Borges and Me, page 9
I wanted from the outset to please him. He was, I supposed, a notable literary figure in Argentina, though I had no idea what that meant. That I’d read nothing of his was an embarrassment, but I assumed there was a long important novel by him that one day I would read. I had my own vague ambitions to achieve something in literature, perhaps a poem of considerable length or even, God willing, a novel, perhaps even a novel of consequence, like Moby-Dick or The Scarlet Letter or The Portrait of a Lady. Only the novel could embrace the whole of experience. It was “the bright book of life,” as Lawrence so memorably said.
We headed out along a stretch of rocky coastline, with my window down, as the day was surprisingly warm for early spring. The fishing villages sparkled with an unnatural brightness, coppery and clean. But a feeling of responsibility overwhelmed and silenced me as I drove. I had been elected to tell Borges what we saw, to describe it precisely. And yet how could I manage this? Did I even know the words for what I saw? Rock and water, flowers and birds. That would never do! In the meantime, Borges sat with his knees lifted high, the cane between his legs and rising to his chin.
“What is this motor vehicle?” he said, breaking the silence after perhaps twenty minutes had passed.
“A Morris Minor. Pretty old, I’m afraid. And threadbare.” On cue, it coughed and spluttered.
“This is Rocinante, your motorcar.”
Silence conveyed my puzzlement.
“I speak of that lazy old horse of Don Quixote. Rocín, in Spanish, this is a workhorse, but never a good one. Nunca! Lazy because exhausted, not unlike your motorcar, which may be unequal to our task of circumnavigating the Highlands.” He tapped his forehead as if trying to recall something. “Cervantes took some trouble to name his horse.”
“I haven’t read the novel, Borges. I should have.”
“Yes, and yet, believe me, you will one day read it with a profound sense of recollection. That happens when you read a classic. It finds you where you have been.”
“It will become my story, is that it?”
“If luck holds, I think so.” He sang a little song under his breath in Spanish. “Have you seen this before, how a beast comes to resemble his owner? Or does the owner come to resemble his beast?”
“I look nothing like my car,” I said.
“Not yet.”
The North Sea broke on our left, with blasts of surf in the rocks below. One could see fishing boats nearby, and on the horizon the occasional tanker.
“It’s quite dark, the sea, in broad daylight,” I said, fumbling to describe what I saw. “There’s a surf.”
“This is not specific enough,” Borges chided. “Talk about the running waves, the white horses on the water. Dark is not detailed. What are the colors? Find metaphors, images. I want to see what you see. Description is revelation! Words that create pictures. Like the cinema, perhaps. Moving pictures!” He rolled down the window to feel the breeze in his face, his eyes closed and his nostrils widening as he took in the cool and salty air. “I’m in love with Beowulf, which is why I favor the North Sea. Beowulf swam in body armor with a sword in his belt. Nine monsters dragged him to the floor of the sea. He killed them, one by one. Swish! Imagine the bloody waters around him. Exhausted, he was carried away to the Land of the Finns.”
We fell into silence, as Borges had spent himself with this memory from Beowulf, and I doubted I could add to his commentary. It worried me that I might buckle under the pressure of needing to “see” what he hoped to see. If my poems, which I labored over, often missed the mark, how could I expect extemporaneously to summon images and metaphors sharp enough to satisfy this unlikely passenger?
Borges touched my left arm, then squeezed the elbow. “This man I mentioned, Mr. Singleton. He wrote to me in Buenos Aires from Inverness. We share this interest in Anglo-Saxon poetry, but it’s the riddles that intrigue us. Games for the mind, the origin of all plots.” Borges dug a scrap of paper from the breast pocket of his jacket, then stuffed it back. “He sent his telephone number, and my mother wrote it down.”
“You brought that from Argentina?”
“It was not so heavy.”
“What do you know of Mr. Singleton?”
“He understands the meaning of surprise. A riddle explodes with meaning, but only at the last moment, when you stand face-to-face with it. You stand under the truth. And in this understanding we know everything. So I wish to surprise him, to say, Borges stands before you. Did you imagine this would happen? Look at me, Mr. Singleton!
