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?
BORGES: The cat died.
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, n
ot 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.
Jorge Luis Borges: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations Page 12