A Dream of Horses & Other Stories (11 page)

At last I could write no more, breaks out his companion, on this, their third night together. At thirty-eight, I had tired of aping Quevedo or Thomas Browne. My bag had become empty of tricks. During this time, my father, who had been for a while impatiently waiting for death, died. I was heartbroken. He had taught me so much, given names to all my curiosities of childhood. Soon thereafter took place the accident I spoke of last night at dinner, recovering from which, almost in a spirit of learning to think again, I wrote my first real story.

He has been quietly listening. Yet somewhere inside him is the other who is recalling his own thirty-eighth year. Heartbroken. The very word he would have chosen. His beloved father long since turned to mud in the yard of that sorry old family church. And then the night when, watching over his unwell mother and reading Stevenson’s
Letters
, a window had suddenly opened on the mouldy cell where he had been slowly suffocating. Throw away everything you have accumulated over the years. Rid yourself of all the tricks, and get down to finding the funda-mental…

A few months before, carried on the other, I had taken up the first regular job of my life, predictably enough, at a municipal library, out in a dull southwest corner of the city. There were too many of us doing the simple work, classifying and cataloguing the library’s holdings. Naturally, my colleagues were more interested in betting on horses, telling obscene jokes and stories, and listening to soccer matches on the radio. Each day I catalogued about hundred or so books. Even with my failing eyesight, I could have easily classified four or five times that number, but I had been forewarned against being too enthusiastic in my work which could reflect unfairly on others. So having finished the task by noon, I’d repair to the basement of the building where, in a staff reading room, I read till it was time to go home. It was here that I read all of Gibbon, Bloy, and Bernard Shaw. It was here that I did those translations of Faulkner and Woolf which enjoyed some measure of success in my country. And it was here, in this modest, forgettable building wherein, ironically – but, well, there is no irony in it – I wrote of that infinite, monstrous Library which marred my dreams each night, picking up facts at random from the very room I sat in, and mixing them with anything I happened to be reading just then. Those ciphers, he says teasingly, have been endowed with undue mystical importance by readers who know nothing about this period of my life.

He is enjoying it. Listening to this soft, slow voice, moving carefully in the dark like a panther, the Irish tinge in it now and then rising above the sound of the lake. He lights up one of his slim cigars and blows on it leisurely. His companion can smell the tobacco on the air and breathing in once or twice continues.

Sometimes in the evening when I took the tram to return home, my eyes would fill up with tears. Mostly I’d be reading
Dante
. Although I remembered a fair bit by heart, I’d keep on reading, and soon the book would begin to lose its letters and grow more and more empty, until finally I was staring into a
creamy eternity whereon the tears were freely falling. And then I’d remember Epictetus. Remember that the door is always open. So if I couldn’t muster the courage to end it all in one stroke, I’d do better to wipe away the tears. Next day, however, it would start afresh. Such is the sameness of our lives. Such is human feebleness. Why bother moving when you can only arrive at that from which you left? On and on I went like this for a good nine years. I know not why though. Maybe because I had gotten used to the drab routine of my days. Maybe because I was carried away on the thrust of the work I was then doing; work, which people today generously call my best. Or simply because time had already begun to set me free for my approaching blindness.

Speaking now for the first time since he rowed them out here, he tells of his school copy of Dante with his notes scribbled in the margins from fifty years ago to which he returns whenever he reaches a stasis in his work. Superstitiously, perhaps, he feels he will find there something new to begin. After all, he says in a voice barely perceptible, it was with Dante that it all began. The motion in stasis, and stasis in motion. The moving unmover.

The Comedy
, says his companion eagerly, is, of course, the greatest work in all the literatures of the world. In its cosmology, I don’t believe for a minute, and yet it is the book I love the most. As for the moving unmover, one may look also at Zeno or the sophist, Gorgias of Lentini, who could well have been behind Kafka.

