“BORGES IS IN town,” Alastair said breathlessly when I ran into him at the entrance to Geddes, a purveyor of fine wines, cheeses, and cured meats in Market Street: not the sort of place where Alastair Reid would normally shop for provisions. He explained that the Argentinian had been dropped off at Pilmour the night before by Norman di Giovanni, an American who often traveled with him these days. “Borges is a bit frail, but Norman has left him in my care for a few weeks. We’re translating some new poems.”
Together we stepped into the lovely shop with its rich smells, and I watched with interest as he bought a thick slice of Dolcelatte, an especially creamy version of Gorgonzola, and a bottle of dark Spanish wine. Good wine, for once. I didn’t think he would normally shop at Geddes, where everything cost so much. When he asked if I would come to dinner, I quickly agreed, but I confessed that despite his exhortations, I had yet to read anything by Borges.
“The translations are mostly terrible,” Alastair said, as if to excuse me.
“I must learn Spanish,” I said. Spanish wasn’t difficult, not compared to Greek.
Alastair of course knew I would not learn Spanish just to read Borges. He touched my shoulder as if to say, There, there…
“He’s here!” Jasper said, greeting me at the door.
Jeff stood behind him, looking beatific with a yellow bandanna on his head, breathing expectantly. It was as if God himself sat in the room next door.
The old man hunched in the shadows, in the wing chair, leaning on a cane with an ivory handle, his hair slicked back. He looked every inch his age of seventy-one, even a decade older, wearing a baggy brown pin-striped suit with big cuffs, his checked waistcoat looped by a gold chain. His wide powder-blue tie was full of orange waterfalls, flying fish, and the residue of many meals. The soiled and fraying collar of his shirt suggested that it had been in use for many years, if not generations. He was talking to himself now, smiling in a twitchy way, lifting his big empty eyes to the ceiling like headlamps.
We approached him without speaking.
“This is Jay Parini,” Jasper said in his piping voice.
“I’m glad to meet you, sir,” I said.
“Speak louder, I’m blind!” said Borges.
Jasper made a little twirl around his ear with a finger.
“Jay Parini!” I shouted.
“Ah, Giuseppe Parini!” he said. “One of my favorites of the Italian poets. Il giorno. What a performance! The Alexander Pope of Italy!”
“I know the poem a little, yes.” Though I was unjustifiably proud to share the last name of this eighteenth-century poet, I’d never bothered to read his verse carefully. Could Borges smell my fraudulence?
“I’m so pleased to meet you at last,” he said. “Do you know Palermo?”
“I’ve never been to Italy.”
“Not in Sicily, with the Mafia. It’s in Buenos Aires. Palermo is a barrio—an adjunct quarter. Alas, there are gangsters in my Palermo, too. I will admit this. The kinship of thieves, men with knives! But you must know, it’s one of the oldest parts of the city, and such lovely sad colonial architecture. Many Italians settled there, and they often speak in Italian in the streets. The best of them read the poetry of Parini.”
I’d soon discover that he often spoke like this, with impressionistic bullet points, circumnavigations, and associations: a wild disjunctive manner. He seemed to chase his own tail around an invisible pole, and I wondered if this manner had something to do with his blindness, as if those who can’t see can sense more than the rest of us, make daring mental leaps, sometimes doubling back on themselves to clarify and reinforce earlier lines of argument.
“Jay is a writer,” Jasper said.
“I’m sure of it: Giuseppe Parini! I’d have been a better writer, perhaps more widely read, had my name been Federico García Lorca. You must know Lorca—a poet, a playwright, and a ferocious egoist? He came to Buenos Aires once, about forty years ago. Kept very bad company. Oliverio Girondo! Don’t let me talk about this particular man, please!”
“Girondo?” asked Jasper.
“I wish I had never heard the man’s name.”
Alastair caught the end of this conversation as he stepped into the room. “Lorca!” he said. “What a good poet. I like his plays, too.”
“Alastair,” said Borges, “you say this only to irritate me.”
“It’s a failing of yours, Borges, this hatred of Lorca.”
“You must know, I have worse feelings about Girondo. He stole from me the most lovely woman in the world, Norah Lange. He stole my bride.”
“You were never married to her.”
“But this is the problem. Let me explain to Giuseppe.” The massive globe of his head spun in my direction. “The catastrophe happened in 1934, I believe. Or was it 1933? Memory is a mirror that may easily shatter. The shards would cut me into ribbons. I would bleed on this floor.”
Alastair said to Jeff and me, “He’s melodramatic, but he controls himself on the page.”
