WE LEFT THE maze at Scone Palace, with its subtle teachings and peculiar ghosts, and pushed on to Killiecrankie, well north of Perth, into the Cairngorms. I felt better now, getting into the rhythms of this peculiar journey, less resistant to Borges than before. I hoped to push into the mountains the next morning, when the peaks would acquire a kind of luminosity that would impress even a blind man. I would somehow have to put this into words for him or, in a cowardly fashion, just ignore everything I saw, as if blind myself.
Now, with the sun dropping in the skies, we crossed the River Garry, passing over an ancient bridge not far from the hamlet, which showed no signs of life as we approached. I pulled in front of a house with its shades drawn but a sign on the door: MORAG B&B. VACANCY. I suggested to Borges that we should find rooms here before dark set in.
After I rang the bell several times, an elderly woman opened the door. She pushed it out only a few inches, perhaps afraid that we might overwhelm her. Her long nose beaked through the crack.
“Rooms for the night?” I asked.
“Aye,” she said, letting us into a poorly lit hallway, where she turned on a lamp with a Tiffany-style glass shade. There was a heavy scent of perfume in the air, which mingled with the odor of cat piss.
“You will pay in advance,” she said.
“If that suits you.”
“The room is two pounds.”
“We need two rooms.”
“There is one room. It’s a large bed.”
“I was hoping for two rooms.”
“No hope for that,” she said, with a hint of glee.
“Is there a hotel in Killiecrankie? Two rooms would really be preferable.”
She simply stared at me.
“Such a wonderful name,” said Borges, as if pretending he hadn’t heard me all but beg for a way to avoid sharing a bed with him. “Killiecrankie. One of the fine legacies of Gaelic, with vowels expanding like an accordion and the air held in place by these brisk consonants.”
“Are there rooms nearby?” I asked. Surely there must be a hotel in the area, even a pub with a couple of rooms for guests.
“Not tonight,” she said, with a finality that closed the deal. “What will you have for breakfast?”
“Kippers,” said Borges. “Do I dare to wish for Arbroath smokies?”
“Toast and marmalade,” she said.
“Eggs?”
“Aye, a boiled egg. Bacon is extra.”
“I will gladly pay for bacon,” said Borges. “If there are no kippers, we must certainly have bacon.”
“You must use the toilet before me,” she said. “There’s only the one, in my bedroom. Don’t take long.”
Despite my dread at the thought of a long night at the Morag B&B, I filled in a form for us both and paid her the £2, with fifty pence extra for bacon in the morning. If I’m not mistaken, the money came from my wallet.
“It’s a shame about the shilling,” she said as I handed her the fifty-pence coin.
The country had only just gone decimal, and people of her generation couldn’t adjust to a change in currency. Many of them still thought in terms of guineas (a guinea being twenty-one shillings).
“You’ll probably get used to it,” I said. “It’s easier to count.”
“Easier for you.”
Borges sat in a rocker, smiling as he tipped forward and back. This drew a scowl from our hostess. A cat leaped into his lap, and he cried, “A tiger!”
“She’s the nice one,” said our hostess. “Pet her behind the ears.”
Borges obliged, and I could hear a loud rumbling purr.
“Have you lived here your whole life?” I asked.
“Do I look so poorly?”
“No, I didn’t mean…You live alone?”
“Since he died, my husband, Baldie.”
“He was bald?”
“Archibald. We called him Baldie.” She screwed up her eyes as if she might cry. “I’m Mrs. Braid.”
“Wife of Baldie Braid,” said Borges. He lifted his nose in the air. “Do I smell kidneys, Mrs. Braid?”
“Steak and kidney pie.”
I asked her where we might find a restaurant, and she suggested the adjacent pub, The Puddock. “They do food,” she said. This was a rare feature in Scottish pubs, where food took a backseat to alcohol. One was lucky to get a stale sausage roll or bag of crisps.
“The Puddock!” Borges cried. “Do you know what it means? The frog. A Scottish term for this amphibian.”
“Your father is correct,” she said.
“He’s not my father. He’s a friend.”
She eyed me with suspicion. Why would a young man travel with an elderly friend? And an obvious foreigner? I could sense these questions gathering in her mind like a purple bruise of cloud, and I felt accused, as if there were something unnatural about our connection.
