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.”
It was like a dream ferry, which sometimes deposited ghosts, or fluttering empty sleeves.
“I have longish brown hair. Glasses. My friend is a blind man with a cane.” I didn’t want to say to Mackay Brown that I would surely recognize him—the scrunched, sun-blasted face I’d seen in photographs, his unruly brown ringlets of hair, and a lower jaw that lunged forward like the bottom drawer of a dresser extended to its full length.
“God has a special place in his heart for the blind,” he said.
“Will we find somewhere to stay in Stromness?”
“Of course! I shall ask Hamish at the Strom for a couple of rooms. He’s a generous man, especially when he pours a drink. There are rooms above the bar. No need to book.”
It worried me that there was no need to book. Such rooms could not be comfortable, but then, this was research. I might learn something!
“I’ll see you on Thursday!” he said, and after only a few seconds he shouted, “Can you hear me, sir?”
“Yes, I hear you! The day after tomorrow!”
Borges was animated after a short sleep. “I’m newborn,” he said as we got back into my car late in the morning. “Remounted on Rocinante, so we must visit Loch Ness, the home of this terrible and sad monster. Grendel!”
“Nessie,” I said.
I noticed that Borges had more than recovered. His skin looked clear and less wrinkled. His high spirits swelled the car, exhausting me slightly.
“These are the same beast, I assure you. Nessie is Grendel.”
I seized the moment and put forward my plan for a visit to Orkney to Borges, and he didn’t object.
“What a splendid idea,” he said. “I want to meet your man, this illustrious poet of the north world!”
Was he mocking me? I gripped the wheel tightly as I drove, my mind drifting to Bella. Had I overstepped the mark in that letter? She might think I’d lost my mind, and she might be right.
We would spend a day at Loch Ness to satisfy Borges and then head to Orkney the following morning, after finding a room at one of the many lodgings by the lake; the guidebook listed several of them. At this point all I wanted was an initial meeting with Mackay Brown, and if things went well, I’d return in a month for a full interview.
“After Orkney,” said Borges, “we must stop at Culloden, field of that sad battle. This will provide a climax for our lovely excursion, I’m quite sure.”
The site of this ancient battlefield had been calling to him, and I knew we must stop, however briefly, on the way back to St. Andrews. I would keep the visit short—a quick look at the bare field, a place once drenched in blood. I’d read a little about the site, which didn’t appeal to me. Enough of battles and blood. It was lucky that Borges was blind and easily distracted and I could elaborate in ways that would satisfy him. “A windswept moor, with the ghosts of dead soldiers.” Phrases gathered in my head in advance of this visit. All the while, my eagerness to get back to Bella only grew. I must set things right there.
Stopping for petrol, I looked around nervously at others at the filling station, especially a tall man in a mackintosh. Scotland Yard? I couldn’t shake the fantasy that at any moment a policeman might tap me on the shoulder, arrest me, and ship me back to Pennsylvania to enlist in the army or go to jail. (Both of these options were preferable to the little bedroom in my parents’ house on South Rebecca Avenue, where a rat-faced stuffed monkey from my childhood still crouched on the headboard, waiting to pounce.)
“I think of monsters quite often,” Borges said as we continued on. “They mirror my deepest self, which swims in cold depths, usually at night.”
I looked at him sideways as I drove. He seemed oblivious to everything but his own dreams. I said nothing; yet he had summoned these monsters just when I felt that my own beasts were in need of slaying. I could imagine the jaws, the fine sharp teeth, the long greasy slide into the dark belly of a whale. Yet I would not, like Jonah, be spit up onto dry land in three days.
As I’d read over breakfast, Loch Ness was about twenty miles long and as deep and cold as Borges imagined. Geologists speculated that underground channels may well have run into the Atlantic in former times. In such dark fathoms the myth of Nessie emerged.
“The monster exists, I feel quite sure,” Borges rambled to himself more than to me. “Her presence was reported by Saint Adamnan in the seventh century. She attacked one of his fellow monks. The poor soul had fallen from a boat, and she tore his arm from his body and swallowed it whole. I believe she ate his ears—quite tasty, the ears. A delicacy among cannibals.”
His straightforward and uninflected tone and apparent lack of irony made me want to challenge him.
“Nessie is a myth,” I said.
