Into the Looking-Glass Wood Page 4

  In European society, hostility against gays did not become widespread until the mid-twelfth century. “The causes of this change,” wrote Yale historian James Boswell, “cannot be adequately explained, but they were probably closely related to the increase in intolerance of minority groups apparent in ecclesiastical and secular institutions throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.” And yet in spite of this hostility, until the nineteenth century the homosexual was not perceived as someone distinct, someone with a personality different from that of the heterosexual, someone who could be persecuted not only for a specific act contra natura but merely for existing. Until then, noted Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality, “the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”

  With the invention of the species “homosexual,” intolerance created its quarry. Once a prejudice is set up, it traps within its boundaries a heterogeneous group of individuals whose single common denominator is determined by the prejudice itself. The colour of one’s skin, one’s varying degrees of alliance to a certain faith, a certain aspect of one’s sexual preferences, can and do become the obverse of an object of desire—an object of hatred. No logic governs these choices: prejudice can couple an Indonesian lawyer and a Rastafarian poet as “coloured people,” and exclude a Japanese businessman as “an honorary white”; revile an Ethiopian Jew and an American Hassid, yet pay homage to Solomon and David as pillars of the Christian tradition; condemn a gay adolescent and poor Oscar Wilde, but applaud Elton John and ignore the homosexuality of Leonardo da Vinci and Alexander the Great.

  The group created by prejudice comes into existence not by the choice of the individuals forming it, but by the reaction of those outside it. The infinitely varying shapes and shades of sexual desire are not the pivot of everyone’s life, yet gay men find themselves defined through that single characteristic—their physical attraction to others of the same sex—notwithstanding that those who attract them run the entire gamut of the human male—tall, short, thin, fat, serious, silly, rough, dainty, intelligent, slow-witted, bearded, hairless, right-wing, left-wing, young, old—with nothing in common except a penis. Once limited and defined by this grouping, the quarry can be taunted, excluded from certain areas of society, deprived of certain rights, sometimes arrested, beaten, killed. In England, the promotion of homosexuality is illegal; in Argentina, gays are routinely blackmailed; in the U.S. and Canada their inclusion in the armed forces is contested; in Cuba they are imprisoned; in Saudi Arabia they are put to death. In Germany, homosexuals who were victimized by the Nazis are still denied restitution, on the grounds that they were persecuted for their criminal, not political, activities.

  A group, a category, a name, may be formed and transformed throughout history, but direct experience of this isn’t necessary for a writer to express that experience in artistic terms—to compose a poem, to write a novel. Many stories touching on a gay theme stem from writers forced to exist within the gay ghetto. But many others have been written by men and women who have not been condemned to such enclosures. As works of fiction, they are indistinguishable from one another.

  V. Variations in the landscape

  Variety is the soul of pleasure.

  MRS. APHRA BEHN, The Rover, Part II

  The fourth book of the Odyssey tells of Proteus, King of Egypt, known as “the Ancient One of the Sea,” able to tell the future and to change shape at will. According to one version of the story, he was the first man, imagined by the gods as a creature of endless possibilities. Like the apparent shapes of that ancient king, our desire need not be limited. Heterosexuality and homosexuality were no doubt two of those protean forms, but they are neither exclusive nor impermeable. Like our literary tastes, our sexual affinities need only declare allegiance and define themselves under duress. In the moment of pleasure, we are as indefinable as the moment itself. Perhaps that generous sense of pleasure will ultimately prevail.

  Our social organizations, however, still demand labels, require catalogues, and these unavoidably become hierarchies and class systems in which some assume power and others are excluded. Every library has its shadow: the endless shelves of books unchosen, unread, rejected, forgotten, forbidden. And yet the exclusion of any subject from literature, whether by design of the reader or of the writer, is an inadmissible form of censorship that degrades everyone’s humanity. The groups ostracized by prejudice may be, and usually are, cut off, but not for ever. Injustice, as we should have learned by now, has a curious effect on people’s voices. It lends them potency and clarity and resourcefulness and originality, which are all good things to have if one is to create a literature.

  III

  MEMORANDA

  “The horror of that moment,” the King went on,

  “I shall never, never forget!”

