Beef stew and hash brownies with Borges

How a wild evening with the great Argentinian writer took an unlikely turn on a Scottish golf course

‘Borges is in town,” the poet Alastair Reid said breathlessly when I ran into him at the entrance to Geddes, a purveyor of fine wines, cheeses, and cured meats on Market Street in St Andrews: not the sort of place where Alastair would normally shop for provisions. He explained that the Argentinian novelist had been dropped off the night before by his friend Norman di Giovanni. “Borges is a bit frail, but Norman has left him in my care for a few weeks. We’re translating some new poems.”

Together Alastair and I stepped into the lovely shop with its rich smells, and I watched with interest as he bought a thick slice of dolcelatte and a bottle of dark Spanish wine. Good wine, for once. When he asked if I would come to dinner, I quickly agreed, but I confessed that despite his exhortations, I had yet to read anything by Borges.

“The translations are mostly terrible,” Alastair said, as if to excuse me. “I must learn Spanish,” I said. Alastair of course knew I would not learn Spanish just to read Borges. He touched my shoulder as if to say, “There, there.”

In 1970, having just graduated from Lafayette College and moved (briefly, I hoped) back in with my parents in Scranton, Pennsylvania, I saw two choices: stay at home, where my mother would chop off my balls, or go to Vietnam, where they’d be blown off by a landmine. A third choice, less apparent at first but finally obvious, was to leave the United States altogether, getting as far away as possible. The place that called to me was St Andrews, a small town on the East Neuk of Fife, in Scotland, where I’d studied for my undergraduate year abroad. I wrote to the university, asking to be admitted as a PhD student, and proposing a thesis on the poet George Mackay Brown. “At least you’ll be safe in Scotland,” my mother said grudgingly, “though Scotch girls have a bad reputation, and the men apparently wear skirts.”

When I arrived, I ran into a tutor from my undergraduate year called Miss Wright – Miss Jean Brodie, come back from the dead – who asked me to tea, and offered to introduce me to her friend Alastair Reid. (“Something of a rake, but never mind,” she said.) Without awaiting my response, she lifted the telephone and called him, and Alastair picked up at once, as if awaiting her call. “I have a young man here, Alastair, a former student. An Italian from America. Mr. Parini. Very serious, and perhaps too serious. But no matter. He wants to write poetry, and I told him I’d introduce you.”

“Are you a gardener?” Alastair asked me, when I met him for the first time in the pub.

“No.”

“That’s too bad,” he said. “You must take it up.”

I knew then I would apprentice myself to Alastair and learn as much as I could from him.

“Cooking and writing are the perfect combination,” he told me another time. “All day I move back and forth between the desk and the stove. They’re elemental. You bring various and distinct elements together, the raw ingredients. You add the flame. It’s chemistry.”

“So poetry is soup?”

“More like a stew.”

Alastair’s squat stone house, Pilmour Cottage, stood in a rookery on West Sands, right on the golf course, with the North Sea in the middle distance. Jasper, Alastair’s black-eyed, black-haired, beautiful son, greeted me at the door. “He’s here!” he said. Jeff, their lodger, stood behind him, looking beatific with a yellow bandanna on his head, breathing expectantly. It was as if God himself sat in the room next door.

Borges hunched in the shadows, in the wing chair, leaning on a cane with an ivory handle, his hair slicked back. He looked every inch his age of 71, even a decade older, wearing a baggy brown pinstriped suit with big cuffs, his checked waistcoat looped by a gold chain. His wide powder-blue tie was full of orange waterfalls, flying fish, and the residue of many meals. The soiled and fraying collar of his shirt suggested that it had been in use for many years, if not generations. He was talking to himself now, smiling in a twitchy way, lifting his big empty eyes to the ceiling like headlamps. We approached without speaking.

“This is Jay Parini,” Jasper said in his piping voice.

“I’m glad to meet you, sir,” I said. “Speak louder, I’m blind!” said Borges.

Jasper made a little twirl around his ear with a finger.

“Jay Parini!” I shouted.

“Ah, Giuseppe Parini!” he said. “One of my favourites of the Italian poets. Il giorno. What a performance! The Alexander Pope of Italy!”

“I know the poem a little, yes.” Though I was unjustifiably proud to share the last name of this 18th-century poet, I’d never bothered to read his verse carefully. Could Borges smell my fraudulence?

“I’m so pleased to meet you at last,” he said. “Do you know Palermo?”

“I’ve never been to Italy.”

“Not in Sicily, with the Mafia. It’s in Buenos Aires. Palermo is a barrio – an adjunct quarter. Alas, there are gangsters in my Palermo, too. I will admit this. The kinship of thieves, men with knives! But you must know, it’s one of the oldest parts of the city, and such lovely sad colonial architecture. Many Italians settled there, and they often speak in Italian in the streets. The best of them read the poetry of Parini.”

I’d soon discover that Borges often spoke like this, with impressionistic bullet points, circumnavigations, and associations: a wild disjunctive manner. He seemed to chase his own tail around an invisible pole, and I wondered if this manner had something to do with his blindness, as if those who can’t see can sense more than the rest of us, make daring mental leaps, sometimes doubling back on themselves to clarify and reinforce earlier lines of argument.

