Into the Looking-Glass Wood Page 6

  The essays are written in Borges’s slow, precise, asthmatic voice; as I turn the pages, I can hear his deliberate hesitations, the ironic questioning tone with which he liked to end his most original remarks, the solemn recitativo in which he would quote long passages from memory. His ninth essay on Dante, “Beatrice’s Last Smile,” begins with a statement that he would have made with disarming simplicity: “My purpose is to comment on the most moving verses ever achieved in literature. They are included in the thirty-first canto of Paradiso and, although they are famous, no one appears to have noticed the sorrow hidden in them, no one heard them fully. It is true that the tragic substance they hold belongs less to the book than to the author of the book, less to Dante the protagonist than to Dante the writer or inventor.”

  Borges then goes on to tell the story. High on the peak of Mount Purgatory, Dante loses sight of Virgil. Led by Beatrice, whose beauty increases as they cross each new heaven, he reaches the Empyrean. In this infinite region, things far removed are no less clearly visible than those close by (“as in a Pre-Raphaelite canvas,” Borges notes). Dante sees, high above, a river of light, flocks of angels and the Rose made from the souls of the just, arranged in orderly rows. Dante turns to hear Beatrice speak of what he has seen, but his Lady has vanished. In her place, he sees the figure of a venerable old man. “And she? Where is she?” Dante cries. The old man instructs Dante to lift his eyes and there, crowned in glory, he sees her high above him, in one of the circles of the Rose, and offers her his prayer of thanks. The text then reads (in Barbara Reynolds’ translation):

  Such was my prayer and she, so distant fled,

  It seemed, did smile and look on me once more,

  Then to the eternal fountain turned her head.

  Borges (always the craftsman) noted that “seemed” refers to the faraway distance but horribly contaminates Beatrice’s smile as well.

  How can we explain these verses? Borges asks. The allegorical annotators have seen Reason (Virgil) as an instrument for reaching faith, and Faith (Beatrice) as an instrument for reaching the divinity. Both disappear once the goal is reached. “This explanation,” Borges adds, “as the reader will have noticed, is no less irreproachable than it is frigid; these verses were never born from such a miserable equation.”

  The critic Guido Vitali (whom Borges had read) suggested that Dante, creating Paradise, was moved by a desire to found a kingdom for his Lady. “But I’d go further,” Borges says. “I suspect that Dante constructed literature’s best book in order to insert a few meetings with the unrecapturable Beatrice. Or rather, the circles of punishment and the southern Purgatory and the nine concentric circles and Francesca and the mermaid and the Gryphon and Bertrand de Born are inserts; a smile and a voice, which he knows lost, are what is essential.”

  Then Borges allows us the ghost of a confession: “That an unhappy man should imagine happiness is in no way extraordinary; all of us do so every single day. Dante too does it as we do, but something, always, allows us to glimpse the horror behind these happy fictions.” He continues, “The old man points to one of the circles of the lofty Rose. There, in a halo, is Beatrice; Beatrice whose eyes used to fill him with unbearable beatitude, Beatrice who used to dress in red gowns, Beatrice of whom he had thought so much that he was astonished to consider that certain pilgrims, whom he saw one morning in Florence, had never even heard of her, Beatrice who once cut him cold, Beatrice who died at the age of twenty-four, Beatrice de Folco Portinari who had married Bardi.” Dante sees her and prays to her as he would pray to God, but also as he would pray to a desired woman.

  O thou in whom my hopes securely dwell,

  And who, to bring my soul to Paradise,

  Didst leave the imprint of thy steps in Hell …

  Beatrice then casts her eyes on him for a single moment and smiles, and then turns forever towards the eternal fountain of light.

  And Borges concludes, “Let us retain one indisputable fact, a single and humble fact: that this scene was imagined by Dante. For us, it is very real; for him, it was less so. (Reality, for him, was the fact that first life and then death had snatched Beatrice away). Absent for ever from Beatrice, alone and perhaps humiliated, he imagined the scene in order to imagine himself with her. Unfortunately for him, fortunately for the centuries that would read him, his knowledge that the encounter was imaginary deformed the vision. That is why the atrocious circumstances take place—so much more infernal, of course, because they take place in the highest heaven, the Empyrean: Beatrice’s disappearance, the old man who takes her place, her sudden elevation to the Rose, the fleeting smile and glance, the everlasting turning away.”

