A LONELY RED booth by the side of the road caught my eye. Who placed calls from here, in the middle of the Cairngorms? This was a godsend, and I pulled over abruptly.
Borges startled, as if something were wrong, and I explained that I had to make a call. It would take only a few moments. He looked weirdly disappointed, as if I had interrupted the journey for no good reason, and slumped backward, closing his eyes.
After I dialed the number, a bleeping sound came on the line, followed by a vacant buzz. I tried the operator, who asked me for the number I was trying to reach, but her voice cut out, leaving the same white buzz. One more time I tried the number for Hamilton Hall, and to my relief a young woman picked up (though it didn’t seem to ring): “Second floor, Hamilton. May I help you?” I asked her to knock on Bella’s door.
“I’ll try,” she said without enthusiasm.
She came back several minutes later with the news that nobody answered her knock. If this were really true, why would she have been gone for so long? Perhaps Bella had answered the knock but had told her hallmate to pretend she was away?
When I got into the car again, I sighed. My feelings silently filled the car.
“This is about the young woman?”
“Yes. Bella Law.”
“She’s even finer than this marvelous name. Am I right?”
“I find her quite wonderful. There’s a rare critical intelligence, a sharpness. And she has a sense of justice—she leads an antiwar group in St. Andrews.”
“Everything about your description sounds dangerous and appealing.”
She was indeed both dangerous and appealing. Not unlike Alastair in many ways.
We resumed our journey, heading into an open stretch of road with stirring views on either side. I took in the measureless landscape, which swept upward along dun-colored hillsides to a series of mountains, one behind the other. I could only imagine the colors when, in their appropriate seasons, the mustard-yellow gorse or purple heather bloomed. It was sad to think of Borges and his blindness and how much richness passed him by. No wonder he lived so fully in the great room of his mind.
I confessed the difficulty of putting the images I saw into adequate words, and he nodded eagerly.
“This is, my dear, the work before us, always. To find a language adequate to what is revealed. I’m glad you know this. I feel the same consternation quite often, trying to attach feelings to words, to summon the image and declare it pure.”
At a wayside inn at the edge of a remote village whose name I didn’t know, we stopped for a lunch of mulligatawny and cheese rolls. Borges seemed uncharacteristically subdued during the meal, and I hoped his mood had shifted away from the frantic philosophizing, which had begun to wear thin. But as soon as we got back to the car, he turned back to metaphysics: always a latent preoccupation with him, and one that surfaced like a sea monster that popped its head above the black waters, looked around warily, then dived back in. It was, I thought, as if the narrow seat and low ceiling of my car forced a pressure in his head that must erupt.
“Does time really exist?” he asked. “No,” he answered himself. He quoted Schopenhauer: “No man has ever lived in the past, and no one will ever live in the future; the present alone is the form of all life.” He then referred to a Buddhist scholar who said, “The duration of life lasts only while a thought lasts.”
“But we do have a past,” I said, my impatience boiling over. “I remember mine pretty well.”
“You think you do.” Then, after a long pause, he asked, “Why did you come to Scotland? To escape this past you think you remember so well?”
“To escape my mother, that’s more like it,” I said. “In her mind I have no life that’s not involved with hers. When she gets hungry, she tells me to eat.”
“Dear brother,” he said, “we confront the same issue. I’m trying to forget Doña Leonor as I speak. Every moment I pass with you is a removal from her, an excision. She will never approve of Maria Kodama. Fortunately she does not yet know about this matter of the heart.” He seemed to chew his cud for a bit. “What will your mother think of Miss Law?”
“I barely know Bella myself,” I said. “You’re leaping ahead.” The idea of my mother in a room with Bella was impossible to contemplate. They were creatures from different planetary systems who would never in my lifetime coincide.
“Bella is an object of your desire, and you will know her. I promise this. Borges predicts as much.”
“I hope you’re a gifted fortune-teller.”
“Call me Scheherazade,” said Borges. “The Arabian Nights is the source of everything I do.”
“Who actually wrote those stories?”
“I did. I’ve written everything.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“No, but it’s true. I’ve written every classic several times. This has, of course, often irritated my contemporaries.”
This was a joke, I assumed. Nonetheless, it stopped our conversation, and a unique half hour of silence followed, during which I wondered why I hadn’t wanted to say anything explicit to Borges about what my mother might think of Bella. I never wrote a word about Bella to my mother in a letter home. But why? Was I afraid to admit that I had dreams of sexual fulfillment, much like any other person of my age? Bella’s politics would have puzzled or angered her, that much I knew. In her world, Bella would have seemed alien, inexplicable.
Borges gasped now. “Let me tell you, Sancho,” he said, “these few days in the Highlands will live in my head as a lovely interval, a break from life as it normally flows.”
