Utterly stunned, I offered not a single word in reply. Elsa’s frustration, her anger, her humiliation, her unhappiness, were now clear to me. So were Georgie’s unhappiness and his secret burden.
7. A Visitor and a Yard of Ale
Ricardo, Elsa’s son, arrived at the very end of December and stayed for one month, not the seven months his mother later claimed in the doctored memories of her 1983 interview. Nor did the young man and Borges spend a lot of time together, as Elsa claimed, on long, long Cambridge walks. Her memories were a fiction. In fact, the day before Ricardo’s arrival it snowed all day, and the snow was deep and impassable on foot. A week later there were daylong sub-zero temperatures that Borges could not manage.
Before the cold weather set in, Borges had been going on and on about how much he looked forward to winter, for he hated the heat of Buenos Aires. Well, winter came, and it was a hard one. The pavements were icy and you had to shuffle along, skating gingerly, one foot in front of the other. His walking stick was of little use to him. He would hang on to my arm or to Murchison’s for dear life. If he fell hard it might result in damage to his retina and the little he could see would be lost.
It snowed and it snowed. The mounds along the kerbs of Concord Avenue grew higher and higher. Whenever the temperature dropped and the wind blew, walking anywhere became an ordeal. It was not long before Borges gave up going to his office at the Hilles Library. He was seeing and feeling at first hand what he came to call an ‘epic winter’.
Twenty-six-year-old Ricardo was introduced to me as a Buenos Aires theatre director. Was this another fiction? He did once in my hearing discuss the personality and fate of Hamlet with Borges, but I kept getting glimpses of another side of him.
In the middle of January, Rita Guibert, an Argentine journalist living in New York, came to Cambridge to work on a lengthy interview with Borges for Life en español. She was accompanied by a photographer who trekked through the snow to shadow Borges and his students at the Hilles Library and to record him and Elsa in their flat. Ricardo appears in two of the Hilles photos, both times in close proximity to the most glamorous girl in the class. (Elsa and Murchison appear in one of these pictures, at a meal, she wearing sunglasses.)
Ricardo, a good-looking fellow, wore his hair slicked straight back and dressed in a V-neck sweater over a shirt with the sleeves of the former pulled back to his elbows. Elsa doted on him and regarded him proudly as a bit of a rake. He was married, of course, but I suspect he was separated from his wife. He quite soon struck me as a louche character and something of a spiv. When the pretty girl retired to her Connecticut home for the term break Ricardo prevailed upon me to help him with a love letter to her.
It was Borges who circulated the story that all Ricardo and Elsa spoke about at the table during lunch, at afternoon tea, and at supper was which streets of the city the No. 48 bus traversed on its long route out to Flores. Maybe mother and son held such a conversation once. So what? In his remarks about this, Borges, who was incapable of inane talk, was airing his superiority. This was the kind of denigrating anecdote, usually apocryphal, that he regarded as clever and that he was constantly inventing to put someone down.
I don’t believe Borges ever took a shine to Ricardo but he seemed to tolerate him for Elsa’s sake and for the peace and stability her son brought to the troubled household.
Just after the new year Borges was invited to a dinner party given by Vail Read at her North Shore home in Manchester, Massachusetts. Mrs Gardner Read, to be more formal, was an official at Boston’s Pan American Society of New England. The party, a fairly large affair, was one Borges did not want Elsa to attend, so he asked me to accompany him instead.
Something odd and yet typical of the perverse whims Borges was capable of took place in the car when we were picked up. He sat beside the driver. I was in the back alongside a young man who happened to mention that his grandfather had been the leading Colombian Modernist poet Guillermo Valencia. A few weeks before I had casually asked Borges about this poet and got a flat reply that he knew nothing about him. Now, suddenly, having overheard the conversation in the back seat, Borges began reciting one of the grandfather’s most famous poems. I could not fathom it and never asked him for an explanation of the strange contradiction.
At the Reads’ we met, among many others, Herbert Kenny of the Boston Globe and John Updike. I seized the opportunity to ask Updike to make some translations for me and he agreed. Across the table, Borges and Updike swapped the names of detective-story writers each had read. The list, which was encyclopedic, held the rest of us in thrall. It was almost as if the one was trying to outdo the other, but in a cheerful, non-competitive way.
It may also have been here at the Reads’ table, if I remember correctly, that Borges and I invented – or, rather, first made public use of – the Old Norse. Whenever we were in company and Borges required the loo he would quietly say, ‘Di Giovanni, do you think an Old Norse?’ I would rise and, having reconnoitred the place beforehand, lead him straight to the bathroom and stand beside him to help point him and his stream in the right direction. Our code had originated when Borges first began to say to me that he thought it may be time for that old English custom, by which he meant taking a piss. But as I knew he had left the study of Old English behind and was now working on Old Norse I leapt at the play on words and contradicted him, saying, ‘You mean an Old Norse, don’t you?’ After that, Old Norse stuck.
During this period Borges and I spent several evenings and nights together working late and then going out for dinner. I owned a VW Beetle, and Borges loved the occasional escape from the flat. One night he asked if we could go to a bar and drink some beer. To amuse him I took him to a place that specialized in something called ‘a yard of ale’.
The yard of ale was drunk from what amounted to a long glass tube with a bulb at the end. You had to learn to lift the tube gradually and sip. If you tipped the tube up too quickly the whole yard rushed down to drench you. Somehow we mastered it and Borges was grinning like a naughty schoolboy. Afterwards, we took a drive down the Esplanade along the Charles on the Boston side of the river. We didn’t get back to Craigie until midnight.
One of Borges’s most popular poems is called ‘El otro tigre’ – the other tiger. At our destination I helped him to the little used Craigie Street entrance. From there he usually made his way up the one or two flights to the door of his flat. On this particular night, Borges could not wait to get upstairs to the loo. As soon as we entered the ground-floor door, he rushed under the stairway and opened his fly. He let go with an almighty flow and splash of piss that echoed loudly in the empty stairwell.
‘Borges,’ I said, pretending to be scandalized, ‘what are you doing?’
‘That’s all right,’ he said, ‘they’ll think it was some cat.’
‘Sure,’ said I, his mini-Niagara still reverberating in my ears, ‘el otro tigre.’
8. Vietnam, Olga, and Harvard Square
Neither Georgie nor Elsa had any idea of what was going on in the United States during the months of their visit. Borges could not read newspapers or did not have them read to him, did not listen to the radio, and would have found that discussing political issues with anyone – or having anyone discuss political issues with him – was too boring for his consideration.
One day a young reporter for the Harvard student paper, the Advocate, appeared at the flat to conduct an interview. He touched on all the literary bases and at some point asked Borges what he thought about the Vietnam war. Borges briefly expressed himself in favour of the war – that is, of the role of the United States in that war.
After the reporter left, I asked Borges what he knew about the war. He could not answer. I asked him on what basis he had come out backing American government policy. I then explained