6. Rome: 1st Philosophical Meeting (8 pgs.)

ACT I - CHAPTER 6

1st PHILOSOPHICAL MEETING

ROME VILLA ASCOLASSI

Saturday October 14, 2017

Villa Ascolassi 100 km south of Rome Italy

The same day that Boris spied on Lenel and Franco at the Louvre in Paris, Alexandre was in Italy.

The entire team had traveled the night before with Greg and the assistants. The lights of Rome that he had seen through the window combined with the smell of the cup of coffee that Alexandre had on his small table in the plane seat, were he saw centuries of history he had looked out the window, and later from the bus when they passed beside the Colosseum on their way to the Walker Medici Hotel; all that, had been an incredible experience.

They had trained hard all week to beat Club Capuleto Scaloni, the second best in Italy. They felt strong and confident.

The match took place at dusk at the Olympic Stadium in Rome. They started losing, but recovered and tied in the second half, although they could not win the game. Ronald’s absence was noticeable on the playing field.

Later back at the hotel, he looked for the man in the yellow beret. He didn’t find him inside, but when he looked toward the driveway, he saw a black car parked and its driver had a yellow beret. As he approached, he opened the back door for him.

“I’m Yellow,” he said, taking off his beret and putting the car in drive.

“Where are we going?” Alexandre asked.

“To the airport,” Yellow responded. Then they saw a sign on the road that said ‘VIA SALARIA’ and when some provocative women appeared on the side of the road Yellow said, “This is the avenue of whores.”

“Are you Spanish?” Alexandre asked.

“No, just Yellow,” he answered.

After taking off from the airport, Alexandre realized that he had never seen Rome at night from a helicopter.

“Where are we going?”

“To Villa Ascolassi.”

“How much left?”

“We’ll arrive in twenty minutes.”

He was delighted to see the coast of Italy south of Rome with picturesque illuminated places and seafronts. When they arrived, he observed the lights of the heliport and the enormous Villa. The moonlight showed a valley with extensive vineyards on gentle hills surrounded by mountains that formed an extensive horseshoe. In the background, in the distance, a bay contained the Mediterranean Sea.

“It’s well-lit and defended,” Alexandre said, seeing the armored vehicles and armed men. “It looks like an army guarding the generals’ headquarters,” he added.

“Maybe you are those generals,” Yellow said.

It was a luxurious Italian Villa, a modern H-shaped mansion, with its typical clay tiles. It had two parallel naves that were connected by a wide corridor. To one side was a lighted pool, as long as an Olympic one, but only half as wide. In the access rotunda there was a round fountain about twenty meters in diameter that contained Greek sculptures of black and white marble along with foaming jets of water that completed a classic painting, all illuminated.

“Do you see the football field?” Yellow asked.

“Yes.”

“The Italian team sometimes trains there. When it’s very hot they go straight to the pool, in Versailles, that’s what those gardens are called that look like a golf course, but with flowers,” he explained to him as they landed.

Could Ronald have been here? Alexandre thought, but did not dare to ask him. Yellow. What a strange name!

“Let’s go, follow me!” he told him when they got off the helicopter.

They walked along a black slate path that bordered the space of the rotunda delimited by gardens with bushes and flowers of different colors and lights emerging from the ground. He estimated there were about twenty guards with machine guns and bulletproof vests. In the red granite atrium four white marble caryatids supported the portico over the enormous mahogany door. They entered a large Etruscan-style room with Greek sculptures in its four corners and a round pond in the center where colorful red, blue, green and yellow fish swam.

They went down six steps to a hallway of sculptures that was like an art gallery. About thirty meters long by about six wide and six high, it was a white space with a red marble pavement and perpendicular stripes of black marble one meter wide. Every eight steps, on each side, had sculptures of Greek gods and goddesses, some in white marble, others in black marble, all illuminated with directional lights highlighting their beauty on pedestals that were also made of marble. Between sculpture and sculpture, thin floor-to-ceiling windows, on the walls on both sides, were like fissures of light in the day, and at night they showed the illuminated exterior garden.

