GLORIA LÓPEZ LECUBE: In addition to writing and having your favorite books read to you, what do you feel compelled to do?
BORGES: I like to travel, I like to get a feeling for countries, and imagine them; very probably inaccurately because …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: So your companion describes them to you?
BORGES: Yes, I travel with María Kodama, she describes things to me and I imagine them, poorly of course.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Do you imagine them in color?
BORGES: Yes, usually, and I dream in color too, but when I dream in color the colors are too dazzling. In my waking hours, however, right now for instance, I’m surrounded by a fog, it’s bright, sometimes bluish, sometimes gray, and the shapes aren’t very well defined. The last color to stay with me was yellow. I wrote a book, The Gold of the Tigers, and in that book—it was a poem—I said, quite accurately I think, that the first color I ever saw was the yellow of a tiger’s fur. I used to spend hours and hours staring at the tigers at the zoo, and when I began to lose my sight the only color left to me was yellow, but now I’ve lost that too. The first colors I lost were black and red, which means that I am never in darkness. At first this was a little uncomfortable. Then I was left with the other colors; green, blue and yellow, but green and blue faded into brown and then the yellow disappeared. Now no colors are left, just light and movement.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: You once said that blindness was a gift bestowed upon you so that people would like you.
BORGES: Well, that’s how I try to think, but believe me …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: It didn’t make you angry?
BORGES: Believe me: the benefits of blindness have been greatly exaggerated. If I could see, I would never leave the house, I’d stay indoors reading the many books that surround me. Now they’re as far away from me as Iceland, although I’ve been to Iceland twice and I will never reach my books. And yet, at the same time, the fact that I can’t read obliges me …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: To connect with the world?
BORGES: No, not to connect with the world, no. It obliges me to dream and imagine. No, I get to know the world mainly through people.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: But it doesn’t make you angry? Doesn’t being blind make you feel impotent?
BORGES: No, well, privately it can, but my duty is to …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: When precisely do you feel that bronca3?
BORGES: No, bronca is too strong a word.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: You never feel bronca?
BORGES: I don’t know, bronca is lunfardo4 for anger isn’t it? I don’t know, no, not anger, sometimes I feel deflated, but that’s natural, and at my age … old age is a form of deflation too, but why be angry about it? It’s no one’s fault.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Do you remember what your face, body or hands look like?
BORGES: No.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Do you touch your face? With your hands?
BORGES: Well, of course, before or after shaving, but not much. Who knows what sort of old man is watching me through the mirror? I can’t see him, of course. I probably wouldn’t recognize him in the mirror (which I no longer have, of course); the last time I saw myself was around 1957. I fear that I’ve changed greatly; it’s a wrinkled landscape, no doubt.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: But wrinkles are also a sign of experience.
BORGES: Yes, for example, I used to have chestnut hair and now I suspect that I’m beyond baldness. [Laughs.]
LÓPEZ LECUBE: You have plenty of hair, you can’t complain.
BORGES: Yes, but it’s strange to be bald and have your hair messed up at the same time.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: You’re blind and yet when I speak to you I feel as though you’re looking at me, why would that be?
BORGES: Well, it’s a trick. As you describe it, it sounds like a facial lie.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: By me or you?
BORGES: No, as your voice is coming from over there, I have to look over there, and then you feel as though I’m looking at you. If you like, I can close my eyes, if that would make you feel more comfortable, I can’t tell the difference.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: No, I feel as though we were looking at each other.
BORGES: Well, if only that were true. Or maybe we are looking at each other; I think that our senses only detect so much.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: What do you feel when you’re walking down the street? Because you’re a kind of thermometer aren’t you? An aural thermometer, out among the people?
