METAPHYSICAL MESSAGES:
WITH J.L.B. IN BUENOS AIRES
1. Where I Am
I’m in downtown Buenos Aires, alone, and I’m heading toward Calle Tucumán. It’s the end of the Argentine summer, the first week in March, 2002.
2. The Mirror that Remains
Buenos Aires is hot, but often as handsome as everybody always told you it is. There are wide, straight boulevards thick with cafés and impressive pseudo-French wedding-cake architecture, plenty of plane trees and feathery jacarandas, flower gardens still blooming. There are also a lot of crumbling newer low high-rises. And there is soot from noisy taxis and buses tangible in the humid air, old window air conditioners above you hosingly dripping onto the crowded sidewalks. Said sidewalks can be outright hazardous with broken tiles, and every few blocks there is maybe yet another woman in ragged Indian dress sitting on that sidewalk with a baby or two and holding up a plastic cup, begging, as the rather chic Porteño downtown population, noticeably Euro-looking, goes this way and that in the coming twilight. Which is to say, the city also appears complicated, even a little seedy sometimes.
I’ve traveled to Buenos Aires to spend a couple of weeks for no other reason than I want to see if I can tune in on a bit of Borges’s metaphysic—meaning the metaphysical insight and airy transport—in the place where it all happened. In the morning I sit around my hotel. First a spot called Hotel Central Córdoba on Calle San Martín, across from the famous jewelry shop that regularly supplied Evita’s spangles, I learn, then moving to a better spot up the street called Hotel Phoenix, where Edward Prince of Wales once stayed when the Phoenix had been legitimately swank and where they give me an oversize corner room on the top floor of the turn-of-the-century place with three balustraded balconies; the center one offers a view right down Avenida Córdoba to the docks and a fine slice of the cinnamon river, the muddy Plata. I read Borges in the morning, either the New Directions copy of Labyrinths I brought or the stack of his poems I photostatted back in Austin, yes, I reread the work I’ve read probably a dozen times before, always discovering something new to me. Then in the afternoon I head out to some of the places important in his biography, also a nice way to get to know such a large city. This is a different kind of a trip for me, not running around to line up interviews with writers or do library research on a country’s literature, as I have done—admittedly happily so—in places like Ireland and Central Africa and India, occasionally with some lecturing, too; now it is just me with Borges’s writing, in the city that was so dear to him, that defined him to the outside world as much as he also defined it to the outside world. I have gone into the entire thing with little direction other than that, to be honest, and sometimes the project seems foolish, to be five thousand or so miles away from my home base with no practical, concrete game plan. But sometimes it more than works out, as it will today.
A government tourism office has told me about the Museo Solar Natal Jorge Luis Borges on Tucumán. Tucumán is one of the main cross streets above the Plaza de Mayo; that’s the park you always see in the news clips where the massive demonstrations go on in front of the very pink Casa Rosada, the presidential palace. (The fascistic rallies for the Peróns transpired there; the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, never letting Argentines forget the literally thousands killed during the reign of the vicious military officers in the 1970s-80s, themselves still march there every Thursday afternoon at three.) I stop before a white two-story building at number 840 Tucumán here in the downtown, a vaguely Neoclassical masonry structure with some frilly trim. There is a plaque on it saying B. was indeed born on the premises in 1899, back then the home of Borges’s maternal grandparents; the birthplace, or solar natal, is now a YWCA. Sandwiched between it and another old building is a newer storefront setup, one-story, almost what you might find at a strip mall in the States. The big blue plastic lettering on the corrugated gray metal atop the glass front says “MUSEO JORGE LUIS BORGES,” though an overhead steel grating is pulled to the sidewalk and padlocked there. With my hands cupped I look inside, to see the place is empty, just deep-yellow walls and a royal-blue floor, poster-paint hues, and nothing else within; whatever displays of manuscripts and photographs and mementos, etc., there once were here are completely gone. I go into the YWCA, its open marble lobby. Continuing through a set of inside doors and past a bronze bust of Borges, I find a rear patio and a small office with a counter. A white-haired woman standing up and shuffling through some papers on a desk doesn’t notice me at first, and when she does, she gives me the kind of suspicious squint that I guess is universal when such a party confronts any middle-aged male poking around a YWCA.
In Spanish, I ask her about the museum, but she tells me it is closed down. I ask her for how long, and she says since last December, which means that it might have folded right around the time that the entire Argentine economy crashed like the Hindenburg on a particularly bad day; she advises I head up to the Centro Cultural Borges. I’ve already seen the small display they have on his life in that too culturally conscious new arts complex, named after him but principally devoted to dance recitals and art exhibitions and foreign films. Nevertheless, possibly still feeling a little creepy myself for poking around a YWCA, I energetically thank the woman for the valuable tip, which seems to be what she wants to hear.
Outside, I look back into the closed museum. That one front room deserted, then a door opening to a smaller back room, just as empty. And I confirm what I thought I saw. There is, in fact, one item left—a single large, round, un-framed mirror on the back yellow wall, which reflects me smack in the middle of it as portrayed looking into it, through the grating and glass with cupped hands. I take out my little pocket notebook and Bic. I write down that it is more than ironic that Borges confessed throughout his life that he had always harbored a terror of mirrors, the watery way they attest to our own incorporeality and even ghostliness, or constantly double us to the point we are not sure if we are who we really are, and now in a museum devoted to documenting his life (the museum was created in 1999, a brochure I have tells me, by the Asociación Borgesiana de Buenos Aires) the only thing that remains, triumphant in a way, is a single mirror.
I get a woozy rush of the metaphysic I came in search of, if you want to know the truth, and the purpose of the trip doesn’t seem mere whimsy at all right then.
3. Maps
The map of the city I’ve gotten from a tourism office is laid out so what is north is on the lower half, what is south at the top. You read it that way. I get a different map from a different tourism office (but like the other map, with ads for local bars and boutiques, on glossy full-colored paper), and it also has the same upside-down configuration.
4. The Hooker, Decidedly High Class
It’s a couple of days later, night now.
