On hearing of the engagement of an old flame, unwelcome news to an elderly man some years past his prime, Borges had called in the dentist. For reasons which have remained unclear, the teeth he still had in his head were extracted. His replacement dentures were a perfect set, top and bottom.
I wrote my letter to the Museo, not the Fundación, out of respect for Borges’s widow. I didn’t want to upset anybody. Although it might seem incredible (I wrote, and it was a letter I savoured in the act of writing), the bones of Jorge Luis Borges, until recently buried in Geneva’s Cimetière des Rois, had unexpectedly entered my possession. I gave a box number, in Geneva, to which the Museo could respond.
Several weeks had now passed since the climax of the Protest of Bones, and the city was still recovering. Some of Geneva’s citizens, and not all of them pessimists, thought their city would never be the same again. The municipal authorities had been hard at work. They’d rapidly established, by a series of dating-tests at the University, that none of those bones which had survived the fire belonged now, or had ever belonged, to John Calvin. This included a comprehensive analysis of the skeleton so callously hung by the neck from the World Intellectual Property Organisation.
Unfortunately, Calvin’s grave was still empty. Perhaps it had always been empty, as some commentators liked to suggest. In which case, various theories could be put forward about where the body actually was.
By common consent, the best guess was America. Calvin’s bones would probably have made the crossing with a band of loyal long-ago pilgrims. East coast, to begin with, perhaps not far from Salem. As the years went by, Calvin was gradually moved inland, his bones making a full contribution to the fantastic early idealism of America’s mid-west States. They had Europe’s best people: the hard-working, the adventurous, the disaffected, all of whom believed they were chosen. They may have been mistaken, but they got a lot done. Still did, and it made sense for Calvin to continue seeing his future on the American side of the ocean, where ninety million people were personally in touch with the living Jesus.
The city and people of Geneva finally had to accept that in all probability their champion John Calvin would never be recovered. A replica stone, the size of a shoebox, was set in place over his repaired plot, and blessed by the Protestant Bishop. As consolation for the absence of Calvin, the Bishop claimed that an empty grave was an outcome in the history of the city which seemed predestined. It was precisely what Calvin himself would have wanted.
The day after the Bishop’s blessing, the Cimetière des Rois was reopened to the public. By which time I’d been staring at the blue plastic sports-bag for nearly a fortnight. It contained our only remaining bones, and I’d resolved once more to establish who these bones might be. I’d then know the fairest way to dispose of them. To find out, I was dependent on Helena’s bright idea that the paste of cement-dust and filler should give it away. However undisturbed a stone might look, the self-made mortar I’d used as a sealant ought still to be soft. It remained my best hope of detecting the identity of the skeleton, and I was there, first thing in the morning, waiting at the gate, on the day the cemetery reopened.
For the sake of appearances, with several others who’d come to pay their respects, I stopped at Calvin’s restored shoebox, and solemnly shook my head. Then, when everyone else had left, I went straight to the nearest graves, and began my investigations.
Closest to Calvin on his left was a Mrs Smith: J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans. I knelt down and felt for the seam of the recumbent. The join was hard and rough, old, untouched. Not this one. There was a Mr Smith behind, and another in front, and several more from the family Smith in both directions to the side. None of them was secretly held together by mortar soft to the touch.
Not far away at all was Jorge Luis Borges, who at the end of his life could only see the colour yellow. Jorge ven a casa.
I felt round the base of his red granite recumbent, but the mortar was undeniably dry, and brittle with age. It wasn’t Borges. I tried François Simon: the same. It was impossible to tell. I’d waited too long, and in the time that had passed since my night as Burton, the paste of cement-dust and filler had become as solid and uncommunicative as mortar in place for years.
But life must go on.
The bones in the blue plastic sports-bag, spurned by Moholy, were becoming an embarrassment. I didn’t know where to put them, or rebury them with the appropriate respect and dignity. As the next best thing, and unquestionably an improvement on doing nothing, I decided they might as well be Borges. They could be Borges. He was in good health, well fed and almost contemporary, a close enough match to the results of Moholy’s test, should anyone care to test him again. I let myself be persuaded. Of course it was Borges. I should have guessed. Otherwise why assemble this story? It was the influence; it was the bones.