BORGES: I feel surrounded by friendship; generous, inexplicable friendship. People like me, I don’t know why. I can’t explain it; most people haven’t read what I’ve written. These friendships are mysterious but in a marvelous way, as though I were a relic. When I went to Texas, in ’61, with my mother, I found it strange that people took me seriously, I asked myself why that would be. I think that I’ve hit upon the answer; I thought, “Of course!” I was sixty-two, and people say that’s old, I don’t think I was really; to me I was young, but other people thought that I was. So, I was an old man, sixty-one years old, I was a poet, I was blind, and this made me something like a Milton, something like a Homer. And of course I was South American, which is exotic in Texas, to them I was a sort of Mexican, and these were all strong cards in my hand, cards in my favor, apart from what I’d written, which hadn’t yet been translated. So I felt confident in the fact that I was an old, blind, South American poet, but in Buenos Aires I hadn’t yet been noticed; they were very, very snobbish in Buenos Aires and only noticed me when they found out that I had been given a prize, the Formentor Prize, by European editors. So suddenly, they noticed that I was there. Up until then I had been Wells’s Invisible Man, which was more comfortable, but all of a sudden they started to pay attention to me.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: And what happened when they started to pay more attention to you? Especially given your characteristic shyness?
BORGES: My shyness has actually grown more acute over time, just like my terror of speaking in public: I was less afraid the first time than I am now because I’m a veteran, let’s say, of the panic.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Panic? How do you feel when you’re standing in front of an audience?
BORGES: Now, I’m terrified, but of course my blindness can be a defense: my friends will tell me that no one’s come, that the hall is empty, but I know they say this to ease my nerves. Then, sometimes, I’ll go out into the hall, hear the applause and realize that my friends have, generously, been lying to me and I start to feel that depression again.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: But you speak so easily …
BORGES: No, no, no, believe me, it’s so difficult, I find writing for myself especially difficult.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: How many canes do you have, Borges?
BORGES: Seven or eight; they’re quite rustic.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Are they gifts?
BORGES: Yes, they’re gifts.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: From people in the countries you visit or …?
BORGES: Well, some of them, and the rest are from María Kodama, they’re Arab shepherd’s crooks from nearby Canaan.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: And do you always dress like that, in a suit and tie?
BORGES: Yes, but I don’t know what color this suit is, because I’m blind.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Mmmm … I’m not going to tell you.
BORGES: You could tell me that it’s a harlequin costume and I could decide whether to believe you or not, but let’s hope not.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Actually it’s a bright red suit with a pink shirt and a pink tie …
BORGES: Really? A pink shirt? Isn’t that a little daring? I didn’t … I thought it was a white shirt.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: No, it’s not true, I’m joking; you’re dressed perfectly.
BORGES: Yes, I don’t think we have any pink shirts at home, I wouldn’t have allowed it.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: No, the shirt is beige, the suit is light brown and you’re wearing a beautiful Yves Saint Laurent beige and violet tie.
BORGES: Oh good, it sounded a little strange to me, but that’s fine.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Don’t worry.
BORGES: Violet?
LÓPEZ LECUBE: It’s lovely.
BORGES: How strange, I don’t like violet, but if the color looks good, I’m not … [Laughs.]
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Who dresses you, Fanny?
BORGES: No, María Kodama.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Oh, because you have a maid, a salteña5 woman, at home …
BORGES: Nooo …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: … who speaks to us journalists and says “The señor is sleeping” or “He’s sleeping.”
BORGES: That “salteña” is actually correntina.6
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Oh, I’m sorry, I thought she was from Salta.
BORGES: She’s from the province and speaks Guaraní, but I don’t understand a word of it …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Borges, how do you imagine your death?
BORGES: Ah, I’m waiting for it very impatiently, I’m told that it will come but I feel as though it won’t, that I’m not going to die. Spinoza says that we all feel immortal, yes, but not as individuals, I assume, rather immortal in a pantheist way, in a divine way. When I get scared, when things aren’t going so well, I think to myself, “But why should I care what happens to a South American writer, from a lost country like the Republic of Argentina at the end of the twentieth century? What possible interest could that hold for me when I still have the adventure of death before me, which could be annihilation; that would be best, it could be oblivion …”
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Or it could be the start of an adventure …
BORGES: It could be, but I hope not. I hope it’s the end. You’re a pessimist. I was thinking about a story about precisely this, concerning a man who spends his whole life waiting hopefully to die and then it turns out that he continues living and he’s extremely disappointed. Eventually, however, he gets accustomed to his posthumous life, just as he got used to the previous one, which is invariably hard.
