“ALASTAIR IS BACK,” I said as we drove out of Stirling.
“El magnífico returns! Our adventure, Giuseppe, has ended. There’s a melancholy in these endings, don’t you agree? I dislike the last pages of any good book, as I anticipate the coming losses, the vacancy.”
A loud snap of thunder surprised us, and a rainstorm swept the road, almost tropical in its density, with flowing sheets of water. There was zigzag lightning in the fields and occasional blasts of sunlight as well. My old wipers could barely combat the rain that lashed over us, and I strained to see the way ahead, ignoring Borges, who rattled on with further thoughts on the demise of William Wallace. A slippery road meant nothing to him, of course, as he’d never driven a car.
At one point, when I failed to respond adequately to his running commentary on Scottish history, I said, “You know, it’s very difficult to see!”
“You tell this to a blind man?”
I’d have liked to end our journey with elaborate descriptions of the countryside, but my goal was not to crash. Nonetheless the latent glory of our surroundings flicked by, with fields of beetroot and soft grass on either side of the road. I saw a bright yellow tractor in one muddy rut as it grumbled along in the downpour, tilling the soil. Even quicksilver bolts of lightning hadn’t sent this intrepid farmer into the barn for shelter, and I felt inspired by a man who plowed forward despite inclement and possibly dangerous weather. The task at hand absorbed him.
As we approached Guardbridge, I could feel the unseen presence of St. Andrews behind the scudding mist a few miles away, imagining the chapel tower and the broken ribs of the cathedral. I visualized the stone pier that pushed into the sea below the castle. And knew that before long St. Andrews would absorb me into its labyrinth of alleyways and cobbled streets, its hedgerows and hidden gardens. My travels with Borges in the Highlands would recede in memory. The work on my thesis would press upon me within days, and I’d resume my quiet argument with Professor Falconer about the value of George Mackay Brown. I’d probably look for Bella at her residence hall or pass her in the street with an embarrassed nod. We might even dine together at Pearl of Hong Kong as planned! Time would bite its own tail.
As we reached a familiar turn just above the broad plain of Eden Estuary, only a few miles outside St. Andrews, what had been a mere clatter of distress in my engine became a full cry for help, with metal grating on metal, bone on bone. Then I heard a kind of low whistle, with a foul odor rising through the floor.
“The Quixote blamed his defeat on misunderstanding the strength and resilience of his horse,” said Borges. “I will not make this mistake.”
He was right. It wasn’t possible to go another mile in my rusty Morris without risking its mortality, and possibly ours. There was no choice but to stop. So I pulled over by the side of the road at the gravel lead-in to a bus stop.
“We’re finished?”
My grunt answered him. “I’ll have the car towed to my garage in St. Andrews. I don’t know how long it will take.”
“It’s how far, St. Andrews?”
“A few miles. I suppose we could walk.”
“You must know, Sancho, I’m too old for such perambulation.” A weariness in his voice seemed new. “The idea upsets my feet, which sometimes refuse to accommodate me. It’s important not to ask too much of them.”
Standing in the rain, I lifted the hood to stare at the tangle of hoses, belts, and unfamiliar mechanical parts. Their configuration meant nothing to me, but I pulled on one black hose that seemed loose. A slight wheezing sound followed. An exhalation of steam from the radiator gave off a strong chemical smell, and I knew for certain that the poor beast desperately needed expert attention.
I could manage by myself, but what to do about Borges?
As if summoned by bells, a taxi stopped beside us, and the driver, a ruddy man of sixty with a handlebar mustache, offered to help. When I explained the situation, he quickly agreed to take Borges back to St. Andrews, allowing me to stay with Rocinante. “I know Pilmour Lane,” he said. I would remain with the car to call a tow truck.
“The captain goes down with the ship,” Borges said.
He stepped close to me, reaching a hand to my face. His fingers played gently across my forehead and cheeks, and he held both ears in his big hands. His eyelids quivered, and he smiled, his breath oddly sweet.
“You’ll be fine, Borges,” I said.
“Oh, I’m sure of this. We shall meet up at Pilmour. But release all worry. Go back to Miss Law. Do not neglect your affections or ‘lose the name of action.’ ”
“I consider myself the name of action,” I said, glad to recognize the phrase from Hamlet, recalling that in Orkney I had found in myself a capacity for action.
