I took that rhetorical pronouncement as evidence that he had grown calmer.
I asked him what other works by Dostoievsky he had read.
He ticked off two or three, among them The Double.
I asked him whether he could tell the difference between the characters when he read, as one could with Joseph Conrad, and whether he planned to read on through Dostoievsky's entire corpus.
"The truth is, I don't," he answered with a slight note of surprise.
I asked him what he himself was writing, and he told me he was working on a book of poetry to be called Red Anthems.
He'd also thought about calling it Red Rhythms or Red Songs.
"Why not?" I said. "You can cite good authority for it—Rubén Darío's blue poetry and Verlaine's gray song."
Ignoring this, he clarified what he'd meant—his book would be a hymn to the brotherhood of all mankind. The modern poet cannot turn his back on his age.
I thought about this for a while, and then asked if he really felt that he was brother to every living person—every undertaker, for example? every letter carrier? every undersea diver, everybody that lives on the even-numbered side of the street, all the people with laryngitis? (The list could go on.) He said his book would address the great oppressed and outcast masses.
"Your oppressed and outcast masses," I replied, "are nothing but an abstraction. Only individuals exist—if, in fact, anyone does. Yesterday's man is not today's, as some Greek said. We two, here on this bench in Geneva or in Cambridge, are perhaps the proof of that."
Except in the austere pages of history, memorable events go unaccompanied by memorable phrases. A man about to die tries to recall a print that he glimpsed in his childhood; soldiers about to go into battle talk about the mud or their sergeant. Our situation was unique and, frankly, we were unprepared. We talked, inevitably, about literature; I fear I said no more than I customarily say to journalists. My alter ego believed in the imagination, in creation—in the discovery of new metaphors; I myself believed in those that correspond to close and widely acknowledged likenesses, those our imagination has already accepted: old age and death, dreams and life, the flow of time and water. I informed the young man of this opinion, which he himself was to express in a book, years later.
But he was barely listening. Then suddenly he spoke.
"If you have been me, how can you explain the fact that you've forgotten that you once encountered an elderly gentleman who in 1918 told you that he, too was Borges?"
I hadn't thought of that difficulty. I answered with conviction.
"Perhaps the incident was so odd that I made an effort to forget it."
He ventured a timid question.
"How's your memory?"
I realized that for a mere boy not yet twenty, a man of seventy some-odd years was practically a corpse.
"It's often much like forgetfulness," I answered, "but it can still find what it's sent to find. I'm studying Anglo-Saxon, and I'm not at the foot of the class."
By this time our conversation had lasted too long to be conversation in a dream.
I was struck by a sudden idea.
"I can prove to you this minute," I said, "that you aren't dreaming me. Listen to this line of poetry. So far as I can recall, you've never heard it before."
I slowly intoned the famous line: "L'hydre-univers tordant son corps écaillé d'astres."
I could sense his almost fear-stricken bafflement. He repeated the line softly, savoring each glowing word.
"It's true," he stammered, "I could never write a line like that."
Hugo had brought us together.
I now recall that shortly before this, he had fervently recited that short poem in which Whitman recalls a night shared beside the sea—a night when Whitman had been truly happy.
"If Whitman sang of that night," I observed, "it's because he desired it but it never happened. The poem gains in greatness if we sense that it is the expression of a desire, a longing, rather than the narration of an event."
He stared at me.
"You don't know him," he exclaimed. "Whitman is incapable of falsehood."*
A half century does not pass without leaving its mark. Beneath our conversation, the conversation of two men of miscellaneous readings and diverse tastes, I realized that we would not find common ground. We were too different, yet too alike. We could not deceive one another, and that makes conversation hard.
Each of us was almost a caricature of the other. The situation was too unnatural to last much longer.
There was no point in giving advice, no point in arguing, because the young man's inevitable fate was to be the man that I am now.
Suddenly I recalled a fantasy by Coleridge. A man dreams that he is in paradise, and he is given a flower as proof. When he wakes up, there is the flower.
I hit upon an analogous stratagem.
"Listen," I said, "do you have any money?"
"Yes," he replied. "About twenty francs. I invited Simón Jichlinski to have dinner with me at the Crocodile tonight."
"Tell Simón that he'll practice medicine in Carouge, and that he will do a great deal of good... now, give me one of your coins."
He took three silver pieces and several smaller coins out of his pocket. He held out one of the silver pieces to me; he didn't understand.
I handed him one of those ill-advised American bills that are all of the same size though of very different denominations. He examined it avidly.
"Impossible!" he cried. "It's dated 1964."
(Months later someone told me that banknotes are not dated.)
"This, all this, is a miracle," he managed to say. "And the miraculous inspires fear. Those who witnessed the resurrection of Lazarus must have been terrified."
We haven't changed a bit, I thought. Always referring back to books.
He tore the bill to shreds and put the coin back in his pocket.
I had wanted to throw the coin he gave me in the river. The arc of the silver coin disappearing into the silver river would have lent my story a vivid image, but fate would not have it.
I replied that the supernatural, if it happens twice, is no longer terrifying; I suggested that we meet again the next day, on that same bench that existed in two times and two places.
He immediately agreed, then said, without looking at his watch, that it was getting late, he had to be going. Both of us were lying, and each of us knew that the other one was lying. I told him that someone was coming to fetch me.
"Fetch you?" he queried.
"Yes. When you reach my age, you'll have almost totally lost your eyesight. You'll be able to see the color yellow, and light and shadow. But don't worry. Gradual blindness is not tragic. It's like the slowly growing darkness of a summer evening."
We parted without having touched one another. The next day, I did not go to the bench. The other man probably didn't, either.
I have thought a great deal about this encounter, which I've never told anyone about. I believe I have discovered the key to it. The encounter was real, but the other man spoke to me in a dream, which was why he could forget me; I spoke to him while I was awake, and so I am still tormented by the memory.
The other man dreamed me, but did not dream me rigorously —he dreamed, I now realize, the impossible date on that dollar bill.
Ulrikke
Hann tekr sverthit Gram ok leggr i methal theira bert
Volsunga Saga, 27
My story will be faithful to reality, or at least to my personal recollection of reality, which is the same thing. The events took place only a short while ago, but I know that the habit of literature is also the habit of interpolating circumstantial details and accentuating certain emphases. I wish to tell the story of my encounter with Ulrikke (I never learned her last name, and perhaps never will) in the city of York. The tale will span one night and one morning.