dot representing one of the boa’s eyes).”

And so it was.  I mean, that was precisely my intention in drawing my slightly modified Gauss curve.  She had seen that illustration of the elephant inside the boa in Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince: she had seen the same illustration I had seen as a young boy.

From that day on we were friends.  She told me her full name, Isabel Victoria Lida.  Victoria, she said, because she was born close to the end of January of 1945, when the Allies won the Battle of the Bulge, sealing their victory over Nazi Germany.  She was born at the end of WWII; I at the beginning; so, I promptly calculated, Isabel was five and a half years younger.   In June, after the end of the university semester, our friendship was free to grow, for she was no longer my student.  During a long walk of about eight miles, starting at Exactas on the border of the River Plate and ending at Isabel’s house, distant a block from the Congreso Nacional or Palace of Parliament, we talked about German songs, Lieder, especially about Schubert’s Schöne Müllerin and Winterreise.  She spoke of Frau Betlieby, her German teacher, and I spoke of Herr Probst, my German teacher in high school.  Incidentally, sixty-two years later we are still trying to improve our German.  She told me of several children’s books she had read by Monteiro Lobato, the Brazilian storyteller: I had read only one, Voyage to the Sky.  And she was a great fan of Ricardo Palma and his Peruvian Traditions: those were unknown to me. When we arrived at Isabel’s place, on the third floor of an apartment building inhabited exclusively by medical doctors, she was fresh and ready for another couple of miles despite her heels, but I was tired, so Isabel invited me upstairs and I sat for a while in her living room and drank a glass of water.  (Dr. Emilio Lida did on another occasion practice his extensive healing skills on my ankle, which hurt after another excursion with his daughter.  That time I slept through the night on their living room couch and he drove me home in the early morning.)

Soon after the winter solstice, Isabel invited me to visit her family country house near the town of Pilar, some thirty-five miles from the Capital.  We went with my Renault Dauphine; Isabel carried food her mother had prepared for us.  As soon as we arrived, we resolved we needed a fire in the chimney.  I was ready to apply the technique I had mastered at the Patagonian campamento químico: start by building a small teepee of wood splinters and lighting it with only one match.  Isabel, however, insisted on doing it her way: crumpled paper under some logs sprinkled with kerosene.  In all practical matters, apparently, she had her strong self-willed side.

In the practical matter of lunch, as it turned out, things went rather awry: the chicken her mother had prepared was undercooked and the rice was patently burnt.  Don Salomón, Isabel’s maternal grandfather, who lived in the house and sat at the table with us, lamented, — Pity you didn’t tell me in advance you were coming; I would have prepared a puchero!  And I added my own regret, — Oh, I do so like puchero!  In Argentina the word puchero stands roughly for what in Spain is called cocido and in France pot-au-feu.  In the early afternoon Isabel put on her boots, I my rubber overshoes, and we went for a walk, hand in hand, on the unpaved, muddy road toward La Lonja, a country store and tavern.  Holding hands: that was the only physical contact we had before I left my native city and flew to New York.

***

It was on my twenty-fourth birthday that my friend Horacio and I left for the North in search of doctorates in mathematics.  At the airport before we boarded our plane, Horacio gave me a birthday present, a small paperback, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, as I told in the previous chapter.  But there I forgot to mention that a Schumann’s song with words by Heine did not leave my mind as the plane took off and flew over Buenos Aires:

Schöne Wiege meiner Leiden,
Schönes Grabmal meiner Ruh’,
Schöne Stadt, wir müssen scheiden,—
Lebe wohl! ruf’ ich dir zu.
(Beautiful cradle of my sorrows, / Beautiful tomb of my peace, / Beautiful city, we must part, — / Farewell! I call to you).

