When We Cease to Understand the World

Part 2 is recounted in the first person by an unnamed narrator. One night he is out walking the dog when he comes upon a man gardening. He asks the man why he is gardening at night, and the man explains that the plants sleep at night and therefore they don’t feel being moved as much. The man tells the narrator about a giant rotting tree that threatens to crush his house and says he can’t bring himself to take it down because bats, hummingbirds, and a parasitic red flowering plant live in its trunk. He says his grandmother used to cut the plant back only for it to return stronger than ever. Then the man tells the narrator that when he was around five or six, his grandmother hanged herself from the tree. His father tried to cut her down, but his grandfather stopped him and told him to leave her there, because she loved the tree.

The next day, the narrator is on a walk with his seven-year-old daughter in the woods when they come upon the bodies of two dogs who have been poisoned to death. His daughter is upset, especially because she knows one of the dogs. She worries that something will happen to their own dog. The narrator does not tell her that there is someone in the village who poisons the dogs at the beginning of summer and the end of autumn, although no one is sure who. The narrator was warned about this by a neighbor who lives three houses away from him.

The narrator talks about his own garden. He remarks that things in it grow slowly because the soil is poor. He reflects on how the night gardener told him that nitrogen fertilizers were invented by Fritz Haber, who also created the chlorine gas used in WWI. His “weapon of mass destruction” killed people, while the fertilizer he made “saved hundreds of millions from famine and fuelled our current overpopulation” (181). Before nitrogen was isolated via chemical processes, it was obtained from bat and bird feces and looted Egyptian mummies. The narrator recounts how the night gardener told him about how Mapuche Indians, an indigenous people from modern-day Chile and Argentina, used the crushed bones of their enemies as fertilizer. They would always spread it at night because they believed some plants could see a warrior’s secret and share it throughout the forest: “His secret life lost, exposed and bared to the world, the man would slowly begin to shrivel, drying up from the inside out, without ever knowing why” (182).

The narrator describes the little town he lives in. He explains how most of the native forest was destroyed except for a small patch near the lake. In this old-growth forest, there is a small limestone grotto. According to the night gardener, it was once a plant nursery. No one visits it anymore except for teenagers looking to hook up. Past the grotto is the artificial lake. It used to freeze over and, according to local legend, during the time of the right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, a boy fell through the ice and drowned. The town was built by European immigrants, which gives it a different atmosphere from other towns in Chile. In the mountains above the town, where few people live, there is a military garrison.

The narrator says his house was built by a retired army lieutenant who disappeared political prisoners during the Pinochet regime. He met the lieutenant twice during the sale of the house, which he got for a low price because, as he later learned, the man was dying. The night gardener told the narrator that everyone in town hated the lieutenant because he walked around with a gun and was cheap. The narrator says when he moved into the house there was a grenade without a pin on the coffee table in the living room, but he can’t remember what he did with it.

The narrator explains that the night gardener used to be a mathematician, but he abandoned that life and decided to live in isolation after reading the work of Grothendieck. The night gardener laments that scientific theories have grown so complex that no one can fully understand them. Then he tells the narrator about lemon trees, which, right before they die, put out an enormous number of lemons. When the narrator asks the night gardener when his lemon tree will die, the night gardener responds that there is no way to know without cutting the tree down, and “who would want to do that?” (188).