“You don’t know what I suffered at the hands of Girondo,” said Borges, gazing at the ceiling.
“I do!” Jeff said. “I have suffered at his hands as well. He was last seen in Ohio.”
Alastair loved this, as did Jasper, who clapped, claiming that he too had been wronged by Girondo in his school in St. Andrews. “Girondo is everywhere,” he said.
“Then you will understand,” said Borges.
Soon we gathered around the kitchen table for a succulent beef stew made with pearl onions and garlic, red potatoes, and capers, all cooked in a thick madeira sauce. Alastair poured wine for everyone, including Jasper. On the Aga sat a trayful of Alastair’s familiar brownies.
Borges said, “I have dreamed of being in Scotland through my whole life.”
“When you wish upon a star,” said Jasper.
“My family had Nordic roots, but my grandmother—she was thoroughly English, from Staffordshire. She was Fanny Haslam. My great-grandfather, Edward Haslam, was a schoolmaster in Buenos Aires, which is where my grandmother met the colonel.” He recited this information as if it had been printed on a card and memorized, to be pulled out for the right occasions.
“That’s his grandfather, the colonel,” Jeff said, and I wondered when he’d imbibed all this Borgesian lore.
“A very great man, yes. And English was my first language,” said Borges, “the language of my nursery.”
“So why do you speak with such an accent?” asked Jasper.
Alastair glared at him.
“It’s not that I don’t like the accent,” Jasper added.
“It’s a Staffordshire accent,” said Alastair.
“He is teasing me always, dear Alejandro.”
“I’m a funny man. Ask Jay.”
“Eso! I have never been amusing in the same way. But it’s a small tragedy, not a large one. My dear friend Bioy Cesares—he carries the humor for both of us.”
“I do love The Invention of Morel,” said Alastair.
“The one perfect novel in the history of novels.”
“A fugitive on an island, a murderer, somewhere in the Pacific. Time dissolves. Reality dissolves,” Alastair said.
“Readers become invisible, even to themselves. Only the story lives. It’s the fate of the writer, yes, as well, to disappear.”
“How is Elsa?” asked Alastair.
“My wife, too, has disappeared, and I’m not unhappy. Marriage has never been in my gift.”
“What?”
“We are divorcing, I will acknowledge the truth. Have I failed to say this? My apologies, but—how to explain? This union which was never a union. Appearances deceive. We never really knew each other. A word of advice, Giuseppe. Do not rush into marriage.”
As if rushing were my problem.
“You courted Elsa for five decades,” said Alastair. “That’s half a century!”
“There is truth in this, but not the whole truth. I loved her when she was a girl of seventeen. I married her when she was an old woman. Never confuse the two. Think how often our cells die, and they’re replaced one by one! We lose ourselves again and again, and the worst is always yet to come. This marriage was my mistake. I loved Norah Lange, in any case. Not Elsa. My mother warned me. She said, Elsa wants your money. I said, Mother, I have no money. Ay, caramba!”
“Nobody says Ay, caramba,” said Alastair.
“Alejandro. Did you not hear me say it?”
“Jay writes poetry,” said Jasper, perhaps noticing that I didn’t know where to put an oar into these swirling waters. In this I sometimes resembled my father, who could stand by the side, failing to assert himself. (I didn’t like this about myself and would have to work over the years to overcome it.)
“Have you published a book, Giuseppe?”
“Not yet,” I said. “I don’t have enough poems, and they aren’t ready for the public.”
“I said as much when I was your age. But I published the book anyway.”
He ate greedily, helping after helping, and we all watched in amazement the way he repeatedly wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Sometimes he withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and cleaned his fingers.
“He likes his food,” said Alastair. “But if he stays in Scotland long enough, it will cure his appetite.”
“Scotland is very dear to my heart, have you not understood me? In part, I think, this is because the greatest writer in the English language lived in Scotland.”
“Who is this?” I asked.
“Stevenson, dear boy.”
“I’ve been singing his praises to Jay,” said Alastair.
“So have I,” said Jasper.
“I love Robert Louis,” said Jeff.
“ ‘Home is the sailor, home from sea, / And the hunter home from the hill.’ These are, Giuseppe, the finest lines of English poetry. I would kill to have written such lines.”
“They pass the envy test,” said Alastair.
“In fact, I shall write them one day,” said Borges. “I shall claim them.”
“He’s not much read in the States,” I said.