Since I didn’t remember more than those four lines, I kept repeating them like a mantra or a scratched record until my cradle cum tomb was left far behind.  Then I began leafing through my recently acquired Four Quartets and I chanced on the following lines:

“Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”

I told Horacio that this reminded me of my father’s philosophical teachings on the dining-room table and of his maxim, “Always look for the center, for the still point.”  Horacio, however, disagreed, arguing that there is neither center nor still point in the universe according to contemporary science or even according, way, way back, to the Hermetica, and that there seems to be no center and no still point in human consciousness either.  I did not feel like contradicting him, or I did not feel able to; I limited myself to reciting the old aphorism: “Genio y figura de la cuna a la sepultura”, which can be translated more or less: Temper and character are the still center of a mind.  I was thinking how my father had acted in the matter of my car, the Dauphine, that I had left with him.  For at least a decade he had been unable to purchase a car of his own, and he promised he would pay for the Dauphine sometime in the future but didn’t offer any cash advance, which would have been of much help to me during my debut in New York.  This was entirely typical, an invariable characteristic of my father.  I did not tell that to Horacio, of course, and anyway he wouldn’t have understood such an example of a still point in human consciousness; he had lost contact with his father very early in life. It is remarkable that the two close male friends I had in my youth, Rodolfo and Horacio, both lived with their mothers, no father in sight.

Horacio responded to my “de la cuna a la sepultura” by quoting the last three lines of the poem by Calderón de la Barca about the flowers blooming in the morning and dying by night:

A florecer las rosas madrugaron
y para envejecerse florecieron:
cuna y sepulcro en un botón hallaron.
(To bloom the roses woke early in the morning / and to grow old they bloomed: / cradle and sepulcher in a bud they found).

Perhaps we were so insistent on the sameness of cradle and grave because we had become aware, for the first time, of the likelihood that our own graves would be very far from our cradles.  Horacio, at present, survives in Illinois and I in upstate New York: no other places will claim our dust.

Our plane made a scale in Port of Spain on the island of Trinidad.  We sat for some refreshment al fresco, and every time a waiter passed by, we called, — ¡Jugo de naranja, por favor!  No one paid any attention.  We had taken it for granted that Spanish was spoken there.  How wrong.  When it dawned on us and we started calling for orange juice, we ended up getting what we wished.  Finally, we landed on Idlewild, so inappropriately called, the airport of a city that was the opposite of idle and where all non-human wilderness appeared to be infinitely remote.

Naturally, what we found most remarkable were the contrasts between Buenos Aires and New York.  Since Judson Hall, the NYU graduate students’ dorm, was closed till the start of classes, we stayed for about a week at a YMCA in midtown Manhattan.  We were surprised when we saw the guys in the bathroom sitting on their johns with the door wide-open and greeting the passers-by and the pissers-by: — “Hi!”  One morning we were walking on the Bowery, and I placed my foot on a parked car’s rear bumper to tie my shoelaces, as I used to do in my native city, when I heard an angry shout from a man standing on the sidewalk: — “Take your fucking foot off my car!”  That was my first lesson both on the multiple uses of the verb “to fuck” and on the sacredness of private property in the United States of America.

Then there was the question of food.  We were astonished when we visited a Horn and Hardart automat, and we asked each other, Horacio and I, if automatic food meant that it was prepared without the assistance and labor of human hands, or that it didn’t require to be chewed, swallowed, and digested, so that it worked completely by itself.  The wonders did not stop there.  We will never forget the Wonder bread, as it was commonly called (we called it pillow bread).  Horacio said that the real wonder was how people seemed to enjoy eating such bland, insipid loaves, unless they’re somewhat improved by toasting, and I suggested that it should be advertised on each package, “Toast it,” like the “It’s toasted” printed on the packs of Lucky Strikes my father used to smoke.  The total absence of bread — of genuine bread, I mean, like French baguettes or Argentine flutes — was hard to bear.  As for the outlandish custom, then prevalent, of drinking milk with lunch and dinner, it was quite repulsive to watch, but we were not obliged to take part in it.

In the third week of August we got into our room at Judson Hall.  It was on the first floor with windows to Washington Square; the view from outside was so majestic that we took photos of each other appearing at our window disguised ridiculously as a pontiff and spreading our blessings urbi et orbi. We had a bed and a desk each, and there was an idle yet very elegant fireplace on whose mantel Horacio and I decided to arrange the empty wine bottles we would be eventually consuming.  As soon as we moved in and before the classes started at NYU, I bought an amplifier kit and a soldering iron.  It was the time before the advent of transistors, and as often happened with me I felt a sudden nostalgia for something I had purposedly abandoned or neglected in the past.  In this case, it was the electronics course I was taking at Exactas right before I left the career of physics and decided to devote myself entirely to math.  Was this a case of nostalgia for the road not taken — the electric road of diodes, triodes, and pentodes?  In any event, I am unable to say, like Robert Frost, that I took the road less traveled by and that it has made all the difference.

