Borges and Me, page 5
“Don’t take him seriously,” said Jeff. “I promise to like your poems.”
Jasper led me upstairs to his small bedroom at the back of the house. All the while I felt a kind of tingle in my limbs, a lightness. Alastair had caught me on his hooks. His life, his world, compelled my gaze. I wanted this.
“Borges is coming,” he said.
“Who is this?”
“Jorge Luis Borges! The Argentine writer. Haven’t you read him?”
“No.”
“Papa will tell you. He’s translating Borges.”
“So tell me about yourself, Jasper,” I said. “What are you reading?”
“Robinson Crusoe.”
“Isn’t that advanced for a boy?”
“I’m advanced. For a boy.”
“Maybe you’re not a boy?”
“A very short man?” he said. “Papa says you’re a poet. Is that true?”
“Want to be.”
“Wannabe poet. I’m a wannabe sailor. Or a tinker. Or a spy.”
“What’s a tinker?”
“A gypsy. Travelers. From northern India originally. But there are different kinds.”
“Really?”
“Why are you so ignorant?”
“I wasn’t aware of tinkers,” I said.
“Or Borges. I shouldn’t be shocked. Americans are ignorant.”
“You think so?”
“That’s what Papa says. And we lived in Ohio last year. So I know whereof I speak.” He drilled me with his big dark eyes, then pulled out a volume of poems by Rudyard Kipling from a small bookshelf by his bed. He opened the book and read a stanza:
Pussy can sit by the fire and sing,
Pussy can climb a tree,
Or play with a silly old cork and string
To ’muse herself, not me.
But I like Binkie, my dog, because
He knows how to behave.
“Are you a dog person or a cat person?” Jasper asked, abandoning this poem.
“I’m not sure.”
“Alastair’s a cat person. They can’t be trusted. They have nine lives. They distrust anything you say. They love too much, are irresponsible, even dangerous. They marry too many wives. Like Papa.”
The blizzard of phrases bedazzled me. Was this really a child? And did he really call his father by his first name?
“Alastair is reading Crusoe to me. I want to live like that.”
“Alone on an island in the middle of the sea, marooned?”
“You get to start over.”
“Is that what you want?”
“We’re in Scotland to start over.”
“As what?”
“Anything we choose.”
Suddenly Alastair stood in the doorframe. His face was bright, wide, well-wishing. There was love in his eyes. And a self-absorption that frightened me a little.
“The cat person appears,” said Jasper.
Alastair sat on the edge of the bed. “You’re rude.”
“I’m a bird son. Tell him.”
Without the slightest hesitation, Alastair began to recite a poem of his from memory:
My son has birds in his head.
I know them now. I catch
the pitch of their calls, their shrill
cacophonies, their chitterings, their coos.
They hover behind his eyes and come to rest
on a branch, on a book, grow still,
claws curled, wings furled.
His is a bird world.
6
I SAW BELLA everywhere, as St. Andrews was a fishbowl. She often walked hand-in-hand through the streets with Angus, her quondam boyfriend. He had a pleasant if rough-hewn aspect: a ginger-haired young man with an angular, thin, and often unshaven face, long muscular arms, and blue eyes. Once I found myself beside him at the meat counter in the grocery store on South Street; when he saw me staring at him, he returned a quizzical look.
He interested me only because he interested Bella and therefore must represent something she liked in men. I assumed, based on no experience, that a genuine romantic relationship could hardly survive for more than a few sensuous nights if the couple failed to relate as friends. I had a lofty and perhaps idealized sense of what this meant in real time, imagining that I would have long conversations about politics, poetry, novels, and films with any future lover. I wanted someone who would share my curiosity about the strangeness of life. I wanted everything, in fact: a highly particular response to my longings, deep passion, a sense of transcendence.
On impulse, I called one afternoon at Hamilton Hall and knocked softly at Bella’s door on the second floor.
She answered and, seeing me, dipped her eyes to the floor.
“I dropped by,” I said masterfully.
“Coffee?”
It was a rainy day, cold and dark, and I could definitely do with a cup of coffee. She invited me into the room, and I could see that she had been working: the chaste single bed was strewn with books and handwritten notes.
“You’re working hard,” I said.
“Wasting my time, reading books not on the examination list.”
“Always a bad sign.”
“So why haven’t you come to our antiwar group?” she asked. “There’s a meeting tomorrow night at the back of the Cross Keys. Some of my friends would like to meet you.”
Showing up for these meetings would have been an easy way to further my contact with Bella, but I hesitated, not only because of my fear of women, but because I still needed to stay on the outside, not wanting to acknowledge my position on the war, whatever it was precisely, or to look too closely at what it meant that I’d left the United States as I had. One night I had had a nightmare about giving a speech at an antiwar rally in St. Andrews, where my uncles had come to hear me, the three who had fought on the beach in Salerno. Geno, Julie, and Tony sat in the back row with frowns and folded arms. Afterward, when I tried to speak to them, they walked away and shook their heads. Didn’t I respect their courage, their willingness to risk everything for my future freedom? What did it mean to put your body on the line, as they had?
