For the rest, the task was one of lengthy administrative duties. On my own I began to match up poems and translators, beginning with some of the same poets who had assisted me in the Guillén volume. This time I included myself among the translators. I corresponded with each contributor, criticized their English versions when they came back to me (often toing and froing with them several times per poem), and generally kept my stable of writers working. When I felt a poem was finished, I read it to Borges for a final nod of approval.
Other administrative duties consisted of raising funds to pay the translators and, most important of all, finding a publisher. It was a whirlwind of activity. I first met Borges at his flat on 4 December 1967. Before that month was out I had landed my publisher, Seymour Lawrence, and Borges had written to his, Carlos Frías, in Buenos Aires – dictating the letter to me – to secure English-language rights. I was amused and flattered when in the letter he referred to me as ‘the onlie begetter of this generous enterprise’. He quickly explained that Frías was also a professor of English literature, so the Shakespeare link would not be wasted on him.
Work on these selected poems began in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and they were three years in the making before being finished in Buenos Aires. The book was then a fourth year in production.
I have mentioned that in the months before I met him Borges had chosen – had been forced to choose – isolation as his daily lot. Worse than his isolation was his stark loneliness. No one came to visit, he told me, and after a while he asked if I could come to work with him on Sundays. His empty Sundays seemed to him to yawn on for ever. I was puzzled by this – the crowds at his public lectures, the emptiness at home – but I did not press him for an explanation. In the flat there was great tension between him and Elsa, which I feigned not to notice. I could see that he was immediately cheered by our work together, and he told me it gave him justification for his existence.
I said he told me that no one came to see him, but I remember that for a couple of days during my early visits a black boy, who may have been a Harvard student with an interest in writing, would be sitting in the kitchen with Borges. The young man said nothing, and Borges said nothing to him. I felt that Borges wanted to get rid of him by maintaining silence and not responding. As Borges snubbed him, the lad stopped coming. Borges never mentioned the incident nor did I.
Fani, the Borges’s Argentine maidservant, reported that one day in Buenos Aires Borges received a visit from two Brazilian women. ‘They stayed the whole afternoon,’ Fani said. ‘When they left the señor came to the kitchen and asked me what they were like physically. I told him they were blacks. “What do you mean blacks? Why didn’t you tell me? ¡Qué horror, I would have thrown them out!”’
I don’t know what it was about black people, but he did have an aversion to them. He sometimes wrinkled his nose and spoke of their catinga, an Argentine word for the smell of their sweat.
For her part, Elsa too seemed pleased to welcome me into the fold. I lifted her out of her gloom. My presence gave her more time for herself, needed space from Borges, and some new company she could trust.
6. Georgie’s Mystery, Elsa’s Bombshell
It was inevitable that Borges would begin to confide in me. There was no one else around with whom to converse, and talking to a stranger is always easier.
One day, when Elsa was out, he broke off from our work to tell me a story. He seemed troubled and confused, and his voice quickly took on a genuine sadness. Some weeks before, he and Elsa had been introduced to a John Van Dell and his wife, a couple living in Salem, Massachusetts. The Van Dells were former Argentines. Borges told me they were congenial people, and he and Elsa had enjoyed several pleasant occasions in their company.
The Van Dells would drive to Cambridge, pick up Georgie and Elsa, and take them touring Salem and other North Shore towns of interest. Of course to Borges Salem meant Nathaniel Hawthorne, the town’s native son and one of his favourite American authors. Knowing this, Van Dell at once took Georgie and Elsa to visit the house of the seven gables.
The couples enjoyed several other outings together, including meals at the Van Dells’. And then, suddenly, abruptly, and without explanation, there were no more meetings. In his puzzlement, Borges quizzed me for a possible reason for such a turn of events. There was obviously some key factor involved about which Borges was being kept in the dark, but I could not put my finger on it. Borges wanted to know if this were typical American behaviour. Quite untypical, I assured him, and with nothing more to offer, we let the subject drop.
Sometime during the university Christmas break Georgie and Elsa changed flats. They moved from the Concord Avenue entrance of their building just around the corner, where they could enter from the Craigie Street side. How Borges delighted to tell people they lived at Concord and Craigie, as if the words held some magical quality for him. He even worked the word Craigie into a new poem and launched into the root of the word.
Why the move at this time? What was the necessity of it? Maybe because Elsa was soon expecting guests – her son and later her cousin Olga – and she would have seen that more room was needed. But perhaps there was another contributing factor.
Along the corridor from the flat they vacated lived a Persian couple, as Borges referred to them. The man was a mathematician who had a theory of spherical time that fascinated Borges, although he did not understand it. Borges was also fascinated by the man’s wife, to whom he frequently paid visits. She was a sultry beauty and, I think, a scholar herself. Obviously this did not go down well with Elsa, and she and Georgie had spats about it.
I found it odd that in his confidences to me about Elsa Borges always belittled and made fun of her. He would give a little laugh so that his words fell short of outright nastiness. She had been a schoolteacher, he once told me, bemused, and yet she would ask why they spoke Spanish and why were they Argentines. He said with a sneer that she enjoyed the company of members of Greater Boston’s Argentine community, common people, non-scholars, non-intellectuals, with whom she could be her unfettered self. She went to their barbecues, where she stuffed herself on sweetbreads so that she would be laid up with a liver or pancreas attack for a day or two after. Taking to bed, she would have to lie on one side and drink lemon or grapefruit juice. Indeed, she had reported this behaviour to me herself, not without a touch of pride in her mischievous flirting with danger.
At the time I thought Borges’s revelations showed unwarranted disloyalty to a new wife but I was too immersed in our work to look for any deeper meaning to any of this. The two had actually come to blows, he told me one day, and he illustrated his words by pummelling me on the back, gentler of course than she had done with him.
Just before Christmas Murchison informed me that Borges had moved out of the marital home and was holed up in Room 319 of the nearby Continental Hotel. I would have to meet him there. Borges explained to me that he’d had a tiff with Elsa and would be at the hotel for a few days. ‘Tiff’ was the actual word he used, and his usage somehow amused me.
Elsa, on another occasion, cornered me in the flat while I was waiting for Borges to wake from his customary after-lunch nap. In an angry, unprovoked tirade she confided that since they were first married Georgie had failed her as a man. I knew the two slept in separate rooms but had given this no special thought. Elsa had always struck me as a sexual animal but standoffish Borges never.
She obviously felt cheated. Georgie was impotent and always had been, she said. Why hadn’t he told her from the