I’ve bought some books in Buenos Aires bookstores that have given me solid information on Borges and the city. Several local proper scholars have already done professionally, and much better, what I’m doing as an amateur, tracking down not only the biographically important sites but also many places alluded to in the stories and poems, even the essays. And, of course, Borges’s essays are not to be forgotten, and included in that New Directions Labyrinths, a volume that blends many of the stories from the seminal 1944 book Ficciones (which some say changed the look of world fiction forever) with a scattering of nonfiction pieces, is the flatly amazing (mind-blowing?) two-part piece, “A New Refutation of Time.” For me it’s a powerful treatise on the outright fluidity of what we sometimes believe, mistakenly, clocks are rather rigidly trying to tell us, commentary akin to that in Eliot’s Four Quartets, but with a more direct daring in the leaps of thought, less hemming and hawing about it; I’ve already reread that essay twice while in Buenos Aires.
No guidebook is needed to find the address where Borges lived the largest chunk of his adult life, between 1944 and 1985, most of that period as a bachelor with his mother. That is my specific mission this evening—to take a good look at the spot that I have already passed a dozen times or more in my wandering around. Actually, it’s tough to miss the place. The very image of an older, cloudy-eyed Borges, who was for a long while often ignored at home during his lifetime, now has become as much of an icon in Argentina as a smiling blond Evita or the wider-smiling, slickly-coiffed legendary tango crooner Carlos Gardel, and as you come out of the subway at the San Martín stop, there at the top of the posh pedestrian walkway for upscale shopping, Calle Florida, a lit plastic sign with a map gives the principal attractions of the Plaza San Martín/Retiro district, including an orange bull’s-eye dot for item “H” on the plan: Casa de Borges. It’s only a few streets over from both hotels where I have been staying, in fact.
Nine-ninety-four Calle Maipú is an eight-story apartment building of functional gray concrete architecture, maybe from the 1930s, built on the corner of narrow Maipú and equally narrow Charcas, also called Calle M. T. de Alvear. Borges’s place was on the seventh floor, and stepping back, looking up from across the street, I can see the apartment, recessed and right under another on the very top floor; it has a terrace with a sort of ship’s pipe railing, green awnings shading the windows, and a line of potted plants on the terrace itself. It is said that Borges’s own bedroom was just a tiny one, with a stubby cot, a night table, and a bookcase. His widowed mother had the apartment’s larger master bedroom, which he kept as almost a shrine to her after she died; reportedly, he announced even then when he came into the apartment at night, “Mother, I’m home.” He also had a white cat, Beppo, shown in some photos rolling around the carpet on its back and boxing maybe imaginary butterflies. The neighborhood is a good one, near Calle Florida and across from the quite formal, more-than-leafy Plaza San Martín, a British-style park, and just around the corner from a shop stocked with a large supply of high-priced polo gear. Next to the apartment building’s lobby is a women’s clothing boutique, where the ground-floor exterior has been given a reddish polished-stone overlay. While I take more notes, looking through the glass doors to that small white-marble lobby with its elevator and twin Art Nouveau marble staircases, cramped and curving, a group of attractive, hi-ply dressed young women come out of the boutique; they are closing up for the night, locking the pulled-down galvanized shutter and talking. I keep taking notes, writing by the streetlight, nobody else but the young women around. I like the idea that Borges wrote much of his major work here, my being at the spot, and I move backward a step or two as one of the young women from the shop walks by in front of me. I keep taking notes on the layout of the place, the way it faces the corner, with a separate plane of the building there to make for a façade of three sides; across Charcas is an edifice in full-fledged Louvre style, an officers’ club and a military museum. A half dozen of what can sometimes seem like the millions of black-and-yellow Buenos Aires taxis now stop for the light at the intersection, then move on. Borges commented in later life about the growing problem of this intersection’s traffic noise, which must get bad during the day. In a poem from the stack of them I photostatted to bring with me, “The Leaves of the Cypress” (actually a prose poem), he offers a wonderfully haunting little account of a dream in which Death comes up to his apartment right here on Maipú and takes him for what seems a test ride to the cemetery: “At the corner of Charcas and Maipú, outside the tenement, a carriage was waiting. With a formal gesture tantamount to an order, he directed me to step in first.”
I glance up to see that the young woman is walking by me again. She is tall, a long-haired brunette with high cheekbones, wearing trim beige slacks, strapped heels, and a knit black top; she smiles at me and I nod. She looks classy, perhaps “Upper East Sidish,” and it’s only when I move on and notice her now walking back and forth in front of a hotel down Charcas a ways, a doorman and another guy standing beside him smilingly ogling her as she passes, do I realize that she wasn’t with the others closing up the store at all. She is a hooker, and what I come to learn in subsequent trips to scout out the area is that this whole pocket is a favorite one for very classy hookers. Some stroll the streets alone, groups of them chat and laugh outside of normal-looking bar/lounges that are actually a part of the business, like one called “Friday’s Club” (not a TGIF franchise), which faces the closed-down old Harrods department store. In Argentina prostitution has been legal since the Perón regime.
The next morning, thinking about the encounter, I suppose I feel naïve for not spotting her as a hooker right off. Some man of the world I am—I mean, there I was lost in what most of my life has been lost in, these obsessive imaginings in and about literature, wildly taking notes, and I didn’t even know enough about how the real world works to recognize a hooker when I saw one, when I was solicited by one. It leads me to rereading another Borges poem I have photostatted for the trip, “Remorse,” where Borges says he never fulfilled the basic message of life that his kind, caring parents wished to instill in him—simply to be happy. “I wasn’t happy. My ways/ Have not fulfilled their youthful hope. I gave/ My mind to the symmetric stubbornness/ Of art, and all its web of pettiness.”
I hope it’s not going to turn out to be one of those brooding trips where, given the solitary, idle time that travel alone affords, you start evaluating every little thing, which often echoes every big thing, in your life. (The women you didn’t marry over the years, the way that lately you haven’t seen enough of, and seem to have drifted away from, your own immediate family all living elsewhere, which would break your own dead parents’ hearts—that variety of dangerous thinking.) If I hit the metaphysic at the closed-down museum with the mirror, I know I came up completely empty in that department with my do-si-doing with the young woman, the smiling hooker, there in front of the Casa de Borges the previous balmy night, big yellow clouds floating by the half-full moon.