“Mythos, in Greek,” said Borges, “is not a story that is false, it’s a story that is more than true. Myth is a tear in the fabric of reality, and immense energies pour through these holy fissures. Our stories, our poems, are rips in this fabric as well, however slight. Think of Beowulf. The prototype for Nessie lies there, in the figure of Grendel, a fallen angel. Envious of the light, he lived with his difficult mother in a cave. You and I have lived in this cave as well, with our difficult and exacting mothers. We bear the marks of our captivity, but we survive.”
“I hardly feel like I’m surviving,” I said.
Though I tried to shut it out, my mother’s voice sounded in my head, with its random warnings. I could imagine her now: “Don’t even think of going to that lake. Loch Ness! It’s deep, and it’s cold. There’s a monster? Even Nello wouldn’t swim there.” Nello was my father’s oldest brother, the black sheep among the five brothers. I hardly knew him, but even glimpses in childhood sent a shock through my nervous system: that face like an ax blade. I thought of him and sighed.
“Oh, Sancho! You exhale, again and again! This sadness! Don’t question survival, mine or yours. More powers lie at your disposal than you realize.” There was a faintly beatific glow about his head as the eastern light wrapped around him. “I recall those lines in Beowulf where Grendel emerges from the fens. The sky glowers, in contrast to the shining mead hall, where light and music blast out. This is the eternal city, the mead hall. A place of singing—and this is what we have at our disposal, you and I. Song!”
I found him annoying, with this blithe enthusiasm.
“Grendel was a monster,” I said.
“I’m a monster, too. You’re a monster. There are no human beings who do not have Nessie or Grendel in their hearts. We swim in dark waters, especially at night. I wake trembling. Don’t you?”
I did, but I didn’t want to think about that now. Borges had found me where it hurt, and I resisted the intrusion. I didn’t want to think about anything except, perhaps, getting to Orkney. That must be my goal. If I could actually get some original manuscripts from Mackay Brown, I had a chance of surviving Falconer’s skepticism. This would be “research,” and nobody could claim otherwise. If the manuscripts were interesting and helpful, revealing something of value about the poet, so much the better.
Yet Borges refused to let go. His lips moved silently, a prelude to his next rhetorical volley. “You were a god once, as Emerson has reminded us. And then envy arrived in the world. You thought, as did I, that others possessed more of everything. More love, more talent, more affection from their father on the throne.”
It was true enough. Others exceeded me in talent, in potential.
“I just don’t know enough,” I said.
“Nor I,” said Borges. “But we all proceed on insufficient knowledge.”
What an idea, I thought. Helpful, encouraging.
As he would, Borges slipped into reverie, allowing me to listen to his thoughts. “I had Eden once,” he said, “as a young man. Back in Palermo, I would stop by the villa of Norah and her family. Her mother was Eve before the Fall: Señora Berta Erfjord de Lange. She presided over three beautiful daughters, Haydée, Chichina, and Norah. Each of them reflected her red hair, but Norah’s was fire itself. Fire! I was singed, then banished from paradise. I fell for decades into the solipsism of my own passionless existence. I lived on what I call Tlön, the ideal and dreadful world of perfection, where there’s no love.” He twisted his lips in a way unfamiliar to me, more than a mere wince. “No love, only the cold symmetry of perfect ideas.”
I tried to absorb this blizzard of facts and fantasies. It wasn’t easy to follow Borges, but his anguish was unmistakable. And I felt sorry for him. He was an old man, and time had flown over his head. He stared at death, and must have wondered about all he had missed, especially in his lost love for Norah Lange. I could, I think for the first time, appreciate the agony of this.
When we got to Fort Augustus, a village at the southwestern tip of Loch Ness, we pulled over and sat together in front of the Viking Arms Hotel, with its heavily leaded Tudor-style windows and oak doors. It looked out over the indigo water from a slight prospect. Above us, gulls sliced the air, their cries like warnings.
“We can probably find a room for the night,” I said. “Or two.”
“Where?”
“The Viking Arms. It’s behind us.”
“I want to fall into the arms of a Viking,” said Borges. “They have beautiful women, so tall, with clear porcelain skin. Their hearts are brave.”
I left Borges to his Nordic fantasies and stepped into the inn, where a woman appeared at my elbow and introduced herself as Ailith McTaggart. She was strong-limbed and blond, with a hard exterior and cornflower-blue eyes. Her jaw had firm, clean lines, and she had a coiled energy that appealed to me. A brave spirit shimmered through her flesh.
“Are you needing a room then?”
“Yes.”
“So,” she said, “we have one.”
