PEN America Issue 1: Classics (PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers) by PEN American Center

Author:PEN American Center [Center, PEN American]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: PEN American Center
Published: 2000-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

Nothing Simple

JOHN MACRAE

THIRTY YEARS AGO, Borges stopped off to visit on his way back to Buenos Aries from Iceland, where he was working over the Norse Sagas. He arrived at 19 West Twelfth, where I had a simple bachelor’s apartment, and he was tired. I said, “Borges, would you like a bath?” I had robed and disrobed Borges in the past, and he said, “Yes, please.”

It was an old-fashioned high-walled tub. I helped him undress, put him into the bath, and gave him his soap and a washcloth. He looked up at me expectantly—a look part grimace, part smile—and he said, “Would you mind closing the door? You see, I am very modest.”

Borges’s wit was wonderful, and it still surrounds me.

After his death, when I visited Buenos Aries with my wife, Paula Cooper, it was a coincidence to find ourselves in a hotel almost next door to a house that Borges once occupied. To see his spartan bed, to see his simple chair—I should not say “simple,” because Borges once corrected me and said, “There is nothing simple in this universe. Nothing is simple. The universe has one unarguable characteristic, complexity.”

When we returned to the hotel, the receptionist called to me, “This is an extraordinary coincidence.” And she passed me a message. “This person with the same name as Borges’s widow has been calling you.” Of course it was María Kodoma, and I then realized how important she is, and how loved she now is in Buenos Aires.

When Paula and I were there, we wanted to walk the literary landscape of Buenos Aires, the landscape of his stories. We needed to find the Hotel du Nord from “Death and the Compass.” I knew it was actually the Plaza Hotel, but there were several Plaza Hotels and we never found the right one. We knew about Morano and Suarez and the knife fights, and we also knew that the knife Borges gave Morano was Spinoza’s knife. It was the knife that had to fulfill a prophecy—everything has its own being, its own need. It’s not the wielder of the knife, it’s the knife itself that does the killing. We knew that Morano was a man from the North Side, from Palermo, and that he had to protect himself from somebody, possibly Suarez, who had invaded from the South Side.

We took buses, we walked: we had to see these places, and many more. Obviously we had to visit the Palermo Zoo, of the tigers real and dreamed. There was so much to see and it was all so alive that memories of Borges came flooding back, again and again. It was impossible not to have memories, real or imagined. On Florida, the great walking street that Borges called the place of greedy pedestrians, I saw somebody in the distance who looked like Borges talking to a tall, rather good-looking younger man who looked exactly like Tom Seaver, the baseball player, at the time he was playing baseball. I didn’t dare mention the sighting to Paula because she already had doubts enough about my sanity.

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