5. Other Spots
I keep reading at the hotel in the morning (the Phoenix, where I eventually settle after a hydrofoil-ferry ride across the wide Plata and a few days in a small coastal town in Uruguay, which seems to be a sweet, sweet country), then walking more in the afternoon, right into the evening. I sometimes use city buses, the subway, too; I check out more Borges landmarks. A bunch of single Australian women book into the otherwise quite empty hotel for a weeklong conference for tango aficionados, and they are fun to talk to at breakfast in the hotel dining room. They speak enthusiastically about tango as if it is a way of life, a yoga. Among them is a physical therapist from Sydney named Brendie, not far from my own age and with a strikingly good figure, probably from all that hearty tangoing (she knows it, likes wearing low-cut leotard tops); she has large dark eyes fringed with incipient crow’s feet, a toothy smile, and what we used to call a Prince Valiant haircut, black. Quieter than the others, she does invite me to go to a professional tango concert offered as part of the conference one evening, though I duck out, telling myself that, if nothing else, innocently flirting with a woman like Brendie at breakfast is really more like my usual territory, and I’ve never been a hooker kind of guy. So how should I have been expected to know what was going on in front of the Casa de Borges?
Buenos Aires in March sometimes seems absurdly hot, ninety degrees and ninety percent humidity. It’s tough even on me, somebody who has lived in central Texas for more than twenty years and should be accustomed to anything a summer can dish out. The end-of-the-day thunderstorms— brief but inundating, the gusts bending the tall palm trees in the parks—don’t manage to usher in any relief and just make the humidity worse. I go out to the Palermo neighborhood of Borges’s childhood, originally a barrio of diverse immigrants and where the established and relatively well-to-do Borges family (his ancestry shows many Argentine notables, including nineteenth-century military commanders on both sides) moved when Borges was very young. It was in Palermo that Borges immersed himself in his father’s extensive English library, and I never fail to get a kick out of the detail of how bilingual Borges first read Don Quixote as a child in an English translation, which was right before the father, a lawyer, took the family to live in Europe for several years. Palermo looks yuppified now; the Borges had a substantial two-story home on Calle Serrano (today Calle Jorge Luis Borges, where the original house is gone), though the neighborhood back then was apparently still a little rough, with tango barrooms and the kind of knife-fighting characters found in B.’s many realistic, and often overlooked, short stories about Buenos Aires street life. Nearby I find other homes the family lived in. There’s no grave to visit; Borges died in Switzerland in 1986 only weeks after marrying his former student and companion/secretary María Kodama— she was thirty-nine, he almost eighty-seven—and is buried in Geneva.
I ride on a rattling red bus with goofy whitewall tires (the breeze through the windows is nice) to ramshackle La Boca, farther south and toward the mouth of the river, where the tango was reportedly born. In La Boca, touristy tango nightspots still thrive in the makeshift old buildings with their distinctive corrugated metal sides painted wildly bright colors. One Sunday morning, walking the length of the long park that runs next to a wildlife refuge on the river, an esplanade called the Costanera Sur not far from downtown, I seem to recognize the asterisk-shaped cast-iron patterning repeatedly inset in the old, formal cement railings of the walkway. I wonder where I have seen that. Then I remember. There is a great picture in nearly all the books about Borges’s life—not only my on-the-scene guidebooks but also the standard biographies I read before the trip—and it shows a dark-haired younger Borges in a good suit standing beside a petite, pretty young woman in a summer dress who is sitting on that railing, Estela Canto, in March 1945; Borges was head-over-heels for her, but the relationship didn’t work out. In the photo, Estela, long curly hair and daintily snub-nosed, has a white purse and open-toed white shoes, and she is holding up for the camera a copy of a book on which you can see on the cover big letters spelling out “Henry James,” but not the full title of the particular volume.
I remember having lingered over that photo when I first saw it. And I remember noticing the distinctive patterning in the railing when reading, a year or so earlier, one biography it appeared in. It is painted green, I see now. And I assure myself that I have logged some real progress in covering the city, or at least the central pocket of it (metropolitan Buenos Aires at twelve million inhabitants is simply huge, going on for miles), if I can stumble on something like this ironwork and in a way recognize it. I tell myself that the moment probably marks for this trip the important pivot point in any trip, when the foreign country doesn’t feel so foreign anymore. That’s nice, too.
I eat a lot of steak on the trip, because carne (the word seems synonymous with “steak” in Argentina) is indeed the country’s staple. Nevertheless, even at my size, six-two, I can only handle what they call a mini-bife and not the thick, plate-size slab the average slim Argentine male is able to put away daily at lunch with no hesitation. There’s an awful lot of pizza and pasta, too, evidence of how Italian Buenos Aires really is, with Italian immigration having been very large and possibly more Italian than Spanish last names in the city phone book today, I think I read somewhere. There are also big street demonstrations going on pretty much daily all over town during the whole time I am here. They attract me at first, an opportunity to be maybe a Witness to History in this period of the country’s huge economic upheavals, now that the government has let the peso float entirely freely (without much buoyancy, by the way), but the street marches are inevitably played out to guys setting off ear-splitting firecrackers. After a couple of bursts igniting only a matter of yards from my tympanic membranes, I learn my lesson, and I don’t follow the crowds when I see the demonstrations building.
6. Café Richmond, Calle Florida, 6 P.M.
What proves to be another minus on the metaphysical chart, but a revealing sequence, nevertheless.