This was, I realized, what I wished for with Mackay Brown: to stand face-to-face with the man behind the poems and stories. I wanted him to see me, his ideal reader. The exchange that takes place on the page would take place in actual time and space. This must happen, I told myself. I would take Borges to Orkney!
We paused in Crail, a tiny village, to walk around the stone-walled harbor, with its picturesque clutch of fishing vessels. The constant cry of gulls formed a backdrop to the scene, and I explained to Borges that in the sky above the bay one could see gannets as they swooped to snatch a fish, then soared back into the heavens with a meal in their beaks.
“What sort of fish?”
“Herring, I think. Mackerel? Not sure.”
“This is too exciting,” said Borges. “As a boy, I would sit and watch the birds over the Río de la Plata. Such colorful birds. They would arrow from the sky, killing the vipers. Zing! We never liked these vipers.”
“Snakes always make me queasy.”
“And we share this, Giuseppe! Even when we don’t in any conscious way, we remember the snake in the garden and poor dear innocent Eve. What a thing, the serpent! And such a phallic creature, no?”
“I try not to think about the phallus, except when I can think of nothing else, which is most of the time.”
“This is the fate of young men, a limited focus. One of the few advantages of my blindness has been that I no longer fasten my eyes on objects of arousal. I look inward now, though the mind has mountains, dangerous cliffs.”
“ ‘Oh the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall,’ ” I said, quoting the famous poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I didn’t want him to assume I knew nothing.
“Dear Hopkins,” he said. “He read the Anglo-Saxon poets, and learned from them. I’m so happy you know this poet, believe me.”
We took off again, passing through Anstruther, pausing briefly to absorb the atmosphere, then moving on to Lower Largo, home of Alexander Selkirk. I sprang this on Borges as we drove slowly down Main Street between three-story sandstone town houses with their orange roof tiles reflecting the late-afternoon sunlight.
“I know of this Selkirk,” Borges said, foraging in his brain for details. “He was a childhood hero. Crusoe in real life! I wished, like him, to isolate myself on a remote island, but one must be careful, as they say, of what one wishes for. Blindness is my very own island.”
“You seem to have set up quite an operation there,” I said.
“This is the lesson of Defoe’s novel—using the materials that lie at hand. I think perhaps Selkirk was more interesting than Crusoe. A terrible hothead, if I recall the facts properly. He argued day and night with his unhappy father. I don’t understand this resistance to one’s father. Mine was a gentle man. I respected him.”
“My father usually gives in,” I told him, “which makes him a second-rate businessman but a good father. My mother insists on getting her way.”
“My mother, too! She is old and still quite alive, and continues to run—even ruin—my life. I will escape her at some point. My wife, who is no longer part of my existence, she has disliked her. Mother made everything impossible. She made life difficult for my sister, too. I have one sister, you see.”
“So do I! Dorrie. She has a hard time with my mother. Oil and water.”
“Oh, dear. This is the old tale, mothers and daughters. Mothers and sons, well, this is another familiar tale, and not often happy. My former wife and my mother, they are like cats and dogs.”
“You’re divorced?”
“Soon. It was never a real marriage, I confess. I never knew her. Our engagement lasted for perhaps decades, but during this time I was in love with another woman.”
“Tell me,” I said, wondering if this would be the important thing he might teach me—something about how to love women. God knew I could use a tutorial. Women were alien to me, another race. I projected onto them, filling in with fantasies where, if I were less intimidated, I might have discovered more compelling realities, something less weighed down by silly presuppositions.
“You wish for me to tell my story? I don’t want to make you unhappy, Giuseppe. Let’s think of Selkirk instead, the model of resourcefulness, this man who gives hope. He was marooned. Or self-exiled, if memory serves. He fought with the captain of his ship and was set ashore. Survival skills obsess me, and Selkirk was a genius of survival. He hunted wild goats and ate their meat, made a garment from their hides. He lived four years on a forlorn island off the coast of Chile. On the other hand, he found the most marvelous wild turnips in the dirt, and pink cabbages, even pepper berries. Rats tried to eat him, so he forged an alliance with the feral cats. He slept with them, and they loved him, and together they frightened off the rats. There’s perhaps a lesson in this tale for a young man like yourself?”