“Only one?”
“Yes. But it has two beds. I saw you through the window, with your grandfather.”
“He’s a friend, an Argentine poet.”
“Aye.”
I guessed she was the same age as me, although her steadiness and firmness added about a decade to her frame.
“You’re an American?”
“From Pennsylvania, yes, but I’m living in St. Andrews.” I gave her my concise biographical spiel, perfected in the past few months. I was “doing research on a Scottish poet” and hoped “one day to teach.” I added, with a measure of bravado, that I also hoped to make my living as a writer.
“A writer! My da’ has written a pamphlet,” she said. “You should talk to him. It’s about Nessie, the monster in our lake. It’s available in the bar for a quid.” She rummaged in a drawer in the desk and found one. “You can have this. A gift.”
She appeared glad to chat, telling me about her time as a student in Edinburgh at Heriot-Watt, assuming (rightly) that this would interest me. She studied at the university for a year, she explained, but then her mother died unexpectedly and she moved back to Loch Ness, where she helped her father to look after the inn.
“What was your subject?”
“Geoscience. I’ll get back to it, one day soonish. There’s a research branch of Heriot-Watt on Orkney.”
This seemed too coincidental. But with Borges in tow, I had begun to take the uncanny for granted. “We’re going to Orkney tomorrow,” I said.
She smiled at this, with a touch of envy. “It’s so close, and yet I never go there. My father says, Ailith, I’ll take you. But who would look after the inn?” I liked the way she talked so openly about these choices. Her father obviously meant a great deal to her.
“While we’re here, if it’s possible, we’d like to take a boat ride,” I said. “My friend is keen to go onto the loch.”
“So you’re lucky. We’ve a motorboat and a rowing boat.”
“A rowboat is better,” I said, knowing Borges would prefer that.
Soon Ailith walked us both to the shoreline, with her father behind us. Mr. McTaggart was under sixty, but the skin of his cheeks and forehead had cracked and splintered, and the backs of his hands resembled the shell of an old tortoise. A scar zigzagged across his cheek under his beard, and I wondered if he had a past that required concealing.
“Here you go,” Ailith said, untying a boat from a frail dock, a little anxious about our marine adventure. “You’ve done this before, I would assume?”
I assured her that I’d had lots of experience in rowboats back in Pennsylvania. There was very little to know, in any case, and I didn’t worry about my skills. I helped Borges onto the dock, gripping his free hand firmly, then settled him into the aft of the wobbly boat. An inch or so of water pooled around our feet, a leakage from the keel, which had known fresher times. Borges rolled up his cuffs, but his shoes would need drying out overnight.
Ailith pushed us off with worry on her face. Her father hovered behind her with a grim look, his arms folded at his chest.
“You’re a magus,” Borges said to me as we slipped into the loch, “finding this boat.”
“Keep it steady,” Ailith called from the dock. “Slow, smooth strokes are best!”
As we slipped into what felt like a stream below the surface, Borges tilted his face upward, allowing the radiance of the late-morning sun to soak in, his lips moving as they often did when he felt excited by his thoughts, as if reading something from a page in his head. Soon he began to hum, a low discordant sound that played against the dripping oars, the click of the oarlocks. Water curled around the bow.
“Tell me what you see. Speak! I see only a blur of light.”
“The shore is nearby. Ailith’s father stands with his arms folded. She herself is watching us carefully.”
“Ailith is an Old English name. She’s a warrior. Does she look belligerent?”
“No. Slender, strong. There’s a confidence there.”
“She’s tall?”
“Rather tall, yes. Thin.”
“Androgynous?”
“A touch of the masculine.”
“As with many beautiful women.” He let one of his hands dangle in the water. “Tell me,” he said, “is she as beautiful as your Bella?”
“I think so,” I said. In truth, I found his conversation oddly disembodied. Borges hadn’t lived in his flesh and bones, had not moved through the seasons of the skin with much awareness. The vast library of his mind preoccupied him. Women for him were mythic creatures, and he clung to a code of courtly love, with the man as knight in love with an inaccessible (and often married) woman; this passion would rarely be consummated. He frequently mentioned Beatrice, Dante’s female spellbinder, one who leads a man into the light.
“Don’t be silent, Giuseppe! Talk about the setting today,” Borges said. “You are my eyes, remember. You’re failing me!”
“The setting?”