  “You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t

  make a memorandum of it.”

  Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter I

  Borges in Love

  A young woman in the audience: “Mr. Borges,

  have you ever been in love?”

  Borges (unhesitatingly): “Yes.”

  Yale University, March 1971

  ONE AFTERNOON IN 1966, in Buenos Aires, I was asked to dinner at the flat of the writer Estela Canto. A woman of about fifty, a little deaf, with wonderful, artificially red hair and large, intensely myopic eyes (she coquettishly refused to wear glasses in public), she stumbled through the small, grimy kitchen putting together a meal of tinned peas and sausages, shouting bits of Keats and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. To her, Borges had dedicated one of his finest short stories, “The Aleph,” and she would let no one forget it.

  Borges, however, did not apparently reciprocate the memory. At least when I mentioned her name and told him I would be seeing her, he said nothing: someone told me later that for Borges, silence was a form of courtesy. I had met Borges a year or so earlier, at Pygmalion, the Anglo-German bookstore in Buenos Aires at which I worked after school. Accompanied by his aged mother, Borges would shuffle into the bookstore and in a groping voice ask for books on Anglo-Saxon (his latest passion) which he would then bring up to touch his face as if his nose could inhale the letters he could no longer see. One afternoon, Borges asked me (as he did so many others) if I was free in the evenings and whether I would come and read to him, since his mother grew easily tired. I accepted, unaware of the privilege.

  Over many nights I read him Stevenson, Kipling, entries in the Brockhaus Encyclopaedia, various annotated editions of Dante, while Borges would interrupt and comment, more for his own sake than for mine, providing me as it were with a private annotated edition of his classics. He tried to persuade me to join him in the study of Anglo-Saxon, but I never got further than the first three lines of “The Battle of Maldon.” Sometimes he’d ask me to accompany him to the cinema and it was a strange experience for me to sit next to the blind old man, narrating the film in a casual way as if I were merely commenting on the plot and the photography. I quickly learned that Borges didn’t like a straightforward account of what was taking place on the screen, and I had to invent circumlocutions, such as “He looks so menacing, the way he comes into the room,” or “Panning over the city like that is very effective, don’t you think?” while the sh around us grew angrier and louder like a menacing wind. Together we sat through West Side Story (which he had already attended several times and very much enjoyed), The Collector, and Lord Jim, and he’d compare them to the films he’d seen when his eyes were still serviceable: She Done Him Wrong (he thought Mae West far superior to either Jean Harlow or Marlene Dietrich), Psycho (“Literature can’t touch this kind of sustained suspense”) and King Kong (“Fay Wray contributed not only to the monkey’s downfall, but also to the downfall of the film”). Afterwards, we’d walk back to his flat while Borges, who enjoyed remembering, would describe the city as it had been when he could see, telling stories of hoodlums in dusky bars on dangerous corners over which now rose, invi
sible to him, the glass towers of the Sheraton Hotel and the latest designer store. When I told him that a well stood now in the middle of the touristy Plaza San Telmo, in the old colonial part of town, he didn’t believe me. “You wouldn’t have a well in a public plaza; wells are built in private patios, inside the house, no?” I imagined a documentary (I suggested it to Ric Young, who was then making films in Canada) in which the camera would record the present and over it Borges’s voice would narrate the past, taking the viewer through the streets that he and Estela Canto had walked two decades earlier. But alas, no Canadian television station could see the merit in such a journey.

