of one of his students, Vlady Kociancich, on whom it was plain to me that he had a crush.)
One version of Elsa’s reappearance on the matrimonial scene tells that Borges’s mother learned that Elsa was now a widow and urged her son to contact her. A meeting was arranged via Elsa’s sister Alicia. Elsa showed Borges a ring he had given her years before; he was moved that she had kept it. Borges later showed Elsa a photograph of her that he had kept between the leaves of a book; doña Leonor told Elsa that for years he looked at it every night before going to bed. All this is too pat and smacks too much of a fairy tale to ring true.
Exactly when these events were supposed to be taking place we do not know. There was some mention of Elsa’s qualifications, as she knew no English. A second version of the story is that another of Borges’s old flames, Margarita Guerrero, was mooted as a possible wife. This too seems to me an absurdity. Margot, as she was known, was a striking beauty, tall, elegant, and worldly. All the things Elsa was not. Was Margot one more of Borges’s – or his mother’s – preposterous fancies?
Eventually Borges chose Elsa, proposed to her, and she accepted. Again there are no dates for any of this. Plans were made for the registry and the church ceremonies. Now it was time for Elsa – unknown in Buenos Aires literary or social circles – to be paraded for inspection. As was to be expected, doña Leonor’s circle of upper-class women, snobs to the last one, sniffed and probed and found Elsa wanting. It was an ocular inquisition. She proved frumpish, unsophisticated, and lacking in looks. It is true that even with her mouth shut tight Elsa was loud. When she laughed her cackle turned shrill and went on far too long. But she would have had little to laugh about at these gatherings; Elsa knew what was taking place and in the end she got her own back by snubbing the lot of this smart set who had arranged a party for the newlyweds on the eve of their departure for the United States. Elsa simply did not show up, leaving Georgie to attend the gathering on his own.
Within a week the couple set off on their great adventure, arriving in Boston on 29 September 1967.
At Harvard, Elsa was immediately plunged into the thick of an academic community and a life that she could not have foreseen and that Georgie could not have prepared her for. This was not the froth of upper-class, pseudo-intellectual Buenos Aires ladies who had informed a large part of Borges’s existence in Argentina. Elsa could deal with such people by ignoring them and falling back on her own family and friends.
Here in Cambridge, Borges’s colleagues were all each other’s close friends as well as being highly professional world-class Hispanic scholars. Borges had made the acquaintance of some of these men and women during a visit to Harvard with his mother in 1961 or 1962, when he spent a semester at the University of Texas. Others were old friends and associates from earlier years together in Buenos Aires.
Juan Marichal, who had been at Harvard since 1949, was chairman of the Romance Languages and Literatures Department at the time of Borges’s appointment to the Norton lectureship. Recognized as one of the most important intellectuals of the Spanish diaspora following the civil war, Marichal was a historian, literary critic, and essayist. He spent ten years rescuing and assembling the scattered and suppressed works of Manuel Azaña, a leading politican and victim of the Franco dictatorship. Marichal’s wife was Solita Salinas, daughter of the poet Pedro Salinas – whose writings Marichal also edited – and sister of the Madrid publisher Jaime Salinas.
It so happened that one of the late Pedro Salinas’s closest friends and associates was Jorge Guillén, whom Borges regarded as the finest living poet of the Spanish language. In retirement, Guillén resided in Cambridge with his wife Irene and his daughter Teresa, who was married to Stephen Gilman, also a Harvard professor. Gilman was a Hispanist who wrote, among other books, specialist studies of classics like the Cid and the Lazarillo de Tormes, the theatre of Lope de Vega, the fifteenth-century La Celestina, its author Fernando de Rojas, and the nineteenth-century novelist Benito Pérez Galdós.
Between all these people the links were tight. To occupy his time and keep from falling into boredom, in addition to his six public lectures Borges in his first term at Harvard gave a small class on Argentine writers. Who was it who volunteered to pick him up from his flat and shepherd him to his classroom, where they sat in on his lectures? Teresa Gilman and Irene Guillén.
Also at Harvard was the unassuming Raimundo Lida, whom Borges had known since the early 1930s and the founding of Sur. Lida had then served as its managing editor. From 1953 he had been at Harvard, where he preceded Marichal as department chairman. Lida was a philologist, a philosopher of language, and an expert in the Romance philology of the Spanish Golden Age. He had been born into a Yiddish-speaking family in a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire that is now Ukraine. When only a few months old he emigrated with his family to Buenos Aires. His wife was Denah Lida, a professor at nearby Brandeis University, where her specialities were Ladino and Sephardic languages. She too wrote a book on Pérez Galdós. It was Lida who retrieved Borges and Elsa from the airport on their arrival and helped set them up in their first flat.
Joan Alonso, the widow of another scholar known to Borges, also formed part of the preceding circle. Amado Alonso had been born in Spain, but emigrated to Argentina before he finally established himself at Harvard. He had been a distinguished philologist, linguist, and literary critic. Joan, who was not of Spanish origin, had at some point become a friend of Borges’s mother, with whom she carried on a correspondence and reported to doña Leonor on Borges and Elsa’s comings and goings in Cambridge.
There was another Argentine well known to Borges who taught at Harvard at this time – the writer, literary critic, and novelist Enrique Anderson Imbert. His stories, branded micro-cuentos, were much admired in the Argentine at the time for their blend of fantasy and magical realism. Borges loathed and looked down on Anderson Imbert, partly from envy of the latter’s success and partly because Borges disliked being linked to Anderson through the kind of writing they both exercised. Consequently at Cambridge they hardly ever met.
Such then was the company Elsa was expected to keep. It was not her lack of English that turned out to be the problem; all these people spoke Spanish. Rather, it was her lack of intellect. Borges, who should have foreseen this, was simply oblivious of the problem. As ever, he was locked in self-absorption, in his own private, hermetic existence. He made a feeble attempt to interest Elsa in English by applying to her one of his pet ideas – that of learning a language through the study of its poetry. He saddled her with a favourite text, Robert Louis Stevenson’s brief ‘Requiem’:
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you ’grave for me:
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
But Elsa had no interest in English verse; Borges should have known the experiment was doomed to fail.
On one occasion, as Borges told it, Elsa baulked and refused to attend a party given by some of his Harvard colleagues when she learned that her husband was not to be the guest of honour. But Elsa was cleverer than Borges gave her credit for. This was her way of extricating herself from a class of people she simply could not deal with, allowing her to escape from the real or fancied humiliation she felt in their
