Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (29 page)

That night, he was to be talking about Walt Whitman, another literary idol. The old Sheldonian Theater in Oxford was full, the balcony creaking under capacity weight, and everyone was anxious to see the great Latin American master who rarely traveled. A total hush fell when he came out unannounced, his skin so white against his black wool suit he seemed an apparition at first, led by the arm by an amanuensis, walking cautiously across the wide stage to where a chair and table with his thick manuscript and a glass and carafe of water were awaiting him.

After he sat down, it felt as if he suspended time itself, keeping his silence as water was slowly poured for him and carefully placed in his hand. The transparent skin of his face, tinged slightly with pink, seemed so delicate and tender. His ethereal expression, his eyes milky and palsied, were inexplicably fixed in what looked like the gentlest stare of commiseration I had ever seen, as if he had spent much of his life consoling others.

In his talk, delivered in a brisk, poetic, sing-song diction that sounded like a Latin Mass being intoned, Borges argued that Whitman’s imagination had been gradually absorbed into American English. To speak the language itself was to echo Whitman’s radical ideas of democracy, humanity, and universality. In a tape I made that night, virtually indecipherable now with age, Borges’s voice booms and trembles in a muffled roar, the audience by turns rapt and laughing along with him, as he dazzled the crowd.

After his talk, I stood to ask a question that seemed to cause him to gasp, and eventually to leave the stage. The question, in Spanish, had been innocent, asking only if by saying that Whitman had been absorbed into American English he meant to say there was no reason to still read great poems like “Song of Myself.” Wasn’t there something in the poetry itself, the long lines, the epic lists, the litanies and epiphanies, that could never be touched or understood by any other means?

First, he asked me to repeat the question, already looking perturbed as one eye twitched warily. But before I could finish, he was already calling on his assistant to escort him from the stage. As I was only the second person called on to ask a question, the audience was stunned. Many turned to look at me with utter scorn. I was quickly set upon by the organizers of the event who angrily recounted how hard they had worked to bring Borges to England, only to have his journey end in this debacle. They insisted that I apologize to the great writer. He would be at a party later that evening, organized by the university. I was put into a car, to be taken there, like a prisoner on the way to the gallows.

By the time I arrived at the fiesta, Borges was already surrounded by other undergraduates, sitting patiently as they read him poems and stories that had been inspired by his work. He looked pained and bored. When I finally found a moment when I could sit next to him, I told him that it was I who had asked the offending question at his talk, and I was sorry if it had insulted him in any way.

Borges broke out laughing,
“¡Es que tuve que mear!”
he said, “I had to take a piss!”

He had told his assistant in a rushed whisper at the very moment I was asking my question, but the assistant had misunderstood and he helped Borges leave the stage. He failed to tell the audience that Borges would return. Then it was too late as the audience quickly began to leave the hall.

After he asked me to fetch potato chips and beer for him, we sat together and he explained that he could see only dim light and colors around him. When he asked my name, it lit up his vast, archival memory. He replied unequivocally that I was Portuguese. Borges spoke in encyclopedic detail of a log from a certain ship from Lisbon in the late sixteenth century that, he claimed, recorded the first time a Santos set foot in the New World.

“Also a Santander. But that Santos must’ve been your great-great-great-great-grandfather,” he declared, laughing more, as content with himself as if he had solved some esoteric ancient mystery. I didn’t tell him that, according to family stories, the name had originally been de los Santos, and that in all likelihood it was a pious name some Mexican Indians took for themselves or had placed upon them by zealous Spanish
curas.
Names like Cruz, Angel, Santamaria, Jesus, and Santos.

But maybe he was right. There weren’t
any
records or documents of the family past of the Santos and Garcias—my father’s tribes—as there were for my mother’s family of Velas and Lopez, which Uncle Lico had traced back to the eighteenth century. Maybe their migrations had begun further south than any of us had thought possible.

 

 

The pulsing, velvety waves were rounding the smooth concrete abutments at Southbank, then turning swiftly east toward the Isle of Dogs. After the great antinuclear march of that day ended, the sounds returned of all the revving cabs, the lumbering lorries, all the rattling tracks of passing red trains from the Underground, carried off in one surging current. From the bridge, the Thames was matte gunmetal gray in London’s sulfurous twilight.

Looking down on the river, debris seemed to hover at its surface, held just above the waters by some eerie reverse magnetism; bags from Wimpy burgers spinning like Chinese fireworks, a sneaker moving like a torpedo, webs of tree branches in a whorl with a piece of a chair, Styrofoam, a dead dog. The lilting falsetto sounds of a Christmas children’s choir periodically rose above the din of the old river, and it felt as if I were standing in the middle of the bridge of exile.

With Uncle Frank’s death, our family had lost the steady beacon that had guided us out of Mexico and helped create the life we had known in San Antonio. The family was different now, bigger, more spread out. Mexico, and San Antonio, too, had undergone enormous changes. But it was a time when poor people all over the world continued to leave their homes and countries because of joblessness, famine, and wars. Our family’s story in this century, of a migration of only two hundred and fifty miles from the mountains of Coahuila to the river plain surrounding San Antonio, was part of a much larger story, encompassing untold millions of lives, all of us setting out once and for all from our homelands—all of us
exilios
—perhaps never to return.

In a journal from that time in England, I recorded a dream of Mexico:

 

These dreams were not prophecies in the sense of prognostications or predictions. I received them instead as if they were dispatches from a story being told to time by all human lives. In a century so interrupted by conflagrations, deceit, destruction, and dislocation, our dreams would continue to echo these reports. As Uela and Tía Pepa had told me, by watching our dreams, especially if they were haunted, we could strengthen our spirits and prepare ourselves for whatever was to come. They were not to be feared or denied. Just watched, reflected on, and told to others as stories that we had lived.

Larger objects were floating downstream in the Thames now. As I stood on that bridge late in the day, gazing down at the water, it suddenly looked as if a whole village had been flooded out upriver, carrying doors from houses, window frames, broken gables, a galaxy of wooden roof tiles. I remembered how such floods had once been common in San Antonio, periodically flushing out whatever buildings or shacks lacked a strong foundation in the downtown precinct. My broken suede Tony Lama boots had been stuffed with dried flowers and stones I had brought back from a trip to Spain, along with the notes, letters, drafts of poems, and essays from the year that I wanted to discard. The boots, whose squeal had only gotten worse, vexing several Oxford cobblers, were bound together by wire and twine, tightly bundled, and hanging from a rope handle. Then, at a moment when the passing traffic subsided and there were no other pedestrians nearby, I hurled them from the edge of the railing into the heavy air of the British evening, watching the long arc they traced downward, past all the lights of London, slipping finally into the rushing, murky Thames with barely a ripple.

“La muerte del quinto sol,”
he repeated, wearily.

The night before, after another long day of driving, I had dreamed of the
Voladores.
I could barely hear the flute and
tambor
of the
caporal,
floating eerily in the dark. It was nighttime, and the wind was gusting from every direction, shaking the treetops and stirring up the dust in violent swirls. It was only in the instant of a lightning flash that I saw their profiles, high atop their braided pole. As the heavy sheets of rain began to fall and the lightning bolts began to thunder across the sky, the four flyers set off from their perch and began revolving upside down around the pole. I could hear the sound of the ropes stretching over the din of the downpour. The
caporal,
still atop the pole, spinning around, continued to beat the
tambor
and play the flute. As I watched the flyers descending toward the earth in wide scooping arcs, their arms outstretched, I hear a voice from behind me say calmly, as if to reassure me, “They are dancing to keep this world from falling apart. . . .”