Jaramillo kept a picture in his wallet of Borges and him, a picture taken on a rainy black-and-white Bogotá afternoon. The young man and the old, the lover and the master. That must have been his proudest moment, for the grin with which he shared it with me could never match the pictured grin. I thought them beautiful; I thought Bogotá beautiful and mine for a moment. What does it mean to meet one’s hero? What thoughts must have stilled and then exploded in his head? What fog in the background, fog that led to low and sinister concrete homes that led to mountains.

Jaramillo introduced me to Borges when I was just a college sophomore, a year when the power of the imagination hinted at me but withheld itself. I read the stories but could not really read them, getting only bits, taking pleasure in the little that I got. I made the mistake of trying to decipher imagination from the actual, the remembered from the real. All these years later I understand that all’s imagination, all’s remembered, all’s shadow born unto shadow, all’s me. What happened in Buenos Aires in 1923 happened to me; the schemes with swords on La Plata and foreign coins and a hat, I was there; when the whores of Junin Street danced the tango I danced too. This was a revelation. All great literature’s a revelation because it deposits you within it and makes you a player and spectator both. Read Tolstoy and Woolf, Hardy and Bishop; you will be there. Jaramillo taught me of the magic of literature; he was the first teacher I ever had. He was bearded and lithe, too wise to be touched by rain.

I won’t bore you with a bibliography, but briefly: read “Funes the Memorious,” “The Aleph,” and “The Other Tiger.” Read “Emma Zunz” and “Averroe’s Search.” Read “A Game of Chess.” Read and embrace bewilderment and truth, and read to find yourself ensconced in places you’ve dreamed of in that fragile hour just before dawn. Great teachers take you to that hour and reinvent it. Jaramillo was a great teacher. He was a deliverer. I chose American lit as my career, but Latin American lit’s my first and favorite mistress, the one who keeps the door unlocked on drunken nights and wears my favorite lingerie. Above all, I loved Jaramillo because he forced me to believe there was another Carl, a fourth tiger waiting in a field of felled bamboo.

I lost touch with Jaramillo after college, but I knew he was there, puzzling through labyrinths and putting together fragments, occasionally taking down his Borges from the shelf for another student, another boy from Ohio or a girl from Kansas City. Yes, he was there, missing Bogotá and the smell of his mother’s bandeja paisa. He was there in the evening watching the Colombia futbol squad work down the field against the Argentines, and wept when the magnificent Escobar fell in an unfair street fight. He had to be there: one’s heroes never really go away but make possible the rise of other heroes. Such is the case with teachers too. The day we read “The Circular Ruins” I fell in love for the first time and sat in the classroom mesmerized by possibility and need. LuAnne’s a hero too. If she’s taken the time to read this far, she knows it.

One dark December afternoon Jaramillo took his dog into the woods. All night the rain had persisted and the river had risen. All that night he’d thought about tomorrow, Christmas, the fact of loneliness in cold and frozen places. He’d thought about Borges and the hills of Bogotá and the bedroom where he’d dreamed La Virgen night after night until nothing remained except a thin volume of poems and moisture on the walls. He thought of weeping and unexpectedly bright mornings and his mother’s hands. You don’t need the details; it’s summer where you and you don’t want to cry. The dog leaped in, chasing ghosts in the way of dogs. Then Jaramillo leaped in, the lover and the teacher always chasing, bartering an instant with a careless god. Only one body surfaced alive; within minutes Jaramillo was dead, hypothermia, and Borges was somewhere frowning. I read about it in the college magazine and died a little bit myself.

Here’s the thing about teachers and heroes: they die. That’s the fact of it you do not want to gather. That’s the obstinate, the blank space on the page when you wish the story would go on—another paragraph, another scene, a resolution. But our endings mostly fail, and when they succeed they leave us needing more. Sometimes they leave us with the wish we’d never begun at all. I can only end this with a wish: that Jaramillo’s widow rescued his wallet, though cold and drenched. That she pulled the picture from the leather folds and keeps it near her, safe. Knowing that would make my own oncoming death permissible.

– Carl Boon