I don’t think that a day passes when we’re not both very happy and very unhappy, in that sense we’re like Joyce’s Ulysses. Ulysses, of course, takes place over twenty-four hours and over these twenty-four hours, everything that happened to Ulysses on his return to Ithaca occurs. That’s what the title Ulysses means. Read it because all of time fits inside that tunnel, that odyssey, and this is what happens to us every day. And at the moment, well, I feel quite happy talking to you, and it seems strange to me that what I’m saying is being recorded; the fact that people take me seriously is what surprises me the most. I don’t take myself seriously, but people do …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: To me, this image, this humility …
BORGES: No, no, it’s not humility, its lucidity. It’s not humility, I hate humility. I find false modesty horrible.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: You once said that you’d rather be someone else, not Jorge Luis Borges …
BORGES: Yes, that phrase is plagiarized; I found it in a book by Papini I read when I was young. It’s called El piloto ciego and says that he wanted to be someone else and of course he thinks that he’s the only one who wants to be someone else, but we all want to be other people.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: And you? Who do you want to be?
BORGES: [Pause.] No, I have to resign myself to being Borges, I can’t imagine any other destiny for myself.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: You can’t imagine being someone else?
BORGES: No, no. Or in another century either.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: In another country?
BORGES: In another country, yes. I’ve lived in Switzerland, I’d like to die in Switzerland, why not? I’m an alumnus of Geneva, my only degree is a baccalaureate from my school in Geneva, all the others are honorary; I was given those.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: And what profession in Switzerland?
BORGES: My only destiny is literary. I read a biography of Milton and another of Coleridge. It seems that they knew they were going to be writers right from the beginning.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: And when did you realize that?
BORGES: I think I have always known. Maybe because my father had an influence on me; I was raised in my father’s library, I went to school, but that hardly matters don’t you think? I was really raised in my father’s library. I always knew that that would be my destiny, being among books, reading them, but it would seem that I was influenced to write as well.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Have you ever tried to paint?
BORGES: No, not that I can remember. I’m very clumsy. I couldn’t.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: You don’t know how to do anything other than write?
BORGES: Well, at one point I knew how to swim, to ride a horse, use my body. Ride a bicycle [laughs] like everyone else. Apparently the height of aspiration in China right now is to own a wristwatch and a bicycle.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Which of your poems do you like the most? And why? The ones you remember as being most definitely yours? The ones in which you express yourself the most?
BORGES: No, I don’t like the ones about me. There’s a sonnet about Spinoza that I like. I wrote two sonnets about him: in one of them, a line I remember says “Someone …” no. “A man creates God in the darkness,”7 that man is Spinoza who engenders God, his God, made of an infinite substance whose tributes will be infinite. And I also wrote another sonnet about Spinoza. I remember two sonnets about me; one of them about the death of my grandfather Colonel Borges soon after Mitre’s surrender at La Verde.8 My grandfather killed himself after Mitre’s surrender. In 1874, the year my father was born, and Lugones,9 too; 1874–1938 …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: What a coincidence …
BORGES: Except that Lugones decided that he wanted to die; Lugones killed himself on an island in Tigre, as I’m sure you’ve been told. My father, well, my father had a hemiplegia, which was apparently incurable, and he said to me: “I’m not going to ask you to put a bullet through my head because you won’t do it, but I’ll manage.” Effectively, he refused to eat, except when he had a burning thirst and drank water. He refused all medication, didn’t let them give him injections, and after a few months he managed to die. So my father’s death was a kind of suicide too, but one that involved more suffering because my grandfather just advanced onto a line of rifles and well, two bullets from a Remington … My father, on the other hand had to wait several months refusing all food. The second form of suicide must have required more bravery.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: I get the feeling that you’re a kind of saint who doesn’t recognize his literary worth, saying that you’ve been given prizes for insignificant work …
BORGES: Yes, that’s true …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: But really you’re more …
BORGES: I’d like to be a saint, why not? [Laughs.] Why reject sainthood? I’ve tried to be an analytical man, which is enough isn’t it? No, I’m not a saint.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: But really …
BORGES: But actually, why not? If you see me as a saint right now, I have no problem with being a saint.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: For everything you’ve done for Argentine literature?
