by Paul Theroux
As I was putting the Kipling book back into its place – Borges insisted that the books must be returned to their exact place – I said, ‘Do you ever re-read your own work?’
‘Never. I am not happy with my work. The critics have greatly exaggerated its importance. I would rather read’ – he lunged at the bookshelves and made a gathering motion with his hands – ‘real writers. Ha!’ He turned to me and said, ‘Do you re-read my work?’
‘Yes. “Pierre Menard” –’
‘That was the first story I ever wrote. I was thirty-six or thirty-seven at the time. My father said, “Read a lot, write a lot, and don’t rush into print” – those were his exact words. The best story I ever wrote was “The Intruder”. And “South” is also good. It’s only a few pages. I’m lazy – a few pages and I’m finished. But “Pierre Menard” is a joke, not a story.’
‘I used to give my Chinese students “The Wall and the Books” to read.’
‘Chinese students? I suppose they thought it was full of howlers. I think it is. It is an unimportant piece, hardly worth reading. Let’s eat.’
He got his stick from the sofa in the parlour and we went out, down in the narrow lift, and through the wrought-iron gates. The restaurant was around the corner – I could not see it, but Borges knew the way. So the blind man led me. Walking down this Buenos Aires street with Borges was like being led through Alexandria by Cavafy, or through Lahore by Kipling. The city belonged to him, and he had had a hand in inventing it.
The restaurant was full this Good Friday night, and it was extremely noisy. But as soon as Borges entered, tapping his stick, feeling his way through the tables he obviously knew well, a hush fell upon the diners. Borges was recognized, and at his entrance all talking and eating ceased. It was both a reverential and curious silence, and it was maintained until Borges took his seat and gave the waiter our order.
We had hearts of palm, and fish, and grapes. I drank wine, Borges stuck to water. He cocked his head sideways to eat, trying to spear the sections of palm with his fork. He tried a spoon next, and then despairingly used his fingers.
‘Do you know the big mistake that people make when they try to film Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde?’ he said. ‘They use the same actor for both men. They should use two different actors. That is what Stevenson intended. Jekyll was two men. And you don’t find out until the end that it is the same man. You should get that hammerstroke at the end. Another thing. Why do directors always make Hyde a womanizer? He was actually very cruel.’
I said, ‘Hyde tramples on a child and Stevenson describes the sound of the bones breaking.’
‘Yes, Stevenson hated cruelty, but he had nothing against physical passion.’
‘Do you read modern authors?’
‘I never cease to read them. Anthony Burgess is good – a very generous man, by the way. We are the same – Borges, Burgess. It’s the same name.’
‘Any others?’
‘Robert Browning,’ said Borges, and I wondered if he was pulling my leg. ‘Now, he should have been a short story writer. If he had, he would have been greater than Henry James, and people would still read him.’ Borges had started on his grapes. ‘The food is good in Buenos Aires, don’t you think?’
‘In most ways, it seems a civilized place.’
He looked up. ‘That may be so, but there are bombs every day.’
‘They don’t mention them in the paper.’
‘They’re afraid to print the news.’
‘How do you know there are bombs?’
‘Easy. I hear them,’ he said.
Indeed, three days later there was a fire which destroyed much of the new colour television studio which had been built for the World Cup broadcasts. This was called ‘an electrical fault’. Five days later two trains were bombed in Lomas de Zamora and Bernal. A week later a government minister was murdered; his corpse was found in a Buenos Aires street, and pinned to it was a note reading, A gift from the Montoneros.
‘But the government is not so bad,’ said Borges. ‘Videla is a well-meaning military man.’ Borges smiled and said slowly, ‘He is not very bright, but at least he is a gentleman.’
‘What about Peron?’
‘Peron was a scoundrel. My mother was in prison under Peron. My sister was in prison. My cousin. Peron was a bad leader and, also, I suspect, a coward. He looted the country. His wife was a prostitute.’
‘Evita?’
‘A common prostitute.’
We had coffee. Borges called the waiter and said in Spanish, ‘Help me to the toilet.’ He said to me, ‘I have to go and shake the bishop’s hand. Ha!’