“Make friends with feral cats?”
“Like Selkirk, yes. As I think of him, I glow with admiration.”
“Selkirk was a pirate,” I said.
“Don’t hold this against him! I’m a pirate, too. Writers are always pirates, marauding, taking whatever pleases them from others, shaping these stolen goods to our purposes. Writers feed off the corpses of those who passed before them, their precursors. On the other hand, they invent their precursors. They create them in their own image, as God did with man.”
It had until now seemed axiomatic to me that authors must start from nowhere, with nothing, and invent themselves, although I knew that influences mattered, that one dipped into the past and found things to remake. Had I invented my father and mother? So much of what I wrote, or thought about, was a by-product of my point of origin. Perhaps I was creating my parents? Since my arrival in St. Andrews, I’d of course been tracing the poems and novels that led to the work of Mackay Brown. But did he invent his precursors, as Borges suggested? Had he rewritten the Old Norse sagas in his mind in some way? I guessed he knew Hopkins very well, as they shared a strong Catholic vision, and their language had that intense concreteness, propelled by alliterative music and what Hopkins had called “sprung rhythm,” where you lunge from foot to poetic foot.
Borges puzzled and intrigued me, and I sensed that if I listened to him keenly, I might begin to revise some long-held assumptions.
“We must have dinner, I’m so hungry,” said Borges, changing the subject abruptly. (I would have to get used to these ruptures.) “I would like to visit a pub. Alastair refuses to take me to a pub. It’s so noisy, he says. I want to try Scottish beer.”
“The Crusoe Hotel,” I said, “is beside us. Its walls have faux Tudor half-timbers, and they’re the color of old cheddar. It will have a bar.”
“Wonderful! We must stay there.”
We had no reservations, but it was easy to book two rooms for the night, as Scottish tourism at this time of year was hardly robust. After depositing our bags, we headed downstairs into the dark bar-cum-dining room, which was below ground level. There were just two or three other patrons, silent elderly men in cloth overcoats with pints in front of them. The room smelled of tobacco and spilled beer, and there was a coal fire in the grate, next to which some cats on a knitted rug licked themselves clean. On the walls hung fox-hunting prints that seemed strangely out of place on the East Neuk of Fife.
I sat Borges down at an oak table. “It’s so comfortable here,” he said. “I smell the burning coals. A smell I love so much. My grandfather’s house in the country, it was full of blazing wood. He was a hero in Argentina. The old men, they would often bow as he passed, whispering. This is respect!”
“What will you have, Borges?”
“Typical Scottish beer from the pump.”
“The tap,” I corrected.
He wrung his hands in a peculiar fashion, as if they belonged to someone else. “I don’t usually drink strong beverage. Once, when I was a student, they said, Borges is a drunkard. Since then I’m careful not to shame myself. But I am feeling quite free of that young man, that Borges.”
What a relief it would be, I thought, to feel free of my own young self.
“This Borges,” he continued, “this much older man, he would like to drink on this journey.” He slapped his palm on the tabletop. “But I am not a drunkard!”
I agreed that he was not, and soon fetched two pints of Export, the flat, warm beer with a tawny color that students drank in vast quantities in St. Andrews. Borges bent over his glass, both hands around it and lightly trembling. He sniffed the foamy head of the brew, stirred it with one finger, then licked that finger clean to taste it.
“Very good,” he said. “Mild, and not too cold. This is the mistake we have made in Argentina. The beer is too cold, and it prevents us from tasting. This is true of food as well. I don’t like food when it is too hot. Moderation!”
“I like moderation.”
“Then you have an instinct for wisdom. Confucius said the doctrine of the mean was the highest virtue, and rare among men. The Buddhists call it the middle way. Aristotle saw moderation as the essence of virtue. I say moderation in all things, even moderation. So enough of that.”
