“YOU’RE A LITTLE sad,” said Borges as we drove toward Culloden, the infamous battlefield, which would be the final stop on our tour of the Highlands.
“I don’t know, Borges. I wonder about myself, where I’m going.”
“We’re going to Culloden!”
“In my life, in my heart.”
“Confide tibimet,” he said.
My Latin was shaky, but I could translate this: Have faith in yourself.
“I’ve faith in you,” Borges added. “We have been battle-tested, tried by circumstance. Fire and flood!”
This may have slightly overstated the case, but I had grown used to these extravagant statements, even gestures. Even to prize them. It was not Borges who spoke and gestured, I realized, but “Borges.”
After a less than an hour’s drive through the soft green air of early spring, with bays of daffodils by the roadside, we pulled into the car park at Culloden, where in 1746 the Jacobite army of Bonnie Prince Charlie was routed, leaving thousands dead or wounded. Charlie himself—a self-centered cad more than a hero, in my view—had evaded capture, despite a bounty on his head, slipping out of the country on a French vessel from the Isle of Skye. From what I had gleaned from the guidebook, Culloden was the last pitched battle on British soil, and it signaled the end of a way of life in the Highlands, squashing the dream of Scottish independence under a Stuart monarch.
There was a tin-roofed shed with a hand-painted sign that read CULLODEN WELCOME CENTRE. An elderly man in a cap sat in a cane chair and smoked a pipe. He eyed us with suspicion as we approached.
“Visitors?” he asked, narrowing his gaze.
“We’ve come to see the battlefield,” I said.
Borges brightened on my arm, with an inane grin. “You should know, good sir, that I harbor Jacobite sympathies.”
“It’s fifty pence,” said our gatekeeper, “and that’s for each. A pound will do.”
The full car park confused me, as I didn’t see other tourists—an oddity that didn’t quite register as we proceeded on foot, with Borges gripping my elbow tightly as we crossed the windswept Drumossie Moor, where the battle took place. I did my best to describe the landscape, pleased by my language. I had the hang of this now. “I’m seeing marram and thistle, the rose-tinged furze beginning to come to life and some kind of white moss over stony patches like doilies. Hawks hang in the sky above us, as if ready for a further feast of corpses, and I feel the presence of slaughtered Highlanders clamoring for revenge.”
“Oh, this is good! Moving pictures! A private cinema!”
The battlefield saddened me when I thought of Billy in the jungle near the DMZ and remembered his last letter, with the badly wounded or even dead soldiers lying on stretchers. I thought about the hopeless, frantic work of the medics, and Billy’s efforts to radio for help. Was there ever a more foolish or cruel war? All the dead young men, on both sides, depressed me. What was the point?
Battlefields had figured in my dreams since childhood. I had taken a trip to Gettysburg with my father when I was very young, not yet twelve. That experience cut a blistering hole in memory, with the thought of blood-soaked corpses, some of them boys only five years or six older than I was. One would have guessed that Americans had learned something about the futility of war by now, and how it rarely advances the cause of humanity. Wouldn’t slavery have petered out in a few years? Weren’t the decades of so-called Reconstruction as bad as slavery itself, creating battle lines between the races that had yet to fade? We had recently suffered the bitter blandishments and compulsive lies of George Wallace, a sociopathic fool who had forged a political career from the populist scraps of resentment that continued to plague Americans more than a century after the Civil War.
When I mentioned this to Borges, his lips began to move (as often happened) before the words emerged, as if his voice must leap onto a conveyer belt already in motion. “The American Civil War, a frightful tragedy, my dear,” he said, breathless. “It has played in my mind since childhood, too. Gettysburg unfolded over days and days, with how many casualties?”
“Maybe fifty thousand,” I said.
“Horrible numbers. And one did not long survive the wounds of these battles, not with infections. This is what nearly killed me in 1938, when I hit my head, as the bacteria ran wild in my bloodstream for months. Before penicillin was a remedy. There must be a God.”
“You prayed for assistance?”
