Borges and Me, page 10
We headed for Dunfermline with Borges in an antic mood. It probably helped that we’d each had our own bedroom in Lower Largo and felt rested. I mentioned this, and Borges responded, “What luxury, yes, but I don’t wish to spend so much money on beds. We should spend the money on beer. And good food. Don’t you think?”
No, I didn’t. Could he tell that from the grunt of my response?
“Where does your money come from?” he asked.
“I have a fellowship,” I said. “And my father sends me extra.” I thought about my father, who worked very hard in Scranton, often coming home late at night from the office. He sold life insurance policies to families and, despite his fragile grasp of the technicalities, seemed remarkably good at the sales aspect of the job. (“Your father could sell a cow a pint of milk,” my mother always said.) In fact I felt grateful to him, and somewhat guilty, thinking that to a degree I lived off his hard work, as the fellowship from Lafayette had not been lavish. And it was hardly clear to me, or anyone, that this time in Scotland would lead to anything like a career. (“Have you ever thought of podiatry?” my mother had recently asked. “It’s a good field. Think of the sore feet, the corns, the blisters and bunions. Maybe better than law school?”)
“Ah, Giuseppe. I understand your silence, your embarrassment. My family supported me, too, with enough money but not so extravagant. I wasn’t a rich boy. And yet I did go to a pleasant school in Switzerland. My grandmother was English, as I have told you, and she said I must go to Oxford one day. I should become a don there, perhaps. Don Borges. It sounds wonderful in Spanish. But I attended no university. Not like yourself.”
“It doesn’t seem to have held you back. You’re very well informed.”
“Ah, informed…” Borges said dismissively. “Nobody can teach you anything. This is the first truth. We teach ourselves. All my life I have lived in books, in libraries. I remember every library in my life as I remember my lovers, their smells, the texture of their skin, the taste, even the brightness in the air around them. Or the darkness. Yes, every library is for me like a woman, erotic, a creature of the dark, full of smells and textures, tastes.”
Libraries were erotic? If so, I was Casanova himself.
We entered Dunfermline on High Street, passing a sign that proclaimed this town as the birthplace of Andrew Carnegie. When I said this to Borges, he beamed.
“The father of libraries!” he said. “He turned a great fortune in steel into books and more books. Like me, he had no formal education. Not like you, Giuseppe!”
“My education has been a farce.” That statement actually took me by surprise, and I wondered if indeed there was any truth to it.
I had caught Borges’s attention with this claim. “Then you must sit with determination in the library of your choice,” he said. “But, you see, there is only one library. The universal library.”
Like so many of his Delphic remarks, this puzzled me. I loved libraries, and had found them a place of retreat in Scranton. After school and late into the evening I would stay in the old public library on Vine Street, often wandering in the ill-lit stacks, amazed by the books—especially long-abandoned novels, with their titles rubbed off or faded, the authors forgotten. Every library I’d known had been, to a degree, like every other library, with this crowd of voices, the dusty echoes of other eras, the sweet smell of moldy pages and broken spines, abandoned hopes, whiffs of glory and transcendence. The universal library indeed.
As we passed the Carnegie Library, Borges insisted we stop “for a wee snoop.” It was a gloomy sandstone building, and I described the architecture as best I could, working to find the exact and imagistic details, grasping for metaphors. “It would seem to sulk,” I said, “with the windows like heavily lidded eyes. The roofline is a brow that sags. There is disapproval here.”
“We seem small by comparison, inadequate,” said Borges, nodding as I led him into the entrance hall, where a snowy-haired man in a tweed suit with the texture of chain mail lurched toward us. He seemed startled to have visitors, and his look was faintly dismissive.
“I’m Mr. Dunne,” he said. “I suppose you would like a tour? Of course you would.”
He could see that Borges was blind, and this handicap earned us a degree of forbearance. “This was the first of more than two thousand and five hundred libraries that Mr. Carnegie funded,” he explained.
“That is too many,” said Borges. “One would have been enough.”
Mr. Dunne frowned, but I resisted describing his expression to Borges.
“God was the first and only librarian,” Borges added.
“The first librarian here was Mr. Peebles,” insisted Mr. Dunne, quoting from an invisible script in his head. “They had over two hundred applicants for the job, but he was a remarkable man, forty years old at the time.”
“I began to work in a library at the age of thirty-eight,” said Borges. “So Mr. Peebles and I have this in common. My father’s health had declined rapidly, and I had no choice but to find a profession. I was a librarian by nature. I’m still a librarian in my heart. But these first years were not so happy. Nine years of sadness and restlessness. A minor branch of the municipal library. I worked as first assistant to the man in charge of cataloguing. But we had few books and too much time. This is the problem of the universe, Mr. Dunne. There is so much time and so little to do.”
Our tour guide said, “Idle hands are the Devil’s playthings.”
“Oh, my dear Dunne. Do you believe in such a proposition? Life is propositions about life, of course. But your proposition is faulty. Idle hands are God’s hands, I’m quite sure of this. God is the head librarian, and he invites us to waste our time in his stacks.”
