Borges and me, p.15
Borges and Me, page 15
As we drove on, I considered our parallel lives. My car and the horse of the Quixote, my Italian ancestry and his childhood in Palermo—not the “real” Palermo, but its distant refraction in Argentina. I thought of his imperious mother, with mine in her shadow. His sister and my own sister. Our sweetly passive and predictable fathers. Our erotic frustrations, with the dream of a sassy and brilliant partner with perhaps a tinge of red in her hair. Or red sneakers? And then there were my literary aspirations, so blatantly unrealized—a handful of poems, none of them quite right or in my own voice. My endless journals, which amounted to little more than scribbles in the margins of my life. My rough chapters on George Mackay Brown…Perhaps, I thought with a shudder, I would go blind one day as well.
I couldn’t begin to fathom this.
“Did you reach Beatrice?” he asked.
“Bella? I left a message.”
“So she will know you care.”
“Not if nobody passes along the message.”
“Women are not so cruel as men. But I’ve noticed this, that women rarely care so much about beauty, not as men do. They marry a soul, not a body. The problem is, they often misread a soul. They see profundity where in truth there is a shallow ditch.” Of course he could not resist a tirade about Oliverio Girondo, whom he called “a second-rate hack.”
“Tell me about Girondo’s writing,” I said, knowing nothing about his work. In a strange turn, I began to worry that everyone in the world was a writer, which left very little space for Borges or me.
“The avatar of ultraism,” he said, “one of the fraudulent strains in Argentine literature. Such excess! He once compared a woman’s hand to a dead ostrich. Had he actually seen a dead ostrich? I’ve been to the zoo, at least. There’s nothing worse than the smell of ostrich piss. Have you smelled this?”
“No.”
“When you’re next in a big city, go to the zoo. There’s always a zoo, and there’s always an ostrich. And where there is an ostrich, there is ostrich piss.”
* * *
—
We motored along the narrow road into Inverness, the putative goal of our journey, where Borges would at least meet Mr. Singleton to discuss Anglo-Saxon riddles, their shared passion. I had yet to mention my specific hope of visiting George Mackay Brown, thinking he might not like the idea, his mind being so focused on his own preoccupations. But soon, soon, I knew I must plunge into this matter, asserting my own needs, seizing this opportunity to visit the subject of my thesis. It would be a pity to lose this chance, with Orkney within a day’s easy travel from this part of the Highlands.
Soon Inverness glowed in the pale afternoon sunlight. I said to Borges, “It’s a beautiful city, with bright stones that catch the sun and give it back. An orderly place, too, with wide streets, very little traffic.” We paused before St. Andrew’s Cathedral, called a “must-see landmark” in my guidebook, and Borges insisted that we go inside. “We have been negligent tourists,” he said. “I shall have nothing to tell my mother!”
I led him into the church, where the purple stones of the exterior gave way to a nave of five bays made of stern, immovable granite. The pulpit was green marble. We stood before an angel of white stone, and Borges insisted on feeling the sculpted figure with his hands. “My angel,” he said. “I’m always surrounded by angels, but they aren’t usually so palpable.”
“Do you believe in angels?”
“I believe in everything,” said Borges.
A man with short white hair appeared at the bottom of one aisle and drifted in our direction as if walking on a cloud. He wore a black cassock and stopped beside us, looking at us with curiosity, as if we’d landed in a space capsule. He introduced himself as William Burns, “a priest of the cathedral.”
“Ah, Burns!” said Borges. “I like the poems of your dear cousin, Robbie Burns. Are you a poet as well, Mr. Burns?”
“I’m just a priest.”
I envied this, with its simplicity. I thought I might have made a good priest and had once entertained fantasies of life in a monastery. I often sat in empty churches, not so much praying as floating, letting my feelings attach to the stones of the building, letting the light of the sun break in its prismatic way through high windows. The idea that God should dwell in particular houses intrigued me. It couldn’t literally be true. But it wasn’t untrue.
“A priest is a poet, sir, and a poet is a priest,” said Borges. “Hieratikos in Greek. Both are vessels of incarnation. The Word becomes flesh on your tongue.”
“I’m not so special.”
“Oh, never underestimate your powers, Father Burns.”
“I fear that I do.” As he said that, a blade of golden sunlight slashed through the window above the altar and cut across the priest’s face. I stepped back, almost in fear. The man appeared shockingly humble, stooped, probably underconfident, with large red arthritic knuckles on his hands that suggested years of praying in cold northern rooms.
“Tell me the truth about yourself,” said Borges.
“I was unsure of my vocation. It’s the only truth.”
“How long have you been a priest?”
“Forty-two years and three months.”
“So you persist! This is all we ask. You made a choice, and continued in the faith. Felicidades! The stream gabbles along. You are the burn, the blaze of water on the landscape, a blister of love. You remain true to the Word.”
The priest shuddered, then smiled. “Thank you for saying this.”
Borges reached for him, and the priest dipped his head forward. With his hands on the forehead of Father Burns, Borges intoned, “Si quaesieritis eum, invenietur a vobis; si autem dereliqueritis eum, derelinquet vos.” If you don’t abandon the spirit, the spirit will not abandon you. Borges had given the priest a blessing.