He nods from the opposite side of the boat, but this his companion cannot see who is silently reproaching himself for interrupting the other with his silly enthusiasm.

For a while none has spoken. Only the sound of water crashing against the boat fills up the silence, which is also another form of silence. He is thinking about the discussion they had earlier in the day, first regarding chess, the domain of the inexplicable for it has in it the light and the dark together, and later, Joyce and
Finnegans Wake
. His companion, an early
champion of Joyce in the South, didn’t have much admiration to spare for the
Wake
. He wonders now whether he himself believes what he had said then: the
Wake
being the only possible development from
Ulysses
. That if the latter was the utterance of thought observing itself, the former was the very speech of the dreaming mind. As they row back to the shore, the lake sighs with each move of the scull.

How do you put in words the sound of water beating the wood? asks his companion. Better still, says he, how do you enter it? Earlier, arm in arm, we went to the cove from where you learnt to dive as a child. Did you hear the terrible cries of the gulls in the lee of the rampart? How easily they crawled into the roar of the tides, carried away who knows to what eternity…

He does not respond. The last few days have taught him at least this much: his companion is extremely shy and so almost all his questions are rhetorical. And, sure enough, before long the other is speaking.

My sight was always poor. I could see faces clearly only in photographs, by bringing them under my nose, by breathing over them. Thus I saw not the Viking swords in Yorkminster, but the hot Saxon blood they spilt on the ground centuries ago. Thus Buenos Aires is not a city but a habit for me. That is why many who have come to it through my writing have found it empty except place names, anecdotes, and a few friends. The markers of the blind. But I deviate. To return to the sound, to the water…

All through the War, my family stayed in Geneva and, oblivious to the happenings beyond the borders, I joyously swam in all the rivers of the Swiss country. Like a fish I went along and the flow of water which is also its sound entered my flesh and bones, writing its script in them. The same script I later divined in the spots of a leopard.

All these many years, it seems to me, I have just wanted to enter this sound. I can hear it in the words I keep rolling in my head. Yet what do I leave behind? Stillborn ideas. Empty
scratchings on paper. Words, words, words. That prison from which I have been unable to rid myself. Exiled in myself, like Hamlet. It is in such moments that I completely grasp the agony of Shakespeare, lord and slave of words. It is in such moments that I become Shakespeare.

There came a time when I was an exile in my own country, amid banners and slogans, amid – what after a fashion was called – the deafening march of history into the future. Exiled in my body, exiled in words, and finally exiled on land as well. A land to which my ancestors gave their blood. A land whose vast wind-rowed wastes alone were enough to wet my eyes. A land whose glories I never did cease to sing, whether through its poets or its hoodlums. And then nearly in a whisper, a land I love almost physically, perhaps this is what I am often accused of – why only physically?

In America, says his companion, in Boston, a city I love, and I love many cities, I saw, no, only heard, but also felt deeply, your play of the man listening to his voice on tape…and the moment on the punt with the girl stretched out on the floorboards, hands crossed under her head, eyes squinting in the sun, and underneath all moving, all astir…A symphony of sounds taking you past knowledge into knowing. An image granted not through words, but in spite of them. A real image, not a label on the image. Expression in art, which Croce demanded from the artist, is mere vanity, a great mistake, as you have shown in your work. My gods, on the other hand, grant me only allusion.

On a sudden inspiration, his companion begins to recite in German a poem of Heine. He has not seen before eyes light up so at the sound of words. These are not the eyes of a blind man, eyes with a child’s innocence in them. So moved is he that he too joins in, at first under his breath, then boldly mixing his voice with the other:

…Als ich nach Hause ritt, da liefen
Die Bäume vorbei in der Mondenhelle
,
Wie Geister. Wehmütige Stimmen riefen –
Doch ich und die Toten, wir ritten schnelle
.