“I go to bed at ten,” she said with a mild malevolence. “You’ll want to use the toilet before I retire.”
“Well before that, dear lady,” said Borges. “Sleep—and dreaming, of course—these are my favorite pastimes, just behind reading. A deep pleasure for a blind man, and such a relief to enter the darkness without expectation. I see vivid colors in my dreams, the whole rainbow unfolding.”
“You’re blind, so how do you read?”
“There are many readers in this world, and I discover them, one by one. One reader is sublime. Two is noise.”
We left Borges in the sitting room with the pets while Mrs. Braid showed me our room. To my dismay, the bed was not as wide as most doubles, and it smelled of stale urine and mothballs. The curtains were dark navy but seemed black. A bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling.
“There are towels in the bathroom,” she said. “It’s the blue door at the end of the hall. If you need hot water, let me know in advance. I’ll turn on the thingy.” She paused. “It’s extra. A few shillings in the old money.”
I told her we did not require baths, giving the illusion that we might after all be decent and undemanding (if possibly unhygienic) guests. “And the toilet?” In many Scottish houses a proper bathroom didn’t have a toilet, as it was used only for bathing. “Is there really only the one?”
“There was another down the hall at one time, but it’s off. Just knock on my bedroom door and you can use mine. We’ll get along well, won’t we?”
During our dinner of barely edible fish and chips in the Puddock, Borges drank three pints of beer. With trepidation, I delivered the pints into his hands, one after the other. His frequent urination had proved awkward enough during our daylight hours; at night, all bets were off.
After the meal we returned to the Morag B&B. Mrs. Braid had provided me with a key, but the dark house unnerved me. Nobody likes a dark house. Soon I found a switch and turned on the light in the hallway, then led Borges upstairs with some difficulty, as he had drunk more than he could handle. He squeezed my arm, leaning on his cane with the other hand for balance, singing a Scottish tune a bit too loudly as we entered our bedroom. His voice was unmusical, almost a rasp, but he sang with feeling.
“There is nostalgia in Scotland,” he said, “in their poetry and music, in the landscape, which I can smell. And their history is sad—a disappointed people. But I’m not nostalgic, Giuseppe. Except for the present. I’m drawn to what happens when it occurs. This is good news, perhaps, until it’s not occurring, at which point there will be less to interest me.”
By now I had lost my appetite for philosophy and wished only to sleep. The journey with Borges had been like standing before a teacher’s desk without your homework in hand, or stepping onto a stage without a script and being told to improvise (a recurrent nightmare of mine, in fact).
Remembering Mrs. Braid’s warning, I led Borges to her bedroom and opened the door without knocking, assuming for no good reason that our hostess would not be there.
She was there, however, propped in bed against the highly wrought mahogany headboard with a pillow behind her, a flannel sleeping cap tugged firmly over her ears, with a flashlight trained on a novel by Agatha Christie. A puffy down blanket rose to her chin, and a pince-nez was perched at the end of her nose, which looked even longer than I remembered it, an invasive organ that dominated the room.
“Ah, Mrs. Braid,” I said. “My friend needs to use the toilet.”
“I know,” she said. “He’s blind.”
Borges squeezed my arm, needing reassurance. And for the second time that day—as with the weird sisters—I sensed his vulnerability. It could not have been easy for him to move without sight, guided by a young stranger who had shown no obvious talent for reconnoitering the world.
“This way,” I said forcefully, leading him around the foot of the bed and feeling the pressure of Mrs. Braid’s eyes.
I tucked his toothbrush into the shirt pocket of his pajamas and positioned him in front of the toilet, then closed the door to wait outside.
And wait.
Could it really take fifteen or twenty minutes for Borges to pee and brush his teeth? Was he also composing an epic in his head?
“I’m not so well,” said Mrs. Braid. “It’s the hour. I don’t sleep well these days.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
When he had finished, I took my turn while Borges stood outside the door. When I came back into the room, he was sitting on the bed of our hostess, who looked less than comfortable, her nose lifted in the air like the Matterhorn, the nostrils pulsing, her thin lips pursing.