Tears rinsed the man’s cheekbones. And I thought these were my tears, too. He wept for me, and for all those who engage, or fail to engage, with the spirit that courses through us, throughout the universe. Exactly how we deal with our souls was at this moment the only question I thought worth asking.
* * *
—
Back in the car, rather weirdly, I missed Father Burns and wished we could have talked at greater length with this gentle man.
“Where are you taking me?” Borges asked.
“Into the center of Inverness.” I noted the Inverness Palace Hotel, which mirrored Inverness Castle across the river in its russet-tinged stonework. I guessed it had seen better days, but it remained impressive, with turrets and leaded windows, a massive façade. I did my best to describe this architecture but didn’t have a wide vocabulary for such things.
“It’s the Gothic fantasy!” Borges said. “We shall stay here in this great palace. I feel a little tired, with so much rushing about. And my stumble in the mountains has set me back. There’s a throb in the back of my skull. A quiet room is required, and I shall pay for two beds this time. And extra bacon.”
“The room may be expensive,” I said.
“There’s no need for cash in the corridors of oblivion that await me.”
We checked in, as he wished, and they gave us a high-ceilinged room on the top floor, with Greek figures on the frieze that crawled in white plaster around the walls. The florid wallpaper with a chartreuse background was so offensive that blindness afforded a blessing to Borges. We had, at least, a single bed for each of us, separated by a chipped wooden table and a dusty lamp. There were fading prints in gilt frames on the walls of legendary Scottish kings: Alexander I, Duncan II, Kenneth II, Donald III, Lulach, and Robert the Bruce. I recited the names to Borges, whose eyelids quivered as if he were trying to push through the gauze of blindness to see the regal faces with their eyes outstaring history.
“Is there a telephone in the hotel?” asked Borges.
“I would guess so.”
“Ah, splendid. Wonderful!” Borges handed me the slip of paper from his jacket pocket. “It’s time to call Mr. Singleton. I’ve waited patiently for years. Invite him for breakfast tomorrow. And when he comes, you must allow us time alone, as we shall burrow into the riddles.”
The idea of a breakfast reprieve from Borges sounded good, and I took the slip into the lobby to find a telephone. When I told the manager it was a local call, he invited me into his office to use the phone. “I’m glad to assist,” he said.
I dialed the number, but nothing happened. It did not even produce a ring: just a dead silent space. I tried again, without luck.
When I showed the number to the manager, he said, “It’s not a Scottish number, sir. Let me see what I can find out.” He rang the operator, who told him this was a number in New Zealand. There was apparently an Inverness on the South Island.
With vicarious disappointment, I returned to our room and gave the sad news to Borges, who let out a sigh. “My mother is never clear about these things. And I shall never get to New Zealand. I’m sure you won’t drive me there. This encounter is lost, Giuseppe. But I feel I know this man, in any case. His absence registers a kind of presence, perhaps more profound.”
“Perhaps.”
Borges and I had dinner that night in the gloomy dining room at the hotel, where the wallpaper had the appearance of splattered mud. We were the only diners, apart from a large elderly woman in a purple dress, who kept staring at us. Did we create such a spectacle? Throughout our nondescript meal, Borges said nothing, eating little of his gammon, barely touching the turnips and potatoes. He slumped in his seat, wearier than I’d seen him before, with gravity tugging on the lines in his forehead and cheeks. Was this an effect of his head injury or perhaps his disappointment about Mr. Singleton?
“I feel on the order of woozy,” he said as I was about to say how interesting it might be for him to meet George Mackay Brown.
I led him back to the room, making sure that he found the toilet in the hallway outside, then helped him into bed.
“You would make a very good nurse,” he said.
I mentioned that Walt Whitman had been a nurse during the Civil War, tending to wounded soldiers, especially his brother—so the vocations of nurse and poet weren’t mutually exclusive. This appealed to Borges, who surged back to life.
“Whitman! How I have loved him, your Walt, whom I have translated. Yes, a nurse he was. His brother lay wounded near Fredericksburg. And he devoted himself to the dying young men. He read letters from their mothers, from loved ones. And helped them to write letters home. He bathed their wounds, changed bandages. Some of them died in his arms.” He wiped tears from his eyes as he spoke.
“What I most admire about Whitman,” Borges said, “is that he created Walt Whitman, an ideal projection, not of himself but someone like him, a character every reader could find in his heart and admire.”
With this, he slipped into a sleep so deep it was almost death. As I lay beside him in the adjacent bed, listening to his faint, persistent snore, I wondered if my own work in life was to summon an invented Jay Parini, one who was not me. Or if maybe the person I should try to summon was in fact the real me, the truest version of myself. And if I should learn to stand behind this self, this persona, the voice sounding through the mask.
I felt a call to honesty. To say how I felt. To declare myself. And to Bella.