He took a long slow drink and smiled, wiping the foam from his lips on the sleeve of his jacket. The blank eyes bulged in his head. He yawned, grinning at nothing, then belched, muttering to himself in Spanish. This was going to be a very long journey.
“Alastair often speaks of your work,” I said, hoping to spark something, anything.
“Alastair is always exaggerating,” he said. “Remember, dear boy, that I write only the smallest of stories. Some of them only a page in length, or less.”
“You haven’t written novels?”
“Not a single novel,” he said, with a smile that vanished as quickly as it came. “But you must know, I hoped for many decades to write an epic of the Pampas. There would be gauchos and prostitutes, and many criminals. Revolutions would come and go. It would be a saga of family life over many generations, with failed love affairs, with incest, and with spectacular achievements, too. There would be fratricide and matricide. Even patricide, the worst of sins. The volume would require perhaps a thousand pages to encompass everything I wished to say.”
“So what happened?”
“It never came, this novel. So frustrating. And long decades passed. But then one day—one day!—I woke early and went to my desk. In perhaps an hour or less I wrote a one-page review of this great novel, and that satisfied the impulse.”
13
AT BREAKFAST WE feasted on kippers with poached eggs and rashers of bacon: not what I would normally have consumed, but Borges had an idea about what constituted an ideal Scottish breakfast, and I felt—at this point in the journey—like making an alliance of sorts. He gobbled the food with abandon, splattering his tie, and the others in the breakfast room—commercial travelers and retirees—looked on with horror. When I went to the gents’, a middle-aged man who stood next to me at the urinal said, “How long has your poor father been blind?”
It was not worth explaining.
Back at the table, I brought up our itinerary with Borges, who explained that after his time with Alastair he planned to visit Edinburgh, so we could leave that out. He mentioned in passing that he’d be traveling to Oxford later in the spring to receive an honorary degree. An Oxford doctorate seemed unimaginably grand to me, the sort of thing reserved for the likes of Mark Twain or Rudyard Kipling. And the fact that I’d probably underestimated Borges dawned on me now. Had I not been listening to Alastair? Even Bella knew about him!
Skimming a map of the Highlands in a guidebook that I’d bought in the hotel lobby, I sketched in my head a plan for our excursion. After stopping for lunch in Dunfermline, we would continue along the M90 to Perth. Then we’d aim straight for Inverness, the heart of the Highlands, moving through the Cairngorm Mountains. Borges could meet his Mr. Singleton, after which we’d take a detour to Loch Ness. The nearby historic battlefield at Culloden would appeal to Borges, too. If things went as I imagined, I could whisk us away to Orkney by ferry for a day to meet Mackay Brown, who might even like the idea that I had in tow an acquaintance like Borges, this cultivated Argentinian. Both admired Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse poetry, after all.
But I didn’t bring this up yet. I needed to propose this meeting in the right terms. Borges didn’t really know anything about my thesis or my need to talk to a writer on Orkney. His focus on his own fantasy journey through the Highlands was intense, and I could see in our conversations that he could easily sweep aside anything that seemed to him irrelevant. He knew what he wanted to see. Or to have me describe.
* * *
—
Borges had brought with him only the brown suit he wore, a single white (and fraying) shirt, and the same extravagant tie with orange waterfalls and flying fish that he’d been wearing on the day we met. None of these items was fresh. And I was not myself well prepared for this jaunt, having packed only two shirts, a pair of jeans, and a sweater that had been a gift from my mother. I wore a light brown corduroy jacket and a tie, which I wore in deference to British conventions. I wished I had a rainproof mac but didn’t—probably in defiance of my mother. (“My God, it’s wet there,” she noted in a recent letter, “and cold. I don’t know why you like it so much. Nobody likes it there. And if you go outside, remember to take a raincoat. Your lungs aren’t so good. You could get very sick like you did at Boy Scout camp, and it wasn’t even wet that summer!”)
