Stephen Beal
Borges's Desk
Edgardo Santiago bought the desk at a small shop in Palermo. The artisan who'd made the desk owned the shop, but he was visiting family in Montevideo when Santiago called, and his assistant could not explain why he called the desk Borges's Desk. It measured 5 inches long by 2 inches wide by 3 inches high, with three drawers across the top, the middle drawer wider than its neighbors, three drawers down the right side, and a cabinet below the single drawer on the left. Santiago enjoyed looking at the desk and using the drawer pulls with the nails of his thumb and middle finger to open the drawers, which were empty.
Santiago lived on the pampa south of Santa Fe where he maintained the family ranch. Two wives had died, and he had gotten fat rather than seek out a third. His only child, an unmarried daughter by his first wife, lived in Barcelona where she was a school administrator. Once every five years she visited the ranch and pointed out repair work that Santiago had his gauchos carry out to preserve family honor. The land itself was too big to inspect or encompass except by helicopter, and Santiago disliked planes. He took the bus when he went to Buenos Aires, and it was usually on the road that he read Borges because his stories unfolded like dreams, like the vistas of the pampa on either side of the bus. Santiago could be lulled whether his eyes were on the page or on the land.
Santiago was not one of those intellectual fellows who, when he was young, sat about cafes debating what Borges meant. He spent his early manhood in Marseille working for the shipping company managed by his maternal grandfather; in Marseille Santiago lost his innocence and his wages, but never, as Papi advised, his heart. At any rate, Santiago often did not understand what Borges meant. Sometimes he suspected that Borges didn't understand either, or that he had concluded a story where he had because the ending seemed fitting. Sometimes, thought Santiago, Borges was overcome by an amiability that allowed his readers to take a story where they thought it should go. Borges would never tell you you were wrong, not about a story; he would say that you were interesting. Being blind, Borges found his way by going along with others, although it could well turn out that the way Borges had taken with another was not the way the other had taken.
Thoughts like these came to Santiago on the bus between his town and Buenos Aires and they came to him as he sat at home gazing at the land that went on and on. Sometimes, he thought, Borges was the pampa, and you certainly aren't going to tell the pampa it is wrong or should behave in a certain manner. The pampa did what the pampa did, and Borges did what Borges did, and Edgardo Santiago had his desk.
Now Santiago sensed that if Borges had told a story called, let's say, The Writer's Desk, the drawers of the desk would contain significant papers and significant objects, and that understanding why this or that was here or there would constitute the meaning of the story. There would be appearances and disappearances within the drawers. The desk would function as a whirlwind, a labyrinth, a portfolio of dreams, and finally you would have to get away from it. The desk would terrify you, in story and in fact. If, like Santiago, you owned a minature called Borges's desk, you would have to take it back to its maker, back to Palermo, and start all over at the public library where the Dewey Decimal System keeps order.
Because he saved reading Borges for the road, Santiago at home read gaucho novels and novels of the wild west by Louis Lamour. As for television, he was a devoted soccer fan but he shied way from entertainment because the pretty women made him wish he was not fat. In the evening and on the weekend he drank beer and ate barbecue and watched teams he cared for lose and teams he hated win. When a team he cared for won, he drank Jack Daniels whiskey and had a headache the next day.
From the easy chair where he watched soccer games and read entertaining novels, Santiago kept Borges's desk within his range of vision. It sat on the third shelf from the bottom of the bookcases that his grandfather had had constructed on the three interior walls. The fourth wall held two French windows to the verandah. For a while Santiago kept a significant object on the surface of Borges's desk: his mother's bar brooch of pale sapphires from Tiffany; a gray baroque pearl that had been his paternal grandfather's watch fob; emerald earrings that had been his first wife's but which he had not passed on to their daughter because she lacked her mother's charm. Then he got tired of the significant objects. Rather, he sensed, Borges got tired of the significant objects. When it came to his desk, Borges liked a clean surface, a clean slate.
The morning after Argentina won the World Cup, Santiago had a dreadful headache. He took an early morning ride on his mare Magdalena, but the fresh air did not clear his head. On the television he watched reruns and boasts and posturings and recriminations, and for no reason but, perhaps, that he was feeling peevish, he applied himself to Borges's desk. He applied himself to determining the purpose of the desk in Borges's life, and he wrote out his reasoning on a piece of paper because he could not hold it in his head.
1) Did Borges use a desk?
2) Did Borges even have a desk?
3) Everybody has a desk. Borges's desk was probably inherited. It probably held papers and objects it had always held.
Santiago liked what he was writing, and he was aware that he himself sat at his grandfather's desk.
4) Before he went blind Borges had come to know the papers and the objects in his desk. In his blindness he could find and fondle papers and objects as though he could still see them.
5) The things in Borges's desk were the only things that Borges could see. Thus Borges's desk held everything.
6) The miniature desk in Santiago's bookshelves held everything.
7) But Santiago was blind.
This thinking aggravated the pain in Santiago's head so he took a long siesta.
When he woke he squeezed into old gaucho clothes and rode Magdalena to town to take part
in World Cup celebrations. He met his third wife that evening, at the principal cafe, and between
his ages sixty-one and seventy they had five children, the youngest of whom, Jorge Luis,
was still nursing when his father died.
©2008 by Stephen Beal