“Maybe you could say something about your draft situation,” Bella said, “and how in America they tend to conscript those without resources, especially blacks and the poor? You’re in a unique place to speak. It would get their attention. A few of us are going to London for a big rally next month, at the U.S. embassy. You should come with us.”
“I’m afraid I’ve fallen behind.”
“Behind what?”
“In my research. Falconer keeps casting doubts on my topic. He thinks I shouldn’t have chosen a living author.”
“Pay no attention to him.”
Easy for her to say, I thought.
“He’s proud of his war record,” I said.
She pulled a copy of Shakespeare and the Sea from the bookshelf beside her desk. “It’s just…so wonderfully batty.”
She had all the accoutrements for serving coffee on her dresser, with an array of mugs that suggested she liked to entertain. Was I nothing more to her than another in a long line of friendly, coffee-sharing guests? So far I had not put a foot forward into our “relationship,” if that’s what it was. She probably wondered why I had not made a pass, although her relationship with Angus gave me an excuse not to make any obvious move.
“You’re quite serious about your poetry,” she said. “So many who come to the Poetry Society are…well, dabbling.”
Dabbling, to her, was not a good thing.
I told her about meeting Alastair, this impish and eloquent poet with a boy and no wife. “He and Jasper move every year, it seems. I’d like to live in that way myself.”
“It can’t be good for children to move around so much.”
Unprompted, she now talked about her father, a businessman and former academic, and her mother, who was “largely concerned with her garden.” She had one sibling, she said, a brother who had “gone down from Cambridge with a triple first and disappeared into the foreign service.” He was eight years her senior and wrote to her every month from Afghanistan. Improbably, he was named Ptolemy. “After the Greek astronomer,” she said, “not the general in Alexander’s army.”
“I wouldn’t make that mistake,” I said.
“We call him Tolly.”
“Tolly Law,” I said. “Nice.”
“Why do Americans always say nice? It’s so bland.”
“Our daily interactions are bland by nature.”
“The bland leading the bland,” she said.
“Do you write poetry yourself?” I asked. It struck me that I’d never seen anything of hers and that she never presented anything at the Poetry Society, though she obviously ran the workshops.
“I do, but—shame—I don’t like to show my work,” she said. “One day, perhaps. There’s no telling where anything will lead, is there?”
I was curious about Angus, but she didn’t mention him, and he was nowhere in evidence in her room. Not even a stray sock in the corner or a random medical textbook on the window ledge. No photograph of Angus with his rugby mates on her desk. Were they lovers? Quondam lovers? I wondered if there was the slightest chance I could move onto his ground, even take his place. But how could I begin to ask about such things?
“I probably should get back to work,” she said.
I took the hint and finished my coffee in a gulp, then left her room, confused but also in a state of hope. There’s no telling, she had said, where anything will lead.
7
“IT’S NOT FOR nothing that Stevenson was a Scot,” said Alastair.
“Who?”
“You’re not asking me who is Robert Louis Stevenson?”
This put me on edge. Needless to say, I set my feelings aside, wanting to belong to Alastair’s household, where passing allusions were obvious and abundant. I wanted to get near his flame, which could be both dangerous and warming.
He drew a tray of hot ginger biscuits from the Aga and put one beside my mug of tea, then handed me The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in an old Penguin edition.
“Your autobiography?” I asked.
“Funny man.” He lit a cigarette, as if to think. “It’s must reading, if you wish to understand Scottish life.”
As I leafed through it, Alastair rolled a fat sloppy joint in French cigarette paper and lit it, sucking air to make it brighten at the tip. He took in a long drag and handed it to me. The sweetly musty smell appealed, though I coughed harshly at first, trying again with a shallower inhalation. My throat burned, but I was determined to open myself to new experiences, to let in the light.
“What I dislike about Scotland,” said Alastair, on his usual jag, “is that virtue is taken for an achievement. And narrowly defined. We’re always judged in this fucking country. It’s as if there’s some blinking scoreboard in the sky. I can hear the chalk scratching above me.”
“Your father was a minister,” I said.
“Yes, and dour. But gentle as well. My mother was strict, caught in a busy life, with her medical practice, several children, a large house to manage. The usual catastrophe.”
“You’ve been married?”
“Questions, questions,” he said. “Once or twice. ‘There’s nothing in the world for us but change.’ A line from Borges. Do you know Borges?”
“Not really.”
“That means not at all in Jay-talk. A literary virgin.”
“It’s too cold for sex in Scotland,” I said.
This struck a chord. “They don’t even take off their clothes to fuck here. I’ve thought about making a special set of Scottish pajamas. The couple can tie up, open trap doors in their fronts, around the crotch areas, and…well, connect. They won’t have to take off anything, just drop the little doors. A corridor to nirvana.”