Slipping into the hallway, I sat before a desk in an alcove overlooking the river, which gleamed in the moonlight, and wrote a letter:
My dear Bella,
I hope you don’t mind this affectionate opening. I feel such a warmth for you, which is a kind of sexual attraction, I know. A purely animal thing. But I hardly know you, and you don’t know me. How many times have we talked? Have we ever really talked except superficially? I love you in ways difficult to explain. I should probably not say such a thing, as perhaps I don’t understand fully what the phrase means. Though I think I do.
I felt a fondness for you, an attraction, from the first time I met you at the Poetry Society. (And it was more than your lovely red sneakers!) Even before that, at the protest in Market Street, when I caught a glimpse of you. There was something in the reserve you projected that appealed to me. And the firmness and fire of your convictions. Can one project reserve? I think so. The fire is the fire.
I don’t mean to be intrusive, or to sound foolish. I know I can be ridiculous at times. There’s a foolishness in this letter, and a bravado. And I’ll say frankly that the circumstances of your relations with Angus are unclear to me. I know that you feel affection for him, that you perhaps love him, and to love anyone is a good and wonderful thing. I don’t want to interfere with that.
I wanted to talk this over with you and did try to call from a phone booth in the mountains but didn’t persist. You must think I’m a hopeless and unreliable friend. I promised we would have dinner at Pearl of Hong Kong. And here I am in Inverness at the Palace Hotel!
I’m here with Borges. Alastair suddenly had to go to London and left me in charge of the blind old fellow, who is snoring in our bedroom. I’m escorting him through the Highlands on a kind of weird circuit. I have stories to tell. He’s not easy. And yet Borges has more stories in his head and heart than anyone alive. He talks incessantly but is rarely boring, though I’m sometimes lost in his chatter. It’s like trying to cross a violent stream from one shore to another over stepping stones where it’s hard to find a footing. I fall into the icy water but climb to the surface again and continue to the other side. Every day is a crossing, and every day I stumble and fall. But I think I’m learning from him. He takes an otherwise dead universe and animates it, brings everything to life in his blindness, which is a kind of vision itself.
Dear God, I’m chattering like him. I’m under the influence, not only of a couple pints of Export but of Borges himself.
You can be sure I will come to see you when I return in a few days.
I signed the letter “Love, Jay,” folded it, and placed it within an envelope I found in the desk, feeling the intense satisfaction of having begun to tell a story in my own way and words. I took the letter downstairs to the front desk and asked them to post it for me in the morning. And damn the torpedoes!
19
AFTER BREAKFAST WE returned to our room, where Borges lay fully dressed on his narrow bed and groaned.
“You’re in pain?”
“My head is not perfect,” he said. “I feel like Admiral Nelson at the end.”
“The Battle of Trafalgar?”
“Ah, Trafalgar, yes. Think of dear old Nelson, hit by a dastardly French sharpshooter who hid in the riggings of a nearby vessel. He said to his lieutenant, ‘Hardy, I am shot through. My spine is shattered, and I shall die.’ And he died, not an hour later, saying, ‘At least I have done my duty.’ ”
“You have not been shot through,” I said.
“Do you challenge me?”
“To a duel? If you like. There are swords in the lobby. Why not?”
He rubbed his temples, crinkling his brow, and I saw that he hadn’t quite recovered from his fall into a ditch by the roadside near Aviemore. With reluctance, I handed him one of the potent blue pills that Dr. Brodie had provided. Then gave him another, vaguely recalling the doctor’s warning. I myself had had a version of these pills, of course, but they only made matters worse for me, producing nightmares that left me wandering the streets of St. Andrews at night in misery. Which is why I flushed them.
“I shall just close my eyes for a few minutes, and then we shall proceed,” he said. I watched him drop, as ever, into profound and childlike sleep.
* * *
—
I went back into the lobby to call Mackay Brown through the hotel manager, who was happy to oblige, having disappointed us with the bad news about Mr. Singleton. It was time to arrange a visit to Orkney, where I would get a sense of the physical place, meet the man himself, and actually hear the human voice behind the words. I might even lay my hands on some original manuscripts, thus pleasing Professor Falconer.
The writer picked up on the second ring. “Hellooo? Is anyone there?” He sounded defensive, cramped, and fearful, and the line was scratchy.
“Mr. Brown, this is Jay Parini. From St. Andrews. We exchanged letters, and you sent me your number. I’m writing a thesis on your work.”
“I’ve only just had the telephone,” he said. There was a long pause, with a windy noise on the line. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes, it’s working. I hear you.”
“Aye, good.”
“I’m wondering if I might stop by, Mr. Brown. I’m in Inverness with a friend, an elderly Argentine writer, a poet, a writer of stories. Like yourself. He’s blind.”
“I’m not blind.”
“No, my friend is blind.”
“Oh, dear. This is very bad news.”
“I’m guiding him around the Highlands.”
“Ah, good lad. And where are you?”
“Inverness.”
“Not so far! Then take the ferry.”
“The day after tomorrow?”
“Yes, good. There’s a ferry in the afternoon from Thurso Bay. I’ll meet you at five.”
“Where?”
“Stromness, the pier head. How will I recognize you? There are sometimes other passengers, whom one doesn’t really see.”