I looked around, fetching images. “The hills run down to the lake,” I told him. “They’re steep. No houses in sight. Some sort of vegetable life on them. Bracken? There are trees nearer to the water, tall pines with a reddish bark. White rocks at the shoreline.”
“A bright smile of shingle,” said Borges. “I hear the lapping of waves. ‘Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.’ A wonderful line from Auden. He is fond of Anglo-Saxon verse. That alliterative voice, the play of consonantal rhyme. Maravilloso! The Beowulf poet was master of this method, too. So difficult to replicate in Spanish. Impossible, really.”
“I’ve read very little Auden.”
“You’ll love him, Giuseppe. He’s a very intelligent poet, and the language is brisk, witty, mixing high and low.”
I rowed for a few minutes, slowly and with care, seeing that our soft glide pleased my passenger. The lake whirled about us, and Borges touched his forehead with wet fingers, as if blessing himself in preparation for a mass.
As if summoned, a fish splashed in the water nearby.
“Nessie approaches,” said Borges.
“Some kind of trout, I think. They leap for bugs.” I looked over the oarlocks to see the bottom of the lake perhaps eight feet below. We weren’t far out.
“Let’s drift, dear boy. I have keen ears, and will hear things you won’t hear.”
I rested the oars in the locks. It was astonishingly calm now, with gulls hanging in the sky like tiny kites. Ailith stood on the dock with her eyes on us, not twenty yards away. Her father stood behind her.
Rashly, Borges rose to his full height, making the boat rock.
“Be careful, Borges!”
He shifted his weight from side to side to keep his balance, then raised his cane to the sky. In a full-throated voice, he bellowed some lines of what sounded like Anglo-Saxon verse, which doubled back on themselves in the form of echo.
“Sit down, and carefully!” I did my best to steady the boat.
“This is the Song of Creation,” Borges said. “It celebrates the music within us, how we can in dark moments sing! It caused such fury in Grendel, who was mad that men could sing like this, could soothe and inspire themselves and others. The song is about origins, how the Almighty shaped the earth with his hands, laid out the fields, bounded them by water, hung the skies with the sun and moon, lamps for his poor creatures. He lifted the trees, spread them with limbs and leaves, and breathed life into every turtle, frog, lizard, bird, and beast! The men and women of the world shivered with joy.”
“Sit down, please!”
“Then Grendel arrived, the fiend from hell. This is Nessie, dear boy! And now, yes, Nessie approaches!”
He swung his cane with two hands like a claymore.
“Borges, no!” I shouted, but too late. He lurched forward, his knees quivering, his lips in a pout, and toppled into my arms. I could smell the stale sweat of his armpits, and his rough cheek brushed against me. I tried to push him away without destabilizing the boat, which in a crazy, blurry instant capsized.
I had no time to absorb what had happened, or to feel fear. The water dazed me, and I wanted only to bolt for the shore. But what about Borges? I opened my eyes underwater and frantically searched for him. Though underwater, he lifted his face to the surface and smiled enigmatically—a child caught with fingers in the cookie jar. I’d been trained as a lifeguard and reached for him, gripping him by the collar just a couple of feet below the surface. With my free arm I pulled us up the water’s frosty ladder.
Somehow Borges still clung to his cane with one hand, grasping me with the other.
“Try to float on your back,” I said, putting a hand under his wet jacket. I could see his leather shoes dragging his feet down.
The rowboat bobbed nearby, upside down, and I dragged Borges toward it, needing something for us to hold, even though it wasn’t so deep, and my feet touched the bottom. Soon I saw Ailith and her father churning in our direction in the motorboat, and within moments they hovered beside us. Ailith crouched at the tiller while her bearded father scowled, shaking his head. Our little stunt had not pleased him.
I felt like an idiot, knowing that one should never take an old blind man who can’t swim in a rowboat, especially when this person is childlike, irascible, and unpredictable. Where was my fucking mind?
Borges proved surprisingly agile, and he managed to get one foot onto their rope ladder. Then I helped to lift—heave is a better word—his bulk into the bow of the waiting boat. McTaggart used his muscular forearms to help, and before long Ailith wrapped the soaking Borges in a woolen blanket and pulled a cloth cap over his head. “You’ll be fine, sir,” she said. “We’ll dry you out at the inn.”
Borges muttered something to himself, his lips blue. The whiteness of his cheeks suggested a state of shock, as did his labored breathing. The blank eyes rolled in his head as he clutched at his cane. And I regarded him as sorrow itself, a man whose venture into the Song of Creation had, at least this time, unmade him.