“Are you a Christian, sir?” Dunne asked.
“I love Jesus. Do you?”
“He is my Lord and Savior.”
“Ah, then,” said Borges, “you have much in common with your cousin, the great poet and cleric. ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God.’ ”
“We’re not related,” said the tour guide. “My name is spelled D-u-n-n-e.”
“A pity,” said Borges. “But let me advise you, the work of our Lord is to help us find the lost books, the ones that hold the key.”
Mr. Dunne sighed, leading us dutifully into the reading room, where he offered us coffee. I could see that he was intrigued by Borges in spite of himself. “You are from where exactly?” he asked.
“I’m an Argentinian, and former director of the National Library.”
With this Mr. Dunne snapped to full attention, as if a general had walked unexpectedly into the barracks. Even the curtains in the windows stiffened in an invisible breeze.
He handed us coffee, and Borges stirred the hot liquid with his finger and licked it.
“This is wonderful,” he said. “Thank you! I have been freezing since I arrived in this country. My grandmother used to say that nobody in Scotland is warm.” He sipped, looking around the room. “I smell the books,” he said, his nostrils expanding.
“There are books on shelves all around us,” I said.
“Can you see any titles?”
“There’s a row of Sir Walter Scott, the Waverly novels.”
“Not as good as Stevenson. But the world took notice! Even the great Russians, they admired Scott.”
“And I see the Encyclopedia Britannica.”
“Which edition?”
I went over to examine one volume of the twenty-nine. “1911.”
“The finest encyclopedia in creation! The most accomplished scholars on each subject were brought together in those pages. One could live forever in that edition, and never leave. I would happily die there. In the municipal library, I worked for only one hour each day. Then I would retreat to the basement, where they kept the encyclopedias.”
He began to move toward the shelves, and I assisted him. “Here is the row of Scott,” I said, drawing one of his hands toward the books.
He plucked a volume and began greedily to lick the spine, his tongue like that of a cat. There was, I thought, lust in his eyes.
“What are you doing, sir?” asked Mr. Dunne. Centuries of disapproval crossed his face.
“Some books should be tasted,” Borges said. “I like to sample them.” His tongue traced the length of the leather spine.
“This is impossible,” Mr. Dunne said.
“Show me into the stacks,” Borges said. “Take me, dear Dunne!”
I felt certain our guide would kick us out of the building, but instead he obeyed, opening the door to a room with a dizzying array of shelves. There were numerous side rooms as well, each of them opening into further rooms. Borges touched one of the shelves, as if finding his way by his fingertips, then leaned his forehead against the spines of several books, as one might lean one’s head against a cross on Good Friday.
“You must not lick them, please,” said Mr. Dunne. “It isn’t allowed.”
Borges mumbled something in Spanish that sounded like Latin, with a liturgical rhythm and intonation. A window without a curtain brightened the corridor before us, with yellow sunlight burrowing through the leaded panes. The glow lit up Borges, his large head seeming overblown. His eyes blinked rapidly.
“You must realize, Mr. Dunne, the universe is a library. When I was a young man, I searched the stacks of the branch near my house in Palermo, in Buenos Aires. My fondest hope was to find the single volume that would tell me everything I must know in order to survive. When I die, I hope very much to pitch myself headfirst over the railing and fall through the stacks. The library itself goes on forever, with no top, no bottom. There are only sides, and rows of books. But they speak to us in tongues. It’s said that every single possibility of expression will be found in this universe of books.”
“This is too much,” said Mr. Dunne. “We can’t have this confusion. Jesus wishes us to speak only the truth.”
“Truth will be found in these stacks,” Borges asserted. “Not one truth, but many! But there is only one Librarian, only one Director!”
“Not you, I should hope.”
“I have moments of divinity. Don’t we all?”
“I’m a Christian,” said Mr. Dunne, for no reason I could discern.
Borges said, “My friend here is a Roman Catholic.”
It surprised me that Borges would assume this. Was it once again my Italian name?
“You are Catholic?” Dunne asked, though it sounded as if he wondered if I were a necrophile.
“I believe in God,” I said.
“And God believes in you,” said Borges.
I thought for a moment that Mr. Dunne was about to cry. Borges was too much for him. I put a hand on his forearm to reassure him, and he quickly pulled away from me. I think I terrified him as much as Borges now.
“It’s a very fine library,” I said, looking for some bland capstone expression that would signal our impending exit, which could not come soon enough. “So many books,” I added.
With a defeated expression, Mr. Dunne said, “There are many rooms and many more books.”
“This is because the universe is infinite,” said Borges. “The library is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is inaccessible.” He liked what he said so much that he paused to let his comment echo in the stacks. Then he said, “I once wrote somewhere that mirrors and copulation are abominable, as both multiply the number of men in the world!”
I felt sorry for poor Mr. Dunne, who could not fully absorb such a visitor. He kept wiping his glasses with a handkerchief, as if he might clear his vision at last.
“I’m grateful to Mr. Carnegie,” Borges continued. “He was a foolish little man, so I’ve heard, but rich. He could multiply dollars. It’s a gift, perhaps, to multiply things. I have tried, without success, to multiply Borges.”
