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beauty) escape from her. The other actors were Bob Gottlieb’s wife, Maria Tucci, and David Warrilow, one of the leading interpreters of Samuel Beckett. Later I would see him perform in French in Paris, and no one there would believe he wasn’t born French, so perfect was his accent. He told me that he’d so hated being English that he’d “acted” his way into being a French actor with total conviction. He had a brief movie career in Barton Fink and The Last Days of Immanuel Kant, but he was too depressed and drank too heavily to be a Hollywood actor. Maria Tucci, whose father was Niccolò Tucci, the Swiss-Italian writer, had had to sacrifice her acting career because of a sick child, but eventually she returned to the stage—and to television in Law & Order.

Dick took me seriously at a time when almost no one else did. I’d brought Patrick Merla to the institute and Dick put him in charge of the W. H. Auden festival that lasted for several days. Patrick, who’d never attended a university, knew more about everything than the rest of us put together and was an excellent poet. The institute gave glamorous parties as book launches for its members. But what it mainly did was hold once-a-week lunches in the Deutsches Haus just next door to Dick’s own mews house. Visitors from all over the world presented their latest thoughts and findings in an informal, collegial way, and the question-and-answer periods following the brief talks were as stimulating as any I ever attended.

We invited Borges to come to New York. He and his companion, Maria Kodama (later his wife), had to fly first-class, of course, from Buenos Aires, and we arranged for them to stay in a beautiful NYU apartment looking down over Washington Square. The only drawback was lack of room service. Maria Kodama called me on a Sunday afternoon and asked, “Who will wash out Borges’s underthings?” I thought to volunteer my own services but I was afraid of embarrassing everyone. Finally I had to hire a maid at a hundred dollars an hour to go over there on Sunday evening and wash out the distinguished panties.

Borges gave a talk, one of the two talks he gave everywhere all the time with no variation. There was an overflow crowd of admiring students, so many that his voice had to be piped out to the sidewalk where hundreds more were gathered and listened reverently. This talk was his one on how the best metaphors are clichés because they’re true: Life Is a Dream and Time Is a River, and any effort to invent newer, fresher images is false and misleading. No one paid much attention to what he was saying. He was iconic because he’d written a half-dozen brain-twisting stories of an admirable lightness in the late 1930s and early 1940s, stories that tapped the urbane tone of G. K. Chesterton and other Edwardian writers of his youth, authors his Scottish grandmother had read to him in Argentina so long ago. Now all these years later he was invited everywhere because of these few brilliant stories that few people in the audience would have read, much less understood. Wherever he went, he talked about dead metaphors being the best ones. Right after he left us he went up to Cornell for a Nabokov festival. There he admitted he’d never read Nabokov, but he did have this little speech about dead metaphors he could deliver. I read the clippings from various local papers as he made his way across America. In each city he gave the same lecture about the beauty and rightness of dead metaphors. I suppose I’d never before witnessed up close such a huge career nor noticed how his was based on such a slim oeuvre written four decades previously.

While he was still in New York, a ritzy Hispanic society gave a banquet in his honor on Park Avenue. I was seated next to Borges, and all through the meal he kept asking me to tell him all the latest dirty words in English. Since he was blind, he couldn’t see the snowy-haired matrons of the Cervantes Club or whatever it was called bending their heads closer to catch the drift of the great man’s conversation … Luisa Valenzuela, the Argentine novelist, was a