Other purchases were meant to fill lacunae left from past decisions or indecisions.  As I already recalled in Chapter 6, in the cellars of Dauber & Pine, a bookstore on Fourth Avenue Book Row, I bought a used copy of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.  There I also bought a battered, almost disintegrating copy of Amadís de Gaula, the medieval chivalry novel.  Both were attempts to remedy old omissions: having read Ivanhoe in a poor, expurgated Spanish translation, and having admired for years Cervantes’ masterpiece despite not having read Don Quixote’s main model, Amadís. 

On our first Sunday at Judson Hall we were wakened by an aubade coming from the square.  From our window we saw an oddball band: a washboard, a saxophone, a bagpipe, and most notably a kind of double bass consisting in a metal tub with a broomstick standing on the center and a string stretched from the top of the stick to the edge of the tub.  As it turned out, they played there every Sunday while the weather was warm.  As for food Horacio and I ended up frequenting a Greek restaurant on 6th Avenue, where we encountered shish kebab for the first time.  We asked the waiter for the meaning of those two words, and he said they meant “six pieces” or “six collops” in Greek.  That was bosh as I learned later, but given the ancient enmity between Greece and Turkey, you could not expect that a Greek waiter in a Greek restaurant would acknowledge that those were originally Turkish words. 

One evening I went down to the Judson Hall lounge.  There were a bunch of people watching TV; I think it was a rerun of “I Love Lucy.”  Except for “I Claudius” and a couple of other series like “The Sopranos,” I’ve always avoided watching TV, so I concentrated my attention on a small record collection kept in a cabinet, where I found recordings by some of my childhood favorites like Claudia Muzio, Ebe Stignani, and Tito Gobbi.  A dark-haired, dark-eyed young woman approached and asked me what I had found.  — “Oh, some old recordings of Italian opera,” I replied.  At this, she beamed, clapped her hands and declared that she was a great lover of Italian opera.

We discussed for a short while about the respective merits of Rossini, of Verdi, and of Puccini, until she said — “Let’s go together to the Opera, okay?  It’s not far from here, on Broadway and 39th Street.”

On the way, she asked me what my name was and where I was from.  Hers was Grace Lamacchia, daughter of Italian immigrants from Basilicata.  She had grown up in the Bronx, attended Catholic schools, and was a PhD student of English literature at NYU.  When we arrived at the Opera, it was closed and dark.  No performance that evening.  It was a beautiful building though, which unfortunately was demolished only four years later.  On our way back to the Judson Hall after our frustrated musical adventure, acting as I would have acted in my native land, I courteously invited her to have a cup of coffee at one of the cafés on Broadway.  — “No,” she replied, “better come to my room and I’ll prepare some coffee.”

I was taken aback.  I was not used to receiving that sort of invitation from a decent, educated woman I had met on that same day.  As an Argentine macho, however, it would have been unthinkable for me to refuse her invitation, even if, as it happened, I felt for her not much sexual attraction.  Her room was a single, up in the tower.  While she was preparing instant coffee, I looked at the titles of the books on the shelf: Beowulf, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  I had read none of them.  We drank our coffee sitting on her bed.  When we finished it, we kissed; four minutes later we were lying, naked, I on top of her, face to face.  After the climax, my body still on top of hers, I saw that Grace was weeping.

— “Why do you cry?” I asked.  “Did I do something wrong?  Did I hurt you?”

— “No, no, it has nothing to do with you,” she said. 

She offered no further explanation.  Mallarmé’s alexandrine crossed my mind: “Hélas! La chair est triste et j’ai lu tous les livres”.  Perhaps she felt that all things considered, the commingling of human flesh is a sad affair, and that she had read all the books — the Old and Middle English ones.

