WAKING WITH DAWN, I groaned, sitting in bed. It felt as if the throats of two frogs pulsed at my temples. I had slept badly, slipping through shelves of nightmares, walking in terror through big-finned jungles along the DMZ. Jerked from sleep repeatedly, I had longed for the reprieve of morning, but the reality of Billy’s death proved even more difficult in full daylight, when I could no longer pretend to myself that it was a dream.
I swallowed a couple of aspirins and made myself a strong cup of tea, but the thought of food sickened me. I couldn’t imagine I would eat again for days.
About nine, feeling marginally better, I took a very hot bath, dressed in fresh jeans and a sweater, and made my way to Hamilton Hall, arriving just as the girls were finishing breakfast in the dining room. The big windows blazed with light.
“You’re up early!” said Miss Wright, the last person in the world I wanted to see right then. Her bright smile, ringed by ruby lipstick, was too much for me, a sunspot burning into my retinas. I blinked rapidly.
“I’ve been up for a while,” I said.
“Bravo! You’re quite the chap, I think. I heard from Professor Falconer last week that you’re doing splendid work. Mackenzie Brown? Hurray.”
“Mackay Brown. There’s a long way to go.”
She offered a faint, uncertain smile. “It’s a long way, yes. Art is long but life is short. And how is Alastair? Have you seen him lately?”
“Oh, he’s very well,” I said, feeling no inclination to prolong this conversation.
“Ah, well, that’s good. Good!”
That she was in her usual hurry relieved me, and it made the superficiality of our exchange less awkward. She blew me a kiss as she departed, wishing me luck with my research. “Onward and upward!” she called. “MacDougal Brown?”
“That’s it,” I said.
I climbed the broad stairwell to Bella’s floor and was on the verge of knocking on her door when I realized that she could be in bed with Angus. She might come to the door breathless, in a cloud of sex-smell; I imagined glimpsing, on the sunlit bed, the bare pale ass of her lover. Had I any right to intrude like this, at this time of day and without prior notice? Even if Angus weren’t here, she could be deep in sleep, having studied late into the night for her looming exams. I realized I knew so little about her, her habits or deep desires.
Yet I could hear Borges in my head, urging me to take action. And I thought about stepping without hesitation into Ailith’s room at the hotel in Stromness.
I knocked, but there was no answer, though I might have heard a rustling of some kind behind the door.
I waited, then turned away. It was all quite pointless. I hoped to tell her about Billy, or perhaps not tell her. But I knew this visit had something to do with Billy as well as something to do with my feelings for her.
“Yes?”
Bella’s sleepy head poked around the door.
“Hi,” I said. “It’s Jay.”
“I see you.”
Those three syllables, flat and passionless, made me want to evaporate. What on earth had I been thinking, coming here like this?
“Would you like a coffee?”
“I would, yes,” I said. “Thank you.” I could feel a tear on my cheek and wiped it away. She mustn’t know how fragile I was.
“Come in.”
She had, as she told me, “overslept,” and wore a white cotton nightdress that stopped just below her knees. Her hair was unkempt but lovely asunder. Her cheeks were puffed a little from sleep, her eyes full of dew. A coverlet on the bed was turned down, and the sheets (I couldn’t help but think, letting myself wax poetic) almost sighed with the absence of her body. I wanted to crawl into them, to bury my face in her pillow. The room smelled of her strongly, beautifully—so distinct and appealing.
“You’ve found me a terrible state,” she said.
“Not at all. I’m sorry to bother you.”
“Don’t apologize. I’m glad to see you. Sit down.”
“Really?”
“I liked your letter—letters! And the poem. I have a couple of suggestions. The line breaks worry me. There is…slack.”
“Slack?”
“Here and there. Don’t look so worried!”
There was a hint of scolding in her tone, as if I’d stepped over some invisible line.
“Should I come back later?”
“No. You’re here.”
It wasn’t an enthusiastic welcome, but I sat in the shabby chair she used for reading. A copy of Borges’s Labyrinths lay on the stand by her bed. Had my letters piqued her interest? She opened the window shades, and light poured in. There was an imposing view of the West Sands from this vantage, and the wide bay gleamed. The air tingled with possibility.
“What a beautiful day,” she said.
