As his dying wish, Borges requested the epitaph “He took the sword and laid the naked metal between them.” He asked this of María Kodama, his beautiful, younger wife and literary secretary, who had married Borges two months before he died, at the age of eighty-seven. He chose Geneva as the place of his passing: it was the city where he had spent his youth and where he now wanted to be buried.
One researcher described that epitaph as “a blue-steel symbol.” For him, the image of the blade was the key that would unlock the significance of Borges’s writing—the knife that divides Borges’s style from conventional literary realism—whereas for me, it seemed an extremely quiet and private confession.
The line was a quotation from a Norse saga. On the first night a man and a woman spent together (which, in this saga, was also to be their last), a sword was placed between them and left there until dawn. If that “blue-steel” blade was not the blindness that lay between the aging Borges and the world, then what was it?
Though I’d traveled to Switzerland, I didn’t visit Geneva. I had no strong desire to see his grave firsthand. Instead, I looked around the library of Saint Gall, which he would have found endlessly enrapturing had he seen it (I recall the rough feeling of the felt slippers that visitors were given in order to protect the thousand-year-old library’s floor), caught a boat at the wharf in Lucerne and floated through the valleys of ice-covered Alps until dusk.
I didn’t take any photographs. The sights were recorded only in my eyes. The sounds, smells and tactile sensations that a camera cannot capture in any case were impressed on my ears, nose, face and hands. There was not yet a knife between me and the world, so at the time this was enough.
The woman brings her hands together in front of her chest. Frowns, and looks up at the blackboard.
“Okay, read it out,” the man with the thick-lensed, silver-rimmed spectacles says with a smile.
The woman’s lips twitch. She moistens her lower lip with the tip of her tongue. In front of her chest, her hands are quietly restless. She opens her mouth, and closes it again. She holds her breath, then exhales deeply. The man steps back toward the blackboard and patiently asks her again to read.
The woman’s eyelids tremble. Like insects’ wings rubbing briskly together. The woman closes her eyes, reopens them. As if she hopes in the moment of opening her eyes to find herself transported to some other location.
The man readjusts his glasses, his fingers thickly floured with white chalk.
“Come on now, out loud.”
The woman wears a high-necked black sweater and black trousers.
The jacket she’s hung on her chair is black, and the scarf she’s put in her big, black cloth bag is knitted from black wool. Above that somber uniform, which makes it seem as if she’s just come from a funeral, her face is thin and drawn, like the elongated features of certain clay sculptures.
She is a woman neither young nor particularly beautiful. Her eyes have an intelligent look, but the constant spasming of her eyelids makes this hard to perceive. Her back and shoulders are permanently drawn in, as though she is seeking refuge inside her black clothes, and her fingernails are clipped back severely. Around her left wrist is a dark purple velvet hairband, the solitary point of color on an otherwise monochrome figure.
“Let’s all read it together.” The man cannot wait for the woman any longer. He moves his gaze over the baby-faced university student who sits in the same row as the woman, the middle-aged man half hidden behind a pillar and the well-set-up young man sitting by the window, slouching in his chair.