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 to him that the country was nearly engaged in a civil war over Vietnam, that university campuses were in turmoil about it, and that all of his colleagues – writers and intellectuals – were protesting daily and marching on Washington to express their opposition.
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.