At this point in my narrative I decide to google Grace and find out how she has fared.  Turns out she died two or three years ago.  I also retrieved a short note she published in the 1990s in an Italian American journal about Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly.”  Grace tells the story of her mother and her maternal grandmother, both named Grazia and both abandoned by their husbands, both betrayed like Madame Butterfly, an opera Grace had seen as a girl.  She didn’t want to repeat the story and be the victim: that was, it seems, her obsessive concern.  She would be an independent, self-supporting woman, and indeed she became a professor of English at a private college.  None of which, I see now, helps me understand why she wept that first time we made love.  Perhaps, given her Catholic upbringing, she felt she had sinned grievously giving in to the temptation of a Latin lover with a name sounding something like Ricky Ricardo.

***

In September Horacio and I took the written exam required for admission to the doctoral program: an A was required for that; a B allowed admission only to the master’s degree, and a C barred all admission.  We got easy As and immediately started on a course taught by Jacob “Jack” Schwartz, a thirty-three-year-old prodigy who had already written with Nelson Dunford, his thesis advisor at Yale, a vast treatise on linear functional analysis. Ourcourse transcended and completed that joint treatise, for its subject was non-linear functional analysis.  Jürgen Moser, an excellent mathematician and a son-in-law of Richard Courant, the founder of the Math Institute at NYU, attended Schwartz’s lectures, and so did the three Argentine students: Horacio, Héctor Fattorini, and I.  For some reason, perhaps because we were the only ones there familiar with the Southern Cross, the three Argentines were put in charge of writing the notes of the course, which were published as a book in 1969.

On occasion, Gian-Carlo Rota, a native of Lombardy who had been Schwartz’s doctoral student at Yale, and whom his advisor, only two years his senior, characterized as being “A gourmet of mathematics; ebullient, a bit of a raconteur,” would come to Schwartz’s lectures and then proceed with us, the three Argentines, to McSorley’s Old Ale House on East 7th Street, where we would drink and talk.  Rota’s Spanish was impeccable: he had been to high school in Ecuador.  I don’t remember what mathematical topics we touched, if any; but I do remember Rota's comments on José Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish neo-Kantian philosopher.  I had a low opinion of the two books by Ortega I had perused in the past — La deshumanización del arte and Meditaciones del Quijote — and I also remembered some disparaging but true comments by Borges about Ortega’s style.  Rota recommended I should read Ortega’s En torno a Galileo (translated as Man and Crisis), and indeed it contributed to my education.  Besides, one should not forget that Borges and all Argentine liberals owe a debt of great import to Ortega: it was he who convinced his wealthy friend Victoria Ocampo to create an Argentine literary magazine, as he, Ortega, had done in Spain when he founded the Revista de Occidente in 1923.  Sur was founded in 1931, just in time to provide a spiritual refuge and a lighthouse amid the torrent of fascism that swamped Argentina for many years, especially after the military coup of 1930 which had toppled President Hipólito Yrigoyen.  U.S. President F.D. Roosevelt saw the situation very clearly when he announced in September 1944: “I have been following closely and with increasing concern the development of the Argentine situation in recent months.  This situation presents the extraordinary paradox of the growth of Nazi-Fascist influence and the increasing application of Nazi-Fascist methods in a country of this hemisphere, at the very time that those forces of oppression and aggression are drawing ever closer to the hour of defeat.”

***

Isabel and I have been trying to find our correspondence during those four or five final months of 1963 without success.  Perhaps my letters to her were left in Buenos Aires and her letters to me were misplaced in one of our many relocations.  We both remember that whenever I was tardy in my reply she would recall, in her letters to me, Schubert’s and Müller’s Winterreise:

„Die Post bringt keinen Brief für dich. 
Was drängst du denn so wunderlich, 
Mein Herz?“
(The mail brings no letter for you. / Why rush you then so wondrously, / my heart?)

