Into the Looking-Glass Wood Read online

  Once the story was finished, Borges published it in Sur, in the issue of September 1945. Shortly afterwards he and Estela had dinner at the Hotel Las Delicias in Adrogué, in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. This was a place of great importance to Borges. Here, as a young man, he had spent a few happy summers with his family, reading; here, a desperately unhappy thirty-five-year-old man, he attempted suicide on 25 August 1934 (an attempt he commemorated in 1978, in a story set in the future, “25 August 1983”); here he set his metaphysical detective story, “Death and the Compass,” transforming Las Delicias into the beautifully named villa Triste-le-Roy. In the evening he and Estela walked through the darkened streets and Borges recited, in Italian, Beatrice’s lines to Virgil, begging him to accompany Dante in his voyage through Hell. This is Dorothy L. Sayers’ translation:

  O courteous Mantuan soul, whose skill in song

  Keeps green on earth a fame that shall not end

  While motion rolls the turning sphere along!

  A friend of mine, who is not Fortune’s friend,

  Is hard beset upon the shadowy coast …

  Estela recalled the lines and told me that Borges had made fun of the crafty flattery Beatrice used to get what she wanted. “Then Borges turned to me,” Estela said, “though he could barely make me out under the misty street lamp, and asked if I would marry him.”

  Half amused, half serious, she told him that she might. “But Georgie, don’t forget that I’m a disciple of Bernard Shaw. We can’t get married unless we go to bed first.” To me, across the dinner table, she added, “I knew he’d never dare.”

  Their relationship, such as it was, continued half-heartedly for another year. According to Estela, their break-up came through Borges’s mother who, as her son’s constant chap-erone, had little regard for his woman friends. Later, in 1967, after his mother had apparently consented to his marriage with Elsa Astete de Millán (“I think it will be all right for you to marry Elsa, because she’s a widow and she knows about life”), Estela commented, “She’s found him a replacement.” The marriage was, however, a disaster. Elsa, jealous of anyone for whom Borges felt affection, forbade him to visit his mother and never invited her to their flat. Elsa shared none of Borges’s literary interests. She read very little. Borges enjoyed telling his dreams every morning, over coffee and toast; Elsa didn’t dream, or said she didn’t dream, which Borges found inconceivable. Instead she cared for the trappings that fame had brought Borges, and which he so emphatically despised. At Harvard, where Borges had been invited to lecture, she insisted that he be paid a higher fee and that they be given more luxurious accommodations. One night, one of the professors found Borges outside the residence, in slippers and pyjamas. “My wife locked me out,” he explained, deeply embarrassed. The professor took Borges in for the night and the next morning confronted Elsa. “You’re not the one who has to see him under the sheets,” she answered. Another time, in their flat in Buenos Aires where I had gone to visit him, Borges waited for Elsa to leave the room and then asked me, in a whisper: “Tell me, is Beppo here?” Beppo was Borges’s large white tomcat. I told him that he was, purring in one of the armchairs. “Thank God,” Borges said, in a scene straight out of Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark. “She told me he’d run away. But I could hear him and I thought I was losing my mind.”

  Borges’s escape from Elsa was decidedly inglorious. Since divorce didn’t exist in Argentina, his only recourse was a legal separation. On 7 July 1970, his American translator, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, picked him up in a taxi at the National Library (where Borges had his office) and secretly accompanied him to the airport, where they caught a plane for Córdoba. In the meantime, instructed by Borges under Di Giovanni’s guidance, a lawyer and three removal men rang the doorbell at Elsa’s flat with a legal writ and the order to take away Borges’s books. The marriage had lasted fifty-three days.

  Once again, Borges felt that it was not his destiny to be happy. Literature provided consolation, but never quite enough, since it also brought back memories of each loss or failure, as he knew when he wrote the last lines of the first sonnet in the diptych “1964”:

  No one loses (you repeat in vain)

  Except that which he doesn’t have and never

  Had, but it isn’t sufficient to be brave

  To learn the art of oblivion.