“ ‘In thy orisons, be all my sins remembered.’ ”
Hamlet, and Hamlet again. Of course, it hadn’t gone so well for the Prince of Denmark.
“Your sins, Borges, lodge in my memory. I won’t easily forget them.”
“Ah my sins….Dear boy, you have no idea.”
He let go of my ears, and I helped him into the backseat of the taxi, which soon dwindled into the mist.
I called the garage from a nearby phone, and the mechanics agreed to rescue my car. But I should have guessed that when the tow arrived, after an hour or more, there would be no room for me in the cab, as two mechanics had come.
I told them not to worry, that I would walk to St. Andrews.
“It’s a fair mass to cover in the rain,” said one of them, in an accent so thick I thought he had instructed me to cover my ass in clover.
It felt good to walk, even necessary now. The low plains stretched to the sea along the estuary, calming, and the rain had thinned to a translucent spray, almost imperceptible, with an early-evening sun pulsing behind it. In the distance I could see the pink West Sands and the town itself, its towers visible in a misty gauze. As I drew near St. Andrews, I felt grateful for the protective walls of the city, with the hush of centuries gathered in a ring of old stones. And I thought of that maze at Scone and how—after a mysterious and disorienting time that my watch could never track—I’d circled back upon Borges, even back upon myself, sensing that I’d been somewhere and that everything would feel different from that point forward.
Standing outside my flat in Hope Street, I heard the bells of St. Salvator’s chiming seven.
Descending the several wet steps to my flat, I felt hesitant to unlock the door, even scared. But why? When I opened it, a rank and musty smell overwhelmed me. I might have been gone for months, not days. On the table across the room a copy of Mackay Brown’s first volume of poems lay open—I owned several copies—with a pad of scribbled notes beside it. Having met the author, I had a better sense of the voice behind the words, though I wasn’t convinced that my trip to Orkney had shifted my understanding in significant ways. At least a few of the geographical sites were no longer abstract names on a map. I could visualize the harbor, the pier head, and the flagstone main street of Stromness, which Mackay Brown nicely described as uncoiling “like a sailor’s rope from North to South.” I could approach my work now with a quickened sense of place.
I knew, however, that I must return to get a fuller sense of the island and the writer. Who was this little man who’d reminded me of my father, with his simple manner, his forthright optimism, his quiet shrewdness and lack of pretension? I had barely begun to understand the mystical core of his writing, and the link to Roman Catholicism I’d somehow missed. I would attend a mass with him in Kirkwall, as he had suggested. I sighed loudly, hearing myself in the still room. So much work lay before me, and I wondered if I could actually complete this thesis within four or five years. And if I didn’t, what then?
A passel of letters had been pushed through the slot onto the tile floor of the entryway, and I glanced at them, almost afraid to look too closely. A fresh one from my draft board sat on top, as if defiantly welcoming me home. How many times would they send the same letter to my house in Scranton? Did my mother never tire of forwarding them, always with more postage than was necessary? I assumed it was the same letter; not having opened any of them, I couldn’t really know. My ignorance was certainly not bliss.
I carried them into my bedroom, propped myself against the wooden bedstead, and read the letter from my mother first. She wrote with the same complaints. “It’s such a long way to Scotland, as your Aunt Irene keeps reminding me. And why are you there? Everybody asks me. There is no good reason. Have you been thinking about law school like your father suggested? He wants to know. Did the letter from the draft board arrive? They keep coming, as you might have noticed. Don’t they know you’re not here? Shouldn’t I give somebody a call down there? It strikes me you don’t say much about any of this. Your letters, they never comment. All you talk about is the weather. Rain, rain, mist, rain. What do I care? I know the weather over there. I’ve seen the movies! It’s what I do these days, with you and your sister gone. I go to the movies once a week by myself. Dirty Harry, now there’s a picture!”