“Spring does its thing again.”
“And without warning.”
“It was stormy yesterday. We drove from Loch Lomond, Borges and I. My car broke down, so I walked in the rain from Guardbridge.”
“You’ve had an adventure…”
“That’s a way to frame it.”
“I’ve been reading his stories. He’s like nothing else in the world.” She handed me the paperback of Labyrinths.
“I’ve got one,” I said.
“It’s a magic carpet. Alastair did some of these translations, I noticed,” she said. “I like them the best.” She put instant coffee into the cups. “So what was he like, up close? Borges? You got to know him. Lucky you.”
I wasn’t sure what I could say in a short space that would equal the reality. But I made a feeble attempt. “He’s a very complicated man, a beautiful man. He’s read and remembers everything. His mind, it’s a spinning wheel. A spiral? Bad metaphors. I’m at a loss…”
“One has to read the pieces slowly, taking time over each story or essay,” she said. “He dismantles the genres.”
I leafed through the book, turning to the tiny story called “Borges and I,” which I’d read on the ferry. Some of the phrases were things he’d just said to me—about Spinoza, and tigers wanting to be tigers—but this didn’t disappoint me. If anything, it made me feel a flush of privilege. In our days together, Borges had been offering his sense of the world, putting his way of being forward for consideration. He had personally introduced me to his stories in a sly, roundabout fashion. And that made sense now.
The ending of “Borges and I” struck me with its aptness: “And so my life is a flight, and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to Borges.”
Bella leaned over my shoulder, handing me a mug. “That little one is good, no?”
I groaned, biting my lip, putting a finger to one of my temples.
“You don’t like my coffee?”
Was it fair to unload my problems, to tell her about Billy? I had never liked that moment in Othello when the Moor says, “She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them.” This was no way to attract a woman’s sympathy or affection. Pity was not love.
“I’ve had news about a friend,” I said, working to hold myself together. “A letter from his mother. He was killed in Vietnam a few weeks ago.”
“Good god!”
My eyes watered as she drew near, knelt close, and folded her arms around me, saying nothing but emanating sympathy. And I knew that we had arrived at a fresh juncture in whatever this was, a “relationship,” a “friendship.” The appropriate word would come later. But somehow I was prepared for both possibilities, and willing to accept either.
I went back to my flat with a wild new energy, feeling a pressure inside, the urge to write a poem I would call “This Reaping.” I wrote it quickly, then typed it. It felt to me like the best thing I’d ever written:
They are all going out around us,
popping off like lights—
the professors crumpled over desks,
the doctors with entrails hanging from their ears,
the operators dead at the end of lines.
They are all going out, shut off
at the source without warning—
the student tumbled from the bike in traffic,
the child in the cradle, choking,
the nun in the faulty subway.
And nobody knows the hour,
whether now or later, whether
neatly with a snap in the night
or, less discreetly, dragged
by a bus through busy corners.
What a business, this reaping
in private or public places
with so little sowing:
let us pray that somewhere
on sweaty beds of complete affection
there are lovers
doubling themselves in the lively dark.
I finished a draft to my satisfaction and rushed to attend the noon mass at All Saints, an Anglican church in North Castle Street that I liked. I felt an urgency to do this, a need to pray—for Billy, of course, but also for myself. After a short service (with only three others in the congregation) I sat alone at the back of the chancel, which filled with a gold-and-blue light parceled by the stained glass windows overhead. I felt close to Billy there, maybe even to God—or whatever I meant when using that word. In my heart I felt—I knew—that Billy was safe wherever he was, and that death was an opening, a springboard. The persistence of souls was an old Platonic idea I could live with. Of course we all proceed, as Borges put it, “on insufficient knowledge,” and I was no different from anyone else in this. My faith was probably no more than a gut-level trust in the power of the universe to lift us when we needed lifting.
In late afternoon I packed the bundle of letters from the draft board into my rucksack, as Borges had insisted, then picked up Bella and took her to Alastair’s house. I knew he would welcome her, and she had expressed a wish to see Borges again before he left. I really liked the idea of seeing them together again. In fact I needed to see them like this, these two parts of my dream life in a daylight reality.