I was an interval in his mind? A humbling thought. But it worked the other way around, too: Borges was a discrete interval in my life. For these few days he controlled my every waking moment—colonizing my life, as it were. Yet after our brief swing through the Highlands, I would never see him again. How would I? He would disappear south, to Oxford, then return to Argentina. He would probably die soon. Other than in his writing, which I must read, this would be our only encounter.
We churned upward in my lowest gear on a steep patch some miles from Aviemore. I paused by the side of the narrow road to take in the Cairngorms with a mental gasp: range after range of mountains, with a purple-and-yellow mist girdling them midway, their peaks many-faceted, glinting. Glens and corries—those deep pits in the rolling landscape—darkened in the distance. The hills bathed in the gold light of late afternoon. I saw below us an isolated stand of pines like an unshaven clump of hair on a man’s cheek. Deer loped in the field below a dip in the road, moving through panels of bronze light, and the sight of them affected me strongly. The world was unspeakably beautiful as well as strange.
“Where are we?”
“There’s a view of the Cairngorms. We’re near Aviemore.” I described everything I could see in as much detail as I could, and his ears seemed to cup my words as a thirsty man might cup water in his palms.
There was a sudden crack of thunder, with a splash of rain. Hadn’t the sun just been shining?
“Let me walk here,” said Borges. “The storm calls to me!”
Before I could ask him not to, he opened the door and leaped into the beating rain. I heard him shouting the famous line from Lear—“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!”—as he tapped his way forward and up the road with his cane. As I opened the door to rush after him, my car slipped backward, the emergency brake stuttering, unable to get a grip on the steep incline. I cursed and jammed a foot on the brakes and managed, with difficulty, to lock the car into first gear; it would not fall backward as easily now, though I didn’t trust my transmission. I pulled and released the emergency brake several times, as this sometimes brought it back to life. The last thing I needed was for Rocinante to topple from this scenic perch.
Satisfied that the car would hold firm, at least temporarily, I lifted my eyes to locate Borges, and it took a moment to register that he was nowhere in view. There was no bend in the road that could have absorbed him. Where the hell was he? I found myself wondering, half seriously, if this sorcerer had somehow donned an invisible cloak.
I jumped from the car and rushed up the slope, calling for him. The name of Borges echoed in the hills, magnifying. Borges! Borges!
A figure lodged in my peripheral vision, a dark blur below the road. He must have toppled when I wasn’t looking! He had skidded down a small slope covered with loose wet gravel.
“Borges!” I called again, and skimmed over the loose-packed surface myself, keeping my balance on the scree like a skier up to my waist in fresh powder. He had landed facedown in a tuft of thistle, with his cane a few yards beyond him. He wasn’t moving.
Dear God in heaven, I thought: I had killed Borges!
I rolled him onto his back gently. There was a nearly invisible scrape on his forehead, and he groaned slightly, opening his eyes. He was alive!
“Can you speak, Borges?”
He squinted into the sun, which had burst into the open, his eyelids quivering.
“Borges, do you hear me?”
“This was not, as Milton would say, a fortunate fall,” he said.
It relieved me that in the midst of this crisis he could still quote John Milton. His world had obviously not collapsed.
“I seem to have lost my balance,” he said.
“Can you stand?”
He pulled himself to his feet, leaning on me, exhaling. I tried to help him maneuver onto some flat ground.
“I’m perhaps dizzy,” he said. “The sky whirls.”
“You’d better lie down.”
“I’m a little weary, as you mention this.” I helped him to lie in some soft grass and put a mossy stone under his head for a pillow.
“Just rest here and let me get some help,” I said, though I couldn’t imagine how or where I would find it, as Aviemore was miles away.
“We’re alone in this wilderness,” said Borges. “So let me die here, in the soft rain. It is not so bad. The crows, they will pick the flesh off my bones. Nature will accommodate me. I will be absorbed.”
This was stupidly melodramatic. But I restrained myself.
By a stroke of luck—or Borgesian magic—only a few minutes passed before a young farmer drove by in an old Land Rover, and I flagged him down. There was, he said, a cottage hospital in Kingussie, near Aviemore, and together we managed to get Borges onto the wide backseat of his car. I followed them into town, thinking about the strange fragility of our physical lives and how tenuously we cling to these pale scraps of flesh. I thought, too, about what Alastair might say when he found out that Borges had stumbled from the road. Should I take the blame for this? Was it my fault? I imagined a glare from Alastair, with arched eyebrows, and already I resented it.
