Jorge Luis Borges (6 page)

BURGIN:
A very personal pact between the two.

BORGES:
Yes. A personal pact between God and the man, And also, of course, the idea of, well, this is a common idea among the mystics, the idea of something lasting a very short while on earth and a long time in heaven, or in a man’s mind, no? I suppose those ideas were behind the tale. Now maybe there are others. And then, as I had also thought out the idea of drama in two acts, and in the first act you would have something very noble and rather pompous, and then in the second act you would find that the real thing was rather tawdry, I thought, “Well, I’ll never write that play, but I’ll work that idea of the play into a tale of mine.” Of course, I couldn’t say that Hladík had thought out a drama or a work of art and say nothing whatever about it. Because then, of course, that would fall flat, I had to make it convincing. So, I wove. I interwove those two ideas … Now that story has been one of
my lucky ones. I’m not especially fond of it, but many people are. And it has even been published in popular magazines in Buenos Aires.

BURGIN:
Maybe they think of it as a more optimistic story of yours, in a way … It ties in with your ideas on time, your “New Refutation of Time.”

BORGES:
Yes, yes, and the idea of different times, no? Of different time schemes. Psychological time.

BURGIN:
Another story that I would think of in relation to “The Secret Miracle” is “The Other Death”—I mean in the sense that in both tales the hero tries to extend the properties of time, in one by increasing the amount of experience given to man within a unit of time and in the other by reversing time or a man’s life in time.

BORGES:
Ah! That’s one of my best stories, I think. But first I thought of it as a kind of trick story. I felt that I had read about a theologian called Damian, or some such name, and that he thought that all things were possible to God except to undo the past, and then Oscar Wilde said that Christianity made that possible because if a man forgave another he
was
undoing the past. I mean, if you have acted wrongly and that act is forgiven you, then the deed is undone. But I thought I had read a story about a past thing being undone.

My first idea was very trivial. I thought of having chessmen inside a box, or pebbles, and of their position being
changed by a man thinking about it. Then I thought this is too arid, I don’t think anybody could be convinced by it, and then I thought, well, I’ll take a cue from Conrad and the idea of
Lord Jim
, Lord Jim who had been a coward and who wanted to be a brave man, but I’ll do it in a magical way.

In my story, you have an Argentine gaucho, among Uruguayan gauchos, who’s a coward and feels he should redeem himself, and then he goes back to the Argentine, he lives in a lonely way and he becomes a brave man to himself. And in the end he had undone the past. Instead of running away from that earlier battle in one of the civil wars in Uruguay, he undoes the past, and the people who knew him after the battle, after he had been a coward, forget all about his cowardice, and the teller of the story meets a colonel who had fought in that war and remembers him dying as a brave man should. And the colonel also remembers an unreal detail that is worked in on purpose—he remembers that the man got a bullet wound through the chest. Now, of course, if he had been wounded and fallen off his horse, the other wouldn’t have seen where he was wounded.

BURGIN:
This feeling of wanting to undo something or to change something in the past also gets into “The Waiting.”

BORGES:
Well, that happened. No, because the story, well, of course, I can’t remember what the man felt at the end, but the idea of a man who went into hiding and was found out after a long time, this happened. It happened, I think it was a Turk and his enemies were also Turks. But I thought that if I
worked in Turks, the reader would feel, after all, that I knew little about them. So I turned him into an Italian, because in Buenos Aires everybody is more or less Italian, or is supposed to know a lot about them. Besides, as there are Italian secret societies, the story was essentially the same. But if I’d given it the real Turkish-Egyptian setting, then the reader would have been rather suspicious of me, no? He would have said, “Here is Borges writing about Turks, and he knows little or nothing about them.” But if I write about Italians, I’m talking about my next-door neighbours. Yes, as everybody in Buenos Aires is more or less Italian; it makes me feel I’m not really Argentine because I have no Italian blood. That makes me a bit of a foreigner.

BURGIN:
But what I meant was this idea of regret, which is essentially a metaphysical regret that we feel against an inevitable destiny, I mean, that feeling is in a lot of your stories. For example, “The South” or “The House of Asterion.” Speaking of “The House of Asterion,” I understand you wrote that in a single day.

BORGES:
Yes. I wrote that in a single day. Because I was editor of a magazine, and there were three blank pages to be filled, there was no time. So I told the illustrator, I want you to work a picture more or less on these lines, and then I wrote the story. I wrote far into the night. And I thought that the whole point lay in the fact of the story being told by, in a sense, the same scheme as “The Form of the Sword,” but instead of a man you had a monster telling the story. And also I felt there
might be something true in the idea of a monster wanting to be killed, needing to be killed, no? Knowing itself masterless. I mean, he knew all the time there was something awful about him, so he must have felt thankful to the hero who killed him.

Now during the Second World War, I wrote many articles on the war, and in one of them I said that Hitler would be defeated because in his heart of hearts he really wanted defeat. He knew that the whole scheme of Nazism and world empire, all that was preposterous, or perhaps he might have felt that the tragic ending was a better ending than the other, because I don’t think that Hitler could have believed in all that stuff about the Germanic race and so on.

Favourite stories; insomnia; a changing picture;
Alice in Wonderland; Ulysses;
Robert Browning; Henry James and Kafka; Melville …

BURGIN:
You seem to disapprove of or criticize so much of your writing. Which of your stories, say, are you fond of?

BORGES:
“The South” and that new story I told you about, called “The Intruder.” I think that’s my best story. And then “Funes the Memorious” isn’t too bad. Yes, I think that’s quite a good story. And perhaps “Death and the Mariner’s Compass” is a good story.

BURGIN:
“The Aleph” isn’t one of your favourite stories?

BORGES:
“The Aleph,” yes, and “The Zahir.” “The Zahir” is about an unforgettable twenty-cent coin. I wonder if you remember it.