BORGES: Well, no, because that’s been minimal. I haven’t influenced anyone, and yet in contrast I owe so much to so many writers from the past.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: But how is it that you think you haven’t had any influence?
BORGES: No, I owe much to Groussac,10 I owe much to Lugones, I owe much to Capdevila,11 I owe much to Fernández Moreno,12 without a doubt. Almafuerte,13 I don’t know if I’m worthy of him. The only man of genius Argentina has produced is Almafuerte, the author of “El misionero,” Carriego could recite “El misionero” from memory. My first contact with pure literature was one Sunday night with Carriego, who was an unremarkable-looking man, at home, standing and reciting “El misionero” in quite a booming voice. I didn’t understand a word, but I felt that I had discovered something new, and that new thing was poetry.
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 Mayo16 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 Justo17 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 Blancos23 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.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: But why do you say that you’d like us to forget you?
BORGES: Because it’s unimportant.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: What’s a typical day for you?
BORGES: Well, when I’m lucky, I’m talking to you here, but I don’t get lucky every day.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Well, thank you. You don’t have to say that.
BORGES: Well, I sleep a siesta.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: How many hours?
BORGES: No, for me a long siesta is forty minutes, because I take a long time to get to sleep. I find it very difficult; sometimes I even have to take a pill.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Do you have insomnia?
BORGES: Yes, insomnia visits me quite often. There’s a lovely verse by Rosetti: “Sleepless, with cold commemorative eyes …”
LÓPEZ LECUBE: And what do you do when you have insomnia?
BORGES: I try not to think about getting to sleep. I try to think up a plot or polish a verse.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Do you remember what you thought about the next day?
BORGES: No, but I managed to get to sleep, which is the important thing. No, happily I don’t remember the projects of my insomnia. But I am always writing verses or prose, I’m always polishing verses or putting together plots for stories because if I didn’t, I’d get very bored. Xul Solar25 once said to me that he wouldn’t mind spending a year in prison. “In the company of your cellmates?” “No,” he said, “a year in a cell on my own.” “Ah well, me too, because spending a year with criminals sounds horrible.” I don’t think it would be so bad, a blind person is alone; blindness is a form of solitude … old age too.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: What time do you get up in the morning?
BORGES: They come to wake me at nine but I’m already awake, and I try to get to sleep when I hear the Torre de los Ingleses26 strike eleven. But sometimes I don’t, sometimes I come home late and it strikes twelve and I’m disoriented. Generally I go to bed at eleven.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: And the cat?
LÓPEZ LECUBE: The cat died? When did it die?
BORGES: About a month ago, I think. I think it was twelve and that’s old for a cat. I didn’t know it, but apparently that’s a good life for a cat.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: And do you miss it?
BORGES: Yes, sometimes, and sometimes not. I look for it and then remember that it’s died.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: So I should get you a little cat?
BORGES: I don’t know. I’d have to ask because cats can be a lot of work and as they die, it can be hard can’t it? And you’d look at it as though it were the previous cat but it would be a little different, as though it were dressed up, so I’d have to ask, but thank you very much in any case.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: All the popularity you’ve earned over the years.
BORGES: It’s strange isn’t it? But it will pass.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Why should it pass if it’s growing all the time? How does it feel? When I walk down the street with you, it causes more fuss than with Miguel Angél Solá!
