Читать книгу Georgie and Elsa: Jorge Luis Borges and His Wife: The Untold Story - Литагент HarperCollins USD, F. M. L. Thompson - Страница 11

It was inevitable that Borges would begin to confide in me. There was no one else around with whom to converse, and talking to a stranger is always easier.

One day, when Elsa was out, he broke off from our work to tell me a story. He seemed troubled and confused, and his voice quickly took on a genuine sadness. Some weeks before, he and Elsa had been introduced to a John Van Dell and his wife, a couple living in Salem, Massachusetts. The Van Dells were former Argentines. Borges told me they were congenial people, and he and Elsa had enjoyed several pleasant occasions in their company.

The Van Dells would drive to Cambridge, pick up Georgie and Elsa, and take them touring Salem and other North Shore towns of interest. Of course to Borges Salem meant Nathaniel Hawthorne, the town’s native son and one of his favourite American authors. Knowing this, Van Dell at once took Georgie and Elsa to visit the house of the seven gables.

The couples enjoyed several other outings together, including meals at the Van Dells’. And then, suddenly, abruptly, and without explanation, there were no more meetings. In his puzzlement, Borges quizzed me for a possible reason for such a turn of events. There was obviously some key factor involved about which Borges was being kept in the dark, but I could not put my finger on it. Borges wanted to know if this were typical American behaviour. Quite untypical, I assured him, and with nothing more to offer, we let the subject drop.

Sometime during the university Christmas break Georgie and Elsa changed flats. They moved from the Concord 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.