It didn’t surprise me that Borges had taken a seat on the bed. His legs weren’t strong, and he lacked mobility and balance, even with the cane.
As he and I lay in our own bed a short while later, I thought again of the call I should already have placed to Bella. There might have been a public phone at the Puddock, and surely there must be a phone box somewhere in this town, but I hadn’t bothered to look, and now I confronted the possibility that it wasn’t forgetfulness causing my lapse so much as a lack of confidence. I sighed, too loudly. Hesitation was a fault of mine, a fear of making binary choices, as I had discovered in the maze at Scone earlier in the day.
“I don’t like to hear a gasp from a young man,” said Borges. “There will be time for gasping. Is something wrong, dear boy?”
“I forgot to make a telephone call.”
A yellow glow from a streetlamp seeped through the thin curtains and tinted the ceiling. Borges, I guessed, saw just the usual nothing.
“But there’s no telephone.”
“Probably I could find a phone box in the village.” I knew I would have to put this off until morning.
“You are having an emergency?”
“The girl I told you about? Bella? I told her I’d call. We had planned to have dinner this week.”
“And now,” Borges said, “you have more important plans. I do understand. Norah Lange had this same tug on my heartstrings. Even to say the name, it makes me long for her. I do not speak of the Norah Lange who is now a very old woman—although I love that version of her, too. I long for the girl of nineteen or twenty, with scarlet hair and slender hips. She had freckles on her neck.”
I had an impulse to push him off the bed—the last thing I wanted now was to hear him droning on about lost love. I needed space to think about how I would explain to Bella that I had abandoned her for a batty old man of letters. But I knew by now that until Borges told his story, I’d have little chance for sleep. So I asked, “What happened between you and Norah?”
“I can’t speak of it. This is not a confessional, and in any case I’m not in thrall to priests who demand blunt confessions in return for absolution.” I waited for his own ruffle of anger to subside, his large and not especially fragrant body beside me, the mattress sloping toward the center, where we met and mingled in awkward ways.
“I loved her,” he said. “But so did Oliverio Girondo. A fool, a dandy, and certainly not a good writer. He was too old for Norah. He wore chocolate-colored suits and fedoras, and this outlandish mustache. Colorful waistcoats, too. I should have purchased a red or yellow waistcoat, but I believed, quite mistakenly, that Norah was above such things. She was a wild girl with a pure heart. So innocent. And the blandishments he could produce, these were effective, and she succumbed. Even worse, she married him, in secret, after more than a decade of fitful cohabitation. The saddest thing in the world.”
How on earth had I landed in bed with an elderly, loquacious blind man in a remote village in the Scottish Highlands? This man in his ridiculous yellow satin pajamas, with a smell of sour sweat, piss, and unfamiliar lotions?
“She didn’t need your approval,” I said.
“Don’t insult me, Giuseppe.”
I felt ridiculously small, and I determined not to speak to him again until morning. The escape into sleep had never seemed more delectable.
Borges shifted to his side now, his back against me; then he swiveled, pushing his face toward my pillow. I edged as far as I could to my side of the bed, nearly tipping onto the floor, barely catching myself on several occasions. He would aggressively spin in the opposite direction.
As the night progressed he repeated these aggressive gyrations, swiveling in one direction, then the next, dragging the blankets to his side, leaving me exposed and cold. His legs twitched, and he farted loudly. He grumbled and exhaled. He hummed.
Soon a hard rain slashed the windows and drummed on the slate roof, overwhelming the sounds of the old man who lay beside me.
I had finally approached the periphery of sleep when Borges grabbed my arm. “It’s nature, and she has summoned!”
“What?” I asked groggily.
“You must, please, convey me toward the little room.”
I wasn’t surprised. Three pints of beer sloshed in his weak bladder. So I guided him into the dark hallway, backlit by light from our bedroom, and knocked softly at Mrs. Braid’s door.
“It’s urgent!” Borges cried as I opened the door and led him forward. Mrs. Braid lay in the dark, silent as we shuffled past her. Easing him in front of the toilet again, I backed into the bedroom.
“What’s wrong?” asked our hostess.
“My friend needed the facility.”
“The wee room?”