“Jay is a writer,” Jasper said.

“I’m sure of it: Giuseppe Parini! I’d have been a better writer, perhaps more widely read, had my name been Federico García Lorca. You must know Lorca – a poet, a playwright, and a ferocious egoist? He came to Buenos Aires once, about 40 years ago. Kept very bad company. Oliverio Girondo! Don’t let me talk about this particular man, please!”

“Girondo?” asked Jasper. The Argentine poet had died a few years before, in 1967.

“I wish I had never heard the man’s name,” said Borges.

Alastair caught the end of this conversation as he stepped into the room. “Lorca!” he said. “What a good poet. I like his plays, too.”

“Alastair,” said Borges, “you say this only to irritate me.”

“It’s a failing of yours, Borges, this hatred of Lorca.”

“You must know, I have worse feelings about Girondo. He stole from me the most lovely woman in the world, Norah Lange. He stole my bride.”

“You were never married to her.” “But this is the problem. Let me explain to Giuseppe.” The massive globe of Borges’s head spun in my direction. “The catastrophe happened in 1934, I believe. Or was it 1933? Memory is a mirror that may easily shatter. The shards would cut me into ribbons. I would bleed on this floor.”

Alastair said to Jeff and me, “He’s melodramatic, but he controls himself on the page.”

Soon we gathered around the kitchen table for a succulent beef stew made with pearl onions and garlic, red potatoes, and capers, all cooked in a thick madeira sauce. Alastair poured wine for everyone, including Jasper. On the Aga sat a trayful of Alastair’s familiar hash brownies. Borges said: “I have dreamed of being in Scotland through my whole life… My family had Nordic roots, but my grandmother – she was thoroughly English, from Staffordshire. She was Fanny Haslam. My great-grandfather, Edward Haslam, was a schoolmaster in Buenos Aires, where my grandmother met the colonel.”

Borges recited this information as if it had been printed on a card and memorised, to be pulled out for the right occasions.

“That’s his grandfather, the colonel,” Jeff said, and I wondered when he’d imbibed all this Borgesian lore.

“A very great man, yes. And English was my first language,” said Borges, “the language of my nursery.”

“So why do you speak with such an accent?” asked Jasper. Alastair glared at him. “It’s not that I don’t like the accent,” Jasper added.

“It’s a Staffordshire accent,” said Alastair.

“He is teasing me always, dear Alejandro.”

“How is Elsa?” asked Alastair. “We are divorcing, I will acknowledge the truth. Have I failed to say this? My apologies, but – how to explain? This union which was never a union. Appearances deceive. We never really knew each other. A word of advice, Giuseppe. Do not rush into marriage.”

As if rushing were my problem. “You courted Elsa for five decades,” said Alastair. “That’s half a century!”

“There is truth in this, but not the whole truth. I loved her when she was a girl of 17. I married her when she was an old woman. Never confuse the two. Think how often our cells die, and they’re replaced one by one! We lose ourselves again and again, and the worst is always yet to come. This marriage was my mistake. I loved Norah Lange, in any case. Not Elsa. My mother warned me. She said, Elsa wants your money. I said, Mother, I have no money. Ay, caramba!”

“Nobody says ‘Ay, caramba,’” said Alastair.

“Alejandro. Did you not hear me say it?”

“Jay writes poetry,” said Jasper, perhaps noticing that I didn’t know where to put an oar into these swirling waters.

“Have you published a book, Giuseppe?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I don’t have enough poems, and they aren’t ready for the public.”

“I said as much when I was your age. But I published the book anyway.”

He ate greedily, helping after helping, and we all watched in amazement the way he repeatedly wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Sometimes he withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and cleaned his fingers.

“He likes his food,” said Alastair. “But if he stays in Scotland long enough, it will cure his appetite.”

“Scotland is very dear to my heart, have you not understood me? In part, I think, this is because the greatest writer in the English language lived in Scotland.”

“Who is this?” I asked. “Stevenson, dear boy… ‘Home is the sailor, home from sea,/ And the hunter home from the hill.’ These are, Giuseppe, the finest lines of English poetry. I would kill to have written such lines. In fact, I shall write them one day,” said Borges. “I shall claim them.”

“He’s not much read in the States,” I said.

“In the States, very little is read,” said Borges. “I have travelled in your country, always to lecture. At Harvard, for instance, in Cambridge. I tell students to read the great ones: Stevenson, Chesterton, Wells. And Chidiock Tichborne. Now there is a poet.”

Alastair raised an eyebrow. “Tichborne?”

Borges warmed his face in the spotlight of our attention.

“He wrote only one poem,” he said, “his ‘Elegy.’ An elegy for himself. He was condemned to the Tower of London, a would-be assassin of Elizabeth. A Catholic, remember. Part of the Babington Plot to bring Mary, Queen of Scots, to the

‘He’s going to kill himself,’ I said. ‘He’s Borges,’ replied Alastair. ‘He can fly’