Borges and Me, page 8
Alastair translated the crucial lines for us: “I can make a true son / of myself, and tell you about my travels, / and the days of struggle that I have endured.”
Borges had apparently long wished to stand at the edge of the North Sea and chant this poem, which is spoken in the first person by an old salt who recalls his long years of solitude at sea, which is a symbol of life itself.
“He’s consecrated the Old Course,” Jeff said in my ear. “Golf will never be the same.”
11
I SAW BELLA the next day at MacArthur’s, the tea shop in South Street, a large room marked by the lace doilies on round tables, with a clatter of china and muted conversation in the air. She was alone, her eyes fixed on the pages of a novel, which she had propped against a sugar bowl.
I approached her warily. “May I sit?”
She was reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and I knew I had disturbed her. But it was, after all, teatime, with the usual invitation to sociability that comes with this British tradition; and she had, after all, made a choice to read in public.
“As you can see, I’m taking a break from more serious work,” she said. “Where have you been?”
“Lost in the library,” I said, taking up a seat. I wanted to tell her about the encounter with Borges, a gift I was waiting to unwrap for her.
“All work and no play…”
“I have nobody to play with.”
“Boo-hoo,” she said.
“You seem to work an awful lot.”
“You make it sound as if I were ill or unstable. Exams are coming in June, so—you know how it goes—I swot.”
“Is Angus swotting?”
“Medics never let up. But he’s moving to Glasgow soon. There or Manchester, to finish his training.”
I eyed the tiered tray in the middle of the table, a pyramid of temptation—scones with shiny specks of currants, vanilla sponge cakes, oatcakes, and shortbread fingers. Like Oscar Wilde, I could resist anything but temptation, so I filled my plate. The waitress in her black uniform took my order for a pot of tea.
“Will you move to Glasgow as well?” I asked. “When you finish in St. Andrews?”
“Good lord, what a thing to say! My father knows a man with a gallery in Florence, a funny old chap with a Fu Manchu mustache. I’m hoping for an internship.”
“Florence is lovely in spring,” I said, knowing nothing of Florence. “I mean, when the flowers come out.”
“The wisteria in April,” she said, “huge purple tunnels of wisteria.”
“I’d love to see that.”
“Autumn and spring are best,” she told me in her patiently informative docent’s voice. “After June it’s unbearably hot and crowded.” She held her cup with two hands, sipping. “Florence isn’t really a city, it’s a museum.”
“Everybody wants to see David’s ass.”
“An arse for the ages. And the flip side is pleasant, too. Almost perfect balls. Come to visit, if I get this internship.”
The invitation tantalized but puzzled me. In fact, I could think of nothing worse than traveling to see her if I was merely a brotherly figure who accompanied her to museums or restaurants. I already had a very nice sister, Dorrie, in Pennsylvania, thank you very much, and now what I wanted was to study Bella’s features with my fingertips, like a blind man passing his hands over a text in Braille. Her lips had a fullness that struck me with force as I sat there, longing to kiss them. Her shallow eyes shone with a gray-green tint.
“Borges is here,” I said.
“Ah, the Argentinian. Alastair’s working with him?”
“On some translations. He’s so peculiar.”
“How?”
“Being blind, he talks a lot.”
“Why would a blind man talk more than anyone else?”
“We’re usually guided by the responses of those around us. If I ramble, you’ll shut me up with a frown.”
“I don’t frown.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Why don’t you get a girlfriend?”
This was a sucker punch of a non sequitur. She knew of my feelings for her—she must know—and yet she’d hit me with this question? I stared at the half-eaten scone on my plate, the pool of jam at the side.
“I didn’t mean to offend,” she said, “but I see you walking in the streets, always by yourself. And along the West Sands.”
“I run there every morning.”
“Every morning?”
“Pretty much.”
“You’re disciplined.”
“Only when it comes to the West Sands. It’s my religion. You should come with me someday.”
“I suppose,” she said, looking at me with wider eyes. “It’s the best beach in Scotland. Or so says Angus.”
“Well, then, it must be the best.”
“Don’t be whiny about Angus. He’s a sweetheart.”
A small silver-plated pot of tea arrived, with a taller one of hot water for refills.
“I don’t know why they give you two pots,” I said.
“Then you don’t know much,” she said.
If the code of British teatime manners was difficult to break, the code of Bella’s true feelings was more so. Was she pushing me away or leading me on? Did she actually know what she wanted, or what sort of things she implied?
“Do the letters keep coming?” she asked.
“From my draft board or my mother?”
“Which do you dread more?”
“It’s a toss-up.” I poured myself a cup of tea, flashing back to a letter from my mother that had arrived the day before. “You should be so careful with the Scottish girls,” she said. “They all want to marry an American just to come to this country. It’s a free passport.” It was another of her endless warnings. Be careful what you eat. Look out for bad company. Wear a sweater if it’s drafty in the house. Don’t drink too much. Don’t stay up too late, as you’ll be exhausted the next day. She meant well, for sure, but she was yet another of Ben Franklin’s tribe, though without his wit.
“The Vietnam thing should have stopped years ago.”
“Nixon lied about ending it.”