  By the time I met Estela, her books were no longer considered part of the Argentinian literary scene. In the wake of the so-called Latin-American “boom” that had launched Manuel Puig’s generation, editors no longer wanted to publish her and her novels now sold at remainder prices in stores as dusty as her kitchen. Long ago, in the forties, she had written essays in the style of Hazlitt (whom she admired) for several of the literary periodicals of the time, from the Anales de Buenos Aires, which Borges edited for a while, to Sur. Her realistic stories which echoed (she thought) Andreiev’s, had been published in the literary supplements of the newspapers La Nación and La Prensa, and her novels, which hesitated between psychology and symbolism, had been well reviewed, if not read, by the Buenos Aires intelligentsia. According to Estela, her downfall was caused by her being too clever. With her brother Patricio Canto, an excellent translator who discreetly encouraged rumours of sibling incest, she devised a plan to win a literary contest juried by Borges, the novelist Eduardo Mallea and the poet and literary host, Norah Lange. The two Cantos would write a novel with something to please everyone: a quotation from Dante for Borges, a philosophical discussion on art, literature and morals for Mallea, a verse by Norah Lange for Norah Lange. They hid behind the name of a literary lady in whose loyalty they believed, and submitted the manuscript, which was unanimously awarded the first prize. Unfortunately, artistic friendships being what they are, the literary lady betrayed them, the plot was revealed and the conspiring siblings were ostracized from every literary salon in Buenos Aires. Partly out of spite and partly out of a misguided fondness for Russian literature, the Cantos joined the Argentinian Communist Party (which, Ernesto Sábato once said, was indistinguishable from the Conservative Party because most of its senile members attended its meetings asleep). Communism, to Borges, who in his regretted youth had written a book of poems in praise of the Bolshevik Revolution, was anathema.

  During the dinner, Estela asked me if I would like to see the manuscript of “The Aleph” (which twenty years later she would sell at Sotheby’s for $27,760). I said I would. From a grease-aureoled brown folder she pulled out seventeen pages meticulously composed “in the handwriting of a dwarf” (as Borges once described his minuscule, unattached letters), with a few minor corrections and alternative versions. She pointed to the dedication inscribed on the last page. Then she reached over the table, took my hand (I was eighteen and terrified) and put it to her cheek. “Feel these bones,” she ordered. “You can tell I was beautiful then.”

  “Then” was 1944, the year Estela met Borges at the house of Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo. Silvina, a fine poet and better short-story writer, was the sister of Victoria Ocampo, the rich and aristocratic founder of the magazine Sur. Bioy, eight years younger than Silvina, was the heir to one of the largest dairy empires in Argentina. His mother’s name, Marta, became the dairy trademark La Martona; Borges and Bioy’s first collaboration had been a series of ads for La Martona yoghurt.

  Estela’s first encounter with Borges was, from her point of view, far from a coup de foudre. “And yet,” she added with a nostalgic smile, “neither was Beatrice much impressed with Dante.”

  As if to justify her reaction, Estela’s description of the forty-five-year-old Borges (later published in her memoir, Borges a contraluz) was deliberately unappealing. “He was plump, rather tall and straight-backed, with a pale and fleshy face, remarkably small feet and a hand that, when clasped, seemed boneless, limp, as if uncomfortable when having to bear the inevitable touch. The voice was shaky, it seemed to grope for words and seek permission.” I once had occasion to hear Borges use the shakiness of his voice to great effect, when a journalist asked him what he admired most in General San Martin, Argentina’s national hero, who had fought against the Spanish in the wars of independence. Borges answered, very slowly, “His bronze busts … that decorate … public offices … and school … playgrounds; his name … repeated … endlessly … in military … marches; his face … on the ten-peso … bill …” There was a long pause during which the journalist sat bewildered. Just as she was about to ask for an explanation of such a curious choice, Borges continued, “… have distanced me from the true image of the hero.”

  After the night of her first meeting with Borges, Estela often had dinner at the Bioys’, dinners at which the conversation was lively, since Silvina had the unsettling habit of springing questions on her guests, such as “How would you commit suicide, given the choice?” The food, however, was atrocious: a few boiled vegetables and milk jam for dessert. It was common knowledge that, unless one wanted to starve, one should always have something to eat before dining at the Bioys’. Once, the critic Enrique Pezzoni hungrily sneaked into the kitchen and discovered in the refrigerator, which he had been told was bare, two steaks. Furious at what he considered intolerable stinginess, he grabbed the steaks and threw them behind the stove. For weeks after, the Bioys complained about an atrocious stench.

