T-shirt, came on stage. Perhaps someone had told her about the bird.
Tcheeer! Tcheeer! imitated Katya. The singer looked up and cottoned on. She too imitated the starling’s cry. The bird responded. The singer improved her pitch and the two cries became almost indistinguishable. The bird flew towards her.
Katya and I hurried down the metal stairs. As we passed the stagehands the young one said to Katya: Didn’t know you were a diva!
Outside in the street, at the corner of the theatre where the little door opened, the soprano, hands clasped before her, repeatedly sang: Tcheeer! Tcheeer! The elderly people with their ice creams and apricots were gathered around her, unsurprised. In such heat, in a deserted city, anything can happen.
Let’s have an espresso first, Katya said, then go to the cemetery.
She found a place fully in the sun. I sat in the shade. We heard clapping in the distance. Perhaps the bird had flown out. Who would believe us, she said, if we told the story?
The cemetery had wide lawns and tall trees. A thrush was stepping fastidiously over some newly mown grass. We asked a gardener, who was Bosnian, for directions.
We found the grave at last in a far corner. A simple headstone, and a rectangle of gravel on which was placed a wickerwork basket containing earth and a thick, small-leafed, very dark green shrub with berries. I must find out its name, for Borges loved exactitude; it gave him the possibility, when writing, of landing precisely where he chose. All his life he was scandalously or grievously lost in politics, but never on the page he was writing on.
Debo justificar lo que me hiere.
No importa mi ventura o mi desventura.
Soy el poeta.
I have to justify what wounds me.
My fortune or misfortune does not matter.
I am the poet.
The shrub, according to the Bosnian gardener, was Buxus sempervivens. I should have recognised it. In the villages of the Haute-Savoie one dips a sprig of this plant into holy water to sprinkle blessings for the last time on the corpse of the loved one laid out on the bed. It became a holy plant because of a shortage. On Palm Sunday there were never enough willow leaves available in the region, and so the Savoyards started to use the evergreen box instead.
He died, the gravestone announced, on June 14th 1986.
The two of us stood there in silence. Katya had a handbag hanging over her shoulder and I was holding my black crash helmet into which I had stuffed my gloves. We bent down to crouch over the gravestone.
On it was a low-relief carving of men in what looked like a medieval boat. Or were they on land and was it their warrior discipline that made them stand so close and steadfastly together? They looked ancient. On the back of the gravestone were other warriors, holding either lances or oars, confident, ready to cross whatever terrain or water had to be crossed.
When Borges came to Genève to die, he was accompanied by María Kodama. In the early sixties she had been one of his students studying Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature. She was half his age. When they got married, eight weeks before he died, they moved out of a hotel in an archive street called the Rue de la Tour-Maîtresse, into an apartment she had found.
This book, he wrote in a dedication, is yours, María Kodama. Must I say to you that this inscription includes twilights, the deer of Nara, night that is alone and populated mornings, shared islands, seas, deserts, and gardens, what forgetting loses and memory transforms, the high-pitched voice of the muezzin, the death of Hawkwood, some books and engravings? . . . We can only give what we have given. We can only give what is already the other’s!
A young man with his son in a pushchair walked past while Katya and I were trying to decide what language the engraved inscription was in. The little boy pointed at a pigeon who strutted forward, and bubbled over with laughter, sure that it was he who had made the bird move.
The four words on the front of the
Tcheeer! Tcheeer! imitated Katya. The singer looked up and cottoned on. She too imitated the starling’s cry. The bird responded. The singer improved her pitch and the two cries became almost indistinguishable. The bird flew towards her.
Katya and I hurried down the metal stairs. As we passed the stagehands the young one said to Katya: Didn’t know you were a diva!
Outside in the street, at the corner of the theatre where the little door opened, the soprano, hands clasped before her, repeatedly sang: Tcheeer! Tcheeer! The elderly people with their ice creams and apricots were gathered around her, unsurprised. In such heat, in a deserted city, anything can happen.
Let’s have an espresso first, Katya said, then go to the cemetery.
She found a place fully in the sun. I sat in the shade. We heard clapping in the distance. Perhaps the bird had flown out. Who would believe us, she said, if we told the story?
The cemetery had wide lawns and tall trees. A thrush was stepping fastidiously over some newly mown grass. We asked a gardener, who was Bosnian, for directions.
We found the grave at last in a far corner. A simple headstone, and a rectangle of gravel on which was placed a wickerwork basket containing earth and a thick, small-leafed, very dark green shrub with berries. I must find out its name, for Borges loved exactitude; it gave him the possibility, when writing, of landing precisely where he chose. All his life he was scandalously or grievously lost in politics, but never on the page he was writing on.
Debo justificar lo que me hiere.
No importa mi ventura o mi desventura.
Soy el poeta.
I have to justify what wounds me.
My fortune or misfortune does not matter.
I am the poet.
The shrub, according to the Bosnian gardener, was Buxus sempervivens. I should have recognised it. In the villages of the Haute-Savoie one dips a sprig of this plant into holy water to sprinkle blessings for the last time on the corpse of the loved one laid out on the bed. It became a holy plant because of a shortage. On Palm Sunday there were never enough willow leaves available in the region, and so the Savoyards started to use the evergreen box instead.
He died, the gravestone announced, on June 14th 1986.
The two of us stood there in silence. Katya had a handbag hanging over her shoulder and I was holding my black crash helmet into which I had stuffed my gloves. We bent down to crouch over the gravestone.
On it was a low-relief carving of men in what looked like a medieval boat. Or were they on land and was it their warrior discipline that made them stand so close and steadfastly together? They looked ancient. On the back of the gravestone were other warriors, holding either lances or oars, confident, ready to cross whatever terrain or water had to be crossed.
When Borges came to Genève to die, he was accompanied by María Kodama. In the early sixties she had been one of his students studying Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature. She was half his age. When they got married, eight weeks before he died, they moved out of a hotel in an archive street called the Rue de la Tour-Maîtresse, into an apartment she had found.
This book, he wrote in a dedication, is yours, María Kodama. Must I say to you that this inscription includes twilights, the deer of Nara, night that is alone and populated mornings, shared islands, seas, deserts, and gardens, what forgetting loses and memory transforms, the high-pitched voice of the muezzin, the death of Hawkwood, some books and engravings? . . . We can only give what we have given. We can only give what is already the other’s!
A young man with his son in a pushchair walked past while Katya and I were trying to decide what language the engraved inscription was in. The little boy pointed at a pigeon who strutted forward, and bubbled over with laughter, sure that it was he who had made the bird move.
The four words on the front of the
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