Walking back through the streets, he stopped at a hotel entrance and gave the metal awning posts two whacks with his stick. Perhaps he was not as blind as he pretended, perhaps it was a familiar landmark. He had not swung timidly. He said, ‘That’s for luck.’
As we turned the corner into Maipú he said, ‘My father used to say, “What a rubbish story the Jesus story is. That this man was dying for the sins of the world. Who could believe that?” It is nonsense, isn’t it?’
I said, ‘That’s a timely thought for Good Friday.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that! Oh, yes!’ He laughed so nard he startled two passers-by.
As he fished out his door-key, I asked him about Patagonia.
‘I have been there,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know it well. I’ll tell you this, though. It’s a dreary place. A very dreary place.’
‘I was planning to take the train tomorrow.’
‘Don’t go tomorrow. Come and see me. I like your reading.’
‘I suppose I can go to Patagonia next week.’
‘It’s dreary,’ said Borges. He had got the door open, and now he shuffled to the lift and pulled open its metal gates. ‘The gate of the hundred sorrows,’ he said, and entered, chuckling.
Borges was tireless. He urged me to visit him again and again. He stayed up late, eager to talk, eager to be read to; and he was good company. By degrees, he turned me into Boswell. Each morning when I woke I sat down and wrote the conversations that had taken place the night before; then I walked around the city, and at nightfall I boarded the Subterranean. Borges said that he seldom went out. ‘I don’t go to the embassies, I don’t go to parties – I hate to stand around and drink.’
I had been warned that he could be severe or bad tempered. But what I saw was close to angelic. There was something of the charlatan in him – he had a way of speechifying, and I knew he was repeating something he had said a hundred times before. He had the beginnings of a stutter, but he calmed that with his hands. He was occasionally magisterial, but he could be the opposite, a kind of student, his face elfin with attentiveness, his fingers locked together. His face became aristocratic in repose, and when he bared his yellow teeth in the exaggerated grin he used to show pleasure – he laughed hard at his own jokes – his face came alight and he looked like a French actor who has realized that he has successfully stolen the show. (‘Stolen the show!’ Borges would say. ‘You can’t say that in Spanish. That’s why Spanish literature is so dull.’) His was the perfect face for a sage, and yet, working his features a certain way, he could look like a clown, but never a fool. He was the gentlest of men; there was no violence in his talk and none in his gestures.
‘I don’t understand revenge,’ he said. ‘I have never felt it. And I don’t write about it.’
‘What about “Emma Zunz”?’
‘Yes, that’s the only one. But the story was given to me and I don’t even think it’s very good.’
‘So you don’t approve of getting even – of taking revenge for something that was done to you?’
‘Revenge does not alter what was done to you. Neither does forgiveness. Revenge and forgiveness are irrelevant.’
‘What can you do?’
‘Forget,’ said Borges. ‘That is all you can do. When something bad is done to me, I pretend that it happened a long time ago, to someone else.’
> ‘Does that work?’
‘More or less.’ He showed his yellow teeth. ‘Less rather than more.’
Talking about the futility of revenge, he reached and his hands trembled with a new subject, but a related one, the Second World War.
‘When I was in Germany just after the war,’ he said, ‘I never heard a word spoken against Hitler. In Berlin, the Germans said to me’ – now he spoke in German – ‘ “Well, what do you think of our ruins?” The Germans like to be pitied – isn’t that horrible? They showed me their ruins. They wanted me to pity them. But why should I indulge them? I said’ – he uttered the sentence in German – ‘ “I have seen London.” ’
We continued to talk about Europe; the conversation turned to the Scandinavian countries and, inevitably, the Nobel Prize. I did not say the obvious thing, that Borges himself had been mentioned as a possible candidate. But, quite off his own bat, he said, ‘If I were offered it, I would rush up and grasp it in two hands. But which American writers have got it?’
‘Steinbeck,’ I said.
‘No. I don’t believe that.’
‘It’s true.’