“The toilet.”
“It’s not an hour since he did his duty.”
“He’s old. His bladder’s weak.”
“I’m older, and my bladder is fine.”
I had no wish to play the game of dueling bladders and kept silent, listening to the rain beat on the windows.
“He’s taking his time,” she said. “My Baldie, he had trouble making water, at the end.”
Although Borges and I had just quarreled, I didn’t like Mrs. Braid’s implication. “He’s not at the end,” I said.
Soon enough Borges grunted loudly on the other side of the door. “Giuseppe! It is finished!”
“The last words of our Savior,” said Mrs. Braid.
Borges stepped through the door, smiling.
I bade Mrs. Braid a good night and led Borges back to our bedroom, where he fell asleep within moments, but I began to worry when he gulped, gasped, and rattled. His lungs were billows that had seen better days, and he groaned miserably, uttering phrases in Spanish or Latin. Feeling a million miles from the realms of sleep, I let my thoughts turn back to Bella. Was it possible that she and Angus had drifted apart? Hadn’t she all but said as much? Their relationship was not happy, I decided, and I had not only an opportunity but a duty to intervene! I thought I could see Bella’s features in a shadow that passed over the ceiling. Was I dreaming? The face floated toward me, and just as I reached out for it, Borges bolted up beside me.
“I’m needing the toilet,” he said.
“Again? Already?”
“Scottish beer, it runs through the pipes of this old building.”
“Argentine beer not so much?”
He dug his nails into my wrist. “One would not like an accidental occurrence.”
I led him back to Mrs. Braid’s door, wondering if I should knock. Borges shifted from foot to foot and breathed urgently, a little Dutch boy with his thumb in the dike. I pushed open the door, and holding Borges by the waist, I guided him around the bed of our snoring hostess. Once I had him installed again at the best angle, I stepped outside and closed the door behind me.
I waited, shivering.
“Borges?” I whispered.
No answer came from within, and I supposed he had decided to sit on the toilet for a while. A mild grunt confirmed this, and I resigned myself to waiting.
“Baldie didn’t come out,” said Mrs. Braid. Her voice made me jump. “Not the last time.”
“What’s that?”
“Seven years ago, he went into the wee room, my Baldie. I didn’t want to disturb, but I might have saved him.”
“He died in there?”
“On the crapper.”
“Your husband died in there?”
“Aye. Is he dead, too, your old man?”
“I don’t think so. I would say no.”
“He should answer if you call.”
I took this cue. “Borges! Are you there?”
Mrs. Braid said, “I might ring for the police.”
“I don’t think so. He’s probably not dead.”
“Not yet,” she said.
She turned on her light and sat up, while I settled at the foot of the bed. The clock on her dresser struck twelve loud pings.
“My Baldie, what a good man.”
“I’m sure he was.”
“Not a mean bone in his body.”
“No.”
We spent a further five minutes or so on the virtues of Baldie Braid.
Finally a thin voice came from behind the door: “Giuseppe?”
It was, I had to admit to myself, a relief that he was alive.
“Where’s the door? I’m inside the room.”
I opened the door and extracted him, leading him by the elbow.
“You got lucky,” said Mrs. Braid. “I wasn’t so lucky. Sat there with his head hanging down, he did. Dead as a fish.”
“Who is dead?” Borges asked.
“Baldie died in there, on the crapper,” I said.
There was anguish on Borges’s face. “My own father died on the crapper,” he said. “Named for Thomas Crapper, as you will know. Mother found him sitting there, and the lightbulb dead as well. I shall die like this. Like Baldie. Like my father.”
“Not here,” said Mrs. Braid.
“In this universe, anything is possible. You will excuse me, Mrs. Braid. I recall what Sir Thomas Browne said in the Religio Medici. A gentleman is indeed one who gives the least amount of trouble. In this, tonight, I have failed.”
“When you’ve got to go, sir, you’ve got to go,” she said. “It’s an old saying in Scotland.”
This was, for Mrs. Braid, a bright and unexpected moment of generosity, and she opened a wide grin for the first time, revealing sharp and pointed teeth like spikes on a fence.
Borges said, “Sir Walter Scott, perhaps? That sounds like him.”