  Borges, a frugal eater, was usually in attendance at these dinners. He maintained that eating well distracted from the conversation. His favourite food was what he called “unobtrusive fare”: boiled rice or pasta with butter and a sprinkling of cheese. One summer evening, as he and Estela were by chance leaving together, Borges asked if he could walk her to the subway. At the station, Borges, stuttering, suggested that they might walk a little farther. An hour later they found themselves in a café on Avenida de Mayo. Obviously, the talk turned to literature and Estela mentioned her admiration for Candida, and quoted a section from the end of the play. Borges was enchanted and remarked that this was the first time he’d met a woman fond of Bernard Shaw. Then, peering at Estela through his incipient blindness he paid her a compliment in English: “A Gioconda smile and the movements of a chess knight.” They left as the café was closing and walked till three-thirty in the morning. The next day Borges deposited at her house, without asking to see her, a copy of Conrad’s Youth.

  Borges’s courting of Estela Canto lasted a couple of years, during which, she said, “he loved me and I was fond of him.” They would go for long walks or for aimless tram rides across the southern neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires. Borges was fond of trams: it was on the number 7 tram, on his way to and from his miserable job at a municipal library, that he taught himself Italian by reading a bilingual edition of Dante’s Commedia. “I started Hell in English; by the time I had left Purgatory I was able to follow him in the original.” When he wasn’t with Estela, he wrote to her, incessantly, and his correspondence, which she later included in Borges a contraluz, is quietly moving. One undated letter, apologizing for having left town without letting her know “out of fear or courtesy, through the sad conviction that I was for you, essentially, nothing but an inconvenience or a duty,” goes on to confess: “Fate takes on shapes that keep repeating themselves, there are circling patterns; now this one appears again: again I’m in Mar del Plata, longing for you.”

  In the summer of 1945 he told her that he wanted to write a story about a place that would be “all places in the world,” and that he wanted to dedicate the story to her. Two or three days later he brought to her house a small package which, he said, contained the Aleph. Estela opened it. Inside was a small kaleidoscope which the maid’s four-year-old son immediately broke.

  The story of the Aleph progressed along with his infatuation with Estela. He wrote t
o her, on a postcard, in English:

  Thursday, about five.

  I am in Buenos Aires. I shall see you tonight, I shall see you tomorrow, I know we shall be happy together (happy and drifting and sometimes speechless and most gloriously silly), and already I feel the bodily pang of being separated from you, torn asunder from you, by rivers, by cities, by tufts of grass, by circumstances, by days and nights.

  These are, I promise, the last lines I shall allow myself in this strain; I shall abound no longer in self-pity. Dear love, I love you; I wish you all the happiness; a vast and complex and closewoven future of happiness lies ahead of us. I am writing like some horrible prose poet; I don’t dare to reread this regrettable postcard. Estela, Estela Canto, when you read this I shall be finishing the story I promised you, the first of a long series.

  Yours,

  Georgie

  “The story of the place that is all places” (as Borges calls it in another postcard) begins with the summer of the death of the beautiful Buenos Aires aristocrat Beatriz Viterbo, with whom Borges, the narrator, is in love. Beatriz’s cousin, the pedantic and bombastic poet Carlos Argentino Daneri (it was rumoured that Borges based the character on his brother-in-law, the writer Guillermo de Torre, who faithfully subscribed to the vocabulary recommended by the Royal Spanish Academy of Letters) is composing a huge epic poem that will include everything on earth and in heaven; his source of inspiration is the Aleph, a place in which all existence has been assembled. This place, Daneri tells Borges, is under the nineteenth step down to Beatriz’s basement and one must lie on the floor in a certain position in order to see it. Borges complies, and the Aleph is revealed to him. “The diameter of the Aleph would not have been more than two or three centimetres, but the entire cosmic space was there, undiminished in volume.” Everything appears before his astonished eyes in a Whitmanesque enumeration: “I saw the populous sea, I saw the dawn and the evening, I saw the crowds of America, a silvery spider’s web in the centre of a black pyramid, I saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), I saw eyes very close to me, unending, observing their own reflection in me as if in a mirror …” The list continues for another page. Among the visions, Borges impossibly sees his own face and the faces of his readers—our faces—and “the atrocious remains of that which had deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo.” Also, to his mortification, he sees a number of “obscene, incredible, precise letters” that the unattainable Beatriz had written to Daneri. “I was dazed and I wept,” he concludes, “because my eyes had seen that secret and conjectural object whose name men usurp but that no man has ever seen: the inconceivable universe.”