“I pray for assistance each day of my life, but who listens? This is the question, and yet I pray.”
I prayed as well, nearly each night before falling asleep, speaking to a God who seemed to live inside more than above or outside me. I mentioned this to Alastair once, but he knocked aside my “religious delusions” as “so much poppycock.” Like so many of his generation, his opinions had somewhere along the way hardened into a stance I considered simplistic, a literalistic atheism that was no more interesting to me than literal-minded Christianity. Neither of these opinions felt open to the mysteries of being. They were two sides of the same coin.
Now the wind came rasping from the northeast, scraping along the ground, and Borges turned up the collar of his jacket—though this could hardly have helped.
“An ill wind blows. The pity of this place is evident,” he said. “It overwhelms Borges.” He winced, leaning on his cane. “Do you have more of those pills? My head!”
“We should be careful. They’re strong.”
“These restless natives, they’re pounding a large invisible drum at the base of my skull.”
I handed over two of the pills, taking them from the pocket of my corduroy jacket. It wasn’t possible for them to work so quickly, but relief flooded his face at once after he swallowed them (without water). He looked up into the sun, and the light bathed his face, a liquid radiance that dripped from his cheeks onto his collar and coat. Did the fish on his tie begin to swim as well? His eyes closed, the lids quivering rapidly. I realized that he was, in his way, quite handsome, with a masculine beauty, his features hewn from marble. He might, like his revered ancestor, have led men into battle.
“They came with nine thousand men under an English duke,” Borges said. “ ‘The Butcher Cumberland,’ a formidable man but vain as well. The redcoats had trained in hand-to-hand combat in Aberdeen, in preparation for a Highland charge. By mid-April, I believe, these troops had reached the Nairn. Cumberland gave his men the day off to celebrate his birthday. No, he would not fight a bloody battle on his birthday! And this vanity deceived the Jacobite army and their prince, who let down their guard. On this moor, where we stand, some five thousand men fell prey to ambush. Think of it, Giuseppe: the armies of the duke on horseback, wielding swords and guns. The clans had their bagpipes. This is a terrifying sound, agony turned into music. But it will not hold back a vicious army.”
He raised his cane like a pikestaff, letting out a wail of shocking amplitude. How could an old man who usually spoke in soft tones summon such a shriek?
“Get down, laddie!” he shouted, curling to the ground.
I lay beside him, smelling the peaty dirt, the tough heathery groundcover. Why did he care about Scottish independence? I thought of Vietnam again, especially those who resisted the American charge, the bombing raids from on high, the poisonous sweep of napalm, which obliterated whole forests. All for a fantasy of liberation, as if the Vietnamese required liberation from what the majority of Vietnamese wanted: a unified (and socialist) country. They had somehow resisted our well-financed onslaught, our technical might. Ho Chi Minh was more like Borges’s heroic Charlie than Charlie himself.
“See them coming! You’re eyes, Giuseppe! What’s the view?”
On the other side of the field, if I was not mistaken, were dozens of warriors, clansmen in tartan kilts. The bleating of bagpipes and the clatter of drums drew closer.
“We must stay low,” whispered Borges. “The dream will pass.”
The drumming only grew more intense, and the thunder of feet, with horses beating over bridges, a fife-and-drum corps hard by where we lay. It felt as if I had myself swallowed several of those blue pills.
“They will not defeat Charlie! Not today!” Borges cried, lifting himself to his feet, raising his cane in the air again, his flag of defiance. He rose and rushed forward, moving over uneven ground in springy steps, skirting a patch of thistle. I could see a boggy pool in the distance, a blister on the landscape. I must stop him!
“Borges!” I called, chasing this full-grown toddler on the loose. A troop of soldiers looked my way, and somebody waved a flag. Was I seeing things this morning, sucked into some sort of folie à deux? When my charge disappeared over a ridge, I followed and found him, moments later, on his back in some heathery grass, a mossy stone not three feet from his head. A couple of jet-winged crows landed nearby, as if inspecting the scene for a possible meal.