“Surprise, surprise. Kissinger’s a liar, too,” she said. “I’m sure the peace talks in Paris were sabotaged. Tens of thousands of civilians have died since, and keep dying, for no reason.”
“The devil’s arithmetic,” I said. “The whole thing is a fucking botch.”
Her awareness of the details of the war in Southeast Asia slightly shamed me. She wasn’t even at risk, not personally, in this conflict.
“Is there any hope?” she asked.
“It gives me hope to sit here with you, in the safety of MacArthur’s.”
“You’re an escapist.”
“Exactly.”
“Hence the dreams of Florence.”
Suddenly desire—that mouse that can turn into a dragon—blazed into life. I wanted badly to hold her in my arms, to feel her long, smooth body beside mine between cool sheets. In my mind I undressed her as we talked, lifting her cashmere pullover, unfastening her bra. I loosened her belt and zipped down her jeans, lifted off her panties. I untied her red “trainers,” as she called her sneakers. Those lovely, tantalizing, and terrifically red trainers.
“We should have dinner one evening,” I said.
“Why not? Do you like Chinese food?”
“Pearl of Hong Kong?”
“Perfect,” she said. She wrote her telephone number on a piece of paper.
I gave her my number as well, writing it on the first page of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
“Lawrence would approve,” she said.
I left the tea shop in a torrent of feeling, a mingling of hope and dread. I felt like a child lying in the summer grass with a white daisy in hand, plucking the leaves one by one and whispering, “She loves me, she loves me not.”
* * *
—
“Jay?” It was Alastair’s voice on the phone, seeming short of breath. “Something has come up.”
“Yes?”
“A friend, a kind of great-uncle in London, has taken ill. Nothing serious, but you never know. He’s over ninety. Jasp and I need to go there. I don’t think we’ll be gone for more than a week. This is important.”
I waited, wondering how this might involve me.
“It’s Borges,” said Alastair. “He can’t be left alone. And Jeff has gone to Edinburgh, damn it. He left yesterday.” He paused, as if to let me imagine Borges stumbling around the cottage by himself, tapping his cane against the walls. “I don’t suppose you could move into Pilmour, just for a week? I can’t say how many days. You can do your own work. Don’t worry. He’s quite independent.”
Jesus. Was I now so dependent on Alastair’s approval that I must respond to his every whim?
I knew, of course, that a blind old man is never independent. He’s the opposite of independent. And I could only begin to imagine the ways in which Borges might depend on me.
“We’re leaving in about an hour,” Alastair said. “Is that possible?”
“An hour?”
“You’ll be there?”
The thought unsettled me. But I could hardly say no. Not to Alastair, after all he’d done for me. Even though I had already filled my diary with appointments: tea with my new friend Tony Ashe, the possible dinner with Bella at Pearl of Hong Kong. Could I really make so many adjustments?
“Yes, I can do that,” I said.
In a confused state, I threw a few things into a canvas rucksack (I had ditched backpack for good, and found myself pretentiously substituting garden for the American yard), including a long recent letter from Billy that I hadn’t read, and a few volumes by Mackay Brown as well as his letter to me from Orkney, where he said I should come for a visit, “and come soon,” giving me his telephone number. A faint resentment stirred in me as I realized that I should be going to Orkney to meet the subject of my thesis, not heading to Pilmour Cottage to look after Borges. In fact, I despaired of getting anything done on my thesis during the days ahead. Borges would talk at me, around me, and through me, scattering my thoughts like pebbles in the path. I would struggle to read or think about George Mackay Brown with Borges over my shoulder. My own poems would come out in pigeon Spanish.
Driving to Pilmour, I wondered if my deck might be reshuffled after all.
* * *
—
The transfer came swiftly. Alastair’s recently acquired Mini, a hand-me-down from his sister, throbbed on the gravel road in front of the cottage, ready to take him and Jasper to the train station at Leuchars, and Alastair put the house keys for Pilmour into my palm. “Borges likes porridge for breakfast,” he said, “with milk and three scoops of sugar. Fruit if possible. Raisins will do. Good for his guts. Likes bacon, too. Lots of bacon, very crisp.”
“I’ll warn the local pigs.”
I watched them pull away, Jasper leaning out and waving from the open window, and went into the empty-feeling house. In the sitting room, where light pillared through a window, with motes of dust quivering in the bright funnel of silence, Borges sat staring ahead in the wing chair, his chin leaning on his folded hands atop his cane’s ivory handle. The brown pin-striped suit was wrinkled like the skin of an old peach. His skin seemed translucent, thin as rice paper.
Feeling inadequate and slightly dazed, I asked, “Are you okay, Mr. Borges?”
“No mister, please,” he said. “Borges. Just Borges.”
“Very good. Borges. I’m Jay.”
“Giuseppe, I’m not senile! Alastair has told me wonderful stories about you. Pennsylvania? The beautiful woods of William Penn? But are they so beautiful? Everything in America is exaggerated.”
“We have some good writers.”
“Do you like Edgar Allan Poe?”
“I do.”
“A story, Poe said, should make a unified, definite impression. This is true of an essay as well. Really, there is no difference between these genres.”