  I’m wary of seeing in one man’s reading, however brilliant that reading might be, a reflection of his own self; as Borges would no doubt argue, in his defence of the reader’s freedom to choose and to reject, not every book serves as a mirror for every one of its readers. But in the case of the Nine Essays I think the inference is justified, and Borges’s reading of Dante’s destiny helps me read that of Borges. In a short essay published in La Prensa in 1926, Borges himself had stated: “I’ve always said that the lasting aim of literature is to display our destinies.”

  Borges suggested that Dante wrote the Commedia in order to be, for a moment, with Beatrice. It isn’t impossible that in some way, in order to be with a woman, any woman of the many he desired, to be privy to her mystery, to be more than just a wordsmith, to be or to try to be a lover and be loved for his own sake and not for that of his inventions, Borges created the Aleph, again and again, throughout his work. In that imaginary all-encompassing place where everything possible and impossible is happening, or in the arms of the man who is all men, she, the unattainable, might be his, or if she still would not be his, she would at least not be his under circumstances less painful to bear, because he himself had invented them.

  But as he, the master craftsman, knew very well, the laws of invention won’t bend any more easily than those of the world called real. Teodelina Villar in “The Zahir,” Beatriz Viterbo in “The Aleph,” don’t love the intellectual narrator, Borges, who loves them. For the sake of the story, these women are unworthy Beatrices—Teodelina is a snob, a slave to fashion “less preoccupied with beauty than with perfection”; Beatriz is a society belle obscenely infatuated with her obnoxious cousin—because, for the fiction to work, the miracle (the revelation of the Aleph, or of the memorable zahir) must take place among blind and unworthy mortals, the narrator included.

  Borges once remarked that the destiny of the modern hero is not to reach Ithaca or the Holy Grail. Perhaps his sorrow, in the end, came from realizing that instead of granting him the much-longed-for and sublime erotic encounter, his craft demanded that he fail: Beatriz was not to be Beatrice, he was not to be Dante, he was to be only Borges, a fumbling dream-lover, still unable, even in his own imagination, to conjure up the one fulfilling and almost perfect woman of his waking dreams.

  1 Two early sources for the Aleph might be: l) The vision of St. Benedict of Nursia who, shortly before his death c. 547, looked up from his prayers and saw in the darkness outside his window that “the whole world appeared to be gathered into one sunbeam and thus brought before his eyes.” (T F. Lindsay, St. Benedict, His Life and Work, London, 1949). 2) In a tale of the late-eighteenth-century Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, a map is described, which shows “the worlds at all times, and whatever happened stood drawn on it to read, the fate of countries, cities and men and all the pathways to this world and the hidden pathways to distant worlds. They stood each thing as it was at the hour when the world was created, as it has been since then, and as it is today.” (Martin Buber, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman, trans, by Maurice Friedman, New York: Avon Books, 1970).

  2 Though Gerard Manley Hopkins said it perhaps more movingly:

  I am all at once what Christ is ‘since he was what I am, and

  This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ‘patch, matchwood, immortal diamond

  Is immortal di
amond.

  (“That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection”).

  The Death of Che Guevara

  I believe in an ultimate decency of things.

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON,

  23 August 1893

  ON OCTOBER 8, 1967, a small battalion of Bolivian army rangers trapped a group of guerrilleros in a scrubby gully in the wilderness east of Sucre, near the village of La Higuera. Two were captured alive: a Bolivian fighter known simply as Willy and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, hero of the Cuban Revolution, leader of what Bolivia’s president, General René Barrientos, called “the foreign invasion of agents of Castro-Communism.” Lieutenant Colonel Andrés Selich, hearing the news, scrambled into a helicopter and flew to La Higuera. In the ramshackle schoolhouse, Selich held a forty-five-minute dialogue with his captive. Up to recently, little was known of Che’s last hours; after a silence of twenty-nine years, Selich’s widow finally allowed the American journalist Jon Lee Anderson to consult Selich’s notes of that extraordinary conversation. Beyond their importance as a historical document, there is something poignant about the fact that a man’s last words were respectfully recorded by his enemy.

  “Comandante, I find you somewhat depressed,” Selich said. “Can you explain the reasons why I get this impression?”