The light was strong, with blades of sun knifing through gilt-edged clouds above the sea. A wind rose from inside the sea and struggled to get out, pushing at the surface. I could smell the dirt under my feet, still wet from the hard rains of the day before. A fragment of the famous psalm filled my head: “This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
As I pushed open the iron gate at Pilmour, there was a flutter above us in the rookery, a peppery spray of birdlife that blackened the sky.
“Ominous,” said Bella.
“An omen isn’t always ominous, is it?”
“There are good omens and bad ones, I should think.”
“I’ll take this as a good one.”
Softly I knocked at the cottage, noticing how the paint had peeled from the stone of its façade. It looked much smaller than I remembered it.
“The weary traveler,” said Alastair, opening the door.
“Where have you been?” Jasper asked.
“Where have you been?”
“In London, with Papa.”
“How was it?”
“A boy who is tired of London is tired of life,” he said.
Was this the cleverest child on Planet Earth? His helmet of dark hair and beautiful big eyes made him so appealing.
“Borges had a good time in the Highlands,” Alastair said. “I think he’s left his heart there.”
“Really?”
“You had a few mishaps…”
“That’s a way of putting it.”
“And how are you, Miss Law?” asked Borges, who pushed into the hallway wearing a psychedelic tie with yellow crocodiles and red waterfalls against an electric-blue background. He knew what Bella meant to me and looked eager to meet her again, perhaps as if Norah Lange had rushed back from his distant past to greet him. “Tell me how you are, please!”
“Very well, sir,” Bella said.
“I’m Sir George now? Well and good. My mother and father, I must remind you, called me Georgie.”
“I don’t,” said Alastair.
“I’m Borges to some, Georgie to others. I make no difference.”
There was something persistently odd and inscrutable about the way he spoke. Was it a problem of translation, or had he cultivated this opaqueness? Or was it translucence? Light filtered through the mask of Borges: a pale yellow glow with its own enigmatic brilliance. One felt somehow more intelligent, more learned and witty, in his presence. The universe itself felt more pliable and yielding, and so available.
Jasper led Bella and Borges into the sitting room while I slipped into the kitchen with Alastair, who had asked if I could help him with the soup. It was a ploy, I knew. He wanted a private word.
“How was your trip?” I asked.
“My great-uncle is okay. A mild heart attack. Not a stroke after all. Almost undetectable.” He sighed. “Thank you for taking care of Borges.”
“An opportunity you handed to me,” I said. “I know that.”
“And not a pleasure?”
“I’m not sure pleasure is the word.”
“Like boating on the Amazon. You’re glad to have the story. Being there, well—too many biting flies, alligators, blisters, cannibals.”
“We found all of those in the Highlands.”
He handed me a glass of wine.
“I’m sorry about your friend.”
“Billy.”
“Borges told me.”
“It’s sad. But I somehow expected it.”
Alastair held my gaze as if it were a goblet of crystal. “I could feel it coming, too,” he said. “I lost a good friend in the Pacific. Bruce Donaldson, ‘Donald the Bruce,’ I called him. We were at school together in Whithorn, sang in the choir at my father’s church—not much of a choir. We played hooky, hitchhiked to Glasgow for a day trip once that turned into a night on the town. My mother was furious. Who cared?” He put a hand on my wrist. “Are you all right?”
“Not really.”
“You can come here anytime. Day or night.”
“I know that. Thank you.”
“Don’t withdraw. Don’t go silent.”
“Sometimes my breath sort of stops. I feel strange, disconnected.”
“Anguish is pain multiplied by resistance. So they say, and I believe them. You will have to grieve.”
The word itself, grieve, puzzled me. I didn’t know how this process might unfold but guessed I would come to accept Billy’s death in due course. What choice did I have?
Alastair took a tray of his usual brownies from the Aga.
“Voilà! The brownies,” he said.
He pulled from the fridge a porcelain bowl filled with a dark creamy chocolate icing, which he lathered over the brownies with a spatula.
“The various parts of the mind,” said Alastair, “usually fail to communicate. My brownies are what I call a facilitator. A shortcut to bliss. But what’s wrong with taking the straight rather than the roundabout way to a destination? In Anglo-Saxon, the ‘straight’ way was the direct way. ‘Wrong’ simply meant going roundabout, the crooked way. Sometimes I think the whole world moves roundabout. Speaking of which,” he added, “you’ve made a connection with Bella, so I see.”