  A symbol, a rose tears you apart

  And a guitar can kill you.

  Throughout his almost centenary life, Borges fell in love with patient regularity and with patient regularity his hopes came to nothing. He envied the literary alliances we encountered in our readings: the British soldier John Holden and Ameera, his Indian wife, in Kipling’s “Without Benefit of Clergy” (“Since when hast thou been a slave, my queen?”), the chaste Sigurd and Brynhild from the Völsunga Saga (two lines of which are now engraved on his tombstone in Geneva), Stevenson and Fanny (whom Borges imagined happy), Chesterton and his wife (whom he imagined content). The long list of names of Borges’s beloved can be culled from the dedications to his stories and poems: Estela Canto, Haydée Lange, María Esther Vázquez, Ulrike von Kühlmann, Silvina Bullrich, Beatriz Bibiloni Webster de Bullrich, Sara Diehl de Moreno Hueyo, Margot Guerrero, Cecilia Ingenieros—“all unique,” as Bioy said, “and all irreplaceable.”

  One evening, over the usual colourless pasta at the restaurant of the Hotel Dora, he told me that he believed, with literary faith, in what he called “the mystery of women and the heroic destiny of men.” He felt unable to recreate that mystery on the page: the few women in his short stories are cogs in the plot, not characters in their own right, except perhaps the avenging Emma Zunz, whose argument was given to him by a woman, Cecilia Ingenieros. The two rival women artists in “The Duel” (a story that properly acknowledges its debt to Henry James) are sexless except in name, and so is the old woman in “The Elderly Lady.” The shared woman in “The Intruder” is little more than a thing the rival brothers have to kill in order to remain faithful to one another. The strangest of Borges’s fictional women, Ulrica, in the eponymous story, is less a woman than a phantom: she, a young Norwegian student, gives herself to the elderly Colombian professor Javier Otárola, whom she calls Sigurd, and who, in turn, calls her Brynhild. First she appears willing, then cold, and Otárola says to her, “Brynhild, you walk as if you wished a sword between the two of us.” The story ends, “There was no sword between us. Time drifted away like sand. Love flowed, secular in the shadows, and I possessed for the first and last time the image of Ulrica.”

  Borges’s men, on the other hand, fulfil their heroic destinies with stoic determination, hardly ever knowing whether they’ve achieved anything, a few times aware that they have failed. The dreaming magus of “The Circular Ruins,” who realizes that he too is someone’s dream, the laborious novelist Herbert Quain, who admits that his work belongs “not to art, but to the mere history of art,” the metaphysical detective Erik Lönrrot, who goes willingly to his own death, the irredeemable Nazi Otto Dietrich zur Linde, who coins for himself the illustrious epitaph “Let Heaven exist, even though our place be in Hell,” the bull-faced prisoner in the labyrinth waiting patiently for his redeemer to slay him, the playwright Jaromir Hladik, for whom God performs a secret miracle to allow him to complete a play before dying, the sedentary Juan Dahlmann, who, in “The South,” is suddenly offered an epic death to crown his quiet life—all these were the men whose fate Borges felt he somehow shared. “Plato, who like all men, was unhappy …” began one of his lectures at the University of Buenos Aires. I think Borges felt this to be the inescapable truth.

  Borges had wished for a simple, uncomplicated union; fate allotted him entanglements that seemed plotted by Henry James, whose arguments, though he much admired their invention, he found at times too psychologically convoluted. His last attempt at marriage, to María Kodama, apparently took place on 26 April 1986, less than two months before his death, through a license issued in absentia by the mayor of a small Paraguayan town.
I say apparently, because the procedures were shrouded in confusing secrecy and since Borges’s marriage to Elsa had never been annulled, it would seem that in marrying María he might have been guilty of bigamy. María had been one of his students in the Anglo-Saxon courses and later, in the sixties, had begun to accompany him on his travels. Her marriage to Borges surprised most people and angered many who felt that she had deliberately distanced the old man from his friends. The truth is that Borges’s friends felt jealous of anyone for whom Borges showed affection or interest, and Borges, with the wilfulness of Jehovah, allowed these jealousies to flourish.