  “I’ve failed,” Che replied. “It’s all over, and that’s the reason why you see me in this state.” …

  “Are you Cuban or Argentine?” asked Selich.

  “I am Cuban, Argentine, Bolivian, Peruvian, Ecuadoran, etc.… You understand.”

  “What made you decide to operate in our country?”

  “Can’t you see the state in which the peasants live?” asked Che. “They are almost like savages, living in a state of poverty that depresses the heart, having only one room in which to sleep and cook and no clothing to wear, abandoned like animals …”

  “But the same thing happens in Cuba,” retorted Selich.

  “No, that’s not true,” Che fired back. “I don’t deny that in Cuba poverty exists, but [at least] the peasants there have an illusion of progress, whereas the Bolivian lives without hope. Just as he is born, he dies, without ever seeing improvements in his human condition.”

  The CIA wanted Che alive, but perhaps their orders never reached the Cuban-born CIA agent Félix Rodriguez, in charge of supervising the operation. Che was executed the next day. To make it appear that their captive had been killed in battle, the executioner fired at his arms and legs. Then, as Che was writhing on the ground, “apparently biting one of his wrists in an effort to avoid crying out,” one last bullet entered his chest and filled his lungs with blood. Che’s body was flown to Valle-grande where it lay on view for a couple of days, observed by officials, journalists and townspeople. Selich and other officers stood at the head, posing for the photographer, before having the corpse “disappear” into a secret grave near the Vallegrande airstrip. The photographs of the dead Che, with their inevitable echo of the dead Christ (the half-naked lean body, the bearded, suffering face) became one of the essential icons of my generation, a generation that was barely ten years old when the Cuban Revolution took place in 1959.

  The news of the death of Che Guevara reached me towards the end of my first and only year of university in Buenos Aires. It was a warm October (summer had started early in 1967) and my friends and I were making plans to travel south and camp in the Patagonian Andes. It was an area we knew well. We had trekked in Patagonia most summers throughout high school, led by enthusiastic left-wing monitors whose political credos ran from conservatist Stalinism to free-thinking anarchism, from melancholic Trotskyism to the Argentinian-style socialism of Alfredo Palacios, and whose book-bags, which we rifled as we sat around the campfire, included the poems of Mao Tse-tung (in the old-fashioned spelling), of Blas de Otero and Neruda, the stories of Saki and Juan Rulfo, the novels of Alejo Carpentier and Robert Louis Stevenson. A story by Cortázar that had as its epigraph a line from Che’s diaries led us to discuss the ideals of the Cuban Revolution. We sang songs from the Spanish Civil War and the Italian Resistance, the rousing “Dirge of the Volga Boatmen” and the scabrous rumba “My Puchunguita Has Ample Thighs,” various tangos and numerous Argentinian zambas. We were nothing if not eclectic.

  Camping down south was not just an exercise in tourism. Our Patagonia was not Chatwin’s. With youthful fervour, our monitors wanted to show us the hidden side of Argentinian society—a side that we, from our comfortable Buenos Aires homes, never got to see. We had a vague idea of the slums that surrounded our prosperous neighbourhoods—villas miseria as we called them, or “misery villages”—but we knew nothing of the slave-like conditions, like those described by Che to Selich, that still existed for many of the peasants on our country’s vast estates, nor of the systematic genocide of the native people that had been officially conducted by the military until well into the thirties. With more or less earnest intentions, our monitors wanted us to see “the real Argentina.”

  One afternoon, near the town of Esquel, our monitors led us into a high and rocky canyon. We walked in single file, wondering where this dusty, unappealing stone corridor would lead us, when up in the canyon’s walls we began to see openings, like the entrances to caves, and in the openings the gaunt, sickly faces of men, women and children. The monitors walked us through the canyon and back, never saying a word, but when we set up camp for the night they told us something of the lives of the people we had seen, who made their home in the rocks like animals, eking out a living as occasional farmhands, and whose children rarely lived beyond the age of seven. Next morning, two of my classmates asked their monitor how they could join the Communist Party. Others took a less sedate path. Several became fighters in the seventies war against the military dictatorship; one, Mario Firmenich, became the bloodthirsty capo of the Montoneros guerrilla movement and for years held the dubious celebrity of heading the military’s most-wanted list.