“Although one library is enough,” I said, drawing a sweet smile from Borges.
Mr. Dunne stood openmouthed beside us. I think we had exceeded his capacity.
“We really must be going,” I whispered to Borges.
“So soon?”
“Miles to go before we sleep,” I said.
In a frantic gesture, Mr. Dunne pressed into my hands a brochure that he urged me to inspect later, at my leisure. It would, he said, “suggest the full extent of Mr. Carnegie’s accomplishment.”
Borges whistled as I led him to the car, then paused to pee against my front wheel, humming loudly as I looked around. This surely wasn’t the right place for him to relieve himself. His urine splashed back onto his leg.
As I opened the passenger door to help Borges in, I turned back for a final glance at Dunne, who gazed into the sky as if seeking divine help. Had he encountered a demon of some kind, or perhaps an embodiment of the divine? Was he losing his mind? He shifted from foot to foot, half smiling, and finally waved to us. By now, of course, I knew only too well how it felt to be upended by Borges.
Goodbye, Mr. Dunne, I said to myself. And flights of angels wing thee to thy rest.
14
THAT PISSING AGAINST my wheel was par for the course with Borges. Like most men of a certain age, he peed often, and kept insisting that I stop so he could relieve himself along the roadside, often against my left front wheel, which he seemed to favor. Not half an hour further into the northward journey, he cried, “It’s of an urgency! Your chariot must pause.”
“Rocinante is a horse, not a chariot.”
“Whoa, I say! It’s known that gauchos will relieve themselves without getting down from their horses. Quite ingenious, this dexterity.” He recited a fragment of a poem in Spanish, which I asked him to translate. “ ‘My horse and my woman, they disappear,’ ” he said. “ ‘May my horse return soon. / I don’t need a woman.’ ” He turned to me. “I think you need a woman. Am I correct?”
“I do,” I said, wondering if Alastair had told him of my romantic woes, or if perhaps he could smell my loneliness, as if it were a shelf of books. “But I have no luck.”
“Nor I! Do you know this phrase unrequited love?”
“Too well.”
“Oh, dear. We have much in common, as I’m beginning to see.”
Did I really want to have much in common with this old, blind man who couldn’t stop talking, who ignored everyone around him, and who seemed obsessed by some woman from a long time ago? Would this be me in fifty years?
“I was in love, deeply in love, perhaps have always and only been in love, with Norah Lange.”
By now he had mentioned Norah too many times, and I wondered if he would ever get around this obstacle in his path. When I spoke of Bella to Alastair and Jeff, did I seem as stymied, as stuck in my own emotional mud? Was I looking at myself here?
Borges said, “I prefer not to speak about Norah Lange. Let’s drop the subject. Tell me about the young girl who has broken your heart. I believe it was recent?”
“Her name is Bella Law.”
“Bella Law—worthy of Dickens! Don’t tell me she has red hair, too?”
“Brownish red. A tinge of blond in the sunlight.”
As I spoke, Bella was almost present in the car, with her pale gray-green eyes and softly throaty voice. I had promised to call her to arrange for a dinner this week at the Pearl of Hong Kong, but what if I didn’t make it back to town in time? I had dared to believe that I was making headway and that Angus had been fading as the object of her affections. Should I have stayed in St. Andrews to press my case with her instead of driving off to the Highlands with a writer whose work I had never even read? I knew that Alastair admired him without reservation, but Borges had struck me from the outset as self-obsessed, a little mad, and I didn’t fully trust Alastair’s appraisal. I kept thinking about George Mackay Brown and his exquisitely painful stories of lonely figures on Orkney, about his concrete, lyrical poems of place. I loved the restraint in those poems, and the keen edge of every phrase, the effect of a chiseled piece of sculpture in language.
“Dear God, Giuseppe, I must tell you, Norah lived in one of the fine neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. Tronado, that was the street. I remember its width, the shade of its plane trees. But Norah’s mother became a widow too early. I loved her as much as Norah.”
“And you proposed to Norah?”
“Many times, yes. She was a writer, too, which is unfortunate. For a writer to love a writer, it’s a bad idea.”
“Bella hopes to become a writer,” I said.
Borges winced. “I can’t talk about this. You don’t want to hear an old man weep, am I right?”
“I wouldn’t like it.”
“One should avoid strong emotion, especially when it interferes with the work at hand. We have European blood in our veins, you and I. Mine is northern blood. We’re cold people, you see. Warriors.”
“I’m doing everything I can to avoid being a warrior,” I said, eager to shift the subject from doomed love affairs, although warriors was hardly a better topic.
“You’re not a warrior in Vietnam,” Borges said. “I’ve been wondering about this.”
“My draft board in Pennsylvania would like me to go,” I said. “They keep sending me draft notices.”
“But you’ve avoided their summons?”
“I don’t open their…invitations, never. I’ve got several in a drawer in my flat.”
“This is a protest!”
“Or cowardice. Or lassitude. Or indifference.”