Dirty fucking Harry. I felt sorry for her, trapped in a small circle of fantasies. My father had his own busy worlds of business and religion, and these didn’t include her. My departure had added to her isolation. The usual recitation of illnesses and events filled many paragraphs here: Aunt Ann was suffering from gallbladder attacks and “it was just like her.” One cousin had hepatitis, the result of “bad seafood at a restaurant in Pittston and he doesn’t even like seafood.” A distant uncle—actually a cousin of my grandfather—had gone into a nursing home in Altoona, suffering from “a case of the shingles and gout as well, two illnesses for the price of one.” As usual, her blood pressure was “not what it should be,” she said, adding, “But who am I to complain?” Her sister, Helen, rarely came to visit, though she lived only half an hour away.
Of course I knew why Helen didn’t come, as did everyone. My mother didn’t listen, and it’s not fun to hear someone talking nonstop in random fashion. Her stories had no beginnings, no ends. Only endless sagging middles.
I put her letter aside and stared into the semidark room as above me on Hope Street a few cars slurred by, and I could hear a number of drunken student voices on the pavement.
The last letter in the packet was from Mrs. Giordano, Billy’s mother. She had written a few times before—always lonely and afraid, with her only son in a war zone on the other side of the planet. She offered gossipy news of Billy and my classmates, and I recognized the looping vowels and double-crossed t’s on the envelope addressed to “Mister Jay Parini.” But somehow I knew at a glance this time—the shaky handwriting worried me—that her letter was not just another of her newsy ramblings.
I read it without breathing, leaping ahead to the phrases I guessed were there. “There isn’t a lot of information. The army doesn’t know much, which I can’t understand. Isn’t that their job, to know things? But the sad truth is that Billy was killed by a sniper while on patrol. An ambush, they said. The officers came to our house to tell us. (I felt sorry for those boys, who had to break the news.)” The rest of his platoon had made it back safely, she said. Billy had been taken by a helicopter to a medical station at a base nearby, “but it wasn’t possible to save him, given the extent.” At the end of the letter, all underlined, she said, “Please write something for us to read at the mass for Billy. I would be very grateful and so would Joe, who sends his hello.” It was signed “Anne-Marie Giordano, with affection and sadness.”
Sadness, indeed. The restrained dignity, brevity, and clarity of her letter startled me. I sat on my bed as the light dwindled into perfect darkness, not moving, not even thinking I would ever move again. I’d turned to stone inside.
Eventually I made it to the kitchen, my legs under me like ghost sticks. In the cabinet under the sink I found a bottle of whisky. I didn’t usually rely on alcohol, but I saw no other option tonight. Was this for real? Had Billy really been jerked away like this, taken from me, from his family? Would I never have a chance to complain to him again in miserable self-involved letters about my thesis, my worries, my unrequited love for Bella? In my head I was already telling him about Borges and our dash through the Highlands in Rocinante, and I planned to write to him at length soon. He would have loved this story.
I poured a tumbler of Scotch to the brim, then took the bottle with me into the dim adjacent room and sat at the table, where I could see the faint outline of myself in a mirror.
It frightened me, that mirror. Had it been here all the while? Had I been too obsessed by my thoughts even to glance at myself and consider what I found there?
I looked older than I imagined, haggard, unkempt, my face unshaven for a couple days. I reeked, and no wonder. My hair needed washing, and I hadn’t changed my clothes for days; there was the residue of Loch Ness in my shirt, and a faint whiff of vomit like an invisible cloak. I perspired now, though I hadn’t lit a fire and the temperature in the room had fallen. I could feel the sweat on my forehead, under my arms, and cold.
I sipped the whisky steadily. When I finished the glass, I poured a second.
My head swirled with memories of Billy. I had a picture of him on my dresser in the bedroom, a fuzzy Polaroid taken during my senior year, when he was already out of school. The picture showed him with the wavy shoulder-length hair that had so annoyed his parents. He wore his favorite tie-dyed T-shirt and cut-off shorts. When he came to see me, he’d often linger on his motorbike in the driveway, sometimes gunning it. My mother would go out and insist that he should park the bike and come into the house for iced tea and banana bread. She would scold him for driving “that thing” and berate him for his long hair. “You’re such a hippie,” she would say.
“I don’t even know what a hippie is,” he would answer.