BURGIN:
Of course. I remember.

BORGES:
And I wrote that out of the word “unforgettable,”
inolvidable
, because I read somewhere, “You should hear so-and-so act or sing, he or she’s unforgettable.” And I thought, well what if there were really something unforgettable.
Because I’m interested in words, as you may have noticed. I said, well, let’s suppose something really unforgettable, something that you couldn’t forget even for a split second. And then, after that, I invented the whole story. But it all came out of the word “unforgettable,”
inolvidable
.

BURGIN:
In a sense that’s a kind of variation on “Funes the Memorious” and even “The Immortal.”

BORGES:
Yes, but in this case it had to be one thing. And then, of course, that thing had to be something very plain, because if I speak of an unforgettable sphinx or an unforgettable sunset, that’s too easy. So I thought, well, I’ll take a coin because, I suppose, from the mint you get millions and millions of coins all alike, but let’s suppose that one of them is, in some hidden way, unforgettable, and the man sees that coin. He’s unable to forget it and then he goes mad. That will give the impression that the man was mad and that was why he thought the coin was unforgettable, no? So the story could be read in two slightly different ways. And then I said, “Well, we have to make the reader believe the story, or at least suspend his disbelief, as Coleridge said.” So if something had happened to him before he saw the coin, for example, if a woman he loved had died, that might make it easier for the reader and for myself. Because I can’t have the teller of the story buying a package of cigarettes and getting an unforgettable coin. I have to give him some circumstance, to justify what happened to him.

BURGIN:
And so you did.

BORGES:
Yes. But those stories go together. “Zahir” is one of the names of God, I think. I got it out of Lang’s
Modern Egyptians
, I think, or perhaps out of Burton.

BURGIN:
The story “Funes the Memorious” is, among other things, about insomnia.

BORGES:
About insomnia, yes. A kind of metaphor.

BURGIN:
I take it, then, you’ve had insomnia.

BORGES:
Oh, yes.

BURGIN:
I have also.

BORGES:
Do you?

BURGIN:
I don’t any more, but I have had it. It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it?

BORGES:
Yes. I think there’s something awful about sleeplessness.

BURGIN:
Because you think it will never end.

BORGES:
Yes, but one also thinks, or rather one feels, that it’s not merely a case of being sleepless, but that somebody’s
doing
that to you.

BURGIN:
A kind of cosmic paranoia.

BORGES:
Cosmic paranoia, or some fiendish foe, no? You don’t feel it’s an accident. You feel that somebody is trying to kill you in a sense, or to hurt you, no?

BURGIN:
How long did you have it?

BORGES:
Oh, about a year. In Buenos Aires, of course, it’s worse than having it here. Because it goes with the long summer nights, with the mosquitoes, with the fact of tossing about in your bed, having to turn your pillow over and over again. In the cold country I think it’s easier, no?

BURGIN:
No sleeping pills there?

BORGES:
Oh yes, I had sleeping pills also, but after a time they did me no good. And then there was a clock. It worried me very much. Because without a clock you may doze off, and then you may try to humbug yourself into thinking that you’ve slept a long time. If you have a clock, then it will give you the time in the face every quarter of the hour, and then you say, “Well, now it’s two o’clock, now it’s a quarter past, now half past two, now quarter to three, now the three strokes,” and then you go on and on … it’s awful. Because you know you haven’t missed any of the strokes.

BURGIN:
What finally got you over the insomnia?

BORGES:
I can hardly remember it, because I had sleeping pills and I also went to another house where there were no
clocks, and then I could humbug myself into the belief that I had slept. And finally, I did sleep. But then I saw a doctor; he was very intelligent about it. He told me, “You don’t have to worry about sleeplessness because even if you are not sleeping you are resting, because the mere fact of resting, of being in bed, of the darkness, all those things are good for you. So that even if you can’t sleep, you don’t have to worry.” I wonder if it’s a true argument, but, of course, that’s hardly the point; the fact is that I did my best to believe in it, and then, once I got over that, that after all a sleepless night meant nothing, I went to sleep quite easily. After a time, of course, as one tends to forget one’s painful experiences, I can’t tell you what the details were of that period. Is there another tale or poem you want to talk about?

BURGIN:
What about the story “The South”? Now you’ve said that story is your personal favourite. Do you still feel that way?

BORGES:
But I think I’ve written a better story called “La intrusa” (“The Intruder”) and you’ll find that story in the last edition of
El Aleph
or of
A Personal Anthology
. I think that’s better than the other. I think that’s the best story I ever wrote. There’s nothing personal about it; it’s the story of two hoodlums. The intruder is the woman who comes into the lives of two brothers who are hoodlums. It isn’t a trick story. Because if you read it as a trick story, then, of course, you’ll find that you know what’s going to happen at the end of the page or so, but it isn’t meant to be a trick story. On the contrary. What I
was trying to do was to tell an inevitable story so that the end shouldn’t come as a surprise.

BURGIN:
That’s sort of like “The South,” though. The sense of inevitability in the story.

BORGES:
Yes, yes. But, I think that “La intrusa” is better, because it’s simpler.

BURGIN:
When did you write it?

BORGES:
I wrote it about a year or so ago, and I dedicated it to my mother. She thought that the story was a very unpleasant one. She thought it awful. But when it came to the end there was a moment when one of the characters had to say something, then my mother found the words. And if you read the story, there’s a fact I would like you to notice. There are three characters and there is only one character who speaks. The others, well, the others say things and we’re told about them. But only one of the characters speaks directly, and he’s the one who’s the leader of the story. I mean, he’s behind all the facts of the story. He makes the final decision, he works out the whole thing, and in order to make that plainer, he’s the only character whose voice we hear, throughout the story.