This particular afternoon I decide to go into the Café Richmond on Calle Florida. Apparently, Borges, a regular, would bring visiting scholars and journalists there when they sought him out in the city, not far from the Calle Maipú apartment; it seems he let just about anybody who showed up at his door interview him. I admit I would not venture into the Richmond if it weren’t for the Borges connection, and with gleaming brass pillars out front and abundant staid wood paneling visible behind the glass exterior there on the ritzy shopping concourse that is Calle Florida, it looks like an overpriced, somewhat official landmark of the sort that it’s just a given you should avoid. Like Deux-Magots in Paris. And in front of the Richmond, I maybe smile to remember how Richard Ford, a predictable writer who many critics tend to take too seriously, once commented that he liked to write in a Paris café, but never Deux-Magots—as if he had some insider’s knowledge that Deux-Magots is nowadays by and large terminally square, which anybody who really knows Paris merely takes for granted. And to think about Ford’s straightforward, easily marketable writing is somehow to remind myself how it is typical of the kind of cookie-cutter fare that currently rules the American fiction scene, so much safe realism displaying no real verbal and structural daring, let alone transporting vision; possibly that American fiction scene is deservedly Oprah-ized. And I maybe think that part of losing myself in this whole Borges obsession is probably to ultimately remind myself what matters in writing, in art itself; an uncompromising and risk-taking career like that of Borges—by every account always a modest, unassuming man, even if he could turn noisy with his occasional awkwardly conservative politics—is something worthwhile in being obsessed with.
The Richmond inside spreads huge, a cavernous expanse of tables, with some businessmen unwinding, ditto for the women having finished a day of shopping and the few couples in low conversation here and there. Downstairs, where I have taken a look, it is livelier, an equally big expanse and well-heeled citizens playing billiards and chess, all male there. The waiter struts over to me, and in my Spanish that I am getting more confident with daily, I tell him I don’t need the menu. I say I will just have the promoción for five pesos, which includes a chopp (draft) of beer and a plate of canapés; I saw it advertised on a placard outside, it seeming one item that will spare me from a gouging. As he walks off, I remind him again, too loudly, “La promoción por cinco pesos” Mustached, gray-haired, dignified, he simply waves my addendum away, as if to say, “Yes, yes, I heard you.” I realize that going on with my talk of a promoción, which loosely translates as “sale” or “special,” wasn’t the classiest of lines. What the hell.
The British long dominated Argentina’s economy, and Borges’s grandmother on his father’s side was from the U.K. Looking around the Richmond you are reminded how British (alternating with the Italian feel) Argentina can be, if only for a certain upper-crust sort, and the Richmond— paintings of British ocean liners and busy British fox hunting on the walls—is very British during the tea hour, much more so than even the other trappings around B.A. I’ve seen so far (the polo-gear store, the British-style parks, Harrods), granting that the Falklands War dampened most overt Anglo enthusiasm. If there is no metaphysic oozing through the comfortably frigid air conditioning this late afternoon, there is for me a better understanding of Borges’s British side— how he loved the literature of Kipling and Stevenson and Chesterton throughout his life, how some members of the higher class like him, with British connections, supported the Allies in the Second World War, while many Argentines remained somewhere between neutral and openly backing the Axis powers of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.
The waiter brings the beer, golden and cold, and a sizable stainless-steel plate bearing the fancy canapés, the ones with chunks of fish in the puffed pastry the best. I take my time with it all. I decide I actually like it in here, the Café Richmond.
7. Did I Tell You I Saw Borges?
Which, of course, is a trick line. And, rest assured, I’m not going to announce something totally wacky. I’m not going to claim I had a vision of Borges reincarnated and strolling around—walking cane in hand, as he was often photographed when older—in the city those summer days of such hot, honey sunshine.
No, this happened when I was in college. Borges came to Harvard to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in Poetry in 1967. A sophomore English major, I wasn’t as sophisticated in matters literary as my roommate, Dan Sorensen, who enthusiastically told me that Borges was the new giant on the scene, easily as important as Beckett, and that I had to accompany him to see the man in Sanders Theatre. Not that Dan was absolutely sophisticated, and he had come to Cambridge from a high school in suburban Salt Lake City; that at least had the edge, I guess, on my education at an unknown private boys’ school in Rhode Island at the hands of, often literally, an order of black-robed Catholic brothers, the whole package quite medieval. I remember having dinner in the Quincy House dining room and then heading along the snow-shoveled sidewalks (the sidewalks of Cambridge frequently being snow-shoveled in my memory—or in my dreams) to one of the lectures. We filed into the Victorian teacup that is Sanders Theatre, to sit high up; we watched ushered onto the stage a partially blind (read “Homeric”) man in a black suit, grinning. Whatever he lectured about I am not sure today, to be frank, though the look alone of him in that black suit, grinning some more and speaking softly and somewhat unintelligible even with a microphone, his longish, thinning silver hair combed straight back, has always lingered in my mind as the image of the Poet as archetype, or “Ur-poet,” a figure representative of the full wisdom that literature, when it is great literature, truly can be. I read a lot of Borges after that, as everybody did in the sixties, the peak of his popularity, and then I came back to him later in life after writing for some time myself, with a new intensity, with a new appreciation, too, of the craft and vision of what he did in those fully innovative, dazzling short stories. More recently I read my way through the poetry, finding there a large body of work that can, surprisingly, hold its own with the stories. So I did once see Borges.
I suppose I have other Borges links as well. I live in Austin and teach at the university there now, and Borges came with his mother to University of Texas to teach in 1961-62 as a visiting professor, loving the town. I even think I have pretty good evidence that a late Borges short story, “The Bribe,” about an encounter between a young Turk of a scholar and an Old English professor in the professor’s office at UT, takes place in the very building where I work, Parlin Hall, home of the Department of English, though Borges doesn’t name it; Borges himself was in residence under the auspices of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese when at the university, so his own office must have been in their building.
Connections that are good to think about, probably meaning nothing and not especially strange. But what was strange was what happened when I set out on the trip, maybe nearly as weird as any actual sighting of Borges back in the flesh in B.A.
A creative writing grad student of mine gave me a lift to the airport in his maroon pickup. I had gotten out of the truck, was yanking my single small bag from the front seat (I’ve learned to travel supremely light), and he said:
“Pete, look.”
“What?”
“Look—that guy sitting there.”