  Now, in his eighties, with María in charge, Borges no longer dined at the Bioys’, no longer met with many of his old acquaintances: all this was blamed on Maria, never on Borges’s mutability. No one recalled that over the years Borges had often erased a name from a poem’s dedication and replaced it, in a childlike switch of affections, with that of another, more recent recipient: the new erasures were attributed to María. Even the fact of his dying in Geneva, far from his eternal Buenos Aires, was blamed on Maria’s jealousy. A day or so before his death, Borges called Bioy from Geneva. Bioy says he sounded infinitely sad. “What are you doing in Geneva? Come home,” Bioy said to him. “I can’t,” Borges answered. “And anyway, any place is good enough to die in.” Bioy said that in spite of their friendship, he felt, as a writer, hesitant to touch such a good exit line.

  But there were those—Borges’s editor at Gallimard, Héctor Bianciotti, for instance, and Cortázar’s widow, Aurora Bernárdez—who saw María Kodama merely as a devoted and zealous companion. According to them, Borges had met at last his adamant, jealous, remote, protective Beatrice. To Bianciotti, Borges had said: “I’m dying of cancer of the liver, and I’d like to end my days in Japan. But I don’t speak Japanese, or only a few words, and I would like to be able to talk my last hours away.” From Geneva, he asked Bianciotti to send him books never mentioned in his writings: the comedies of Molière, the poems of Lamartine, the works of Rémy de Gour-mont. Then Bianciotti understood: they were the books Borges had told him he had read as an adolescent in Geneva. The last book he chose was Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen which he asked the German-speaking nurse to read to him throughout the long, painful wait. The day before he died, Bianciotti came to see him and sat by his bed throughout the night, holding his old hand, until the next morning.

  Borges died on 14 June 1986. Ten years later, rereading “The Aleph” for his memory’s sake, I wondered where it was that I’d come across the idea of the all-encompassing space in Borges’s work—Hobbes’s nunc-stans or hic-stans quoted as an epigraph to “The Aleph.”1 I looked through my two shelves of Borges: the tattered original Emecé editions, cluttered with typos; the two fat volumes of the incomplete Obras Completas and Obras Completas en Colaboración, no less typo-ridden; the glossy and somewhat more prolix Alianza editions; the erratic English translations; the superb French Pléiade edition of his Oeuvres, so lovingly edited by Bernès that in my mind it almost supersedes the original Spanish. (Borges might not have minded: he once said of the English version of Beck-ford’s Vathek, written in French, that “the original is unfaithful to the translation.”)

  Roger Caillois, responsible for making Borges known in France (“I’m an invention of Caillois,” Borges said once) suggested that the master’s central theme was the labyrinth; as if to confirm this supposition, the best-known collection of somewhat clumsily translated Borges pieces in English bears that title in the plural. Astonishingly (at least for me, who thought myself quite familiar with Borges’s work) as I reread his books, I found that, far more than the labyrinth, it is the idea of an object, or a place or person or moment, that is all objects, places, persons and moments, that pervasively appears throughout his writing.

  I made a list on the endpaper pages of my Pléiade volume, but I’m sure it is far from exhaustive:

  It is headed by the most obvious: “The Zahir,” companion piece to “The Aleph.” The zahir, which means “visible” in Arabic, is an object (a coin, but also a tiger, an astrolabe) that once seen cannot be forgotten. Quoting Tennyson’s line about the flower in the crannied wall, Borges says that “perhaps he meant that there is no event, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation of effects and causes.” Then comes the celebrated Library of Babel, “which some call the Universe” and which contains every possible book, including “the true account of my death.” This infinite Library is abridged into a single book of infinitely thin pages, mentioned in a note to the story of the same name and expanded in the late “Book of Sand.” The universal encyclopaedia sought by the narrator in the long story “The Congress” is not impossible: it already exists and is the universe itself, like the map of the Nation of Cartographers (in El Hacedor), which Lewis Carroll foresaw in Sylvie and Bruno and which, in Borges’s short fable, coincides with the country it set out to map.