At the end of the sculpture corridor, they went down three steps and there was a large room from which they could see a terrace that they entered. One floor below, the illuminated pool was surrounded by a long stone terrace and a grass ramp. On a larger terrace, attached to the house, a tall man and a short one were playing table football. Alexandre was about twenty meters away from them when he looked at them.

“The tall one is Ricardo,” Yellow said and realized that Alexandre didn’t hear him. He had his eyes fixed on them.

He recognized the tall one immediately. So, Ricardo is the great Manuel! he thought surprised, The best technical director of the European Cup! That honor! I wouldn’t have imagined it! Who will be… the… shortest…? That…? His mind was dazed as he focused his eyes to convince himself. Is it Ma…? It looks like it is. It’s Diego! But… what is he doing here! I can’t believe it! He smiled from ear to ear and looked at Yellow, who stared at him unfazed. But, come on Yellow, smile a bit! he thought, unable to control his joy.

“Don’t call them by their real names. The tall one here is Ricardo and the short one is Arturo. It’s about security. Do you understand?” Yellow warned him.

“Yes,” said Alexandre, looking at the staircase where he would go down.

Nearby another man was preparing a barbecue. He saw smoke and smelled roasting meat.

“Come here Alexandre! Help Manu… Ricardo, I’m beating him up!” laughed Arturo, the shorter one, with his Argentine accent.

The tall man was trying to defend himself against the short man who moved his hands with the same precision with which he moved his feet on the court.

“Goal!” Arturo celebrated when Alexandre went down the stairs.

“Nine to three! And I’m going to beat you both!” he exclaimed when Alexandre took two handles from the table football.

“The court is never the same,” said Arturo when they were already dining on a tender and tasty chorizo steak by the pool, “because the court changes depending on where the ball is,” he completed the sentence. “What makes me angry is that they take the footballer for an idiot, we are going to change that, right?” he asked at the end of his speech.

“Yes. I’m going to record what we’ll talk about in the meetings, okay?” Alexandre asked.

“Ok, but you must destroy them immediately after using them, promise?” Ricardo asked.

“Sure. What do you know about Ronald’s death?” Alexandre asked.

“No more than you. Did you bring the summary of the first part of the book?” Ricardo asked, changing the subject.

“Yes,” Alexandre said and put a folder on the table.

“And that’s a summary?” Arturo asked when he saw that it was thick.

“I didn’t want to leave anything out. Here we will summarize it together. Do you think we’re going to write a book?” Alexandre asked looking at Arturo.

“And what else summons us?” he said.

“Build the stake to kill a vampire,” Alexandre said, and there was a long silence. “We are not going to write a book, we are going to discover the philosophical causes that murdered Ronald. They are premises that poison the world. We need three shotguns, now!” he exclaimed.

“For what?” Arturo asked.

“To make an oath of fire.”

“What oath?”

“That we are going to finish and publish the book no matter what,” Alexandre responded, and shortly after they brought the weapons and went out to the terrace. He has the same fiber that Ronald had, Ricardo thought as he observed him.

“Three shots in Ronald’s memory!” Alexandre exclaimed, pointing to the sky.

The three sounds came out in unison. They stood in silence for a minute gazing at the stars before returning to the living room.

“What are the premises that poison the world?” Alexandre asked them once they were already seated.

“Poisonous premises?” Arturo asked.

“Yes. The premises that murdered Ronald and that are destroying reason in the world,” Alexandre said.

“Can you explain?” Arturo asked.

“Yes. The heart of philosophy is ethics that is derived from metaphysics and epistemology. Politics derives from ethics, but the puppeteers of politicians, who pull the strings of culture, have poisonous premises, and they are poisonous because they deny reality. Ethical error begins with metaphysical and epistemological error. We’re not going to be intimidated by strange words like metaphysics and epistemology, are we?” said Alexandre.

“No,” Ricardo said and added, “but these concepts are not understood at first.”

“It is true, learning is gradual, but few have enough patience, which is why they miss out on this enormous wealth. Let’s focus on what Ronald asked for this part of the book. It’s about metaphysics,” said Alexandre.

“And what is metaphysics?” Arturo asked.