And this was true. He was more like James Dean than anyone protesting the war or smoking dope in some Berkeley park. He was Dean Moriarty in On the Road, though he never read books like that and wouldn’t have liked my pretension in bringing it up. “Tone it down, Socrates,” he would say. “I don’t care about knowing shit. Forgetting is hard enough.”
I fell into a drowse, my head in my hands. When a light knocking came at the door, I thought I might be dreaming. I flipped on a light in the hall and went to the entryway.
It was Borges.
“Giuseppe! I am missing you!”
“Borges?”
“I remain Borges. Although I sometimes question the meaning of this appellation. Which is the real Borges? The man who writes or the old man who presents himself in your doorway, who shifts from foot to painful foot and awaits an invitation to enter this dark and terrifying establishment?”
Alastair hovered on the pavement above, under a streetlamp. Why hadn’t he accompanied Borges down to my flat? Perhaps his guest had wished for our little story to have a denouement and asked for a moment of privacy. He’d obviously disliked our abrupt separation in Guardbridge, this interrupted narrative, a story without a proper ending.
I turned on the light in the entryway and led Borges to the table where I’d been sitting.
“You missed a good dinner at Pilmour,” he said.
“I wasn’t hungry.”
He looked around with his blank eyes, as if picking out objects. His head filled the room, massive, like a Roman bust. “Your flat is something of a cave,” he said, tipping his cane against the table.
“I live here alone.”
“This I have never done.”
“I sympathize.”
“You’ve been drinking? My nose, as you know, is a delicate instrument.”
“I’ve had some news.”
“And what’s this?”
“My friend Billy. I told you about him, the friend from school. I’ve had a letter from his mother. He was killed in Vietnam.”
After a long pause, a soft, unhappy gasp followed, with a thin line of anguish in the vibrations. Had I sighed? Or was it Borges? Eerily, I stood beside myself, as if looking on, and I saw and heard that I wept. An eerie stillness widened, pressed at the walls of the room, and pulsed. Was the room spinning?
“Are you all right, Borges?” I asked, though the question made no sense.
“Dear boy, I don’t know much about these matters or I’d comfort you with my knowledge. I’m not a priest. My life has been something of a flight to oblivion. We lose everything in the end, as with your friend Billy, who lost his altitude too quickly.” He reached for me and touched my eyes, finding them wet with tears, as he suspected. “Spinoza, dear brilliant Spinoza, he said that all things long to persist in their own state. A stone wishes to remain a stone. A tiger wants to be a tiger. I want to be Borges and cannot help myself in being Borges, and there is something admirable in this, something eternal. And you, Giuseppe, you will persist as Giuseppe—even when these body rags, they fall away. We have discussed this perhaps, a little. How we persist in ourselves.” After a pause, he asked, “Is there comfort there?”
“A little,” I said. “Thank you.”
We stood together in the nearly dark hallway for quite a long time. It was, somehow, no longer necessary to talk. We had done that. And this was different.
“Alastair asked me to invite you for dinner, for tomorrow night,” he said, at last. “We must celebrate the end of my Scottish adventure.” It would be his last night in St. Andrews, he explained, as he must move on. There was “a man in Edinburgh” he wished to see, and Oxford beckoned. And there was, of course, his inamorata, this “lovely girl, Maria Kodama,” his former student, who was several decades younger. He would meet her in Oxford in a few weeks. “I am,” he said, “with you on Hope Street, and so wonderful this hope.”
“You’re running away with a beautiful and much younger woman,” I said.
“Don’t tease an old man. What you say has the ring of truth, which doesn’t mean it’s true.” He sighed, looking up at the ceiling. “Alastair is outside.”
I didn’t want to see Alastair just now, as I wasn’t fit for conversation or ready to deal with him, a man who so quickly had occupied a huge space in my life, though he had faded in the past week, lost in the bright blasts of light from Borges. I thanked Borges for coming and opened the door for him.
Before he climbed the stairs, he drew close to me, his nose two or three inches from mine. And pulled me close, wrapping both arms around me. Did he kiss my cheek? Even my eyes?
“Giuseppe, listen,” he said gravely. “When you come to Pilmour tomorrow night, bring the letters from your army. It’s the only thing I ask you. I insist!”