BORGES: Who’s Miguel Ángel Solá? Now, Émile Zola, I know that name …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Miguel Ángel Solá is an actor … With you people stand back, amazed, it’s an expression of …
BORGES: Well, if I were with Émile Zola that would be because he’s dead; it would be an amazing sight. Walking with Émile Zola!
LÓPEZ LECUBE: And you’re growing ever more popular, your wit, your genius …
BORGES: What can I do? And yet I’m still published, which should put people off shouldn’t it? This year, I’m directing a collection of one hundred books, I wanted to call it the Marco Polo Library, but the publisher chose a more vague title, Personal Library, so that’s what it’s called. I’m choosing them with María Kodama, and writing the prologues.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: A good thing is happening that I want to tell you about: children are learning about you because of the advertisement on television. When I told my daughter that I was going to interview Jorge Luis Borges, she said to me: “The man who’s writing all the books?”
BORGES: Well, I’m not writing them, they’re books by great writers; a Personal Library.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: No, I know, but it means young people already know about you.
BORGES: Well, Bioy told me a story today; he was with a Spanish woman at his home, and a package of books arrived from the printers: fifty copies. She looked at it and he said, “Yes, I wrote them.” So she opened the package and saw that they were fifty copies of the same book and said to him “There’s been a mistake! They’re all the same!” She was very disappointed; she was expecting fifty different books! As they were all the same, she must have said to herself “Caramba, this man’s an impostor! Caramba, what a poseur!” “Yes,” he said to me, “I reproached myself; just one book!” [Laughing.] It would seem that she knew nothing about editions, of course. And especially that she was unfamiliar with the concept of fifty first editions.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Do you live on a pension?
BORGES: Yes, I have two pensions: I was the director of the National Library, and I resigned when I heard that he had come back to power. Well, we know the story don’t we? He was called …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Say it! Say it!
BORGES: What they call Cangallo now.27 That’s it, the man who’s now known as Cangallo. I left because I couldn’t in good conscience serve him, it would be ridiculous. And then I was an English literature professor and I let go of my anger, and I have two pensions. Books don’t make enough to live on in this country; a friend of mine sadly resigned himself to writing pornography, he tried to live off the dirty words he learned in third grade, to writing about the sexual act, and he was very melancholy. Then it turned out that even these universal studies weren’t enough to make him prosperous and he’s still poor. Because pornography isn’t enough, obscenity isn’t enough to maintain oneself. Apparently not. And that means that nothing will be enough.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: No?
BORGES: Well, it seems that nothing is enough; everything is so difficult these days.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Borges, you say that you don’t read the newspapers and yet you know about everything that goes on in politics because you offer opinions on everything.
BORGES: Well, my friends keep me informed, but I have never read a newspaper in my life. I realized that something that lasts a day can’t be very important, can it? They call them dailies, which doesn’t inspire much confidence, does it?
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Before, you didn’t get involved in politics …
BORGES: And I still don’t, I don’t belong to any party.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: And yet your opinions can be harsh …
BORGES: Yes, but for ethical reasons, not political ones. When I was young I started out as a Communist, around 1918, committed to universal brotherhood, the absence of borders, friendship between all men. And then, who knows why, I became a Radical, I was a Conservative, and now I don’t belong to any party.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: But never a Peronist.
BORGES: Well, I like to think that I’m a gentleman, a decent person.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: So you’re still a committed anti-Peronist. I thought from some of the statements you’ve made that you’d forgiven a little.
BORGES: Forgotten, not forgiven. Forgetting is the only form of forgiveness, it’s the only vengeance and the only punishment too. Because if my counterpart sees that I’m still thinking about them, in some ways I become their slave, and if I forget them I don’t. I think that forgiveness and vengeance are two words for the same substance, which is oblivion. But one does not forget a wrong easily.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: And have you forgotten?