“The playing field where you play the game of your life. You need to know it to know where you stand,” Alexandre responded.

“What playing field? What match?” Arturo asked.

“But I just said it! Pay attention! The playing field where you play the game of your life is the material reality that surrounds you where you live. Life is like a football game and, just as one knows the football field to position oneself, it is necessary to know reality to position oneself on the field of life,” Alexandre stated.

“Ah! And if you don’t know the court where you are playing the game of your life, you don’t know how to position yourself, therefore, you can’t score goals,” added Arturo.

“That’s right,” said Alexandre.

“And they fill you with goals!” Ricardo added.

“Exactly,” Alexandre reiterated.

“If you don’t know where you are standing on the field, of course they will fill you with goals,” Arturo added and asked, “What do you have in that green envelope?”

“The question to position oneself on the field of life,” Alexandre responded.

“What does it say?” Arturo asked him and Alexandre took out the card with the philosophical question, ‘Where are you?’ and he left it on the table.

“Where are you?” Arturo asked, looking at it, and they remained silent for a while. “Did Ronald make that card?” he asked again, taking it in his hands.

“Yes, it is part of the notes he prepared before he died. The answer to that question is studied by metaphysics, nothing mystical but reality as a whole,” Alexandre responded.

Alexandre took the summary he had made and told them that on the football field it was easy to know where you were standing because your eyes didn’t lie, but on the field of life it was easy to get lost because words deceived and, if words deceived, so did thoughts, because we think with words.

“Can you explain a little more to us?” Arturo asked and saw that Alexandre nodded his head.

“There are complex words with meanings that deceive and, if you think with them, you cannot position yourself on the court, in which case you do not know where you are standing so you will make bad decisions in life,” Alexandre said.

“And what are the words that deceive?” Arturo asked.

“The ones used by politicians. Words that omit what they refer to in material reality. In contrast, it’s easy to know what simple words like tree refer to because you can point your finger at it. But the most abstract words do not seem to be anchored in concrete reality. If your words cause confusion or are not anchored in reality, your thinking is poor, and you are playing the game of your life on a court that does not exist,” Alexandre said.

“It’s awful!” Arturo exclaimed, “because in addition to not knowing where you are standing on the field, you are going to want to take penalties without the ball,” he added.

“And without a football or soccer goal,” Ricardo added.

“Exactly! Words that deceive make you live in a dream, in a fantasy, without your feet on the Earth and with your head on the Moon,” said Alexandre.

“And when you woke up from the dream you realized that they scored goals and you lost the only game of your life,” Arturo said.

Thus, they continued speaking in metaphors that gave an idea of those topics, difficult at first, but easy when understood. Just as the body of a mountaineer suffered when climbing Everest, the human mind suffered when it climbed to the summit of its own excellence. In both cases, you had to go through a gradual acclimatization process, go little by little, be patient and be constant. It wasn’t easy, nor overnight, but it was possible. They realized that the most important thing in metaphysics were the axiom-concepts. There were three: existence, identity and consciousness and each one had a corollary. The corollary that caught their attention the most was Causality and Alexandre had explained it very well when he said…

“If something is equal to itself, it is obliged to act according to its nature, that is why football balls, act differently than rugby balls; the fire, burns; the water, gets wet; the corks, float; the stones, sink.”

They grasped that the axiom-concepts and their corollaries explained the implicit order of the universe. They were the basis of science and objective reality. No one was free from them since, even to deny them, they had to be used.

Since a tetrahedron has six edges, it occurred to them to write on each one the axioms and corollaries that also add up to six. Alexandre decided to make one out of acrylic to put as a sculpture in his apartment. Being a non-deformable three-dimensional structure, it represented the axioms and corollaries, but integrated into a whole, which was more than the sum of its parts. They called it The Metaphysical Tetrahedron. It was a good mental tool to never forget it. When they finished the meeting, they were happy and satisfied with what they toasted. It was when Alexandre threw his glass and made it explode into a thousand pieces against the wall, as if performing a ritual, and they followed him. The explosive sound was heard like a burst of sanity scattering seeds into the cosmos.