He went silent, then said, ‘Well, di Giovanni, I thought Poe, Emerson, Whitman …’
On this flimsy literary basis he felt the United States could do no wrong. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Poe, Emerson, Whitman – and then who, Borges? Lyndon Johnson?’
I had more than hinted that he should not speak, especially to reporters, about matters of which he knew nothing. I phoned the Advocate and had a cordial word with the interviewer. I asked if he thought it was fair to put questions to Borges about the Vietnam war. He agreed it wasn’t and promised not to run Borges’s statement. And he didn’t.
This was the first of many times I was to stick my head above the parapet for Georgie. It was also the first time I was exposed to his blind political views.
The next guest to arrive at the Craigie Street flat was Elsa’s cousin Olga. It was a mark of Elsa’s ever increasing despair that as soon as her son had returned to Buenos Aires she required the familiar company of someone else who was close to her.
And Olga was close. Except in looks, Olga and Elsa were cut out of the same cloth. Now, in her cousin’s company, Elsa had no need to keep up her guard. The cousin was so ingenuous, so naturally candid, that she would not have known what it meant to keep up one’s guard. I liked that about Olga. She was incapable of putting on airs. She was just herself.
The two of them chittered and chattered incessantly, like a pair of cage birds. The way they spoke to each other fascinated me. Olga’s word in agreement with anything Elsa said was ‘lógico’, by which she simply meant ‘of course’. In addition to this usage, the word ‘logical’ held another meaning for Elsa. She prided herself in being logical, by which she meant practical, down to earth, and it was always in contrast to Georgie, who was impractical, a dreamer.
Once, when the subject of Ricardo’s wife came up, Elsa said, ‘Tell di Giovanni, Olga, isn’t Ricardo’s wife divine?’ To which Olga came back, ‘Oh, yes, di Giovanni, Ricardo’s wife is divina – divina, divina, divina.’
Yes, I told myself, so divina that her poor long-suffering husband is a confirmed womanizer.
There was something incorrigibly brazen about Olga.
I liked the way she spoke to Borges, without deference, as though he were part of the furniture, an old childhood friend, one of the family, which of course he now was. No one else knew how to speak to him in this straightforward manner. I liked the completely unselfconscious way she expressed herself with her body.
Olga was slightly shorter than Elsa. She wore loud combinations of clothes. On her, colours clashed, so that there was something of an out-of-tune brass band about her. Maybe it was her hair. The words ‘peroxide blonde’ had obviously been invented specially to describe its particular brash, strawlike colour. Apart from her earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and rings, Olga was adorned with the suntan of a New York widow who had long since taken up residence in Miami Beach.
And yet and yet … she was kindly and good-natured and I was truly grateful for the comic relief she unwittingly provided. Not for the others, perhaps, but certainly for me. I know that Elsa welcomed her; so did I. She was a waft of fresh air in a breathless, claustrophobic household.
The cousins were for ever off on shopping sprees, spending hours roaming Harvard Square together and gushing non-stop when they got back about the merits of this or that perfume, lipstick, eye shadow, false lashes, mascara, face cream, shampoo, hair conditioner. Georgie and I were always delighted to be left alone to get on with our work. In the late afternoon, exhausted and excited, the two piled in with their bags and tipped out the goodies. Then they could not rush fast enough to make us coffee. The only trouble with all this – at least from Borges’s point of view – was that Olga would not have won prizes for her looks.
The women’s outings brought them within range of a new species of local fauna – hippies. How the word tumbled off Olga’s tongue. She had come from Argentina with hippies as the number one attraction that she wanted to see at Harvard. She was awestruck and could not hold back from asking was it true the odd ways they wore their hair? The strange clothes they paraded about in? Was it true they smoked marijuana in public? I knew what was coming.
One day Elsa said, ‘Di Giovanni, why don’t you take Olga out some evening? She’d like to see some of the bars around Harvard Square.’
I did not know Olga to be a drinker. What she wanted was to be suitably chaperoned so that she could take in the sights in a discreet manner. Olga presenting herself discreetly. That was going to take some doing.
The appointed night came round, the two of us went out, and I must say that seeing the kick Olga got from our excursion was a genuine pleasure. She drank in the bright lights along the throbbing streets. She held tightly to my arm and asked an unceasing stream of questions and also kept pointing out for my inspection this or that person. Was it true that at home they slept on mattresses on the floor? Was it true that they exchanged partners for sex? Were they smoking pot?
It was hard to offer Olga a drink. I wondered whether she thought it might be spiked. She knew that speaking Spanish gave her a certain cover. Not even her scorched peroxide locks stood out in this crowd.
She did not insist in staying out very late. She couldn’t wait to get back to Elsa so that she could tell all. Did Olga know that I was expressing my thanks to her for having come from afar to enliven the otherwise gloomy atmosphere of the Craigie Street flat?
Our work began to be noticed. The roster of poets who were engaged on our project were spreading the word. One whose ears that word reached was Galen Williams of the Poetry Center of the YM-YWHA, in New York, who had been badgered by the poet Alan Dugan to contact me for a proposed reading in April. She did and hired Borges, Murchison, and me on the spot.
Meanwhile, Murchison initiated our first reading, a trial run, at the Harvard Faculty Club. In preparation, he and I met at the Hilles Library, where he read aloud our choice of poems and I timed him. Our format was for me to recite the poems in English, Murchison in Spanish, and after each one for Borges to speak a couple of minutes, making impromptu remarks. That small inaugural reading went ‘swimmingly’, to use Borges’s word for it.
An invitation soon followed for a reading at Brandeis University. There, when Borges sensed the packed house, he panicked. Gripping me by the arm he asked me to take him to the loo and, as we stood side by side watering the walls of the big white urinal in front of us, he begged me to get him out of this. I could scarcely believe it. Here was the professional who was delivering the prestigious, high-powered Norton lectures and suddenly he was caving in before my very eyes. Really, I was the one with the butterflies. This was the first time in my life I had performed in public on this scale. And it was to be alongside the illustrious Borges.
I knew I somehow had to take over and prop him up, ignoring the butterflies, his and mine, and simply assuring him it was going to be all right. Of course once we got started it proved more than all right. The audience loved what we were doing.
Since Borges was hard of hearing in his left ear, I sat to his right, with him in the middle and Murchison on his left. This way, after each of his contributions, I could lean towards him and with a whisper guide his performances, saying either ‘Too long’, ‘Too short’, or ‘Just right.’ Remarkably, I was later reputed to have ice-water in my veins when I read. Needless to say, Elsa chose not to attend any of these local outings.
Within days of Ricardo’s departure Georgie and Elsa also departed. Their first stop was Smith College, then Princeton, then the University of Pennsylvania. They were back in Cambridge for less than a week before they were off again to Vassar. At some point there was – or had been – a brief tour of a couple of Texas universities. These visits took place before Olga’s arrival. Borges was bored