Jorge Luis Borges (16 page)

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
The power …

BORGES:
Yes, it came to me from Almafuerte, but through Carriego who recited him very well. I remember: “
Yo deliré de hambre muchos días y no dormí de frío muchas noches, / para salvar a Dios de los reproches de su hambruna humana y sus noches frías
.”
¹⁴
That’s from the end of “El misionero.”

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
If we were in your library right now, what poem would you ask me to read to you?

BORGES:
The poem “Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost, or we could open the book
La fiesta del mundo
by Arturo Capdevila. I’d tell you to open it anywhere and just start reading to surprise me. Especially the poem “Aulo Gelio” which has some admirable verses that no one remembers any more: “
(Si los Lacedemonios al combate, iban a son de lira o son de flauta, ¿en cuántas drachmas cotizó Corinto? La noche de la
Laís la cortesana)
,”
¹⁵
that’s by Capdevila, it’s admirable. And yet it seems that he’s been forgotten because people tend to forget easily, or they remember stupid things like a football match, for example, or the founding fathers. I’m a descendent of the founding fathers, but I don’t know if they’re worth much thought. We have a history, but I don’t know if it’s filled with men of ideas, equestrian social strata, rather.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
Why shouldn’t you be described as a genius?

BORGES:
There’s no reason why I should be. What have I written? Transcriptions of writing by other people.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
But it’s not just what you’ve written, it’s how you’ve exposed the Argentine being, describing what’s happening …

BORGES:
No, not at all, I haven’t done anything …

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
How you got involved with political events, how you spoke out about the military dictatorship.

BORGES:
Well, because I was getting such sad news, and also
I knew that I was in a fairly untouchable position. I could speak out against the military, against the war, without being in any danger.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
And you did.

BORGES:
And I did.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
Another person might not have.

BORGES:
But it was my duty, I did it for ethical reasons. I haven’t read a newspaper in my life; news reaches me indirectly but surely. For example the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo
¹⁶
came to my house, maybe their children were terrorists, maybe they got what they deserved, but the tears of those women were sincere, they weren’t acting, they weren’t hysterical, and I saw this, and so I spoke out. It was my duty, many others did too … yes.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
Do you lie, Borges?

BORGES:
Not voluntarily. But I can lie, language is so limited compared to what we think and feel that we are obliged to lie, words themselves are lies. Stevenson said that in five minutes of any man’s life things happen that all of Shakespeare’s vocabulary and talents would be unable to describe adequately.
Language is a clumsy tool and that can oblige one to lie. Lie deliberately? No. I try not to lie.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
When do you lie? You don’t lie to journalists.

BORGES:
No, I am very naive with journalists. Everyone celebrates my humor and my irony. I have never been ironic as far as I know, I can’t; irony exhausts me. If I speak insolently, everyone says “How wonderful, what lovely irony”; “What marvelous mockery.” But I haven’t mocked anyone.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
You said once that you have always been in love with a woman.

BORGES:
Yes, but the women have changed over time.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
Have you had so many loves?

BORGES:
I asked my sister about her first love and she said to me, “I don’t remember much from my life but I know that I’ve been in love since I was four years old,” and as far as I remember I have always been in love, but the people change. The love is always the same, and the person is always unique, even if she is different.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
Who is that unique person?

BORGES:
There have been so many that I’ve lost track.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
Have you been in love with many women?

BORGES:
It would be very strange if I hadn’t.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
Because I would say that actually one has very few great loves.

BORGES:
All love is great, love doesn’t come in different sizes, whenever one is in love, they’re in love with a unique person. Maybe every person is unique, maybe when one is in love they see a person as they really are, or how God sees them. If not, why fall in love with them? Maybe every person is unique, I could go further: maybe every ant is unique, if not why are there so many of them? Why else would God like ants so much? There are millions of ants and each one is undoubtedly as individual as, well, as Shakespeare or Walt Whitman. Every ant is undoubtedly unique. And every person is unique.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
Like women …? The species known as woman?

BORGES:
I think that they’re more sensible than men, I have no doubt that if women governed countries, there would be no wars, men are irrational, they’ve evolved that way, women too.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
So why aren’t women allowed to govern countries?

BORGES:
Well, they probably have somewhere … I was
talking to Alicia Moreau de Justo
¹⁷
who seems a miraculous person to me; she’s about to turn a hundred and she speaks so fluently. She can put together long, complex phrases and each phrase has a certain elegance. I was genuinely amazed for the first time in my life, really, a few months ago at her house, which is in Cinco Esquinas.
¹⁸
The tenement where Leónidas Barletta was born used to stand where her house is now, in Juncal and Libertad, and Barletta used to say to me “I’m a
compadrito
from Cinco Esquinas.”
¹⁹
In the end he came into town. He liked to play the guitar and knew how to improvise, he was very good. Once he dedicated a song to Mastronardi that lasted maybe a quarter of an hour, all improvised, the whole thing, it came to him very easily.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
You left your mother’s bedroom untouched. Why did your mother mean so much to you? Well, mothers are important to everyone, aren’t they …

BORGES:
I felt that I had no right. She said to me that when she died, I should make it into my study, and that meant moving all of my books there, but I left the bed.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
To remember her by?