They have reached ashore, and he has moored the boat alongside the jetty. Now he helps his companion on to the pier and hands him his stick. In truth, only last year he was himself half blind, but the surgery on his cataracts has, for the time being, restored his vision. They walk away from the lake, the one on the arm of the other, matching their steps to the measured beat of the stick on the ground. He has always found something utterly compulsive in the sound of steps. He can hear not only their own, but hundreds and thousands of tired steps crisscrossing this tired, deformed earth of his. Unending line of steps, of men, women, and children, poor and hungry and homeless, armies of battle-fatigued warriors, prisoners of so many gulags and camps with lost, weather-beaten faces, young whores running away from their tormentors, inconsolable souls wasting away from their love of metaphysics, animals collapsing under strain of their load, little steps, giant steps, steps, steps, steps, walking from one horizon to the other, from there to another and another and another, and then only the pendular movement of the prisoner in the Santé Prison he has seen so many times from his apartment window, and then it is not the prisoner he sees, but the beast in the cage, taking the world with him, from sense to nonsense, from nonsense to sense, with its every turn, this beloved tiger of Señor Borges.

Thank you, says Señor Borges pressing his elbow a little more firmly, for the boat ride, for bringing me here, for everything you have said and done, for all that you have taught me these past few days. How many times since we left Paris have I told you of my love for this place, dearer to me than even the red maze of London.

He shakes his head silently, and in turn threads his own arm through the other’s, overwhelmed by emotion, unable to respond. No more is necessary, for the hint has been understood.

Let us now go and eat and drink, resumes his companion. There I will bore you with an idea of a story I just this minute discovered, about a rose that is made immortal by the name ‘rose’, and in return you may tell me how the moon is tonight. That we are here, without anyone knowing it, is nothing short of a miracle, which I produced simply by walking up the street and pressing the bell to your apartment, while all around us they break their heads and spines over our work, suffocating it under oceans of words and mountains of paper.

Academic dementia, he breathes in the ear of his companion, tightening his hold on the other’s arm, and the two men break into laughter and song together,
the bays, the bogs, the moors
,
the glens, the lakes, the rivers, the streams, the brooks, the mists
,
the – fens
…

*

He lies sprawled on the wet grass thinking of Macedonio, a cold compress on his head, slowly forgetting the world, himself, and his quest, divining the truth in the middle of the pampa. What does he care that to his left at some distance, clouds are biting away and spitting ice on Mont Blanc? What does he care that he is back in the beloved city of his youth where he first found Schopenhauer and Whitman? For he can now see the tiger clearer than ever before, flying through the heat-shimmering jungles of Bengal, gathering speed, salivating, as it rushes to tear him to pieces.

A Word on Two Travellers

Fiction, once remarked André Gide, was history which could have happened. The evidence that Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett met in real life is scant and unreliable. This conclusion is supported by their respective conversations, interviews, and correspondences published to date, where one is conspicuous by his absence in the other. And yet their international renown owes so much to the First
Prix Formentor
the two writers shared in 1961. The prize opened up for their works new commercial possibilities, led to translations into several languages, and won for them innumerable admirers around the world. Proceeding with the assumption that the singular event of a meeting between the two writers never transpired is in some way liberating for a storyteller, for it grants him the occasion to weave fantasies into the texture of that which we call real.

Growing up in completely different and yet not so different worlds of Buenos Aires and Dublin in the early part of the last century, both Borges and Beckett were exceptional readers and dreamers from early age. Borges loved English as much if not more than Spanish and once remarked that English should have been his by birth right. Fueled by his father’s love and passion for English writers and philosophers, he had by the age of nine already translated Oscar Wilde’s
Happy Prince
into Spanish, which the publisher unknowingly but not unreasonably ascribed to the father instead of the son. Troubled by poor vision from the beginning, his father’s library became for Borges the entire world, and it seemed to him later that he never did step out of it. Books, yes, but two other ‘heterogeneous’ (the word is a favourite of Borges or at least his translators) interests would divide and occupy him, remaining lifelong obsessions: chess and the tiger.