BORGES: Well, I think of my mother, who was in prison for a month, my sister too, apart from what happened to me. They were imprisoned for a month and a day and if I don’t think about that, I think about how they’ve debased the country as well as ransacking it.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Do you know that there are writers who charge for interviews? You’re someone …
BORGES: Well, I really have no idea how much you’re going to pay me.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: [Laughing.] We can talk about that later.
BORGES: I think nothing, don’t you? Let’s set it at zero then, is zero fine with you?
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Of course, zero. Silvia Bullrich28 charges in dollars.
BORGES: Well, Silvia Bullrich is a rich woman and I’m a poor man. It’s strange that rich people are usually miserly and often greedy too. Poor people aren’t, the poor are free with their generosity. Poor people are generous, rich people aren’t. My father used to say to me that when one inherits a fortune, they inherit the conditions that led to making that fortune, meaning that rich people inherit wealth and the qualities of miserliness and greed, which it maybe requires.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: That’s wonderful, you mean that one can’t be rich without stealing from someone?
BORGES: I think so, property is originally a theft.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Property is theft?
BORGES: The problem is that you and I aren’t Guaraní Indians or Charrua Indians, we have no right to be here, of course.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Working hard …
BORGES: Working hard …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: And at zero, as you just said.
BORGES: Many thanks.
3 A slang word for “frustration” or “anger.”
4 Buenos Aires slang invented primarily by tango writers and singers in Buenos Aires in the first half of the twentieth century.
5 Salta is a province in northern Argentina.
6 From Corrientes, another province in Argentina.
7 Borges says “tiniebla” while the poem actually reads “penumbra.”
8 In 1874, Bartolomé Mitre, a prominent liberal general and politician, led a short-lived revolution that ended with defeat in the battle of La Verde and surrender of his army on December 3, 1874.
9 Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938), Argentine poet.
10 Paul-François Groussac (1848–1929), Franco-Argentine writer, historian and literary critic.
11 Arturo Capdevila (1889–1967), Argentine poet and writer.
12 Baldomero Fernández Moreno (1886–1950), Argentine poet.
13 The pen name of Pedro Bonifacio Palacios (1854–1917), Argentine poet and doctor.
14 “I was driven delirious with hunger for many days and many nights I couldn’t sleep for the cold / to defend God from reproach for human hunger and his cold nights.”
15 The verse actually reads: “(Si los lacedemonios al combate iban a son de trompa o son de flauta / si en diez mil dracmas cotizó Corinto la noche de Lais, la cortesana.)” “(If the Laconians sallied forth into combat to the rhythm of the horn or the flute / if Lais, the courtesan, priced Corinth at ten thousand drachmas.)”
16 Human rights groups who campaigned for the release of political prisoners and the end to torture and killings during the dictatorship.
17 Alicia Moreau de Justo (1885–1986), Argentine politician and one of the country’s first female doctors.
18 A neighborhood in Buenos Aires.
19 “Compadrito” is a lunfardo term for “street-kid” or “scoundrel.”
20 A wealthy neighborhood in Buenos Aires with a famous cemetery.
21 Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877), Argentine dictator.
22 The Unitarian Party was a liberal political party, opposed throughout the nineteenth century by the Federal party.
23 Between 1843 and 1851, Montevideo was put under siege by the Blanco party led by General Manuel Oribe.
24 Retiro is a train station and railway terminal in Buenos Aires.
25 Xul Solar (1887–1963), Argentine artist.
26 A clock tower in Retiro, Buenos Aires. It was a gift to Argentina from the British government to celebrate the nation’s centenary.
27 Borges is referring to the former Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón (1895–1974), whose government he fiercely opposed in the 1940s and ’50s. In 1973, Perón returned from exile in Spain, to take control of the government once more and Borges resigned his post at the National Library. Cangallo is a major street in Buenos Aires that was renamed Juan Domingo Perón and then changed back after his government fell.
28 Silvia Bullrich (1915–1990), Argentine writer.