Jasper appeared in the doorway with his helmet of black hair, his beautiful wide eyes. “That was my idea, Papa, the fucking pajamas,” he said.
“I stole it.”
“You’re always stealing my ideas.”
“You’re the next Thomas Edison, Jasper.”
“So who gets rich? Me or you?”
“We share everything, don’t we?”
“Fucking Communist,” said Jasper, walking away.
Alastair relit the joint, sucked in a long drag, and passed it back to me. He obviously didn’t care that Jasper knew he was smoking pot. This was so unlike the world of my own childhood, where everything was concealed. Where desires of any kind lived in dark rooms, where doors and windows remained tightly shut. “Don’t let anybody see what you’re thinking,” my father had once said to me, and I’d taken it to heart.
I began to cough again and went to the sink to get a glass of water. It was late now, darker by the moment. A shadow of dread passed over me like a rook, its black wings stirring the air.
“Did you get another letter from the draft board?” Alastair said, as if, after all, he knew what I was thinking.
“I’ve had three letters.”
“Throw them away,” he said.
There was something fresh in his voice. I turned to see, and his affectionate look brought tears to my eyes.
“War is never worth the expense of life,” he said.
“You fought in the war against Hitler.”
“It was a different time.”
“I won’t go to Vietnam.”
“No, you won’t,” he said. Opening a bottle of red wine from Bulgaria, he filled a large tumbler with the harsh ruby liquid. “Always wash down the grass with the grape.” He swallowed the contents of the glass in a gulp, then poured himself another, his eyes glistening.
I had brought a poem to show him, but seeing how stoned he was, I decided not to bother, guessing that the results of such a consultation wouldn’t be helpful.
“Do you have a poem? You have that look on your face.”
“It’s not good. I wrote it to seduce this girl, Bella.”
“Remember what Auden said: ‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’ It has no utilitarian value.”
“I can’t get her out of my head.”
“So bring her to Pilmour! I’ll do my best for you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Seduction is an art, but less complicated than poetry. Think of the billions of couples who are fucking every night on their sweaty beds. Men and women, women and women, men and men, men and turtles. Making the beast with the double back, as our friend Shakespeare put it.”
A voice came from upstairs. “Papa, you were going to read to me before dinner!”
Alastair ignored him. “Do you know how to cook?”
“Not really.”
“I didn’t think so. I’ll teach you.” He took out knives and a thick block of wood, and we began to chop garlic, onions, and carrots according to his highly specific instructions.
“Cooking and writing are the perfect combination,” he said. “All day I move back and forth between the desk and the stove. They’re elemental. You bring various and distinct elements together, the raw ingredients. You add the flame. It’s chemistry.”
“So poetry is soup?”
“More like a stew.” He poured a tremendous amount of oil into a skillet and asked, for no apparent reason, “What about this new car of yours? I saw you in the bottom of North Street yesterday. You nearly ran over a little old lady. We could do in this country with fewer old ladies.”
“It’s a rust bucket,” I said. “Morris Minor, 1957.” I felt quite proud of this car in a way. It was a two-tone affair, with a white roof but a candy-red body. A four-cylinder, four-speed manual. Never very well looked after. I shared ownership with a postgraduate student from Australia, and the whole business had set me back only a few hundred pounds.
“Read to me,” said Jasper, appearing at my elbow. “Papa promised, but he won’t. He’s baked.”
“Read to him,” Alastair said. “Otherwise he may call the police.”
So I followed the boy into the sitting room, where he nestled against me on the green sofa, with its lumpy pillows and damp smell. The Indian carpet on the wooden floor showed off elephants and tigers in dark blues and reds. The room had grown dim with twilight, so I turned on a lamp.
“Let’s have Stevenson,” said Jasper.
“He’s a favorite in this house, isn’t he?”
“Papa loves him. Borges loves him.”
“It’s always Borges here, isn’t it? Do you know when he’s coming?”
“Soon.”
“Why is Borges such an important man in this house?”
“Do you know nothing? Papa says you’re thick.”
“He says that?”
“Not thick. Ill-informed.” He shook his loose and shiny black hair and crinkled his nose. “I should button my lip, that’s what Papa says. He likes you. Don’t worry.”
“He thinks I’m naive,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“Lacking experience of the world.”
“I don’t lack it, do I?”
“No. You’ve been to so many places. More than most people ever get to see.”
“We like Majorca best.”
“What is there—what do you like?”
“The wine, the women.”
“And the song?”
“I only like the Beatles.”
“Do you really like wine and women?”
“Not so much.”
“You will.”
“That’s what Papa says.” He touched my face, running his fingers over my features. “This is how Borges sees,” he said. “Did you know he’s blind? He always touches your face.”
“I’m glad I’m not blind.”
“I’d rather be deaf,” said Jasper.
“Why?”