“Your essays are made up?”
“My work is only invention,” he said. “I was in Israel last year, for a visit. I’m a great fan of the Jewish mind, which is elevated and cosmopolitan. And Israel as a state inspires me. An intractable situation, very sad, unsolvable with Palestine: competing and equally valid claims.” His face seemed to close like a fist, then open again. “What I like especially is that when you walk into a bookstore in Israel, there is a wall of books in the category of siporet, which means narrative. Novels and works of nonfiction rub spines, even mirror each other. Anything that passes through memory becomes fiction, you see. Fictio—in Latin, it means ‘to shape.’ I am shaping things. Leaving in some facts, suppressing others.” Borges surfed a thought-wave, after the briefest pause. “It is only for the gods to decide what angels will sit on whose shoulders.”
“Do you believe in angels?”
“I believe in everything, dear boy. It is the secret of life. Bileven, in Middle English, is our belief. It means ‘to hold dearly.’ This is gelefen in Anglo-Saxon. Glauben in German.”
I could see that I had a long week ahead of me.
“Is there anything you would like to do this week, Borges?”
“To do, indeed! Alejandro tells me you have access to a motorcar.”
“I have some wheels with an engine. And a good deal of air.”
“Air! In which case, let’s be free as the western wind. I would like you to take me on your breeze around Scotland. I want to see the Highlands!”
“But you’re blind, Borges,” I said.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Don’t tell me that you are blind as well?”
“I’m not.”
“What luck, then! You will be my eyes.”
He told me about a man in Inverness whom he dearly wished to visit, one Mr. Singleton, who was editing a volume of Anglo-Saxon riddles. He had written to Borges a couple of years before.
“We will discover this Wonderland together,” Borges continued. “I know the points on the map: Perth, Aviemore, Inverness. Loch Ness and its monster, Grendel! And the battlefield of Culloden! Just to read a map of the Highlands is to recite poetry.” His eyes grew huge, wet empty globes.
I had promised Alastair I’d stay with Borges. But had I promised to be here when Alastair returned? Would he approve of my lighting out for the Highlands with his charge? As gently as I could, I asked, “Did you mention this trip to Alastair?”
“No, it has just occurred. A vision, shall I say? Let’s go, Giuseppe.”
“Now?”
“There is only now,” he exclaimed with unstoppable force. “Act, dear boy! Do not procrastinate! It’s the worst of sins. I’ve thought about this, you see: the progression toward evil. Murder, this is very bad, a sin. It leads to thievery. And thievery, dear God, leads to drunkenness and Sabbath-breaking. And Sabbath-breaking leads to incivility and at last procrastination! A slippery slope into the pit!”
I may have smiled. But Borges, of course, couldn’t see it.
“I have money for the rooms in hotels, for our meals,” he said. “It will cost you nothing. I will pay for the petrol as well.”
“No need for that,” I told him.
“There is every need. I’m an old man. You’re a young man. You must save whatever you have for the future that awaits. I need to spend myself.”
“This sounds like a good deal for me,” I said, not yet sure if I believed the statement to be true.
To say that I had mixed feelings about this projected trip through the wilds of Scotland underplays my trepidation. I had a responsibility here, one that coupled with very little experience of the needs of elderly people. Could I really do this, whatever it was? Any number of reasons to resist Borges and avoid this improbable journey flickered in my brain. But there was a glimmer on my mental horizon, a light that seemed to beckon beyond my mental hills. I might learn something in proximity to this man who clearly knew a great deal about literature and life, a writer Alastair obviously admired. He struck me as difficult and self-involved, a man with few checks on what he said. He would no doubt test my patience. But on some deep and probably inaccessible level, I thought I might well get a story out of this one day.
“There’s this wonderful thing in Britain,” Borges said, “the B&B. The second B is for breakfast, and they do opulent breakfasts. Do you like bacon? And oatmeal?”
“Oatmeal is fine.”
“Uncooked if possible. You will ask them for me?”
“It may raise an eyebrow.”
“I no longer need to save face. This is one of the benefits of extreme age. Nothing matters much, and very little matters at all.”
It would be important, he said, for me to name everything we saw, to rephrase each experience, making it permanent. “Description is revelation,” he said. He would pay for our expenses, but this naming aloud would be my contribution to the trip. “Nothing exists,” he said, “until it has found its way into the language.”
“Should we make a plan?” I asked.
“This doesn’t concern me. What is the line from Burns? ‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.’ Such a ring of veracity. We’re in the country of Burns, where everything is askew.”
“So it’s the Highlands then? Inverness?”
“Ahora vamos,” Borges said. “We must take the plunge. What we discover, as within any labyrinth, will always be ourselves. Wherever you go, Giuseppe, there is Giuseppe. I go where Borges goes.”
12
WE BEGAN OUR journey by heading in the wrong direction, at least if our goal was Inverness. But I sensed that Borges would like to “see” Lower Largo, the home of Alexander Selkirk, the figure behind Robinson Crusoe. I had been there once with a friend, and the story had intrigued me. And Crusoe, I knew, meant a lot to Alastair and Jasper, so it might well be something Borges would like.