“In the States, very little is read,” said Borges. “I have traveled in your country, always to lecture. At Harvard, for instance, in Cambridge. I tell students to read the great ones: Stevenson, Chesterton, Wells. And Chidiock Tichborne. Now there is a poet.”
Alastair raised an eyebrow. “Tichborne?”
Borges warmed his face in the spotlight of our attention. “He wrote only one poem,” he said, “his ‘Elegy.’ An elegy for himself. He was condemned to the Tower of London, a would-be assassin of Elizabeth. A Catholic, remember. Part of the Babington Plot to bring Mary, Queen of Scots, to the throne. It’s the most perfect poem:
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain.
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
“Does it get better, I ask you? ‘My crop of corn is but a field of tares.’ Metaphor raised to the level of perfection. And I, you see, am an old man. I’m in my own Tower, awaiting execution. ‘And now I live, and now my life is done.’ ”
“Are you going to die soon?” asked Jasper, who was removing the capers from his stew one by one, lining them up on the side of the bowl.
“Indeed, boy. Look at these withered hands, my stoop! Look into my eyes, which see nothing!”
“Enough,” said Alastair. “Scotland is working its dark magic. Morbidity is the national curse.”
“I must read Tichborne,” I said. “All of him.”
“Yes! And if you read Spanish, Giuseppe, I will also recommend Lugones. Turn first to his history of the Jesuits. What a masterpiece! But who reads Lugones now? He was the hero of my youth: poet and translator, theologian, historian, essayist, playwright, novelist. Does anyone write in so many genres today?”
“I do,” said Alastair.
“Alejandro, for shame! Nobody is Lugones. Our age murders great writers. There are no readers for such a man.”
“You’re a great writer,” said Jasper.
“A great reader, perhaps. Great readers are scarce, more difficult to find than great writers. This was not the case in the age of Leopoldo Lugones.”
Alastair led Borges into the sitting room after dinner, and Jeff passed around wine in pewter goblets that belonged to the house, and the tray of glistening brownies, which reminded me of the last time we’d shared some, with Bella. I wished I could have brought her with me tonight to meet Borges. She’d have liked his talk, his thought excursions, this one-man literary spectacle!
Borges lifted his brownie to sniff it before biting into it. Then he smiled, with apparent relief. “I have, how do you say, a sweet tooth. Alejandro knows me well.”
“You’ll find these to your liking, Borges. My special Scottish brownies, the ones I gave you last night. Laced with stardust.”
“They make me so happy.”
An hour later the brownies had taken hold, and Borges was cheerily quoting reams of his favorite writers by heart, lecturing us on any number of topics, from Zeno’s paradoxes to the Zohar, quoting verbatim a lengthy passage from De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: “Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or a hundred years in one night.”
When we clapped for him, he said, “I’m not your John Barrymore, my grandmother’s favorite actor, but I will accept your approbation.” He stood, leaning forward on his cane. “We must take the air, no? I need to breathe! The North Sea beckons!”
“A walk in the dark,” said Jeff. “What a good idea.”
“For a blind man, it’s business as usual,” said Alastair.
We stepped into the tingling air under a full moon and reeled across the golf course toward the beach. Nobody but Jasper was sober.
Borges said, “You must know, I longed for the presence of the North Sea as a boy. And now here I am, too blind to see it, but I know it by its presence. Smell the salt!”
Jeff said, “It’s straight ahead of you, a hundred yards or so.”
The old man took off as if he could see, rushing in the direction of the water, where the moonlight splashed with a strange intensity. It wasn’t an easy route, however brief, as he had to cross the seventeenth hole first, near sand traps and roughs. When he came to the sea he would have to plunge through a ridge of marram grass.
“He’s going to kill himself,” I said to Alastair.
“He’s Borges. He can fly.”
Was Alastair so high that he’d lost touch with the physical world?
I was not especially clear-headed myself, but Jeff and I followed close behind Borges, as if shadowing a boisterous two-year-old.
Borges stopped on the brink of a sweeping dune, listening to the water or perhaps the gods. He lifted his arms with his cane in the air and whirled around, but when he stopped, he was facing us and the Old Course, not the sea. In a thundering manner, he began to recite The Seafarer in its original Anglo-Saxon.
“Mæg ic be me sylfum / soðgied wrecan,/ siþas secgan.”
“Should we turn him around?” asked Jeff in a whisper.
“Let him be,” I said. It was too wonderful, unlikely, and satisfying: a blind old poet beside a putting green. Alastair, Jeff, Jasper, and I gathered before him, listening to the odd recitation, the cries of gulls overhead and the nearby surf nearly drowning him out.
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.”