“I think so, yes.”
“Let it go where it goes. Or fails to go.”
He finished icing the brownies, swirling it with little peaks of chocolate.
“Borges likes you,” he said.
“Really?” It somehow surprised me to hear this stated plainly. And pleased me, too, more than I might’ve been prepared to acknowledge.
“Very much so,” he said. “He’s a magician, a sorcerer, a fraud, and a genius.”
“And a priest.”
“That, too. When you read him, you’ll see.”
“Mackay Brown gave me a copy of Labyrinths.”
“Good for George. Everything you need is there.” He licked the spatula clean. “The rest is icing, but we all like icing, don’t we? Borges—on the page—takes a lifetime to absorb. I don’t have so many years left.”
“I read the one about Pascal this afternoon.”
“A good one. Borges makes these perfect little texts, essays that are stories. It’s all poetry, a kind of spell. After reading Borges, if you miss a train, the event will feel drenched in meaning.” Alastair had taken flight, his eyes wide, his nostrils almost flaring like a bull’s before his charge, and I guessed he’d sampled his brownie mix at some point earlier in the afternoon. “Literature, after Borges, must change.”
Borges stepped into the kitchen. “I’m hearing my name, and taken in vain!”
“Borges,” said Alastair.
His name hung in the air, more concept than address. And Borges savored this.
“I’ve been introduced to the Highlands by your friend,” he said. “He is Giuseppe, but he is Sancho, too—the great formulator of homely wisdom.”
“There is something homely, now that you mention it,” Alastair said.
Bella came into the kitchen now and looked fondly in my direction. She was followed by Jasper and Jeff.
“Papa made brownies,” said Jasper.
“Not for you, Jasp,” said Alastair, with a narrow glance.
“How old do you have to be for brownies?” asked Jeff. I hadn’t known he was back from his travels. We would have a lot to talk about in the coming weeks, I was quite sure, and he would be his usual genial and wise self, willing to listen and advise. I was so damned lucky, I thought. And in so many ways.
“You have to be old as Homer,” said Borges. “Give me a brownie, Alejandro.”
Alastair obliged, lifting a fat one into the outstretched palm of the Master. He gave another to Jeff, who greedily accepted the offering.
“Miss Law, you will have a brownie?” Alastair asked. “They’re potent, I warn you.”
“I love potency!” she said, taking a brownie and biting into it with gusto. With the back of her hand, she wiped a bit of icing from her lips. “They say that chocolate is love,” she added.
“And perhaps more reliable in its effects,” said Borges. “Dante should have had access to this drug. Beatrice, as you know, lived forever in his mind. But to her, Dante had very little presence. On the other hand, when they meet at the end of the Purgatorio, she guides him toward heaven. She cared deeply for his soul, but not for his body.”
“Very unfortunate,” said Alastair. “Was she Scottish?”
Bella laughed at this, and never looked more beautiful. She wore a diaphanous light yellow shift, with tiny cornflowers in a design that played off her red sneakers—always the red sneakers, with white ankle socks that accented them.
I devoured a large brownie myself, eager to join this gladdening circle.
Music pulsed from the big speakers near the windows. Alastair was especially fond of Bach, and what we were hearing was, I knew, The Art of the Fugue, which often played in the background at Pilmour. It was, I think, a kind of weaving together of various elements in the air, a single strand of melody absorbing the disparate parts and making a whole of the room, the occasion, the voices.
Tuning in to the music, with a slight dancing step as he crossed the room, Borges seemed animated, more so than usual, his face burning. He called to me: “Giuseppe! Have you brought the letters?”
“They’re in my rucksack.”
“Such a charming word, rucksack. The world hides in your rucksack.”
“I need a rucksack,” said Jeff.
Taking the cue, I went into the front hall, where I had dropped this fabled rucksack, and returned holding up the passel of unopened letters, seven of them, bound by a rubber band.
“The letters,” I said.
“We must incinerate them,” said Borges. “Ashes to ashes, no? This is the only solution. I think from the Book of Genesis. The origin of all stories.”