I was tardy to reply on more than one occasion.  In my discharge I’ll say my thoughts were primarily occupied not with the human heart, the all too human heart that urges and rushes and pushes so wondrously and mysteriously, but with mathematical notions that grow out of reason and logic, clear as sunlight, not from the obscure ventricles, the twists and turns and valves of the heart.  Blaise Pascal was a very great but very atypical master of math.  He distinguished two kinds of truths: the ones revealed by reason and those which are cognized by the heart; he gives as an example of the latter the truth of the proposition: I am not dreaming; I mean this life is not a dream.  Another example is that numbers are infinitely many.  Mathematicians, however, have not followed Pascal to the letter: what he called “truths of the heart” they call “axioms”: they much prefer to have nothing to do with the heart.  “Dónde estás, corazón, no oigo tu palpitar...” was a 1930 tango my mother used to sing while in the kitchen chopping onions: “Where are you, my heart, I don’t hear your beat.”  Perhaps that is a question mathematicians ought to ask, but as far as I know they don’t: they would rather hear the incessant beat of their brains. They beat their brains, crush and destem their thoughts to produce a logical proof, but are unlikely to empathize with, or even to notice, the musings, illusions, and amorous whims of an eighteen-year-old.  You should remember I was doing my darned best to become a mathematician.

Don’t get me wrong.  I had not lost my sexual drive.  An hour on Grace’s bed now and then, a little masturbation in the bathroom looking at those girls in Playboy, a magazine I had recently discovered, were enough to satiate the sexual part of my brain so as to allow the rest of it to function smoothly and efficiently.  But again, I was determined to concentrate on non-linear functional analysis, and a serious love affair at this point would have been distracting, or so I feared.  My models were Archimedes and Jack Schwartz, not Romeo or Don Juan, and what I wanted to possess, my predominant passion, so to say, was Morse theory, not at all la giovin principiante.  That’s why I was more worried than excited when I received a letter from Isabel announcing that she was planning a trip to the U.S. after her academic semester, towards the end of December.  She would spend a week in New York with me, then go to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to spend some time with her paternal uncle, Raimundo Lida, who was a professor of Spanish literature at Harvard.  She had saved enough money, she added as if to reassure me that she wouldn’t need my help, from what she had earned teaching Spanish to an attaché of the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires.  Incidentally, Isabel’s English was better than mine; when we arrived in New York, Horacio had correctly conjectured that the word “steak” is pronounced like “stake,” while I, poor fool, insisted that it must sound like “steek.”

***

On November 22 JFK was shot.  I was at a lecture given by Professor Louis Nirenberg, my namesake, when the news broke: for a while, Fourier integrals ceased being chalked on the boards, and our brains found themselves before the brink.  Was this the end times? a communist conspiracy? a mafia plot? the start of another world war?  All of us students sat numb and aghast; as for myself, I cursed the academic stars that had led me to this diabolical place.  Why, oh why hadn’t I stayed in purgatorial Argentina?  But this bewildered interval didn’t last.  “Nothing at all will be gained by us trying to figure this out,” said Louis, with an ataraxy and composure that would have gained him the envy of the assembled Stoa; “let’s go on with Sobolev spaces.”  And so he did.  I don’t know about the others, but I wouldn’t or couldn’t follow him there.  I knew that he was right, that leading the audience away from the bloody deeds of Dallas and back into the absolute security of Fourier integrals and Sobolev spaces was the only responsible thing to do, but I couldn’t do what I knew was right.  I ask myself if I would have considered it right to go on with a concert, instead of a math lecture.  Or with a political gathering.  Or with a lecture on political science.  All I remember is that when at the end of the day I was back in Judson Hall, I saw that Bill Pearson, the first Republican voter I had ever met, was weeping unconsolably, something that struck me, the cynical Argentine, as odd.

Three weeks later, the emotional climate had completely changed; another news cycle, Christmas season, was upon us with its elevator carols, bearded Santas, and frenzied shopping.  Mid December, the Math Department had its Christmas party.  I learned this was a tradition, that all offices and workplaces in America have their annual Christmas parties; even, some student told me, at J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.  Back in Argentina I had known nothing of the sort: Christmas parties were family affairs which my family, being secular Jews, ignored as best they could.  But I was away from home, lonely, and curious about what a combination of math and Bethlehem might look like.

