The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Throne. It’s the most perfect poem:
My prime of youth is but a frost of
cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain, My crop of corn is but a field of
tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of
gain.
The day is past, and yet I saw no
sun,
And now I live, and now my life is
done.
Does it get better, I ask you? ‘My crop of corn is but a field of tares.’ Metaphor raised to the level of perfection. And I, you see, am an old man. I’m in my own Tower, awaiting execution. ‘And now I live, and now my life is done.’”
“Are you going to die soon?” asked Jasper, who was removing the capers from his stew one by one, lining them up on the side of the bowl.
“Indeed, boy. Look at these withered hands, my stoop! Look into my eyes, which see nothing!”
“Enough,” said Alastair. “Scotland is working its dark magic. Morbidity is the national curse.”
Alastair led Borges into the sitting room after dinner, and Jeff passed around wine in pewter goblets, and the tray of glistening hash brownies. Borges lifted his brownie to sniff it before biting into it. Then he smiled, with apparent relief.
“I have, how do you say, a sweet tooth. Alejandro knows me well.”
“You’ll find these to your liking, Borges. My special Scottish brownies, the ones I gave you last night. Laced with stardust.”
“They make me so happy.” An hour later the brownies had taken hold, and Borges was cheerily quoting reams of his favourite writers by heart, lecturing us on any number of topics, from Zeno’s paradoxes to the Zohar, quoting verbatim a lengthy passage from De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater: “Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or a hundred years in one night.”
When we clapped for him, he said: “I’m not your John Barrymore, my grandmother’s favourite actor, but I will accept your approbation.” He stood, leaning forward on his cane. “We must take the air, no? I need to breathe! The North Sea beckons!”
“A walk in the dark,” said Jeff. “What a good idea.”
“For a blind man, it’s business as usual,” said Alastair.
We stepped into the tingling air under a full moon and reeled across the golf course toward the beach. Nobody but Jasper was sober.
Borges said: “You must know, I longed for the presence of the North Sea as a boy. And now here I am, too blind to see it, but I know it by its presence. Smell the salt!”
Jeff said: “It’s straight ahead of you, a hundred yards or so.”
The old man took off as if he could see, rushing in the direction of the water, where the moonlight splashed with a strange intensity. It wasn’t an easy route, however brief, as he had to cross the 17th hole first, near sand traps and roughs. When he came to the sea he would have to plunge through a ridge of marram grass.
“He’s going to kill himself,” I said to Alastair.
“He’s Borges. He can fly.”
Was Alastair so high that he’d lost touch with the physical world? I was not especially clear-headed myself, but Jeff and I followed close behind Borges, as if shadowing a boisterous two-year-old. Borges stopped on the brink of a sweeping dune, listening to the water or perhaps the gods. He lifted his arms with his cane in the air and whirled around, but when he stopped, he was facing us and the Old Course, not the sea. In a thundering manner, he began to recite The Seafarer in its original Anglo-Saxon: “Maeg ic be me sylfum soðgied wrecan,/ siþas secgan.”
“Should we turn him around?” asked Jeff in a whisper.
“Let him be,” I said. It was too unlikely, and satisfying: a blind old poet beside a putting green.
Alastair, Jeff, Jasper, and I gathered before him, listening to the odd recitation, the cries of gulls overhead and the nearby surf nearly drowning him out. Alastair translated the crucial lines for us:
“I can make a true son/ of myself, and tell you about my travels,/ and the days of struggle that I have endured.”
Borges had apparently long wished to stand at the edge of the North Sea and chant this poem, which is spoken in the first person by an old salt who recalls his long years of solitude at sea, which is a symbol of life itself.
“He’s consecrated the Old Course,” Jeff said in my ear. “Golf will never be the same.”