That evening the four of us sat in the bar by a fire. Because neither Borges nor I had brought a change of clothes, I wore a pair of trainers and a shirt that a previous guest had left behind, and Borges was forced to wear McTaggart’s castoffs—a pair of twill trousers and a baggy sweater. He didn’t even look like Borges.
Ailith assured him that within hours they would dry and press his suit and shirt, even his tie; a woman at the inn would like the challenge, she explained. She herself would dry and shine the leather shoes. “We’ll make you a new man,” she said.
“The old Borges will do,” he said.
As I watched him, safe and snug by the fire, it struck me how rarely the physical aspects of reality impinged on his daily life. Even his walk—splay-footed, gingerly, as if he were stepping over blazing coals with bare feet—suggested a hesitance in his attachment to this earth. Loch Ness had been for him an idea, not a body of icy water that could easily drown a man.
“What happened out there?” asked McTaggart, who lit a pipe and settled in a captain’s chair.
“Grendel,” said Borges.
This produced hardly a flicker of interest from McTaggart, whose eyes lifted to a corner of the room, but his daughter brightened. “I read Beowulf in school,” she said.
“The Song of Creation, this is my favorite part,” Borges said. “I was reciting this passage when the monster approached and overturned our boat. Do you still like poetry?”
“Oh, I do,” she said. “I write a bit of it myself now and then.”
I could see him perking up in the presence of this beautiful Nordic woman, an after-echo of young Norah Lange. And one who wrote a bit of poetry!
“I know a tune from the Song of Creation,” Ailith said. “We have a folk club here on Sunday nights.”
“Oh, do sing! I will become your fan.”
Almost as if she’d been expecting the request, she pulled a guitar from a nearby cupboard and delivered a lyrical folk version of the Song of Creation, drawing on a Celtic melody that I vaguely recognized. Her father nursed a pint of ale and listened with his mouth open, as if tasting the words his daughter sang.
When she finished, Borges clapped with boyish abandon.
“She wants an audience,” said McTaggart.
“She’s found one,” I said.
“Do you have another song, my dear?” Borges asked. “I should be delighted. I could even dance!” He stood now, with the blanket around him, and did a kind of sideways shuffle.
His unabashed and complete recovery shocked me. Was it possible? Hadn’t he nearly drowned in Loch Ness that morning? Was he just used to pratfalls and lunges? Was this, bizarrely, par for the course as he motored or soared through time and space? Was it somehow even part of his poetic life, how he created the world with his own longings in spite of everything that conspired against him, including his blindness?
It had been a long day, and we’d have to make it to the Pentland Firth by early afternoon to catch the ferry to Stromness. So I bid Ailith goodnight and thanked her for everything she’d done for us.
“I’ve always wanted to go to Orkney,” she said.
“Then you shall be my guest,” Borges informed her. “I shall pay for your ticket, your meals, and lodging as well. But I shall not be accompanying you and Giuseppe.”
“You’re not coming to Orkney?”
“No, Giuseppe! This adventure on the loch—I do not wish to get into another boat with you. And in truth, I’m weary. The throb in my skull returns.”
I felt a flicker of disappointment, even annoyance—I had genuinely looked forward to seeing what would happen when Borges met George Mackay Brown—but the feeling was snuffed by a bigger one: relief.
“Thank you, sir. I shall go with your friend,” Ailith said. “Da’ will look after you. He’s a sweetheart.”
This remark drove her “da’ ” from the room, though Borges remained unaware of anything awkward. His blindness allowed him to live within his circumference, excluding noxious elements. A gift, in its way. For me, I could only tremble with a kind of giddy anticipation. Ailith and I would be going to Orkney, the two of us.
After Borges had gone to bed, I sat in a parlor downstairs and preemptively wrote to Bella, riddled with minor guilt about my upcoming adventures with Ailith, however they might unfold. I gave her a florid account of our hapless tour of the Highlands, taking up where I had left off in my previous embarrassing letter, trying to talk over that, asking, “Can this be happening in what now passes for ‘real life,’ or have I wandered into a land of unlikeness?”
I pushed the envelope into a pillar box outside the Viking Arms that night with the usual misgivings. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut and let the relationship with Bella unfold as it would or—more likely—wouldn’t. Hadn’t I been stricken by self-doubts after sending the previous one? Then again, I needed to write to her. Why shouldn’t I tell my story, find my own way of talking?