In mid-afternoon, the drop-off/pick-up concourse in front of the sprawling new terminal was virtually empty, save for a college-age guy sitting on a concrete slab of a bench; a suitcase beside him, he was waiting for a taxi or bus, surely—and reading a copy of Borges’s Labyrinths, its distinctive black-and-white glossy cover showing a blurred photograph of superimposed abstract blocks, almost a maze. It was the only complete literary “text” I myself had packed in my own bag, along with a Lonely Planet travel guide and a Spanish dictionary, plus those photocopies of a couple dozen Borges poems. Or look at it this way—I was going to Buenos Aires to see if I could indeed savor some of Borges’s metaphysic, and sitting there as I was about to depart was a guy in a turtleneck reading a copy of Labyrinths, the book that contains a good chunk of his major work.
I mean, think of all the airports in the world. Think of all the books in the world. Think of all the different hours and minutes in all the different time zones in the world. A coincidence, perhaps, but, again, what are the sheer odds of a guy happening to be sitting there at that exact moment when I crossed paths with him and reading the book by Borges that I had brought for no other reason than I just wanted to feel what it was like to do some reading of the man in Argentina, “on the premises,” so to speak?
I like to think Borges would have loved it.
But to get back to my time in Buenos Aires.
8. The Worst Job in the World
I’m in the subway, going to a stop far out on this, the “E” line. I’m on my way to the Biblioteca Municipal Miguel Cané at the end of Calle Carlos Calvo, well beyond downtown.
It’s a Friday afternoon, hot enough on the street above and a bona fide inferno down in the subway, my shirt soaked with sweat. When Borges conceded that he had to bring in an income more steady than what his literary journalism (of which he turned out a sizable amount) provided him, he landed, through the help of friends, an appointment as an “assistant” at this small Buenos Aires neighborhood library in 1937. He was thirty-eight, rather old, admittedly, to find a first real job; he was there for nine years. The employment was painful, a long tram ride back then to a distant and bleak part of town for him. He himself writes in his “Autobiographical Essay” about it, and the biographers document the experience well. His fellow employees were mostly loafers who had gotten their jobs as political plums, guys who talked about soccer and women the entire day. When Borges worked a little too fast at the task of cataloguing all the books there according to the Dewey Decimal system, a major project underway, his coworkers called him aside and told him something along the lines of, “Whoa, Trigger”—if everybody did that much work every day, half of them would be canned before long because there would be nothing to do. Borges apparently became very upset, understandably, about a rape that occurred in the ladies’ room, off the main reading room, yet his coworkers told him that it was only inevitable, considering the way that somebody had foolishly, in their opinion, built the ladies’ room right next to the men’s room in the library (worse, I seem to recall reading that the prime suspect turned out to be a fellow librarian). In the honored tradition of many government employees, Borges soon learned to lose himself in personal projects on state time, carefully studying The Divine Comedy in Italian, writing his own work. Borges was a vocal critic of Colonel Juan Domingo Perón and the latter’s rise to power after World War II, and when the man did assume the presidency in 1946, Borges received official word from the Peronista administration that while he would keep a government job, he was being transferred to a position as chief inspector of poultry and rabbits at the Calle Córdoba public marketplace (Borges’s own version of the incident). It was surely seen as a hilarious joke to be played on somebody they thought to have ties to the smug—and for them hated and overtly elitist—oligarchy. When faced with the poultry-inspecting job, Borges had no choice but resign. True, Borges often spoke about how distasteful working at the Biblioteca Municipal Miguel Cané was, qualifying it for any list of the most legendary bad jobs in literary history, ranked right up there with Dickens’s time as a child in the blacking factory. And, as I said, I’m on the subway now heading there, the heat in the un-air-conditioned car itself dead with that smell of vacuum cleaner innards that all subways possess.
Once above terra firma, I see a neighborhood of mostly new apartment buildings that today doesn’t seem that bad, and at least there flows a slight breeze. The Biblioteca Municipal Miguel Cané is a white two-story rise with the standard Neoclassical masonry decoration (grape leaves, bunting), looking quite like that house where Borges was born, and outside is another plaque, here giving the dates of Borges’s employment as a librarian. Inside, the first impression is that everything is more or less in a time buckle, that the place probably hasn’t changed much whatsoever since Borges served his sentence here. On the first floor there’s a reading room with dark-wood tables and chairs, a row of tall, dark-wood bookcases dividing it in two. The holdings appear to be what you would expect in a neighborhood library—some popular fiction (I notice John Grisham in translation), some encyclopedias, a hefty red-bound Merck Manual. In one of my Borges-territory guidebooks I have seen a snapshot that gives evidence that despite Borges’s own public proclamation of distaste for the place, there is now a little room they have set up for a display with apparently his desk and chair from his working days here; or, as the caption with the picture in the book would have it: “...un sillón y un pupitre utilizados por Borges cuando trabajada allí.” That is my target of sorts for today. A wiry guy in brown jeans and a short-sleeve beige shirt, rumpled, approaches me; his skin is leathery, his slicked-back black hair sparse, his mustache what they used to call pencil-thin. Fifty or so, gruff, he doesn’t strike you as your typical librarian, and when I spout off something about looking for “un sillón y un pupitre utilizados por Borges,” he appears to only pick up on the “Borges” part of it.
“Jorge Luis Borges?” he says, not excited about it.
“Sí, sí,” I say.
