Jorge Luis Borges (3 page)

BURGIN:
So you think that remark of your father’s heralded the beginning of your own metaphysics?

BORGES:
Yes, it did.

BURGIN:
How old were you then?

BORGES:
I don’t know. I must have been a very young child. Because I remember he said to me, “Now look here; this is something that may amuse you,” and then, he was very fond of chess, he was a good chess player, and then he took me to the chessboard, and he explained to me the paradoxes of Zeno, Achilles and the Tortoise, you remember, the arrows, the fact that movement was impossible because there was always a point in between, and so on. And I remember him speaking of these things to me and I was very puzzled by them. And he explained them with the help of a chessboard.

BURGIN:
And your father had aspired to be a writer, you said.

BORGES:
Yes, he was a professor of psychology and a lawyer.

BURGIN:
And a lawyer also.

BORGES:
Well, no, he was a lawyer, but he was also a professor of psychology.

BURGIN:
Two separate disciplines.

BORGES:
Well, but he was interested in psychology and he had no use for the law. He told me once that he was quite a good lawyer but that he thought the whole thing was a bag of tricks and that to have studied the Civil Code he may as well have tried to learn the laws of whist or poker, no? I mean they were conventions and he knew how to use them, but he didn’t believe in them. I remember my father said to me something about memory, a very saddening thing. He said, “I thought I could recall my childhood when we first came to Buenos Aires, but now I know that I can’t.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because I think that memory”—I don’t know if this was his own theory, I was so impressed by it that I didn’t ask him whether he found it or whether he evolved it—but he said, “I think that if I recall something, for example, if today I look back on this morning, then I get an image of what I saw this morning. But if tonight, I’m thinking back on this morning, then what I’m really recalling is not the first image, but the first image in memory. So that every time I recall something, I’m not recalling it really, I’m recalling the last time I recalled it, I’m recalling my last memory of it. So that really,” he said, “I have no memories whatever, I have no images whatever, about my childhood, about my youth. And then he illustrated that, with a pile of coins. He piled one coin on top of the other and said, “Well, now this first coin, the bottom coin, this would
be the first image, for example, of the house of my childhood. Now this second would be a memory I had of that house when I went to Buenos Aires. Then the third one another memory and so on. And as in every memory there’s a slight distortion, I don’t suppose that my memory of today ties in with the first images I had,” so that, he said, “I try not to think of things in the past because if I do I’ll be thinking back on those memories and not on the actual images themselves.” And then that saddened me. To think maybe we have no true memories of youth.

BURGIN:
That the past was invented, fictitious.

BORGES:
That it can be distorted by successive repetition. Because if in every repetition you get a slight distortion, then in the end you will be a long way off from the issue. It’s a saddening thought. I wonder if it’s true, I wonder what other psychologists would have to say about that.

BURGIN:
I’m curious about some of your early books that haven’t been translated into English, such as
Historia de la eternidad
(History of Eternity). Are you still fond of those books?

BORGES:
No, I think, as I said in the foreword, that I would have written that book in a very different way. Because I think I was very unfair to Plato. Because I thought of the archetypes as being, well, museum pieces, no? But really, they should be thought of as living, as living, of course, in an everlasting
life of their own, in a timeless life. I don’t know why, but when I first read
The Republic
, when I first read about the types, I felt a kind of fear. When I read, for example, about the Platonic Triangle, that triangle was to me a triangle by itself, no? I mean it didn’t have three equal sides, two equal sides, or three unequal sides. It was a kind of magic triangle made of all those things, and yet not committed to any one of them, no? I felt that the whole world of Plato, the world of eternal beings, was somehow uncanny and frightening. And then what I wrote about the kennings, that was all wrong, because afterwards when I went into Old English, and I made some headway in Old Norse, I saw that my whole theory of them was wrong. And then, in this last book,
Nueva antología personal
(A Second Personal Anthology), I have added a new article saying that the idea of kennings had come from the literary possibilities discovered in compound words. So that virtually there are very few metaphors, but people remember the metaphors because they’re striking. They forget that when writers, at least in England, began to use kennings, they thought of them chiefly as rather pompous compound words. And then they found the metaphorical possibilities of those compound words.

