I was sitting on a green bench in a
lovely park in the Retiro neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Facing me was what the
Argentines call the Torre de Monumental,
a bell tower given to them by the English in 1910 to commemorate the May
Revolution of 1810 (before the Falkland War with Britain, it was called the Torres de Ingles). At my back, across
the busy Avenida Santa Fe, at the head of Maípu road, stood the grey walk up
where writer Jorges Luis Borges made his last residence.
Twenty minutes
earlier, I stood on the threshold of the home, where in 1979 Paul Theroux met a
young boy, the son of Borges' housekeeper, who opened the door for him. The boy
led him to a man he found taller than he expected, a blind man who sat him down
and had him read Kipling aloud. Theroux would come back the next day and read
Kipling again for Borges. The Torre
had not yet been bombed by the British. A few years later, Borges would move to
and die in Europe, returning to Argentina only as a visitor. According to
Theroux, there was nothing in the apartment a person could trip on.
Romance determined
for me that this was the best bench in the whole park for a blind indoor face
to be warmed by the sun on an afternoon walk. The progression of days -- each
morning, noon, afternoon, evening, and night – appear with such frequency in
Borges’ writing to border on obsession, and none chilled and fascinated his
soul more than the afternoon. Borges described it as “the dramatic altercation
and conflict between the invisible and the shadow.”
I sat there, as if
following directions, in the “easy decline of our spiritual electricity,” and
any attempt I made to feel what Borges must have felt – closing my eyes,
feeling the cold wind, quieting what I think is my soul – led only back to my
life, my tasks, my purpose, my head. “It is by force of afternoons that the
city goes about entering us,” is what the text said, but I felt nothing of this
charge.
3 o’clock is the
coffee hour, the hour of doubt. The distant stare, the pale boredom which sits
in the stomach, even here in Buenos Aires where I have never been before,
naturally, arrived. I let myself think about the boy again. The young boy
approaches the door, emerging into the light of the threshold, out of the
black. Theroux mentions him only briefly, intent as he is to ascend the stair
to meet his hero. Borges was waiting. There is just something about the way
Theroux put it, the boy said nothing to Theroux. The boy is only mentioned briefly,
here and gone in an instant. He was sucking his thumb.