BORGES:
I didn’t think I had the right …

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
To move it …

BORGES:
To move it, yes. Also, if I were to move it I’d almost be accentuating the difference between one era and another, but if I keep things more or less as they were …

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
It’s your way of keeping her here.

BORGES:
Yes, it’s a way of stopping time a little, when I go back there I think that she’s in her room …

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
Waiting …

BORGES:
Waiting for me, yes. About a month ago, I went to Recoleta,
²⁰
and saw our tomb, which is horrible, like all tombs, and I thought, “Well, if there’s somewhere in the world where my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents aren’t, it’s here.” Why should I think that they’re in a horrible place like Recoleta? It’s odd that they’ve put so many restaurants in an unpleasant place like Recoleta, there’s something morbid about Argentines, wanting to be close to death, don’t you think?

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
And where is your mother buried?

BORGES:
In the tomb where my great-grandfather Colonel Suárez is buried with his close friend Olavarría; they both fought in the campaign in the Andes, the campaign in Brazil, they fought in the civil wars together and died together in exile, even though my great-grandfather was related to Rosas,
²¹
but he was proudly Unitarian.
²²
They died within a few months of each other in Montevideo, which was under siege from Oribe’s Blancos
²³
at the time. The government gave them a pretty ugly tomb that reads “
TO COLONELS SUÁREZ AND OLAVARRÍA AND THEIR DESCENDANTS
,” and they might bury me there, but I’d prefer, well, to be cremated, there’s no … I find the idea of being buried horrible, the corruption of the body is an awful concept.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
And facing the bars of Recoleta …

BORGES:
It’s a little depressing, how odd that people decided to do that.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
So your mother asked you to make her bedroom into your study. What would you do? What will happen to your house when you die?

BORGES:
It’s not important. When you’re dead, you’re not
there. Now, what I hope is that I will be forgotten because it’s all a mistake, these superficial honors, people taking me seriously all over the place. They made me a Doctor Honoris Causa in a university in Rome this year, the University of Cambridge too; I’m not seduced by those honors or by any other. I have recently been named something rather curious: I am “Rector Emeritus of the University of Caracas.” What does “Rector Emeritus” mean? No one knows!

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
Not even they know.

BORGES:
No, they only know that it sounds good phonetically. Like Doctor Honoris Causa, what is that? And yet one gets excited. When I received my first doctorate, I got very excited. It happened in ’55, ’56. From the University of Cuyo.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
Was that when you went blind?

BORGES:
Yes. So I travelled with my mother and we got on the train at dawn in Retiro.
²⁴
People didn’t travel by plane in those days. And we made our way across the dusty pampas, all day and all night, arriving in Mendoza a little before dawn. I was honored that same day, and I was very excited. And now I’ve received honors from the Sorbonne, Harvard, Oxford, Rome, Cambridge, Turin …

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
When you’re given a prize do you get the
same feeling you used to get when you went up on stage to get a prize at primary school?

BORGES:
Well, maybe not so vivid, but you do feel something, because children are more impressed by life. My memories of childhood are very vivid.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
But do you still get excited by awards? Do they still have an effect on you?

BORGES:
Yes.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
Or are you tired of prizes?

BORGES:
No, no. I think “
¡Caramba! Another group of people, another group of generous, mistaken people …
”

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
Remember Borges.

BORGES:
Yes, remember me.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
And yet you say you’d like to be forgotten. Why do you want to be forgotten by us. By me? I was born and you already existed …

BORGES:
Well, maybe there are already enough memories, don’t you think? There’s no doubt that too many books have been written, we’ve almost certainly got enough with just one of the different literatures, maybe too much. I taught English
literature for twenty years, at the School of Philosophy and Letters, and I always said: “I can’t teach you an infinite literature I know very little of, but I can teach you love, not for the literature I don’t know, but for some writers, no, perhaps that’s too much, some books maybe, perhaps the odd verse.” And that’s plenty for me. A few months ago, a lovely thing happened to me, one of the best experiences of my life: I was walking down calle Maipú.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
Alone?

BORGES:
No.

LÓPEZ LECUBE:
With María? With María? With María, then.

BORGES:
No, it wasn’t María. Well, “X.” I don’t remember who it was, but it wasn’t María. And I was stopped by a stranger, who said to me: “I’d like to thank you for something, Borges,” and I said: “What would you like to thank me for, sir?” And he said, “You introduced me to Robert Louis Stevenson.” “Ah, well,” I said to him, “in that case I feel that I haven’t lived in vain. If I’ve introduced you to such an admirable writer …” I didn’t ask him who he was, because it’s perfect like that. Whoever he was, that was enough. Knowing who he was would be redundant, useless, I was already congratulating myself without knowing who the boy I taught around 1960 and introduced to Stevenson’s work was. I thought: “Well, now, after that, I am justified.” The books I’ve written don’t matter. They’re the least important thing.