In my letter to the Borges Museum, I was wary of making unfounded claims, but the jumble of bones as they crowded my desk-top did seem to emit a specifically Borgesian energy.
The goal that led him on was not impossible, though it was clearly supernatural: he wanted to dream a man. He wanted to dream him completely in painstaking detail, and impose him upon reality. The magical objective had come to fill his entire soul; if someone had asked him his own name, or inquired into any feature of his life until then, he would not have been able to answer.
The assistant director of the museum wrote back, deftly phrasing an uncommitted kind of curiosity. The people of Argentina, he wrote, were not unfamiliar with the ongoing lives of the dead. Evita, not the person but the corpse, had been kidnapped from a chapel of rest and secretly shipped to Milan. The hands of Juan Perón, Borges’s favourite politician, had been amputated at the wrist, and ransomed.
For many years, as was public knowledge, the Museo Jorge Luis Borges had led an international campaign seeking the repatriation of a national and cultural treasure, namely the remains of Borges the writer. The recent violation of John Calvin, a close neighbour of Borges in Geneva’s Cimetière des Rois, had only confirmed the widespread consensus that Borges would be better protected and appreciated in Buenos Aires, where he undoubtedly belonged.
Without explicitly declaring an interest, the governing body of the Museo managed to suggest they’d be grateful for indications of authenticity, price and import regulations.
I was not a dishonest or greedy man, and nor was Borges. I referred to Moholy’s catalogue, and quoted the catalogue price. Except for a small bone of indeterminate function I was holding back as a keepsake, all I now had left, in front of me on the table in the kitchen, was the skull. The rest of the body I’d packed into various sizes of padded envelope, which over the course of the last month I’d posted in stages to the Calle Anchorena, where Borges used to live.
On the outside of each envelope, on the customs declaration, I’d written Gift, value Nil. In return for final payment, I now owed the Museo Borges the skull. I was going to miss it. I curved my hand flat across its dome, stroking it lightly from front to back. I felt no remorse: it wasn’t Calvin. And if it was Borges, and it might as well have been him as anyone else, there were no children, and his wife he married late, and in unconvincing emotional circumstances. His mother, with whom he’d spent by far the greater and more intense part of his life, was long gone, and she wasn’t anyway the type of woman to have cultivated an attachment to human remains. At the end, it was said, she’d pleaded with the maid to throw her out with the rubbish. And her last words, when they came: ‘Fuck. Enough suffering.’
I picked up the skull by the face, cheekbones delicate between the pinch of my fingers. I lifted Borges level with my eyes, eye to eye, like a baby, fondly moving his toothless skull from side to side.
You’re just like Calvin, Georgie, all head and no heart.
He was just like me. As a skull, he was just like anybody, not the great international writer wearing on his chest the ribbon of the Grand Cross of the Order of Bernardo O’Higgins, but the boy, age
d twelve, shipped to Geneva as a cure for compulsive masturbation. His head was my head, all of us the same beneath the skin, with only one fact of importance to remember: remember you will die. So make the most of it, by living as many lives as you can. Or live one life as fully as possible. Do both. It amounts to the same thing.
I put him back down, and rested my chin on the table-top directly facing his. If nothing else, just for a moment, I AM HERE, like a tourist in the history of literature. In contact with the skull of Jorge Luis Borges, I can at least say, I AM HERE.
I am here.
I am.
I filled a shoebox with polystyrene chips, and, for added protection, considered some bubble-wrap. For the moment, I left the skull where it was, and went to check on Helena. She was lying in bed, reading a novel, almost fully recovered from whatever it was that had slammed her so hard in the back. As well as the bang on the side of her head, there was an almighty bruise between her shoulder-blades, which was still in the process of fading.