BURGIN:
What about
A Universal History of Infamy
?

BORGES:
Well, that was a kind of—I was head editor of a very popular magazine.

BURGIN:
Sur
?

BORGES:
Yes. Coeditor. And then I wrote a story, I changed it greatly, about a man who liberated slaves and then sold them in the South. I got that out of Mark Twain’s
Life on the Mississippi
, and then I invented circumstances and I made a kind of story of it. But all the stories in that book were kind of jokes or fakes. But now I don’t think very much of that book; it amused me when I wrote it, but I can hardly recall who the characters were.

BURGIN:
Would you like
Historia de la eternidad
to be translated, do you think?

BORGES:
With due apologies to the reader, yes, explaining that when I wrote that I was a young man and that I made many mistakes.

BURGIN:
How old were you when you wrote that?

BORGES:
I think I must have been about twenty-nine or thirty, but I matured, if I ever did mature, very, very slowly. But I think I had the luck to begin with the worst mistakes, literary mistakes, a man can make. I began by writing utter rubbish. And then when I found it out I left that kind of rubbish behind. The same thing happened to my friend, Bioy Casares.
¹
He’s a very intelligent man, but at first every book he published bewildered his friends, because the books were quite pointless, and very involved at the same time. And he
said that he had done his best to be straightforward but that every time a book came out it was a thorn in the flesh, because we didn’t know what to say to him about it. And then suddenly he began writing very fine stories. But his first books are so bad that when people come to his house (he’s a rich man) and conversation is flagging, then he goes to his room and he comes back with one of his old books. Of course, he, well, he hides what the book is, no? And then he says, “Look here, I got this book from an unknown writer two or three days ago; let’s see what we can make of it?” And then he reads it, and then people begin to chuckle and they laugh and sometimes he gives the joke away and sometimes he doesn’t, but I know that he’s reading his own old stuff and that he thinks of it as a joke. He even encourages people to laugh at it, and when somebody suspects, they will remember, for example, the name of a character and so on, they’ll say, “Well, look here, you wrote that,” then he says, “Well, really I did, but after all, it’s rubbish; you shouldn’t think that I wrote it, you should enjoy it for the fun of it.”

You see what a nice character he is, no? Because I don’t think many people would do that kind of thing. I would feel very bashful. I would have to be apologizing all the time, but he enjoys the joke, a joke against himself. But that kind of thing is very rare in Buenos Aires. In Colombia it might be done, but not in Buenos Aires, or in Mexico, eh? Because in Mexico they take themselves in deadly earnest, and in Buenos Aires also. To suggest, for example, that perhaps—you know that we have a national hero called José de San Martín, you may have heard of him, no? The Argentine Academy of
History decided that no ill could be spoken of him. I mean he was entitled to a reverence denied to the Buddha or to Dante or to Shakespeare or to Plato or to Spinoza, and that was done quite seriously by grown-up men, not by children. And then I remember a Venezuelan writer wrote that San Martín “Tenía un aire avieso.” Now
avieso
means “sly,” but rather the bad side, no? And then Capdevila, a good Argentine writer, refuted him in two or three pages, saying that those two words,
avieso
—sly, cunning, no?—and San Martín, were impossible, because you may as well speak of a square triangle. And then he very gently explained to the other that that kind of thing was impossible. Because to an Argentine mind—he said nothing whatever about a universal mind—the two words were nonsensical. And now, isn’t that very strange; he seems to be a lunatic behaving that way.

BURGIN:
What about your book
Evaristo Carriego
?

