WITH SILO

Humor, God And Gullibility

Negro and I were walking along the boardwalk that parallels Rio’s Copacabana beach. It was evening and as we walked he once again avoided whatever subject I was trying to introduce and instead started to once again tell the story of fire . This situation will be familiar many of his friends. He could be so “mono-thematic”; when he was trying to make a point he would return to it over and over again. Each new encounter or situation would become a pretext to review the point again. He never seemed to get bored. Each time he explored the theme with the same energy and enthusiasm as the first time. No doubt some of the listeners, after participating in 2, 3 or a half-dozen similar conversations would get bored, thinking they’d heard him go through it all already. I like to think, however, that most of us who had the privilege of spending time with him knew enough to at least try to stay alert, to re-engage with the subject matter and try to see it with fresh eyes – as he did. It’s more than once that I kicked myself for tuning out when I thought there was nothing more to hear and only much later discovering I’d missed something important.

So we were walking along and he started explaining this whole story – again – then he started to draw conclusions that I had neither heard from him earlier nor thought of myself. But the conclusions now seemed abundantly clear. I started to realize to my great embarrassment that in a series of conversations over the last 6 months he had given me all the clues I needed to understand where he was going with this idea. Now he was now spelling it out for me. How had I missed it? How had we all missed it? It was so clear and he’d laid out all the pieces and talked about each one of them. He’d done everything but put them together. I felt so dense. He’d waited patiently for one of us to think it through. None of us did. I realized that I’d seen this happen on numerous other occasions where he’d explained all the elements of the puzzle and hoped someone of us would join in on thinking it out. It happened sometimes. Pretty rarely though – we were not exceptionally lazy but it sure seemed that we too often waited to be spoon-fed wisdom.

This time I commented on that, not on the subject he was explaining but rather how I felt realizing he’d given me all I needed to figure it out myself and I still hadn’t got it. Six months later he was still explaining the punchline . So I said something: How was it possible that he’d worked this out from scratch and that even with his help, his cajoling, his explanations and dropped clues, I hadn’t been able to figure out the implications for myself?

It was like the many times I’d tried to teach myself calculus. I figured Newton had invented it (or Leibniz depending on whom you believe) so I should at least be able to learn it. He had a problem he needed to solve and he couldn’t so he invented the tool he needed to solve it. That tool was calculus. Designing that instrument was an astounding accomplishment. All I had to do was head out on the super highway that had evolved from the trail he had blazed. Pretty straightforward, especially since we now had teachers who not only understood the ins and outs of the math, but also specialized in transmitting that knowledge: we have courses, books … the complete moron’s guide to the calculus and so on. Makes sense, right? I thought so, but I was wrong.

The sad truth seemed inescapable. He’d invented calculus but I couldn’t even learn it. Oh well. It was very much the same sensation I was now feeling as we walked along so near the water’s edge.

Negro responded to my confession in an unexpected way. He turned to me and almost brought me to tears as he talked about the unique quality each one brings to the mix, about how each of us has our own point of view, a unique perspective, a particular way of understanding. The emotion in his voice was palpable as he insisted that this is the beauty of it all, how each of us has something of value to contribute that no one else can. The welling up in my eyes was disrupted by his next apparently cynical quip that left me almost doubled over with laughter.

That was typical. If you spent time with Silo then you know he was a master of many things – including ensuring that no one’s head got too big, or that no one lost their sense of proportion, or forgot to laugh. After producing an explosion of sublime emotion he would almost invariably deflate the situation by producing a situation, or telling a joke, or in some other way reminding you of the less “elevated” aspects of our experience.

I had a memorable encounter with this method/tendency of his the first time I stayed at his home in Chacras . Back then this tranquil community still felt like a small rural town, far from the “big city” of Mendoza; the last time I was there with him a lot of tension had developed between the rich “newcomers” who had moved to Chacras and environs seeking a more pastoral existence and the “criollas” – the native born – who felt their tranquil lives were being overturned by this invasion of city slickers.

The conversation (and laughter) had been going non-stop since he picked me up at the airport earlier that day. Among the traditions or customs that his intimates knew him for were things like his insistence on personally picking up and seeing his guests off (which involved waiting until they had gone to their gate) and paying for the seemingly endless coffees, teas, meals, ice creams (a subject that, as you will see, appears here often), and other treats. In all of this there was not the slightest feel of showiness or artificiality. On the contrary it felt natural and spontaneous, if a little unusual – being with him was a lesson in genuine courtesy and kindness.