He leads me to a small bookcase in the rear of the room; here they have, alongside some ancient classics of Spanish literature in flaking calfskin bindings, a set of the blue bound complete works of Borges. He hands me the volume containing the poems, while he doesn’t say anything about where I might find “un sillón y un pupitre utilazados por Borges.” To be polite, I sit down at one of the long tables, thumb through the book. I also look around, the overhead fans churning through the degrees centigrade, and the heat here is just about the same as in the subway. Dirty pale green walls; high ceilings with embossing; up front a single, cheesy turned-off computer on a table, next to a small bookcase of videotapes—those two items attesting that things have at least changed some since Borges’s days at the library. And, of course, there in back are two doors side by side: “Damas” and “Caballeros,” the scene of the crime. The mustached guy is ignoring me, so I now try a woman at the front desk, forty-something with heavy lipstick, hennaed hair, and a red dress. I hate to say it, but she looks a lot more like a hooker than any of the authentic examples I eventually took notice of around the classy San Martín quarter downtown. I give her the line about my trying to find “un sillón y un pupitre utilaza-dos por Borges,” and she talks to me while sitting on a stool and thumbing through a stack of dog-eared index cards that are yellow-going-to-brown with age. She finally looks up, telling me to wait a minute, and after she walks off and disappears from the reading room to go to maybe the office of the head librarian in back, the mustached guy getting summoned in there, too, the mustached guy eventually comes out on his own, heading toward me up front and carrying a ring of keys; saying nothing, he just casually motions me to follow him upstairs. I do. We cross a gallery area up there, and he takes me to an addition in back. He unlocks the door to a closet-sized, windowless nook, where they have set up the display. I walk in, start taking some notes about the look of the desk (which really seems like just the same type of long table I saw in the reading room, with three upright dividing boards to make three small carrels, an attached reading lamp above each section) and the chair (a bentwood one with arms and a too-new, red leatherette cushion); there are some mounted newspaper clips about Borges on the desk and old schoolbook copies in Spanish of the stories of Oscar Wilde and Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb, yet I’m not sure exactly what they have to do with B., whether he contributed translations or if they were just his personal copies. There are some photographs of him when young. I take more notes, glance outside once.
In the corridor, the mustached guy has found a ledge to sit on, low and hunched over. His chin on one fist, he has lit up a cigarette and is puffing it slowly, flicking the ashes to the floor, then puffing it slowly some more. I suspect that he is thinking, “I wonder how long this crazy American bastard is going to be in there,” but maybe he is grateful for having to conduct the tour, getting the windfall of this unexpected smoking break. Also, I hate to say it, but he, too, could have been a leftover—very much so—from when Borges was employed here, one of those rowdy guys talking only of women and soccer. But he does finally smile, politely, when I finish and thank him for his time, his locking up again with the big ring of keys, and I feel foolish for thinking what I had about him.
Downstairs, I sit alone at the same table again, taking more notes. There are a couple of men there, senior citizens, reading books at other tables. A college-age girl in camouflage pants and black T-shirt appears to be doing an assignment. A woman with a baby cradled in one arm comes in and the librarian in the red dress helps her look up something. I’m really hot, hotter than when I was in the subway. I take still more notes. I notice the girl in camouflage pants get up and bounce toward the ladies’ room in back, and I can’t help but think again myself of the odious crime that once transpired right there. I’m really, really hot, the shirt glued to my back again, and looking out the old story-high front doors with glass panels and to the street, I see the leaves on a jacaranda rattling, so I know there remains somewhat of a breeze out there. I want to be out there, escape, and I tell myself, yeah, I am getting a taste of the experience of what it was like for Borges. I think of jobs I had when younger that I hated, clock-watching jobs and most of them involving what for me was the day-to-day, repetitive grind of city newspaper work, before I was downright lucky enough to find teaching positions in creative writing. I get up to leave. I thank the woman in the red dress at the front desk, and she also finally smiles, as I feel foolish for having thought ill of her, too.
I know I still have the Biblioteca Nacional to go to before I leave Buenos Aires.
In a fitting reversal of fortune right after Perón was deposed in 1955, Borges, who had been supporting himself with university teaching and editing since leaving the assistant’s post at the neighborhood library, was appointed by the new government the director of the national library, an institution that is the equivalent of our Library of Congress. It was a prestigious position that, from every report, he deeply loved for the almost twenty years he held it, until resigning in 1973, when an embalmed-looking Perón returned from exile in Spain for a brief final term in office before officially dying. By then B.’s worldwide notoriety (the French were the first to celebrate him abroad, as they have been in the cases of so many writers slighted in their homelands) led to constant international travel with lucrative lecturing and major prizes, which, along with substantial book sales, rendered him financially independent. He accepted his increasing blindness, an inherited affliction.
9. Reading and Thinking at Night
Still dressed in chinos, a loose chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and comfortable Reeboks, I’m stretched out on my made bed at the Hotel Phoenix. I am reading an interesting little book I came across in a used bookstore, a tattered paperback history of the Argentine short story published in 1975. I have bought a couple of tallboy cans of Brahma beer at a corner kiosco (deli), drinking one now while reading, keeping the other cool by having wrapped it in a heavy white terrycloth bath towel. It’s ultimately interesting how in that two-hundred-page survey of the genre, Borges merits only a little more than two pages, and even then he is unceremoniously lumped together in a roundup for a chapter titled, “Cuentistas que no figuran en las antologías Argentinas del cuento,” or the writers who at that time hadn’t made it into the standard anthologies of the Argentine short story. The author, a certain Carlos Mastrángelo, talks of the difficulty of Borges’s stories, albeit respectfully, while most of the book is concerned with what he seems to believe is the country’s more noteworthy fare, much of it work in what could be called the “gaucho tradition,” by local-colorists, really. Nevertheless, I am drinking the Brahma in its sweating white-and-red tallboy can, wondering why Borges by 1975 didn’t get anthologized, unless ignoring him was possibly a political thing and Borges for some Argentine critics was simply out of the loop on that count, therefore afforded scant publicity. I get up to unwrap the second Brahma from the towel, and I feel it in my grip—it is still very cold.