“I think we’ve lost this battle, dear comrade. My clansmen, they are scattering.” The bagpipes drew closer. “The English have routed us again.”
A small band of Highlanders in checkered black-and-red kilts moved toward us, and one of them came forward from the others. He stood beside us, arms akimbo.
“Your grandfather?” he asked.
“My father,” I said—the only answer that made sense today.
This man of perhaps fifty, with a beard like cotton wool, stood close. Below his kilt he wore high socks fastened at the top with an orange ribbon. His blue vest was open at the bottom, not quite able to latch over a huge paunch.
“You’re a ghost,” Borges said, pointing his cane toward the man as if he could actually see him.
“No ghost, me!”
“Who are you, sir?”
“Robbie Makgill, son of Rab Makgill.”
“Are you a warrior, sir?”
“I’m quite benign. Don’t fret yoursel’.”
“I will not let you pummel me with musket balls!” Borges cried.
“I shoot no one.”
“You see that I’m blind, Robbie?”
“Aye.”
“I can’t see you. May I touch your face?”
Makgill looked around and winked at me, obviously embarrassed. But he stepped forward, unable to resist the force that was Borges. He knelt beside him, took his hands, and drew them to his fluffy beard. Borges explored the weathered face, the wiry beard, the woolen tam.
“He’s real,” I said to Borges.
“I commend you, Robbie,” said Borges. “You’ve done well, an auld-farrant lad, I would say!”
“Auld-farrant? You can speak our language?” He seemed in awe of this peculiar foreigner.
“The language of resistance, yes. It’s tasty on my tongue.”
A dozen of Makgill’s comrades in arms looked on without comprehension.
“We’re Fraser’s Dragoons,” explained Makgill. “We do the reenactments.”
The pennies began to drop. History buffs. I had heard of these enthusiasts who put a great deal of time, thought, and money into their re-creations of life on famous battlefields, mimicking the actual movements of troops. Gettysburg and other Civil War battles had legions of men—they were mostly men—who spent their weekends reliving the hell of long-ago furious engagements. It was the defeated armies who apparently garnered the most avid replicators, as if they hoped, in the mirage of reenactment, to find victory at last.
Borges tried to understand. “Reenactments, you say?”
“Aye, we replay the past.”
“And for what reason?”
“Pleasure.”
“What a marvelous answer. You mirror reality! And this is what I do for a profession. Hold little mirrors to the world, I do, but they’re untrustworthy. Like all mirrors, prone to distortion.” He paused, perhaps aware that he had lost his audience.
“He’s well enough, your father?” asked Makgill, looking at me instead of Borges.
“Well enough,” I said.
He didn’t trust my response, but our fate no longer concerned him. His friends readied themselves to charge Cumberland’s men in the middle distance, and he must join them.
“What’s this again?” Borges asked, sitting. “I didn’t quite follow the chap.”
“Reenactors,” I said. “Groups who replay old battles.”
“I’ve found a name for myself. Borges the Reenactor! The problem is, one never wins old battles. The losses only mount.”
Borges reached for my hand, and I helped him to his feet. Slowly we made our way back to the car.
“Our heroes,” he said, as we drove away, “they disappoint and frustrate us. Charlie was impossible, arrogant, obsessed by himself. He caused so many deaths, fighting out of vanity, ruining his army and himself. The Jacobite cause fell to his madness. Probably a delusion in any case. Most wars are fought over delusions. I will agree with you there.”
I hadn’t said anything, but he could read my thoughts.
“But you mustn’t give up, or lose your idealism,” he said.
“That’s not in the cards, Borges. I feel pretty determined about this. Americans are, I think, idealistic by nature. Think of our Declaration of Independence.”
“You are declaring your own independence!”
I remembered how, when I had first arrived in St. Andrews, I had copied a line in my journal from Walden. Henry Thoreau had moved to his cabin in the woods on the Fourth of July in 1845, to “live deliberately.” I had not quite taken that on board when I wrote it. But I would.
Borges continued to think about the Jacobite cause. “Culloden failed on nearly every count. So much was lost.”