On that first Monday, immediately after the protest, we’d read on a website that the police had fired plastic bullets. There were witnesses, from in front of the Palace of Nations, who claimed they’d also fired real bullets, into the air. Not one newspaper carried either story.
Helena raised her hand without looking out from behind her book. Then that hand went back to fiddling with the chain of the locket, at about the point where it crossed the smooth ridge of her collarbone. I sat on the end of the bed, and watched a black bug move slowly along the spine of her book, so slowly and deliberately it was hard to imagine who it intended to bug. A tram went by. The man upstairs reset his samba record.
The flat was ours for as long as we liked (make yourselves at home, Moholy had said, invite your friends, your family, anyone you want), and for weeks now we’d slept in, ignoring the urgent e-mails and calls from the Appointments Committee and the Church Commissioners. Their letters we found useful as coasters, and for recording the predictions of the wise I-Ching.
Whenever we remembered to ask, the I-Ching suggested we should carry on regardless. Though I think even the I-Ching was secretly pleased, given the growing baby, that both of us had also found work. With her first week’s wages, Helena bought me a watch, a Swiss one. She said it was to remind me of our baby (tick, tock, she said), but also because the public clock we saw most often, on the Norman-style tower of the Church of All Saints, had been deliberately stopped at the stroke of one. This was the time at which Moholy had first opened his exhibition of relics, one o’clock on Tuesday afternoon two weeks after the protest.
He wanted to get visitors into the right frame of mind, he said. It wasn’t an experience bounded by time. At least not on the Swiss model. It wasn’t so precisely engineered.
In the week after the demonstration, Moholy had moved his collection of relics out of the villa. As a form of rent for the flat, he’d consulted us freely on the labelling, and the layout of relics in the church. I suggested that anything connected with Byron ought not take the place of the altar, and that we avoid too prominent a display of those bones still supposedly buried.
The exhibition, a collection of ancient and modern relics, was open every afternoon from Monday to Friday. It was a sensation, All Saints the perfect location for displaying bones at their glorious best. The church architecture allowed only certain sorts of movement, as if in this kind of space only certain ways of thinking were possible. It was exactly the slow, reflective approach that Moholy had always imagined, and the public loved it, even though, in truth, the relics were rarely as described on the labels. Richard Burton was standing in for many of the originals, but in a bravura performance the lost heir to Olivier tirelessly enacted audacious portrayals of the formerly great and good. Burton could be almost anybody, with an added roll of the r.
The visitors left enthused, often in high spirits, sometimes even thirsty.
Moholy publicly stated that all profits from the exhibition would be used for the promotion of good works. The relics were therefore fulfilling, without any question, their vaunted function for good. Moholy soon expanded the collection to include bones sourced from outside Switzerland, and the public kept on coming, avid for contact. They wanted to touch St Francis on the elbow, rub shoulders with the saints. They wanted to shake Herman Hesse by the hand. On Fridays, our most popular day, we filled the church with candles, and in the flicker of these most primitive units of light, the bones could say all or nothing.
Moholy stopped short of exhibiting the bones of Jesus. The public wasn’t ready, not for that, not yet. He did keep at least one of the Jesus bones about his person at all times, ordering bespoke pockets sewn into the linings of his suits. He even slept with them, though sometimes the bones had the bed, and Moholy slept on the floor.
After his leadership success on the Sunday of the protest, and then more consciously as days went by, and then weeks, Moholy deferred sending the Jesus bones to his man at the lab. There seemed little value in attempting to put a date on God, or the son of God. He was eternal. He didn’t start or finish, and he couldn’t be tested, at least not scientifically, not at the University lab. Moholy did have moments of doubt, as Jesus too must have had his doubts, but one thing or another would soon reassure him. His liking for canvas sandals, for example, or an unexpected taste for simple living.