  The news of Che’s death felt colossal and yet almost expected. For my generation, Che had incarnated the heroic social being most of us knew we could never become. The curious mix of resoluteness and recklessness that appealed so strongly to my generation, and even to the one that followed, found in Che the perfect incarnation. In our eyes he was in life already a legendary figure, whose heroism we were certain would somehow survive beyond the grave. It did not surprise us to learn that, after Che’s death, Rodriguez, the treacherous CIA agent, suddenly began to suffer from asthma, as if he had inherited the dead man’s malady.

  Che had seen what we had seen, he had felt, as we had felt, outrage at the fundamental injustices of “the human condition,” but unlike us, he had done something about it. That his methods were dubious, his political philosophy superficial, his morality ruthless, his ultimate success impossible seemed (perhaps still seems) less important than the fact that he had taken upon himself to fight against what he believed was wrong even though he was never quite certain what in its stead would be right.

  Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (to give him his full name before fame reduced it to a simple “Che”) was born in the city of Rosario, in Argentina, on 14 May 1928, though the birth certificate stated “June” to hide the reasons for his parents’ hasty marriage. His father, whose ancestors first arrived in Argentina with the conquistadores, owned a plantation in the subtropical province of Misiones. Because of Ernesto’s asthma, which plagued him throughout his life, the family moved to the more salubrious climate of Córdoba and later, in 1947, to Buenos Aires. There Ernesto studied at the faculty of medicine and, armed with a doctor’s title, set off to explore the Latin-American continent “in all its terrible wonder.” He was enthralled by what he saw and found it hard to give up the wandering life: from Ecuador he wrote to his mother announcing that he had become “a 100 per cent adventurer.” Among the many people he met on this Grand Tour, one in particular seemed to haunt him: an old Marxist refugee from Stalin’s pogroms whom Ernesto came across in Guatemala. “You
will die with the fist clenched and the jaw tense,” said this far-flung Tiresias, “in perfect demonstration of hate and of combat, because you are not a symbol, you are an authentic member of a society that is crumbling: the spirit of the beehive speaks through your mouth and moves in your actions; you are as useful as I, but you don’t know the usefulness of the help you give to the society that sacrifices you.” Ernesto could not have known that the old man had given him his epitaph.

  In Guatemala, Ernesto became acutely aware of political strife, and identified for the first time with the revolutionary cause. There, and in Mexico soon afterwards, he became acquainted with the Cuban emigrés who were leading the struggle against the dictator Fulgencio Batista whose corrupt regime had so fascinated and repelled Hemingway and Graham Greene. With a canny nose for troublemakers, CIA agent David Atlee Phillips, appointed at the time to Central America, opened a file on the young Argentinian doctor—a file that over the years was to become one of the thickest in the CIA’s records. In July of 1955 the first meeting between Ernesto Guevara and Fidel Castro took place in Mexico. Castro, who as far back as 1948, as a twenty-one-year-old law student, had begun plotting against Batista’s regime, took an immediate liking to the Argentinian whom the other Cubans had started calling “Che” after the Argentinian colloquial address. “I think there is a mutual sympathy between us,” wrote Che in his diaries. He was right.

  After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Che sought an ambitious sequel. We don’t know whether he would have lent his support, out of loyalty to the Revolution, to the tyrannical measures Castro was to take in the years to come to protect his regime. Che’s sights were far in the future. After the war in Cuba, Che believed, the revolutionaries would spread to other neighbouring nations (Bolivia was the first chosen). Here they would wage war against the oligarchy and their imperialist bosses, wars that would finally force the archenemy, the United States, to step into the fray. As a result, Latin America would unite against “the foreign invader,” following the model of Vietnam, and defeat imperialism on the continent. Che’s battle was not against all forms of power, nor was it even against the notion of a tiered society. He was certainly not an anarchist: he believed in the need for organized leadership and he imagined a pan-American state under a strong-handed but moral government. In a small book on the Greek idea of liberty, La Grèce antique à la découverte de la liberté, the French historian Jacqueline de Romilly pointed out that Antigone’s revolt stemmed not from a rejection of authority but, on the contrary, from obedience to a moral law rather than to an arbitrary edict. Che too felt compelled to obey such moral laws and it was for them that he was willing to sacrifice everything and everyone, including, of course, himself. As we know, the events never proceeded beyond the Bolivian campaign. Whether Che ever learned what the usefulness of his sacrifice was, is a question that remains unanswered.