BORGES:
Well, therein a tale hangs. Evaristo Carriego, as you may have read, was a neighbor of ours, and I felt that there was something in the neighbourhood of Palermo—a kind of slum then, I was a boy, I lived in it—I felt that somehow, something might be made out of it. It even had a kind of wistfulness, because there were childhood memories and so on. And then Carriego was the first poet who ever sang the Buenos Aires slums, and he lived on our side of the woods in Palermo. And I remembered him because he used to come to dinner with us every Sunday. I said, “I’ll write a book about him.” And then my mother very wisely said to me, “After all,”
she said, “the only reason you have for writing about Carriego is that he was a friend of your father’s, and a neighbor and that he died of lung disease in 1921. But why don’t you, since you have a year”—because I had won some literary prize or other—“why not write about a really interesting Argentine poet, for example, Lugones.”

“No,” I said, “I think I can do something better with Carriego,” but as I went on writing the book, after I had written my first chapter, a kind of mythology of Palermo, after I had written that first chapter and I had, well, I had begun reading deeply into Carriego, I felt that my mother was right, that after all he was a second-rate poet and I suppose if you get to the end of the book—I suppose a few people have because it’s quite a short book—you feel that the writer has lost all interest in the subject and he’s doing everything in a very perfunctory kind of way.

BURGIN:
It seems that you began to use your famous image of the labyrinth when you first wrote your handbook on Greek mythology, but I wonder how and when you began to use another of your favourite images, the image of a mirror?

BORGES:
Well, that, that also goes with the earliest fears and wonders of my childhood, being afraid of mirrors, being afraid of mahogany, being afraid of being repeated. There are some allusions to mirrors in
Fervor de Buenos Aires
, but the feeling came from my childhood. But, of course, when one begins writing, one hardly knows where to find the essential things. Look here, has this girl gone?

BURGIN:
Yes.

BORGES:
Well, that’s right. She’s crazy, this girl.

BURGIN:
Why, what happened?

BORGES:
Well, this morning she came; I was in Hiller’s Library. Then, all the time she was aiming that machine at me. And I found out that she has had thirty-six shots and then she popped in a moment ago and wanted to have seventeen more.

BURGIN:
What is she doing with them? Is this for herself, or for any magazine?

BORGES:
No, she says that perhaps she’ll send them to a magazine. She doesn’t know. Thirty-six shots, no?

BURGIN:
You and di Giovanni were working on the translations?

BORGES:
Yes, we were working, yes, but I felt rather, well, I can’t be expected to speak or to talk when anyone is around like that.

BURGIN:
She was doing them about five inches away from your face?

BORGES:
Yes, it was almost a physical assault. Yes, I felt that, I don’t know, that somebody had been aiming a revolver at
me, no? That she had been aiming a pistol at me, and she kept on at it. Then di Giovanni had the strange idea to tell her to go to Buenos Aires and there she might find other people to photograph and then she got very interested in the idea.

BURGIN:
She wants to make a book of photographs of writers, is that it?

BORGES:
Writers, yes.

BURGIN:
Of course, a camera is a kind of a mirror.

BORGES:
Yes.

BURGIN:
A permanent mirror.

BORGES:
Because I’m afraid of mirrors, maybe I’m afraid of cameras.

BURGIN:
You didn’t look at yourself much when you could see?

BORGES:
No, I never did. Because I never liked being photographed. I can’t understand it.

BURGIN:
Yet your appearance is always very scrupulous. You always dress very well and look very well.

BORGES:
Do I?

BURGIN:
Yes, of course. I mean you’re always very well groomed and attired.

BORGES:
Oh, really? Well, that’s because I’m very absent-minded, but I don’t think of myself as a dandy or anything like that. I mean I try to be as undistinguished and as invisible as possible. And then, perhaps, the one way to be undistinguished is to dress with a certain care, no? What I mean to say is that when I was a young man I thought that by being careless people wouldn’t notice me. But on the contrary. They noticed that I never had my hair cut, that I rarely shaved, no?