Moholy invited United Nations supplicants of all kinds to use his villa in Geneva as a base, re-equipping the rooms once full of antiquities and relics as offices. His business profits, and now also the proceeds from the exhibition of relics, funded a revival of schemes recently abandoned by the Anglican church. He fed the homeless in Les Grottes, and rescued several Latvian hostesses from business bars in the Paquis. He was often featured in the local newspaper Le Matin, and also the less sceptical Temps de Genève.
‘How does it feel?’ a journalist asked.
‘Fantastic. Like a whole new beginning.’
Moholy infuriated his fellow Genevans by consistently denouncing the city as the cradle of capitalism, a primitive belief system dependent on the most basic of human instincts (I want I want), a darkening of the truth about human nature which other beliefs attempted to enlighten. He used his growing profile to ridicule those who thought they had the answers, but at the same time he called upon the people of Geneva to rethink the way they lived their lives, and resist a system which was violent, unjust and evil.
And he should know. He’d been taking advantage of it for years.
He gathered followers around him, and gave some of them special status, though they didn’t always know what to do with it. He issued invitations, welcomes, challenges, summons. Geneva once again became a centre of pilgrimage for dissidents from around the world, and the city started to change in character, radicalising, probing at the Western world’s epidemic discontent with self-interest. It was developing into a centre for genuine debate, which drew even the dinosaur United Nations into dialogue.
Moholy was disparaged by established protest-groups as bitterly as by the Genevan authorities. Who did he think he was? He took these attacks from both sides as evidence he must be doing something right. He was forceful, and convincing, and resigned to the probability that before too long something dreadful was likely to happen to him.
Occasionally, he almost had me persuaded. Maybe the bones, somehow, I don’t know how, contained some tiny grain of Jesus. There were evenings, after we’d closed up the exhibition, when Moholy would sit rocking at the organ, his euphoria let loose. That was when I’d tell myself that of course he wasn’t Jesus: he was having far too much fun. At top volume, he was a madman wanting to save the world, setting the swell and pedal to Trumpet and Bombard, and the fifty-six-note Great to Vox Humana.
I did sometimes wonder why I didn’t tell him. But I wasn’t all bad, or I hadn’t the courage, I don’t remember which. I convinced myself that the strength of his will to believe was in itself evidence of some divine presence. It was a miracle that the madness of Joseph M
oholy could be channelled, through the example of Jesus, into wanting to do some good.
So it wasn’t exactly the second coming, but Geneva at this time did often feel like the beating heart of a second Reformation, home to a fresh outbreak of goodness. Just like the first time round, everyone was a star, everyone’s story equally important.
I did my bit. I wrote down everything that had happened. At the Church of All Saints, I sold tickets and was the English-speaking guide on guided tours. As a reward, on Sundays, Moholy gave me the freedom of the building. On Sundays, he said, I could do what I liked. I could clear away the relics. I could wear my dad’s red chasuble. I could even preach.
I always preached.
Often starting with the text 1 Corinthians xv, By the Grace of God I am what I am. I was a pope in my own parish, with a vision of spiritual and personal freedom, spiced with the occasional experimental sermon. The Sri Lankans came, and we prayed for cricketers everywhere, though mostly in Sri Lanka. The church committee came, and other ex-English regulars, and even some stragglers from the protest. I brought in some extra chairs.
Between us, we explored the spiritual crisis in contemporary society, one of the few features of any society which was always contemporary. I then proselytised for Moholy’s causes, a little sheepishly at first, but gradually with more boldness, proposing that the doorway to the fullness of life was the death of the self.
Mrs Meier and Mr Oti would look quizzical in the front row, sometimes frowning and shaking their heads to keep me honest. They convinced me that the Church hadn’t slipped far enough from the spindle of public life to be a credible focus for a reforming counter-culture. However, in other ways they were always surprising me. As a congregation, they decided that All Saints on Sunday was now a non-conformist english church, without capitals. Its new creed rejected the belief that all God asked in return for the outrageous privilege of being born English (or close to it) was apathy, or embarrassment and cake-bakes. The middle class in the developed world at the beginning of the twenty-first century were chosen: we were lucky, and someone had to take that seriously.
Dry Bones Page 31
