dear.’
‘That’s of no consequence,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if the new edition is even in print yet. I have added a few new poems – all short ones. I have them all memorized.’
Then he asked would I come today. What time? Six o’clock. He gave me the address and repeated the apartment number twice. Eagerly, he also asked me to bring some of the translations. I told him he had misunderstood; I hadn’t any translations yet but would be commissioning them.
‘Well, come and we’ll talk,’ he said, his enthusiasm undiminished.
It did not occur to me then that Borges would have asked Teresa Gilman, or perhaps even Guillén himself, about me. I know in their loyalty they would have given me a warm report. Elsa would have invested this train of events with prophetic significance, calling it fate. But predetermination is not one of my beliefs; what was taking place at breakneck speed I knew to be just dumb luck.
That evening, for a couple of hours, Borges and I sat at a wooden table opposite each other on the benches of the flat’s old-fashioned built-in breakfast nook. We discussed the planned volume in general terms and then went over some specific lines in a couple of poems I had been tinkering with in English translation.
The present book – the story I am trying to tell here – is about Georgie and Elsa. I want it to be a book about two married people, one of whom happens only incidentally to be a famous writer. My interest is strictly in them, not in literary criticism. And yet it was the work that Borges and I were embarking on that was the glue that held the three of us together. Perhaps, then – as an aside – the briefest, pedantry-free description of our daily enterprise would not be out of place.
I first read through his poems – they dated from 1923 to 1967 – and then joined him to hammer out a suitable broad selection. I brought notes, and while Borges would volunteer information about this or that poem I would scribble down jottings that might later prove useful to a prospective translator. Our views of what to include or exclude in a volume of a hundred poems rarely failed to coincide. Next I would take to our meetings a literal line-by-line handwritten draft of the poems, each of which we discussed at length. As Borges was blind, I read him one line at a time and added changes and corrections as he guided me.
There was a long history of visual abnormalities running through the male side of Borges’s family. His father before him had lost his sight, and from his early years Borges was severely myopic. His vision had gradually deteriorated down the years until around 1955, when he could no longer read. When I met him he was able to distinguish the colour yellow as a luminous patch and so had a preference for yellow neckties. This too left him in time. When our books were published he would hold the title page up close to his face and make out the large letters. I noticed that he saw outlines better in bright light, and that his psychological state was a factor as well. This blindness worked to the advantage of our translations, since everything had to be read to him and demanded his strict attention.
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