All the doors to the three balconies are open now, and there is a breeze, slowly lifting then dropping the long maroon drapes gently, as if they are breathing. The latest round of overdramatic thunderstorms that afternoon has finally cleared out the air, and around town in the last couple of days I’ve seen school kids in uniforms returning to the start of fall classes; the season is changing. Going out to the center, corner balcony above the major downtown intersection, I look to the wedge of the glassy black river a few blocks away, tall yellow cranes at the docks framing the view; there is a moon, full. I sip the cold Brahma. The night smells muddily sweet, if that makes any sense, and I am at that last stage in a trip when you start missing things already. I know I will miss this giant room, the best in the old, well-worn hotel, so maybe it was where the Prince of Wales himself stayed. I will miss eating those good steaks and not worrying about blood pressure and cholesterol, because, as I tell myself at the table every day, “You’ll only be in Argentina once, Pete.” I’ll even miss goofing around with the group of Australian women at breakfast. Just that morning, Brendie (in a tight top displaying a lot of peachy cleavage, as usual) was giving me more commentary on the tango, with her pal named Georgia noddingly agreeing. Brendie said: “The tango really freed the poor here. It struck some rhythm in them that made them forget their sadness for a while.” The whole of which could have been trite, a platitude, until Brendie added, talking more to herself than anybody else: “There’s so much sadness that people need to forget.” Brendie is OK. Despite any early doubts about the trip (those fears of indulging in too much self-examination concerning my admitted mess-ups in life), I realize that this is turning out to be one of the best trips I’ve taken in a long while, probably since going to India and especially Bombay, which was something else, too. (I traveled around for a month to give some lectures in India, had a great time with the bright and wonderfully energetic Indian students while in residence as a visiting faculty member at an American studies research center in Hyderabad; it was a place where everybody was wild about books—long informal sessions with the students late into the night, talking literature, long walks with them to the dusty hills behind the center’s compound in the afternoons, talking literature. And then a week in shimmering, forever mysterious Bombay, a major world city on par with London or Paris or New York, I tell myself now.) I guess I’m also thinking of everything I have to do back in Austin. I have to plow through the chore of really complicated income taxes this year, and though I am on official academic leave now for a semester, there’s waiting for me back home the ongoing baloney that can surround academia sometimes. Not from the students, who are great, but from vapidly self-important administrators, “politic, cautious, and meticulous,” and lately such campus careerists can even be found on the creative writing end, another sign of the dim and commercialized literary times. But one must keep loudly bucking the likes of them, try to make things better, also always try to instill in graduate creative writing students specifically, I remind myself now, a hunger for the lasting and significant, the old Borgesian ethos, all right. On the balcony, I tell myself that a duration of a couple of weeks in my adult life is about as long as I can go without working on my own fiction, and I admit I’m jumpy to get back to that, already planning new projects. I go inside again. I stretch out on the bed again, continue reading the paperback history of the Argentine short story.
10. Thinking Some More at Night
And from the bed I can see myself reflected—me, comfortably tired after walking, relaxing like that with book in hand, the ceiling fan above lopsidedly looping around and around—in the full-length mirror on the huge mahogany armoire with its tarnished brass fittings. That reminds me again of that Borges museum, which was empty except for the single round mirror left to reflect people passing by on the busy sidewalk of Calle Tucumán, or reflect a stranger like me cupping my hands at twilight there to look in—Borg-es himself long gone but the mirror still very much around. Borges was right to be suspicious of mirrors, and often it’s easy to feel that not much of anything is close to what we commonly call real.
I sip the beer. I continue with the book on the history of the Argentine short story.
11. Brendie Says
The next morning at breakfast I ask Brendie if maybe she knows what the deal is on those tourism maps, how north is south and south is north. Is it because the layout of the city just fits better on the page that way? Or, possibly, is it because we’re below the Equator, and it’s like the sink draining the other way? Is it the same on maps in Australia? Pretty and practical Brendie, the physical therapist, pauses in her spooning the cornflakes into her lipsticked mouth (the Hotel Phoenix harbors Anglo airs), and she says she hasn’t noticed it, adding with a grin, “Don’t be daft—of course maps aren’t that way in Australia.” Perfect.
12. Books as Pure as Air Itself
The former Biblioteca Nacional is on Calle México, number 564, in a funky district of older, colonial-style architecture called Barrio Sur, south of the Plaza de Mayo. It’s siesta time, early afternoon, hot again but without the humidity, and the streets here are all but deserted—or more than that, everything is perfectly and utterly still. I see the high façade rising above the low houses around it on narrow Calle México, flat granite lower down and a row of six huge pillars above that, like a proud old American bank, imposing; however, as I already know, it is no longer the Biblioteca Nacional, granting the Roman lettering chiseled in the top peak’s triangle still announces exactly that. The library has been moved to a new venue of reinforced-concrete brutalist architecture—pretty ugly—in an outlying park, and now the former library serves as a national music center, with performance space and offices for administration. As a cultural seat, therefore, it hasn’t escaped the recent protest that is currently questioning any elitism in Argentina—financial, cultural, or otherwise—and in swirly spray-painting, red and black, on the walls near the sidewalk you can read:
“ATACA EL ESTADO!”
and:
“COLONIALES!’
and:
“EL SECTOR DE LOS MESÍAS LOCOS!”
The first two needing no translation or commentary, and the last identifying the music center as another operation of the crazy messiahs, who I assume are the allegedly corrupt government bigwigs who are charged with landing the country in the current economic mess. If nothing else, it’s free of the particular graffiti that blankets just about every bank building downtown: “LADRONES!” Thieves.
The tall carved-wood front doors are open, and I head up the granite steps. It’s cooler in the expanse of the foyer, tiled with squares in a red-and-yellow floral pattern. A slim young guy in black slacks and a white open-neck shirt but no hat, his security uniform, is at the desk, very soft-voiced and friendly. After he seems assured that I am not mistaken that this is the present seat of the national library and understand that it is now the music center, he affirms that it once was, in fact, the Biblioteca Nacional, and that Borges indeed was the director. I ask him if I can look around, and he tells me of course I can, ushering me through a set of high doors to what had been the central reading room. He leaves me alone there, goes back to his desk in the lobby, deserted like everywhere else, it seems, during a weekday siesta time.
The place is wonderful.