‘I can’t believe that Steinbeck got it. And yet Tagore got it, and he was an atrocious writer. He wrote corny poems – moons, gardens. Kitsch poems.’
‘Maybe they lose something when they’re translated from Bengali into English.’
‘They could only gain by that. But they’re corny.’ He smiled, and his face became beatific – the more so because of his blindness. It frequently went this way: I could watch him studying a memory. He said, ‘Tagore came to Buenos Aires.’
‘Was this after he won the Nobel Prize?’
‘It must have been. I can’t imagine Vittoria Ocampo inviting him unless he had won it.’ He cackled at that. ‘And we quarrelled. Tagore and I.’
‘What did you quarrel about?’
Borges had a mock-pompous voice. He reserved it for certain statements of freezing dismissiveness. Now he threw his head back and said in that voice, ‘He uttered heresies about Kipling.’
We had met this evening to read the Kipling story, ‘Dayspring Mishandled’, but we never got to it. It had grown late, it was nearly dinnertime; we talked about Kipling’s stories and then about horror stories in general.
‘ “They” is a very fine story. I like Lovecraft’s horror stories. His plots are very good, but his style is atrocious. I once dedicated a story to him. But it is not as good as “They” – that is very triste.’
‘I think Kipling was writing about his own dead children. His daughter died in New York, his son was killed in the war. And he never went back to the States.’
‘Well,’ said Borges, ‘he had that fight with his brother-in-law.’
I said, ‘But they laughed him out of court.’
‘ “Laughed him out of court” – you can’t say that in Spanish!’ He was gleeful, then he pretended to be morose. ‘You can’t say anything in Spanish.’
We went out to eat. He asked me what I had been doing in South America. I said that I had given some lectures on American literature, and that twice in describing myself as a feminist to Spanish-speaking audiences I had been taken for a man confessing a kind of deviation. Borges said that I must remember that the Latin Americans were not very subtle on this point. I went on to say that I had spoken about Mark Twain, Faulkner, Poe, and Hemingway.
‘What about Hemingway?’ he asked.
‘He had one great fault,’ I said. ‘I think it is a serious one. He admired bullies.’
Borges said, ‘I could not agree more.’
It was a pleasant meal, and afterwards, walking back to his apartment house – again he whacked the awning posts at the hotel – he said, ‘Yes, I think you and I agree on most things, don’t we? Eh?’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But one of these days I have to go to Patagonia.’
‘We don’t say Patagonia,’ said Borges. ‘We say “Chubut” or “Santa Cruz”. We never say Patagonia.’
‘W. H. Hudson said Patagonia.’
‘What did he know? Idle Days in Patagonia is not a bad book, but you notice there are no people in it – only birds and flowers. That’s the way it is in Patagonia. There are no people there. The trouble with Hudson was that he lied all the time. That book is full of lies. But he believed his lies, and soon he couldn’t tell the difference between what was true and what was false.’ Borges thought a moment, then said, ‘There is nothing in Patagonia. It’s not the Sahara, but it’s as close as you can get to it in Argentina. No, there is nothing in Patagonia.’
If so, I thought – if there is really nothing there – then it is the perfect place to end this book.
21 The ‘Lagos del Sur’ (Lakes of the South) Express
Patagonia was also the way home. I had cancelled several train reservations in order to spend more time with Borges, but now I stopped procrastinating and made firm plans to head south. I had a few days in hand before I could leave Buenos Aires but, excluded from the Argentine intimacy of the long Easter holiday, I roamed the city on my own. It now depressed me. Some of the gloom the natives had temporarily dispelled entered my own soul and dampened it. It was partly the effect of La Boca, the Italian district near the harbour; there were boys swimming in the oily, evil-smelling harbour, and I saw more fakery than charm in the Sicilian-style houses and restaurants; some of the squalor was affectation, the rest was real dirt. I went to the Chacarita Cemetery – everyone seemed to be doing that. I found Peron’s tomb and saw women kissing his bronze creepy face and twining carnations around the handle on the mausoleum door (‘Fanatics!’ said a man standing near by. ‘It is like football,’ whispered his wife). One night, driving towards a suburb with Rolando, we were overtaken by a policeman on a motorcycle, who waved us to the roadside. Rolando did the talking. The policeman said that we had gone through a red light. Rolando insisted the light had been green. At last, the policeman agreed: the light had been green. ‘But it is your word against mine,’ said the policeman, in a voice coyly extortionate. ‘Do you want to be here all night, or do you want to settle this now?’ Rolando gave him about seven dollars’ worth of pesos. The policeman saluted and wished us a happy Easter.