It turned out to be a rather drab affair, graduate students and faculty standing in small groups, each nursing a drink, talking quietly and rarely laughing.  A record was playing unfamiliar and insipid pop music. I walked around, pausing here and there to listen into some of the conversations; as far as I could gather, they all vaguely qualified as shop talk.  Suddenly, and when I was already preparing to slip out, Louis Nirenberg appeared, with his thick eyeglasses and his dark and bushy goatee-mustache.  “Are you having fun yet?” he asked.  I replied, “So, so.”  “Well, there’s a simple solution: drink some more,” he said, pointing to the table and the bowl of punch.

I’ve often thought about those words, apparently so trivial, and the effect they had on me.  The tone, the smile, were such as to convey genuine sympathy on Louis’ part and a care for my having a good time, but the notion of drinking more as a means to achieve that purpose seemed strange to me.  Being drunk, I had already had the opportunity to experience, is no fun, rather the contrary; perhaps it all comes down to finding the ethylic level in your brain that maximizes fun and to stop drinking right there.  Anyhow, the good will evidenced by the great mathematician’s face and words seemed beyond mere yuletide cheer, and it also seemed, in recollection, stronger than the previous time I had talked with him. That first time he wanted to know if we were relatives, given the coincidence of our family names.  I could only contribute the little I knew – that my paternal grandfather was named Marcos or Mordechai, that he emigrated from the Ukraine to Argentina about 1905, and that his father’s given name was Wolf.  Louis’ parents came from the Ukraine too, but they had migrated toward the opposite pole, to Canada, something I should have been able to tell by the way Louis pronounced the u of solution, like the u of fusion.  Our information proved inconclusive: there are simply too many Nirenbergs come to the Americas from the shtetls and ghettos of Eastern Europe.  Between that first genealogical encounter with Louis and this drab Christmas party, I had aced the preliminary written exam given to all graduate students: that performance, I suspected, must have been a reason for his increased interest in me and his joviality.

Something I discovered only much later: the importance Louis placed on the idea of “fun.”  Through the years, in all the interviews where he was asked when and why and how he had become a mathematician, he would invariably answer, “Math is fun.”  This apparently simple explanation, I realized in time, modestly hid, beneath it, Louis’ own fantastic talent for math, but also a long and bizarre history of fantastic notions about math.  Pythagoras, so they say, taught that everything that is, is number, nothing but number; Plato thought there is something else indeed, a god, but that all this god does by day and by night is math; Aristotle, many believe, was less extreme, but in fact he was as mathematically besotted as his master, and taught that the only part of the soul that survives death is the part which is able to do math; Augustine, the father of the Church who was horrified and ashamed of his erections, was exceedingly proud of having proved to his own satisfaction the existence of God from the irrefragable truth that seven plus five equals twelve, and already in modern times Galileo stated that the book of nature is written in mathematical language and Spinoza affirmed the old Aristotelian faith that our mind is eternal insofar as it thinks from the viewpoint of eternity.

I was willing to give Louis’ advice a try, so I helped myself to two servings of punch, one right after the other.  True to its name, it made me groggy, after which my memories of the evening become disconnected and blurred.  I may have had a few extra drinks.  I do remember that at one point the music changed from blah or outright ugly into something familiar from south of the border, a cha-cha-cha:

Cha-cha-cha de las secretarias, cha-cha-cha de las taquimecanógrafas,

which moved me to start dancing as I used to dance back in Buenos Aires, with little leaps, turns, and shakes.  As in a Fred Astaire movie, people stopped dancing all around to look at me.  The next thing I remember is a young woman taking me to her small apartment nearby.  She was pretty and perky; she worked as a secretary to Louis and typed his papers.  Her name was Abigail.

I know it is highly unlikely and that it would have been unethical, but I’m fond of the fantasy that Louis, so as to complete my fun, suggested she take me home with her.  At Abby’s place we kissed and necked on her couch, but she wisely refused to go further, for I was quite drunk, and as Rabelais once noted,

“De trop boire, d’amour déboire” —
from too much drinking will follow erotic disappointment.

She promised to satisfy all my wishes another day, once I had sobered up, and she walked me back to Judson Hall.  Nothing came out of it though, for soon Isabel arrived and changed the nature and the truth of all my wishes.