Georgie and Elsa: Jorge Luis Borges and His Wife: The Untold Story. Литагент HarperCollins USD

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СКАЧАТЬ Avenue entrance of their building just around the corner, where they could enter from the Craigie Street side. How Borges delighted to tell people they lived at Concord and Craigie, as if the words held some magical quality for him. He even worked the word Craigie into a new poem and launched into the root of the word.

      Why the move at this time? What was the necessity of it? Maybe because Elsa was soon expecting guests – her son and later her cousin Olga – and she would have seen that more room was needed. But perhaps there was another contributing factor.

      Along the corridor from the flat they vacated lived a Persian couple, as Borges referred to them. The man was a mathematician who had a theory of spherical time that fascinated Borges, although he did not understand it. Borges was also fascinated by the man’s wife, to whom he frequently paid visits. She was a sultry beauty and, I think, a scholar herself. Obviously this did not go down well with Elsa, and she and Georgie had spats about it.

      I found it odd that in his confidences to me about Elsa Borges always belittled and made fun of her. He would give a little laugh so that his words fell short of outright nastiness. She had been a schoolteacher, he once told me, bemused, and yet she would ask why they spoke Spanish and why were they Argentines. He said with a sneer that she enjoyed the company of members of Greater Boston’s Argentine community, common people, non-scholars, non-intellectuals, with whom she could be her unfettered self. She went to their barbecues, where she stuffed herself on sweetbreads so that she would be laid up with a liver or pancreas attack for a day or two after. Taking to bed, she would have to lie on one side and drink lemon or grapefruit juice. Indeed, she had reported this behaviour to me herself, not without a touch of pride in her mischievous flirting with danger.

      At the time I thought Borges’s revelations showed unwarranted disloyalty to a new wife but I was too immersed in our work to look for any deeper meaning to any of this. The two had actually come to blows, he told me one day, and he illustrated his words by pummelling me on the back, gentler of course than she had done with him.

      Just before Christmas Murchison informed me that Borges had moved out of the marital home and was holed up in Room 319 of the nearby Continental Hotel. I would have to meet him there. Borges explained to me that he’d had a tiff with Elsa and would be at the hotel for a few days. ‘Tiff’ was the actual word he used, and his usage somehow amused me.

      Elsa, on another occasion, cornered me in the flat while I was waiting for Borges to wake from his customary after-lunch nap. In an angry, unprovoked tirade she confided that since they were first married Georgie had failed her as a man. I knew the two slept in separate rooms but had given this no special thought. Elsa had always struck me as a sexual animal but standoffish Borges never.

      She obviously felt cheated. Georgie was impotent and always had been, she said. Why hadn’t he told her from the start? He had waited until their wedding night, then thrown himself down on his knees before her, weeping. If only he had explained the situation beforehand, she seethed, adding bitterly, ‘I know how to take a man to bed.’

      Utterly stunned, I offered not a single word in reply. Elsa’s frustration, her anger, her humiliation, her unhappiness, were now clear to me. So were Georgie’s unhappiness and his secret burden.

       7. A Visitor and a Yard of Ale

      Ricardo, Elsa’s son, arrived at the very end of December and stayed for one month, not the seven months his mother later claimed in the doctored memories of her 1983 interview. Nor did the young man and Borges spend a lot of time together, as Elsa claimed, on long, long Cambridge walks. Her memories were a fiction. In fact, the day before Ricardo’s arrival it snowed all day, and the snow was deep and impassable on foot. A week later there were daylong sub-zero temperatures that Borges could not manage.

      Before the cold weather set in, Borges had been going on and on about how much he looked forward to winter, for he hated the heat of Buenos Aires. Well, winter came, and it was a hard one. The pavements were icy and you had to shuffle along, skating gingerly, one foot in front of the other. His walking stick was of little use to him. He would hang on to my arm or to Murchison’s for dear life. If he fell hard it might result in damage to his retina and the little he could see would be lost.

      It snowed and it snowed. The mounds along the kerbs of Concord Avenue grew higher and higher. Whenever the temperature dropped and the wind blew, walking anywhere became an ordeal. It was not long before Borges gave up going to his office at the Hilles Library. He was seeing and feeling at first hand what he came to call an ‘epic winter’.

      Twenty-six-year-old Ricardo was introduced to me as a Buenos Aires theatre director. Was this another fiction? He did once in my hearing discuss the personality and fate of Hamlet with Borges, but I kept getting glimpses of another side of him.

      In the middle of January, Rita Guibert, an Argentine journalist living in New York, came to Cambridge to work on a lengthy interview with Borges for Life en español. She was accompanied by a photographer who trekked through the snow to shadow Borges and his students at the Hilles Library and to record him and Elsa in their flat. Ricardo appears in two of the Hilles photos, both times in close proximity to the most glamorous girl in the class. (Elsa and Murchison appear in one of these pictures, at a meal, she wearing sunglasses.)

      Ricardo, a good-looking fellow, wore his hair slicked straight back and dressed in a V-neck sweater over a shirt with the sleeves of the former pulled back to his elbows. Elsa doted on him and regarded him proudly as a bit of a rake. He was married, of course, but I suspect he was separated from his wife. He quite soon struck me as a louche character and something of a spiv. When the pretty girl retired to her Connecticut home for the term break Ricardo prevailed upon me to help him with a love letter to her.

      It was Borges who circulated the story that all Ricardo and Elsa spoke about at the table during lunch, at afternoon tea, and at supper was which streets of the city the No. 48 bus traversed on its long route out to Flores. Maybe mother and son held such a conversation once. So what? In his remarks about this, Borges, who was incapable of inane talk, was airing his superiority. This was the kind of denigrating anecdote, usually apocryphal, that he regarded as clever and that he was constantly inventing to put someone down.

      I don’t believe Borges ever took a shine to Ricardo but he seemed to tolerate him for Elsa’s sake and for the peace and stability her son brought to the troubled household.

      Just after the new year Borges was invited to a dinner party given by Vail Read at her North Shore home in Manchester, Massachusetts. Mrs Gardner Read, to be more formal, was an official at Boston’s Pan American Society of New England. The party, a fairly large affair, was one Borges did not want Elsa to attend, so he asked me to accompany him instead.

      Something odd and yet typical of the perverse whims Borges was capable of took place in the car when we were picked up. He sat beside the driver. I was in the back alongside a young man who happened to mention that his grandfather had been the leading Colombian Modernist poet Guillermo Valencia. A few weeks before I had casually asked Borges about this poet and got a flat reply that he knew nothing about him. Now, suddenly, having overheard the conversation in the back seat, Borges began reciting one of the grandfather’s most famous poems. I could not fathom it and never asked him for an explanation of the strange contradiction.

      At the Reads’ we met, among many others, Herbert Kenny of the Boston Globe and John Updike. I seized the opportunity to ask Updike to make some translations for me and he agreed. Across the table, Borges and Updike swapped the names of detective-story writers each had read. The list, which was encyclopedic, held the rest of us in thrall. It was almost as if the one was trying to outdo the other, but in a cheerful, non-competitive way.

      It СКАЧАТЬ