The only other patient at the hospital was a pregnant young woman who had taken a spill in her house, and she did her best to ignore us. A soft-spoken young nurse with brown hair in a bun addressed me in the hallway outside the ward, wondering if Borges was my father. Once again! I did my best to suppress a laugh this time around, and stopped myself from saying yes, he was my father, and I wanted to kill him. Patricide! I began to tell her that he was a writer from Argentina, head of the National Library, but then realized that this information was irrelevant, and I paused midsentence.
“He’s good and lucky, aye,” she said. “A blow to the head, and he’s an elderly man. We’ll keep him overnight. It takes twenty-four hours to tell if there’s a concussion, but I don’t think so. A wee shake-up. Not to worry.”
Not to worry, indeed. I found a bed in a nearby boarding house, queasy with a kind of hangover from the adrenaline rush of the day. Savoring my privacy, I lay down in a big double bed, relieved to have time and space to myself. A whole room of silence! But when I closed my eyes to try to nap, I kept seeing images of Borges’s motionless body in the scree and heard a voice resounding in the hills in some accusatory fashion: Borges! Borges!
And what if he did have a concussion? What harm would it do—headaches, confusion? Difficulty speaking? Speech was, of course, the main thing about Borges. A laconic Borges would be no Borges.
Still shaking, I remembered the most recent letter I’d gotten from Billy and fished it out of my rucksack. It was written on blue paper, crackly and thin, in ink that must have smeared in the sweat of its composition, with some passages too blurry to read. I read with amazement now:
Every day it’s Russian roulette, we spin the barrel of the gun. I’ve been lucky so far. Empty chambers, again and again. How’s that for shit-ass luck?
The guys on patrol. They pop off one by one like low little lights. I was in a village near the DMZ last week, doing some “intelligence work.” Don’t that sound smart?
Anyway, my friend Nicky Boose (called Bozo around here) is a medic, more like a nurse, and I was visiting him, and to say it was a fucking nightmare is too kind to bad dreams. I stood in the tent and saw a doctor dipping his head into the entrails of a corpse. He came up looking kind of sick. Get me the Medivac, he said. So we called for a chopper on the radio.
Good luck with that, I thought. The pilots, they were probably dead already.
Saw a couple of Green Berets lying on the tables, bleeding, one guy hollering loud for his Mom, next to some local militia, the ARVN, these fucking useless Vietnamese who pretend to help us but set booby traps in our tents. I’m sure of it. They’re worse than enemies.
I never saw a dead body till I came here, unless you count my old dog Kisser. Even the living are dead here. We move around like corpses, waiting for the little tags on our bare toes and maybe a snug plush quiet coffin (if we’re lucky). Or just to rot in the jungle.
Don’t mean to drag you down, amigo. You can die in lots of ways, anywhere. Get killed crossing a street. Smacked by a fucking bus. Bang: you’re a memory. Or worse, a lost memory.
So what’s the moral, if I got one? Get laid. It’s the only wisdom anybody gets from this shit. Get laid often as you can. Make more of us. Fuck and fuck and fuck some more. Fuck the world hollow. That’s my goal now, the future I dream about. Look out, girls. Billy’s coming home!
Jesus, I loved this letter, the weird street wisdom here, the army slang, the sassy tone. Billy had “a gift for gab,” my mother always said. Well, he’d gone a step further here, lodging a few paragraphs beyond my forgetting.
That night I returned to the hospital after dinner with a packet of chocolate-covered biscuits, which Borges devoured, though I could see from an empty tray at the foot of his bed that he’d been fed by the staff. I felt relieved to see him recovered, more like his old incorrigible self. We talked happily, our voices echoing loudly in the ward, where Borges was now the only occupant.
“You can sleep here, Giuseppe,” said Borges. He touched a finger to the small bandage on his head, which covered the invisible abrasion—no more than a scratch. “The nurse tells me there are no other patients. Only Borges.”
“Thanks, but I’ve found a nice room nearby.”
“So I will miss you.”
I believed he meant this, and found myself weirdly missing him, too. In just a couple of days he’d become more to me than just an annoying task that Alastair had thrust upon me. We had begun to forge a connection.
It relieved me that Borges certainly had not lost his gift for speech. “When I woke,” he said, “I thought I was in the hospital again in Buenos Aires. When I was a young man, not yet forty, and soon after my father’s death, I stumbled into the overhanging ledge of a window. So sharp! My vision had already begun to fail me. I fell to the floor, bleeding profusely. In a pool of myself I lay there, dying! My mother found me in this frightful condition, and—you will imagine it too well—she woke the dead in the graveyard of Santa Maria de la Concepción. I lay for weeks in the ward, with blood poisoning. Close to death, I assure you, so very close. My life changed forever.”
“So how did your life change?” I asked.