  Characters too can be, like places and objects in Borges’s work, all-encompassing. Sir Thomas Browne, whom Borges loved, had said it for all time: “Every man is not only himself; there hath been many Diogenes, and as many Timons, though but few of that name: men are liv’d over again, the world is now as it was in Ages past; there was none then, but there hath been some one since that parallels him, and is, as it were, his revived self.”2 Borges rejoiced in the paragraph and asked me to read it to him several times. He approved of Browne’s seemingly naive “though but few of that name,” which “makes him dear to us, eh?” and chuckled without really expecting an answer. One of the earliest of these “revived selves” is Tom Castro, the unlikely impostor from A Universal History of Infamy, who, though a semi-idiot who speaks not a word of English, tries to pass himself off as the English-born and aristocratic Tichborne heir, following the dictum that one man is in fact all men. Other versions of this protean character are the unforgetting and unforgettable Funes (in “Funes the Memorious”) whose memory is a rubbish heap of everything seen throughout his short life; the Arab philosopher Averroes (in “The Search of Averroes”) who tries, across the centuries, to understand Aristotle, much like Borges himself in search of Averroes, and the reader in search of Borges; the man who has been Homer (in “The Immortal”) and who has also been a sampling of all men throughout our history, and who created a man called Ulysses who calls himself Nobody; Pierre Menard who becomes Cervantes in order to write, once again but in our time, Don Quixote. Already in the epigraph to the early book of poems Fervor de Buenos Aires, published in 1923, Borges had written, “If the pages of this book consent a single happy verse, may the reader forgive me the discourtesy of having usurped it myself, previously. Our nothings are barely dissimilar; it is a trivial and fortuitous circumstance that you are the reader of these exercises, and I their author.” In “Everything and Nothing” Shakespeare begs God to let him, who has been so many men, be one and himself. God confesses to Shakespeare that He too is nothing: “I dreamed the world [says God] as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms of my dream are you who like Myself are many and no one.” In “The Lottery of Babylon” every man has been a proconsul, every man has been a slave: that is to say, every man has been every man. My list also includes this note, with which Borges ends his review of Victor Fleming’s film, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: “Beyond Stevenson’s dualist parable and close to the Assembly of the Birds composed in the twelfth century of our era by Farid ud-din Attar, we can imagine a pantheistic film whose many characters, in the end, resolve themselves into One, which is everlasting.” The idea became a script written with Bioy (The Others) and then a film directed by Hugo Santiago.

  Even in Borges’s everyday talk, the theme of all-in-one was constantly present. When I saw him, briefly, after the Malvinas War had been declared, we talked, as usual, about literature and touched on the theme of the double. Borges said to me sadly, “Why do you think no one’s noticed that General Galtieri and Mrs. Thatcher are one and the same person?�
� Another time, consoling Silvina Ocampo on the death of a favourite dog, he tried to use the Platonic tag: “You haven’t lost a dog, one dog is all dogs and all dogs are your dead dog …” Silvina told him, in no uncertain terms, what to do with his metaphysical argument.

  But this multiplicity of beings and places, this invention of an eternal being and an eternal place, is not enough for happiness, which Borges considered a moral imperative, and in an apocryphal tale appended to El Hacedor, Borges (under the name Gaspar Camerarius) intoned his two-line long regret d’Héraclite:

  I, who have been so many men, have never been

  He in whose embrace Matilde Urbach swooned.

  Four years before his death, Borges published one more book, Nine Essays on Dante, composed of pieces written in the forties and fifties, and revised much later. In the first paragraph of his introduction, Borges imagines an old engraving found in an imaginary Oriental library, in which everything in the world is arduously depicted. Borges suggests that Dante’s poem is like that all-encompassing engraving, the Commedia as the Aleph.