I am standing alone in the middle of an octagonally shaped empty space, five stories high. The floor is planked; each level above me is ringed by a gallery walkway, with doorways at the corners showing very intricately carved trim; there are long plaques listing the great names of “Ciencia,” “Filosofía,” and such in gold (Plato, Herodotus, etc.); the walls themselves are all bookshelves and paneling, the fine, aged woodwork the color of walnut; up top is a domed skylight, and in the middle of that is what looks like a Tiffany-glass insert with huge stars in an indigo-blue night sky (harking back to the building’s original intended use, as a center for the government lottery—the stars of luck?). A stage has been set up in front, for recitals, but it still feels entirely like a reading room, and a magnificent one at that. I think of Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel,” about a mythical library where books endlessly lead to still more books about those books, then books about those books about those books, and so on, a dizzying, infinite maelstrom of verbal information that maybe foretold the computer age. And while nearly every commentator on the story, including Borges himself, noted that its inspiration traced back to the seemingly endless cataloguing travail when Borges worked at Biblioteca Municipal Miguel Cané, I remember that in his “Library of Babel” the rooms of the imagined library are six-sided, giving a spiraling sense of continuity—that touch surely must have been influenced by the time he spent here in the course of his life, as far back as when he had first visited the library as a schoolboy poring over the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And it’s so quiet in here. Of course, I’m back to taking notes. I’m also thinking how it is pleasant to picture Borges finally having “arrived” in his native land, the lord of this domain, when it suddenly hits me: There is everything here for a library but the books—the shelves are completely and achingly empty. It deals me a measure of near vertigo even greater than that from having seen the mirror in the museum, and I sense for a moment maybe the ultimate idea of books, the purity of the thoughts and the knowledge, often the veritable transcendence, they convey, all of which in a way isn’t the least bit corporeal; it is one message certainly at the center of Borges’s basic credo. (Stories like “The Library of Babel,” or “The Approach to al-Mu’Tasim,” a fiction in the form of an imaginary review of an imaginary book, or “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” where an obsessed contemporary man tries to rewrite the Cervantes masterpiece by virtually becoming Cervantes—learning his seventeenth-century Spanish, schooling himself in the ways of Cervantes’s own day—to the point that he does eventually sit down to rewrite it, but as himself now, Pierre Menard, and the product is exactly the same Don Quixote, which shows how invisible, but enduringly constant, any book is in the mind, almost beyond and independent of the author.) The physical absence of books here is somehow the magical essence of books. And for me in the Biblioteca Nacional, mark a hole-in-one, a perfectly pitched game, a ninety-yard run, whatever, on the Scoreboard of Metaphysical Moment.
When I walk out to the foyer, the young guy hands me a brochure on the music center, which will be good to have for future reference because it does contain color photos and a floor plan of the building. I tell him Borges interests me very much and that I am, though definitely not in the league of Borges, an “escritor norteamericano” myself. He nods, smiles. I walk back out into empty Calle México. When I return the next afternoon to take another look, check some things for my notes, the young attendant comes into the reading room to talk to me a little. He asks me in his soft voice if what I said is true, that I am an “escritor norteamericano.”
I tell him yes, repeating that I am very interested in Borges. He tells me that others are, too. I ask him if people come every day, and he says not every day, but they come often for a look. Then he looks at me, and says in his Spanish, serious:
“An American writer, that is a good thing to be.”
I thank him, feeling good about that myself, while knowing I seldom introduce myself as any kind of writer at all—I have managed to publish a few books of fiction, but I must admit that I usually feel a complete interloper in claiming to be a real writer (no need to dive noggin-first into that particular lack of assurance or soul-searching here).
I leave Buenos Aires a day later, totally enamored with the city, a most complicated one, and deeply hoping, as well, that Argentina tugs itself out of its financial quagmire soon—the place is too special for that sort of stuff.
13. Where I Really Am
Needless to say, where I really am is here in my apartment at 1407 West 39th 1/2 Street in Austin, Texas.
It is Easter, March 29, 2002, and earlier I went to a seven-thirty Mass, had breakfast, then returned here to get back to work on this piece, the computer screen glowing. Since I’ve been back in Austin, I’ve been alternating working on this with working on a long short story set in Buenos Aires, “Southern Majestic Zone,” which is going really well. Now and then I slip a CD of orchestra tango classics—the thumping bandoneon accordion, the sighing violins—into the computer’s player for mood while I write; I have maps and notes and the books bought on my trip spread out on the carpet around my desk. Naturally, I hope that for anybody reading this it has felt as if you were actually with me in Buenos Aires, and I can say (here comes the shameless Borgesian imitation, pulling out the rug from under the wobbling guise of reality in the artifice in order to dispose of any pretension to such easy reality in the artifice, as the narrative hopefully evokes and enters into some yet higher reality well beyond artifice; but in this case I probably blew it a while ago when I awkwardly abandoned present tense for past in the section that moved back toward my remembering seeing Borges in person at Sanders Theatre at Harvard that cold late November night), yes, I can say that writing it, I truly felt I was in the moment, actually there.
Believe me, my flimsy initial premise for the trip didn’t backfire after all, and I think I did tune in on (be a son of the sixties and be forever shackled to its loopy jargon) the metaphysic in all my rereading of Borges there, in all my tramping around town and playing the old, and thoroughly exciting, literary fan’s game of following in the footsteps there. The place was laced with metaphysic, if you know what I mean.
14. On the Other Hand
I get up to take a break from writing, stroll around my bedroom/study. I walk to the large sliding-glass doors and look out beyond the second-floor deck at what should be my neighbors’ sun-splashed, fenced-in backyard with its uncut emerald grass and its dog pen for the obnoxious, neurotic golden lab and its clutter of kids’ bicycles...and, no kidding, I seem to be much higher up, I seem to have a balcony view of Avenida Córdoba in Buenos Aires, busy with horn-blowing taxis right down to the docks and those tall yellow cranes there, where the Plata is now strikingly silver and not its usual cinnamon tone as the noontime sunlight hits it just the right way, living up to its name.
That’s what I’m looking at.
No kidding, that’s what I see!
15. (And 16, 17, 18, 19, etc.) Plus, What About?
Plus, if you don’t follow me on that, what about that kid who was sitting like a statue there outside the airport, reading Labyrinths, something that has to go well beyond mere coincidence? I mean, you tell me.
2004, FROM AGNI MAGAZINE