“And the little people who fight these wars, they lose the most.”
Borges seemed to think about this deeply. “You wish to write, I know,” he said at last. “Remember that the battle between good and evil persists, and the writer’s work is constantly to reframe the argument, so that readers make the right choices. Never work from vanity, like our Bonnie Prince. Or the Butcher of Cumberland, for that matter. What does Eliot say? ‘Humility is endless’…We fail, and we fail again. We pick ourselves up. I’ve done it a thousand times, Giuseppe.”
As ever, he circled in his head, where he found—or created—a reality that to him was obsessively present. But there was reality in the hard lines of the world, upon which the imagination depends. I recalled a line from Wallace Stevens: “Soldier, there is a war between the mind and sky.”
Borges liked this quotation. “Yes, a war between the mind and sky. Marvelous, your poet! We fight our battles over and over. For us, it’s the effort to express reality. It’s a battle. I feel sad at times, lonely and detached from reality. But the sky overwhelms me, even though I’m blind. The sun is too bright, blinding a blind man! This is the reality we encounter and wrestle into words. This wrestling is our life. But it’s impossible to win. There’s never a total victory. That would be death. The victories of the living are partial at best. We vomit on ourselves, but we wash our shoes clean. And begin again.”
Though I didn’t know it consciously, this was for me a beginning. I could find somewhere to go from here. Confide tibimet indeed!
I couldn’t wait to tell Billy about Culloden and its reenactors. And I might try to say something about my subsequent insights, though I wasn’t sure he’d understand. Billy had landed in the most literal sort of war. And my theorizing about any of this might feel unhelpful, if not infuriating. He used to laugh at me when I’d go philosophical, saying, “Don’t talk out of your ass, amigo. It’s noisy and smells bad, and everybody wants to leave the room.”
Uncannily, Borges continued to read my mind. “War is always unfortunate, even evil, yes. That’s an argument one could make. But you, son, haven’t been conscripted. This is lucky. Rejoice, and let it rest there.”
“It’s an immoral war,” I said.
“And this is somehow an argument? Isn’t every war, in a most basic sense, a meaningless exercise, a cruel and pointless one that rarely changes much for the better?”
“My uncles landed on the beach in Salerno in 1943. That war meant something.” I could feel the presence of my Uncle Tony behind me, and he was pleased. Had I, his pigheaded nephew, suddenly understood him?
“The stench of Hitler had to be erased, yes. This is true.”
It might take years to sort through these thoughts, which probably couldn’t be sorted. War was always the last choice for any nation, an admission of defeat. One should never enter a conflict with a sense of triumph, with the slightest jubilance. A war is an enormous funeral, and one should proceed sadly into battle, in humility, with a bowed head, fully aware that one might never be forgiven. I knew I’d never for a second approve of any rhetoric about war that verged on the exultant. There was no glory in war, only shame for having lacked the imagination to prevent this stumble into the abyss.
Borges asked again about the letters from my draft board, as if needing to push into this wound a little, to make it bleed. Was he being cruel? Or did he have a benign motive that eluded me? I decided to assume the best.
“It’s much like I said, Borges. I don’t know if they want to draft me. But I don’t want to know.”
“Then you should burn them!” he said. “The letters will plague you if you don’t. I destroyed the letters from Norah Lange that I received as a young man, though I waited too long. By that time, alas, I was completely blind, so there was no point.”
This was a thought. Just fucking burn them. If I wasn’t going to war, and I wasn’t, I should make my point—at least to myself—boldly. The idiotic notion that I should enlist had flickered in my brain like heat lightning over distant hills. I’d wondered if I shouldn’t, like Billy, do something heroic. Was it actually true that somebody else fought in Vietnam in my place and therefore my evasion of the war had moral consequences? Culloden had unexpectedly forced me to face the truth that war is always destructive, and one should not, under most circumstances, fight for somebody else’s grand illusion. Uncle Sam might want me, but at this point in history, I didn’t want him. He wasn’t worth it.