As soon as Borges said this, I felt the wisdom—even the necessity—of his proposal. I must burn the letters as a kind of benediction for Billy, as an elegy for my younger self. It felt as right as anything had felt since my arrival in St. Andrews.
Alastair, as he would, understood that we required a ceremony.
He led us, with that impish glow in his eyes, out of the house and across the grassy links to the West Sands. We were a grateful train, Borges and Bella, me, Alastair and Jeff, and young Jasper: silhouettes against the sky. We passed several bemused golfers in plus-fours, who tipped their caps in our direction. It was still quite bright, with a strange milky pink glow on the sea as we moved through wiry brush and dunes to the broad flat beach.
“I can make a fire,” said Jasper.
“You are a fire,” said Alastair.
Jeff suggested they look for kindling together, and Alastair followed them into the brush.
I stood alone with Bella and Borges on the wide sands. Beyond us, the clouds hung like a massive bronze chandelier over the sea. A gannet moved past the edge of a cloud, and I watched it swoop and pierce the surf, then lift off with a fish for its meal. The beach itself was pale and soft, almost pink, full of bladderwrack that spilled its oily guts and the skeletal display of cuttlefish bones. The remains of crab and dogfish mingled with driftwood, the white bare limbs in tangled patterns, a residue of the falling tide. Everything would in due course be exposed.
Soon Jasper, Jeff, and Alastair brought kindling and erected a small temple in a sand pit, stacking driftwood and sticks in a pyramid above the twigs and dry leaves. With the pyromaniac glee of a child, Jasper lit the fire and blew on it, and before long we heard the low snap-crackle of flames.
“Voilà!” said Jasper, a phrase copied from his father.
“Un pequeño fuego,” said Alastair.
Borges drew close. He could see the flames, I was sure. He quoted Hopkins: “ ‘And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion / Times told lovelier, more dangerous!’ ”
“Your letters,” Alastair said to me, as the time had come.
We gathered in a circle around the fire, and I felt strangely, even crazily, high now, elated, trembling. Did I want to go ahead with this? Bella could intuit my hesitation, and she touched me on the elbow, squeezing in reassurance. When I turned to her, her eyes were wide and deep with acceptance. And she smiled.
Everyone watched as I dropped the envelopes into the flames, one by one. Seven of them: the mystical number. They turned orange at first, then curled at the edges, brown and black, blistering, curling into themselves. The flakes rose—ashes to ashes, at last.
“Dust to dust,” said Jeff.
“These are blessed transformations,” Borges told us. “They go on and on. One cannot stop them, the glorious changes. I was such a young man once, so tender. And now, you see…”
“A tender old man,” said Jeff.
“And soon only dust. But we come again. You know Whitman? ‘I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.’ ”
Alastair chimed in: “ ‘If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.’ ”
To my amazement, Bella continued. “ ‘You will hardly know who I am or what I mean / But I shall be good health to you nonetheless.’ ”
Borges added, completing the stanza: “ ‘And filter and fiber your blood.’ ”
Was there music in the air? I could hear it distinctly, feel it coursing through me—a strong and palpable sound, with a scent of cinnamon, a tingle in the air. There were drums, too, and perhaps bagpipes as well, and an unseen guitar with a rhythmic stroke that scraped across strings in bold fashion. I saw Borges begin to sway, his eyes closing, his shoulders swiveling, caught in the tune. He gave a little step, a leap, then reached one hand out to the side for Alastair, who grabbed it, while Jeff took the other; and they began to bob, moving in sideways intricate steps as they sang in Spanish. And then Jasper took his father’s other hand, and the four of them began to dance around the fire to this strangely wonderful melody.
Bella drifted by herself toward the sea, where she slipped off her red sneakers and socks and stepped barefoot into the surf. She raised her shift so that her long legs glistened in unsurprising beauty. The sea washed around her knees, a foamy mix. The wind picked up slightly, and her dress opened, almost disappeared. The music was like thunder, everywhere on the beach, as the surf rose and crashed.
I took off my own shoes and walked toward her. The light was palpable, soft, succulent. I could taste the pink-orange of the clouds as the sun pulsed and shone in the water. The sea itself was a sprawl of diamonds.
Bella smiled at me, an invitation.
And I walked toward her into the quivering water.