‘I’m leaving,’ I told Rolando.
‘You don’t like Buenos Aires?’
‘No, I like it,’ I said. ‘But I want to leave before I have to change my mind.’
It took an hour for the Lakes of the South Express to disentangle itself from the city. We had left at five, on a sunny afternoon, but when we began speeding across the pampas, a cool immense pasture, it was growing dark. Then the afterglow of sunset was gone, and in the half-dark the grass was grey, the trees black; some cattle were as reposeful as boulders and in one field five white cows were as luminous as laundry.
This was the General Roca Railway. It had recently been bombed, but such a line was easy to bomb. It ran through the provinces of La Pampa and Rio Negro, through empty grassland and desert and across the Great Plateau of Patagonia. It took very little skill to blow up trains in these scarcely inhabited places. Anyone could be a terrorist here. But the sleeping car attendant said that I would have nothing to worry about. For some reason, the terrorists preferred freight trains – perhaps there was more damage to be done on freight trains; but this was entirely a passenger train. ‘Relax,’ he said. ‘Enjoy yourself. Let us do the worrying. It is our job to worry.’
The sleeping car was an unusual shape. It was old, and wooden, and the wood panelling of the interior was dark polished mahogany. It was very long, and in the middle there was a lobby, a sort of sitting room, with upholstered chairs and card tables. There were doors here, too; this was where the passengers –most of them elderly – congregated and talked about how cold it was in Patagonia. I had been given a First-Class ticket. I kept to my compartment, wrote about Buenos Aires and Borges and regretted that I had not asked him in my Boswell role, ‘Why is a fox’s tail bushy, Sir?’
At dinner that first evening –
wine, two salads, the statutory steak – a fellow in an army uniform was seated at my table. It was purely for the waiter’s convenience – there were only six of us eating in the dining car, but we were gathered together to save the waiter running the length of the car to serve us. The soldier was young. I asked him where he was going.
‘Comodoro Rivadavia,’ he said. ‘It is an ugly place.’
‘So you’re going to Patagonia, too.’
‘I don’t have any choice,’ he said, tugging at his uniform. I’m in the service.’
‘You have to do it?’
‘Everyone does – for a year.’
‘It could be worse,’ I said. ‘You don’t have a war.’
‘Not a war, but a problem – with Chile, over the Beagle Channel. It had to be this year! This is an ugly year to be in the service. I might have to fight.’
‘I see. You don’t want to fight the Chileans?’
‘I don’t want to fight anyone. I want to be in Buenos Aires. What did you think of it? Beautiful, eh? Pretty girls, eh?’
‘What sort of an army does Chile have?’
‘No good – not very big. But the Chilean navy is huge. They’ve got ships, boats, cannons, everything. I’m not worried about the army – it’s the navy that scares me. Where are you going?’
‘Esquel,’ I said.
He snorted. ‘Why there?’
‘The train goes there.’
‘The train goes to Bariloche, too. That’s where you should go. Mountains, lakes, snow, pretty houses. It’s like Switzerland or Austria.’
‘I’ve been to Switzerland and Austria.’
‘The snow is fantastic.’
‘I came to South America to get away from snow. It was ten feet deep where I come from.’
‘What I’m saying is that Esquel is only a little bit pretty, but Bariloche is fantastic.’
‘Maybe I’ll take your advice and go to Bariloche after Esquel.’
‘Forget Esquel. Forget Patagonia. They’re ugly. I’m telling you, Buenos Aires is the place to be.’
So even here, within striking distance of the little town I had circled on my map in Boston, they were trying to discourage me.
