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 with Cambridge and he was slipping out of favour with his Harvard colleagues. These outside lectures gave him a taste of fresh blood and a degree of escape from Elsa’s stranglehold. Paradoxically, it gave her an escape too.
It seems, however, that Marichal’s feathers were ruffled by the amount of time Borges was travelling to lecture at other universities. Under the terms of the Norton lectureship he was meant to reside in Cambridge.
It was at this time, I suppose, seeing his popularity on other campuses and as well in retaliation or revenge for imagined slights, that Elsa began to taunt Georgie, telling him that this was his quarter hour of fame and that he must take advantage of the moment. By this she probably meant he should quickly hike up his lecture fees. Tomorrow, she would say, nobody will remember who you were. These remarks incensed Borges and he would repeat them to me with surprising frequency and irritation.
Although she had shown no interest in our previous readings, Elsa was not going to miss a chance to visit New York. There was one rub. Borges was adamant and pitiless about Olga’s accompanying us. He flatly would not have it. Elsa begged me to plead with Borges to get him to relent. I felt sorry for Olga. Somehow I managed to get Georgie to agree to Elsa’s request, but there was an iron-clad proviso. Olga had to stay at another hotel and was not to be seen with us.
Galen Williams made it quite clear that the reading at the Y had to go like clockwork. The programme was to last an hour and a half, with one intermission, and everything had to end at a precise moment or else the Y would be in trouble with the unions. Of course Murchison and I had timed the poems and estimated Borges’s contributions to the last second. Jack was one of the readers, I was another, and so were two of our poet-translators, Alan Dugan and Mark Strand. All of us, except for Borges, read from lecterns.
The Theresa L. Kaufmann Concert Hall, where the performance was taking place, was immense. From the stage you seemed to be looking out over an endless prairie. More daunting was the audience. It was packed with Borges connoisseurs, writers and poets, editors and publishers – the elite of the New York literary world.
At the end there was a tremendous ovation. Borges was relieved and elated, so elated that he called Elsa up onto the stage and had her recite one of his sonnets that she had memorized. The audience erupted in applause. Elsa could not have been more pleased.
Then suddenly from below the stage I was staring down into the face of Willis Barnstone, a poet and professor and great admirer of Borges. He was desperate to climb up beside us, wanting to read translations of his own of early Borges poems. He pleaded with me to stop the proceedings – that is, the public’s exit from the auditorium – and grant him the podium. The request was not only beyond my power to grant, but it seemed such an absurd and amateurish thing to do. Incredible how people who should have known better were desperate to bask in Borges’s limelight. Elsa’s recitation had been enough; the public liked it, but I felt Barnstone could have turned the evening into a vulgar circus. Months earlier, before Dugan had persuaded Galen to hire me, Barnstone had proposed to include in the reading a disproportionate seventeen of Borges’s earliest poems, which dated from 1923. Georgie had been outraged that Barnstone was prepared to overlook his far better work of recent years.
The Barnstone fiasco did not end there. Galen had to write him a conciliatory letter the day after the reading. In it she said that I had actually listed him as reader for a first encore. She pointed out that
We had fully expected that there would be at least one, if not three encores; but the drama of the evening was too much for encores. Once Borges had left the stage, it would have been awkward, anti-climactic, and unprofessional-amateurish. This evening shows that poetry can be ‘show business’ – a performance – and that the unexpected occurrences of the stage have to be ‘expected.’ For instance, who would have ever predicted that Borges would want his wife to read a poem and to sit on stage with him? It is unheard of in Poetry Center history, yet it worked beautifully!
Galen got an instant apology from Barnstone and there the matter rested. But at the same time she wrote to me saying that ‘WB is,