“You ask the simplest of questions, which is a Socratic gift, dear boy. And yet it’s difficult to answer. This was my road to Damascus. I had a vision of God, or some concatenation of images that I believed was a composite god. In any case I was lifted into the Third Heaven. This is what Saint Paul called it, when he heard the choir of a thousand angels. I heard this singing, too, and could see my friends and enemies in the audience, their wings folded. It was heaven or hell. I am not sure which.”
“People close to death often glimpse the afterlife,” I said. “They see a kind of glow on the horizon like at dusk, when the sun has dipped behind the purple hills or below the lip of the sea.”
“You do say wonderful things,” he said, though I knew he exaggerated. I’d said nothing very special. Jasper would have laughed at my clichés!
Borges continued. “After my accident, in 1938, I began to write stories, the good ones. Incredible time it was. I could not stop writing. The angels spoke to me, and I took their dictation, without volition, no act of will on my part. This magic carpet unrolled for perhaps a decade. But the good years, I’m afraid they were fewer than I should have liked.”
“Why aren’t the good years still ahead of you?”
He reached out for my hand, which I extended in sympathy. “You know,” he said, “I remember waking after days of sleep in that hospital. I saw the nuns in their wimples, smiling and coaxing me into consciousness. They wondered if I had lost my mind. It’s not uncommon, they said, for one who has hit his head with a vengeance to forget things. But I wasn’t diminished in my recollective abilities but—dear God!—amplified. It was terrifying. As I lay there, I recalled the moldings and floorboards of every room in my house in Palermo. The towels in the laundry, with their intricate textures and colors. Every glass in the cupboard in our pantry, its exact size and shape. I could see one crystal goblet with a V-shaped chip and the bent silver knife in the drawer, every fork and spoon, some of them relics of a wedding from the nineteenth century. I could picture the faces of everyone I ever met and each leaf on every tree I’d ever met. I was engorged by these details, and wretchedly unhappy.”
“That’s a wild memory,” I said. “Frightening. It would make a good story.”
“And so it did. ‘Funes the Memorious,’ in which I imagine what life would be without the gift of forgetfulness. Funes was an unfortunate, you see, thrown from a horse and paralyzed. As he lay in his room, he found he could forget nothing. Nothing! He became the lonely and lucid observer of this unbearably precise world. He couldn’t sleep, the poor fellow, because sleep requires erasure, turning one’s back to experience. In the end he couldn’t think, only recall. To think, as you know, is to disallow differences, to generalize, to make abstractions. The activity of selection.”
“You’ve never forgotten a thing,” I said.
“Don’t say this! Why do you torment me?”
The nurse looked in. “Is everything good?”
“Not good!” Borges shouted. “Sancho has accused me of eidetic memory! He thinks I’m unable to discriminate among mental objects! He would confine me to a vertiginous world where every pebble has its own name. He is like John Locke, who tried to imagine a comprehensive language in which every word had only one referent. Can you imagine such a language? What library could contain these infinite volumes of expression?”
The nurse looked at Borges, then at me. “Are you accusing him of this?”
“It was more or less a joke,” I said.
“Once,” said Borges, “I imagined a total map of Argentina. It contained every mottled shadow in the landscape, each rock, bush, or brisk and rushing stream. The map withheld nothing! Every inch of every river had its corresponding mark on the map. The city of Buenos Aires wasn’t a crosshatch of streets and alleyways, parks and squares and hidden gardens; instead, every square foot of every street found a corresponding footprint on the map. The map was like a photograph that has resolved into such detail that nothing disappears. Not one leaf on any tree was missing.”
Puzzlement doesn’t begin to describe what befell the face of the nurse as she listened to Borges.
“The problem,” he said, “was that it unfolded to the exact size of the country. A perfect mirror of reality. It was useless.”
“You are not well,” said the nurse.
“On the contrary, I’ve never been better,” Borges said to her. “I have almost forgotten the cruel machinations of Oliverio Girondo. I recall only a handful of the many slights administered by Norah Lange over many decades. My mother’s insults fade into one large insult, which I have put into a drawer and locked. I can move forward, but only because so much has been abandoned and willfully forgotten. The weight of the past becomes light in the amnesia of my living. I move into the present unencumbered.”
“Are you all right, sir?” the nurse asked me.
“Yes.” I sipped a glass of water from the tray beside Borges’s bed.
“May I have a word with you?” she whispered in my ear.
I followed her into the hallway, beyond his hearing.
“Your friend seems very confused,” she said.
“This is just the way he talks.”
“He doesn’t appear to know what’s happened to him, even where he is.”
I assured her that Borges knew exactly where he was and what had occurred. I would collect him in the morning. If the doctor found no evidence of a concussion that required further medical attention, we would continue our journey northward, then return to St. Andrews in a couple of days.
“I would alert his family to the issues,” she said.
“Oh, I think they’re aware of his issues.”