1946 The 47-year-old Jorge Luis Borges was, by this date, internationally famous and widely read abroad. His own background was cosmopolitan. Born in Buenos Aires, the son of a well-off and cultivated lawyer, Jorge was educated in Switzerland and Spain. English was spoken, alongside Spanish, in his family (throughout his life, Borges had a fierce love of Anglo-Saxon literature).
Borges returned to Argentina in his early twenties. Already a published poet (of the ‘Ultraist’ modernist school), he took up day-work in Buenos Aires as a cataloguer in the national library system (an image of which would recur in his later ‘fictions’ – see, e.g., ‘The Library of Babel’, 1941). Already Borges’s eyes were failing. It was a family weakness, and had blinded his father.
On 4 June 1946 Juan Perón was elected president – effectively dictator – of Argentina. Perón established himself as the leader of the decamisados (the shirtless ones – i.e., the masses) and set in process a programme of aggressive socialism, using the tactics of 1930s fascism.
Borges, like many intellectuals, opposed ‘Perónismo’ and imprudently made his opposition known. On Perón’s assuming office he was dismissed from his library position and reappointed ‘poultry inspector for the Buenos Aires municipal market’. He resigned – as was intended. For the next eight years he and his family suffered persecution and some physical threat. On Perón’s being deposed in 1955, Borges was appointed director of the National Library. It was, as he noted, a supreme irony since he was, sadly, wholly blind, and could see neither books nor chickens.